Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (13 page)

Under the circumstances, Magellan decided that the best course of action was to leave the Canaries immediately. If the Portuguese caravels caught up with Magellan, they would return him in shackles to the Portuguese court, where he would be convicted of treason, tortured, and perhaps executed. Poorly provisioned, but afraid for his life and the welfare of the fleet, Magellan gave the order to raise anchor and set sail at midnight, October 3.

W
e sailed on the course to the south,” Pigafetta wrote. “Engulfing ourselves in the Ocean Sea, we passed Cape Verde and sailed for many days along the coast of Guinea or Ethiopia, where there is a mountain called Sierra Leone, which is in eight degrees of latitude.” Magellan ordered the fleet to sail both day and night, attempting to place as much distance as possible between his ships and the Portuguese caravels and to take evasive action by following an unexpected course. He led the fleet southwest, hugging the coast of Africa, rather than west across the Atlantic. From the deck of
San Antonio,
following closely behind the flagship, Cartagena immediately challenged Magellan’s orders. Why, he demanded, was Magellan following this unusual route?

Follow and do not ask questions, instructed the Captain General. Cartagena continued to protest, insisting that Magellan should have consulted his captains and his pilots. Was he trying to get them all killed by following this dangerous course? Magellan did not attempt to explain; he simply reminded the other captains to follow, and that they did. The mutiny that he expected to break out any moment failed to materialize, and order reigned aboard the ships, at least for the time being.

F
or the next fifteen days, the Armada de Molucca ran before the wind; the favorable conditions placated the irritable captains and gave Magellan time to strategize about the best way to avoid his Portuguese pursuers. Although he had seen no evidence of them, he continued to follow the coast of Africa rather than head west. But as they worked their way farther south, the weather turned foul, the winds confused and contrary day after day. They had no reliable nautical charts, no indications of rocks or other hazards that might have been lying in wait, and no idea when their miserable weather would change. Cooking fires were extinguished, the men went without sleep, and life on board the battered vessels became exceedingly precarious. One slip, and a sailor could plunge into the sea without hope of rescue.

The changeable winds blew the ships sideways into the troughs between waves. As the ships were tossed about, their yardarms dipped into the seething water, a prelude to a possible shipwreck. To keep from being dragged under, the captains on several occasions came close to ordering their men to chop down the masts, a desperate measure that would have disabled the fleet once the weather began to clear. Instead, they cleared nearly all their sail, offering bare masts to the relentless wind. “Thus we sailed for sixty days of rain to the equinoctial line,” Pigafetta wrote. “Which was a thing very strange and uncommon, in the opinion of the old people and of those who had sailed there several times before.” They were buffeted “by squalls and by wind and currents that came head on to us so that we could not advance. And in order that our ships should not perish or broach to us (as often happens when squalls come together), we struck the sails. In this manner we did wander hither and yon on the sea.”

Throughout the ordeal, sharks constantly circled the ships, terrifying the crew. “They have terrible teeth,” Pigafetta wrote, plainly aghast at the sight, “and eat men when they find them alive or dead in the sea. And the said fish are caught with a hook of iron, with which some were taken by our people. But they are not good to eat when large. And even the small ones are not much good.”

A
fter weeks of constant, life-threatening storms, several hissing, incandescent globes mysteriously appeared on the yardarms of Magellan’s ship,
Trinidad.
Saint Elmo’s fire!

Here was a natural phenomenon to rival any fanciful, supernatural apparition cataloged by Pliny or Sir John Mandeville. Saint Elmo’s fire is a dramatic electrical discharge that looks like a stream of fire as it trails from the mast of a ship; it can even play about someone’s head, causing an eerie tingling sensation. The superstitious sailors, always alert to omens, associated the phenomenon with Saint Peter Gonzalez, a Dominican priest who was considered the patron saint of mariners and who had acquired the name Saint Elmo; the “fire” was regarded as a sign of his protection.

