Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (52 page)

“After ten days of sailing,” according to de Mafra, “we arrived at one of the Islands of the Thieves.” Their position was uncannily close to the armada’s first landfall after the ninety-eight-day ordeal of crossing the Pacific during the voyage out. “There Gonzalo de Vigo stayed, much tired of the travails.” Nor was he the only one to desert—in all, three crew members fled, preferring to take their chances on a remote Pacific island rather than remain aboard Espinosa’s ship of doom. (De Vigo remained in the Philippines for the rest of his life; the other two deserters were killed by islanders.) De Mafra wrote that
Trinidad
“sailed to the northeast until she reached 42 degrees North.” Espinosa faced winds of ever-increasing intensity, and soon storms overwhelmed the isolated ship. A more ill-advised global detour cannot be imagined. One can only wonder what he was thinking as he sailed as far north as Japan, into ever more frigid waters, because this course took him away from his goal of reaching Darién.

Scurvy returned to plague the men, and its miseries made the living envy the dead. “At this point many began dying,” said de Mafra, “and one of them was opened to see what it was that they were dying of, and his body was found to be as if all its veins had burst open because all the blood had spread all over the interior of his body. Henceforth, whenever anyone fell sick he was bled because it was thought that the blood was suffocating him, but they kept dying all the same and did not elude death, so thenceforward the sick men were considered helpless and left untreated.” Scurvy ultimately claimed the lives of thirty men, leaving only twenty to carry on. In their frail and bewildered state, the handful of survivors sought an explanation for their suffering. “Some claimed that it was because of the venom poured by the Ternate Indians into the well where they had collected water for the voyage,” de Mafra suggested. Even Espinosa admitted that his course placed the ship in peril, first from the weather, and then from illness: “It became necessary for me to cut the castles and quarter-deck because the storm was so big and the weather so cold that aboard the ship that we could not cook any food. The storm lasted twelve days and because the people did not have any bread to eat, most of them lost weight and when the storm had passed and the people could once again cook food, on account of the many worms we had, it gave them nausea, which affected most people.”

Finally, Espinosa came to his senses. “When I saw the people suffering, the contrary weather, and [realized] that I had been at sea for five months, I turned back to the Moluccas, and by the time we got to the Moluccas . . . it had been seven months at sea without taking [on] any refreshments.”

A
fter a brief respite at the Islands of the Thieves to collect water, Espinosa commanded
Trinidad
to resume her retreat toward Tidore, but as he approached his goal, he received shocking news. On May 13, five weeks after
Trinidad’s
departure from Tidore, a fleet of seven Portuguese ships, all looking for Magellan and the Armada de Molucca, had arrived at the island. Their leader was António de Brito, bearing a royal appointment as governor of the Spice Islands.

His Portuguese soldiers, heavily armed, imprisoned the four crew members Espinosa had left behind to maintain a trading post. Then Brito turned his attention to Almanzor, the king of Tidore, demanding to know how he could have allowed the Spanish to maintain a post on his island. Almanzor pleaded for mercy, explaining that the Spanish had forced him to yield, but now that Captain Brito had come to rescue Almanzor from the Spanish, he would gladly switch his allegiance back to the Portuguese. Captain António de Brito, whose cynicism concerning Almanzor’s protestations can be imagined, reclaimed the Spice Islands in the name of Portugal.

Espinosa dispatched a boat bearing a letter for Captain Brito, begging for sympathy. He told a pathetic tale. His ship was in bad condition, down to its last anchor; one storm could send her to the bottom. And he was in desperate need of supplies. Had Magellan been alive, he would never have been so foolish as to write a letter to the Portuguese captain charged with capturing him, and the last thing he would have done was to reveal his whereabouts and weaknesses to the enemy. He would have known there was no chance of mercy from the Portuguese.

Rather than the compassion Espinosa expected, the letter only made Brito gloat. After searching the Indies for three years, the Portuguese governor now knew exactly where the Armada de Molucca was located, and once he had captured the crew, he would treat them as cruelly as he wished.

