Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (55 page)

By portraying himself as a humble defender of Spanish honor, Elcano skillfully played up to King Charles, but he was less successful in his defense of the expedition’s commercial aspects. Why, his inquisitors demanded, were there only 524 quintals of cloves on board
Victoria
when she tied up at the quay in Seville, but the ship’s own register clearly showed she had taken on no less than 600 quintals in the Spice Islands?

In his response, Elcano carefully explained that he had relied on the weight given by the islanders from whom he had purchased the cloves, that he personally supervised weighing the cargo in Seville, and that any discrepancy could be accounted for by drying during the long voyage home.

Next, Elcano was asked why he had failed to keep accounts. According to the transcript, “Elcano was asked to declare all that was done on the voyage to the disservice of His Majesty and to defraud him of his property.”

Again, the Basque-born mariner tried to shift the blame to Magellan, claiming that as long as Magellan was alive, he had written nothing “because he dared not to do so,” while after Magellan’s death, he did record transactions. This explanation made no sense because Magellan was scrupulous about recording the fleet’s activities, whether in Pigafetta’s diary or in Albo’s pilot’s log. Ignoring those inconvenient pieces of evidence, Elcano instead spoke grandly and vaguely about Magellan’s “disservice” to the king and the fleet, which he recklessly “abandoned to its fate.” His indictment of Magellan was as damning as it was unsupported by the events.

Finally, Elcano was forced to confront the disquieting rumors surrounding Magellan’s death. In his brief reply, Elcano held the Mactanese islanders completely responsible. By burning their hamlet, Elcano implied, Magellan had goaded them into taking revenge. His explanation went unchallenged, and served as the basis of the official determination of the cause of Magellan’s death.

Elcano’s testimony was sufficiently dexterous to exculpate himself from royal disfavor or worse. And his two companions, giving answers remarkably similar to Elcano’s, achieved the same result. By the time the inquiry ended, King Charles and his advisers were reminded that the survivors had brought them a fortune in spices, a claim to the Spice Islands themselves, a new water route to the islands, and an unequaled mastery of the ocean—all of it priceless, no matter how underhanded they had been in getting it.

I
n the end, King Charles waived the royal duties on the spices the men brought home for their personal enrichment and offered a quarter of his own proceeds from the voyage to the three survivors who had testified in Valladolid. Elcano’s bonus included even more: an annual pension of five hundred ducats, a knighthood, and a coat of arms befitting the mariner who had sailed around the world. It depicted a castle, spices, two Malay kings, a globe, and the legend:

Primus circumdedesti me

Thou first circled me.

Of equal importance, Elcano received a royal pardon for his role in the failed mutiny against Magellan’s command. Elcano insisted on having the document published, making his exoneration complete. He would now be qualified to lead future expeditions for Castile.

With all his new riches, Elcano acquired two mistresses, one of whom bore him a daughter, the other a son, but he lived with neither.

T
he other survivors of the expedition received similar marks of royal favor. Martín Méndez,
Victoria’s
accountant; Hernando Bustamente, the barber; Miguel de Rodas, the master of
Victoria;
and Espinosa each received individualized coats of arms commemorating their accomplishments. (Meanwhile, the coat of arms for the Magellan family remained defaced and dishonored, as it had been since Magellan left Portugal to serve the king of Spain—the king who had all but forgotten him now.)

The men who had mutinied against Magellan—an entire ship filled with them—were freed from prison and absolved of their crimes. Álvaro de Mesquita, who had served as captain of
San Antonio
until the mutineers overwhelmed him, had languished in jail ever since 1521, when his ship returned to Seville. With
Victoria’s
survivors corroborating his story, the diehard Magellan loyalist was also freed in a general amnesty designed to end lingering controversy about the voyage. Having had enough of Spanish justice, he fled home to Portugal.

D
espite Elcano’s skill at self-promotion, and King Charles’s endorsement, a different interpretation of the voyage emerged soon after
Victoria’s
return. Maximilian of Transylvania, a secretary to King Charles, pounced on Elcano, Albo, and Bustamente at Valladolid, interviewed them all at length, and very likely talked to Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s official chronicler, as well. Within a month of
Victoria’s
return to Seville, he delivered his lengthy report to King Charles.

In his account, Maximilian saw past the expedition’s internal power struggles to emphasize how it changed the way the entire world would be seen from this time forth. “I have resolved to write as truly as possible,” he remarked. “I have taken care to have everything related to me exactly by the captain and by the individual sailors who have returned with him.” These men were so sincere that it was apparent to Maximilian that “they seemed not only to tell nothing fabulous themselves, but by their relation to disprove and refute all the fabulous stories which had been told by ancient authors.”

B
y far the most authoritative and eloquent chronicle of the first voyage around the world flowed from the pen of Antonio Pigafetta, who had faithfully maintained his diary throughout the entire expedition. To counter what he expected would be Elcano’s selfserving distortions of the events that had occurred at sea, Pigafetta immediately set about writing his own impassioned plea for Magellan’s valor and lo more important, how he had lived. He revealed Magellan as the fearless disprover of long-standing myths and overturner of tenacious fallacies.

Leaving Seville, Pigafetta headed directly for Valladolid, where he presented the young monarch with “neither gold nor silver, but things very highly esteemed by such a sovereign. Among other things, I gave him a book, written by my hand, concerning all the matters that had occurred day to day during our voyage”—the most important account of distant lands to appear since
The Travels of Marco Polo.

