The Voyage of Magellan

September 6 – December 31, 1522

A low-level functionary stationed at Sanlúcar was sent out to greet the Victoria and ascertain the battered vessel’s provenance. He climbed from his boat up to the ship’s deck expecting to hear a conventional tale of woe, expecting just another ill-prepared crew of chancers who had found out that the Atlantic Ocean is not something to be trifled with. What he actually met with was quite different. The small bunch of ragged scarecrows who constituted the crew of the Victoria told him that they had been away from Spain for fully three years, during which time they had, so they claimed, sailed all the way around the world. It was an extraordinary, well-nigh unbelievable story that they offered up, but he was inclined to believe it nonetheless. One glance in the haunted eyes of the weary, weathered sailors was enough to tell him that they had lived through experiences far beyond his ken. Should he chose not to credit those impressions as proper evidence as to the sailors’ veracity, he had only to look into a crate which Captain Elcano opened for him. It and the dozens of others like it were filled with an exotic spice which was not to be found in any land bordering the Atlantic.

The first order of business, the functionary decided, was to get some good, hot food into these scarecrows’ bellies. He sent orders to that effect ashore. An hour later, he sat and watched as they threw themselves like starving jackals upon platters of meat and vegetables.

Ultimately, of course, it wouldn’t be up to him or to any of the few other officials stationed in Sanlúcar to verify the sailors’ story and decide what to do with this second group of survivors from Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition to wash up unexpectedly back in Spain. The officials in Sanlúcar had merely to send the Victoria up the Guadalquivir River to Seville, where a proper inquiry could be conducted. Accordingly, already on the day after its arrival in Spain, the Victoria was underway again, albeit now under the care of some of Seville’s contingent of skillful boatmen, whose job it was to steer nautical traffic between the great Spanish metropolis and the open sea.

The Victoria tied up at a pier in Seville on September 8, 1522. This was a public holiday, being by the Catholic Church’s reckoning the birthday of Mother Mary. The occasion was celebrated especially lavishly in this city, whose cathedral bore the name of Santa María de la Sede. There was no separate fanfare to mark the conclusion of the most epic voyage in the history of the world.

Whatever else it might come to represent, the prodigal son of a ship was a practical problem in the here and now for the harbormaster of Seville, who had thought the book on Magellan’s expedition had been closed after the disposition of the sailors from the San Antonio had been decided. Now, that volume would have to be reopened and amended, with a new set of facts that might prove an awkward fit with the ones that had been established.

In the meanwhile, a delegation of slightly more elevated officials than the ones who had greeted the Victoria at Sanlúcar took these latest arrivals discreetly in hand, leading them to a rest home where they could eat and, if they had no place else to go in Seville, sleep while the harbormaster tried to sort out the truth of their story and determine how they should be dealt with. The Victoria itself was kept under armed guard while the equally pressing question of what to do with the fortune in its hold was being decided.

The returning sailors were as subdued as their reception. There were no more musket salutes, no cheering, even very little boasting from their side. Most of them didn’t feel the need to rush immediately to the quayside bars, as they had done at Santiago — this even though there had been no explicit restrictions placed on their movements. Those of the sailors with family in Seville were naturally eager to seek them out, and this too they were entirely free to do. Some of them would learn that their wives had long since given them up for dead and gone on with their lives, had in some cases married other men; this presented an awkwardness of a whole other order. Antonio Pigafetta’s first priority was to visit the pope’s representative in Seville, to inform the prelate of his miraculous return and of the journal of the voyage he had brought back with him.

So, the sailors fanned out across the bustling city on their various errands, trying to get used to the idea of being back in a place where people of their own kind and creed were the norm, where the only dangers lurking around the next corner were the relatively plebeian ones that were to be found on any rough-living European waterfront. But before they parted on this day, they all agreed to meet up again on the morrow. There was one last thing they had to do as a crew before they permanently went their separate ways.

On the morning of September 9, 1522, the seven and a half percent of Magellan’s expedition who had successfully circumnavigated the world and returned to Seville met at the church of Santa María de la Victoria, the same place where they had gathered three years earlier to receive the formal blessing of the now deceased Pope Leo X and the final orders of Charles, king of Spain and the Netherlands and Holy Roman Emperor, who was still very much alive. On this ordinary Tuesday in Seville, the church in question played host to a less pompous affair that nevertheless involved a handful of the same actors. Each sailor took upon his body the humble brown robe of a monk. One by one, each knelt down to receive the blessing of a priest. Then each took up a single long candle, and went outside in procession. Luckily, it was a still and balmy day; their candles flickered but did not go out.

