Over the Edge of the World

Chapter XI Ship of Mutineers

The naked hulk alongside came,

And the twain were casting dice;

“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”

Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The officers and seamen of the armada had long anticipated Magellan’s death. “As soon as the Captain General died,” wrote Pigafetta, “the four men of our company, who had remained in the city to trade, had our goods brought to the ships.” With the precious trading cargo—the bells, beads, and fabrics designed to entice islanders—safely stowed away, the survivors held an election to select the next admiral of the Armada de Molucca. They sought a man who would, above all, avoid high-risk endeavors similar to those that had endangered and claimed the lives of so many, and who would rededicate the fleet to its primary commercial goal: spices.

There was no discussion of disbanding the fleet or turning back. They had come too far and suffered too much for that. Nor was there any shortage of candidates to succeed Magellan; the ranks swelled with rivals and would-be admirals who had long been waiting for this moment. Although the loss of the Captain General was tragic—no one, not even his detractors, begrudged Magellan his courage—his death brought a palpable sense of relief that the ordeal of sailing under him had at last ended. When completed, the voting produced an unusual result, electing not one but two men: Duarte Barbosa, Magellan’s brother-in-law, and Juan Serrano, the Castilian captain. Even now, the sailors maintained a balance of power between the Spanish and Portuguese presences in the fleet.

Even so, this careful outcome did not satisfy everyone. Sebastián Elcano, the Basque mariner who had played a leading role in the mutiny against Magellan at Port Saint Julian, believed that Serrano was miscast as co-commander. Elcano thought Serrano a competent pilot but nothing more. Implicit in Elcano’s judgment was the conviction that he was better equipped to lead the expedition.

Magellan’s loyal servant, Enrique, was even more bitterly opposed to the new leadership of the fleet. Enrique had rendered valuable service with his ability to interpret the Malay tongue, a skill now more necessary than ever, but he refused to leave Trinidad as ordered, claiming that he was suffering from battle wounds. He remained in his bunk, wrapped in a blanket, loudly proclaiming that he was free now that his master was dead. He was correct on this point; in the event of Magellan’s death, his will provided for Enrique’s liberty along with a bequest of 10,000 maravedís, but the new leaders of the expedition, accustomed to the slave’s unquestioning subservience and still in need of his linguistic and diplomatic skills, insisted that he continue to obey orders. Enrique, coming into his own after years of servitude, stubbornly refused to yield to anyone’s authority.

A loud argument between Enrique and Barbosa ensued, which Pigafetta recorded. “Duarte Barbosa, commander of the Captain General’s flagship, told him in a loud voice that, although his master was dead, he would not be set free or released, but that, when we reached Spain, he would still be the slave of Madame Beatriz, the wife of the deceased Captain General. And he threatened that if he did not go ashore he would be driven away.” Pigafetta’s rendition of Barbosa’s threats likely disguised a considerable amount of verbal abuse. But Sebastián Elcano left a more complete account of the confrontation. According to him, Serrano, and not Barbosa, abused Enrique. “Serrano, being unable to do anything without this intermediary, reprimanded him with bitter words, telling him that in spite of his Master, Magellan, being dead, he was still a slave and that he would be whipped if he did not obey everything that he [Serrano] commanded. The slave became enraged by Serrano’s threats. Ire overtook his heart.”

The harsh words succeeded in rousing Enrique from his stupor, and he furiously stalked off the ship.

Pigafetta believed that Enrique, on leaving the ship, sought out Humabon, “the Christian King,” as he was called, to scheme against the armada, even though the Cebuan leader seemed to be the Europeans’ staunch ally. On hearing of Magellan’s death, he had wept copious tears, obviously undone by the tragedy he had tried so hard to avoid. Despite these strong emotional ties, Enrique “told the Christian King that we were about to depart immediately”—this much is true—“and that, if he would follow his advice, he would gain all our ships and merchandise. And so they plotted a conspiracy. Then the slave returned to the ships, and he appeared to behave better than before.”

