Gomes had skillfully piloted the ship across the Atlantic to Spain. There had been talk of returning to Port Saint Julian to rescue Cartagena and the priest whom Magellan had marooned, but in all likelihood the ship never attempted to rescue them. Instead, San Antonio made for the coast of Guinea to find water.
Despite having braved the Atlantic Ocean alone, San Antonio’s captain and crew felt no joy on seeing Seville’s familiar cathedral because they were returning in disgrace, mutineers who would face the prospect of an official inquiry, incarceration, and even punishment by death. They could console themselves in the knowledge that Guerra was related to Cristóbal de Haro, who had financed the expedition. They could also draw strength from Magellan’s lack of popularity in Spain, and planned to destroy the Portuguese Captain General’s reputation with tales of his poor judgment and brutal mistreatment of Spanish officers. But these stories had to be compelling because their lives depended on convincing the authorities that the mutiny had been necessary and justified. Of course, Magellan would not be present to plead his case or contradict their assertions. The only one likely to speak up on his behalf was Álvaro de Mesquita, whose wounds offered eloquent evidence of the mutineers’ tactics. And Mesquita had used the long sea journey home to prepare for an inquiry because his life also depended on how persuasively he argued his case.
So began a fierce, tangled battle between the two competing versions of the mutiny.
The moment King Charles heard that San Antonio had returned, he ordered the Casa de Contratación to restore all the merchandise and equipment aboard the ship to Cristóbal de Haro, to whom Charles, perpetually strapped for cash to fund his empire, was deeply in debt. The Casa was to sell off anything of value “and after the sale,” the king instructed, “send me an account . . . of what you have sold so that the said Cristóbal de Haro can make an accounting of it so that we can know what our share will be.” Anything over ten thousand ducats would be remitted to the crown. The order crackled with the young king’s eagerness to get his hands on the money, if there was any.
As it happened, there was none. The Casa’s detailed inventory of the ship’s contents listed tarnished combs, crumbling paper, rusty knives, scissors, bent sewing needles, beads, crystals, pearls, a velvet-covered chair, a bolt of decaying altar cloth for celebrating mass, iron, mercury, copper, an oven, a scale, pots, a green moth-eaten cloth, decaying barrels, two compasses, and a small bag of fishhooks, but no spices—nothing, in fact, of any great value. Furthermore, the ship was much the worse for wear after eighteen months at sea. The heat and humidity had taken their toll, to say nothing of the termites boring into the hull. Eventually, the authorities in Seville realized that San Antonio had not made it to the Spice Islands, after all. The king’s dreams of claiming the Moluccas for the glory of Spain would have to wait.
No one aboard San Antonio knew what had happened to Magellan. They assumed—or perhaps they hoped—that his recklessness and secret loyalty to Portugal had caused him to perish at sea, somewhere over the edge of the world, and the Casa was inclined to believe them. “They believe he must have been double-dealing,” a representative of the Casa reported to the king, “so they had no hope at all of his returning.” The weather-beaten San Antonio and her mutinous, ragtag crew of fifty-five were presumed to be the only survivors of what had once been the glorious Armada de Molucca.
Within days of their return, the mutineers delivered their finely honed accounts to the Casa de Contratación. Fifty-three out of the fifty-five members of the crew gave depositions, and the sudden activity threw the Casa’s clerks into a frenzy. “Since the morning of the Feast of the Ascension, we have been asking questions and taking the declarations, without forcing them, in the presence of two clerks,” wrote Juan López de Recalde, an accountant at the Casa, to Archbishop Fonseca on May 12, just six days after the ship’s return. The task of gathering and squaring fifty-three separate accounts was exhausting and daunting. “We had with us the lawyer Castroverde, legal counsel of this House, and until last night, Saturday, for three days now, we have not been able to take the declarations of more than twenty-one of them. Half a day is needed to take down their account from the day they left this place till their return.”
Mesquita, meanwhile, went directly from confinement aboard ship to jail on land. He was now “in the custody of the Admiral, where he is well-guarded.” The Casa’s representatives insisted they were only protecting Mesquita from the others, but the deposed captain believed he had been singled out for unfair treatment.
The Casa did a remarkably thorough job in uncovering the details of the mutiny at the strait in the allotted time. Their report included an elaborate description of the initial confrontations between Magellan and Cartagena shortly after the armada’s departure from the Canary Islands. There was even an account, inaccurate and inflammatory, of the homosexual behavior that had sent Magellan into a rage and sparked so much resentment among the crew: “It seems that on Victoria captained by Luis de Mendoza, a sailor attacked a cabin boy in an act contrary to nature and they told Magellan about it. One calm day, he had the boy thrown into the sea.”
As the report unfolded, a strong anti-Magellan bias became increasingly apparent. “It seems that the captains and officers, seeing that they were moving along the coast instead of going ahead to search for Cape Horn”—the southernmost promontory of South America—“decided to require Magellan to follow His Majesty’s instructions, which were for them to continue their voyage with the agreement, counsel and opinions of the captains, officers and pilots of the armada.” In fact, Magellan’s orders were to “go in search of the strait,” not Cape Horn, and despite what the mutineers later claimed, he had made a point of calling a formal conference and soliciting in writing the opinions of his captains and pilots, just as his orders required. Although he had not accepted their recommendation to turn back, he was not obliged to heed their advice. This was not a democracy, it was an armada, and he was the admiral.
Not surprisingly, the mutineers rearranged events at Port Saint Julian to suit their cause. To hear them tell it, they aroused Magellan to fury simply by asking him to obey the king’s orders, or at least their interpretation of them. “One night Gaspar de Quesada with certain companions went from his ship, Concepción, to San Antonio, which was commanded by Álvaro de la Mesquita. He asked for the said Álvaro de la Mesquita and took him prisoner and told the men of the ship, in the presence of Juan Cartagena . . . that they already knew how Magellan had treated him [Cartagena]; and that Magellan would have him killed because he had asked Magellan to comply with the orders of His Majesty. . . . They demanded that Magellan comply with the orders of His Majesty; and for their having done this, not to be maltreated by him. . . . If he did this, they were and would be at his command.” They would even, they claimed, “call him Your Lordship and kiss his feet and hands.”
The mutineers delivered a wildly distorted rendition of the meeting to which they had tried to lure Magellan. In reality, Magellan had spurned their invitation to attend a conference aboard the rebel ship for fear of his life. But to hear the mutineers tell it, “Magellan sent word for them to come to his ship and that he would hear them out and do whatever was right. They replied that they dare not go to his ship for fear that he would punish them, that instead, he should come to San Antonio, where all of them could meet and they would do what he ordered them.”