The Voyage of Magellan

June 21 – July 15, 1522

In a very real sense, the first circumnavigation of the world was completed already during the first week of July in 1522. For it was then that the Victoria, making its slow way northwestward at some distance from the coast of Africa, crossed the path which the original fleet of five ships had followed under Ferdinand Magellan during the autumn of 1519, as they were turning away from that same continent to set out across the Atlantic Ocean. Mission accomplished.

Then again, though, this had never been the Victoria’s mission, had it? Certainly the momentous achievement was remarked not at all aboard the ship, whose sick and starving crew had the far more pressing concern of simple survival on their minds.

Ahead of the Victoria lay the Cape Verde Islands, Portugal’s liveliest and most important outpost of empire on this side of Africa. Under less desperate circumstances, this would be a place for the ship to avoid at all costs, either by clinging as tightly as possible to the coastline of Africa or, even better, by taking to the open ocean and passing well to the west of the islands. But, with the situation being what it was, Captain Elcano conceived a different plan, one so wily and audacious that it might have impressed Gómez de Espinosa or even Magellan himself.

Instead of trying to avoid the archipelago like the guilty slinker it was, the Victoria would sail right into the harbor at the southern tip of Santiago, the largest of the islands, as if it had no reason whatsoever to fear being there. The sailors would then go ashore and buy the supplies they needed to complete the voyage home, posing as the crew of an ordinary Spanish cargo ship that had gotten lost while attempting to reach the Canary Islands from their king’s new colonies in Central America.

The plan may have been audacious, but it wasn’t insane. The downtrodden crew definitely looked the part of refugees from the wrath of Poseidon, such that it would take quite the mental leap on the part of the islanders to connect them and their barely seaworthy vessel with the shipshape fleet that had sailed from Spain under Captain General Magellan. Then, too, although Spain was Portugal’s geopolitical rival, there remained an unwritten bond between the sailors of all countries, a duty that most of them felt they owed to fellow men of the sea when they found them in distress. This sense of obligation was based partially on the old Biblical maxim about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, partially on a superstitious mariner’s understanding of karma. For his part, Elcano knew well how the sailors of all European countries thought about such things. He hoped and believed that the Portuguese on Santiago would be willing just to sell these poor lost Spaniards the supplies they needed and let them be on their way. Surely they would see little point or profit in being sticklers about one weather-beaten old cargo ship in dire straits.

Luckily, the Victoria encountered no Portuguese vessels on its approach to the islands, or at least none who deigned to pay it any attention. (Needless to say, the starving sailors, who were consumed with the constant labor at the pumps that was necessary just to keep their leaky craft afloat, were not keeping much of a lookout.)

On July 9, 1522, the ship sailed into the belly of the Portuguese beast and dropped anchor in an inconspicuous berth well away from the bustling wharves. It was a poignant moment for the sailors. While Santiago was by no means the first thriving hub of commerce that they had visited in the course of their journeys, it was the first Western port they had seen since the Canary Islands. The forest of masts that stood between the Victoria and the docks were mostly of the same sturdy square-rigged construction as that vessel’s, while the voices that wafted across the water were indubitably European. The spirits of the sailors were lifted a little more by each and every dockworker’s curse that came drifting their way on the breeze. Whatever was to happen next, they were at long last back to the world that they knew.

The 21 islands and islets that constitute the Cape Verde archipelago had been a part of that world long enough to make them seem positively venerable in comparison to the newfangled bastions of empire on the other side of Africa or the Atlantic Ocean. The modest cluster of volcanic peaks sticking out above the waves begins about 300 miles (500 kilometers) off the western coast of the African continent. The total area of all of the islands is less than one-seventh that of modern-day Belgium.

The Spanish and Portuguese word verde means “green” or “verdant” in English, but the name is a misnomer. For, although these islands lie right at the line of latitude that marks the divide between the two sides of continental Africa’s personality, they hew more to the Sahara Desert of the north than the lush jungles that lie farther south. They are arid places even during good years, and subject to prolonged droughts during bad ones. The lack of water, combined with their hilly and rocky topography, make them of limited agricultural utility. The word “lunar” comes to mind when peering at some of the islands’ precipitous landscapes, all ragged peaks plunging down into deep ravines that remain inky black even at noontime. On the other hand, the climate here is far milder than it is at the ferocious heart of the Sahara, with temperatures that seldom drop much below 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius) or climb much above 85 degrees (29 degrees).