Elcano told much the same story: Enrique “secretly spoke with the master of Cebu”—Humabon—“telling him that the Castilians were endlessly greedy and that . . . they would come back and arrest him.” To Elcano’s way of thinking, “The slave convinced the king that because the Castilians had been plotting against them, there was no other solution for the Cebuans than to plot back against the Castilians.” With these arguments, Enrique launched his betrayal of Magellan’s memory. Enrique’s motives were powerful and probably quite complex. Perhaps he resented being a slave for his entire adult life, perhaps the rediscovery of his Filipino origins awakened long-suppressed feelings of loyalty and kinship, or perhaps he failed to realize the drastic effect his words would have on Humabon, who found himself in a desperate situation. Magellan, to whom he had been loyal, was dead, and the crew was about to depart, terminating the protection Humabon had enjoyed. In the absence of the armada, Humabon would have to contend with Lapu Lapu, whose victory over Magellan had emboldened the local chieftain. Because Humabon had sided with Magellan, it was only a matter of time before Lapu Lapu, seeking revenge, came after him. Pressure on Humabon to retaliate against the Europeans came from yet another direction. Many of the island men resented the way their women had been treated by the Europeans. For all these reasons, plotting against Magellan’s men was the most effective way for Humabon to demonstrate his loyalty to his own people and save his own neck.

On Wednesday, May 1, Humabon requested that the armada’s leaders attend a feast. The invitation, presumably delivered orally by Enrique, promised a lavish meal accompanied by gifts of jewels and other presents, which Humabon wished the fleet to carry across the waters as tribute to the king of Spain. The Christian king hoped that as many people as possible would partake of his hospitality and generosity. In all, around thirty men, most of them officers, decided to accept.

This was a large contingent, approximately a quarter of the entire crew; their number included Barbosa and Serrano, the new co-commanders, as well as their astrologer and astronomer, Andrés de San Martín. Antonio Pigafetta was also invited to the feast, but, as he later explained, “I could not go, because I was all swollen from the wound of a poison arrow that I had received in the forehead.” He had sustained his injury at Magellan’s side, during the battle of Mactan.

This banquet promised to be another occasion for Humabon’s guests to fill their bellies and get drunk on the island’s palm wine. But shortly after the officers went ashore, Pigafetta, recovering on board Trinidad, was startled to hear João Lopes de Carvalho, the Portuguese pilot, and the master-at-arms, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, returning unexpectedly. Pigafetta listened apprehensively as they “told us that they had seen the man cured by a miracle”—the prince’s brother healed by Magellan—“leading the priest into his house, and for this reason they had departed, fearing some evil chance.” The sight of Father Valderrama entering a Cebuan hut hardly seemed sinister, but in this charged atmosphere it was enough to send the two Europeans scurrying back to the ships for safety.

No sooner had those two spoken their words than we heard great cries and groans,” said Pigafetta. “Then we quickly raised the anchors, and, firing several pieces of artillery at their houses, we approached nearer to shore.”

What they saw exceeded their worst imaginings; it was worse, even, than the massacre of Juan de Solis. Ginés de Mafra, among those who had remained behind, described the murderous chaos engulfing the sailors on shore:

As the banquet was about to end, some armed people emerged from the palm grove and attacked the invitees, killing twenty-seven of them, and captured the priest who had remained there and Juan Serrano, the pilot, who was an old man; others, although there were few of them, swam to the ships and, helped by those aboard, cut the cables and set sail; the barbarians, gorging on the killing and anxious to steal whatever was in the ships, brought their armada to the sea and, in order to stop our men while they were preparing to leave, also brought Juan Serrano to the shore and said that they wanted to exchange him for ransom. The old man implored our men with words and tears to feel sympathy for his old age and not to become accomplices, lest his last days end in the hands of such cruel barbarians, but to strive so that at least he could spend what little life he had left amidst his kin.

Our men told him that they would do as they could. The ransom was discussed and they asked for an iron gun, which is what they fear the most; this was sent to them on a skiff, and upon seeing it, the Indians asked for more, and no sooner would our men grant their request than the Indians would reply asking for more, and this continued until, realizing their intention, those aboard the ships did not want to remain there any longer and said to Juan Serrano that he himself could very well see what was going on, and how the Indians’ words were all but a pretence.

Serrano pleaded for his crew members to come to his rescue, but they refused to leave the safety of their ships for fear that they would be massacred, as well. “Then Juan Serrano, weeping, said that as soon as we sailed he would be killed,” Pigafetta recorded. “And he said that he prayed God that at the day of judgment he would demand the soul of his friend João Carvalho.” Serrano’s desperate words fell on deaf ears, and his friend Carvalho refused to intervene. Pigafetta was appalled by this cowardice, but there was nothing that he, as a supernumerary, could do.

Hoarse cries from the ships floated to land. Had the worst happened? Were the men ashore all dead? Could it be possible? Summoning his last reserves of strength, Serrano, stranded on the shore, confirmed that the other men, including Barbosa and San Martín, were dead, slaughtered during Humabon’s banquet. He then watched the ships weigh anchor, preparing to abandon him to bloodthirsty island warriors seeking to reclaim their lost honor and dignity. “I do not know whether he is dead or alive,” Pigafetta wrote in anguish as the ships sailed. Left behind by his own men, Serrano eventually met the same fate as his crew members. Enrique’s revenge on the Europeans had been bloodier than anyone could have foreseen.

