The Voyage of Magellan

Pedro Alfonso was entirely correct when he told Captain Espinosa what his sentence would be if he was captured by his countrymen. The last the rest of the crew of the Trinidad saw of him was when he was being bundled away in chains by Admiral Brito’s men, quaking with fear. That night, a priest came to see him in the dark hole into which he had been cast on the island of Ternate. Early the next morning, he was dragged to a clearing next to the Portuguese fort that was being built there. Under the first rays of rosy-fingered dawn, an executioner’s axe separated his head from his body. He was buried in an unmarked traitor’s grave.

His former shipmates were treated only slightly better. Brito’s initial instinct to sympathize with them for the terrible ordeal they had undergone evaporated when he began to peruse the logbooks he had seized, which documented the fleet’s movements in exhaustive, damning detail. They told how, in addition to Maluku, the Trinidad and its companion vessels had visited Brazil and a whole host of islands in the Pacific, all of which had been explicitly reserved for Portugal in a treaty brokered by Pope Alexander VI, God’s personal spokesman on Earth. As far as Brito was concerned, his prisoners had not just disobeyed international law; they had disobeyed their Holy Father, thereby sinning against God himself. This was how the admiral chose to frame the issue, at any rate. He made his opinion of the prisoners known in a letter to his king, saying that “it would be more to Your Highness’s service to order their heads to be cut off.” But, “not knowing whether Your Highness would be pleased or not” if he was to execute them, he chose to “keep them in Maluku.”

Thus these sailors who had already suffered so much now found that their suffering had barely begun. They were pressed into service as slave labor to help Brito build his fortress. None of them were spared; despite his rank, Captain Espinosa was made to toil alongside his men. One does have to wonder whether Sultan Mansur of Tidore ever saw the old soldier in his altered circumstances when he came to Ternate from time to time to re-pledge his troth to the Portuguese. Did their eyes ever meet? And if so, what passed between them in that glance?

So, the three years that the men had spent as explorers were followed by three more, vastly harder years as slaves, first on Ternate, then at various other Portuguese possessions between Maluku and India. One of the prisoners managed to escape from the port of Kochi, India, by stowing away on a ship bound for points west. He believed that, once he was inevitably discovered, it would be easier for the crew to employ him as another hand on deck than to keep him in chains below or to deliver him back where he had come from — and as far as we know, he wasn’t wrong in this calculation.

The shipmates he left behind had been dying one by one for years. Juan Bautista Punzorol, the hapless young navigator who had done the best he could, was among the group who lived through plague and starvation at sea only to expire from overwork and neglect on land. By the end of 1525, when they were noticed in their plight by a kindhearted Italian priest, only a few of the prisoners were left alive; amazingly, among the survivors was Gómez de Espinosa, who simply refused to die, no matter what the Fates threw at him. The priest wrote both King Charles of Spain and King John of Portugal, describing the slaves’ pitiable condition and asking whether they hadn’t suffered enough. Could the two monarchs not agree that they had paid sufficiently for their crimes, if crimes they were?

The priest’s letter set some slow-grinding diplomatic gears in motion, and at last, in July of 1526, Espinosa and two other sailors — the last of the 52 men who had remained on Tidore after the Victoria’s departure in December of 1521 — were delivered to Lisbon by a Portuguese trader, an event that marked the completion of their own, decidedly meandering circumnavigation of the world. Even now, their travails weren’t completely over: they were held as prisoners in the Portuguese capital for seven more months while the wheels of diplomacy ground further. Finally, in February of 1527, Espinosa and the two others were returned to Spain, not quite seven and a half years after they had sailed away from that country on a fine early autumn day when the very wind in the canvas seemed to sing a song of possibility. They came back on a bleak winter day, dumped without ceremony at the border by a jailer’s wagon; they were the last of those from Magellan’s expedition who would be lucky enough to return home at all to actually do so. Their bodies were bent and broken, their souls torn and frayed, but they had made it back alive. Like pilgrims, they set out on foot for the great port of Seville.

Once they reached the city, the first question on their lips was what had become of the rest of the expedition. And so they learned of the return of the mutineers aboard the San Antonio — this piece of news prompted no more than a grunt and a glower from Espinosa — and of how the Victoria too had made it back to Spain. Old Espinosa raised a fist in triumph upon hearing this; to his soldierly mind, it marked the mission as a success, justifying the steep price in suffering that it had exacted from all of them. Then he started to ask more questions. He had so many, many questions.

