Over the Edge of the World

Chapter XIV Ghost Ship

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:

So lonely ’twas, that God himself

Scarce seeméd there to be.

Laden with cloves and about sixty survivors, Victoria left the island of Tidore on December 21, 1521. Heading southwest, she called at a small island nearby to load firewood, and resumed her southerly course toward one of the most dangerous stretches of ocean in the world: the Cape of Good Hope.

Embarking on the final leg of the unprecedented journey around the world should have been an occasion for relief among the homeward-bound crew members, but it was not. The character of the expedition had changed completely; the Armada de Molucca finally had its spices, but it had lost its soul. The absence of Magellan’s guiding hand, his fierce discipline, even his quixotic delusions of grandeur, left the two remaining ships and their crew members without a sense of overriding purpose. Only survival mattered now.

Even if the crew survived the voyage home, they were anxious about the reception they would receive in Spain. Although they had no knowledge of San Antonio’s arrival in Seville seven months earlier, they suspected that the mutineers aboard that ship might have made it back and succeeded in discrediting Magellan. Elcano and Victoria’s crew feared they would be arrested and jailed for treason the moment they tied up at the dock. Desertion might have been an appealing option among the grim choices facing the sailors, except for their fear of cannibals inhabiting the islands surrounding them. In the end, staying aboard ship served as the best strategy to forestall disaster. They found themselves prisoners of peculiar circumstances, hostages to a situation created largely by those who had predeceased them.

Even Antonio Pigafetta, so determined to bring the news of Magellan’s accomplishments back to Europe, was at a loss for words, content simply to note the islands Victoria passed: Caion, Laigoma, Sico, Giogi, and Caphi, all part of the Moluccas. On the advice of local pilots, he recorded, “We turned toward the southeast, and encountered an island that lies in a latitude of two degrees toward the Antarctic Pole, and fifty-five leagues from Maluco. It is called Sulach [later called Xulla], and its inhabitants are heathens.” Here Pigafetta briefly resumed his amateur anthropology: “They have no king, and eat human flesh. They go naked, both men and women, only wearing a bit of bark two fingers wide before their privies.” Cannibals seemed to be everywhere; Pigafetta listed ten islands to be avoided at all costs.

Two days after Christmas, the ship found anchorage in Jakiol Bay, where the crew obtained fresh, and much needed, supplies, along with an Indonesian pilot who knew his way around these islands. Under his guidance, the crew sailed on as if in a trance, heading south, narrowly avoiding Moors and cannibals, coral reefs and hidden sandbars. Eventually, Victoria put the Indonesian islands astern, passing through the Alor Strait and eluding pirates. As a lone vessel laden with spices, Victoria was especially vulnerable to predators.

On January 8, 1522, Victoria entered the Banda Sea, extending west of the Moluccas, and the torpid weather suddenly changed. “We were struck by a fierce storm,” Pigafetta reported, “which caused us to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guidance. Running before the storm, we landed at a lofty island, but before reaching it we were greatly worn out by the violent gusts of wind that came from the mountains of that island, and the great currents of water.” The squall nearly shattered the ship, but Elcano avoided the rocks and reefs, and when the seas moderated, Victoria limped to an anchorage close to shore. The next day, divers inspecting the hull discovered extensive damage, and the men gingerly hauled the vessel onto a beach to commence repairs and caulking.

The inhabitants of this island, known as Malua, shocked even these hardened sailors. They were, said Pigafetta, “savage and bestial, and eat human flesh,” and their appearance combined the frightening and the outlandish. They went naked, or nearly so, “wearing only that bark as do the others, except when they go to fight, they wear certain pieces of buffalo hide behind, and at the sides, which are ornamented with small shells, boars’ tusks, and tails of goat skins fastened before and behind.” They lavished most of their attention on their hair, “done up high and held by bamboo pins which they pass from one side to the other.” Completing this curious picture, “They wear their beards wrapped in leaves and thrust into small bamboo tubes—a ridiculous sight.” All in all, Pigafetta judged them to be “the ugliest people in the Indies.”

Despite the inhabitants’ bizarre appearance, the sailors, by this time old hands in such transactions, bestowed trinkets on them, and both sides quickly made peace. As the sailors set to work repairing the ship, the aristocratic Pigafetta, spared the indignity of physical labor, roamed the island, studying its flora and fauna, noting an abundance of fowl and goats and coconuts and pepper: “The fields in those regions are full of this pepper, planted to resemble arbors.” He was speaking of black pepper, which had been introduced to the island some time before the Europeans’ arrival, and which the inhabitants carefully cultivated.

Two weeks later, with repairs to the hull completed, Elcano gave the order to resume their voyage home, and the crew set sail on Saturday, January 25. Victoria, having sailed five leagues or so, called at the island of Timor, towering nearly ten thousand feet above the shimmering surface of the Pacific. Everyone aboard her looked forward to a luxurious, satisfying time ashore, because food, spices, almonds, rice, bananas, ginger, and fragrant wood were all said to grow there in abundance.

Pigafetta’s linguistic skills gave him a prominent part to play in the dealings with the locals to obtain provisions. “I went ashore alone to speak to the chief of a city called Amaban to ask him to furnish us with food. He told me that he would give me buffaloes, swine, and goats, but we could not come to terms because he asked many things for one buffalo.” Assessing his surroundings, Pigafetta realized the chief lived in luxury, attended by numerous naked serving women, all of them adorned with gold earrings “with silk tassels pendant from them, as well as amulets of gold and brass.” And the men displayed even more gold jewelry than the women.

