Over the Edge of the World

Chapter XV After Magellan

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,

Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest

Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

As the skeleton crew guided the weather-beaten Victoria along the Guadalquivir River to her mooring in Seville, Juan Sebastián Elcano employed his considerable skills of persuasion in a letter to King Charles to boast of the voyage’s multifaceted accomplishments and to justify his assumption of command after Magellan’s death.

By the florid and long-winded standards of the era, the dispatch was a marvel of concision:

Most High and Illustrious Majesty:

Your high Majesty will learn how we eighteen men only have returned with one of the five ships which Your Majesty sent to discover the Spice Islands under Captain Ferdinand Magellan (to whom glory); and so that Your Majesty may have news of the principal things which we have passed through, I write to say briefly this:

First, we reached 54° S of the Equator where we found a Strait which passed through Your Majesty’s mainland to the Sea of India, which Strait is of 100 leagues and from which we debouched; and, in the time of three months and twenty days, encountering highly favorable winds, and finding no land save two small and uninhabited islands; afterward we reached an archipelago of many islands quite abundant in gold. We lost by his death Captain Ferdinand Magellan, with many others, and unable to sail for want of people, very few having survived, we dismantled one of the ships and with the two remaining sailed from island to island, seeking how to arrive, with God’s grace, at the Isles of Maluco [Spice Islands], which we did eight months after the death of the Captain; and there we loaded the two ships with spices. . . .

Having departed the last of these islands, in five months, without eating anything but wheat and rice and drinking only water, we touched at no land for fear of the King of Portugal, who had given orders in all his dominions to capture this fleet. . . . We arrived at the islands of Cape Verde, whose governor seized my boat with thirteen men, and sought to throw me and all my men into a ship which was sailing from Calicut to Portugal charged with spying . . . but we resolved, with common accord, to die before falling into the hands of the Portuguese. And so with very great labor at the pumps, which we had to work day and night to free her of water, and as exhausted as any man ever was, with the aid of God and of Our Lady, and after the passage of three years, we arrived. . . .

Your Majesty will know best that what we should esteem and admire most is that we have discovered and made a course around the entire rotundity of the world—that going by the occident we have returned by the orient.

After boasting of his feats of discovery, Elcano turned to the commercial aspects of the expedition and petitioned the king to excuse the men who had suffered so greatly for him from having to pay duties on profits from their personal store of spices:

I beg Your Majesty, in view of the many travails, sweats, famine, and thirst, cold and heat that these people have endured in the service of Your Majesty, to give us grace for the fourth and twentieth of their property and of what they brought with them. And with this I close, kissing the feet and hands of Your high Majesty.

Written on board the ship Victoria, in Sanlúcar, on the 6th day of September of 1522.

The Captain

Juan Sebastián Elcano

The first account of the first journey around the world, Elcano’s letter was dispatched from Sanlúcar de Barrameda even before the ship reached Seville—an indication of Elcano’s eagerness to offer explanations. But his letter did little to clear up the mystery of how Magellan died; nor did Elcano explain how he, a Basque mariner, emerged as the fleet’s Captain General. And any connection between the two events—Magellan’s fall and Elcano’s rise—was similarly obscured. The letter concealed more than it revealed. Many serious questions loomed concerning the voyage: mutinies, the sailors’ licentious behavior and outright orgies with women in distant lands, which had been expressly forbidden by the king; and, most important of all, Magellan’s conduct at sea and accusations of torture.

King Charles never mourned the loss of the Captain General, even though Magellan had always regarded the young sovereign as the paragon of all virtues, the recipient of all his loyalties and efforts, the justification of all his suffering. And Magellan’s fanatical devotion was not returned in kind. Charles felt no sense of kinship with the ardent Portuguese mariner who had presented himself at Valladolid four years before, pleading for royal backing of an expedition. The armada’s many scientific and geographic discoveries and the claiming of dozens of islands and lands for Spain made little impression on this preoccupied sovereign, who, through lifelong habit, merely considered such tributes his due. King Charles barely acknowledged that, thanks to Magellan’s efforts, he now laid claim to much of the known world, at least for a short time. Eventually, he took to boasting about the expedition because it had returned with a shipload of cloves, the aromatic equivalent of gold. He counted the number of bahars of cloves aboard the battered Victoria and ignored the number of souls Magellan and the priests had converted to Christianity. For Charles, the Armada de Molucca could be considered a commercial success; that was all, and that was enough.

