Over the Edge of the World

Chapter V The Crucible of Leadership

With sloping masts and dipping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled.

After six months at sea, Magellan’s ability to lead the armada was still in grave doubt. Many of the most influential Castilian officers, and even the Portuguese pilots, were convinced their fierce and rigid Captain General was leading them all to their deaths in his zeal to find the Spice Islands. Few among them had confidence that Magellan could lead them to the edge of the world and beyond with a reasonable chance of survival.

A crucial evolution of Magellan’s style of leadership, and perhaps his character, occurred over a period of nine trying months, from February to October 1520. He emerged from the ordeal a very different man from the one who had begun the voyage. The Magellan of February teetered on the brink of being murdered by the men he commanded. The Magellan of October was on the way to earning a place in history. In the intervening months, he passed a series of tests that forced him to confront his own limits as a leader and to change his ways, or die.

Hugging the coast, the fleet spent the last week of February sailing west toward Bahía Blanca, a spacious harbor worthy of investigation. Magellan led his ships in and around the islands of the bay, but found no sign of a strait. As he familiarized himself with the coastline, he became increasingly confident of his navigational skills, and he resumed sailing twenty-four hours a day, staying well offshore at night to avoid rocks and reefs lurking below the dark water. On February 24, the fleet came to another possible opening. “We entered well in,” Albo recorded in his log, “but could not find the bottom until we were entirely inside, and we found eighty fathoms, and it has a circuit of 50 leagues.” Magellan refused to consider this huge bay as anything more than that. His surmise proved correct and saved the fleet days of aimless investigation.

Finally, on February 27, the armada explored a promising inlet with two islands sheltering what appeared to be numerous ducks. Magellan named the inlet Bahía de los Patos, Duck Bay, and carefully explored it to locate an entrance to the strait. He cautiously committed only six seamen to a landing party charged with fetching supplies, mainly wood for fire and fresh water. Fearful of stumbling across warlike tribes that might be prowling in the forest, the landing party confined their activities to a diminutive island lacking in either fresh water or wood but seething with wildlife. On closer inspection, what appeared to be ducks turned out to be something quite different. Pigafetta identified them as “geese” and “goslings.” There were too many to count, he said, and wonderfully easy to catch. “We loaded all the ships with them in an hour,” he claimed, and they were soon salted and consumed by the voracious sailors. From his description, it is apparent that the “geese” were actually penguins: “These goslings are black and have feathers over their whole body of the same size and fashion, and they do not fly, and they live on fish. And they were so fat that we did not pluck them but skinned them, and they have a beak like a crow’s.”

Pigafetta marveled at another beast they encountered, one worthy of Pliny himself and all the more wonderful because it was absolutely real. “The sea wolves of these two islands are of various colors and of the size and thickness of a calf, and they have a head like that of a calf, and small round ears. They have large teeth and no legs, but they have feet attached to their body and resembling a human hand. And they have feet, nails on their feet, and skin between the toes like goslings. And if the animals could run, they would be very fierce and cruel. But they do not leave the water, where they swim and live on fish.”

By “sea wolves” Pigafetta meant the sub-Antarctic sea lion or the sea elephant, usually distinguished by its inflatable snout. Although these mammals spend most of their time in the ocean, diving to depths of over four thousand feet, they occasionally spend relaxing months frolicking onshore in uncannily human family groups, lolling, stretching, yawning, scratching themselves, and peering lazily at their surroundings. Each male keeps a large harem of females, as many as fifteen, and often carries deep scars from fights with other males during the mating season. The adults weigh a thousand pounds, and if butchered properly, their rich meat and blubber could provide abundant food, and their thick, glossy, silvery-gray pelts a sorely needed source of warmth in these frigid latitudes.

The six enterprising seamen crept up on family groups of “sea wolves,” stunned them with clubs, and lugged as many as they could into the longboat. Before the landing party could return to the fleet, a severe storm sprang up. The strong offshore winds blew Magellan’s ships out to sea, stranding the six seamen on the little island. They passed a wretched night fearing that they would either be devoured by the “sea wolves” or die from exposure to the extreme cold.