Pigafetta’s diplomatic background served him well, because he then succeeded in giving his account to sovereigns who were often bitter enemies of one another: “After this, I left for Portugal, where I gave an account to King João of all that I had seen. Passing again through Spain, I also went to present some rare objects from the other hemisphere to the very Christian King François. Finally, I went to Italy, to the very industrious lord, Philippe Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a worthy grandmaster of Rhodes, and placed at his disposal my person and services of which I would be capable.” Pigafetta’s thorough and even-handed distribution of his account ensured Magellan’s leading role in the adventure for posterity—and, not so incidentally, his own. “I made the voyage and saw with my eyes the things hereafter written,” Pigafetta vowed, “that I might win a famous name.”

After traveling across Europe, Pigafetta arrived in Venice, his home, and immediately caused a stir. “There came into the college a Venetian who had been appointed a knight errant, a brother of [the Order of] Rhodes, who has been three years in India,” wrote Marin Sanudo on November 7, 1523, of Pigafetta’s visit. “And all the college listened to him with great attention, and he told half of his voyage . . . and after dinner also he was with the doge, and related those things in detail, so that his Serenity and all who heard him were rendered speechless over the things of India.”

In August of the following year, Pigafetta, by this time settled in Venice, requested that the doge and city council allow him to print his sensational account; he supplied two reasons, the overwhelming importance of the events recorded, and Pigafetta’s singular authority in relating them:

Most Serene Prince and your Excellencies:

Petition of me, Antonio Pigafetta, Venetian knight of Jerusalem, who, desiring to see the world, have sailed, in past years, with the caravels of his Caesarean Majesty [Charles V], which went to discover the islands of the new Indies where the spices grow.

On that voyage, I circumnavigated the whole world, and since it is a feat that no man had accomplished, I have composed a short 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. [I petition] also that the execution [of the penalty] may be imposed by any magistrate of this city who shall be informed of it; and that the fine be divided as follows: one-third to the arsenal of your Highness, one-third to the accuser, and one-third to those who shall impose it.

I humbly commend myself to your kindness.

Pigafetta’s request met with a favorable response, and he was granted the privilege that “no other except himself be allowed to have it printed for twenty years.”

The first copies of Pigafetta’s “relation,” the ones he brought with him to the courts of Europe, were lavish handwritten manuscripts illustrated with maps of his own devising, items literally fit for a king. It is believed that Pigafetta wrote his “relation” in the Venetian dialect, mixed with Italian and Spanish, but the original has been lost. Instead, four early versions produced by expert scribes have come down over the centuries, one in Italian and three in French. By general agreement, the most handsome, complete, and extravagantly illustrated version resides today in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. To read this memoir, and to turn its ancient vellum pages, is to be transported instantly five hundred years into the past. Although Pigafetta tells his story more or less in chronological order, he has not constructed a linear narrative; rather, it is a compilation of events, illustrations, translations of foreign tongues, prayers, descriptions, epiphanies, and bawdy asides, all of them heavily cross-referenced and colorcoded in brilliant inks of black, blue, and red. Yet it is also a personal document, unusual for that time, when the idea of an individual consciousness was just beginning to take root. The reader of Pigafetta’s chronicle hears his voice, alternately bold, astonished, devastated, fascinated, and, in the end, amazed to be alive in the cruelly beautiful world of his time.

A
lthough a few influential voices celebrated Magellan’s extraordinary accomplishments and appreciated the extent of his ordeal, he was despised or discounted by most authorities and observers from Seville to Lisbon; in both countries he was considered a traitor, and court historians everywhere prepared to blacken pages with their indictments of his nefarious deeds and treachery. Ironically, Magellan’s most fervent admirers were in England, where political commentators urged their island nation to emulate his daring example. Closer to home, King João III of Portugal (the son of the monarch who had spurned Magellan) seethed at the news that one of the ships of the Armada de Molucca had returned to Seville with a full load of cloves. He hotly protested to King Charles, insisting that the Spice Islands actually belonged to Portugal. Charles, for his part, patiently but insistently pressed for the release of the men taken prisoner by the Portuguese in the Cape Verde Islands, and they trickled in to Spain in small groups throughout the following year. The additional survivors of
Victoria
included Roland de Argot, a gunner; Martín Méndez, the fleet’s accountant; Pedro de Tolosa, a steward; Simón de Burgos, suspected of betraying the other crew members in the Cape Verde Islands; and one Moluccan, who went by the name of Manuel.

Victoria’s
two groups of survivors, for all the hardships they had endured since leaving the Spice Islands, enjoyed far better fortune than the sixty men who had chosen to sail home aboard
Trinidad.
Only four of that number ever returned to Spain or Portugal. A deaf seaman named Juan Rodríguez, at forty-eight the oldest survivor, stowed away on a Portuguese ship bound for Lisbon. He spent a short time in jail, won his release, made his way back to Seville, and, despite his age, his infirmity, and the hardships he had endured during his years at sea, applied to the Casa de Contratación to sail to the Indies once again.

Enduring months of hard labor and humiliation in the Moluccas, Espinosa was transported along with several of his crew members to Cochin, a Portuguese outpost on the west coast of India. Refusing a Portuguese invitation to fight the Arabs, he wrote to King Charles, complaining that the viceroy, Vasco da Gama, was busy “menacing me and telling me that my head would be cut off and dishonoring me with many evil words, saying that he would hang the others.”

I
n 1526, after four miserable years in captivity, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the former captain, and Ginés de Mafra, the garrulous pilot, joined the crew’s gunner, Hans Vargue, aboard a ship bound for Lisbon. Freedom would elude them a while longer, though; on arrival, the heroic circumnavigators were thrown into jail. Vargue died there, leaving all his worldly possessions—his back pay and a package of cloves—to Espinosa.

Toughened by years of adversity, de Mafra and Espinosa survived their time in a Lisbon prison as they had survived everything else, and upon their release they returned to Seville, only to be jailed again. Their case came to trial in 1527; at last they were acquitted and finally released.