While Pigafetta was negotiating, two young crew members deserted; Martín de Ayamonte, an apprentice seaman, and Bartolomé de Saldaña, a cabin boy, swam ashore under cover of darkness and never returned to their ship. They were exceptions to the generally cautious behavior of Victoria’s crew in Timor. For example, they refrained from enjoying the charms of the local women, believing they were infected with syphilis—“the disease of St. Job.” They had seen evidence of what they assumed to be syphilis all over the Moluccas, according to Pigafetta, but the greatest concentration occurred here, on this island. The origins of syphilis in this part of the world are a mystery. Portuguese traders or sailors might have carried it with them (syphilis was also known as “the Portuguese disease”), but it is worth noting that the disease was reported in China centuries earlier than in Europe, and that junks regularly plied these waters. It is also possible that the sailors’ diagnosis was mistaken, and they had come across islanders affected with leprosy.

To guarantee cooperation with the islanders, Elcano ordered a party of sailors ashore in search of a bargaining chip: “Since we had but few things, and hunger was constraining us, we restrained in the ship a chief and his son from another village.” With their hostages in hand, the armada’s officers proceeded to negotiate for the food they so desperately needed. The strategy worked exactly as planned, and the recalcitrant islanders delivered a ransom of six buffalo, a dozen goats, and as many pigs to the grateful yet rapacious sailors in exchange for the hostages’ freedom.

Once the slaughtered beasts had been loaded, Victoria prepared to set sail once more, this time heading for the island of Java, the largest and, to Europeans, the best-known destination in the Indies. Among the crew members, Java possessed a mysterious allure, if only because the Javanese reputedly practiced exotic customs such as palang. Pigafetta relished telling the tales he heard of Java, beginning with its funeral rites. “When one of the chief men of Java dies, his body is burned,” he wrote. “His principal wife adorns herself with garlands of flowers and has herself carried on a chair through the entire village by three or four men. Smiling and consoling her relatives who are weeping, she says, ‘Do not weep, for I am going to sup with my dear husband this evening and to sleep with him this night.’ Then she is carried to the fire, where her husband is being burned. Turning toward her relatives, and again consoling them, she throws herself into the fire, where her husband is being burned. If she did not do that, she would not be considered an honorable woman or a true wife to her dead husband.” For all its melodrama, this was a fairly accurate account of a funeral ceremony as practiced on the island of Bali, located little more than a mile east of Java, and in India.

And then there was the role palang played in Javanese courtship rites. Magellan’s relative Duarte Barbosa, in his account of the region, had described Javanese palang in excruciating detail. “They are very voluptuous,” he wrote of the inhabitants, “and have certain round hawk’s bells sewn and fastened in the head of their penis between the flesh and the skin in order to make them larger. Some have three, some five, and others seven. Some are made of gold and silver and others of brass, and they tinkle as the men walk. The custom is considered quite the proper thing. The women delight greatly in the bells, and do not like men who go without them. The most honored men are those who have the most and largest ones.”

Pigafetta observed that the custom still formed a vital part of Javanese life. “When the young men of Java are in love with any gentlewoman, they fasten certain little bells between their penis and foreskin. They take a position until their sweetheart hears the sound. The sweetheart descends immediately, and they take their pleasure; always with those little bells, for their women take great pleasure in hearing those bells ring from the inside of their vagina. Those bells are all covered, and the more they are covered, the louder they sound.”

Normally a careful observer, Pigafetta could not resist telling tales when the mood came over him. In the same breath as his description of palang, he conjured Amazons, among the most persistent of all the illusions of Neverland, and perhaps the hardest for the lonely sailors who roamed the world to give up. Pigafetta lent at least partial credence to an account he heard about Amazons on a neighboring island kill their male offspring and raise only females. And any man found exploring the island would be attacked instantly. Needless to say, the survivors of so many shipwrecks, mutinies, ambushes, and other disasters elected not to risk the wrath of the Amazons they believed to be in their midst.

Although Victoria remained hundreds of miles distant from the southernmost point of China, Pigafetta heard dramatic stories of the Middle Kingdom from local traders. “The king,” as Pigafetta referred to the emperor, “never allows himself to be seen by anyone. When he wishes to see his people, he rides about the palace on a skillfully made peacock, a most elegant contrivance, accompanied by six of his principal women clad like himself; after which he enters a serpent called a nagha”—the name given to a mythical dragon —“which is as rich a thing as can be seen, and which is kept in the greatest court of the palace. The king and the women enter it so that he may not be recognized among his women. He looks at his people through a large glass which is in the breast of the serpent. He and the women can be seen, but one cannot tell which is the king. The latter is married to his sisters, so that the royal blood may not be mixed with others.”

The emperor, it seemed, had absolute power over all his subjects, and he wielded it with impressive, if fiendish, enthusiasm. “When any seigneur is disobedient to the king, he is ordered to be flayed, and his skin dried in the sun and salted. Then the skin is stuffed with straw or other substance, and placed head downward in a prominent place in the square, with hands clasped above the head, so that he may be seen to be performing zonghu, that is, obeisance.”

Pigafetta’s vivid evocation of Chinese customs reveals his yearning to visit the Middle Kingdom and play the role of diplomat and translator as he had throughout the voyage. Perhaps Magellan, had he been alive, would have made a detour and allowed Pigafetta to fulfill his dream, but Elcano had no such ambitions. China remained tantalizingly remote.