In the morning, Magellan dispatched a rescue team. When they found only the abandoned longboat, they feared the worst. They carefully explored the island, calling out for their lost crewmates, but succeeded only in scaring the “sea wolves,” several of which they slaughtered. Approaching the creatures, the rescue party came upon the lost men huddled beneath the lifeless “sea wolves,” spattered with mud, exhausted, giving off a dreadful smell, but alive. They had settled next to the creatures to find shelter from the violent storm and enough warmth to sustain them through the night.

As if these men had not suffered enough, another storm blasted the island just as they attempted to return to the waiting fleet. They managed to make it back safely to the ships, but the squall was fierce enough that Trinidad’s mooring cables parted, one after the other.

Helpless in the storm, pitching wildly, hurling her crew this way and that, the flagship veered dangerously close to the rocks near the shore. Only one cable held fast, and if it gave, Trinidad and her men—Magellan included—would all be lost. The sailors prayed to the Virgin and to all the saints they knew. In their abject fear, they promised to make religious pilgrimages on their return to Spain if only they survived this ordeal.

Their prayers were answered when not one but three glorious instances of Saint Elmo’s fire danced on the ships’ yardarms, casting an unearthly light of hope and inspiration. “We ran a very great risk of perishing,” Pigafetta recorded. “But the three bodies of St. Anselm, St. Nicholas, and Saint Clare appeared to us, and forthwith the storm ceased.” The last deity was especially apt, for Saint Clare was considered the patron saint of the blind and was often represented holding a lantern; it was even believed that she could clear up fog and rain. To the religious sailors, the sudden manifestation of these signs was clear evidence that God still watched over them and protected them even in the remotest regions of the globe. As proof, the sole cable protecting them from disaster held until dawn, when the storm finally relented.

Battered by the storm, Magellan sought shelter in a cove, but the weather refused to cooperate. The wind disappeared, and the Armada de Molucca remained becalmed until midnight, when a third storm descended on them, the most destructive yet. The gale lasted three days and three nights, days and nights of freezing, of near starvation, of helplessness in the face of the elements. The fierce wind and seas tore away masts, castles, even poop decks. Through it all, the beleaguered sailors, trapped in disintegrating vessels that threatened to send them to their deaths at any moment, prayed for salvation with a fervor born of desperation.

Once again, their prayers were answered. The five ships rode out the great storm. The damage inflicted by the wind and waves, while serious, could be repaired. Incredibly, no lives were lost, despite all the hazards they had encountered on land and on sea. The Captain General gave the order, and the armada finally set sail.

Magellan resumed his search for a strait. Now that he had seen how quickly the offshore gales that raged in this region could maim or destroy his fleet, the need for an escape route became more urgent than ever. After several more days at sea, hope appeared in the form of another inviting cove. Magellan sailed into the protected waters, where he was disheartened not to find an inlet. This was merely a bay, but it would protect the fleet from severe storms—or so he thought. Six days later, another protracted tempest proved him wrong.

As before, the heavy weather stranded a landing party already ashore, this time with no “sea wolves” to provide shelter or warmth. Enduring bone-chilling cold, their skin and hair and beards soaked constantly with freezing rain, their fingers and toes numb, the men forced themselves to forage for shellfish in the freezing water. Their hands bleeding, they smashed the shells and survived on the raw flesh until, nearly a week later, they were able to return to the fleet.

Leaving the harbor, now named the Bay of Toil, the armada resumed its southerly course into even colder weather and the approaching subequatorial winter. The days grew shorter, and each unruly puff of wind darkened the sea and pummeled the sails, threatening to bloom into yet another squall. Finally, Magellan had had enough of exploration; he decided to suspend the search for the strait until the following spring. He turned his attention to finding a safe harbor where the fleet could ride out the approaching cold weather. On March 31, at a latitude of 49° 20', he found it. From his vantage point aboard Trinidad, it appeared to be an ideal haven: The harbor was sheltered, and abundant fish punctured the water’s surface, as if in welcome. It was named Port Saint Julian.

The entrance to the port was framed by impressive gray cliffs rising one hundred feet as the harbor quickly contracted into a channel about half a mile in width. Although it offered protection, the narrow inlet experienced tides of over twenty feet and currents of up to six knots; in these conditions, the ships had to anchor themselves carefully and, when necessary, run cables to the shore to secure their positions.