The three black ships of the Armada de Molucca raised anchor, set sail, and headed out of Cebu harbor with all the speed they could muster. No thought was given to sending a rescue party to stop the massacre, to recover bodies or search for survivors, or even to punish Enrique for his betrayal. Only 115 men remained of the 260 who had left Spain, and as they fled to safety, their last sight of Cebu was of enraged islanders tearing down the cross on the mountaintop and smashing it to bits.

The May 1 massacre claimed many of the ablest and most prominent crew members. The victims included Duarte Barbosa, who had served as co-commander for just three days; Serrano; Andrés de San Martín, the fleet’s cautious astrologer; Father Valderrama; Luis Alfonso de Gois, who had succeeded Barbosa as the captain of Victoria; two clerks named Sancho de Heredia and León Expeleta; a barrelmaker by the name of Francisco Martín; Simón de la Rochela, a provisioner; Francisco de Madrid, a man-at-arms; Hernando de Aguilar, who had been the servant of the mutineer Luis de Mendoza, whom Espinosa had executed; Guillermo Feneso, who operated the lombardas; four sailors; two cabin boys; three ordinary seamen; a servant attached to Serrano; and four men described in the roster as “servants of Magellan.”

According to some accounts, eight of these crew members survived, but were imprisoned and sold off as slaves to the Chinese merchants who regularly visited Cebu, but the rumors were impossible to confirm. Enrique, whose treachery had set the stage for the ambush, disappears from history at this point, as does the wily Humabon. Such was the tragic conclusion of what had begun as a highly promising experiment in the Philippines.

Five days later, and half a world away, a weatherbeaten vessel tied up at the harbor in Seville.

The arrival of a ship from distant lands was hardly an unusual event in Seville, but she was not just any vessel, this was San Antonio, part of the Armada de Molucca. It was May 6, 1521, and the event marked the first news of the fleet since it left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519.

No one ashore knew what to make of her arrival, for the fleet had not been expected to return for months. They would soon learn that Magellan had found the fabled strait, after all, but before he could traverse it, San Antonio had been commandeered by mutineers fleeing Magellan’s cruelty and excessive daring. She carried her captain, Estêvão Gomes; his chief co-conspirator, Gerónimo Guerra; and fifty-five men, including Magellan’s cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita, whom the mutineers had stabbed and kept in irons throughout the return journey.

Gomes had skillfully piloted the ship across the Atlantic to Spain. There had been talk of returning to Port Saint Julian to rescue Cartagena and the priest whom Magellan had marooned, but in all likelihood the ship never attempted to rescue them. Instead, San Antonio made for the coast of Guinea to find water.

Despite having braved the Atlantic Ocean alone, San Antonio’s captain and crew felt no joy on seeing Seville’s familiar cathedral because they were returning in disgrace, mutineers who would face the prospect of an official inquiry, incarceration, and even punishment by death. They could console themselves in the knowledge that Guerra was related to Cristóbal de Haro, who had financed the expedition. They could also draw strength from Magellan’s lack of popularity in Spain, and planned to destroy the Portuguese Captain General’s reputation with tales of his poor judgment and brutal mistreatment of Spanish officers. But these stories had to be compelling because their lives depended on convincing the authorities that the mutiny had been necessary and justified. Of course, Magellan would not be present to plead his case or contradict their assertions. The only one likely to speak up on his behalf was Álvaro de Mesquita, whose wounds offered eloquent evidence of the mutineers’ tactics. And Mesquita had used the long sea journey home to prepare for an inquiry because his life also depended on how persuasively he argued his case.

So began a fierce, tangled battle between the two competing versions of the mutiny.

The moment King Charles heard that San Antonio had returned, he ordered the Casa de Contratación to restore all the merchandise and equipment aboard the ship to Cristóbal de Haro, to whom Charles, perpetually strapped for cash to fund his empire, was deeply in debt. The Casa was to sell off anything of value “and after the sale,” the king instructed, “send me an account . . . of what you have sold so that the said Cristóbal de Haro can make an accounting of it so that we can know what our share will be.” Anything over ten thousand ducats would be remitted to the crown. The order crackled with the young king’s eagerness to get his hands on the money, if there was any.

