The Voyage of Magellan

April 6 – June 21, 1522

Like their counterparts aboard the Victoria who had been in no particular hurry to set off across the Indian Ocean, the 48 sailors of the Trinidad took their time before facing the North Pacific. Captain Espinosa made no objection when his guide Sultan Mansur stopped just a few hours out of Tidore at the island of Halmahera, the largest in Maluku. Here the sultan prepared to preside over more rounds of banqueting and feting. For his part, now that he stood on the verge of leaving Maluku, Espinosa forgot the impatience to be away which had dogged his every waking hour on Tidore. He was content to let the sultan have his fun on Halmahera for several days.

The next leg of the trip took only a little longer than the last one. Mansur led the Trinidad up to the island of Morotai, the northern boundary of the world that he knew. Here there was yet more celebrating, plus one last round of provisioning: fat chickens and succulent fruits to cram into the hold atop the crates of cloves. Looking at this delicious bounty, gruff old Espinosa felt ashamed of himself for having so persistently doubted the sultan who had so guilelessly arranged it.

But on April 20, 1522, the time finally came for the Europeans to part once and for all with their Moluccan benefactor. Mansur enveloped Espinosa in a big bear hug right there on the quarterdeck of the Trinidad. Espinosa surprised everyone by returning the hug with equal gusto. “Please take good care of the men I have left on Tidore,” he said through his new translator Pedro Alfonso.

“I will do so,” answered the sultan. “You can be assured of that. I hope that, when your King Charles sends more ships to visit his friends in Maluku, you will be the one in command of them.”

Espinosa nodded, his eyes filled with unexpected, unwonted tears. No Christian gentleman could have behaved better in word and deed than this Muslim sultan had. From here on, though, Captain Espinosa and his men would be on their own again. This was not an overly welcome thought — especially not with João Lopes Carvalho no longer among their ranks. Yet there was nothing to be done about it. They would just have to make the best go of it that they could.

Despite having parted with the people of Guam on far less friendly terms the previous spring than they just had with the people of Maluku, Espinosa and his new head pilot Juan Bautista Punzorol hoped to reach that island once again, then to use it as their final jumping-off point for the daunting Pacific crossing. But almost as soon as they had said farewell to Sultan Mansur, the god of the sea seemed to turn against the Trinidad, just as he already had the Victoria thousands of leagues to the southwest. Persistent headwinds made progress slow, as did the loss of the seamanship of Carvalho, the full extent of whose skill at tacking against the wind was recognized by the landlubber Espinosa only now that he was gone. Each day at noon Punzorol took a fresh astrolabe reading, just as Carvalho had taught him to do, and each day he was disappointed by the result. Sometimes his reading seemed to indicate that the ship had scarcely moved at all. The days at sea turned into weeks, and the sailors’ diet of chicken and fruit was replaced by a less satisfying one consisting mostly of sago bread. Strict rationing, and the constant hunger pangs it brought, became a fact of life again. Fear came to haunt the sailors — the fear that their inexperienced navigator had already missed Guam altogether, leaving them lost somewhere out in the terrifying blue nothingness that had nearly been the death of them all a year and a half ago.

As it happened, they had good reason to be fearful: the Trinidad really did miss Guam altogether. But thankfully, the god of the sea granted the ship a small mercy, the last he would ever bestow upon it. On June 11, the Trinidad bumped into the island of Saipan, the largest member of the scattered archipelago we know as the Marianas.

The ship may have come to the wrong island, but its arrival at Saipan nevertheless smacked of the one at Guam. Canoes and double-hulled sailboats streamed toward the Trinidad from the shore, bearing a greeting party of dozens of shouting, waving, laughing natives. The Europeans’ reaction to this joyous onslaught showed how much they had been changed by their experiences in the Philippines, Borneo, and Maluku, as well as perhaps illustrating some of the innate differences between Gómez de Espinosa and Ferdinand Magellan. Knowing what sort of storm was likely coming, Espinosa ordered the longboat that was currently in tow behind the Trinidad to be hastily pulled on deck and tied down securely there, to prevent a recurrence of the theft that had so outraged his now-deceased captain general lo those many months ago. Everything else of value was likewise hidden away.