Magellan considered Port Saint Julian a landmark of sufficient importance that he wanted to determine its longitude. He asked his pilots if they could make use of his friend Ruy Faleiro’s techniques. Not possible, they told him. He consulted San Martín, his official astronomer, who tried to accommodate him; he took measurements, consulted with the pilots, and concluded that they might have strayed into Portuguese territory as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The idea appalled Magellan, under orders from King Charles to avoid Portuguese waters and, at the same time, to demonstrate that the Spice Islands lay comfortably within the Spanish realm. Now it appeared the fleet had already sailed beyond the line of demarcation. Magellan realized he might be sailing halfway around the world only to demonstrate the opposite of what he had expected. The matter was potentially so serious, so damning to the entire enterprise, that the pilots deliberately obscured the location of Port Saint Julian on their charts.

Anticipating a long, grueling winter in Port Saint Julian, Magellan placed his crew on short rations, even though the ships groaned with the butchered meat of “geese” and “sea wolves,” and fish abounded in the harbor. After the unbroken succession of life-threatening ordeals they had faced over the previous seven weeks, the seamen expected to be rewarded for their courage and perseverance, not punished. Outraged by the rationing, they turned insubordinate. Some insisted that they return to full rations, while others demanded that the fleet, or some part of it, sail back to Spain.

They did not believe the strait existed. They had tried again and again to find it, risking death while coming up against one dead end after another. If they kept going, they argued, they would eventually perish in one of the cataclysmic storms afflicting the region, or simply fall off the edge of the world when the coastline finally ended. Surely King Charles did not mean for them all to die in the attempt to find a water route to the Spice Islands. Surely human life had some value.

Magellan obstinately reminded them that they must obey their royal commission, and follow the coastline wherever it led. The king had ordered this voyage, and Magellan would persist until he reached land’s end, or found the strait. How astonished he was to see bold Spaniards so fainthearted, or so he said. As far as their provisions were concerned, they had plenty of wood here in Port Saint Julian, abundant fish, fresh water, and fowl; their ships still had adequate stores of biscuit and wine, if they observed rationing. Consider the Portuguese navigators, he exhorted them, who had passed twelve degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn without any difficulty, and here they were, two full degrees above it. What kind of sailors were they? Magellan insisted he would rather die than return to Spain in shame, and he urged them to wait patiently until winter was over. The more they suffered, the greater the reward they might expect from King Charles. They should not question the king, he advised, but discover a world not yet known, filled with gold and spices to enrich them all.

This eloquent speech to the vacillating crew members bought Magellan a few days’ respite, but only a few. His stern words had confirmed their worst fears about his behavior and his do-or-die fanaticism. On the most basic level, they believed he considered their lives expendable. In the following days, the men began to bicker; national prejudices suddenly flashed like well-oiled swords drawn from scabbards to cut and slash, usually at Magellan himself. Once again, the Castilians argued that Magellan’s insistence that he intended to find the strait or die was proof that he intended to subvert the entire expedition and get them all killed in the process. All this talk of glorifying King Charles, they felt, was merely a stratagem to trick them into going along with Magellan’s suicidal scheme. Anyone doubting Magellan’s intention to subvert the expedition had only to examine the course they had been following, southward, ever southward, into the eternal cold, whereas the Spice Islands and the Indies lay to the west, where it was warm and sunny, and where luxury surely abounded.

In the midst of this turmoil, the officers and crew observed the holiest day of the year, Easter Sunday, April 1. At that moment, Magellan had one paramount concern: Who was loyal to him, and who was not? With a sufficient number of loyal crew members, he would be able to withstand this latest, and most serious, challenge to his authority. Without them, he might be imprisoned, impaled on a halberd, or even hanged from a yardarm by hell-bent mutineers. To assess the extent of danger he faced, he carefully interviewed each member of the crew.

“With sweet words and big promises,” Ginés de Mafra recalled, “[Magellan] told them the other captains were plotting against him, and he asked them to advise him what to do. They replied that their only advice was that they were willing to do as he commanded. Magellan . . . openly told his crew that the conspirators had resolved to kill him on Easter Day while he attended mass ashore, but that he would feign ignorance and go to mass all the same. This he did and, secretly armed, went to a small sandy islet where a small house had been built to accommodate the ceremony.”

