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.