Meanwhile, San Antonio entered Magdalen Sound. Magellan gave his ships four days to return with their reports, but even after six, San Antonio failed to reappear. “We came upon a river which we called the River of the Sardine because there were so many sardines near it,” said Pigafetta of this moment of doubt and confusion, “so we stayed there for days in order to await the two ships”—Concepción and San Antonio. “During that period we sent a well-equipped boat [Victoria] to explore the cape of the other sea. The men returned within three days and reported that they had seen the cape and the open sea.” Sighting the Pacific was itself a momentous event, but the excitement of this discovery was overshadowed by the mysterious failure of San Antonio to reappear at the appointed time and place. Magellan had no idea what had become of her. Perhaps she had foundered and lay at the bottom of one of the yawning fjords. Or perhaps she had deserted just when the expedition was on the verge of its great accomplishment.
At this critical moment, Magellan conferred with Andrés de San Martín, now aboard Trinidad. After consulting the position of the stars and planets, he concluded that San Antonio had indeed sailed for Spain, and worse, her captain, Mesquita, a Magellan loyalist, had been taken prisoner. His vision proved to be remarkably accurate. “The ship San Antonio would not await Concepción because she intended to flee and to return to Spain—which she did,” Pigafetta tersely reported. The long-frustrated mutiny had finally succeeded; even worse, it had taken place when Magellan least expected it. San Antonio, and all her crew, had vanished.
Aboard the renegade San Antonio, the situation was more even complicated than Magellan or his astrologer realized. Mesquita, the captain, had attempted to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, but he failed to locate the other ships in the strait’s confusing network of estuaries. Gomes naturally offered little help in the endeavor. During a formal inquiry after the voyage, another usurper, Gerónimo Guerra, insisted that he had deposited papers for Magellan at the precise point where the ships were supposed to meet. These papers would serve as proof of that effort, but they were never found.
Guerra’s words sound self-serving, and perhaps they were. He had worked for Cristóbal de Haro, and was rumored to be related to the financier as well. He had shipped out on San Antonio as a mere clerk, but his remarkably high salary, 30,000 maravedís, twenty times greater than an ordinary seaman’s, signaled a much larger role. Guerra’s real mission was to look out for Haro’s interests; in other words, he was a spy. Had Magellan agreed to return to Spain, Gomes’s alliance with Guerra suggests that the Haro family would have supported the decision; after all, they would have gotten their ships back safe and sound. But King Charles was another matter. At the very least, he would have sent Magellan to jail.
Exactly when San Antonio tried to rejoin the rest of the fleet—if she ever did—is open to question. The ships’ officers later testified at the inquiry that they returned well before they were expected. If so, why had Magellan failed to locate the missing ship? There were two possibilities. Either she had gotten lost in the strait’s endless estuaries, or the mutineers had seized the ship, sought refuge in a concealed bay or fjord, and slipped out of the strait under cover of darkness for Spain.
No matter what the intentions of Gomes and Guerra actually were, discontent aboard San Antonio increased. Mesquita sent smoke signals and fired cannon to try to raise the rest of the fleet, but these signs went unseen and unheard. Mesquita stubbornly insisted on continuing his search for Magellan, but the growing uncertainty convinced Guerra, Gomes and a few like-minded sailors that the time had come to seize the wayward ship. They swiftly overpowered Mesquita, a deed for which they could pay with their lives. Once the mutiny was in progress, there was no stopping it; the mutineers had to succeed or, as they well knew, they would be drawn and quartered and displayed as so many pieces of freshly butchered meat.
Desperate, Gomes flourished a dagger and stabbed Mesquita in the leg. Battling the wound’s throbbing pain, Mesquita snatched the dagger from Gomes and stabbed the attacker in the hand. Gomes howled as the iron entered his flesh, and his cries attracted reinforcements. They overwhelmed and shackled Mesquita, who was held prisoner in Guerra’s cabin. Now Mesquita would receive his bitter payback for the court-martial and suffering he had overseen in Port Saint Julian. As San Antonio set a course for Spain, the mutineers planned to torture him into signing a confession that Magellan had tortured Spanish officers.
The thought of San Antonio slipping away from the rest of the fleet filled Magellan with dread. The Captain General feared that the would-be mutineers had finally found the perfect occasion for their revenge on Mesquita. Even without the prompting of his astrologer, Magellan suspected that Gomes would sail for Spain, and, once there, attempt to tarnish Magellan’s name with a biased account of the tragic events at Port Saint Julian. Gomes could twist the truth to claim that his mutiny had actually been an act of heroic resistance in the face of Magellan’s disloyalty. In this scenario, none other than Estêvão Gomes would be Captain General for the next expedition to the Moluccas, while Magellan would hear about it from the obscurity of a Spanish prison.
San Antonio was the largest ship in the fleet, and she carried many of the fleet’s provisions in her hold, so the loss instantly put the other sailors’ food supplies—indeed their very lives—in jeopardy. The rebels also carried off another prize, an affable Patagonian giant whom they had captured several months before. Magellan had to decide whether to pursue the mutineers or hope that his cousin would regain control of the ship. He elected to resume searching for the missing San Antonio. “We turned back to look for the two ships, but we found only Concepción,” Pigafetta wrote. “Upon asking them where the other was, Juan Serrano, who was captain and pilot of the former ship (and also of that ship that had been wrecked), replied that he did not know, and that he had never seen it after it had entered the opening.” Magellan launched a search mission to recapture the missing ship, a virtual impossibility in this watery labyrinth. “We sought it in all parts of the Strait,” Pigafetta recorded, “as far as that opening whence it had fled, and the Captain General sent the ship Victoria back to the entrance of the Strait to ascertain whether the ship was there.”
In his actions, Magellan strictly followed his royal instructions of May 8, 1519, governing ships that had gone astray, to establish prominent indicators. Pigafetta described the lengths to which Magellan went: “Orders were given, if they did not find it, to plant a banner on the summit of some small hill with a letter in an earthen pot buried . . . near the banner, so that if the banner were seen the letter might be found, and the ship might learn the course we were sailing. For this was the arrangement made between us in case we went astray one from the other. Two banners were planted with their letters—one on a little eminence in the first bay, and the other in an islet in the third bay, where there were many sea wolves and large birds.”