Magellan expected to see all four captains at Easter mass but only one, Luis de Mendoza, of Victoria, arrived. The air crackled with tension. “Both conversed,” de Mafra says, concealing their emotions under blank countenances, and attended mass together. At the end of the ceremony, Magellan pointedly asked Mendoza why the other captains had defied his orders and failed to attend. Mendoza replied, lamely, that perhaps the others were ill.

Still feigning bonhomie, Magellan invited Mendoza to dine at the Captain General’s table, a gesture that would force him to proclaim his loyalty to Magellan, but Mendoza coolly declined the request. Magellan appeared unfazed by Mendoza’s insubordination, but the Captain General now knew that Mendoza was a conspirator.

Mendoza returned to Victoria, where he and the other captains resumed plotting against Magellan, sending messages by longboat from one ship to another. After mass, only Magellan’s cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita, the recently appointed captain of San Antonio, came aboard Trinidad to dine at the Captain General’s table. Magellan realized that the empty chairs made for an ominous sign.

At the moment, Magellan capitalized on a piece of luck. The longboat belonging to Concepción’s captain, Gaspar de Quesada, lost its way in the strong current while ferrying conspiratorial messages between the rebel ships and, to the dismay of the men aboard, found itself drifting helplessly toward the flagship and Magellan himself, the one individual they did not want to encounter at that moment. To their surprise, the crew of Trinidad, at Magellan’s direction, rescued them from the runaway longboat. Even more amazing, Magellan welcomed them aboard the flagship and provided them with a lavish meal, which included plenty of wine.

At dinner, the band of would-be mutineers drank a great deal and decided that they had nothing to fear from the Captain General after all. They even revealed the existence of the plot to Magellan; they confided that if the plot succeded, he would be “captured and killed” that very night.

Hearing this, Magellan lost all interest in his visitors and busied himself readying the flagship against attack. Once again he questioned his crew to see who was loyal to him and who was not and, satisfied that Trinidad’s men would take his side when the mutiny inevitably erupted, awaited the inevitable assault.

Late that night, Concepción stirred with life. The captain, Quesada, lowered himself into a longboat and quietly made his way to San Antonio. He was joined there in the dark water lapping at the ship’s hull by Juan de Cartagena, former captain, bishop’s unacknowledged son, and frustrated mutineer; Juan Sebastián Elcano, a veteran Basque mariner who served as Concepción’s master; and a corps of thirty armed seamen.

Under cover of darkness, they boarded San Antonio and rushed to the captain’s cabin, entering with a flourish of steel, rousting the hapless Mesquita out of his bunk. This had once been Cartagena’s ship, and in his mind, it still was. Mesquita offered little resistance as the party of mutineers clapped him into irons and led him to the cabin of Gerónimo Guerra, where he was placed under guard.

By this time, word of the uprising had spread throughout the ship, and the crew sprang to life. Juan de Elorriaga, the ship’s master, and a Basque, valiantly tried to dismiss Quesada from San Antonio before any blood was shed, but Quesada refused to stand down, whereupon Elorriaga turned to his boatswain, Diego Hernández, to order the crew to restrain Quesada and quash the mutiny.

“We cannot be foiled in our work by this fool,” Quesada shouted, knowing that there could be no turning back. And he ran Elorriaga through with a dagger, again and again, four times in all, until Elorriaga, bleeding profusely, collapsed. Quesada assumed Elorriaga was dead, but the loyal master was still alive, though perhaps he would have been better off if he had died on the spot; instead, he lingered for three and a half months until he finally died from the wounds he received that night at Quesada’s hand.

As the two struggled, Quesada’s guard took Hernández hostage, and suddenly the ship was without officers. The bewildered crew, without anyone to give them orders and fearing for their lives, gave up their arms to the mutineers. One of their number, Antonio de Coca, the fleet’s accountant, actually joined the insurgents, who stored the confiscated weapons in his cabin. The first phase of the mutiny had gone off as planned.

