Over the Edge of the World

Chapter VI Castaways

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

Finding the strait leading to the Spice Islands, always a priority for Magellan, reached the level of an obsession in late April. When the oppressive weather briefly lifted, he rashly sent out a reconnaissance mission to search for the elusive waterway. He selected Santiago, the soundest of the vessels, for the task, with Juan Rodríguez Serrano as her Castilian captain. “An industrious man, he never rested,” said one of the crew members of him. He was about to meet the ultimate challenge of his career.

Even if Serrano succeeded in finding the mouth of the strait, he would have to embark on an equally dangerous return journey to Port Saint Julian. Violent storms at sea or cannibals on land could spell disaster. And the temptation to mutiny and sail away—either east toward Spain or west through the strait—might be irresistible to Santiago’s crew. Magellan stifled thoughts of escape by keeping provisions on board to a minimum and offering Serrano a reward of one hundred ducats if the expedition located the strait; of course, he could collect only on his return.

Favored by calm weather, the mission began auspiciously enough. On May 3, about sixty miles south of Port Saint Julian, Serrano discovered a promising inlet, which on closer inspection revealed itself as the mouth of a river, which he named Santa Cruz. More than three hundred years later, in 1834, the youthful Charles Darwin visited the Santa Cruz River aboard HMS Beagle on her voyage of discovery, and found the same inviting prospect. The river, he wrote, “was generally from 300 to 400 yards broad, and in the middle about 17 feet deep. . . . The water is of a fine blue colour, but with a slight milky tinge, and not so transparent as at first sight might have been expected.”

Santiago’s crew soon discovered that food was even more plentiful around the Santa Cruz River than at Port Saint Julian, and Serrano decided to linger for six days to fish and hunt for sea elephants. Given the urgency of finding the strait, his decision to tarry is peculiar. Perhaps neither he nor his men wished to return to Port Saint Julian and its grim reminders of the mutiny sooner than necessary; or perhaps they had no desire to risk their lives on the open water.

After the tranquil respite, Santiago set sail and proceeded south in search of the strait. On May 22, the wind picked up and the seas began to churn, tossing the ship as if she were nothing more than an oversized piece of flotsam. The armada had encountered many violent squalls, but little Santiago had stumbled into the most powerful storm her crew had ever experienced, and they would have to face it alone.

Serrano had no time to reef the sails. Fierce seas pounded the ship mercilessly, terrifying her crew. Serrano attempted to head into the wind and ride out the storm, but overpowering gusts tore the sails, and the seas battered the rudder until the device failed to respond. Santiago was now out of control, caught in the middle of a storm that was still building in power, her men beyond the hope of rescue. The situation was desperate.

At that moment, the storm gathered force, and the winds pushed the helpless ship toward the rocky coast and the prospect of certain death for her crew. Serrano faced every captain’s nightmare as razor-sharp rocks sawed into her hull, and she began taking on water. Luck was with her crew, since Santiago washed ashore before breaking up. One by one, her crew of thirty-seven crawled to the end of the jib boom and jumped to a rocky beach. As soon as they had abandoned ship, Santiago broke up, and the storm carried away all her life-sustaining provisions—wine, hardtack, and water, to say nothing of the freshly caught sea elephants. Incredibly, all the men aboard ship survived, but once they had given thanks to the Lord for sparing their lives, they grasped the desperate situation they now faced.

The storm had stranded the castaways about seventy miles from the rest of the fleet, without food or wood or fresh water, in freezing weather. They were cold and exhausted; soon they would be starving. There was no way to get word of their plight to the Captain General. Their land route back to Port Saint Julian presented seemingly overwhelming obstacles: snow-covered mountains and the Santa Cruz River, three miles wide.

The castaways spent eight days in more or less the same area, disoriented, dispirited, waiting for pieces of the wreck, possibly even food, to drift onto the pebbly beach, but the sea yielded only a few planks broken off from Santiago’s hull. Subsisting on a diet of local vegetation and whatever shellfish they could catch, the castaways evolved a plan. They would drag the planks over the mountains until they reached the river and there, on its banks, build a raft to cross it. The river lay many miles to the north, and the task proved daunting to the crew. They left most of the planks behind, and after four wretched days of marching overland, the exhausted crew finally reached the broad expanse of the river. The weather had relented, and fish, as they knew from their first visit to the river, were plentiful. It seemed they would not starve, after all.