They walked for more than a mile through the narrow streets of the city, past vendors and dockworkers and fishwives and whores, their state of grace unperturbed. As they made their slow way, the sailors prayed and sang and remembered and cried. They prayed for the souls of those who had died on hostile beaches and in strange jungles and on desolate seas, and for those men of the Trinidad whom they had left behind, whose status and fate were unknown to anyone in this half of the world. While they were shedding tears for all of their comrades who had been lost, they cried as well for the scars left upon their own souls by suffering and knowledge. The eyes which cried were as wise to the ineffable as those of any saint. Small wonder that even the cheekiest street urchins whom they passed made the sign of the cross; small wonder that many got down on their knees to pray with them. No one whom they passed knew who they were or where they had been or what they had seen. But all could tell that they had been touched by transcendence.

At last, the eighteen sailors reached the cathedral known as Santa María de la Sede. Inside, they laid their burdens of memory and sin down before the altar of the Virgin Mary, who had known so much grace and pain during her own life. One by one, each of the candles was snuffed out. A final puff of smoke drifted from each toward the painted vault above, like the soul of one of the sailors’ liberated comrades, going up to join God.

Then the sailors of the Victoria turned to depart the halls of grace, to rejoin the real world with its worldly concerns — not least among them when they could expect to be paid for all those cloves they had brought with them back to Spain. Their time as shipmates had come to an end, but they would always be joined in spirit by that which they had endured together. Each and every man among them knew how lucky — or, if you like, how blessed — he had been. And he suspected that the 53 sailors to whom he had waved farewell near Tidore may not have been so blessed.

This suspicion was correct. As Homer wrote more than 2000 years before the events chronicled in this book, “there are two great jars that stand on the floor of Zeus’s halls and hold his gifts: our miseries one, the other our blessings. When Zeus who loves the lightning mixes gifts for a man, now he meets with misfortune, now good times in turn. When Zeus dispenses gifts from the jar of sorrows only, he makes a man an outcast. Brutal, ravenous hunger drives him down the face of the shining Earth, stalking far and wide, cursed by gods and men.” This latter was the fate that had been earmarked for the returnees’ erstwhile comrades aboard the Trinidad, who were still lost on an endless blue ocean on the other side of the world, as far as they could possibly be from the comforts of hearth and home, even as the men of the Victoria were humbly thanking the Virgin for their deliverance.

The renewed spirit of optimism aboard the Trinidad that accompanied the rising of Captain Espinosa from his sickbed didn’t last long. For if the mysterious rotting plague was now abating, it was only so as to give more space for the horrors of starvation and its loyal handmaiden of scurvy. The hold of the Trinidad was empty now of food, except for all those crates of cloves, decadent luxuries mocking men whose current cravings were far more fundamental. The crew continued to die one by one — yes,  now of hunger and scurvy rather than the plague, but what difference did that really make in the end? After the body of Pedro Alfonso’s wife was added to the trail of corpses the vessel was leaving in its wake, that man began to blame his new shipmates for his woes. If these foolish Spaniards hadn’t convinced him to join them, he could be heard to mutter, he would still be back in Maluku enjoying the good life instead of slowly starving to death at sea. Even Captain Espinosa struggled to put a brave face on such a desperate situation as this one.

Espinosa’s plan now was to return to Saipan, that last oasis of peace and plenty that the ship had found in this watery desert. He was well aware, however, that any plan of navigation was doomed to be an uncertain proposition at best as long as the greenhorn Juan Bautista Punzorol occupied the role of pilot. To Punzorol’s credit, he did come reasonably close to hitting his target: the Trinidad  bumped into what we know as the Maug Islands, a trio of pebbles in the ocean near the northern edge of the widely scattered Marianas archipelago that also includes Saipan. Espinosa named these islands Las Monjas — “The Nuns,” because the way they were laid out reminded him of a nun’s habit.

But these nuns could offer the sailors no salvation, only well under one square mile each of coarse grass and thistles and thorns. Despite the islands’ poverty, three of the six men from the party that was sent in the launch to investigate them failed to return to the ship. These had evidently decided that they would prefer to die with soil beneath their feet, however hardscrabble it might be. Or perhaps they were so delirious from hunger that they thought they could subsist on grass and dirt. Either way, no one aboard the Trinidad could work up the energy to try to convince them otherwise. The ship sailed onward without them, its remaining crew dreaming of the oasis of plenty that Punzorol believed must lie not too far ahead now.

As matters unfolded, though, the Trinidad missed Saipan altogether. When it became obvious that his target had eluded him, Punzorol tried to aim for Guam, only to miss that oasis as well. As a last resort, it was decided that the Trinidad would try to return to the Spice Islands. And this time, Punzorol’s aim was reasonably true.

