The Voyage of Magellan

March 31 – April 17, 1520

Inside the harbor of Puerto San Julián, the fleet dropped anchor in a tight cluster with the flagship Trinidad at its center. Then Magellan climbed up onto his poop deck to deliver a rare speech to all of the men. As he clop-clopped from one side of his small stage to the other, his clipped, accented Spanish rang out across the blessedly placid waters of the bay.

“When I assumed command of this expedition, I was convinced that the sailors who go to sea under the flag of Spain are the bravest, hardiest, and most skillful in the world,” he intoned. “Nothing that has occurred since we left Sanlúcar just over six months ago has caused me to doubt that conviction. We have passed through storms and other perils together to arrive at this strange place, farther south than Christian men have ever ventured in these waters. We will be recognized as the pioneers we are when we return to Europe.

“But we have not yet fulfilled the purpose which brought us here. We have not yet found a westerly route to the Spice Islands, the task which we promised His Holy Majesty King Charles that we would accomplish. Honor therefore demands that we press onward. We will not — cannot — return to our God-given monarch and tell him that a little ice and snow was too much for our courage. If we were to do so, we would be no better than dogs. We are not dogs! We are Christian men! There is only one course available to us. We must continue the search. If we remain strong in courage and faith, God will see us through. We will reach our destination.

“Still, God does not reward foolishness. We cannot sail on today, nor  tomorrow, nor next week or even next month, because winter is descending quickly on this part of the world. You can sense this as well I can, can feel it in your sailors’ bones. We have no choice but to stay here until better weather returns. In his bountiful good grace, God has provided us this sheltered bay in which to do so, stocking it with abundant fish and fowl for our consumption. It must be our home for the months to come, until we can sail onward.

“We will cease forthwith to consume our precious store of hardtack. We will preserve it for the spring, when we will need it to complete our journey and fulfill the oath we swore to His Majesty Charles, King of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, and First Lord of the Netherlands. All hail His Holy Majesty, His Holiness the Pope, and the One and Only God, Son, and Holy Ghost whom they and we all serve!”

When the obligatory round of hurrahs was finished, the ships took up more scattered stations in the little bay and dispatched landing parties to survey the wind-blown steppes that surrounded it, looking for sources of food and water. The prospect of savage native cannibals was on everyone’s mind, but they were a risk that simply had to be run. Puerto San Julián must be made to provide for its new inhabitants, one way or another.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the first scouts returned at dusk to report no signs of other humans amidst the bleak landscape. Unfortunately for Magellan, though, internal conflicts within the fleet were soon to make the cannibal threat the least of his concerns.

It was the same old conspiracy and for the most part the same old set of conspirators. Magellan’s decision to transfer his nemesis Juan de Cartagena into the keeping of Captain Gasper de Quesada of the Concepción had proved a bad one. The alleged prisoner Cartagena had used his charm and the power of his connections back in Spain to turn the tables on Quesada, who now answered to him once again. Magellan had not been completely unaware of what was happening aboard the Concepción during the recent weeks at sea, but, preoccupied with the more immediately existential crises of storms and ice, he hadn’t done anything about it.

Captain Mendoza of the Victoria, who had narrowly escaped the humiliation meted out to Caratagena in Rio de Janeiro and in doing so avoided being relieved of his command, remained a partisan of Bishop Fonseca’s illegitimate son as well. Ditto Antonio de Coca, the disgraced second captain of the San Antonio, who had like Cartagena been given to the untrustworthy Quesada for safekeeping. And now there was a new name on the list of conspirators: Juan Sebastián Elcano, the ship’s master of the Concepción, whom Cartagena, Quesada, and Coca had brought over to their side during the journey down the coast of South America. Two of the five ships of the fleet — the Concepción and Victoria — were thus firmly in the hands of Magellan’s enemies. The other three were captained by Magellan himself and by two steadfast loyalists, but who could say how their crews would react if and when the covert rebellion being led by Cartagena turned overt? The latest nasty rumor to sweep through the fleet — quite probably started by the ringleaders of the conspiracy — had it that Magellan had been secretly commissioned by King Manuel of Portugal to deliberately scupper the expedition. Why else would he have stranded them all in these godforsaken latitudes?