Lacking planks to build a raft large enough to carry all the men, the castaways split into two groups. The larger group—thirty-five men—set up camp at the river’s edge, while two strong men, whose names were not recorded, set out on the tiny raft. They intended to cross the river and walk the rest of the way back to Port Saint Julian to seek help. It was an exceedingly risky undertaking. Successfully crossing the three-mile expanse of river required a combination of daring and luck, and when they reached the other side, they faced an arduous march in freezing weather, living off the land.

The two crew members in the vanguard succeeded in mastering the river’s breadth in their rudimentary raft, and once they had landed on the far side, they set out in the direction of Port Saint Julian. At first, they followed the coast, where they could be reasonably certain to find shellfish, but vast swamps barred their progress, and they had to walk inland, over hills and mountains, eating only ferns and roots, and suffering greatly in the freezing weather. The trek lasted eleven harrowing days, and when they reached Port Saint Julian, ravaged and gaunt from their ordeal, even those who knew the survivors barely recognized them.

Once the castaways revived, they described the desperate situation of their shipmates on the far side of the Santa Cruz River.

Magellan had no choice but to attempt to rescue the other thirty-five crew members of Santiago. Afraid to risk the loss of another ship to a storm, he sent a rescue squad of twenty-four men, carrying wine and hardtack, along the overland trail that the two survivors had blazed through the harsh wilderness. “The way there was long, twenty-four leagues, and the path was very rough and full of thorns,” said Pigafetta of their grim progress. “The men were four days on the road, sleeping at night in the bushes. They found no drinking water, but only ice, which caused them great hardship.” Failing to find a river or spring, they resorted to melting snow. Finally, in a drastically weakened condition from their days in the wild, they reached the desperate castaways, who had been camping out along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. A pathetic reunion ensued: exhausted men at the end of the world, suffering intensely, expecting to die at any time, united only in the cause of survival, as unlikely as the prospect seemed.

Relying on the small raft cobbled together from the wreck of Santiago, the rescue party ferried the survivors back across the river in groups of two or at most three; each trip consumed hours and was fraught with hazard, but miraculously everyone made it to the northern shore. Even so, they were still far from safety because they had to make the rugged overland trek back to Port Saint Julian. As Magellan anxiously awaited the outcome of the rescue mission, the thirty-five castaways and twenty-four rescuers picked their way through the snows of the Patagonian winter, fortified mainly with wine and hardtack. About a week later, they emerged one by one from the forest surrounding Port Saint Julian. Driven by an unshakable will to survive, everyone made it back safely.

Magellan greeted the dazed, exhausted men with ample food and wine, and treated them all as heroes.

The wreck of Santiago and the hardship endured by her crew troubled Magellan more deeply than the violence and torture of the Easter Mutiny. “The loss of the ship was much regretted by Magellan,” de Mafra recalled, “although it was not the pilot’s fault, because along this coast the sea rises and ebbs eight fathoms, and this was the cause of the calamity, so that the ship found itself high and dry.”

As serious as the loss of Santiago might be, Magellan had more to fear from the emotional consequences of the wreck. The disaster confirmed his crew’s fear that the Captain General was leading them on an expedition so dangerous that they would all get killed long before they reached the Spice Islands. To ensure his control of the remaining four ships in the fleet, he saw to it that only diehard loyalists commanded them. While Álvaro de Mesquita, his first cousin, remained in command of San Antonio, Magellan appointed Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law, as captain of Victoria, and Juan Serrano, the unlucky skipper of Santiago, as the new captain of Concepción, the ship once commanded by Gaspar de Quesada, the mutineer whose severed head rotted on a pike. Magellan himself still ruled over all from Trinidad. Finally, he scattered Santiago’s long-suffering crew among the four remaining ships to prevent them from secretly conspiring.

In fact, Magellan’s appointment of his relatives as captains served to fuel the silent resentment of many crew members, even those from Portugal. When they finally returned to Spain, if they ever did, they could tell vivid tales of Magellan’s insolence toward the Spanish captains; his shameless nepotism; his reckless seamanship, culminating in the needless loss of Santiago; and, most blatant of all, the drawing and quartering of Gaspar de Quesada. All of these grievances remained urgent in the minds of many seamen as they awaited a time and place to act on them.