Sure enough, the Saipanians climbed onto the Trinidad’s deck with no more hesitation than if the vessel had belonged to long-lost prodigal sons of their island. As they did so, they chattered and laughed to beat the band, picking up everything that wasn’t nailed or roped down. Oddly, Pedro Alfonso said that he couldn’t make any sense of the language they spoke, even though we now know it to belong to the Austronesian family. Maybe he lacked Antonio Pigafetta’s intuitive talent for language, or maybe he just wasn’t as used to making the leap from one member of a language family to another.

In the end, it didn’t really matter. Espinosa and the rest of the sailors smiled and made friendly gestures toward the welcoming delegation, whilst pointing at their mouths to indicate what was probably already obvious: that they were hungry. The Saipanians grasped the Europeans’ plight readily enough, and dashed ashore to fetch baskets full of meat, fish, and fruit to remedy it. The sailors dug in eagerly, sitting in cross-legged gaggles on deck with their new dark-skinned friends. Even Espinosa joined in without standing on ceremony.

The sailors of the Trinidad wound  up spending ten happy days on Saipan, sharing their hosts’ food and drink and, yes, sometimes their women. These would be the last days of peace, plenty, and contentment that most of them would ever know on Earth.

When their stay on Saipan was over and the time came to sail into the unknown Pacific blue in a ship freshly provisioned for the journey, three sailors were nowhere to be found. Espinosa sent some of his men out to search for them, but they returned empty-handed. Saipan was so small an island that this could mean only one thing: that the missing sailors didn’t want to be found, that they were deliberately hiding, preferring to live out their lives here among these joyous islanders than to face the watery emptiness that loomed before the Trinidad. Just as Captain Elcano had recently done when two members of his crew had deserted the Victoria on the eve of its departure from Timor, Captain Espinosa shrugged his shoulders and turned his attention to other matters. If not for the call of duty which he took so seriously, he might have been tempted to join the deserters. As it was, he gave the order to sail, and the Trinidad set out on its ill-advised way. Before too long, most of the sailors still aboard would be wishing that they too had chosen desertion over duty.

In the meantime, there had been no peace, plenty, or contentment whatsoever for their former comrades aboard the leaky Victoria, whose destiny, whether fair or foul, must now lie in the opposite direction from that of the Trinidad. The reader may remember that Captain Elcano had left Timor with a plan of crossing the Indian Ocean well up in the southern latitudes, passing under the southern tip of Africa into the Atlantic Ocean and only then turning north toward Europe and home.

Unfortunately, the god of the sea was feeling no more congenial toward the Victoria than he was toward the Trinidad; if anything, he was feeling even less so. Winter was setting in here near the bottom of the world, the first cold weather the sailors had experienced since leaving Tierra del Fuego. The gale-force winds that had been blowing against the ship’s desired course throughout the voyage became frigid as well as recalcitrant. The men dug their seal-skin gear out of the dankest recesses of the hold, discovering it to be rancid, gnawed by rats and infested with lice. They held their noses and donned it anyway, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough. A constant, gnawing, shivering chill was added to the miseries of hunger, the struggle with wind and current, and the unending work at the pumps that was required just to keep the Victoria afloat each day.

By the last week of April, Captain Elcano’s position was becoming desperate, in more ways than one. Thus far, he had held to his plan despite all of the obstacles in his way, maintaining a due westerly course for the past month. But by now, two and a half months out of Timor, the mood aboard the ship had passed from gloom to anger. There were little more than scraps of weevil-infested sago bread left to eat, almost as rotten as the scabby seal skins the sailors wore on their backs. (Whatever its other virtues, the Moluccans’ nutritional staple had not proved as durable as good old European hardtack.) Early grumbling had turned into a steady background hum of discontent, the harbinger of mutiny. Kill or imprison the captain, then do what he refused to do  and turn northwest to reach the east coast of Africa before it was too late — this was the course of action the men were inexorably moving toward.