In the early hours of Wednesday, February 11, Victoria weighed anchor and put the island of Timor astern, sailing along a southwesterly course. With Java and, later on, Sumatra barely visible to starboard, she headed for her meeting with destiny at the Cape of Good Hope.

The struggle with the elements was joined within days of leaving Timor as Victoria became the plaything of the unstable weather systems of the southern latitudes. “In order that we might double the Cape of Good Hope, we descended to forty-two degrees on the side of the Antarctic Pole. We were nine weeks”—nine weeks!—“near that cape with our sails hauled down because we had the west and northwest winds on our bow quarter and because of a most furious storm,” Pigafetta explained. He went on to warn, “It is the largest of and most dangerous cape in the world.” And he was right.

Although the Cape of Good Hope was first rounded in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias and nine years later by Vasco da Gama—both major accomplishments in Portuguese exploration history—it was still considered extremely hazardous and barely navigable even by the most seaworthy of ships and the most experienced of captains. It occupied a nearly mythical place in the Portuguese consciousness as the most fearsome place in the entire world.

Sebastián Elcano had never experienced anything like the fierce, confused winds and riptides of Cabo Tormentoso; doubling it would tax his navigational skills, his patience, and his daring to the utmost. Many of the crew wanted to jump ship at the island of Madagascar rather than risk doubling the cape, said Pigafetta, “because the ship was leaking badly, because of the severe cold, and especially because we had no other food than rice and water; for as we had no salt, our provisions of meat had putrefied.” Doing so meant a life of exile and slavery, because Madagascar was a Portuguese stronghold, with ships flying the Portuguese colors calling there on their way to and from the Indies.

A few brave souls on board Victoria had no use for Madagascar. They retained their principles and allegiance to King Charles, and preferred death to spending the rest of their days marooned off the coast of Africa. They were, said Pigafetta, “more desirous of their honor than of their own life, determined to reach Spain, dead or alive.”

Halfway between Australia and Africa, Victoria began to leak dangerously. Deliverance seemed at hand on March 18, when the crew sighted the prominent hump of what is now known as Amsterdam Island. Elcano hoped to perform urgently needed repairs on the shores of this small volcanic landmass, but after four days of tacking in rough weather and surging seas, he was unable to find a secure anchorage. “We saw a very high island, and we went towards it to anchor, and we could not fetch it; and we struck the sails and lay to until the next day,” Albo recorded in frustration.

Elcano eventually gave up on the idea of reaching Amsterdam Island, and repairs took place in the ocean swells. As the men worked, they might have seen the killer whales or elephant seals, and if they lifted their gaze, they would have seen several species of albatross circling above them, the same benignly smiling bird that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination transformed into a symbol of hope and innocence corrupted by thoughtless violence.

Once the repairs were completed, Victoria resumed her westerly course. Over the following days and weeks, the crew, hovering on the verge of starvation and dreading the onset of scurvy, steadily ate their way through their supply of rice and awaited whatever destiny had in store.

Fifteen hundred miles east of Amsterdam Island, Trinidad prepared to leave the island of Tidore. On April 6, after more than three months of repairs, she finally weighed anchor and unfurled her sails. The ship carried a full load of spices, one thousand quintals of cloves—fifty tons!—more than enough to justify the expense of the entire voyage.

Magellan’s former flagship was commanded by Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, and her pilot was Juan Bautista Punzorol, known to history as the “Genoese pilot,” after the name of the short memoir of the voyage he left behind. Sorely missed was Juan Carvalho, the capable pilot who had become a corrupt Captain General; he had died of unknown causes on February 14.

As the fleet’s alguacil, or master-at-arms, Espinosa had performed as a loyal servant to King Charles, and he had helped Magellan maintain authority over his often rebellious crew. During the mutiny in Port Saint Julian, when Magellan lost control of three of his ships, Espinosa had come to his aid, and as a career soldier, he discharged his dangerous duties without fuss or complaint. But as a captain, Espinosa was hopelessly out of his element. Without Magellan to advise and protect him, it became apparent that he lacked the navigational skills to take his ship through rough weather; beyond his lack of expertise, his character, seemingly so straightforward and loyal, turned ambivalent when he should have been resolute, and naïve where he should have been canny. It was not that he lacked discipline, or the support of the men; the problem was that Espinosa, a soldier, was simply not qualified to command a ship. The challenge of guiding Trinidad halfway around the world, often against the prevailing winds, was beyond him, as it might have been beyond even Magellan, had he lived to face it.

Espinosa decided to leave behind four men to operate a trading post on the island of Tidore. The post would store cloves and serve as a symbol of Spanish rule in the Spice Islands. The four men stationed there were, Ginés de Mafra recalled, “Juan de Campos and Luis de Molino and a Genoese and a certain Guillermo Corco.” While serving time at their remote outpost, they picked up alarming intelligence: “Some Indian merchants who had come there to buy cloves told them that a Portuguese armada was coming from India to the Moluccas because they had learned of the Castilians’ presence there.” They, too, wanted to establish an outpost, but more than that, they planned to seize control of the spice trade. The four men left behind suddenly found themselves vulnerable to both Portuguese marauders and to the island’s residents, whose loyalties could be purchased or transferred with a show of force.

Setting sail, Espinosa backtracked and followed an easterly course through waters the fleet had already explored, past Gilolo and Morotai, and into the Philippine Sea, all the way to the island of Komo, where Trinidad took on more provisions. From this point on, stout easterly headwinds got the better of his navigational skills, and he took a more northerly course. The choice proved disastrous. Although he now understood how large the Pacific Ocean was, his ideas about the location of landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere were deeply flawed. He mistakenly believed that Asia was connected to the American continent, and that misunderstanding led him to assume that if he sailed far enough north, he would catch benign westerly winds. But soon after his departure, the monsoon season started in earnest, bringing with it a seemingly endless succession of storms and drenching rains.

