Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (21 page)

Torture, no less than the skill he displayed in recapturing the mutinous ships, played an important part in Magellan’s preventing further mutinies. Through his use of torture, his crew came to understand that the only thing worse than obeying Magellan’s dictates, and possibly losing their lives in the process, was suffering the consequences of defying him. One of the outstanding reasons that his crew had the courage and determination to circumnavigate the globe, even if it meant sailing over the edge of the world, was that he compelled them to do so. Fear was his most important means of motivating his men; they became more afraid of Magellan than the hazards of the sea.

T
o punish the other offenders, Magellan conducted a secular inquisition at Port Saint Julian. He appointed his cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita, as judge presiding over an exhaustive trial. First Magellan had promoted him to captain of
San Antonio
over the heads of more qualified pilots and master seamen, both Spanish and Portuguese. Now Mesquita functioned as Magellan’s agent of agony, deciding who was guilty of treason and who would suffer the consequences. No wonder the men hated him.

Mesquita spent two weeks assessing the “evidence” of guilt before passing judgment. At the end of the trial, Mesquita, no doubt under orders from Magellan, let one of the accused off with a slap on the wrist. The hapless accountant Antonio de Coca was merely deprived of his rank. But Mesquita found Andrés de San Martín, the esteemed astronomer-astrologer; Hernando Morales, a pilot; and a priest all guilty of treasonous behavior.

This judgment was unquestionably excessive. Their behavior was that of frightened men rather than of conspirators. For example, when searched, San Martín was found to possess an itinerary of the expedition, as would be expected of the fleet’s chief astronomer. In a panic, he threw the chart into the water. And what had the priest done to deserve the same treatment? According to the charges, he had been heard to say that the “ships did have enough provisions”— which was only the truth—“and for not having consented to communicate to the Captain General the secrets of what the crew had told him in confession.” Magellan probably expected that the priest had been privy to the plot, which sailors would have confessed, but it is unlikely they considered their deeds sinful; rather, they were justified by their desperate circumstances.

The tenuous connection of these deeds to the actual mutiny suggests that Mesquita and Magellan, for all their patient investigation, turned up little additional evidence of disloyalty and simply resorted to San Martín and the priest as scapegoats for their wrath. San Martín had been exercising his navigational skills with distinction at least since 1512, when King Ferdinand had appointed him as a royal pilot. He later tried twice to win a commission of pilot major, or chief of all pilots. Even though King Charles passed him over, San Martín replaced Ruy Faleiro as the astronomer-astrologer for the Armada de Molucca. San Martín’s skills, his royal charter, the lavish pay he received, his prominence, and his long record of loyalty all made him an unlikely candidate for the role of mutineer. Unlike Quesada, Cartagena, and the other co-conspirators, he did not hunger to become a captain and harbored no resentment against Magellan. His worst offense consisted only of a moment of panic. Nevertheless, this lapse condemned him to suffer what many considered a fate worse than death.

Mesquita ordered San Martín to undergo the most common punishment of the Inquisition, the ghastly
strappado.
The
strappado
was administered in five stages of increasing agony. In the first degree, the victim was stripped, his wrists were bound behind his back, and he was threatened until he confessed. If he refused, he was subjected to the second degree. In it, the victim’s arms were raised behind his back by a rope attached to a pulley secured overhead, and he was lifted off his feet for a brief period of time, and given another chance to confess. If he still refused, he faced the third degree of the
strappado,
in which he was suspended for a longer period of time, which dislocated his shoulders and broke his arms. Once again, he was given another chance to confess. If he still failed to make a satisfactory confession, he was subjected to the fourth degree: The victim was suspended and violently jerked, which inflicted excruciating pain. Few victims of a methodically administered
strappado
lasted beyond this point without confessing. In certain cases, there was a fifth degree, as well. In the final phase of the
strappado,
weights were attached to the victim’s feet, and they were