Antonio Pigafetta was alarmed by the talk he heard all around him, as any thinking person would be. He may not have been a sailor by trade, but he had learned enough of the ways of the sea to know that, without Juan Sebastián Elcano to guide it, the Victoria might be well and truly doomed. So, the chronicler turned translator and diplomat now played the last role one final time, this time as an envoy to one of his own people. He knocked on the door to Elcano’s cabin. Once inside, he told his captain, as delicately as he could, that the men simply wouldn’t stand for much more of this. If Elcano continued to refuse to change course, they would rise up against him, probably sooner rather than later. If it had been Ferdinand Magellan or Gómez de Espinosa in charge, the situation might have been different, but the reality was that Elcano, for all his talents, didn’t hold the same sway over the sailors. The memory of his disgrace at Puerto San Julián was still too deeply etched in their minds.

Elcano nodded silently there in the cabin, the expression on his haggard face unreadable in the dim light let into the cramped, fetid space by a few chinks in the wood. (All of the candles the sailors had brought with them were long gone.) After a tense moment, he answered the anxious Italian who perched on a stool in front of him. “Thank you for coming to me with this,” he said. “I will take your advice.” And with that, he strode out to the quarterdeck to order a change in course to the northwest. The threat of mutiny that Pigafetta had sensed hanging in the air almost palpably dissipated as soon as he did so.

Alas, though, the worst was still to come for the men aboard the Victoria. For the change in course brought no dramatic change in the daily regime of suffering. The last of the food disappeared into growling bellies. Shortly thereafter, the first sailors found themselves unable to rise for yet another day of travail, increasing the burden on those who could and did that much more. All distinctions of rank disappeared; Elcano, Pigafetta, and Martín Méndez — still the ostensible captain general of the expedition as a whole, although absolutely no one was looking to him to make any decisions now — took their turns at the pumps just like everyone else.

The deaths began, four of them in the first week of May. The living dragged their deceased shipmates to the edge of the deck, still wrapped in the seal-skin swaddling in which they had shut their eyes for the last time and in which were now destined to sleep forever. The sailors shoved the bodies over the gunwales into the water, before the temptation of cannibalism became too strong. They didn’t have the strength or energy to weight the corpses down before they did so. Thus the bodies were left bobbing in the wake of the ship until its macabre leavings disappeared from view.

More so than the lack of food, the sailors were suffering and now beginning to die from scurvy. Their skin took on a grayish hue, hanging slack on their stooped frames; teeth, hair, fingernails, and toenails fell out. They moved about on deck like slack-jawed, shambling zombies, toothless maws hanging open, voices reduced to hollow moans. But somehow enough of them continued to work the pumps and the sails to keep the ship afloat and on track to the northwest. These eternal tasks became their sole reason for existing. No lookout was to be be seen in the rigging anymore; there was no manpower to spare for such niceties, even if a sailor fit enough to make the climb could still be found.

Thus there was no orderly shout of “Land ho!” from above when a strip of greenish brown emerged and stretched itself across the azure horizon on May 8, 1522. Instead everyone on deck seemed to see it at once, and they all began to shout at once. Ahead lay the first continent to meet their gaze since South America.

Yet, just as had been the case with Amsterdam Island, what might have first seemed like a deliverance proved more like a cruel joke. For the coastline ahead was rugged and shoal-strewn, presenting no favorable prospect for getting ashore easily. Elcano found himself in an ironic predicament. If he had had a strong, healthy crew, he might have dared to send the launch or the longboat to look for a way around and through the natural palisades that protected Africa from intruders. But he did not have a healthy crew, only a sick, starving one who wouldn’t have a chance against those reefs. The reason for his urgent need to make a landing was the same as the reason that he was prevented from making one.

