Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

by Laurence Bergreen

In the intervening months, he passed a series of tests that forced him to confront his own limits as a leader and to change his ways, or die.

On February 24, the fleet came to another possible opening. “We entered well in,” Albo recorded in his log, “but could not find the bottom until we were entirely inside, and we found eighty fathoms, and it has a circuit of 50 leagues.” Magellan refused to consider this huge bay as anything more than that. His surmise proved correct and saved the fleet days of aimless investigation.

He cautiously committed only six seamen to a landing party charged with fetching supplies, mainly wood for fire and fresh water. Fearful of stumbling across warlike tribes that might be prowling in the forest, the landing party confined their activities to a diminutive island lacking in either fresh water or wood but seething with wildlife.

On closer inspection, what appeared to be ducks turned out to be something quite different. Pigafetta identified them as “geese” and “goslings.” There were too many to count, he said, and wonderfully easy to catch. “We loaded all the ships with them in an hour,” he claimed, and they were soon salted and consumed by the voracious sailors. From his description, it is apparent that the “geese” were actually penguins:

By “sea wolves” Pigafetta meant the sub-Antarctic sea lion or the sea elephant, usually distinguished by its inflatable snout.

The adults weigh a thousand pounds, and if butchered properly, their rich meat and blubber could provide abundant food, and their thick, glossy, silvery-gray pelts a sorely needed source of warmth in these frigid latitudes.

In the morning, Magellan dispatched a rescue team. When they found only the abandoned longboat, they feared the worst. They carefully explored the island, calling out for their lost crewmates, but succeeded only in scaring the “sea wolves,” several of which they slaughtered. Approaching the creatures, the rescue party came upon the lost men huddled beneath the lifeless “sea wolves,” spattered with mud, exhausted, giving off a dreadful smell, but alive.

Battered by the storm, Magellan sought shelter in a cove, but the weather refused to cooperate. The wind disappeared, and the Armada de Molucca remained becalmed until midnight, when a third storm descended on them, the most destructive yet. The gale lasted three days and three nights, days and nights of freezing, of near starvation, of helplessness in the face of the elements.

Magellan resumed his search for a strait. Now that he had seen how quickly the offshore gales that raged in this region could maim or destroy his fleet, the need for an escape route became more urgent than ever.

As before, the heavy weather stranded a landing party already ashore, this time with no “sea wolves” to provide shelter or warmth. Enduring bone-chilling cold, their skin and hair and beards soaked constantly with freezing rain, their fingers and toes numb, the men forced themselves to forage for shellfish in the freezing water.

Finally, Magellan had had enough of exploration; he decided to suspend the search for the strait until the following spring. He turned his attention to finding a safe harbor where the fleet could ride out the approaching cold weather. On March 31, at a latitude of 49° 20', he found it.

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

He consulted San Martín, his official astronomer, who tried to accommodate him; he took measurements, consulted with the pilots, and concluded that they might have strayed into Portuguese territory as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The idea appalled Magellan, under orders from King Charles to avoid Portuguese waters and, at the same time, to demonstrate that the Spice Islands lay comfortably within the Spanish realm. Now it appeared the fleet had already sailed beyond the line of demarcation. Magellan realized he might be sailing halfway around the world only to demonstrate the opposite of what he had expected.

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

This eloquent speech to the vacillating crew members bought Magellan a few days’ respite, but only a few. His stern words had confirmed their worst fears about his behavior and his do-or-die fanaticism.

In the midst of this turmoil, the officers and crew observed the holiest day of the year, Easter Sunday, April 1. At that moment, Magellan had one paramount concern: Who was loyal to him, and who was not?

At the end of the ceremony, Magellan pointedly asked Mendoza why the other captains had defied his orders and failed to attend. Mendoza replied, lamely, that perhaps the others were ill.

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

To their surprise, the crew of Trinidad, at Magellan’s direction, rescued them from the runaway longboat. Even more amazing, Magellan welcomed them aboard the flagship and provided them with a lavish meal, which included plenty of wine. At dinner, the band of would-be mutineers drank a great deal and decided that they had nothing to fear from the Captain General after all.

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

Under cover of darkness, they boarded San Antonio and rushed to the captain’s cabin, entering with a flourish of steel, rousting the hapless Mesquita out of his bunk. This had once been Cartagena’s ship, and in his mind, it still was.

Juan de Elorriaga, the ship’s master, and a Basque, valiantly tried to dismiss Quesada from San Antonio before any blood was shed, but Quesada refused to stand down, whereupon Elorriaga turned to his boatswain, Diego Hernández, to order the crew to restrain Quesada and quash the mutiny.