“After ten days of sailing,” according to de Mafra, “we arrived at one of the Islands of the Thieves.” Their position was uncannily close to the armada’s first landfall after the ninety-eight-day ordeal of crossing the Pacific during the voyage out. “There Gonzalo de Vigo stayed, much tired of the travails.” Nor was he the only one to desert—in all, three crew members fled, preferring to take their chances on a remote Pacific island rather than remain aboard Espinosa’s ship of doom. (De Vigo remained in the Philippines for the rest of his life; the other two deserters were killed by islanders.)

De Mafra wrote that Trinidad “sailed to the northeast until she reached 42 degrees North.” Espinosa faced winds of ever-increasing intensity, and soon storms overwhelmed the isolated ship. A more ill-advised global detour cannot be imagined. One can only wonder what he was thinking as he sailed as far north as Japan, into ever more frigid waters, because this course took him away from his goal of reaching Darién.

Scurvy returned to plague the men, and its miseries made the living envy the dead. “At this point many began dying,” said de Mafra, “and one of them was opened to see what it was that they were dying of, and his body was found to be as if all its veins had burst open because all the blood had spread all over the interior of his body. Henceforth, whenever anyone fell sick he was bled because it was thought that the blood was suffocating him, but they kept dying all the same and did not elude death, so thenceforward the sick men were considered helpless and left untreated.” Scurvy ultimately claimed the lives of thirty men, leaving only twenty to carry on. In their frail and bewildered state, the handful of survivors sought an explanation for their suffering. “Some claimed that it was because of the venom poured by the Ternate Indians into the well where they had collected water for the voyage,” de Mafra suggested.

Even Espinosa admitted that his course placed the ship in peril, first from the weather, and then from illness: “It became necessary for me to cut the castles and quarter-deck because the storm was so big and the weather so cold that aboard the ship that we could not cook any food. The storm lasted twelve days and because the people did not have any bread to eat, most of them lost weight and when the storm had passed and the people could once again cook food, on account of the many worms we had, it gave them nausea, which affected most people.”

Finally, Espinosa came to his senses. “When I saw the people suffering, the contrary weather, and [realized] that I had been at sea for five months, I turned back to the Moluccas, and by the time we got to the Moluccas . . . it had been seven months at sea without taking [on] any refreshments.”

After a brief respite at the Islands of the Thieves to collect water, Espinosa commanded Trinidad to resume her retreat toward Tidore, but as he approached his goal, he received shocking news. On May 13, five weeks after Trinidad’s departure from Tidore, a fleet of seven Portuguese ships, all looking for Magellan and the Armada de Molucca, had arrived at the island. Their leader was António de Brito, bearing a royal appointment as governor of the Spice Islands.

His Portuguese soldiers, heavily armed, imprisoned the four crew members Espinosa had left behind to maintain a trading post. Then Brito turned his attention to Almanzor, the king of Tidore, demanding to know how he could have allowed the Spanish to maintain a post on his island. Almanzor pleaded for mercy, explaining that the Spanish had forced him to yield, but now that Captain Brito had come to rescue Almanzor from the Spanish, he would gladly switch his allegiance back to the Portuguese. Captain António de Brito, whose cynicism concerning Almanzor’s protestations can be imagined, reclaimed the Spice Islands in the name of Portugal.

Espinosa dispatched a boat bearing a letter for Captain Brito, begging for sympathy. He told a pathetic tale. His ship was in bad condition, down to its last anchor; one storm could send her to the bottom. And he was in desperate need of supplies. Had Magellan been alive, he would never have been so foolish as to write a letter to the Portuguese captain charged with capturing him, and the last thing he would have done was to reveal his whereabouts and weaknesses to the enemy. He would have known there was no chance of mercy from the Portuguese.

Rather than the compassion Espinosa expected, the letter only made Brito gloat. After searching the Indies for three years, the Portuguese governor now knew exactly where the Armada de Molucca was located, and once he had captured the crew, he would treat them as cruelly as he wished.

A few days later, a Portuguese caravel with twenty armed men stormed Benaconora, the harbor where Espinosa had sought refuge. The soldiers boarded Trinidad, expecting to overwhelm the crew, but were repelled by the grievous spectacle of men near death, a foul and unhealthy stench that no one dared to brave, and a ship on the verge of sinking. Everything Espinosa had said in his letter to Brito was true; Trinidad and her crew were in desperate condition and offered no threat to the Portuguese.

Unmoved, the Portuguese soldiers arrested Espinosa and sailed Magellan’s fetid and decrepit flagship to Ternate. There Brito took possession of Trinidad’s papers, logbooks, quadrants, and astrolabes. Included in the haul were the diary of Andrés de San Martín and, it is said, Magellan’s personal logbook. Brito ordered the ship stripped of all her sails and rigging, and in this condition, she rode helplessly at anchor until a severe storm hit the island. The winds smashed apart the remains of the once-proud ship, her precious cargo of cloves sank, and the splintered remnants of her hull washed ashore. The flagship of the Armada de Molucca ended up as driftwood.

Espinosa had squandered his chance for glory. If he had succeeded in guiding Trinidad home, he would have earned a place in history and a fortune for himself. Instead, his indecision claimed the lives of over a score of men, half the remaining assets of the armada, a valuable cargo of cloves, and the records maintained by Trinidad’s officers, including Magellan himself.