often heavy enough to tear the limbs from his tormented body. Andrés de San Martín suffered the full five stages of the
strappado.
In the last, most horrific stage of Magellan’s inquisition, several cannonballs were attached to San Martín’s feet, and the additional weight inflicted excruciating pain when he was suspended. Another early account of this inquisition describes the final stage of
strappado,
as it might have been experienced by San Martín: “The prisoner hath his hands bound behind his back, and weights tied to his feet, and then he is drawn up on high, till his head reaches the very pulley. He is kept hanging in this manner for some time, that by the greatness of the weight hanging at his feet, all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and of a sudden he is let down with a jerk, by slacking the rope, but kept from coming quite to the ground.”

After enduring these torments, San Martín may have begged to be executed rather than be made to endure any more of the
strappado,
he may have fainted from the pain, but he survived the ordeal. In fact, he recovered sufficiently to return to his former position as astronomer-astrologer, but from then on, he remained wary of Magellan and the entire enterprise of the armada.

T
he punishment Mesquita and Magellan inflicted on Hernando Morales was even more severe than San Martín’s. Accounts of the proceedings say only that Morales’s limbs were “disjointed,” but the procedure to which he was subjected was so severe that the poor pilot later died from the wounds he received; the agonies he suffered at the hands of Mesquita and Magellan can only be imagined. He

might have undergone a variation of another common torture of the Inquisition era, the fiendish Wooden Horse, in which the victim was secured with metal bars to a hollowed-out bench, his feet higher than his head. “As he is lying in this posture,” runs an early account, “his arms, thighs, and shins are tied round with small cords or strings, which being drawn with screws at proper distances from each other, cut into his very bones, so as to no longer be discerned. Besides this, the torturer throws over his mouth and nostrils a thin cloth, so that he is scarce able to breathe through them, and in the meanwhile a small stream of water like a thread, not drop by drop, falls from on high upon the mouth of the person lying in this miserable condition, and so easily sinks down the thin cloth to the bottom of his throat so that there is no possibility of breathing, his mouth being stopped with water, and his nostrils with cloth, so that the poor wretch is in the same agony as persons ready to die, and breathing their last. When this cloth is drawn out of his throat, as it often is, that he may answer to the questions, it is all wet with water and blood, and is like pulling his bowels through this mouth.” After enduring this torture, what victim, no matter how innocent, would not willingly confess to spare himself more agony?

Both the
strappado
and the water ordeal were well-known “official” methods of torture used in the Inquisition, but there were also illegal methods, which were nearly as common, to which San Martín, Morales, and the priest might have been subjected. They might have been starved. They might have been subjected to sleeplessness. Or they might have had their feet bound and covered with the abundant natural salt found in the Port Saint Julian harbor. A goat licking the soles of the feet for a prolonged period of time was said to inflict excruciating agony, yet it left no damage to the victim’s body.

O
nce the horror of the inquisitional catharsis subsided, Mesquita (with Magellan’s blessing) sentenced the other accused—in all, forty men—to death. A mass execution appeared to be in the making, but the expedition could not continue without the help of the con victed men. It was unlikely that Magellan, even in his cold wrath, would execute forty men, many of whom abandoned the mutiny soon after it began. His victory was, in this sense, all too complete, and he had to find a way out of the grim situation he had helped to create.

Magellan had succeeded in terrorizing all the men under his command, captains and commoners alike. In his letter of March 22, 1518, King Charles gave Magellan complete authority over everyone in the armada; this was the “power of rope and knife.” He had demonstrated that he had, as his orders indicated, the power of life and death over all those who served under him. As brutal as his conduct sounds, the Captain General was well within the rights granted to him by King Charles. But Magellan took his authoritarianism to an extreme, refusing to share power or even give the illusion of power to his captains, and they communicated their dissatisfaction down the chain of command to the ordinary seamen, making rebellion and its hideous aftermath—torture—inevitable. With his insistence on controlling every aspect of the expedition himself, and scorning any suggestions that threatened his master plan, Magellan made the captains who served under him feel impotent, and they directed their rage at him. Magellan insisted, but rarely troubled to persuade, and his continuous invocation of King Charles when they were thousands of miles from Spain and in great peril sounded hollow, especially coming from the lips of a Portuguese.