Easter Sunday — the holiest day on the Christian calendar, far more important than Christmas during the sixteenth century — fell on April 1, the day after the fleet’s arrival in Puerto San Julián. The devout Magellan conducted an Easter Mass personally on the shore of the bay. The officers of the Concepción didn’t show up at all for this ceremony. Magellan pointedly asked Captain Mendoza of the Victoria, who did deign to make an appearance, where his colleagues were. Wilting under the piercing glare of those dark eyes, Mendoza could only mutter that perhaps they were ill. Magellan shook his head; this bald-faced snub could bode nothing good.

After the Mass was over, only Captain Mesquita of the San Antonio, Magellan’s cousin, accepted his invitation to all of the captains of the fleet to visit the Trinidad for an Easter banquet. Quesada and Mendoza were afraid of being ambushed and arrested as soon as they boarded the flagship, Magellan having proved himself capable of such trickery before. Even the eminently trustworthy Captain Serrano of the Santiago was too concerned about the state of his own command to want to be away for too long, what with the winds of discord that were emanating from the Concepción. Only the young, rather naïve Mesquita seemed oblivious to the reality that the fleet was more openly than ever before dividing itself into two separate, mutually antithetical camps. Magellan, on the other hand, realized this all too well as he sat the head of his table aboard the Trinidad, gazing down its length at the empty seats. As soon as the meal was finished, he ordered the flagship’s cannons to be unlimbered, and repositioned the vessel near the narrow mouth of the bay, ready to fire upon any of the other ships if needs must. He intended to allow his enemies neither to take over his fleet nor to escape him. In truth, he was almost pleased that matters were coming to a head at long last. The conspirators who had been doing their level best to undermine him since long before the expedition had left Spain would be dealt with once and for all — that, or else Magellan would die trying.

For their part, his enemies could sense as well that the crux of the matter was at hand. They had to make their play now or never.

Late that evening, Cartagena, Quesada, Coca, Elcano, and 30 hand-picked seamen lowered themselves silently into the longboat of the Concepción and shoved off. Their destination was not the well-prepared Trinidad but rather the San Antonio, the largest ship of them all, floating in unperturbed complacency under the command of  Álvaro de Mesquita. It was a gray night typical of this time of year in this place; the moon floated nearly full somewhere above, but its rays served only to make visibility worse as they diffused themselves amidst a heavy fog. Reaching the San Antonio entirely unobserved, Cartagena, Quesada, and a few sailors leaped into that ship’s longboat, which was tethered alongside its parent. Scrambling across it, they climbed up the ropes that dangled into it from the San Antonio’s gunwale. They emerged out of the night and onto the ship’s deck like apparitions from a sailors’ ghost story, padding silently aft toward the captain’s cabin.

They found Captain Mesquita sound asleep inside. He was rudely awakened by the shaking of rough hands and the sight and smell of cold steel blades. Even as the baffled young man was being clapped into irons, the rest of the assault party was pouring over the gunwales. Cartagena, who had himself been the captain of the San Antonio prior to his first fall from Magellan’s grace, knew the ship and its crew well. He whispered to the befuddled sailors that he was summarily taking charge of the ship and, indeed, taking the entire fleet out of the hands of the foreign traitor who was currently at its head. He would ensure that they all made it safely back to Spain as soon as possible.