Late in October of 1522, more than six weeks after the resurrection of Gómez de Espinosa, the surviving sailors of the ghost ship Trinidad saw the irregular sprawl of Halmahera Island ahead of them. They had actually done remarkably well, all things considered, to have traveled from the edge of the Arctic back to these Equatorial climes in such a short span of time. That they had managed to keep the sails hoisted and the rudder steady was a tribute to the indomitable will of Espinosa and the uncanny fortitude of so many humans in distress. They already felt more than half untethered from this world, which they peered at through a tunnel vision, wreathed in their halos of suffering. Yet they had kept to their tasks, had never lain down meekly to accept their fate, as they had been prepared to do before Espinosa’s return to the quarterdeck.

With their last reserves of strength, the sailors manhandled the anchor over the gunwale just off the coast of Halmahera. Minutes later, a group of Moluccans in one of their familiar boats rowed up to investigate. Horrified, as anyone would be, by the sight of this ghost ship and its skeleton crew of skeletons, they rushed ashore to gather up armloads and baskets full of food. When they returned, they found that the sailors hardly knew where they were or what was happening. Some of them were so weak that they had to be fed by hand, babes in the tender care of these people whom they had once looked down upon and so persistently distrusted.

Espinosa slowly roused himself to reckon the terrible cost of his trip to nowhere and back again. Of the 48 men and one woman who had sailed from Tidore with the Trinidad the previous April, just 21 men had returned to Maluku. Six had deserted along the way — three of them to seemingly certain death on the Maug Islands — while 22 others had died at sea from disease or starvation. All merely to bring the ship back to the place whence it had started. Espinosa had chosen disastrously wrong, had failed in his duty to his men just when they had needed his good judgment the most. And he was enough of an honorable soldier to know it and to acknowledge it.

And then Pedro Alfonso, who had been gossiping with the Moluccans about what had transpired in their part of the world over these last six months, came to his captain with a bombshell. The event Espinosa had spent so much time on Tidore dreading had come to pass in his absence from that island: the Portuguese had arrived.

In a way, the Trinidad had been incredibly lucky (not that this was an adjective many of its crew were ever likely to apply to their ship). It had escaped Maluku just two weeks ahead of a Portuguese fleet of no less than seven ships, containing 300 men in all, well armed with muskets and cannons. They were led by an admiral named Antonio de Brito. His superiors had decided that it was high time for Portugal to establish a more permanent presence in the only source of the most valuable spice in the world, and had directed him to stay in these Spice Islands as long as it took for him to do so.

Stopping first at the island of Ternate, the rival to Tidore where the Portuguese were accustomed to do their trading, Brito had promptly gotten an earful about the other Europeans who had spent so many months as the special guests of Sultan Mansur, and who had just recently sailed away with Pedro Alfonso now among their ranks. It wasn’t overly hard to put two and two together; the pair of ships that had passed through must surely have been a part of Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet, the same one that the Portuguese had been looking for intermittently ever since it had dodged the dragnet they had set up off the Canary Islands. Upon learning that five of the strangers were still to be found on Tidore, Brito set out immediately to apprehend them.

This he did quickly and easily enough; Sultan Mansur’s warm expressions of friendship toward his guests may very well have been as genuine as they appeared, but, even if so, he was too pragmatic a ruler to resist their enemies now. He merely watched mutely as the five sailors who had stayed behind, the would-be proprietors of a far more modest trading post than the one Admiral Brito was now contemplating, were led away in chains. Mansur told the Portuguese that he had been forced to give aid and comfort to their opponents in the game of overseas empire, that in his heart he had been on their side all along. His performance was not a profile in courage, but Espinosa nevertheless found it hard to judge the man too harshly for it when Pedro Alfonso relayed the story. Caught between these two alien empires whose connections and antagonisms he understood not a whit, the sultan had clearly prioritized the preservation of his own people. Would he himself have done any differently in the same situation?

Gómez de Espinosa was not a man who gave up easily. Over the past three years, he had led the sailors in his charge out of scrape after scrape where the odds seemed to have been stacked against them. More recently, he had returned to himself from the throes of a plagued delirium by a sheer effort of will. Now, however, looking at his pathetic crew of skeletons, in some cases too weak even to feed themselves, he knew that he was beaten. Thanks to his one tragically misguided decision in the midst of so many good ones, the Portuguese cat had finally won the cat-and-mouse game with the Trinidad; he could only hope that his friends on the Victoria had enjoyed better luck.

So, he gathered his exhausted crew for what would prove the last meeting of its type. He spoke in his usual matter-of-fact way, but for the first  time ever weariness, despair, and self-recrimination were to be heard lurking in his diction. “We have done our best, but we have failed in our bid to return to the Americas,” he said. “The plan to do so was plainly a fantasy from the outset, one for which I and I alone take full responsibility. The death of more than half of this ship’s crew is on my head and heart, and will remain there for the rest of my days.