Winter relentlessly advanced on Port Saint Julian; the days contracted to less than four hours of light, and the snow line reached down the mountains, across the fields and swamps, eventually extending to the water’s edge. If the crew members and officers ever spent an idle hour at Port Saint Julian, if they fished for the sport of it, or played cards, or indulged in practical jokes, or read the books of exploration and discovery that they carried with them, books such as The Travels of Marco Polo, or The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, or if they participated in any other pastime during the Patagonian winter, there is no record of it. Magellan kept his men too busy and afraid for their lives for such activities. Only survival mattered.

Magellan ordered his men to hunt and fish, which they did. They found mussels, as well as foxes, sparrows, and “rabbits much smaller than ours,” in Pigafetta’s words. They preserved their catch with salt derived from flats surrounding the bay.

When it became too cold to fish, Magellan sent a party of four armed men—all that he was willing to risk—to explore the interior. They had two goals, to plant a cross on the highest mountain they could climb and to befriend Indians, if they found any. The landscape proved more rugged than they had anticipated, and they were unable to make much progress or to ascend any of the distant mountains. Instead, they selected a lower mountain close to the harbor, named it “Mount of Christ,” fixed their cross on the summit, and returned to the waiting ships, where they confidently reported that there was no sign of human life around Port Saint Julian.

Despite the empty winter months stretching before them, Magellan was determined to await the coming of spring before he ventured into the treacherous ocean and resumed searching for the strait. To keep his men occupied, he ordered a detachment ashore to construct a small stone enclosure for a forge to be used to repair the ships’ metal fittings, but even this modest project ended in frustration because the weather became so bitter that several sailors suffered crippling frostbite on their fingers.

Amid the intense suffering and hardship, discontent spread among the crew members. As the prospect of another mutiny loomed, Magellan, along with everyone else in the fleet, was distracted by an unexpected sight: a distant plume of smoke wafting over the landscape. Perhaps they were not alone, after all.

“We remained two whole months without ever seeing anyone,” wrote Pigafetta of their stay in Port Saint Julian. “But one day (without anyone expecting it) we saw a giant who was on the shore, quite naked, and who danced, leaped, and sang, while he threw sand and dust on his head. . . . Our captain sent one of his men toward him, charging him to leap and sing like the other to reassure him and show him friendship. Which he did.”

The strange rite recommended by Magellan worked; after watching the European seaman imitate his gestures, the giant appeared peaceful and eager to socialize, as the dancing continued.

On seeing the giant, every sailor in Port Saint Julian thought immediately of the ghastly fate that had befallen the landing party of Juan de Solis five years before. “In time past these tall men called Canibali, in this river, ate a Spanish captain named Juan de Solis and sixty men who had gone, as we did, to discover land, trusting too much in them,” Pigafetta wrote, inflating the number of victims in Solis’s party, but otherwise invoking that horrible event with clarity.

Eager to make contact but wary of falling into a trap, Magellan took the precaution of inviting the giant to meet him in an isolated, protected setting, rather than allowing himself or his men to be lured to an unfamiliar spot where they might be ambushed. “Immediately the man of the ship, dancing, led this giant to a small island where the captain awaited him. And when he was before us, he began to marvel and to be afraid, and he raised one finger upward, believing that we came from heaven.”

The Europeans marveled at the giant’s stature. Some crew members reached only the waist of the giant, who was said to be twelve or thirteen palmos tall—a palmo being the equivalent of a hand span. By this measurement, he and giants like him stood over eight feet tall. Pigafetta, who had been silent during the mutiny, recovered his powers of description the moment the giant appeared. “He was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist,” the official chronicler observed. “He had a very large face, painted round with red, and his eyes also were painted round with yellow, and in the middle of his cheeks he had two hearts painted. He had hardly any hairs on his head, and was painted white.”

The giant was a member of the tribe known as the Tehuelche Indians, who were numerous throughout the region. In reality, the Tehuelche measured about six feet tall; the impression of the Indian’s great stature derived in part from his costume and especially the elaborate boots he wore, which added to his height. “When he was brought to the captain, he was clad in the skin of a certain animal”—the guanaco, similar to the llama—“which skin was very skillfully sewn together. And this animal has the head and ears as large as a mule’s, and a neck and body like those of a camel, a stag’s legs, and a tail like that of a horse. . . . This giant had his feet covered with the skin of the said animal in the manner of shoes, and he carried in his hand a thick bow, with a thick bowstring, made from the intestines of the said animal, with a bundle of cane arrows which were not very long and were feathered like ours, but no iron point, but, at the tip, small black and white stones.”

