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.