Given this, the next question before him was monumental. Should the Victoria follow the coastline north or south, up or down the continent? To the north lay certain salvation of a sort, in the form of a Portuguese colony known as Mozambique. But going there would mean giving up, surrendering to the empire whose ships had been intermittently looking for the expedition ever since it had left Spain. To go south, on the other hand, was a far more uncertain course, but one that offered the chance of escaping the Portuguese dragnet and returning home as free men, with a fortune in cloves in the hold. The question hovered over the Victoria as it dropped anchor to pass the night there where Africa had first been sighted. The first circumnavigation of the globe hung in the balance — not that Captain Elcano or anyone else thought of it in those terms, of course.

Elcano called Pigafetta to his cabin again, to take the temperature of the crew. The report Pigafetta delivered was just the one he had expected. He was told that the specter of Portuguese captivity had long since lost its power to scare the sailors, for surely no prison camp could be worse than the hell they were already living through. If permitted to choose, the sailors would head for Mozambique, there to cast themselves on the mercy of their enemies. If Elcano chose to defy their will, Pigafetta couldn’t answer for how the sailors would react.

But Elcano had already made his decision. “I bowed to the will of these men once,” he said. “I won’t do so again.”

“Then you will have to make the speech of your life to keep them from tossing you overboard,” said Pigafetta.

Elcano nodded, walked out onto the quarterdeck, and asked the sailors to gather around. Then he did indeed make the speech of his life to them, an address that might have done Ferdinand Magellan proud. He sympathized with their suffering — which was also his suffering — and praised the steadfastness that had gotten them all this far. Then he dropped the hammer. “You believe now that you face a choice between prison and death,” he said. “But what if the real choice is between a future of prison and shame and one of respect and ease? We are so close to accomplishing the greatest voyage in history.” Knowing that only naked honesty would serve him now, he shocked the men by alluding directly to his own checkered past. “I am no stranger to the call of mutiny,” he said with a wry smile. “But I ask you not to give in to it. I ask you this not for my sake, but for that of your late captain general, your king, your God, and yourselves and your families. We are so very close now. Will you sail south instead of north with me, around this continent and home?”

It would be an exaggeration to say that the sailors cheered; they were too weak, sick, and hungry for that. But enough of a mutter of grudging acquiescence rose up from the deck that Elcano returned to his cabin modestly reassured. The next morning, he issued the order to sail south and waited to see if it would be obeyed. After some delay, during which every man seemed to be looking to his nearest shipmate to see how he would react, it was. Thus did Juan Sebastián Elcano take the next step to secure Ferdinand Magellan’s place in future history books.

A week passed, with the coast to starboard continuing to present no favorable prospect for a landing. Elcano dropped anchor each night, so that the sailors could throw fishing lines over the side, baited with maggots and rat entrails. Their catches were not prodigious by any means, but they were sufficient to stave off starvation a little longer. Being far beyond such social niceties as the fire and the stew pot, the sailors ate what they caught raw, gnawing on flesh, skin, and bones with their few remaining teeth, or simply swallowing chunks of pulpy fish flesh and scales whole. They couldn’t and didn’t know that doing so actually maximized the value they extracted from their meals, since it preserved as much as possible of the scant amount of vitamin C to be found in seafood. Despite it, three more sailors died during the second week of May.

The black comedy in all this is that the cloves that filled so much of the ship’s hold were themselves dried plants, and thus contained many of the nutrients the sailors’ bodies craved. But no one realized this, and so no one was tempted to eat the fortune they carried with them, which they thought provided its swallower only with a sweet taste on the tongue. Needless to say, had the sailors known better, the Victoria’s hold would soon have been empty, its crew no less hungry after their feast but a good deal less sick and one fortune poorer.