Being possessed of little in the way of intrinsic economic value, the Cape Verde Islands have been uninhabited for most of human history, although they were quite possibly visited by Phoenician and Roman explorers as well as adventurers from closer by in Africa during ancient times. They became suddenly, unexpectedly interesting to the Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries not because of what they were but because of where they were. When in circa 1455 Antonio de Noli, a Genoese captain sailing under the flag of Portugal, discovered (or rediscovered) the islands, it was immediately obvious to Prince Henry the Navigator, the architect of Portugal’s maritime empire, that they would provide a wonderful staging ground and command post for his ongoing efforts to explore, trade with, and eventually colonize western Africa from the sea. It was he who gave the islands’ their misleading name, after the Cap-Vert Peninsula, the westernmost point of mainland Africa and thus the part of the continent to which they were closest. Just before his death in 1462, Prince Henry sent Antonio de Noli back to establish a Portuguese settlement on Santiago.

In the years that followed, the Cape Verde Islands became the setting of a colonial drama that would play out again and again on the other side of the Atlantic during the subsequent century. The Portuguese settlers built a local economy around sugarcane, cotton, and — most significantly and least appetizingly of all — on slavery. Thousands of people were rounded up from the African mainland and brought to the islands in chains, where they toiled on plantations that compensated for the lack of fecund soil with sheer manpower. While the men worked in the fields, huge proto-factories were filled with slave women, weaving the cotton grown here and elsewhere into fabrics for export. Inevitably, the Portuguese settlers had sex with their female chattel, with or without their consent, fathering a mixed-race population who came to stand between the black slaves and their white masters. These “Creoles” became vital to the functioning of the society, given that the white Portuguese settlers remained surprisingly small in number; a 1515 census counted just 80 Portuguese families living permanently on all of the plantations of Santiago.

But even more so than a laboratory for the exploitive plantation economies that would soon become so prevalent in the Americas, the Cape Verde Islands turned into exactly the strategically vital staging ground for Portuguese trade and empire that Prince Henry had envisioned them becoming. They became the most important port, naval base, and logistics hub that Portugal possessed in the Atlantic Ocean, filling the same function of a steppingstone between the homeland and its expanding overseas empire that the Canary Islands did for Spain. Fortunes in slaves, ivory, gold, hides, spices, woods, grains, and dyes passed through Santiago in particular every month, along with warships that used it as their primary base for guarding all that commerce against interceptors and interlopers from Spain or elsewhere.

That fact notwithstanding, the Victoria was nicely inconspicuous in a harbor full of similarly battered vessels, most of them plying the slave trade, an unsavory enterprise that always attracted more than its share of unscrupulous, fly-by-night chancers in ships that looked the part. The people of Santiago paid one more ship of this ilk no attention at all. So far, so good, thought Elcano. He asked Martín Méndez to take the ship’s launch to the docks with just two other sailors, to get the lay of the land in the harbor and to see how their sob story about being the crew of an ordinary Spanish cargo ship gone astray went over with the locals. Accordingly, Méndez, whose oddly persistent plumpness had finally given way to loose-skinned sallowness over the recent weeks of privation, climbed carefully down the ropes like the weak old man he so resembled now and planted himself in the boat with his two shipmates.

The people on the docks looked up with shock to see these three cadaverous Charons who seemed to have emerged in their boat from the depths of Hades to visit them. By the time the launch bumped against the wharf, a whole cluster of dock dwellers were awaiting it, shouting their queries across the water: “Where do you come from? Do you need help?” With that natural instinct to aid their fellow creatures in distress that is among the best qualities of our species, they did the work of pulling the boat into place with grapples and tying it up securely. Others brought food — blessed food, heaping mounds of chicken and rice and vegetables! — to give to the skeletal refugees, whom they pulled bodily out of their craft and set gently ashore on cushions and blankets to enjoy their repast.

Meanwhile some of the other Good Samaritans went to the harbormaster’s  office, to inform him of the human detritus that had just washed up at their dock. That gentleman came personally to find out who the newcomers were and how they had ended up here in such a sad condition. Not forgetting himself amidst the sights, sounds, and most of all the tastes of deliverance, Martín Méndez regurgitated the story that he had rehearsed aboard the Victoria.

“We are part of the crew of a Spanish cargo vessel, the one you see anchored just there,” he said, point in the direction of his ship. “We were on our way unladen to our sovereign’s outposts in the New World, part of a large convoy of ships which was scattered by a storm. Our mainmast was broken in the gale, and, by the time our carpenters had managed to repair it, we could find no trace of our companion vessels. We continued as best we could alone, but our pilot is young and green, and the weather was uncooperative. We were becalmed for long stretches. Our supplies ran out. At last, on the point of our last distress, we spotted these islands. We had no choice but to come to you and cast ourselves on your mercy. We sail a simple cargo ship, not a ship of war, and we ourselves are humble ordinary sailors. We have gold to pay for the food we need. We ask only that you sell it to us, and then let us be on our way. Again, we are ordinary men who went to sea to earn a living for ourselves and our families — nothing more. We take no sides in politics.”