Emboldened after the first encounter, Magellan invited the giant on board the flagship, where he offered his guest plentiful “food and drink.” In the midst of their feasting, the Captain General summoned his men to produce a large “steel mirror.”

The reaction was swift and stunning. “The giant, seeing himself, was greatly terrified, leaping back so that he threw four of our men to the ground.” When the mirror was removed, the giant regained his composure. Magellan then tried to win back his guest’s confidence with a gift of trinkets: “two bells, a mirror”—presumably smaller and less alarming—“a comb, and a chaplet of paternosters.” This last item was by far the most significant of all the gifts and no doubt included what is now known as the Lord’s Prayer—in Latin, of course. Magellan probably knew that Jesus taught this prayer to the disciples, and perhaps he expected that the giant would take this prayer back to the Indians. When the feast ended, a guard of four armed men escorted him to shore.

During the feast, another giant had watched the proceedings from land, and as soon as his tribesman returned safely, he tore off in the direction of their concealed huts to convey the news. Slowly, the other giants emerged from the trees to reveal themselves to the crew members, who were astounded by the sight and transfixed by the unexpected appearance of giant women:

“They placed themselves one after the other quite naked and began to leap and sing, raising one finger to the sky, and showing our people a certain white powder made from roots of herbs, which they kept in earthenware pots, and made signs that they lived on that, and that they had nothing to eat but this powder,” Pigafetta wrote. “Whereupon our men made signs to them that they should come to the ships, and that they would help them carry their provisions. Then these men came, bearing only their bows in their hands. But their wives came after them loaded like asses and carrying their goods. And the women are not so tall as the men, but somewhat fatter. When we saw them, we were all amazed and astonished. For they had teats half a cubit long, and they were painted on the face and clad like the men. But they wore a small skin in front to cover their private parts. They brought with them four of those little animals of which they make their clothing”—guanacos—“and led them on a leash with a cord.”

The guanacos intrigued the sailors almost as much as the giants did. The guanacos had adapted to life in this harsh region over thousands of years. Their stomachs contain three compartments to extract protein efficiently from the food they chew, and they have long legs for scrambling up and down steep mountainsides. Magellan’s crew, eager for guanacos of their own, learned from the giants how to capture the animals. The procedure proved surprisingly simple. “They tie one of the young ones to a bush, and thereupon the large ones come to play with the little ones, and the giants hidden behind some ledge kill with their arrows the large ones. Our men took eighteen of these giants, both men and women, whom they divided into parties, half on one side of the port, and the other half on the other, to catch the said animals.”

Within days, the sailors were delighted to have their own guanacos. Their tough, stringy meat provided a welcome alternative to the diet of salted sea elephant, and the guanaco wool, similar in color and texture to a sheep’s, helped the men to endure the rigors of Port Saint Julian.

In addition, the giant Indians provided a welcome source of companionship and distraction for the crew members from the bleakness of the empty landscape. Everything about their customs and appearance fascinated Pigafetta. “Verily those giants stand straighter than a horse, and are very jealous of their wives,” he observed. “They wear a cotton cord around their head, to which they fasten their arrows when they go hunting, and bind their member close to their body by reason of the very great cold.”

There was more: “When these giants have a pain in the stomach, instead of taking medicine, they put down their throat an arrow two feet or thereabout in length, then they vomit [matter] of a green color mingled with blood. And the reason they bring up this green matter is that they eat thistles.”

And still more: “When they have a headache, they make a cut across their forehead, and the same on the arms and legs, to draw blood from several parts of their body.”

Most of all, their belief system fascinated Pigafetta, who recorded a vivid glimpse into the inner lives of the Tehuelche Indians. “When one of them dies, ten or twelve devils appear,” he came to understand, “and dance around the dead man. And it seems they are painted. And one of these devils is taller than the others. And from this the giants took the fashion of painting themselves on the face and body.” Pigafetta learned a few words of their language to better understand these concepts. The big devil, they told him, was called Setebos, a name to be reckoned with, and the little ones Cheleule.