A few days later, a Portuguese caravel with twenty armed men stormed Benaconora, the harbor where Espinosa had sought refuge. The soldiers boarded
Trinidad,
expecting to overwhelm the crew, but were repelled by the grievous spectacle of men near death, a foul and unhealthy stench that no one dared to brave, and a ship on the verge of sinking. Everything Espinosa had said in his letter to Brito was true;
Trinidad
and her crew were in desperate condition and offered no threat to the Portuguese.

Unmoved, the Portuguese soldiers arrested Espinosa and sailed Magellan’s fetid and decrepit flagship to Ternate. There Brito took possession of
Trinidad’s
papers, logbooks, quadrants, and astrolabes. Included in the haul were the diary of Andrés de San Martín and, it is said, Magellan’s personal logbook. Brito ordered the ship stripped of all her sails and rigging, and in this condition, she rode helplessly at anchor until a severe storm hit the island. The winds smashed apart the remains of the once-proud ship, her precious cargo of cloves sank, and the splintered remnants of her hull washed ashore. The flagship of the Armada de Molucca ended up as driftwood.

Espinosa had squandered his chance for glory. If he had succeeded in guiding
Trinidad
home, he would have earned a place in history and a fortune for himself. Instead, his indecision claimed the lives of over a score of men, half the remaining assets of the armada, a valuable cargo of cloves, and the records maintained by
Trinidad’s
officers, including Magellan himself.

When Brito perused the logbooks, he became incensed because they contained damning evidence of the armada’s route through Portuguese waters and its attempts to snatch the Spice Islands away from Portugal. The source of the intelligence was impeccable: the records of the fleet’s official astronomer, Andrés de San Martín. To make matters worse, Brito discovered that the astronomer had secretly altered the location of various lands to obscure the embarrassing fact that the ships had wandered into the Portuguese hemisphere, at least as it was defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. With this information, Brito had his motive for revenge.

H
is first victim was Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, the Portuguese renegade who had joined the fleet when it first called at the Spice Islands. He was beheaded.

Brito then considered executing several sailors and pilots, but preferred that they die a slow death in the tropical heat. He later reported to the king of Portugal, “So far as concerns the master, clerk, and pilot . . . it would be more to your Highness’s service to order their heads to be struck off than to send them [to India]. I kept them in the Moluccas because it is a most unhealthy country, in order that they might die there, not liking to order their heads to be cut off, since I did not know whether your Highness would be pleased or not.” Brito based his judgment of the climate on his own troops’ suffering; of the two hundred under his command, only fifty survived. The Portuguese governor did spare the lives of two men, a boatswain and carpenter, but he did so only to press them into service for the Portuguese. He sent the rest of the crew to a fortress under construction on the island of Ternate, with orders to help build it. The timber used to construct the Portuguese fort, and the cannon to protect it, came from the wreck of
Trinidad,
formerly Magellan’s flagship and the symbol of Spanish sea power in the Indies.

Espinosa, now just another prisoner, at first refused to comply with Brito’s humiliating dictates, but eventually he was forced to go along: “I was rewarded for my labor by threats of being hanged from the yardarms and the seizure of the ship loaded with cloves and all of the equipment.” The Portuguese clapped several of his men into leg irons, and even Espinosa himself, “dishonoring me and saying that I was a thief in front of all the native people and not paying respect to me at all, and saying”—and this was the ultimate insult—“ ‘Now we’>ll see [who will prevail], the King of Spain, or that of Portugal.’> ” Espinosa was forced to admit that the Portuguese, not the Spanish, remained firmly in control of the Spice Islands.

T
rinidad ’s voyage came to its heartbreaking end in October 1522. >Now there was only one ship left of the five comprising the original Armada de Molucca. This was
Victoria,
under Elcano’s command, and her prospects of returning to Seville appeared even less certain than
Trinidad
’s.