As it happened, there was none. The Casa’s detailed inventory of the ship’s contents listed tarnished combs, crumbling paper, rusty knives, scissors, bent sewing needles, beads, crystals, pearls, a velvet-covered chair, a bolt of decaying altar cloth for celebrating mass, iron, mercury, copper, an oven, a scale, pots, a green moth-eaten cloth, decaying barrels, two compasses, and a small bag of fishhooks, but no spices—nothing, in fact, of any great value. Furthermore, the ship was much the worse for wear after eighteen months at sea. The heat and humidity had taken their toll, to say nothing of the termites boring into the hull. Eventually, the authorities in Seville realized that San Antonio had not made it to the Spice Islands, after all. The king’s dreams of claiming the Moluccas for the glory of Spain would have to wait.

No one aboard San Antonio knew what had happened to Magellan. They assumed—or perhaps they hoped—that his recklessness and secret loyalty to Portugal had caused him to perish at sea, somewhere over the edge of the world, and the Casa was inclined to believe them. “They believe he must have been double-dealing,” a representative of the Casa reported to the king, “so they had no hope at all of his returning.” The weather-beaten San Antonio and her mutinous, ragtag crew of fifty-five were presumed to be the only survivors of what had once been the glorious Armada de Molucca.

Within days of their return, the mutineers delivered their finely honed accounts to the Casa de Contratación. Fifty-three out of the fifty-five members of the crew gave depositions, and the sudden activity threw the Casa’s clerks into a frenzy. “Since the morning of the Feast of the Ascension, we have been asking questions and taking the declarations, without forcing them, in the presence of two clerks,” wrote Juan López de Recalde, an accountant at the Casa, to Archbishop Fonseca on May 12, just six days after the ship’s return. The task of gathering and squaring fifty-three separate accounts was exhausting and daunting. “We had with us the lawyer Castroverde, legal counsel of this House, and until last night, Saturday, for three days now, we have not been able to take the declarations of more than twenty-one of them. Half a day is needed to take down their account from the day they left this place till their return.”

Mesquita, meanwhile, went directly from confinement aboard ship to jail on land. He was now “in the custody of the Admiral, where he is well-guarded.” The Casa’s representatives insisted they were only protecting Mesquita from the others, but the deposed captain believed he had been singled out for unfair treatment.

The Casa did a remarkably thorough job in uncovering the details of the mutiny at the strait in the allotted time. Their report included an elaborate description of the initial confrontations between Magellan and Cartagena shortly after the armada’s departure from the Canary Islands. There was even an account, inaccurate and inflammatory, of the homosexual behavior that had sent Magellan into a rage and sparked so much resentment among the crew: “It seems that on Victoria captained by Luis de Mendoza, a sailor attacked a cabin boy in an act contrary to nature and they told Magellan about it. One calm day, he had the boy thrown into the sea.”

As the report unfolded, a strong anti-Magellan bias became increasingly apparent. “It seems that the captains and officers, seeing that they were moving along the coast instead of going ahead to search for Cape Horn”—the southernmost promontory of South America—“decided to require Magellan to follow His Majesty’s instructions, which were for them to continue their voyage with the agreement, counsel and opinions of the captains, officers and pilots of the armada.” In fact, Magellan’s orders were to “go in search of the strait,” not Cape Horn, and despite what the mutineers later claimed, he had made a point of calling a formal conference and soliciting in writing the opinions of his captains and pilots, just as his orders required. Although he had not accepted their recommendation to turn back, he was not obliged to heed their advice. This was not a democracy, it was an armada, and he was the admiral.

Not surprisingly, the mutineers rearranged events at Port Saint Julian to suit their cause. To hear them tell it, they aroused Magellan to fury simply by asking him to obey the king’s orders, or at least their interpretation of them. “One night Gaspar de Quesada with certain companions went from his ship, Concepción, to San Antonio, which was commanded by Álvaro de la Mesquita. He asked for the said Álvaro de la Mesquita and took him prisoner and told the men of the ship, in the presence of Juan Cartagena . . . that they already knew how Magellan had treated him [Cartagena]; and that Magellan would have him killed because he had asked Magellan to comply with the orders of His Majesty. . . . They demanded that Magellan comply with the orders of His Majesty; and for their having done this, not to be maltreated by him. . . . If he did this, they were and would be at his command.” They would even, they claimed, “call him Your Lordship and kiss his feet and hands.”