When Brito perused the logbooks, he became incensed because they contained damning evidence of the armada’s route through Portuguese waters and its attempts to snatch the Spice Islands away from Portugal. The source of the intelligence was impeccable: the records of the fleet’s official astronomer, Andrés de San Martín. To make matters worse, Brito discovered that the astronomer had secretly altered the location of various lands to obscure the embarrassing fact that the ships had wandered into the Portuguese hemisphere, at least as it was defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. With this information, Brito had his motive for revenge.

His first victim was Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, the Portuguese renegade who had joined the fleet when it first called at the Spice Islands. He was beheaded.

Brito then considered executing several sailors and pilots, but preferred that they die a slow death in the tropical heat. He later reported to the king of Portugal, “So far as concerns the master, clerk, and pilot . . . it would be more to your Highness’s service to order their heads to be struck off than to send them [to India]. I kept them in the Moluccas because it is a most unhealthy country, in order that they might die there, not liking to order their heads to be cut off, since I did not know whether your Highness would be pleased or not.” Brito based his judgment of the climate on his own troops’ suffering; of the two hundred under his command, only fifty survived. The Portuguese governor did spare the lives of two men, a boatswain and carpenter, but he did so only to press them into service for the Portuguese. He sent the rest of the crew to a fortress under construction on the island of Ternate, with orders to help build it. The timber used to construct the Portuguese fort, and the cannon to protect it, came from the wreck of Trinidad, formerly Magellan’s flagship and the symbol of Spanish sea power in the Indies.

Espinosa, now just another prisoner, at first refused to comply with Brito’s humiliating dictates, but eventually he was forced to go along: “I was rewarded for my labor by threats of being hanged from the yardarms and the seizure of the ship loaded with cloves and all of the equipment.” The Portuguese clapped several of his men into leg irons, and even Espinosa himself, “dishonoring me and saying that I was a thief in front of all the native people and not paying respect to me at all, and saying”—and this was the ultimate insult—“‘Now we’ll see [who will prevail], the King of Spain, or that of Portugal.’”

Espinosa was forced to admit that the Portuguese, not the Spanish, remained firmly in control of the Spice Islands.

Trinidad’s voyage came to its heartbreaking end in October 1522. Now there was only one ship left of the five comprising the original Armada de Molucca. This was Victoria, under Elcano’s command, and her prospects of returning to Seville appeared even less certain than Trinidad’s.

Six months earlier, Elcano had tried repeatedly to set a course around the Cape of Good Hope, each time without success, but without serious damage either. After weeks of failed attempts, Victoria finally sought refuge in a harbor located in South Africa, perhaps Port Elizabeth. More disappointment ensued when a scouting party found no helpful natives, in fact, no people of any kind; and no food. Burning precious calories, the explorers climbed a hill to survey the landscape only to realize that, after all their attempts, they had yet to double the cape. It still lay ahead of them, far to the west.

With the greatest of reluctance, Victoria put to sea once more, battling a set of weather conditions found nowhere else on earth, the result of the interaction between the Agulhas current and ever-changing winds. The Agulhas current runs from the northeast to southwest, following the contour of the continental shelf, often at speeds of up to six knots. As if the current did not pose a sufficient threat, the ship also had to battle giant waves and gales that can change from northeasterly to southwesterly in a matter of minutes.

The wind was an even more dangerous force than the current. The major wind belts around southern Africa are influenced by two high-pressure systems, the South Atlantic High and the Indian Ocean High, which form part of the so-called subtropical ridge. The Coriolis effect deflects these winds to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, and they blow around in a counterclockwise direction. Such systems are also called “anticyclones.” Winds can reach up to one hundred miles an hour, and Victoria experienced blasts powerful enough to sheer away her fore-topmast and main yard.

Sixty-foot-high rogue waves, monstrous walls of water, inflicted additional misery on the crew. Each upsurge threatened to swallow the fragile little ship, but somehow she managed to emerge from the churning troughs in one buoyant piece and to surge forward into the next wall of water. After a while, the mauling Victoria received came to seem, if not routine, then predictable. The sea had its own patient rhythm of destruction.

Given the wretched and chaotic existence the men endured, the logs and diaries covering this segment of the journey are understandably sparse and occasionally in conflict with one another. Albo, the pilot, and Pigafetta, whose records are generally in close agreement, diverge over milestones they reached by as much as two weeks. Apparently, they were too preoccupied, and the ship too unsteady, to make detailed note-taking possible.

The constant pummeling exhausted the crew, and simply finding a quiet moment to consume a few handfuls of barely edible food, usually rice, came to seem a major accomplishment, and getting through the day a miracle of sorts. Of course, the weather continued to batter the boat by night as well, so there was no rest for the crew, nor safe harbor, nor cooking fire, nor soft dry blanket, nor guarantee that their misery would end anytime soon. They might double the cape in a matter of days, but then again they might never be able to accomplish the feat. And if they were forced to turn back, the prospect of starvation in the open stretches of the Indian Ocean or death at the hands of the Portuguese awaited them. And so they tried again and again, fleeing for their lives, hoping to cheat death just one more time.

Just when it seemed that the cape was impassable, the wind shifted slightly and the storms relented briefly. Elcano seized the moment to round Cape Agulhas, the point farthest south on the African continent, with the Cape of Good Hope coming up quickly, almost easy to handle in comparison.