King Charles proudly wrote to his Flemish aunt, the Archduchess Marguerite of Austria, the Netherlands’ regent, to proclaim the arrival of the prized cargo transported against all odds from halfway around the world. “The armada that three years ago I sent to the Spice Islands has returned and has been to the place where the said spices grow, where the Portuguese or any other nation has never been . . .”—that was manifestly untrue, but Charles had to maintain the fiction that Spain reached the Moluccas first in order to claim them—“and the captain of the said armada asserts that on this voyage they went so far that they roamed around the entire world.” These boasts reveal a twenty-one-year-old king attempting to assert his legitimacy and authority, and he asked his aunt to help bring the spices to market, “as if it were my own affair.” He reminded her that he had “borne great expenses for this new and untried effort, in addition to the work and care my people gave to it,” and he reminded her that he expected the entire empire over which he ruled, from Spain to the Netherlands, to profit, that is to say, get out of debt to the Haro family: “I hope that certainly my realms on this side and also my said countries on that side, and the subjects of each, will receive great benefit, convenience, and profit in the future, as you may well expect. And as to the value of the spices that the ships brought, what will come of them . . . will serve to furnish the preparation of a larger armada that I have decided to send to these Spice Islands as soon as possible.”

Excited by the thought of these riches, the archduchess requested her nephew to designate Bruges, the flourishing Flemish city in her realm, as the new center of the European spice trade, but Charles, thinking he had found a surefire way out of debt, insisted on keeping it in Spain “because this merchandise was first found at the expense of this realm.”

Still gloating over this unexpected success, King Charles summoned Elcano and two men of his choosing to visit the royal residence at Valladolid to provide a full account of their exploits. Elcano selected the pilot, Albo, and the barber-medic, Bustamente, to back up his account. Significantly, he excluded Pigafetta, whom he knew to be a Magellan loyalist. As a sign of royal favor, Elcano’s delegation received a lavish disbursement for formal clothes and traveling expenses to Valladolid; they could be assured of making an impressive appearance before their sovereign.

The city, in north central Spain, was a time capsule of the Spanish past, held for centuries by the Moors, who named it. Christians conquered the city in the tenth century, and it became a stronghold of commerce, its citizens renowned for speaking the purest Spanish anywhere, so important to the kingdom as a whole that by the dawn of the Renaissance the kings of Castile made it their official seat. For this reason, Valladolid exerted its bureaucratic influence over a substantial part of the world. By the time King Charles took up residence in Valladolid, the city was at its zenith.

Charles received the three world travelers on October 18 with apparent warmth and congratulated them on having reached the Spice Islands through a water route and claiming them for Spain. Keenly aware of what was expected, Elcano solemnly presented His Majesty with samples of the spices brought back from the Moluccas, as well as letters from the island chieftains swearing loyalty to the unknown ruler of the distant land. All that was very impressive, but just for show.

Clouds of suspected disloyalty, even mutiny, hung over the survivors’ heads. Just before their arrival in Valladolid, disquieting rumors had reached King Charles. It was whispered that Magellan had not been killed by warriors on Mactan but by the members of the fleet. Could Elcano have been among them? And there were conflicting accounts of the bitter mutiny at Port Saint Julian, some blaming the Spanish officers for the uprising and others holding the Portuguese contingent responsible.

To get to the bottom of these stories, the three men—Elcano, Albo, and Bustamente—faced an inquiry conducted by Valladolid’s mayor, acting on orders from King Charles himself. The proceeding, which began on October 18, consisted of thirteen questions put to the men. The questions concentrated on two themes, the mutiny and the commercial aspects of the voyage. Elcano had given considerable thought to the charge of disloyalty that he was bound to face, and during his examination he carefully explained his way out of the mutinies that had occurred on the ships by condemning Magellan. Elcano rearranged events to make it sound as though he had been invited by the Spanish captains to serve as the Captain General, that Magellan had favored his relatives on board the ships at the expense of all others, especially the Spanish captains, and that Magellan had defied the king’s explicit orders. “Elcano declared that Magellan said that he did not wish to . . . carry out the instructions entrusted to him by His Majesty,” read the transcript of the proceedings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primus circumdedesti me

Thou first circled me.