Pigafetta, normally a thorough chronicler of the voyage, offers little guidance to the mutiny. In this case, he was close, too close, to Magellan to be helpful. As a Magellan loyalist, he resisted the temptation to hear or repeat any ill concerning his beloved captain. He eloquently presented the Magellanic myth of the great and wise explorer, but at the same time he turned a blind eye to the scandals and mutinies surrounding Magellan throughout the voyage. In his one cursory mention of the drama at Port Saint Julian, Pigafetta even confuses the names of the principal actors. The chronicler, who could be extremely precise when he wished, likely got around to mentioning the mutiny only after the voyage, when he felt safe enough to discuss the bloody deeds happening all around him.

The mutineers in control of San Antonio swiftly converted her into a battleship. Elcano, the Basque mariner, took command and immediately ordered the imprisonment of two Portuguese who appeared loyal to Magellan, Antonio Fernandes and Gonçalo Rodrigues, as well as a Castilian, Diego Díaz. The mutineers, led by Antonio de Coca and Luis de Molino, Quesada’s servant, raided the ship’s stores, filling their hungry bellies with bread and wine, anything they could lay their hands on, and they endeared themselves to their followers by allowing them to partake of the forbidden food. Father Valderrama, preoccupied with administering last rites to Elorriaga, watched all and vowed to report the evil deeds to Magellan, if he ever got the chance. Meanwhile, Elcano ordered firearms to be prepared; the arquebuses and crossbows—powerful, state-of-the-art weapons—were broken out. Anyone attempting to approach the renegade ship would face a barrage of lethal arrows and muzzles belching fire.

Within hours the mutiny spread like a contagion to two other ships, Victoria, whose captain, Luis de Mendoza, had resented Magellan from the day they left Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and to Concepción. It was only a matter of time until Cartagena, Quesada, and their supporters came after Magellan himself. Only Santiago, under the command of Juan Serrano, a Castilian, remained neutral. Quesada, for the moment, decided to leave Santiago alone; it was a decision that would later haunt the mutineers.

The sun rose over Port Saint Julian on April 2 to reveal a scene of deceptive calm. The five ships of the Armada de Molucca rode quietly at anchor, their crew members sleeping off the previous night’s excesses. For the moment, the Captain General remained secure in his stronghold, Trinidad. As a test of loyalty, he dispatched a longboat to San Antonio, where Quesada and Elcano held sway, to bring sailors ashore to fetch fresh water. As Trinidad’s longboat approached, the mutineers waved the sailors away and declared that San Antonio was no longer under the command of Mesquita or Magellan. She now belonged to the mutineer Gaspar Quesada.

When the longboat brought this disturbing news back to Magellan, he realized he faced a grave problem, but he remained oblivious to the full extent of the mutiny. He believed he had to contend with only one rebellious ship, not three, until he sent the longboat to poll the other ships and determine their loyalty. From his stronghold aboard San Antonio, Quesada replied, “For the King and for myself,” and Victoria and Concepción followed suit.

To make his point, Quesada audaciously sent a list of demands by longboat to the flagship. Quesada believed, with good reason, that he had Magellan boxed in, and he tried to force the Captain General to yield to the mutineers. In writing, Quesada declared that he was now in charge of the fleet, and he intended to end the harsh treatment Magellan had inflicted on the officers and crew. He would feed them better, he would not endanger their lives needlessly, and he would return to Spain. If Magellan acceded to these demands, said Quesada, the mutineers would yield control of the armada to him.

To Magellan, these demands were outrageous. To comply meant ignominy in Spain, disgrace in Portugal, years in a prison cell, and even death. Under these circumstances, he might have been expected to launch a full-scale attack on San Antonio, but for once Magellan restrained his need to assert his authority. He sent back word that he would be pleased to hear them out—aboard the flagship, of course. The mutineers were hesitant to leave their base. Who knew what awaited them aboard Trinidad? They replied that they would meet him only aboard San Antonio. To their astonishment, Magellan agreed.

Having lulled Quesada and his followers into a sense of false security, Magellan quietly went on the offensive. By any objective measure, he operated at an enormous disadvantage. The mutineers controlled three out of the fleet’s five ships and most of the captains and the crews. They had popular sentiment on their side and weapons to back up their demands. In his diminished position, Magellan did not attempt to meet force with force; instead, he sought to dismantle their revolt piece by piece, without placing himself in more peril than he already was.