Fighting churning waters, sailing as close to the wind as he dared, Elcano finally drove his ship around the Cape of Good Hope. Pigafetta wrote, with evident relief, “Finally, by God’s help, we doubled that cape . . . at a distance of five leagues.” It was only a guess, for the cape lay shrouded in fog and mist, an invisible, menacing presence now falling behind. They had survived one more ordeal, and that was enough to give thanks to a merciful Lord.

By now it was May 22, 1522, the winds had abated, and Victoria was at last able to proceed on a northerly course. Elcano led the weather-beaten ship and her worn-out crew into what is now called Saldanha Bay, just north of Cape Town, where the men rested. There is no record that they thought of themselves as heroic for having outlasted the storms surrounding the Cape of Good Hope; there was no longer any boldness or swagger about them. They had suffered too much for that; the sea had not killed them, but it had humbled them, and they were simply grateful to be alive. Nothing else mattered in comparison with that singular fact.

When the men recovered a bit of their strength, there was work to be done. They occupied themselves loading enough water and wood to see them home. For once, they were not alone because they shared the bay with a Portuguese ship plying the India route. Elcano imprudently risked making his presence known to the Portuguese captain, who saluted and sailed away, two ships at the end of the world pursuing their disparate goals.

Although Victoria had passed the supreme navigational test, the torments afflicting her crew were not over yet. On June 8, 1522, she crossed the equator again; this was the fourth time since the departure from Seville. “Then we sailed northwest for two months continually without taking on any fresh food or water,” Pigafetta reported. Inevitably, scurvy returned to devastate the crew. “Twenty-one men died during that short time. When we cast them into the sea, the Christians went to the bottom face upward, while the Indians always went face downward.” The victims included Martín de Magallanes, Magellan’s young nephew, who had sailed as a passenger. Despite everything he had endured, Pigafetta retained his touching faith. “Had not God given us good weather, we would all have perished from hunger.” The survivors summoned the strength to go on.

“Finally, constrained by our great extremity, we went to the islands. On Wednesday, July 9, we reached one of the Saint Jacob islands”—by which Pigafetta meant Santiago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of West Africa, the very same islands that had served as the marker for the line of demarcation under the Treaty of Tordesillas. The islands remained a Portuguese stronghold, a center for commerce in materials and in men. The seas surrounding the Cape Verde Islands were familiar to Portuguese mariners, too familiar, in fact, for Victoria’s safety. The farther north she journeyed, the more likely she was to encounter vindictive Portuguese authorities.

As soon as Victoria dropped anchor in the port of Ribeira Grande, on Santiago Island, Espinosa dispatched a longboat for food needed by the starving crew. Fearing that the Portuguese would likely pounce, the men crafted a story designed to elicit sympathy and avoid uncomfortable facts: “We had lost our foremast under the equinoctial line (although we had lost it under the Cape of Good Hope), and when we were restepping it, our Captain General had gone to Spain with the other two ships.”

The cover story omitted any mention of their visit to the Spice Islands, the precious cloves they were carrying, Magellan’s death, the mutinies, their doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, among other incursions into Portuguese waters, and, most important of all, their nearly complete circumnavigation of the globe. Instead, they posed as an unlucky, storm-battered Spanish cargo ship, hardly worth troubling over. The ruse seemed to work, and Pigafetta exulted, “With those good words, and with our merchandise, we got two boatloads of rice.”

As an afterthought, Elcano told his men to confirm the date with the Portuguese, just to make sure the ship’s log remained accurate after nearly three years’ record-keeping. The reply—Thursday—baffled the sailors. “We were greatly surprised for it was Wednesday with us, and we could not see how we had made a mistake; for I had always kept well, and had always set down every day without interruption.” How could they have omitted a day? As they learned later, “It was no error, but as the voyage had been made continually toward the west, and we had returned to the same place as does the sun, we had made a gain of twenty-four hours.” But this miscalculation meant that they violated their faith by eating meat on Fridays, and celebrating Easter on a Monday.

This was no mere bookkeeping oversight: Albo, Pigafetta, and the rest of the survivors erred because the international date line did not yet exist. No Western cosmologist or astronomer, not even Ptolemy, had anticipated that a correction would be necessary to compensate for sailing around the globe. It took the first circumnavigation to demonstrate the need for a twenty-four hour gain. By general agreement, the international date line now extends west from the island of Guam, in the Pacific Ocean.

As Victoria was about to slip away from Santiago Island, Elcano made a serious mistake. “On Monday, the fourteenth [of July],” wrote Albo, “we sent the ship’s boat ashore for more rice. It returned the next day, and went back for another load. We waited until night, but it did not return. Then we waited until the next day, but it never returned.” Something had gone awry, but no one aboard the ship knew what it was. One possibility was that the four Indians who had gone ashore to fetch rice tried to purchase food with cloves. When the Portuguese authorities saw this contraband, which could only have come from the Spice Islands, they became deeply suspicious of Victoria.

That was not all. While on the island of Santiago, one of the sailors let slip that their Captain General, Ferdinand Magellan, was dead. Pigafetta’s all-too-brief mention of the incident suggests that whoever revealed Magellan’s death also revealed that Elcano and the others were afraid to return to Spain, a remark calculated to raise suspicions. The sailor suspected of betraying secrets was Simón de Burgos, a Portuguese who had passed himself off as a Castilian to join the armada. His concealed identity might have had an innocent explanation—he simply wanted to find work, and with restrictions on the number of Portuguese crew members, pretending to be Spanish was the only way around the problem—or it might have been more sinister. It is possible that once he was among his fellow Portuguese in Santiago, he felt free to reveal his identity and betray his long-suffering crew members in exchange for favors. The severity of the subsequent Portuguese reaction to Burgos’s admissions—assuming he was the source—suggests that he exposed still more about the expedition, including its visit to the Moluccas and incursion into Portuguese waters—all inflammatory matters.