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

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

The other survivors of the expedition received similar marks of royal favor. Martín Méndez, Victoria’s accountant; Hernando Bustamente, the barber; Miguel de Rodas, the master of Victoria; and Espinosa each received individualized coats of arms commemorating their accomplishments. (Meanwhile, the coat of arms for the Magellan family remained defaced and dishonored, as it had been since Magellan left Portugal to serve the king of Spain—the king who had all but forgotten him now.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most Serene Prince and your Excellencies:

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

On that voyage, I circumnavigated the whole world, and since it is a feat that no man had accomplished, I have composed a short narration of the entire voyage, which I desire to have printed. For that purpose, I petition that no one may print it for twenty years, except myself, under penalty to him who should print it, or who should bring it here if printed elsewhere, of a fine of three lire per copy, besides the loss of the books. [I petition] also that the execution [of the penalty] may be imposed by any magistrate of this city who shall be informed of it; and that the fine be divided as follows: one-third to the arsenal of your Highness, one-third to the accuser, and one-third to those who shall impose it.

I humbly commend myself to your kindness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The harsh fate of these two men, who had been loyal to Magellan and King Charles, stood in marked contrast to the mutineers who had returned to Seville aboard San Antonio; all of them had been freed, except for the true loyalist among them, Álvaro de Mesquita, whom they had taken hostage during their mutiny. The injustice was particularly striking in Espinosa’s case, because whatever his failings as a captain, he had performed effectively as the alguacil in moments of crisis, and had played a crucial role in helping Magellan regain control of the fleet after the mutiny in Port Saint Julian. Magellan’s father-in-law, still living in Seville, took up the cause of these unjustly punished survivors, and risked all to write in their defense to King Charles. Rather than being punished for their acts of disloyalty, the mutineers had been “very well received and treated at the expense of Your Highness,” Barbosa remarked, “while the captain and others who were desirous of serving Your Highness were imprisoned and deprived of all justice. From this, so many bad examples arise—heartbreaking to those who try to do their duty.”

Both men found their homecoming to be bitter, indeed. De Mafra, for one, learned that his wife, assuming that he was dead, had remarried; not only that, she had spent his entire fortune with her new husband. Disgusted with his lot, de Mafra returned to the life he knew best, that of a pilot in the Pacific; by 1542, he was back in the Philippines in the service of Spain.

Espinosa faced a more ambiguous destiny. On August 24, 1527, King Charles granted him an enormous pension—112,500 maravedís—but Espinosa never received it. The Casa de Contratación, as mean-spirited as ever, withheld the salary he earned during his years in jail, arguing that he was not actually “in the service of Spain” at the time. Outraged by the treatment he had received at the hands of unfeeling bureaucrats, he sued for twice the amount, settled for half of the original pension, and, in the end, received only a fraction of the settlement, and even that modest amount was contingent on his participating in another expedition to the Moluccas. (The king did allow Espinosa to keep the 15,000 maravedís left to him by Hans Vargue.)

Understandably, Espinosa refused to return to the lands that had claimed so many Spaniards’ lives, and where he had suffered in prison for four long years. In 1529, King Charles decided to bestow another pension on his loyal servant, this time in the amount of 30,000 maravedís, and he received a comfortable job as an inspector, at an annual salary of 43,000 maravedís. He lived out his days in Seville.

Spain and Portugal agreed to hold another conference to determine the locations of the line of demarcation and the Spice Islands. The Spanish delegates included experts such as Sebastián Elcano, Giovanni Vespucci (Amerigo’s sibling), and Sebastian Cabot. Despite the good intentions of the two nations, and the credentials of the delegates, the proceedings quickly degenerated into farce.

To symbolize the strict impartiality of the deliberations, the summit was held on a bridge spanning the Guadiana River, along the Spanish-Portuguese border, but the location nearly undid the conference. As the distinguished members of the Portuguese delegation happened to be walking across the bridge, they were stopped by a small boy, who asked if they were carving up the world with King Charles. The former governor of India, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, acknowledged that indeed they were. At that, the boy lifted his shirt, turned to reveal his bare bottom, and with his small finger traced the line between his buttocks.