This is how Saint Elmo’s fire first appeared to the terrified, storm-tossed crew: It assumed “the form of a lighted torch at the height of the maintop, and remained there more than two hours and a half, to the comfort of us all. For we were in tears, expecting only the hour of death. And when this holy light was about to leave us, it was so bright to the eyes of all that we were for more than a quarter of an hour as blind as men calling for mercy. For without any doubt, no man thought he would escape from that storm.” Once the apparition subsided, some crew members believed that supernatural powers had singled out the Captain General for a special destiny. But their deliverance from the perils of the sea proved brief, and their faith in Magellan’s ability to save them would soon be tested again. For the moment, Magellan’s official chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, enjoyed a rare moment of repose and pondered the mysteries of the sea. No monsters with flaming faces menaced the ships; instead, flying fish leaped from the water, and not just a few, but “so great a quantity together that it seemed an island in the sea.” The wonderful sight, half real, half illusion, mesmerized Pigafetta. In the sea below, as in the heavens above, there were marvels and perils beyond comprehension. This was not the world as described by the speculative historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages; it was stranger and richer, and even more dangerous.

C H A P T E R   I V
"The Church of the Lawless"

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward,
I beheld A something in the sky.

S
ixty days of furious storms left the ships of the Armada de Molucca in need of repair and ruined a good part of the precious food supply. Magellan found it necessary to reduce rations. Each man received only four pints of drinking water a day, and half that amount of wine. Hardtack, a staple of the sailors’ diet, was also reduced to a pound and a half a day. As with his other decisions, Magellan did not explain why he was reducing the amount of food and drink, and no other decision he could take was as likely to create resentment among the captains and the crew.

Once the gales abated, the battered black ships drifted into equatorial calms. As the sails luffed lamely amid rising temperatures, the ships rode helplessly in the water. The rebellious Spanish captains, with time on their hands, resumed plotting against the Captain General. They avoided overt violence on this occasion; rather, they displayed a pointed lack of regard for the status of a man they considered their social inferior.

Magellan inadvertently set the stage for their mutiny when he reminded his officers that the instructions he had received from King Charles gave him full authority over the fleet. The captain of each ship was to approach
Trinidad
at dusk to pay his respects to Magellan and to receive orders. Cartagena chose to defy Magellan in a studied manner. When
San Antonio
approached the flagship, the quartermaster rather than Cartagena spoke up and, worse, he refused to address Magellan by the correct title. Cartagena should have said,
“Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y maestro y buena campaña.”
(“God keep you, sir Captain General, and master and good company.”) Instead, the lowly quartermaster called Magellan “Captain” rather than “Captain General.”

Magellan sharply reminded Cartagena of the proper form of address, but the Castilian captain took the opportunity to insult Magellan again. If he did not approve of
San Antonio’s
quartermaster offering the ceremonial salute, Cartagena would select a lowly page next time. For several days after that exchange, Cartagena neglected all forms of salute. Magellan had to devise an effective way to handle Cartagena’s defiant attitude or risk losing control over the entire fleet.

A
t this tense moment, a new crisis erupted aboard
Victoria.
Magellan learned that
Victoria’s
master, a Sicilian named Antonio Salamón, had been discovered sodomizing a cabin boy, Antonio Ginovés. There was no question as to whether the incident had taken place, because the two had been caught in flagrante delicto; the question was what to do about it.

Under Spanish law, homosexuality was punishable by death. Spanish authorities and the Catholic Church condemned homosexuality in the harshest language possible, despite its prevalence. As Captain General of the fleet, Magellan had little choice but to take disciplinary action, but he found himself in an impossible predicament, caught between the cruelty of Spanish law and the reality of homosexuality at sea. In practice, homosexuality among sailors confined to ships over long periods of time was inevitable. There are few accounts of captains attempting to punish sailors for this behavior; instead, they simply looked the other way. Magellan took a harsher course of action. He held a court-martial of Salamón, serving as both judge and jury. The outcome of the proceeding was swift, and Salamón was condemned to death by strangulation. The deed was to be carried out several weeks hence, on December 20.