Burgos was not the only crew member who tried to seek asylum from the Portuguese. Elcano had revealed the true nature of the expedition to a Portuguese captain shortly after Victoria doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and in the distant Spice Islands, Espinosa had also implored the Portuguese to come to his rescue. Assuming that many of the crew felt the urge to surrender to the Portuguese for the sake of survival, Burgos’s admission might be seen as a diplomatic feeler rather than a betrayal of men who had suffered and died for each other. The crew, near death after three years of incessant journeying, deserve a measure of sympathy. To these beaten-down men, throwing themselves on the mercy of the Portuguese seemed a reasonable strategy for survival.

In practice, however, their attempt to disclose the true nature of the expedition as a prelude to defection failed miserably. “We went nearer the port,” Albo continues, “to discover the reason of the delay, whereupon a vessel came out and demanded our surrender, saying that they would send us with the ship that was coming from the Indies, and that they would place their men in our ship, for thus had their officials ordered.”

Victoria’s officers stoutly resisted. “We requested them to send us our men and the ship’s boat. They replied that they would bear our request to their officials. We answered that we would take another tack and wait. Accordingly, we tacked about and set all our sails full, and left with twenty-two men, both sick and well.” The number probably included eighteen Europeans and four captives acquired en route. Twenty-two men: all that remained of the approximately 260 who had left Seville with the armada three years earlier. Twenty-two survivors of an endless succession of calamities, storms, scurvy, drowning, torture, execution, war, desertion, and now this final indignity: capture by the Portuguese. The prisoners included Martín Méndez, the fleet’s accountant; Ricarte de Normandia, a carpenter; Roland de Argot, a gunner; four sailors; an apprentice seaman, Vasquito Gallego; and two passengers who had avoided misfortune until this point in the journey.

“Fearing lest we also be taken prisoner by certain caravels,” Pigafetta recorded, “we hastily departed.”

It was July 15, 1522.

With barely enough men to handle the ship, Elcano took Victoria along a northerly course to her rendezvous with destiny in Spain. The diarists’ silence concerning the final weeks of the circumnavigation suggests both their distaste for Elcano’s barely legitimate authority and the suffering they endured from scurvy, other forms of malnourishment, depression, and exhaustion. Each day, familiar, well-charted landmarks along the coast of North Africa slid past, bringing no cheer, markers on a voyage to disgrace and prison—or so it seemed to the handful of men occupying their ramshackle ship.

Leaks constantly threatened to scuttle Victoria, and the men, in their exhausted condition, were forced to work the pumps night and day, simply to stay afloat. Their incessant labor paid off, and by July 28, Tenerife swung into view, signaling the beginning of a new course toward the Azores to negotiate the northerly winds. Elcano, still in command, approached the Azores, hoping to take on the fresh provisions they desperately needed and depart before the Portuguese, who claimed these islands, pursued them, but he wisely judged the maneuver too dangerous to attempt.

As they worked the pumps, the ship’s crew discerned Cape Saint Vincent to the north on September 4. It would be the last important landmark they observed before reaching their goal, and it was a fitting sight, for Sagres, the location of Prince Henry the Navigator’s academy, was located right on the cape; the developments that he had pioneered there a century before had culminated in this strange, difficult, and heroic voyage. Cape Saint Vincent disappeared in the mists as the “Portuguese trades” bore Victoria and her skeleton crew east toward the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, its waters churning just as they had three years earlier, when the ship, part of the proud Armada de Molucca, began the expedition to the Spice Islands.

On Saturday, September 6, 1522, we entered the bay of San Lúcar with only eighteen [European] men, the majority of them sick, all that were left of the sixty men who had left the Moluccas. Some died of hunger; some deserted at the island of Timor; and some were put to death for crimes.” So wrote Antonio Pigafetta, in an elegiac mode.

His cryptic reference to “crimes” has given rise to speculation that Elcano had to endure a mutiny during the final weeks of the voyage, and might have sunk to the same level of cruelty as Magellan had in quelling the uprising. Yet the mutiny, if there was one, must have been pathetic and halfhearted, because no other diarist has a word to say on the subject. More likely, the crimes mentioned by Pigafetta were the mundane deeds of desperate men, crimes such as the theft of Trinidad’s cloves or the dwindling food supply. Or the malefactors might have been one of the Indians still aboard the ship. The armada had captured a number of prisoners during its travels through Indonesia, some of them pilots, others hostages to be used as bargaining chips, and still others women whose chief role was to serve in a harem. The fleet’s roster, so scrupulous and detailed concerning European crew members, offers little help in tracking the Indians taken aboard during the voyage. Even Pigafetta, who recorded the sad history of John the Giant with great interest and compassion, evinces little interest in later captives and offers no hint concerning their fates, but such prisoners would likely be the first to desert or to be condemned to death for their transgressions.

At last, Pigafetta allowed himself a moment of pride concerning the chief accomplishment of the Armada de Molucca. “From the time we left that bay until the present day, we sailed fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leagues”—nearly sixty thousand miles—“and furthermore completed the circumnavigation of the world from east to west.” The distance the armada traveled was fifteen times longer than that covered by Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, and correspondingly more dangerous.