“Draw your line right through this place!” he declared.

The parties adjourned to towns on either side of the river. The cosmologists and astronomers continued to argue over longitude, and could not even agree on the length of a degree, so the question of where to place the Moluccas remained unresolved. Magellan had traversed the Pacific, it was true, but no one yet knew how to measure the distance he had traveled, except by dead reckoning, of limited value over long distances.

For all these reasons, the attempt to redefine the line of demarcation ended in failure. As might be expected, both sides claimed victory—and possession of the Spice Islands.

Blithely ignoring the conference, King Charles splurged on lavish follow-up expeditions to the Moluccas, heedless of the cost and the risks involved in these tragic enterprises.

In 1525, the Casa de Contratación commissioned a well-connected officer, Francisco García Jofre de Loaysa, to lead the next Armada de Molucca. Sebastián Elcano, honored as the first circumnavigator, received an appointment as second-in-command. The voyage’s primary goal—to build a fully staffed Spanish trading post and fort in the Spice Islands—demonstrated how hollow King Charles’s conciliatory language actually was. Spain remained determined to break the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade and to claim the islands, no matter what.

The second Armada de Molucca left Seville with the hope that retracing Magellan’s route would make the voyage to the Spice Islands far safer and faster, but just the opposite occurred. Without Magellan’s navigational genius to guide the ships, the second armada met with an even harsher fate than the first. Elcano, despite his experience, made one navigational error after another during the journey, and he arrived at the strait discovered by Magellan only after dangerous delays. Storms in these low latitudes battered the ships of the armada, reducing their number from five to just two. In the Pacific, scurvy broke out among the officers and crew, just as it had during Magellan’s crossing, and this time, no one had quince preserves to protect them from its ravages, not even the Captain General.

Loaysa died, leaving behind an envelope prepared by King Charles himself, naming a successor. When the seal was broken, the letter appointed Elcano as the next admiral. The Basque mariner had finally reached the summit of ambition, but the time remaining to him proved to be cruelly brief, because he was already suffering from scurvy. Retreating to his small cabin, he drew up his will; the document carefully inventoried all his worldly possessions down to the last article of clothing and ream of paper; it listed his many charitable bequests; it specified gifts to his two mistresses; and it requested that his funeral take place in his hometown, Guetaria. The will was witnessed by seven others, each one a Basque. Five days after assuming command, on August 4, 1526, Sebastián Elcano died at sea, another casualty of the Age of Discovery. His body was committed to the deep amid the rolling blue expanses of the Pacific.

In an eerie recapitulation of Magellan’s voyage, just one of the five original ships of the second Armada de Molucca reached the Spice Islands. And of the 450 men who set sail from Spain aboard these ships, only 8 lived to see Spain again, an even greater loss of life than Magellan’s crew suffered.

The extraordinary death rate, to say nothing of the expense involved, did nothing to deter King Charles from trying to reach the Spice Islands again—and again. He sent Sebastian Cabot, then the piloto mayor, or chief pilot, of Seville, in search of the Indies, but the hapless mariner only got as far as the Río de la Plata, the false strait on the east coast of South America. After a time, he led the third Armada de Molucca, back to Spain, where he was charged with failing to complete his mission because he was afraid to enter the real strait and face its dangers.

Soon after that debacle, Hernándo Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, dispatched his own expedition to the Moluccas from his outpost in Aguatanejo, Mexico. Although this expedition promised to be shorter, and did not have to pass through the strait, it, too, met with disaster. Only one ship reached the Spice Islands, and the Portuguese captured her crew and seized her cargo, abruptly aborting the mission.

With each failure, the dream of establishing a Spanish outpost in the Spice Islands and bringing the wealth of the Indies into Spanish coffers faded, and the scope of Magellan’s superhuman accomplishment and fierce determination came to seem greater and greater.