He began his attempt to recover his fleet by claiming the longboat carrying Quesada’s communiqué. With this equipment in hand, he turned his attention to recapturing at least one ship, and then he would go after the others. He decided not to attempt to reclaim San Antonio, where the mutineers were deeply entrenched, but Victoria, where support for the rebels might be softer, and where he would be most likely to summon support.

Victoria became the key to the whole plan, and to get her back, he resorted to a ruse. He filled the captured longboat with five carefully selected sailors and instructed them to appear sympathetic to the mutineers, at least at a distance. But beneath their loose clothing they carried weapons, which they intended to use. Their ranks included Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms, which automatically lent authority to their mission. Magellan gave the men a letter addressed to Luis de Mendoza, Victoria’s captain, ordering him to surrender immediately aboard the flagship. If Mendoza resisted, they were to kill him.

As soon as the longboat moved out of sight to begin its mission, the Captain General sent a second skiff into the water, filled with fifteen loyal members of the flagship’s crew under the command of Duarte Barbosa, Magellan’s brother-in-law.

When the first longboat pulled up to Victoria, Mendoza allowed the party to board his ship. De Mafra, the best eyewitness to the unfolding mutiny, relates, “Mendoza, a daring man when it came to evil deeds but too rash to take advice, told them to come aboard and give him the letter, which he set about reading in a careless manner, and not as befits a man involved in such a serious business.” According to other witnesses, Mendoza responded to the letter with mockery and laughter, crumpled the orders into a ball, and carelessly tossed it overboard. At that, Espinosa, the military officer, grabbed Mendoza by the beard, violently shook his head, and plunged a dagger into this throat, as another soldier stabbed him in the head. Spurting blood, Victoria’s captain slumped to the deck, lifeless.

With Mendoza dead, Magellan held the advantage in the life-and-death contest. No sooner had the captain breathed his last than the second longboat rowed into position beside Victoria, discharging its complement of loyalists who stormed the ship. As Magellan had calculated, his guard met with little or no opposition. Stunned by the death of their captain, the crew meekly submitted to Magellan’s men.

As if the sight of the dead officer was not insult enough to the other Castilians, Magellan later paid off Espinosa and his henchmen for this bloody deed in plain view of everyone. “For this [action], the Captain General gave twelve ducats to Espinosa,” recalled Sebastián Elcano, one of the mutineers, “and to the others six ducats each from Mendoza’s and Quesada’s savings.” Was this the price of their lives, the Castilians asked themselves. A few ducats?

To signal Magellan’s triumph, Barbosa flew the Captain General’s colors from Victoria’s mast, announcing to Quesada and the other rebels that the mutiny was ending. Magellan placed Trinidad securely between the two loyal ships, Victoria guarding one side and Santiago, now loyal to Magellan, the other. Together, the three vessels blockaded the inlet to the port; the two rebel holdouts, positioned deeper in the harbor, could not escape.

Magellan expected Quesada to recognize that resistance was futile. The mutiny had failed, and he would soon have to bargain not for better rations or a swift return to Spain, but for his very life. But Quesada refused to give up. Concepción and San Antonio remained at the other end of the harbor, offering no clue about the mutineers’ intentions. To prevent them from slipping past the blockade at night, Magellan readied his flagship for combat. He doubled the watch and gave an order to “make a plentiful provision of much darts, lances, stones, and other weapons, both on deck and in the tops.” To win the men’s cooperation, he allowed them the pleasure of ample food. At the same time, he warned them not to let the two delinquent ships escape from the harbor into the open sea.

While the others were distracted, Magellan entrusted a seaman with a perilous assignment. Under cover of darkness, he was to sneak on board Quesada’s ship, Concepción, where he would loosen or sever the anchor cable so that she would slip her mooring. Magellan calculated that the strong nocturnal ebb tide would draw her toward the blockade guarding the mouth of the harbor, giving him just the pretext he needed for launching a surprise attack. He was prepared to greet her with all the firepower he could muster.

Late that night, Concepción drifted mysteriously across the harbor. Because no one knew of Magellan’s subterfuge, she appeared to be dragging her anchor. It was only a matter of time before she came within range of the flagship and touched off a battle at sea.