He learned that Juan Sebastián Elcano had navigated the treacherous politics of the Spanish court as skillfully as he had guided the Victoria from the Spice Islands back to Spain. Just a few days after the crew had offered their thanks to God for their deliverance, the harbormaster in Seville had received orders from his king to send a handful of the survivors to Valladolid, where Charles was currently holding court. The five names specifically requested were those of Elcano, Martín Méndez, Antonio Pigafetta, Francisco Albo, and Hernando Bustamente. (Albo had been Elcano’s understudy in navigation in much the same way that Juan Bautista Punzorol had been that of João Lopes Carvalho, while Bustamente had been the last ship’s master of the Victoria.) But as it happened, Pigafetta was already gone from Seville by the time the summons arrived, having set off for Italy with his cherished journal in hand. Meanwhile Méndez, after holding up so well during the voyage, had fallen seriously ill upon reaching home, and was excused on that basis. The other three men obeyed the summons, having no idea what sort of reception to expect.

What they got in Valladolid vacillated between a hero’s welcome and a criminal inquiry. King Charles seemed inclined to be merciful and generous, but Bishop Fonseca was as suspicious and as influential as ever. For his part, Elcano had no intention of surviving the most epic voyage in the history of the world only to end up dying on a gallows back in Spain. Reading which way the winds were blowing in the Spanish court as adeptly as he had the winds at sea, he excused his participation in the Easter Mutiny by telling the bishop what he most wanted to hear: that Elcano and his fellow mutineers had felt compelled to rise up because Magellan had been a bad leader whose real sympathies still lay with the land of his birth rather than his adopted homeland — that the captain general “did not wish to carry out the instructions entrusted to him by His Majesty.” Then, too, Elcano was at pains to give the “disgraceful” treatment that Magellan had meted out to the bishop’s son a prominent place on his list of grievances against the man. If his testimony was not that of an upstanding hero, it is nevertheless hard to condemn him overmuch for saying what he needed to say in order to retain his life, his freedom, and his good standing with his king.

But even as he did the needful to keep his own neck out of a noose, Elcano did no favors for the perpetrators of that later,  more successful mutiny that had brought the San Antonio back to Spain alone. His testimony cast serious doubt upon the justness of the verdict of the last court of inquiry, which had elected to punish only Álvaro de Mesquita, the one man aboard the San Antonio who had remained steadfastly loyal to his captain general. In truth, this was a can of worms that no one at court really felt like opening again, but Bishop Fonseca did deign to allow Mesquita to be set free from the prison cell in which he had been languishing for months. Understandably enough, Mesquita immediately returned to his native land of Portugal, wanting nothing more to do with Spanish notions of justice.

As for Elcano, he played both sides against the middle and won. He was absolved of all wrong-doing, and, indeed, commended for his actions before, during, and especially after the Easter Mutiny. Because Elcano was a native-born Spaniard and was not hated by Bishop Fonseca, it was more convenient to make him than Magellan the decreed hero of the expedition. And in some ways, of course, this status wasn’t unjustified: Elcano really had actually accomplished the circumnavigation, while Magellan had gotten himself killed when it was only half done.

The reign of the young King Charles was still beset with problems here in Europe: the religious rebellion that Martin Luther was fomenting in his easterly lands, his ongoing precariousness on his throne here in Spain, and now worsening relations with France that would soon lead to a general continental war. In the face of all this intractable ugliness, Charles was captivated by the seemingly cleaner, nobler reports of adventure and derring-do on the high seas which Elcano brought to him. He rewarded their artful bringer commensurately. Elcano was knighted, an honor that came complete with a lifelong pension from the crown and a coat of arms which featured two cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs, and twelve cloves, topped by a globe and a Latin legend: Primus circumdedesti me. “Thou first circled me.” It seems safe to say that no failed mutineer in history ever did better for himself.

After he recovered from his illness, Martín Méndez was rewarded in almost as lavish a fashion. The rest of the surviving crew of the Victoria were each given a royal indemnity and a small share of the cloves with which they had returned. If these shares didn’t add up to the whole quantity of spice, well, that was the prerogative of kings. In the final reckoning, the expedition was profitable for the Spanish crown, despite the loss of three of the five ships and two-thirds of the men who had sailed them. Such was the value of cloves, the most precious spice in all the world.

And yet neither of the royally anointed heroes of Magellan’s expedition was still in Spain by the time that Espinosa made his return a few years later. Instead, one of them was definitely dead in foreign climes, the other one either dead as well or well on his way toward that state; call it proof of the axiom that the favor of kings could be as dangerous to one’s personal well-being as their disfavor. For, being so captivated by Elcano’s tales, King Charles was determined to send more expeditions to follow up on the discoveries of the last one, and thought it a capital idea to include these pet heroes of his among their ranks.