The crew of the San Antonio had served under three captains already on this voyage, all of them more or less incompetent. They were largely past caring about the constant wrangling of their betters — certainly not interested in charging the muskets and swords of the invaders out of fealty to Mendoza or his older cousin. The ship’s pilot Estevão Gomes was a Portuguese himself, but he nevertheless despised both Mendoza and Magellan even more than most of his shipmates did, for having seized positions of respect and authority that he believed were his by right; he said nothing now. It was left to the ship’s master, a professional Spanish seaman named Juan de Elorriaga, to attempt to restore the lawful chain of command. Standing defiantly before the cluster of usurpers, he said, “I demand, in the name of God and King Charles, that you return to your ship! I also demand that you release our captain!” By way of response, Quesada became the first of the mutineers to shed blood. He stabbed the unarmed Elorriaga half a dozen times with a dagger, leaving him to bleed out there on the deck. With this act of murder, the die of mutiny was well and truly cast. No member of the crew of the San Antonio offered any further resistance. Just like that, Cartagena’s faction controlled three of the five ships of the fleet.

All of the surviving legitimate officers of the San Antonio, including an indignant Estevão Gomes, were placed in chains alongside Captain Mesquita for safekeeping. Cartagena tried to buy the loyalty of the crew in the quickest way he could think of: he gave them free run of the hold of the ship. The men were desperately hungry; the fishing and hunting of Puerto San Julián had barely begun as of yet, even as they had already been denied their customary seagoing ration of hardtack. They fell upon the foodstuffs with only the filling of their bellies on their minds. Meanwhile the mutineers ransacked the hold for another sort of treasure. They hauled out the muskets, crossbows, and swords that were stored there to augment the weapons they currently had at their disposal. Cartagena took charge of the San Antonio with Coca and Elcano as his lieutenants, while Quesada returned to the Concepción with about half of the boarding party and some of the weaponry.

The fog seemed to swallow sound as much as light on this gloomy night. Aboard the Trinidad, Magellan had no idea that anything untoward had transpired.

In the morning, the captain general sent a group of sailors in the flagship’s launch to fetch some of their comrades from the San Antonio and go ashore to continue the survey of their surroundings. The San Antonio presented a weirdly unwelcoming aspect as the boat approached. There came no hallo, no bustle of men preparing to lower themselves down the side of the hull. A little annoyed, the sailors in the boat shouted up to the ship to look alive and get on the ball. It was Juan de Cartagena himself who answered them, telling them that the San Antonio, Concepción, and Victoria were now under his command. They should return to the Trinidad and inform Magellan of this fact.

When he received this message, Magellan immediately sent the same launch out on a less routine mission, to query the captain of each ship individually as to where his loyalties lay. Only the reliable Captain Serrano of the Santiago answered that he still served Captain General Ferdinand Magellan. The reality of mutiny was now undeniable.

Soon after, Cartagena sent a peremptory missive over to the Trinidad. It stated matter-of-factly that he was now captain general of the expedition, which he intended to lead back to Spain forthwith. If Magellan accepted the new situation with good grace, he could expect lenient treatment. If he refused to do so, all bets were off. Knowing as he did that trying to cross the Atlantic at this time of year from these latitudes could only end in disaster, Magellan would have had good reason to refuse angrily even had his aristocratic pride not been affronted. As it was, he had two reasons to fight for his commission.

But Magellan was wily as well as proud, and on this occasion the former quality trumped the latter. He dispatched a response to the San Antonio that was surprisingly placating. Perhaps the conspirators had a point, it read. Would they not come visit him on his flagship, so that they could all hash it out like gentlemen?

Cartagena wasn’t about to deliver himself into the hands of his enemy; he had gotten burnt doing that before. “We don’t dare board your ship for fear of mistreatment,” he wrote back bluntly. He suggested that they all meet instead on the San Antonio. Indeed, he dispatched this message in his ship’s longboat rather than its smaller launch, presumably so that Magellan and his staff could pile aboard there and then for the trip over. This episode illustrates how, despite all their conniving, the mutineers were still in some senses amateurs playing against a professional. Magellan promptly imprisoned the sailors who arrived in the longboat and confiscated their vessel, potentially an important tactical asset in any battle that might be still to come.

