“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.