At last, on May 16, the coastline turned definitively west. The Victoria crept past Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa, to reenter the Atlantic Ocean. Still following the shoreline to starboard, it turned north again, approaching the Cape of Good Hope.

Often confused with Cape Agulhas, the Cape of Good Hope has been a locus of nautical legend and superstition since before it was first successfully rounded by Bartolemeu Dias in 1487. For here the prevailing winds and currents of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans converge upon one another, producing at their worst a swirling, malevolent maelstrom resembling a mythological whirlpool. The tale of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship which is condemned to sail the same seas endlessly without ever reaching its destination, was born at the Cape of Good Hope, a wry commentary on a seascape that it could sometimes take a ship literal weeks to batter its way through, if it didn’t batter itself to pieces on the rocky shoreline instead. As we’ve seen, the prospect of this passage had terrified Juan Bautista Punzorol so thoroughly that he had opted to attempt to cross the Pacific a second time instead of braving the spot that seasoned sailors referred to simply as “The Cape.”

But for once, the Victoria was lucky. The conditions of sea and sky were relatively mild at this particular instant in time, and, under the skillful guidance of Captain Elcano, it took the vessel only three days to “round the cape,” to use the nautical terminology. Just beyond, the sailors saw a sheltered bay beckoning on the coastline — the place that we know as Saldanha Bay, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of the modern city of Cape Town, South Africa.

Knowing that this bay was frequently used as a staging ground by Portuguese ships about to assault the Cape of Good Hope from the north, Elcano permitted his men less than 36 hours to rush ashore — the first time their feet had touched dry land in three and a half months — and forage for whatever they could find. All but the sickest among them combed the beach for mussels and prowled beyond the treeline above for fruits and wild game. For these scurvy-ridden zombies, the taste of a wild berry was that of life itself.

On the one hand, they hated to leave Saldanha Bay so quickly. On the other, they did so with a dawning hope in their hearts, the first real spark of same that they had felt in many weeks. Although they were still sick and starving by any normal standard, the deaths stopped for a while, thanks to the fresh food they had managed to gather during their brief stop. Just as importantly, the god of the sea suddenly seemed to be on their side again. The wind blew fresh from the south, filling the sails and sending the Victoria skating over the water toward home. Taking advantage of the certainty of his charts of this part of the world — the return to known seas was an auspicious omen in itself — Elcano struck out boldly northwestward into the open water, away from the coastline that he knew would be paralleled by a fairly steady stream of Portuguese ships on their way to or from the eastern side of Africa, India, or beyond. He shared the growing sense of his crew that home — and with it fame and fortune — was coming within reach. There would be plenty to eat back in Spain.

The Victoria crossed the Equator on June 7, earlier than Elcano would have thought possible before the improvement in wind and weather. Home seemed closer than ever.

But optimism is no defense against the ravages of scurvy, which were now setting in again in deadly earnest after the reprieve of Saldanha Bay; the food that had been foraged there was all gone now, and fishing was a nonstarter in these deep waters. The same day that the Victoria crossed the Equator, a sailor died. Then another the next day, and still another the day after that. Three more men went to meet their maker over the following seven days.

In a peculiar way that was rather horrifying in itself, Captain Elcano and his crew had become accustomed to sailing their ship of death, ensconced in its little bottle of suffering; over time, human beings can get used to almost any condition of life. Yet Elcano realized that, if things went on like this, he soon wouldn’t have sufficient sailors left to work the ropes and man the pumps. Tantalizingly close though they were returning to the home they had departed almost three years before, they couldn’t complete the journey non-stop, couldn’t even feel confident of making it as far as the Canary Islands before disaster struck. This reality was reinforced by the wind, which turned markedly less favorable to Elcano’s desired course shortly after the Victoria crossed the Equator, slowing the ship’s pace dramatically. It would have to make one more stop — would have to find some more food somewhere — before it could complete its circumnavigation of the world. And in this Portuguese-dominated part of said world, that was not a comforting prospect.

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