The storm had stranded the castaways about seventy miles from the rest of the fleet, without food or wood or fresh water, in freezing weather. They were cold and exhausted; soon they would be starving. There was no way to get word of their plight to the Captain General. Their land route back to Port Saint Julian presented seemingly overwhelming obstacles: snow-covered mountains and the Santa Cruz River, three miles wide.
The castaways spent eight days in more or less the same area, disoriented, dispirited, waiting for pieces of the wreck, possibly even food, to drift onto the pebbly beach, but the sea yielded only a few planks broken off from Santiago’s hull. Subsisting on a diet of local vegetation and whatever shellfish they could catch, the castaways evolved a plan. They would drag the planks over the mountains until they reached the river and there, on its banks, build a raft to cross it. The river lay many miles to the north, and the task proved daunting to the crew. They left most of the planks behind, and after four wretched days of marching overland, the exhausted crew finally reached the broad expanse of the river. The weather had relented, and fish, as they knew from their first visit to the river, were plentiful. It seemed they would not starve, after all.
Lacking planks to build a raft large enough to carry all the men, the castaways split into two groups. The larger group—thirty-five men—set up camp at the river’s edge, while two strong men, whose names were not recorded, set out on the tiny raft. They intended to cross the river and walk the rest of the way back to Port Saint Julian to seek help. It was an exceedingly risky undertaking. Successfully crossing the three-mile expanse of river required a combination of daring and luck, and when they reached the other side, they faced an arduous march in freezing weather, living off the land.
The two crew members in the vanguard succeeded in mastering the river’s breadth in their rudimentary raft, and once they had landed on the far side, they set out in the direction of Port Saint Julian. At first, they followed the coast, where they could be reasonably certain to find shellfish, but vast swamps barred their progress, and they had to walk inland, over hills and mountains, eating only ferns and roots, and suffering greatly in the freezing weather. The trek lasted eleven harrowing days, and when they reached Port Saint Julian, ravaged and gaunt from their ordeal, even those who knew the survivors barely recognized them.
Once the castaways revived, they described the desperate situation of their shipmates on the far side of the Santa Cruz River.
Magellan had no choice but to attempt to rescue the other thirty-five crew members of Santiago. Afraid to risk the loss of another ship to a storm, he sent a rescue squad of twenty-four men, carrying wine and hardtack, along the overland trail that the two survivors had blazed through the harsh wilderness. “The way there was long, twenty-four leagues, and the path was very rough and full of thorns,” said Pigafetta of their grim progress. “The men were four days on the road, sleeping at night in the bushes. They found no drinking water, but only ice, which caused them great hardship.” Failing to find a river or spring, they resorted to melting snow. Finally, in a drastically weakened condition from their days in the wild, they reached the desperate castaways, who had been camping out along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. A pathetic reunion ensued: exhausted men at the end of the world, suffering intensely, expecting to die at any time, united only in the cause of survival, as unlikely as the prospect seemed.
Relying on the small raft cobbled together from the wreck of Santiago, the rescue party ferried the survivors back across the river in groups of two or at most three; each trip consumed hours and was fraught with hazard, but miraculously everyone made it to the northern shore. Even so, they were still far from safety because they had to make the rugged overland trek back to Port Saint Julian. As Magellan anxiously awaited the outcome of the rescue mission, the thirty-five castaways and twenty-four rescuers picked their way through the snows of the Patagonian winter, fortified mainly with wine and hardtack. About a week later, they emerged one by one from the forest surrounding Port Saint Julian. Driven by an unshakable will to survive, everyone made it back safely.
Magellan greeted the dazed, exhausted men with ample food and wine, and treated them all as heroes.
The wreck of Santiago and the hardship endured by her crew troubled Magellan more deeply than the violence and torture of the Easter Mutiny. “The loss of the ship was much regretted by Magellan,” de Mafra recalled, “although it was not the pilot’s fault, because along this coast the sea rises and ebbs eight fathoms, and this was the cause of the calamity, so that the ship found itself high and dry.”
As serious as the loss of Santiago might be, Magellan had more to fear from the emotional consequences of the wreck. The disaster confirmed his crew’s fear that the Captain General was leading them on an expedition so dangerous that they would all get killed long before they reached the Spice Islands. To ensure his control of the remaining four ships in the fleet, he saw to it that only diehard loyalists commanded them. While Álvaro de Mesquita, his first cousin, remained in command of San Antonio, Magellan appointed Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law, as captain of Victoria, and Juan Serrano, the unlucky skipper of Santiago, as the new captain of Concepción, the ship once commanded by Gaspar de Quesada, the mutineer whose severed head rotted on a pike. Magellan himself still ruled over all from Trinidad. Finally, he scattered Santiago’s long-suffering crew among the four remaining ships to prevent them from secretly conspiring.
In fact, Magellan’s appointment of his relatives as captains served to fuel the silent resentment of many crew members, even those from Portugal. When they finally returned to Spain, if they ever did, they could tell vivid tales of Magellan’s insolence toward the Spanish captains; his shameless nepotism; his reckless seamanship, culminating in the needless loss of Santiago; and, most blatant of all, the drawing and quartering of Gaspar de Quesada. All of these grievances remained urgent in the minds of many seamen as they awaited a time and place to act on them.
Winter relentlessly advanced on Port Saint Julian; the days contracted to less than four hours of light, and the snow line reached down the mountains, across the fields and swamps, eventually extending to the water’s edge. If the crew members and officers ever spent an idle hour at Port Saint Julian, if they fished for the sport of it, or played cards, or indulged in practical jokes, or read the books of exploration and discovery that they carried with them, books such as The Travels of Marco Polo, or The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, or if they participated in any other pastime during the Patagonian winter, there is no record of it. Magellan kept his men too busy and afraid for their lives for such activities. Only survival mattered.
Magellan ordered his men to hunt and fish, which they did. They found mussels, as well as foxes, sparrows, and “rabbits much smaller than ours,” in Pigafetta’s words. They preserved their catch with salt derived from flats surrounding the bay.