They did not believe the strait existed. They had tried again and again to find it, risking death while coming up against one dead end after another. If they kept going, they argued, they would eventually perish in one of the cataclysmic storms afflicting the region, or simply fall off the edge of the world when the coastline finally ended. Surely King Charles did not mean for them all to die in the attempt to find a water route to the Spice Islands. Surely human life had some value.
Magellan obstinately reminded them that they must obey their royal commission, and follow the coastline wherever it led. The king had ordered this voyage, and Magellan would persist until he reached land’s end, or found the strait. How astonished he was to see bold Spaniards so fainthearted, or so he said. As far as their provisions were concerned, they had plenty of wood here in Port Saint Julian, abundant fish, fresh water, and fowl; their ships still had adequate stores of biscuit and wine, if they observed rationing. Consider the Portuguese navigators, he exhorted them, who had passed twelve degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn without any difficulty, and here they were, two full degrees above it. What kind of sailors were they? Magellan insisted he would rather die than return to Spain in shame, and he urged them to wait patiently until winter was over. The more they suffered, the greater the reward they might expect from King Charles. They should not question the king, he advised, but discover a world not yet known, filled with gold and spices to enrich them all.
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. On the most basic level, they believed he considered their lives expendable. In the following days, the men began to bicker; national prejudices suddenly flashed like well-oiled swords drawn from scabbards to cut and slash, usually at Magellan himself. Once again, the Castilians argued that Magellan’s insistence that he intended to find the strait or die was proof that he intended to subvert the entire expedition and get them all killed in the process. All this talk of glorifying King Charles, they felt, was merely a stratagem to trick them into going along with Magellan’s suicidal scheme. Anyone doubting Magellan’s intention to subvert the expedition had only to examine the course they had been following, southward, ever southward, into the eternal cold, whereas the Spice Islands and the Indies lay to the west, where it was warm and sunny, and where luxury surely abounded.
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? With a sufficient number of loyal crew members, he would be able to withstand this latest, and most serious, challenge to his authority. Without them, he might be imprisoned, impaled on a halberd, or even hanged from a yardarm by hell-bent mutineers. To assess the extent of danger he faced, he carefully interviewed each member of the crew.
“With sweet words and big promises,” Ginés de Mafra recalled, “[Magellan] told them the other captains were plotting against him, and he asked them to advise him what to do. They replied that their only advice was that they were willing to do as he commanded. Magellan . . . openly told his crew that the conspirators had resolved to kill him on Easter Day while he attended mass ashore, but that he would feign ignorance and go to mass all the same. This he did and, secretly armed, went to a small sandy islet where a small house had been built to accommodate the ceremony.”
Magellan expected to see all four captains at Easter mass but only one, Luis de Mendoza, of Victoria, arrived. The air crackled with tension. “Both conversed,” de Mafra says, concealing their emotions under blank countenances, and attended mass together. 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.
Still feigning bonhomie, Magellan invited Mendoza to dine at the Captain General’s table, a gesture that would force him to proclaim his loyalty to Magellan, but Mendoza coolly declined the request. Magellan appeared unfazed by Mendoza’s insubordination, but the Captain General now knew that Mendoza was a conspirator.
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. Magellan realized that the empty chairs made for an ominous sign.
At the moment, Magellan capitalized on a piece of luck. The longboat belonging to Concepción’s captain, Gaspar de Quesada, lost its way in the strong current while ferrying conspiratorial messages between the rebel ships and, to the dismay of the men aboard, found itself drifting helplessly toward the flagship and Magellan himself, the one individual they did not want to encounter at that moment. 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. They even revealed the existence of the plot to Magellan; they confided that if the plot succeded, he would be “captured and killed” that very night.
Hearing this, Magellan lost all interest in his visitors and busied himself readying the flagship against attack. Once again he questioned his crew to see who was loyal to him and who was not and, satisfied that Trinidad’s men would take his side when the mutiny inevitably erupted, awaited the inevitable assault.
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. Mesquita offered little resistance as the party of mutineers clapped him into irons and led him to the cabin of Gerónimo Guerra, where he was placed under guard.
By this time, word of the uprising had spread throughout the ship, and the crew sprang to life. 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.