Aboard Concepción, the rebellion was beginning to falter. Ginés de Mafra, held hostage along with Mesquita, noticed that Quesada, the leader of the mutiny, was experiencing pangs of remorse, but he could not persuade his followers to end their rebellion now. “He summoned his crew and asked them that in case they could not get away with what they had begun, what should be done to avoid falling into the hands of Magellan.” The other mutineers merely offered to “follow his decisions obediently.”

Quesada’s only hope, a faint one, was to slip past the blockade and escape. “He gave the order to weigh the anchor, but this did not turn out well for him, as the current brought his ship down the river to the flagship, something that neither Quesada nor those in the ship could help because of the fury of the waters,” de Mafra recalled, without realizing what manner of subterfuge had placed the ship in jeopardy.

Quesada patrolled the quarterdeck, bearing sword and shield, hoping to regain control of the ship or, failing that, to slip past Magellan unnoticed. Instead, he sailed straight into a trap.

As Concepción approached the flagship, Magellan shouted, “Treason! Treason!” and ordered his men to ready their weapons. “Once Quesada’s ship passed by his,” de Mafra continued, “[Magellan] ordered that it be shot, which made those who had offered to sacrifice their lives lose their ferocity and hide below.”

Suddenly, Trinidad opened fire on the approaching vessel, hurling cannonballs onto her decks. “Quesada, armed, stayed on deck, receiving some spears that were hurled at him from the flagship’s topsail, an attitude suggesting he wished to be killed. Magellan, realizing how slight the opposition offered by those in the nao was, boarded the skiff with several of his men.” Before Quesada’s men could offer resistance, Trinidad’s loyal seamen grappled Concepción to her side and rushed aboard as Victoria performed the same maneuver on the hapless ship’s starboard side.

“Who are you for?” the attackers cried as they swarmed across Concepción’s cramped decks.

“For the King,” came the response, “and Magellan!”

The mutineers’ volte-face may have saved their lives, because Magellan’s guard made straight for Quesada and his inner circle, who offered little resistance. The guard freed Mesquita, the deposed captain (and Magellan’s cousin), along with the pilot, Ginés de Mafra. The coup was generally bloodless, and de Mafra was the only one who came close to harm when a ball fired from Trinidad passed between his legs as he sat in fetters below deck, shortly before he was freed.

With Quesada and his inner circle under arrest, and Concepción returned to Magellan’s control, the midnight mutiny of Port Saint Julian came to an ignominious conclusion. Even Juan de Cartagena, aboard San Antonio, gave up hope of carrying out a mutiny. When the flagship drew alongside San Antonio, and Magellan demanded Cartagena’s immediate surrender, the rebellious Castilian meekly complied and was confined in irons in Trinidad’s hold.

That morning, the Captain General had controlled two ships; now he ruled all five. Despite their overwhelming numbers, the mutineers had lost, and Magellan had emerged from the ordeal more powerful than before. His expedition, whose fate had been in grave doubt, would continue.

Now that the Easter Mutiny was finally at an end, Magellan meted out punishment to the guilty parties. The mutineers were about to discover that defying Magellan was even more perilous than the most ferocious storm at sea. To begin, Magellan instructed one of his men to read an indictment of Mendoza as a traitor. The Captain General then ordered his men to draw and quarter Mendoza’s body. This complicated and grotesque procedure usually began with hanging the victim, then cutting him down while he was only partly strangled. The executioner or an assistant would make an incision in the victim’s abdomen, remove his intestines, and, incredibly, burn them in front of the half-dead victim. When he finally expired, his head and limbs were severed from his body, parboiled with herbs to preserve them and repel birds, and finally displayed to the public. In a variation, the victim’s arms and legs were attached to four horses, who were made to walk in opposite directions, slowly tearing the victim’s limbs from his body.

Magellan combined elements of both methods. Mendoza was secured to the flagship’s deck, with ropes running from his wrists and ankles to the capstans, which consisted of a cable wound about a cylinder to hoist or move heavy objects. On cue, sailors pressed on levers to rotate the capstans’ drum, which contained sockets to check its backward movement. Bit by bit, the pressure applied to the capstans ripped Mendoza’s lifeless body to pieces.