Eventually, Magellan gave the Indians a name—Pathagoni, a neologism suggesting the Spanish word patacones, or dogs with great paws, by which he meant to call attention to their big feet, made even larger by the rough-hewn boots they wore. So these were the Bigfeet Indians, according to Magellan, who later gave the name to the whole region, known ever since as Patagonia.

Now that they had a name, the giants came to seem even more human to Magellan and his crew, who, as Pigafetta describes, made friends with one in particular. “This giant,” he wrote, “was of better disposition than the others, and was very graceful and amiable, loving to dance and leap. And when dancing he depressed the earth to a palm’s depth in the spot where his feet touched. He was with us for a long time, and in the end, we baptized him, naming him John.”

In this instance, the solemn rite was undertaken as a sign of kinship rather than of conquest. “The said giant pronounced the name Jesus, the paternoster, Ave Maria, and his own name as clearly as we,” Pigafetta related. “He had a terribly loud and strong voice.” What these incantations meant to John the Giant can only be imagined, but he no doubt associated them with the lavish gifts he received from Magellan. “The captain gave him a shirt and a cloth jerkin, and seamen’s breeches, a cap, a mirror, a comb, bells, and other things, and sent him away whence he had come; and he went off very joyous and happy.” The new convert returned the next day, bearing precious guanacos, and received still more gifts in trade, but then he was not seen or heard from again. “It is to be supposed that the other giants killed him because he had come to us.”

This was pure conjecture. The crew found no evidence that John had been killed or ostracized for fraternizing, but their fear that he had been harmed for this reason betrayed how wary they were of the Indians, friendly or not. Relations with the Patagonian giants deteriorated when a European scouting party unearthed a cache of Indian weapons. The discovery suggested that an ambush might be in the making. All thought of further baptisms were forgotten as the crew members feared for their lives and sought the safety of the ships. For two weeks, no giants were seen, and Magellan decided it was time to change his tactics.

On July 28, four Patagonian giants, two men and two boys, appeared at the water’s edge, signaling to the fleet that they wished to come aboard. This was just the opportunity Magellan had been awaiting. A longboat was dispatched to bring the four unsuspecting Indians aboard Trinidad. Magellan bestowed presents on his guests—“knives, scissors, mirrors, bells, and glass”—and while the four held them and marveled at them, “the captain sent for large iron fetters, such as are put on the feet of malefactors.” Two of the giants were shackled. Even Pigafetta recoiled at the sight, disdainfully remarking that Magellan had resorted to a “cunning trick.” For once, the expedition’s official chronicler found it painful to watch Magellan’s scheme unfold.

Instead of resisting, “The giants took great pleasure in seeing these fetters, and did not know where they had to be put, and they were grieved that they could not take them in their hands.” The two giants who were still free tried to undo the fetters, but Magellan refused to allow them to interfere. Still naïvely trusting the cunning stranger in their midst, the giants “made a sign with their heads that they were content with this.” Magellan saw to it that their bellies were full, offering them “a large boxful of biscuit, and unskinned rats, and . . . half a pailful of water at a time.” At this point in the journey, the rats were nothing more than a nuisance to the sailors. Whenever they caught one of the little beasts, they tossed it into the sea. Seeing this waste of perfectly good food, the giants begged to have them, and devoured them whole.

Magellan then proceeded with his plan. “Forthwith the captain had the fetters put on the feet of both of them. And when they saw the bolt across the fetters being struck with a hammer to rivet it and prevent them from being opened, these giants were afraid. But the captain made signs to them that they should suspect nothing. Nevertheless, perceiving the trick that had been played on them, they began to blow and foam at the mouth like bulls, loudly calling on Setebos (that is, the great devil) to help them.”

Confusion engulfed both parties. Magellan underwent a sudden change of heart and decided against imprisoning the giants. He ordered a detachment of nine guards under the command of Carvalho, Concepción’s pilot, to escort two of the giants ashore, and to reunite one of them with the woman assumed to be his wife “because he was greatly lamenting her.” As soon as his feet touched dry land, this giant managed to escape, “running with so much nimbleness that our men lost sight of him.” Carvalho’s detachment feared he would tell others about the trick that had been played on them, and the tribe would return, seeking revenge.

The downward spiral of brutality continued. “The other giant who had his hands bound made the utmost effort to free himself, so that to prevent him one of our men struck him and wounded his head, at which he was violently angry.” In an effort to calm him, the crew members led him to the huts where the women had taken refuge, but this gesture failed to bring about peace between the Indians and the sailors.