The mutineers delivered a wildly distorted rendition of the meeting to which they had tried to lure Magellan. In reality, Magellan had spurned their invitation to attend a conference aboard the rebel ship for fear of his life. But to hear the mutineers tell it, “Magellan sent word for them to come to his ship and that he would hear them out and do whatever was right. They replied that they dare not go to his ship for fear that he would punish them, that instead, he should come to San Antonio, where all of them could meet and they would do what he ordered them.”

The mutineers remained oblivious to Magellan’s successful effort to sabotage the revolt. In their account, Cartagena and Quesada ordered the rebel ships to sail out of Port Saint Julian, an act that meant confronting Magellan, whose flagship, Trinidad, blocked their path to freedom. “San Antonio raised two anchors and started to steady itself with one. Quesada agreed to set his prisoner Álvaro de Mesquita free and sent him to Magellan so there would be peace between them.” This was fiction, as Mesquita knew, but the mutineers invented still more incidents with Mesquita playing a critical part. For example, as the rebel ships sailed past the flagship, Mesquita supposedly asked Magellan not to fire on them so they could “iron out their differences, but before they could move from where they were, in the middle of the night while the men slept, the flagship fired heavy and light volleys at their ship.” This was a good story, but the truth was that San Antonio, carried along by a powerful current and dragging her anchor, had approached Trinidad quite unintentionally in the middle of the night because her cable had parted, not because Quesada had given the order to sail. The befuddled mutineers were left telling tales of San Antonio somehow slipping past the flagship in the middle of the night . . . of Magellan’s loyal cousin temporarily siding with the mutineers . . . of the leaders of the mutiny offering to kiss the hands and feet of the Captain General they obviously despised. None of this made sense unless their stories were seen for what they were: rather obvious attempts to exculpate themselves.

Inevitably, the mutineers recast the climactic struggle at the strait in their favor. In their version, Mesquita provoked the rebellion by stabbing Gomes in the leg, and Gomes retaliated by stabbing Mesquita’s left hand. (In reality, of course, Gomes had stabbed Mesquita first.) They also insisted that the trip home had been unspeakably difficult because each man was limited to a ration of three ounces of bread a day. This was another doubtful assertion because San Antonio carried provisions for the entire fleet, more than enough food to fill the mutineers’ bellies.

While the mutineers spun their tales for the Casa’s representatives, Gomes and Guerra were held in custody, as was Mesquita, despite his claims that he was the mutiny’s principal victim, not its perpetrator. “We receive a thousand complaints every hour from them, insisting that they should not be imprisoned,” Recalde complained, “that they be given a chance to see Your Majesty to tell Your Majesty what had happened in the said voyage.” But they never got the chance. From his jail cell, Mesquita insisted, truthfully, that he had been tortured into signing a confession that he had tortured Spanish officers, that it was spurious, and that he had acted loyally to Magellan and the king of Spain. Nevertheless, suspicion fell more heavily on Mesquita than on anyone else.

Mesquita’s account, so different from the mutineers’ exculpatory version, received little attention and even less credence at the Casa de Contratación. In his defense, Mesquita presented the Casa with the documents he had kept when he presided over the prolonged mutiny trial in Port Saint Julian. The dossier recorded the rebellious actions of every accused crew member, the sentences they received, and Magellan’s clemency, all to no avail. Mesquita was ordered to remain in prison, while the mutineers went free. The ringleaders, Gomes and Guerra, even had their travel expenses to and from court reimbursed, while Mesquita, considered guilty until proven otherwise, was ordered to pay travel costs out of his own, threadbare pocket.

In their depositions, the crew members skillfully played on Spanish fears that Magellan was a Portuguese tyrant after all, a cunning agent of his native land who skillfully assembled the Armada de Molucca at Spain’s expense merely to destroy it and to dupe King Charles. They embellished this stereotype with fresh horrors: Magellan was a murderer who tortured honorable Spanish officers with connections in the highest possible place, the Church. They told the tragic tale of Cartagena—a Castilian officer!—who, through no fault of his own, was left to rot on a remote island by Magellan. As if that were not wicked enough, the Captain General left a priest to the same miserable fate.

This was an accomplished argument, but it was not flawless. For one thing, the mutineers had difficulty explaining why they had not rescued Cartagena as they retraced their route home. Fortunately, they generated enough shock and anti-Magellan hysteria in Seville that their inconsistent behavior was overlooked, for the present. Instead, the authorities focused on the accusation that Magellan had tortured loyal Spanish officers at Port Saint Julian, and not only abused them, but dismembered and disemboweled them, and placed his victims’ heads on stakes.