Believing that he had finally demonstrated his absolute authority, Magellan commuted all forty of the death sentences to hard labor. Among the forgiven was Elcano, the Basque shipmaster who would later have his revenge on the Captain General. Those who had been freed looked on the man who controlled their fate with decidedly mixed emotions. They were overjoyed, in the short run, to be spared a gruesome death by drawing and quartering or another form of torture, but as the prospect of a long winter in Port Saint Julian loomed, they realized they faced a life of daily hardship and danger. On shore, cannibals, only slightly more ruthless than the Captain General, might attack them and devour them; on the high seas, a storm might send their ships to the bottom. Desertion was impossible; no one could survive the harsh climate unaided. The only choice left to them was a slavish adherence to Magellan’s authority, even if it led over the edge of the world.

T
here were two important exceptions to the general clemency: Gaspar de Quesada, the leader and murderer of
San Antonio’s
master, and his servant, Luis de Molino. Magellan insisted that Quesada be executed. And he gave Molino a brutally simple choice: He could either be executed along with his master or spare his own life by beheading his master. If Molino did so, he would violate some of the most central tenets governing Spanish conduct and morality, codes of behavior going back to feudal times. As Magellan expected, Molino accepted the deal, as cruel as it was. In full view of the crew, Quesada knelt on the deck of
Trinidad,
and Molino stood over him, sword in hand. He asked his master for forgiveness, but received none. And then with one powerful blow, he severed Quesada’s head from his neck. As if that were not enough carnage for one day, Magellan ordered a detail to draw and quarter Quesada’s body. His remains were displayed as a grisly warning to the others, just as Mendoza’s body had been displayed several weeks before.

D
ays later, Magellan discovered that Cartagena, the sole surviving Spanish captain, was conspiring with a priest, Pero Sánchez de la Reina, to mount yet another mutiny. Under his real name, Bernard de Calmette, the priest, who came from the south of France, served as chaplain aboard
San Antonio;
he adopted a Spanish name so that the crew would feel more comfortable with him. It was astonishing that Magellan’s nemesis would risk his life again, after all the carnage, this time with little hope that any of the seamen would follow, but Cartagena was almost as stubborn as Magellan.

The Captain General subjected the two conspirators to a fresh court-martial. His first instinct was to have both men executed; this was, after all, Cartagena’s third attempt at mutiny, but Magellan found himself in a difficult position. He could not bring himself to condemn a priest—even a disloyal priest—to death. And as for Cartagena, his blood ties to Archbishop Fonseca prevented Magellan from taking severe disciplinary action such as execution or torture. Instead, Magellan devised a much worse fate for Cartagena and the priest. He decided to leave them behind to fend for themselves in the wilderness of Port Saint Julian after the fleet’s departure.

In all, Magellan’s conduct during the mutiny and its aftermath was worthy of Machiavelli—subtle and calculating when possible, but brutal when necessary. He had survived the testing, and emerged victorious.

A
lways a perfectionist about outfitting his ships, Magellan turned his attention to his neglected fleet. The ships were in a state of disrepair, their sails and rigging in disarray, their holds fetid, their hulls leaky. He ordered his men to empty the ships and give them a thorough cleaning. This exhausting chore meant removing all the provisions, even the stone ballast, which was cleansed by seawater. The forty mutineers, bound in chains, performed the most grueling labor; they operated the pumps, essential for keeping the ships afloat until the armada’s carpenters made them seaworthy again. Once they had emptied the ships, the seamen scoured the holds, washed down the wooden surfaces with vinegar to eradicate the ubiquitous stench, and returned the ballast.