The harbormaster may have sworn his own loyalty to the king of Portugal, but he was not a monster. He nodded briskly. “As long as you can pay for your food and any other supplies you need, you may re-provision and recuperate here,” he said. “Just do not make a spectacle of yourselves. This harbor is regularly visited by the warships of His Holy Majesty King John, who will show you less leniency than I have if they notice your presence here.”

Méndez was momentarily confused by these words; Manuel I had been king of Portugal when he had left Europe. Then he remembered that the crown prince had been named John. His father must have died, Méndez surmised, at the same time that as he realized that the harbormaster was looking at him quizzically, waiting for him to agree and to say thank you. “Yes, yes, of course,” he rushed to say now. “We will conduct ourselves just as you say. We thank you for your beneficence, in the name of the God in whom we all place our faith.”

Seeming satisfied by this, the harbormaster strode away back to his office, while Méndez and his two comrades finished their meal and hobbled back to the launch, still at the center of a flock of curious, concerned faces. Declining as politely as he could the welcoming party’s repeated suggestions that they take the oars and row the refugees back to their ship — he knew that such helpers might look more like captors to Elcano from the quarterdeck of the Victoria — Méndez entered the boat with the two others alone and shoved off.

The sailors back on the Victoria were thrilled to learn that Elcano’s plan had worked so well. The captain dispatched another shore party, consisting of a dozen men this time in the larger longboat, with plenty of gold in their pockets and with orders to buy as much food as they could fit in their conveyance. Those forced to wait aboard the ship did so with watering mouths, hardly able to bear the agony of anticipation. When their shipmates returned, the victuals they brought with them did not disappoint. The zombies of the Victoria began to feel like men again.

The vessel remained at anchor there in the harbor for the better part of a week, its longboat and launch shuttling regularly back and forth between ship and shore. After everyone had eaten their fill, the shore parties continued buying more food, to store in the hold for the last stage of the voyage home. Almost as importantly, they bought pitch and wood as well from the local merchants. These they used to fix the worst of the leaking that had forced such endless, grinding toil at the pumps over the course of the recent months at sea. Weakened by privation and travails as they were, the sailors would have preferred just to rest and recuperate for a while in this unlikely haven before turning their attention to the repairs their ship so urgently needed, but Elcano cajoled and reasoned and threatened, and somehow kept them moving. For, even though he heard nothing more from the harbormaster, he had good reason to feel nervous; he knew all too well that the cover story Méndez had related would fall apart as soon as anyone bothered to question it closely.

Yet most of his men felt less nervous; they had all but convinced themselves that the time to worry was passed, now that they had returned to the world that they knew. Having guided them to this haven — however dubious it might be — Elcano had enough juice with them to keep them busy during the day, but he couldn’t dictate their actions after the sun went down in the same way that an Espinosa or Magellan might have been able to do. They were, after all, sailors — sailors who had been on a very long journey indeed, and now found themselves in a wild and raucous port full of amusements designed to cater to men just like them. Even in their poor physical condition, they were ready and eager to take full advantage of what it had to offer. They filled the dockside taverns each night, guzzling down the European beer and wine they had been without for so long, filling the air with their lusty sailors’ songs, reveling at being back in the company of men — and women; the brothels could be found right next door to the taverns — with whom they could converse easily. It is almost impossible to adequately convey what a comfort and relief it was for them to be with people who worshiped the same God as they did and understood the same acts to be sins, even as they were all happily committing them together.

The sailors brought much intelligence from the fast-changing Europe of the past few years back from their nightly revels. They confirmed Martín Méndez’s conjecture that Ferdinand Magellan’s sworn enemy, King Manuel I of Portugal, no longer ruled over his kingdom: he had indeed passed away the previous December, to be replaced by his son John III. They learned of the civil rebellion in Spain that King Charles had barely succeeded in putting down, of the religious rebellion fomented by Martin Luther that was still roiling the same monarch’s realms in Germany and was now rumored to be spreading into Scandinavia. They learned also of the extraordinary successes that the Conquistador Hernán Cortés had notched in Central America, how he had taken down the entire Aztec Empire and subjugated it to Spain.

On a more practical level, they learned that they had somehow lost a day in the course of their circumnavigation of the globe; the people of Santiago reckoned the calendar date to be one day later than did the crew of the Victoria. This piece of intelligence baffled and annoyed Elcano for quite some time, for he knew that he and the other trained pilots with the fleet had kept meticulous records of the passing days. Finally, he realized that the discrepancy must stem from the circumnavigation itself, which had caused the Victoria to outrun the Sun on one of that heavenly body’s cycles around the Earth.