The next expedition which Charles ordered to sail westward to the Spice Islands was under the command of an admiral named García Jofre de Loaísa, who was assigned Elcano as his head pilot. His fleet was far more impressive than Magellan’s had been: seven ships instead of five, several of them bristling with cannons this time, and all of them bigger, with a total complement among them of no fewer than 450 men. Part of Loaísa’s brief was to find out what had happened to the Trinidad, whose fate was still unclear at that time. The more important part of his mission, however, was the same as the one that Admiral Brito was already carrying out in Muluku on behalf of King John of Portugal: to establish a permanent presence there in the name of his king. The fact that the Portuguese had become a fixture in Maluku was as yet unknown in Spain. In the absence of that information, papal directives only carried so much weight with King Charles. He deemed the Spice Islands to be too valuable a prize not to try to claim for the Spanish crown.

Loaísa’s expedition left Spain in July of 1525, and proceeded to mimic the broad contours of Magellan’s course, sailing across the Atlantic, down the coast of South America, and through the Strait of Magellan. But the wind and weather fought this fleet even more tenaciously than they had the last one. Two ships were wrecked and, in an uncanny echo of the past, one ship mutinied and deserted in Tierra del Fuego. Everything that could go wrong continued to do so during the Pacific crossing. The days alternated high storms which blew the ships every which way with becalmed periods that left them sitting stock still. The vessels became hopelessly separated from one another and were left to face their individual destinies alone. Loaísa died on July 31, 1526; officially speaking, this event elevated Elcano to the position of captain general. But he wasn’t given much time to enjoy his promotion: he too died of scurvy or starvation just five days later, having tempted the god of the sea one time too many.

Only one of the seven ships completed the Pacific crossing; in another eerie echo of the past, it was named the Santa Maria de la Victoria. This second Victoria made it to, of all places, the island of Saipan in September of 1526. There it met a Spanish sailor, a fellow named Gonzalo de Vigo who had been one of the trio who deserted the Trinidad in the Maug Islands. In an astonishing stroke of good fortune on his part, a Saipenese fishing boat had found him there on the verge of death, his two companions having already perished. The native crew had taken him with them back to their island home. And now, in another stroke of fortune, he was rescued again, this time by his own countrymen. (The three sailors who had abandoned the Trinidad under less extenuating circumstances at Saipan itself had apparently made themselves scarce, preferring to continue in their new life rather than take their chances with the Law of the Sea, which did not look kindly upon deserters such as them.)

Some weeks later, Vigo and the second Victoria’s 25 other remaining men reached Maluku — whereupon, finding the place swarming with Portuguese and being too hungry and under-manned to consider sailing further, they saw no alternative but to follow in the footsteps of Gómez de Espinosa and meekly surrender themselves. So, Gonzalo de Vigo became a Portuguese prisoner in the end despite it all. Fortune can be a fickle mistress. We do not know what became of him or his comrades after their capture.

Martín Méndez didn’t cut the figure of a hero so well at the Spanish court as Elcano had done; he was more of a seagoing grocer by disposition and profession. Nevertheless, he too eventually found himself pressed into service by his king, this time as part of a fleet of four ships commanded by Sebastian Cabot, an Italian captain who had sailed for England for some years, until his lifelong habit of claiming to have visited places he hadn’t actually reached at all rather wore out his welcome there. Undaunted and unabashed, this inveterate fabulist landed in Spain during 1522, where he found the wide-eyed King Charles to be an easy mark. Charles appointed Cabot to lead yet another expedition to distant points west, with Méndez as his head quartermaster and third-in-command. It sailed in April of 1526.

Cabot handled the fleet ineptly almost from the first day, prompting a mutiny that allegedly had Méndez as its ringleader. (One shudders to think how dire the situation must have been for him of all people to lead an insurrection against his captain general!) The mutiny failed, and — shades of the fate of Juan de Cartagena — Méndez was marooned along with two alleged co-conspirators on Santa Carina Island, just off the South American coast near the southern border of modern-day Brazil. He was never seen again.

Cabot didn’t return to Spain until 1530, with one ship and a hold full of South American slaves. He claimed that during his time away he had sailed all the way around the world, just like the Victoria had done, and then done it once again in the opposite direction. But few in Spain believed that he had even made it to the other side of South America, much less crossed the vast watery desert of the Pacific twice. To this day, no one is entirely sure what all he got up to during those four years he was away.