A
fter the hearing, Magellan held a tense meeting with the other captains of the fleet in his cabin; there was Cartagena from
San Antonio,
Quesada from
Concepción,
Mendoza from
Victoria,
and Serrano from
Santiago.
As Magellan realized, all the captains, except Serrano, were determined to lead a mutiny. Cartagena immediately began attacking Magellan about the eccentric and dangerous course they had been following along the coast of Africa. First Magellan had led them into storms, Cartagena complained, and now he had gotten them trapped in equatorial calms. Cartagena insisted that the only explanation for this bizarre behavior was that Magellan intended to subvert the fleet, because no matter how loyal to King Charles he claimed to be, Magellan’s true loyalty belonged with the king of Portugal.

In his fervor to usurp Magellan, Cartagena had been misled by appearances. In fact, the Captain General had chosen the risky, unorthodox course to avoid the Portuguese caravels pursuing him and was actually doing his best to frustrate Spain’s enemies.

Another resentment fueled Cartagena’s passion for mutiny. He believed that King Charles had appointed the two of them as coadmirals of the fleet. Although Cartagena carried the title inspector general, and had been appointed
persona conjunta,
King Charles had intended no such power-sharing arrangement. Cartagena had little if any experience as a navigator, certainly had nothing to recommend him as an admiral of the most ambitious ocean expedition Spain ever mounted; rather, he was to serve as a symbol of the fleet’s Spanish identity. His chief qualification, besides his relationship to Archbishop Fonseca, was that he was a Castilian. On that basis, the privileged Cartagena believed he was entitled to share power equally with Magellan. Had Cartagena known the truth, that Magellan was fleeing the Portuguese to save the fleet rather than destroy it, the revelation might have defeated the Castilian’s paranoid logic, but it would not have restrained his unbridled chauvinism and his sense of entitlement.

As a Castilian loyal to his sovereign, Cartagena declared he would no longer take orders from Magellan.

F
ully prepared to counter Cartegena’s challenge, the Captain General gave a sign, and
Trinidad ’s
alguacil.
or master-at-arms, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, stormed the cabin. Right behind him came two loyalists, Duarte Barbosa and Magellan’s illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, all with swords drawn. Magellan leaped at Cartagena, catching the Castilian by the ruff of his shirt, and shoved him into a chair. “Rebel!” Magellan shouted, “this is mutiny! You are my prisoner, in the King’s name.”

At that, Cartagena barked at the other traitorous captains, Quesada and Mendoza, to stab Magellan with their daggers. From the way he spoke, it was apparent that the three of them had plotted to overthrow the Captain General, but now, at the crucial moment, lost their resolve to act.

Seizing the initiative, Espinosa, in his role as
alguacil.
picked up Cartagena and shoved him out of the captain’s cabin to the main deck, where he was secured to stocks intended for common seamen who had committed minor offenses. The indignity of seeing a Castilian officer subjected to this ignominy was more than Quesada and Mendoza could bear. They pleaded with Magellan to free Cartagena or, failing that, to release him into their custody. They reminded their Captain General that they had demonstrated their loyalty by ignoring Cartagena. They persuaded Magellan that he had nothing to fear from them, and he agreed to free Cartagena on condition that Mendoza confine him aboard
Victoria.
Cartagena was immediately relieved of command.

Had he chosen, Magellan could have convened a court-martial and sentenced Cartagena to death. As Captain General, he would have been within his rights because Cartagena had plotted to kill Magellan: Nothing could be more serious. But Magellan was acutely aware of Cartagena’s privileged position and concerned that executing or severely punishing him would be inflammatory, so for once he erred on the side of caution. The lack of disciplinary action made it a certainty that the irascible Castilian would continue to challenge Magellan until only one of them remained.