Six months earlier, Elcano had tried repeatedly to set a course around the Cape of Good Hope, each time without success, but without serious damage either. After weeks of failed attempts,
Victoria
finally sought refuge in a harbor located in South Africa, perhaps Port Elizabeth. More disappointment ensued when a scouting party found no helpful natives, in fact, no people of any kind; and no food. Burning precious calories, the explorers climbed a hill to survey the landscape only to realize that, after all their attempts, they had yet to double the cape. It still lay ahead of them, far to the west.

With the greatest of reluctance,
Victoria
put to sea once more, battling a set of weather conditions found nowhere else on earth, the result of the interaction between the Agulhas current and everchanging winds. The Agulhas current runs from the northeast to southwest, following the contour of the continental shelf, often at speeds of up to six knots. As if the current did not pose a sufficient threat, the ship also had to battle giant waves and gales that can change from northeasterly to southwesterly in a matter of minutes.

The wind was an even more dangerous force than the current. The major wind belts around southern Africa are influenced by two high-pressure systems, the South Atlantic High and the Indian Ocean High, which form part of the so-called subtropical ridge. The Coriolis effect deflects these winds to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, and they blow around in a counterclockwise direction. Such systems are also called “anticyclones.” Winds can reach up to one hundred miles an hour, and
Victoria
experienced blasts powerful enough to sheer away her fore-topmast and main yard.

Sixty-foot-high rogue waves, monstrous walls of water, inflicted additional misery on the crew. Each upsurge threatened to swallow the fragile little ship, but somehow she managed to emerge from the churning troughs in one buoyant piece and to surge forward into the next wall of water. After a while, the mauling
Victoria
received came to seem, if not routine, then predictable. The sea had its own patient rhythm of destruction.

Given the wretched and chaotic existence the men endured, the logs and diaries covering this segment of the journey are understandably sparse and occasionally in conflict with one another. Albo, the pilot, and Pigafetta, whose records are generally in close agreement, diverge over milestones they reached by as much as two weeks. Apparently, they were too preoccupied, and the ship too unsteady, to make detailed note-taking possible.

The constant pummeling exhausted the crew, and simply finding a quiet moment to consume a few handfuls of barely edible food, usually rice, came to seem a major accomplishment, and getting through the day a miracle of sorts. Of course, the weather continued to batter the boat by night as well, so there was no rest for the crew, nor safe harbor, nor cooking fire, nor soft dry blanket, nor guarantee that their misery would end anytime soon. They might double the cape in a matter of days, but then again they might never be able to accomplish the feat. And if they were forced to turn back, the prospect of starvation in the open stretches of the Indian Ocean or death at the hands of the Portuguese awaited them. And so they tried again and again, fleeing for their lives, hoping to cheat death just one more time.

J
ust when it seemed that the cape was impassable, the wind shifted slightly and the storms relented briefly. Elcano seized the moment to round Cape Agulhas, the point farthest south on the African continent, with the Cape of Good Hope coming up quickly, almost easy to handle in comparison.

Fighting churning waters, sailing as close to the wind as he dared, Elcano finally drove his ship around the Cape of Good Hope. Pigafetta wrote, with evident relief, “Finally, by God’s help, we doubled that cape . . . at a distance of five leagues.” It was only a guess, for the cape lay shrouded in fog and mist, an invisible, menacing presence now falling behind. They had survived one more ordeal, and that was enough to give thanks to a merciful Lord.

B
y now it was May 22, 1522, the winds had abated, and
Victoria
was at last able to proceed on a northerly course. Elcano led the weather-beaten ship and her worn-out crew into what is now called Saldanha Bay, just north of Cape Town, where the men rested. There is no record that they thought of themselves as heroic for having outlasted the storms surrounding the Cape of Good Hope; there was no longer any boldness or swagger about them. They had suffered too much for that; the sea had not killed them, but it had humbled them, and they were simply grateful to be alive. Nothing else mattered in comparison with that singular fact.

When the men recovered a bit of their strength, there was work to be done. They occupied themselves loading enough water and wood to see them home. For once, they were not alone because they shared the bay with a Portuguese ship plying the India route. Elcano imprudently risked making his presence known to the Portuguese captain, who saluted and sailed away, two ships at the end of the world pursuing their disparate goals.