But naturally, the exchange of information during the drunken evenings ashore was not only one way — and herein lay trouble. The drink loosened the tongues of sailors whose bodies were no longer accustomed to its potency. Filled with the fellowship of the sea, they began to drop hints about the long, strange trip they were returning from. Then they began to do more than hint. Their tales got taller as more beer passed down their throats. They told of tawny-skinned beauties who were ready to provide a man with every imaginable form of pleasure at the drop of a hat; of bizarre and delicious fruits and equally strange animals; of dastardly mutinies put down and improbably vast tracts of oceans crossed; of a far-off strait where sheets of ice rose sheer out of the water and groaned like tormented souls throughout the day and night; of a distant Shangri La where they had ridden around on the semi-mythical beasts known as elephants; of a fierce battle with the bloodthirsty natives of another region that had cost them their brave leader; of a place where fortunes literally grew on trees — some of which fortunes, they implied, they were carrying home with them.

Even had they been much less loose-lipped, the newcomers could hardly have failed to raise questions in the minds of their interlocutors. Why were there so many foreign accents to be identified among this Spanish crew? How could it be that they didn’t seem to know anything about Hernán Cortés’s recent triumphs in the New World, if, as they claimed, they had been sailing there as part of a Spanish convoy? How could it be that they knew so little of anything else that had happened in and around Europe in the past three years? How had they run out of not only food but pitch and timber on what was by now a fairly routine Atlantic crossing? How had their pilot, regardless of how green he was, gotten them so badly off course that they had wound up here, on the opposite side of the Atlantic from the one they had been trying to reach? And how had he gotten himself so bollixed up while he was about it that he had lost an entire day? Where was this green pilot, for that matter? He never did turn up at the bars.

Most of all, though, it was the affect of the strangers — their aura, one might even say — that gave the lie to their cover story. They seemed like something more than the unbelievably incompetent crew of a tramp cargo hauler. Their withered bodies, gaunt faces, and puckered, toothless mouths bore silent witness that these were men who had been seared body and soul by an encounter with destiny, who had done and experienced something profound, something whose full import even they couldn’t fully articulate or understand.

The skeletal strangers became the talk of the docklands. And soon enough, the rumors and speculations got back to the harbormaster. Not having had the opportunity to observe the visitors personally as they told their tall tales, he still inclined to the belief that their stories were nothing more than that. Likewise, he would still have preferred just to see this strange pack of fabulists be on their way; certainly he had more than enough other things to worry about. But as they lingered on in his port, and as the reports coming back from the tavern keepers and the merchants grew ever more outlandish, he decided he had to mount some kind of investigation, if for no other reason than to cover his own posterior.

On the evening of July 14, fewer sailors than usual left the Victoria to hit the taverns: just ten men from the remaining crew of 32. The others, having blown off whatever steam their tired bodies still had left to blow over the last several days, were content to spend this night quietly aboard. This fact would prove an incredible stroke of luck for Captain Elcano.

For when the ten sailors  who did go ashore sashayed arm-in-arm back to the longboat at dawn, they found the harbormaster and a dozen armed men waiting for them there. “You must come with me,” the harbormaster said, quietly but firmly. “We must have a talk as soon as you have sobered up.”

Captain Elcano was greatly alarmed when he awoke a couple of hours later to find that the longboat had not returned. Climbing the mast to get a better view, he spotted it right where the sailors had made a habit of docking it. Yet he could see none of his own men around it, only the standard hustle and bustle of another busy day in the docklands. His heart sank to his belly. With an instinctual certitude that transcended logic, he knew in his gut that the Victoria’s real identity was either revealed already or was about to be.

He scrambled down from his perch, cursing himself for a fool for not taking a firmer hand with his pleasure-seeking crew. “Get up! Get up!” he shouted to the slumbering sailors who were still sprawled all over the place above and below deck. “We have been found out! We must away!” Hearing the urgency in his voice, his bleary-eyed crew roused themselves and launched into the familiar symphony of departure without questioning him. And so, for the last time on the ship’s epic voyage, the Victoria’s capstan was turned, its sails were unfurled, and it left yet another perilous harbor in its wake for the comparative safety of the sea.

The harbormaster saw it go from the balcony of his office. Just behind him, his ten captives still snored in a pair of jail cells. “The Spanish ship is leaving, Senhor!” called a member of his staff from inside. “Shall we try to find a ship to pursue it?”

The harbormaster hesitated for a moment. There were no warships currently at Santiago, which meant that they would have to try to find a trader to press into service. Was it really worth the trouble, given that the strangers were leaving anyway? “No, no need to bother,” he answered with a sigh, turning to reenter the building. “We can interrogate this group whom we have seized later to find out whether there is anything to be concerned about. Right now, though, where are we with that slaver who was suspected of under-counting his cargo…”

And so the ten drunken sailors slept on while another hectic morning on Santiago hummed into action. They deserved their rest. For even though their voyage had ended here, as unexpectedly as anticlimactically, they had nonetheless made it all the way around the world.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)