On May 26, Archbishop Fonseca—Cartagena’s father—delivered his response to the depositions, and it became apparent that the mutineers’ conspiracy to distort the truth had worked as planned. The bishop expressed shock and dismay at Magellan’s treatment of Cartagena and Quesada. It seemed incredible that Spanish officers would be capable of mutiny, and there was no excuse for drawing and quartering one man and marooning the other. So the mutineers went free, for now, though a taint of suspicion clung to them, and they did not receive the back pay they claimed was due them. “We told the officers and seamen . . . to look for a means to earn a living without wasting more time,” Recalde noted. “They have begun to look for work. We request Your Majesty to let us know what to do regarding said salary.”

In Magellan’s absence, his wife, Beatriz, became an object of suspicion, as if she were somehow involved with events at the other end of the world. The Casa de Contratación cut off her financial resources, and in a memorandum to the king suggested a convenient excuse for not paying her. “The wife of Ferdinand Magellan, as authorized by Your Majesty, has 50,000 maravedís in this House due the said Magellan as captain. . . . We doubt whether we should pay these claims considering the outcome of the voyage. . . . Inasmuch as we do not have the funds right now to pay them the first trimester of this year, we shall not pay them until Your Majesty advises us what to do.”

The vindictive Archbishop Fonseca had even more punitive measures in store for Magellan’s family. He ordered Beatriz and their young son to be placed under house arrest; they were forbidden to return to Portugal while the inquiry continued. Of course, she had no way of knowing that her husband had died only weeks before, on April 27, in the battle of Mactan, followed by her brother, Duarte Barbosa, who died on May 1 in the massacre at Cebu. And so throughout her captivity she waited, Penelope-like, for them to return home from their wanderings.

But Fonseca was almost as suspicious of the mutineers as he was of Magellan loyalists. He ordered Gomez, Guerra, and several other ringleaders to be brought to him in custody, insisting that they travel separately because they might continue to conspire. He told them he was making plans to send a caravel to Port Saint Julian to retrieve Cartagena and the priest. How the mutineers must have regretted their hasty decision to leave those two in the wilderness. Had Cartagena, who had always despised Magellan, returned to Spain, he would have done more than anyone else to blacken Magellan’s reputation and to win vindication and even honor for the mutineers.

No one besides Mesquita spoke up on Magellan’s behalf. The Spanish officials clearly planned to prevent him from returning in triumph to claim the lands, titles, and riches promised him by King Charles. But they had no way of knowing that their precautions were unnecessary, that Magellan was already dead. Mesquita, whose chief crime was being Magellan’s cousin, remained confined in jail for another year, during which he frequently proclaimed his innocence, to no avail.

The inquiry into the mutiny of San Antonio consumed six months, and in the end, Guerra and Gomes were set free together with all the sailors; Gomes even received a royal appointment to another expedition, a sure sign of rehabilitation.

Those who sided with Magellan fared much worse. His wife and son remained under house arrest, and now his father-in-law, the well-connected and prominent Diogo Barbosa, was ordered to give up property that Magellan had given to him before the fleet left Seville. This shabby treatment roused him to fury, and he spoke to the king in defense of Magellan’s conduct during the mutiny: “He had to take great care so that it would be to your advantage and not against your honor,” Barbosa said, pointing out that “when the men he brought with him mutinied with three of the principal ships, he did not punish them severely when he could have, and he pardoned many who later proved to be ungrateful.” In addition, “The captain [Mesquita] was taken to Seville as a prisoner and later to Burgos until the time Your Majesty arrived in Spain. Prior to this, he was never given a chance to air his side, nor was he shown any justice.” Barbosa recklessly lectured King Charles about the principles at stake. “These [events] serve as bad examples which discourage those who wish to do what they should and give greater encouragement to those who do otherwise.” Barbosa was not fighting to clear Magellan’s name alone; the official disgrace extended to Barbosa’s daughter, his grandson, and to himself. For all their sakes, he offered a rousing if solitary defense of the Captain General, yet Barbosa’s impassioned arguments in Magellan’s defense came off as special pleading, and because they challenged Fonseca, worked against his own interests. As a Portuguese, Barbosa was seen as treasonous rather than honorable, and his star fell along with Magellan’s.

One other Magellan loyalist, the brilliant but unstable cosmologist Ruy Faleiro, remained at large. After the Armada de Molucca had left Spain, he returned to Portugal, only to be imprisoned. He suffered a breakdown in jail, but he eventually regained his strength and was released. He then returned in secret to Seville, where he gained some sympathy at the Casa by displaying the marks made by the shackles he had worn during his time in prison. Out of pity, and to keep him away from Portugal, where he might have some value, the Casa gave him (and his brother Francisco) separation pay “because they had arrived worn out and penniless from Portugal; besides, they are here by order of Your Majesty.” Faleiro, the prime mover behind the Armada de Molucca, lived out his days in obscurity.