Magellan directed that the quartered remains be spitted and displayed as a warning of exactly how traitors would be treated. The preserved body parts of Luis de Mendoza remained visible throughout the next several months in Port Saint Julian, an indelible lesson to the men concerning the consequences of mutiny. The practice, so barbarous by present standards, was in keeping with the customs of the time for those who would defy authority.

Magellan’s display of barbarism did not end there; he was only beginning to exact revenge for the mutineers’ insult to his authority and to the honor of King Charles. More than execution, torture was his ultimate weapon at sea. That he resorted to torture was not unusual; this was, after all, the era of the Spanish Inquisition, which had formally begun in 1478 and continued under the leadership of Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor. To many Europeans, the mere mention of Spain summoned images of the Inquisition and of diabolical methods of torture, although Spain was hardly the only offender. Nor was torture confined to special cases of heresy; as Magellan’s behavior demonstrated, it was also applied to other criminal behavior such as usury, sodomy, polygamy, and especially treason, considered the most serious crime against the state.

An inquisition was not a trial in the modern sense. The accused were presumed guilty; their reluctance to confess their crimes only added to the sum of their crimes. Torture was designed to elicit withheld confessions, and the sooner the accused confessed, the sooner the agony ended. Indeed, confessions elicited by torture were considered the best evidence of all.

One eyewitness account of a typical Spanish inquisition evokes the fear and despondency Magellan’s victims likely experienced. “The place of torture in the Spanish Inquisition is generally an underground and very dark room, to which one enters through several doors. There is a tribunal erected in it, in which the Inquisitor, Inspector, and Secretary sit. When the candles are lighted, and the person to be tortured brought in, the Executioner . . . makes an astonishing and dreadful appearance. He is covered all over with a black linen garment down to his feet, and tied close to his body. His head and face are all hid with a long black cowl, only two little holes being left in it for him to see through. All this is intended to strike the miserable wretch with greater terror in mind and body when he sees himself going to be tortured by the hands of one who looks like the very devil.” In Magellan’s time, torture was a vivid, dreaded presence in daily life, and it belonged in every captain’s arsenal of techniques to keep sailors in line. With its legal and religious trappings, it was far more systematic, cruel, and psychologically damaging than the traditional remedy of the lash. Even when physical pain ended, psychological wounds continued to fester deep in the victims’ souls.

Magellan’s use of torture inflamed early Spanish historians, who professed to be shocked by his brutality, but what upset them was not that he resorted to torture, a fact of life in Torquemada’s Spain, but that he tortured Spaniards. Among those who denounced Magellan’s conduct regarding the mutiny was Maximilian of Transylvania, the scholar who interviewed the survivors of the expedition on their return to Seville; based on their recollections, he stated flatly that Magellan’s actions had been illegal. “No one, aside from Charles and his Council, can pronounce capital punishment against these dignitaries.” (Pigafetta, who was at the scene of the torture, simply ignored the inconvenient display of barbarism, as he did with everything else concerning the mutiny; it would not do to portray his beloved Captain General as inflicting grievous hardships on his beleaguered men.) Early historians stress that some of the victims of Magellan’s torture were Spanish officers in order to emphasize the insult to King Charles and Castile—evidence of Magellan’s disloyalty toward Spain—but many victims were actually Portuguese.

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.

To 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.

The 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.

Once 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 convicted 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.

There 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.

Days 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.

Always 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.

So the wretched winter passed, day by day, hour by hour, the men working constantly and trying to keep themselves warm as best they could, enduring life in a prison so remote it needed no walls. Overseeing these projects, Magellan intended to keep his prisoners in chains until they left Port Saint Julian in the spring.

When the time came to load the provisions, they discovered more evidence that the dishonest chandlers in Seville and the Canary Islands had robbed them blind, and endangered their lives. Although their bills of lading showed enough supplies on board to last a year and a half, long enough to reach the Spice Islands, the ships’ holds actually carried only a third of that amount. This grim discovery cast the rest of the expedition in a different light because, as Magellan realized, they would likely run out of food well before they reached their goal. The men resumed hunting to make up the difference, but they were eating their way through their supplies almost as fast as they replenished them. The only way out of their predicament was to resume the voyage as soon as possible, storms or no storms.