Just as the mutineers had done 24 hours before, Magellan looked for the weak link in the chains of ships that were arrayed against him. The Concepción had long been the seat of the opposition, while the San Antonio was its prized latest conquest; neither seemed an especially ripe target for reconquest. But what of the Victoria? It had played the least active role in the mutiny to date. It also had the highest number of Portuguese and other foreign sailors of any ship in the fleet, even as Magellan knew that Captain Mendoza was the most hated of all the fleet’s political appointees in the eyes of the ordinary seamen. For his ignorance of the ways of the sea were exceeded only by his arrogance, qualities which in combination had very nearly gotten his charge sunk a couple of time over already. Magellan hatched a daring plan with the hard-bitten Gómez de Espinosa, the stalwart master-at-arms who had come through for him in other tight spots.

A bleak day turned into another murky night, which suited the plan perfectly. Espinosa left the Trinidad in the ship’s launch, accompanied only by a pair of rowers. They approached the Victoria openly, Epinosa shouting up to the crew that he bore a message from the rightful captain general to Captain Mendoza. At first, Mendoza refused him permission to come aboard, to which Epinosa responded with mocking laughter. Was a crew of 40 men really so afraid of one man? The mockery did its job; Mendoza acquiesced.

Once on deck, Espinosa told the captain that he was authorized to present the message only in the privacy of the latter’s cabin. Unnerved by the imposing soldier, but not wishing to lose face in the eyes of the crew who surrounded the two men on deck, the captain agreed. Inside the little cabin, Espinosa handed Mendoza a piece of paper. He took it, unfolded it — and saw that it was entirely blank. He experienced a split-second of confusion, then a split-second of terror as he realized what this must mean. Then Espinsoa was snatching a dagger from his boot with his right hand, while his left hand grabbed the captain by the forelock. Bending the head back expertly, he slashed the throat with his knife. As Mendoza slumped down over his bunk, his lifeblood spurting against the wall, Espinosa stabbed him again,  through the ear this time. Mendoza never managed so much as a gurgle.

Espinosa grabbed a lantern from the desk and waved it back and forth behind the cabin’s lone porthole. In response to this signal, a longboat which had been lurking in the murk approached swiftly and silently. Sixteen more men from the Trinidad were climbing over the gunwales before the crew of the Victoria knew what was happening. The leader of the boarding party was a Spanish officer named Duarte Barbosa, a member of the same family into which Magellan had married during his time in Seville. In consoling tones, Barbosa told the crew that he was sure they were all merely victims of circumstance, that they hadn’t really intended to court a traitor’s death by joining a mutiny against the fleet’s lawful leader. Surely they had been misled by the tyrannical captain who now lay crumpled on the floor of his cabin, in plain view behind the door which Espinosa had just flung open. It took them no more than a few heartbeats to agree, and to join their attackers in a rousing chant of “Long live the Emperor and death to traitors!” In the end, the whole operation had been a rather uncanny mirror image of the assault on the San Antonio of the previous night, right down to the death toll of exactly one officer.

The fog began to lift just at that time, like a sign from God himself. Magellan, peering into the night from his flagship, saw a signal fire being lit on the poop deck of the Victoria, saw his own coat of arms flapping just above it. Under Barbosa’s command, the Victoria raised anchor and approached the Trinidad. The Santiago did the same at a signal from the flagship. The three loyal ships now stood in a line abreast at the mouth of the bay. Magellan was no longer afraid that the mutineers would succeed in deposing him from his position as captain general and take control of the whole fleet; not only did he once again have more ships than they did in his corner, but his flagship was the only one with cannons. Now his biggest priority was preventing the mutineers from escaping the bay.