During the clamor arising from the unexpected return of the mutineers, not a word was heard from the young king who had authorized the expedition two years earlier, despite the petitions and correspondence pleading for his attention. Charles had not lost interest in the enterprise, but ever since the ships had sailed from Seville, he had been engulfed in political turmoil. His mother, Juana the Mad, lived on, hopelessly insane. She was said to have kept the body of her late husband, Philip I, the Handsome, who died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight, next to her bed for years in the belief that he would eventually return to life on the anniversary of his death. After his death, she always wore black and refused to clean herself. Meanwhile, the young monarch, encouraged by his backers, was still making every effort to become the next emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the most powerful political entity in Europe.

The Holy Roman Empire was founded on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, when Charles the Great (Charlemagne), the ruler of the Franks, an affiliation of Germanic kingdoms, was crowned emperor. His coronation unified France, much of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and northern Italy. Although Charlemagne’s line of male descendants died out within a century, he was an ancestor of many European ruling dynasties. Over time, the Holy Roman Empire became so fragmented that by the eighteenth century Voltaire remarked that it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Nevertheless, it survived.

The Holy Roman Empire was an elective monarchy; its German electors had the authority both to appoint the emperor and to control his actions thereafter. Charles’s grandfather, Maximilian, while emperor had elicited promises from the seven German electors to appoint the boy as emperor, but promises alone were not enough to assure Charles’s succession. He faced competition from the king of France, Francis I, who was eager to make a reputation, especially at Spain’s expense. It was true that Charles belonged to the House of Hapsburg, which traditionally ruled the Holy Roman Empire, but he needed money, lots of it, to clinch the deal. Charles had to pay bribes, thinly disguised as tributes, to the electors and to representatives of the papacy if he wished to secure the title. Lacking resources of his own, he borrowed heavily from various banking houses, permanently placing himself in their debt. He eventually paid the electors an astounding figure, 850,000 ducats, of which 540,000 ducats came from loans arranged with the Fugger banking dynasty. Thus Charles was borrowing from German bankers to pay German electors to win his largely German title, “Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.” The Germans made a fortune from Charles’s imperial ambitions, and he expected Spain to pay the bill, incurring wrath from one end of the Iberian peninsula to the other.

To complete his quest to become emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles required the blessing of Leo X, the Medici family pope whose excesses helped to inspire the Reformation. According to popular mythology, he was a free-spending libertine, but Raphael’s renowned portrait of Leo X, painted in 1518, depicts a very different image, that of a pudgy, thoughtful scholar and aesthete averting his saturnine expression from the viewer. With his puffy face and massive, fleshy nose, he presents an altogether homely and unprepossessing figure, flanked by two young cardinals, who stand directly behind him, uncomfortably crowding him. Although all three are swathed in luxury, in damasks and velvets and silks, they look at odds with each other, as if their robes concealed sharp weapons. Raphael’s portrait reflected a difficult and divisive time in Rome. The year before, Leo X had uncovered a plot among the younger cardinals to poison him. Cardinal Petrucci, who admitted to knowledge of the plot, was strangled in prison, and the other conspirators were exiled or executed. No wonder Raphael’s portrait showed a careworn, abstracted Leo X surrounded by menacing cardinals.

There was another side to Leo X. When not presiding at Church functions, he displayed a sense of bonhomie, rich laughter, and an addiction to theater and music and art, and other secular pleasures such as banquets and hunting. “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us,” he declared. He dispensed papal largesse to his entourage without regard to the dwindling papal treasury. Leo X then tried to raise money with the same lack of discipline, indiscriminately selling titles, favors, and indulgences, the latter popularly understood as the promise of avoiding Hell in the afterlife, given in exchange for donations.

To discontented outsiders, the Church deteriorated into a spectacle of corruption, selfishness, and arrogance. In 1520, Martin Luther, in Wittenberg, Germany, wrote a furious and menacing letter to Pope Leo X. “Among those monstrous evils of this age,” he wrote, “I am sometimes compelled to look to you and call you to mind, most blessed father Leo.” Under the influence of Pope Leo X, the Church of Rome, “formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels,” Martin Luther wrote, and many agreed. “Not even the antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.” He ranted in this vein for many pages, inciting others to follow his example. The Reformation was in full cry.