Quesada assumed Elorriaga was dead, but the loyal master was still alive, though perhaps he would have been better off if he had died on the spot; instead, he lingered for three and a half months until he finally died from the wounds he received that night at Quesada’s hand.

As the two struggled, Quesada’s guard took Hernández hostage, and suddenly the ship was without officers. The bewildered crew, without anyone to give them orders and fearing for their lives, gave up their arms to the mutineers.

Pigafetta, normally a thorough chronicler of the voyage, offers little guidance to the mutiny. In this case, he was close, too close, to Magellan to be helpful.

In his one cursory mention of the drama at Port Saint Julian, Pigafetta even confuses the names of the principal actors. The chronicler, who could be extremely precise when he wished, likely got around to mentioning the mutiny only after the voyage, when he felt safe enough to discuss the bloody deeds happening all around him.

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

He believed he had to contend with only one rebellious ship, not three, until he sent the longboat to poll the other ships and determine their loyalty. From his stronghold aboard San Antonio, Quesada replied, “For the King and for myself,” and Victoria and Concepción followed suit.

In writing, Quesada declared that he was now in charge of the fleet, and he intended to end the harsh treatment Magellan had inflicted on the officers and crew. He would feed them better, he would not endanger their lives needlessly, and he would return to Spain. If Magellan acceded to these demands, said Quesada, the mutineers would yield control of the armada to him. To Magellan, these demands were outrageous. To comply meant ignominy in Spain, disgrace in Portugal, years in a prison cell, and even death.

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

Victoria became the key to the whole plan, and to get her back, he resorted to a ruse. He filled the captured longboat with five carefully selected sailors and instructed them to appear sympathetic to the mutineers, at least at a distance. But beneath their loose clothing they carried weapons, which they intended to use.

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

As if the sight of the dead officer was not insult enough to the other Castilians, Magellan later paid off Espinosa and his henchmen for this bloody deed in plain view of everyone.

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

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

Aboard Concepción, the rebellion was beginning to falter. Ginés de Mafra, held hostage along with Mesquita, noticed that Quesada, the leader of the mutiny, was experiencing pangs of remorse, but he could not persuade his followers to end their rebellion now.

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

The mutineers’ volte-face may have saved their lives, because Magellan’s guard made straight for Quesada and his inner circle, who offered little resistance.

That morning, the Captain General had controlled two ships; now he ruled all five. Despite their overwhelming numbers, the mutineers had lost, and Magellan had emerged from the ordeal more powerful than before.

To begin, Magellan instructed one of his men to read an indictment of Mendoza as a traitor. The Captain General then ordered his men to draw and quarter Mendoza’s body.

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

To many Europeans, the mere mention of Spain summoned images of the Inquisition and of diabolical methods of torture, although Spain was hardly the only offender. Nor was torture confined to special cases of heresy; as Magellan’s behavior demonstrated, it was also applied to other criminal behavior such as usury, sodomy, polygamy, and especially treason, considered the most serious crime against the state.

In Magellan’s time, torture was a vivid, dreaded presence in daily life, and it belonged in every captain’s arsenal of techniques to keep sailors in line. With its legal and religious trappings, it was far more systematic, cruel, and psychologically damaging than the traditional remedy of the lash.

Magellan’s use of torture inflamed early Spanish historians, who professed to be shocked by his brutality, but what upset them was not that he resorted to torture, a fact of life in Torquemada’s Spain, but that he tortured Spaniards.

Torture, no less than the skill he displayed in recapturing the mutinous ships, played an important part in Magellan’s preventing further mutinies. Through his use of torture, his crew came to understand that the only thing worse than obeying Magellan’s dictates, and possibly losing their lives in the process, was suffering the consequences of defying him.

Fear was his most important means of motivating his men; they became more afraid of Magellan than the hazards of the sea.

Mesquita spent two weeks assessing the “evidence” of guilt before passing judgment. At the end of the trial, Mesquita, no doubt under orders from Magellan, let one of the accused off with a slap on the wrist. The hapless accountant Antonio de Coca was merely deprived of his rank.

This judgment was unquestionably excessive. Their behavior was that of frightened men rather than of conspirators. For example, when searched, San Martín was found to possess an itinerary of the expedition, as would be expected of the fleet’s chief astronomer. In a panic, he threw the chart into the water. And what had the priest done to deserve the same treatment? According to the charges, he had been heard to say that the “ships did have enough provisions”—which was only the truth—“and for not having consented to communicate to the Captain General the secrets of what the crew had told him in confession.”

The tenuous connection of these deeds to the actual mutiny suggests that Mesquita and Magellan, for all their patient investigation, turned up little additional evidence of disloyalty and simply resorted to San Martín and the priest as scapegoats for their wrath.

Mesquita ordered San Martín to undergo the most common punishment of the Inquisition, the ghastly strappado.

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