“Another attempt to leave these islands is not in the cards; we are too few in number now to sail again, even if we were healthy, which of course we are most definitely not. And now we have learned that the Portuguese are here. We have but two choices. We can burn the Trinidad and retreat into the interior of Halmahera. Perhaps we can escape the Portuguese pursuers who will surely come after us as soon as word of our return reaches them and, in time, build new lives for ourselves there. There is no point in denying the fact that our chances of doing so are not good. Nonetheless, we can try. Or I can send a letter to the Portuguese commander, announcing our presence here and stating our willingness to surrender ourselves and our ship. Having come so far with me, through so many dangers and hardships, you deserve to decide your own destiny. I put it to you to do so, by a simple majority vote.”

As he had expected, only a few hands went up when he asked who wished to retreat into the jungle. All of the other sailors declared themselves on the side of surrender. For they were all so very tired, and the prospect of Portuguese captivity held few horrors for men who had been through the travails that they had.

Among the few who voted against surrender was Pedro Alfonso. After the issue was decided, he looked at Espinosa with terror in his eyes. “They will hang me, Captain,” he said. “I know my countrymen. They will hang me for a traitor.”

Espinosa looked sadly but steadily back at the man. He knew well that Alfonso was at bottom an opportunist if not a mercenary, but he had been a good officer and shipmate for all that. “I am afraid there is nothing else to be done, my friend,” he said. “The decision is made. However, if you or anyone else with to try your luck on the island, I am prepared to deliver you there, and to conceal the fact of your presence there as well as I am able. That is the best I can do for you.”

No one took him up on the offer; Alfonso dithered, but even he opted to stay with the ship in the end. They really were all so very, very tired.

With the course of action thus decided, Espinosa retired to his cabin to write the most painful letter of his life. A shortage of ink and parchment kept it even briefer and more to the point than was the norm for the old soldier.

The next morning, one sailor who had come through the last months of trauma slightly better than most of the others boarded a boat with a crew of Moluccan rowers and set off toward Ternate, where Admiral Brito was busy building the fort and trading post that was to become the permanent home of a Portuguese garrison. With the boat’s departure, the die was cast; now, there was nothing for the rest of the sailors to do but wait — and eat, liberally and joyfully. As men who had known starvation, they would never again take the food they put into their mouths for granted.

On a late afternoon a few days later, they saw the sight which they had feared for so long: the sails of two sleek Portuguese caravels drawing toward them, swiftly and determinedly. To make sure there were no misunderstandings about his intentions, Espinosa ordered that a white flag of surrender be hoisted to the top of the Trinidad’s mainmast. With no preamble, the lead caravel hove to alongside Magellan’s former flagship. A gangplank was flung across the gap, and Admiral Brito himself became the first man to bridge the distance. His rigid military bearing was insufficient to conceal his shock and horror at the emaciated state of the Spanish crew, at the smell of death which still clung to the Trinidad, as acrid as the sulfurous fumes of Hell. Ever the stickler for duty and honor, Captain Espinosa knelt down before him on the quarterdeck to formally proffer his surrender. Brito was almost too distracted by the scene around him to notice.

The Portuguese admiral treated his captives with respect, even with a measure of kindness. Not ungentle hands guided the sailors through the last steps — the last of how many millions? — that their feet would ever tread upon the deck of the Trinidad, thence across the gangplank and onto the Portuguese ship, to be transported to Ternate and reunited with their five former shipmates who were already there under the less than joyous circumstances of captivity. There was just one exception to the rule of respect: Brito demanded that the sailors point out to him Pedro Alfonso, or, as he called him, “the traitor to his king.” Quaking with fear, Alfonso was bundled into handcuffs and leg irons that looked comically oversized on his withered wrist and ankles. Then he was carried across the gangplank, not gently at all.

Brito ordered that the Trinidad’s cargo of cloves be loaded onto a sturdy and commodious Portuguese carrack that came up behind his two caravels. The cannons and muskets were taken as well, since one could never have too many of such things; ditto ropes and canvas, and logbooks and navigational instruments and the last reserves of gold aboard. At last the Trinidad was denuded of all that was valuable or useful, and floated there forlorn, its bare masts standing out against the sky like winter trees in this part of the world that knew no winter. One of his officers asked Brito what was to be done with the ship. “Nothing,” he answered, stamping one foot against the deck like the seasoned mariner he was. “This wood is more than half rotten. It isn’t worth the effort to repair and refit.”

So, the Portuguese sailed away with their prisoners and their booty, leaving the Trinidad there where its exhausted crew had thrown out its anchor for the last time. In the weeks that followed, curious Moluccans ventured out to clamber over its deck and down into its empty hold, but they knew no better than Admiral Brito to what purpose it could be put. Eventually, a typhoon sprang up, ripped the decaying ship away from its anchor, and dashed it against the rocks. Unsung and unlamented, Ferdinand Magellan’s once-proud flagship joined the captain general who had stridden its quarterdeck in the fate of a lonely death on a faraway shore, half a world away from the land of its birth, without a gravestone or a funeral pyre to mark its passing.

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