That night, Carvalho, still in charge of the detachment, decided they would sleep ashore. In the morning, the giants’ huts were deserted; all the Indian men and women had fled into the interior, perhaps for good, perhaps to regroup for a surprise attack.

Their intentions became clear when arrows began whizzing from the dark forest. Suddenly nine Indian warriors appeared. Each carried three quivers of arrows held in leather girdles. With fluid movements, they fired off one deadly arrow after another. “Fighting thus, one of these giants pierced one of our men in the thigh, who died immediately. Whereupon seeing him dead they all fled.” The fallen crew member was Trinidad’s Diego Barrasa. The suddenness of his death suggests that the arrow carried a poisoned tip.

Enraged, the other crew members retaliated with all their might. “Our men had crossbows and muskets, but they could never hit any of those people because they never stood in one place, but leapt hither and thither.” The weapons’ deafening roar scattered the giants, and when quiet returned to Port Saint Julian, the detachment sorrowfully buried their fallen colleague.

Magellan still held two Indians hostage, one aboard Trinidad, the other assigned to San Antonio, and despite his prohibition against passengers, slaves, or stowaways, he intended to present these two giants to King Charles.

The encounter between the European visitors and the Tehuelche Indians deteriorated drastically from its spirited and happy beginning. Conditioned by the fate of Solis and his crew, Magellan expected the Indians to bare their fangs eventually, no matter how sociable and benign their behavior seemed at first.

Yet his response to the Indians wavered. Had he considered them nothing more than cannibals, he would not have troubled to convert John to Christianity, nor would he have offered the new convert sacred texts, gifts far more valuable than any number of shiny mirrors, tinkling bells, and other trinkets. The paternoster was not given as a trick or as bribery, but as an attempt to forge a bond between the Indians and Europeans. The conversion strongly implied a measure of trust and respect between the two parties, as well as the expectation that John would abide by Christian standards of morality. Then, inexplicably, Magellan turned away from John and the other Indians. Perhaps it was the cache of weapons gnawing at Magellan’s sense of security. Perhaps he had difficulty accepting that his faith could embrace both Europeans and Indians. That startling possibility had existed ever since Columbus, who saw no contradiction between converting Indians and enslaving them; both methods caused them to submit to the will of Spain. Although he was a devout Catholic, Magellan had no policy concerning conversions, and nothing in his royal orders offered explicit guidance in this crucial matter. He was an admiral, not a missionary. His conversion of John seemed motivated more by personal conviction than by a preconceived plan.

On August 11, 1520, Magellan carried out the sentence he had proclaimed for his nemesis, Juan de Cartagena, and the priest, Pero Sánchez de la Reina, who had conspired with the Castilian captain. At Magellan’s order, both were marooned on a small island in sight of the ships. They had no longboat, no firewood, and scant clothing. Their supplies consisted mainly of bread and wine, enough to last them the summer, perhaps, but they would have to face the next winter in Port Saint Julian alone.

Magellan finally gave the command to weigh anchor on August 24. After the harrowing five-month layover in Port Saint Julian, the Armada de Molucca put to sea. During that interval, Magellan had endured violent storms, single-handedly defeated a seemingly insurmountable mutiny, lost Santiago, befriended and then antagonized the local population of Indians, and at the cost of several lives strengthened his command of the fleet. He had demonstrated that he could be as much of a trickster as Odysseus. Most important of all, he had survived, kept most of his fleet intact, and his men under his command.

Just before leaving, Magellan sent everyone ashore to attend a final religious observance. They confessed their sins, received the sacrament, and returned to the ships, humbled before their Maker, to whom they prayed to preserve their lives during the next phase of the journey. As they sailed away from the ill-starred Port Saint Julian, the crew believed the worst of their difficulties were behind them. They had been hardened by adversity, and if nothing else, they were determined to survive to the end of the voyage. The strait still eluded them but, God willing, they would find it, and reach the Spice Islands, and eventually return to Spain, where they would be rich enough to spend the rest of their lives in retirement. It was a fantastic dream, and their only hope of deliverance.

As the four remaining ships of the armada sailed into the open waters of the Atlantic, the abandoned conspirators, Cartagena and the priest, watched the spectacle from their island prison. The two condemned men kneeled at the water’s edge, crying and pleading for mercy as the ships grew smaller and finally vanished over the horizon.