Magellan inadvertently set the stage for their mutiny when he reminded his officers that the instructions he had received from King Charles gave him full authority over the fleet. The captain of each ship was to approach Trinidad at dusk to pay his respects to Magellan and to receive orders. Cartagena chose to defy Magellan in a studied manner. When San Antonio approached the flagship, the quartermaster rather than Cartagena spoke up and, worse, he refused to address Magellan by the correct title. Cartagena should have said, “Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y maestro y buena campaña.” (“God keep you, sir Captain General, and master and good company.”) Instead, the lowly quartermaster called Magellan “Captain” rather than “Captain General.”
Magellan sharply reminded Cartagena of the proper form of address, but the Castilian captain took the opportunity to insult Magellan again. If he did not approve of San Antonio’s quartermaster offering the ceremonial salute, Cartagena would select a lowly page next time. For several days after that exchange, Cartagena neglected all forms of salute. Magellan had to devise an effective way to handle Cartagena’s defiant attitude or risk losing control over the entire fleet.
At this tense moment, a new crisis erupted aboard Victoria. Magellan learned that Victoria’s master, a Sicilian named Antonio Salamón, had been discovered sodomizing a cabin boy, Antonio Ginovés. There was no question as to whether the incident had taken place, because the two had been caught in flagrante delicto; the question was what to do about it.
Under Spanish law, homosexuality was punishable by death. Spanish authorities and the Catholic Church condemned homosexuality in the harshest language possible, despite its prevalence. As Captain General of the fleet, Magellan had little choice but to take disciplinary action, but he found himself in an impossible predicament, caught between the cruelty of Spanish law and the reality of homosexuality at sea. In practice, homosexuality among sailors confined to ships over long periods of time was inevitable. There are few accounts of captains attempting to punish sailors for this behavior; instead, they simply looked the other way. Magellan took a harsher course of action. He held a court-martial of Salamón, serving as both judge and jury. The outcome of the proceeding was swift, and Salamón was condemned to death by strangulation. The deed was to be carried out several weeks hence, on December 20.
After the hearing, Magellan held a tense meeting with the other captains of the fleet in his cabin; there was Cartagena from San Antonio, Quesada from Concepción, Mendoza from Victoria, and Serrano from Santiago. As Magellan realized, all the captains, except Serrano, were determined to lead a mutiny. Cartagena immediately began attacking Magellan about the eccentric and dangerous course they had been following along the coast of Africa. First Magellan had led them into storms, Cartagena complained, and now he had gotten them trapped in equatorial calms. Cartagena insisted that the only explanation for this bizarre behavior was that Magellan intended to subvert the fleet, because no matter how loyal to King Charles he claimed to be, Magellan’s true loyalty belonged with the king of Portugal.
In his fervor to usurp Magellan, Cartagena had been misled by appearances. In fact, the Captain General had chosen the risky, unorthodox course to avoid the Portuguese caravels pursuing him and was actually doing his best to frustrate Spain’s enemies.
Another resentment fueled Cartagena’s passion for mutiny. He believed that King Charles had appointed the two of them as co-admirals of the fleet. Although Cartagena carried the title inspector general, and had been appointed persona conjunta, King Charles had intended no such power-sharing arrangement. Cartagena had little if any experience as a navigator, certainly had nothing to recommend him as an admiral of the most ambitious ocean expedition Spain ever mounted; rather, he was to serve as a symbol of the fleet’s Spanish identity. His chief qualification, besides his relationship to Archbishop Fonseca, was that he was a Castilian. On that basis, the privileged Cartagena believed he was entitled to share power equally with Magellan. Had Cartagena known the truth, that Magellan was fleeing the Portuguese to save the fleet rather than destroy it, the revelation might have defeated the Castilian’s paranoid logic, but it would not have restrained his unbridled chauvinism and his sense of entitlement.
As a Castilian loyal to his sovereign, Cartagena declared he would no longer take orders from Magellan.
Fully prepared to counter Cartegena’s challenge, the Captain General gave a sign, and Trinidad’s alguacil, or master-at-arms, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, stormed the cabin. Right behind him came two loyalists, Duarte Barbosa and Magellan’s illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, all with swords drawn. Magellan leaped at Cartagena, catching the Castilian by the ruff of his shirt, and shoved him into a chair. “Rebel!” Magellan shouted, “this is mutiny! You are my prisoner, in the King’s name.”
At that, Cartagena barked at the other traitorous captains, Quesada and Mendoza, to stab Magellan with their daggers. From the way he spoke, it was apparent that the three of them had plotted to overthrow the Captain General, but now, at the crucial moment, lost their resolve to act.
Seizing the initiative, Espinosa, in his role as alguacil, picked up Cartagena and shoved him out of the captain’s cabin to the main deck, where he was secured to stocks intended for common seamen who had committed minor offenses. The indignity of seeing a Castilian officer subjected to this ignominy was more than Quesada and Mendoza could bear. They pleaded with Magellan to free Cartagena or, failing that, to release him into their custody. They reminded their Captain General that they had demonstrated their loyalty by ignoring Cartagena. They persuaded Magellan that he had nothing to fear from them, and he agreed to free Cartagena on condition that Mendoza confine him aboard Victoria. Cartagena was immediately relieved of command.
Had he chosen, Magellan could have convened a court-martial and sentenced Cartagena to death. As Captain General, he would have been within his rights because Cartagena had plotted to kill Magellan: Nothing could be more serious. But Magellan was acutely aware of Cartagena’s privileged position and concerned that executing or severely punishing him would be inflammatory, so for once he erred on the side of caution. The lack of disciplinary action made it a certainty that the irascible Castilian would continue to challenge Magellan until only one of them remained.
With the brief mutiny at an end, Magellan ordered the trumpets aboard the flagship to sound, alerting the other ships, and he announced that henceforth, San Antonio would be commanded by Antonio de Coca.
Stripped of his command, and having learned nothing from the experience of his failed mutiny, Cartagena grew intensely resentful of his inexperienced replacement. From that moment, he burned with desire for revenge against Magellan, no matter what the cost to the expedition, and as Fonseca’s son, Cartagena had power to make great trouble. Of all the perils that Magellan faced on the journey’s first leg, the greatest was Cartagena’s treachery.
With Cartagena removed from power, at least temporarily, Magellan turned his attention to his long-delayed crossing of the Atlantic. For three weeks in late October and November, the fleet headed south, vainly awaiting favorable winds. At last the sails began to fill, and Magellan ordered the ships to set a southwesterly course toward Rio de Janeiro. Learning that Concepción’s pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, had visited Rio several years before on an earlier expedition, Magellan brought him over to Trinidad to serve as pilot. To supplement Carvalho’s expertise, the Captain General carried with him a reliable, though not flawless, map of the Brazilian coast known as the Livro da Marinharia—the Book of the Sea. At about the same time, Francisco Albo began keeping a navigational log intended for use by those following in the wake of the Armada de Molucca.