Fortunately for Magellan’s designs, the mutineers lost heart in response to the capture of the Victoria as quickly as the loyalists gained it. Deciding he had no chance of taking over the whole fleet, Cartagena tried to hold onto the part of it that was currently under his command. He released Mesquita from his chains and asked him to intercede with his cousin to secure the San Antonio and Concepción safe passage out of the bay. Mesquita all but laughed in his face; he may not have been the savviest young man in the world, but he knew his cousin too well to imagine a negotiation like that bearing fruit. Nor ought Cartagana to bother trying to use him as a hostage; Magellan was not a man to allow duty and honor to be superseded by personal sentiment. After this conversation, Cartagena concluded that there was only one thing to be done. When morning came, the San Antonio and Concepción would have to try to run the blockade put up by the Trinidad, Victoria, and Santiago. With the current and the wind both moving swiftly out to sea, it was doubtful whether even the Trinidad’s handful of cannons would be able to prevent the breakout.

But as it happened, luck — combined with his enemies’ ignorance of basic seamanship — was still on Magellan’s side. Quesada ordered that two of the Concepción’s three anchors be raised in preparation for the sprint to freedom. Somehow or other, the third one slipped its chain just before dawn, and no one among the tired, hungry crew noticed it — or, if they did, they didn’t bother to report it. As rosy-fingered Dawn spread her light across the firmament, Magellan was shocked to espy the Concepción languidly drifting toward his flagship, silhouetted beautifully in the glow.

Unsure what was going on, he yelled for his gunnery crews to fire off several broadsides in warning, aiming more or less at random. The cannons boomed, shaking the flagship from the top of its masts to the depths of its bilges, filling the air with acrid smoke. Magellan now saw a still more incongruous tableau than the haplessly drifting mutinous vessel itself: Quesada was running around frantically on the deck of the Concepción, dressed in a full suit of ceremonial armor, obviously trying to rally the crew to the fight. But it wasn’t working; everyone else was crouching well out of sight under the cannonade.

The truth was that the sailors had no taste for this civil war. They may not have loved Magellan, may even have been highly suspicious of the man and his motives, but they had even less confidence in the ability of his dilettantish enemies to bring them home in one piece. They had seen Magellan, bound by his soldier’s code, refuse to abandon some of their number during the long, hard voyage down the coast of South America; it was hard to imagine Juan de Cartagena and his cronies showing them the same consideration. They certainly weren’t ready to die for Cartagena or Quesada. Mostly they just wanted to stay alive to see the next day. Thus the ease with which both the San Antonio and the Victoria had been conquered on successive nights, and thus the prone positions which the crew of the Concepción now adopted.

Magellan read all of this quickly. He shouted for his gunners to stop firing; the last thing he wanted to do was sink the Concepción, a ship he needed as badly as all of the others. The Trinidad raised its own anchors, as did the trusty little Santiago. Skillfully handled as ever by Captain Serrano, the latter vessel made a wide circle to approach the Concepción from the opposite side, while Magellan’s flagship came at it straight on. The vise tightened; both ships threw out grappling hooks and reeled themselves up to their quarry, aboard which even Quesada was no longer making even a show of resistance. “Whom are you for?” shouted Magellan as gangplanks were being slammed into place. “For the king… and Magellan!” came a feeble cry in return. No one at all died in this, the third coup of the Easter Mutiny. Quesada was ignominiously stripped of his showy armor and clapped in irons.

That left only the San Antonio still to deal with. There was no fight left in this ship either. It simply sat there at anchor, waiting for Magellan’s loyalists to arrive; even had Cartagena ordered the crew to attempt a breakout, it seems unlikely that they would have complied. As it was, when the Trinidad sailed up to demand his surrender, Cartagena capitulated immediately. Barely 48 hours after it had begun, the Easter Mutiny was over. Magellan had won. Now came his retribution.