Needless to say, these twin fiascos added no luster to the posthumous reputation of either Elcano or Méndez. Still, the primary reason that it is the name of Ferdinand Magellan rather than Juan Sebastián Elcano that schoolchildren learn today when they learn about the first circumnavigation of the Earth is that irrepressible wildcard of the original expedition, Antonio Pigafetta.

Back in his native Venice, Pigafetta knew that his journal could be worth many times its weight in cloves — knew it so well, in fact, that he had been willing to forgo his share of the profits from the expedition in order to get back to Italy, the publishing capital of Europe, as quickly as possible. For books had become a big business since the invention of the printing press 80-some years ago, and no type of secular book sold better than travelogues of distant lands. If he required any additional inducement to deliver his journal to a printer with alacrity, Pigafetta needed only look to Marco Polo, another native son of Venice, whose 200-year-old travelogue of an overland journey to China and other points on the Asian mainland was quite possibly the single most printed book in Europe other than the Bible at this point in time. And then there was the example of Amerigo Vespucci, whose two books had gotten not one but two continents named after their author…

Pigafetta was so conscious of the value of his journal that, before publishing it, he made an effort to secure his copyright to it, notwithstanding the fact that that term had not actually be invented yet. He wrote to the doge and town council of Venice that “I circumnavigated the whole world, and since it is a feat that no man has accomplished, I have composed a narration of the entire voyage, which I desire to have printed. For that purpose, I petition that no one may print it for twenty years, except myself, under penalty to him who should print it, or who should bring it here if printed elsewhere, of a fine of three lire per copy, besides the loss of the books.” The government of Venice duly granted this request.

In yet one more telling proof of his ambitions for the manuscript, Pigafetta himself appears to have translated his journal into French, which was slowly replacing Latin as the international language of popular texts in Europe, before proceeding with it to the printer. (We suspect the French edition to be the original one from Pigafetta’s own hand both because it is the earliest we have and because its French is rather bad, frequently substituting Italian words where the author apparently doesn’t know the French equivalent.) From Venice, Navigation and Discovery of the Upper Indies — a title which weirdly buried the lede that Pigafetta had sailed all the way around the world — spread across Europe. Pigafetta had done what he could, but the ability of the legal system of Venice to protect the author’s copyright inevitably dwindled in proportion to a printer’s distance from that Italian city-state. The book was widely and flagrantly pirated, even it was also translated, condensed, or imaginatively expanded to suit the needs and desires of each printer through whose hands it passed. One measure of its popularity is provided by a rare authorized edition that is held today by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. It is numbered as the 5650th official copy to be printed — an impressive figure indeed for these formative days of mass media, when books were still expensive luxury items and the large majority of Europeans  could not yet read at all. Add to that number the doubtless thousands upon thousands of pirate copies, and you have the sixteenth century’s equivalent of a bestseller.

The book did much for Antonio Pigafetta, both in making him a lot of money and in winning him entry to all of the most prestigious salons of Europe, where he would be able to dine out for the rest of his life as the man who had traveled all the way around the world. But in the longer term, the book did even more for Ferdinand Magellan. For, however much of a personal opportunist he may have been, Antonio Pigafetta was also an unabashed fan of the captain general who had permitted him to join the expedition in the first place and treated him with consistent respect and courtesy thereafter, from the very beginning of the voyage until that tragic day on Mactan. Pigafetta glossed over or ignored entirely the unbecoming complications and mistakes: the several mutinies, the harsh and self-defeating treatment of the natives of Patagonia and Guam, the decision to set out across the Pacific Ocean without stopping to re-provision, the hubris at Cebu City that led so directly to Magellan’s downfall. In place of a more nuanced portrait, Pigafetta drew a picture of a stalwart, enlightened explorer, who led the fleet with unmitigated bravery and wisdom until he made the ultimate sacrifice so that his men might live and see the great project through to its completion.

Thanks to his Italian Boswell, Magellan was thus enshrined in the international pantheon of Great Men as the hallowed leader of the “sailors of eternal fame,” who, in the words of the sixteenth-century poet Peter Martyr Vemigli, were “worthier than the Argonauts who sailed with Jason.  And much more worthy was their ship of being placed among the stars than that old Argo. For they only sailed from Greece through Pontus, but ours through the whole west and southern hemisphere, penetrating into the east, and again returned to the west.” It is this celestial vision of Ferdinand Magellan that schoolchildren still meet today — a picture that is partially accurate, yes, but only partially.