Despite all the setbacks, King Charles refused to let the dream of dominating the world’s economy die. He backed plans for a fifth armada, led by Simón de Alcazaba, another Portuguese sailing for Spain, and this one promised to be the most ambitious—and aggressive—of all. The fleet consisted of eight ships capable of transporting a large garrison of Spanish soldiers to the Spice Islands. They were to drive out the Portuguese and claim the islands for the crown once and for all. But before these ships put to sea, King Charles found himself in desperate financial straits. Fighting off the French had drained his coffers, and his longtime financial backers, Cristóbal de Haro and the Fugger dynasty, refused to back another expedition in search of the elusive goal that had claimed the lives of so many brave men. For the next two decades, the House of Fugger tried to recover its huge investment in the failed armadas, but the Spanish crown, teetering on the brink of insolvency, failed to repay the debt.

Desperately short of cash, Charles was unable to send any more expeditions to the Spice Islands. But he did not give up his goal; instead, he sought a diplomatic solution to thwart or slow Portugal’s imperial ambitions. He invited Portugal to join a commission to study the Spice Islands quandary, and he asked the Vatican to arbitrate in case of disagreement. In the end, João III had no choice but to agree to the plan, or risk seeming bellicose and heedless of papal authority. In this way, King Charles maintained his interest in the Spice Islands through diplomacy—but not for long.

Unable to raise money from his usual backers, Charles was forced to turn to Portugal for aid. In 1529, he borrowed 350,000 ducats from João III, and as security for the loan he pledged the Moluccas and all the islands lying to the east. Both nations signed the Treaty of Saragossa, ending the epic struggle for control of the global economy. Just seven years after Magellan’s voyage and three unsuccessful follow-up expeditions to the Spice Islands, King Charles, facing bankruptcy, gave up and returned the islands to the Portuguese. In matters of empire, everything had its price.

Not until 1580, fifty-eight years after Victoria returned to Seville, did another explorer, Sir Francis Drake, complete a circumnavigation. His voyage took him through the Strait of Magellan. To accomplish the feat, Drake relied on the knowledge so painfully and heroically acquired by the Captain General and his crew.

Little Victoria, the first ship to complete a circumnavigation, had her own curious epilogue. No one thought to preserve the battered vessel as a testament to Magellan’s great achievement. Instead, she was repaired, sold to a merchant for 106,274 maravedís, and returned to service, a workhorse of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. As late as 1570, she was still plying the Atlantic. En route to Seville from the Antilles, she disappeared without a trace; all hands on board were lost. It is assumed that she encountered a mid-Atlantic storm that sent her to the bottom, her wordless epitaph written on the restless waves.

In 1531, one of the first accurate maps of the Strait of Magellan appeared. Oronce Finé’s representation placed the strait in its proper position in South America, and although the map does not name the strait, it does call the Pacific “Magellanicum.” The name Magellanica, or Magellanic Land, would appear on many later maps of South America, usually indicating Patagonia or Chile. Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish cartographer, canonized the strait on his famous globe in 1536. In time, the name Magellan came to designate only the strait—no lands, in fact, none of the territories that he once dreamed of bequeathing to his heirs. At least, such was the case on earth. In the heavens, his name came to be associated with the two dwarf galaxies he had discovered, the Magellanic Clouds, visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

Although no continent or country was named after him, Magellan’s expedition stands as the greatest sea voyage in the Age of Discovery. In its epic, world-straddling scope, his voyage harkened back to Greek and Roman antiquity, which had been rediscovered and embraced with such conviction during the Renaissance. “Worthier, indeed, are our sailors of eternal fame than the Argonauts who sailed with Jason,” wrote Peter Martyr, Magellan’s contemporary and the first historian of the New World. “And much more worthy was their ship of being placed along the stars than that old Argo; for they only sailed from Greece through Pontus, but ours through the whole west and southern hemisphere, penetrating into the east, and again returned to the west.”

By confronting the intellectual and spiritual limitations of the ancient view of the world, by subjecting its assumptions to the ultimate reality check—traveling around the globe—Magellan looked ahead of his time to the Age of Reason and beyond, to the present. In their lust for power, their fascination with sexuality, their religious fervor, and their often tragic ignorance and vulnerability, Magellan and his men epitomized a turning point in history. Their deeds and character, for better or worse, still resonate powerfully.