He vented a goodly portion of his rage on the corpse of Luis de Mendoza. He ordered the former captain of the Victoria to be subjected to postmortem drawing and quartering. Mendoza’s body was fastened to the Victoria’s capstan with an elaborate array of ropes and cables. Then, with the entire crew assembled there on deck and those of the other ships looking on from across the water, a team of burly sailors began to crank the great wheel. As it spun on its bearings, it pulled the corpse limb from limb with agonizing slowness. Bones and tendons snapped like gunshots in the chill air, until Mendoza’s earthy remains were no more than assorted mangled chunks of meat spread across the deck. These bits and pieces were then gathered up, to be nailed to posts around the encampment that the sailors would soon build ashore. There they would serve as a gruesome daily reminder of the wages of betrayal.

But the mere mutilation of a corpse was not sufficient for Magellan’s purposes. To teach his underlings to properly fear as well as respect him, he needed at least one living scapegoat as well. Surprisingly, he did not choose his bête noire Juan de Cartagena. Even after all that had transpired between the two before and after the fleet left Spain, Magellan still refused to apply the ultimate remedy to the problem he posed, still out of the same fear of his ultra-powerful father Bishop Fonseca. In fact, Cartagena got off lightest of all the mutineers; he was once again merely confined to his quarters.

Instead of the ringleader, Magellan ordered the execution of his flunky Gasper de Quesada, whose betrayal he felt particularly keenly. He had, after all, trusted Quesada to keep Cartagena safely sequestered away under lock and key, only to see him choose his prisoner over his captain general. And then, too, Quesada was the only mutineer to have deliberately shed blood in the cause, when he had murdered the ship’s master of the San Antonio. There was just one difficulty: Quesada too was a nobleman, and nobody in the fleet — not the hardy master-at-arms Espinosa, not even Magellan himself — wanted to return to Spain as the man who had administered the killing blow. Magellan’s solution was as ingenious as it was cruel. He told Quesada’s personal servant to do the deed, or else be subjected to execution in his master’s stead. Spain was still largely a feudal society at the time, and the killing of a noble master by his commoner servant was as heinous as crime came under that rigidly hierarchical system. The servant cringed and begged to be spared the choice almost as pathetically as Quesada himself begged to be spared his life. But Magellan was equally implacable with both of them. In the end, the servant chose his own life over his master’s, as the captain general had always suspected he would.

So, another crew assembled on the deck of a ship, this time the flagship Trinidad. Quesada knelt shaking and crying on the quarterdeck, his servant crying just as profusely behind him, holding a sword awkwardly in one hand while he pleaded with his master to absolve him for what he was being forced to do. But no absolution was forthcoming from the hysterical man. At last, with a strangled cry, the servant raised the sword high in the air with both hands and brought it down again. The stroke was unexpectedly strong and true; Quesada’s head thumped down on the planking and rolled onto the main deck, blood spurting from the neck, an infernal baptism for the terrified servant.

Magellan wasn’t finished even now. He ordered Quesada’s body to be subjected to the same treatment as that of Mendoza, then to be hung up piecemeal alongside it. He placed Álvaro de Mesquita in charge of ferreting out the other perpetrators of the mutiny. Over the next fortnight, the reluctant young officer conducted trials and pronounced guilty verdicts on some 40 different men, or about 20 percent of the expedition as a whole, always with Magellan watching closely over his shoulder. Among the condemned were the other ringleaders Antonio de Coca and Juan Sebastián Elcano. All of the guilty were placed under suspended sentences of death, allowed to pay off their debt to the expedition by working harder than the other 80 percent of their peers, for the time being as part of a literal chain gang. It was not entirely out of mercy that they were allowed to live; the fact was that Magellan still needed all of the sailors he could get to man his five ships, whose personnel rolls had already been thinned out somewhat by the slow attrition of six months of hazard and privation.

By the middle of April, the rounds of recrimination and punishment were wrapping up, and everyone with the fleet was turning his attention to another, more pressing problem. While they had been dilly-dallying with mutiny and its aftermath, the days had been growing steadily shorter, a sign that the frigid Antarctic winter was drawing inexorably closer.

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