Ironically, the places in Europe where this idealized version of the man took the longest to become the conventional wisdom were the countries that the man himself had once called home. When Espinosa made his belated return to Spain, he found that Magellan was not only widely seen as an unscrupulous traitor in Portugal, which was predictable enough, but that he was seen in much the same light in Spain as well. It would be decades before that would really begin to change in Iberia. Magellan’s wife and two children were bequeathed only an inheritance of shame, and all of them died young. Thus Magellan’s own fondest dream of all, of elevating his family to the upper ranks of Iberian nobility, fell by the wayside. None of his line is known to have lived beyond the sixteenth century, much less come to occupy any of the halls of prestige and power.

The taciturn old soldier Espinosa knew that the real Ferdinand Magellan was neither an unblemished hero nor a black-hearted villain, but he had none of Elcano and Pigafetta’s talent for shaping narratives; nor did he have the desire. He settled down in Seville, where his king gave him a largely ceremonial job as inspector of ships and a fairly generous salary as a reward for his service and his suffering. The last record we have of him dates from 1543, at which time he was still living in Seville, by now in his sixties. One hopes that his later years were good and happy ones. Certainly the privilege of dying peacefully in his bed was one he had earned countless times over. In many ways, Gómez de Espinosa was the real hero of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition.

We have no similarly concrete records of what became of the two other sailors who returned with Espinosa, nor of the vast majority of those who arrived back in Spain aboard the San Antonio or Victoria before them. But we do know what became of the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. The Spanish crown sold the Victoria to a trading firm, who patched it up and put it back in service. It then crossed the Atlantic Ocean dozens of more times over a span of decades. Circa 1570, it disappeared at sea on its way from Spain to the Antilles. Not until ten years after this event would another ship — the Golden Hind, under the command of Sir Francis Drake — duplicate its feat of sailing all the way around the world.

As I write these words, the 500-year anniversary of Magellan’s epic odyssey has recently passed. Today, the name “Magellan” is a proud icon of exploration of many different stripes, in Portugal and Spain as much or more so than anywhere else. The man most definitely got his due in the end; his name is everywhere, applied to everything from bays and straits to plants and animals, from universities to sports teams. Astronomers seem to be especially fond of him, evidently agreeing with Peter Martyr Vemigli’s assertion that he deserves to be “placed among the stars”: he has had everything from distant galaxies to extraterrestrial craters, from space probes to telescopes named after him. In that vein, William Manchester writes that “of all the tributes to him, the Magellanic Clouds are the most appropriate. Like them, his memory shines down upon the world his voyage opened, illuminating it from infinity to eternity.” But of course the Strait of Magellan abides as well, not as the trans-continental nautical superhighway its namesake wished it could have been — we have the Panama Canal for that purpose now — but as one of the most strange and beautiful waterways a person can visit, a place to feel humbled before the majesty of one’s chosen god, whoever or whatever that may be. “Forever sacred to the hero’s fame,” wrote the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões, “these foaming straits shall bear his deathless name.”

To mark the quincentennial of the expedition, the Spanish government planned a series of lavish celebrations in Sanlúcar, spanning from the anniversary of Magellan’s departure on September 20, 1519, to that of Elcano’s return on September 6, 1522. Sadly, though, this period coincided almost perfectly with that of the COVID-19 pandemic; the lockdowns and other public-health measures more or less undid the celebrations completely.

And yet in a way this was perchance ironically appropriate. Although Magellan himself may not have planned for or cared about sailing around the world, the expedition he set in motion compelled everyone who so much as heard about it after it was over to begin to think about our planet in a newly global sense. This globalization which Magellan wrought has brought with it benefits, among them the bare fact that people from all over the world were even able to make plans to visit Sanlúcar in order to honor this landmark event in our collective history as a species. But it has also brought drawbacks, as exemplified by the fast-spreading pandemic that forced most of those people to stay at home in the end.  This is not the time or place to litigate globalization, nor the manifold injustices of the epoch of European imperialism that separates Magellan’s time from our own. I’ve written this book first and foremost as an adventure story; coming to understand the deeper repercussions of Magellan’s achievement would require a different sort of book, at least as long again as this one. So, suffice it for our purposes to say that Magellan changed the world — nay, he shrank the world. Whether it is a good or a bad thing that our world has continued to shrink ever since, and at such an ever increasing rate… well, that is for each of us to grapple with alone. One of its consequences of the shrinkage, however, cannot possibly be denied: that there can never be another explorer like Ferdinand Magellan.

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