In theory, the beleaguered Leo X could draw additional support—and funds—from the Holy Roman Empire, but that conglomeration was in disarray. After the death of Maximilian, Leo X nominally supported Francis I, the king of France, over King Charles, but in reality the pope skillfully played one candidate against the other. More zealous and better funded, King Charles ultimately prevailed, and the pope reluctantly threw his weight behind the young man who had suddenly arrived at the summit of power in Europe. Or was it a precipice?

On July 28, 1519, less than a month before Magellan’s fleet sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the Atlantic, King Charles, then in Barcelona, learned that he had been elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but the title would not belong to him until he paid for it. He had counted on Spanish nobles for financial support, but they turned their backs on him. He remained in Europe, raising funds, and finally, on October 23, 1520, in the ancient city of Aachen, Germany, from which Charlemagne had once ruled the empire, Charles, now twenty-one years old, was crowned emperor. The occasion marked the formal alliance between a hesitant, cash-starved pope under siege from the forces of the Reformation and an untested, cash-starved monarch.

In Spain the nobility resented Charles even more fiercely now that he was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite his promise not to appoint foreigners to government posts in Spain, Charles selected his former tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, as regent, and the choice confirmed the nobles’ fears that Charles was essentially a German interloper plunked down in their midst. The city of Toledo responded by expelling its corregidor, as the royal administrative executive was known, and the Revolt of the Castilian Comuneros was under way. Cities and towns across Spain, Madrid and Salamanca among them, joined in the Junta Santa de las Communidades to return political power to Spain. They showed their determination by raising militias that marched on Tordesillas, where they placed their trust in King Charles’s mother, the mad Queen Juana, but she refused to come out of seclusion to offer support or even to sign a document expressing their grievances.

The insurrection spawned a counterrevolution in rural areas among those who despised the nobles; they now turned to King Charles for protection. He eagerly sought their support, promised to indemnify them against losses they incurred while fighting the rebellious nobles, and consented to appoint two Castilian noblemen to serve alongside Adrian of Utrecht as co-regents. He also showered titles and dukedoms on those who rallied to his side, and managed to bring the recalcitrant nobles around. Despite these victories, King Charles’s position in Spain remained hotly contested as alliances between the comuneros and the royalists shifted constantly. Desperate to shore up his empire, King Charles paid scant attention to the controversy surrounding a rogue ship tied up in Seville. He remained abroad until July 1522, and in his absence Spain struggled to redefine itself as a nation and as part of the Holy Roman Empire.

Seville, the center of Spanish commerce, reflected the tensions afflicting the rest of the country and developed a reputation as a city in crisis. Criminal behavior flourished in the streets and alleys of its shabbier neighborhoods. Triana, the suburb across the Guadalquivir River, served as home to many underworld types, as well as to the sailors who manned Spanish ships. Gypsies, slaves, palm readers, beggars, itinerant thespians, and minstrels populated a rapidly expanding underworld. In time, its ranks came to include defrocked clergy, destitute nobles, and unemployed soldiers, as well as an assortment of con artists and dealers in questionable merchandise. With goods flowing into Seville from Africa and across Europe, smuggling became a major enterprise; the value of smuggled goods far outstripped that of legitimate merchandise. Chronically unemployed people masqueraded as disabled beggars; it was often difficult for their victims to distinguish them from mendicant orders of monks. Knife fights were common throughout Seville, as were bribery and prostitution. Each year, eighteen thousand prisoners entered the gates of the Royal Prison, further stressing the city’s already burdened economy.

Meanwhile, Seville’s titled oligarchy fattened itself with income derived from leasing lands to farmers or cashed in on their titles and prestige to engage in commercial pursuits, importing wine, oil, and soap. With the profits, they constructed impressive castles, gardens, and ravishing courtyards. Throughout Spain, Seville’s wealthy nobility was renowned and envied even as the city’s criminals were feared.

These two disparate sides of Seville met at the docks, where wealthy merchants jostled with sailors and dishonest middlemen seeking merchandise to peddle. Amid the chaos on the banks of the Guadalquivir, San Antonio, now stripped of her rigging and fittings, rode at anchor, a mute but eloquent witness to an expedition gone awry. In Seville no one knew that the Armada de Molucca had successfully navigated the strait, or crossed the immense Pacific Ocean. No one realized how close the survivors were to their ultimate goal, the Spice Islands. Everyone—from King Charles to the bureaucrats in the Casa de Contratación to the recently freed sailors looking for their next ship—assumed that the fleet was lost and the expedition a complete failure.

Everyone was wrong.