To complete her journey around the world, Victoria and her decimated crew had to make one last passage, from the harbor of Sanlúcar de Barrameda along the Guadalquivir River into Seville. Elcano sent for a small boat to tow the battered craft and her exhausted crew to the teeming city, now abuzz with talk and excitement concerning the unprecedented voyage. Although her hull was in such poor condition and leaking so copiously that the men had to keep pumping all the way just to stay afloat, Victoria completed her journey along the river to Seville and tied up at a quay on September 10.

Under the scrutiny of representatives of the king and his financiers, dock workers unloaded the precious cargo that Victoria had traveled around the world to collect: cloves. Even without the other four ships, the amount of cloves in Victoria’s hold was sufficient to turn a profit for the expedition’s backers. The king’s agents were pleased to note that the cloves were of first quality, far exceeding those obtained from merchants who had acquired them in the traditional manner, from middlemen using land routes. The cloves filled no less than 381 sacks, weighing 524 quintals. Their value came to 7,888,864 maravedís. By royal order, the cargo passed directly to the expedition’s backer, Cristóbal de Haro. Within weeks, he was in possession of the precious cloves, which he dispatched to his brother Diego in Antwerp for sale. The profits were divided between the Haros and the nearly insolvent Spanish crown.

Beyond the profits from spices, the completion of Magellan’s voyage finally gave the Spanish a water route to the Spice Islands, if they wanted it. In terms of prestige and political might, the achievement was the Renaissance equivalent of winning the space race—a competition between the world’s two great maritime superpowers, Spain and Portugal, for territory of vital economic and political importance. In a sudden reversal of the balance of power, Spain was poised to control the spice trade and, by extension, global commerce.

The day after arriving in Seville, the eighteen European survivors, attired only in their ragged shirts and breeches, did penance. Their number included Elcano; Francisco Albo, the pilot; Miguel Rodas, a ship’s master; Juan de Acurio, the boatswain; Hernando Bustamente, the barber and medic; Antonio Pigafetta, whose eloquent, occasionally X-rated journal became the primary source of information about the entire voyage; and twelve seamen who, through luck and caution, had managed to survive where so many of their cohorts had perished. Walking barefoot, holding a candle, each world traveler slowly walked, still getting accustomed to the unusual feeling of solid, unshakable land beneath his feet. Elcano led the gaunt, weary pilgrims through Seville’s narrow, winding streets to the shrine of Santa María de la Victoria, where they knelt to pray before the statue of the blessed Virgin and Child. They returned to Seville as sinners and penitents rather than conquerors. Their voyage had commenced as a Shakespearean drama, bristling with significance and passion, starring the heroic Magellan, but three years had taken a dreadful toll and the journey was ending as a play by Samuel Beckett. The survivors were shell-shocked, tentative, and chastened by all they had seen and experienced.

As curious onlookers watched, they rose and hobbled in bare feet over a wooden pontoon bridge across the Guadalquivir River and proceeded to another shrine, Santa María del Antigua, in Seville’s massive cathedral. The grandeur of the cathedral dwarfed the little band of mariners as they trudged through the square to the chapel.

Their prayers concluded, the remnants of the first crew to circle the globe dispersed. They shed the rags they had brought with them from the sea, donned new clothing, and sought out their modest homes.

In a bustling square in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, there is today a small marble plaque mounted high on the stone façade of a well-worn building. The plaque’s tarnished inscription commemorates the eighteen survivors of the first-ever circumnavigation of the globe:

Juan Sebastián Elcano

Captain

Francisco Albo

Pilot

Miguel de Rodas

Master

Juan de Acurio

Boatswain

Martín de Judicibus

Sailor

Hernando Bustamente

Barber

Hans of Aachen

Gunner

Diego Carmona

Sailor

Nicholas the Greek, of Naples

Sailor

Miguel Sánchez, of Rodas

Sailor

Francisco Rodrigues

Sailor

Juan Rodríguez de Huelva

Sailor

Antonio Hernández Colmenero

Sailor

Juan de Arratia

Sailor

Juan de Santandres

Ordinary seaman

Vasco Gomes Gallego

Ordinary seaman

Juan de Zubileta

Page

Antonio Pigafetta

Passenger

In the entire list, only Elcano, the captain; Albo, the pilot; Bustamente, the barber; and Pigafetta, Magellan’s chronicler, could be considered notable members of the armada’s original roster. The others, for the most part, were ordinary men, many still in their twenties or even younger, the overlooked servants of more powerful officers and specialists. No matter what their status, they had surveyed more of the world than anyone else before them; by accident or design, their names belong among history’s great explorers.

They had seen a great deal, and although they failed to understand much of what they experienced, they had made records for others to study, enlarging the Europeans’ knowledge of the world. They had circled the globe, only to demonstrate that the world was now a larger place than previously imagined, not smaller. Seven thousand miles had been added to the globe’s circumference, as well as an immense body of water, the Pacific Ocean. They had learned that beyond Europe, people existed in astonishing profusion and variety, as tall as the giants of Patagonia and as short as the pygmies of the Philippines, as generous as the courtiers of Brunei, and as violent as the inhabitants of Mactan. Banished were phenomena such as mermaids, boiling water at the equator, and a magnetic island capable of pulling the nails from passing ships. All these discoveries came at the cost of over two hundred lives and extreme hardship. No other voyage had been as prolonged and complicated as this one; no other voyage during the Age of Discovery would ever equal it for ambition and daring.

The expedition had ended, but its effects on Spain, and on world history, were just beginning.