The mutineers remained oblivious to Magellan’s successful effort to sabotage the revolt. In their account, Cartagena and Quesada ordered the rebel ships to sail out of Port Saint Julian, an act that meant confronting Magellan, whose flagship, Trinidad, blocked their path to freedom. “San Antonio raised two anchors and started to steady itself with one. Quesada agreed to set his prisoner Álvaro de Mesquita free and sent him to Magellan so there would be peace between them.” This was fiction, as Mesquita knew, but the mutineers invented still more incidents with Mesquita playing a critical part. For example, as the rebel ships sailed past the flagship, Mesquita supposedly asked Magellan not to fire on them so they could “iron out their differences, but before they could move from where they were, in the middle of the night while the men slept, the flagship fired heavy and light volleys at their ship.” This was a good story, but the truth was that San Antonio, carried along by a powerful current and dragging her anchor, had approached Trinidad quite unintentionally in the middle of the night because her cable had parted, not because Quesada had given the order to sail. The befuddled mutineers were left telling tales of San Antonio somehow slipping past the flagship in the middle of the night . . . of Magellan’s loyal cousin temporarily siding with the mutineers . . . of the leaders of the mutiny offering to kiss the hands and feet of the Captain General they obviously despised. None of this made sense unless their stories were seen for what they were: rather obvious attempts to exculpate themselves.
Inevitably, the mutineers recast the climactic struggle at the strait in their favor. In their version, Mesquita provoked the rebellion by stabbing Gomes in the leg, and Gomes retaliated by stabbing Mesquita’s left hand. (In reality, of course, Gomes had stabbed Mesquita first.) They also insisted that the trip home had been unspeakably difficult because each man was limited to a ration of three ounces of bread a day. This was another doubtful assertion because San Antonio carried provisions for the entire fleet, more than enough food to fill the mutineers’ bellies.
While the mutineers spun their tales for the Casa’s representatives, Gomes and Guerra were held in custody, as was Mesquita, despite his claims that he was the mutiny’s principal victim, not its perpetrator. “We receive a thousand complaints every hour from them, insisting that they should not be imprisoned,” Recalde complained, “that they be given a chance to see Your Majesty to tell Your Majesty what had happened in the said voyage.” But they never got the chance. From his jail cell, Mesquita insisted, truthfully, that he had been tortured into signing a confession that he had tortured Spanish officers, that it was spurious, and that he had acted loyally to Magellan and the king of Spain. Nevertheless, suspicion fell more heavily on Mesquita than on anyone else.
Mesquita’s account, so different from the mutineers’ exculpatory version, received little attention and even less credence at the Casa de Contratación. In his defense, Mesquita presented the Casa with the documents he had kept when he presided over the prolonged mutiny trial in Port Saint Julian. The dossier recorded the rebellious actions of every accused crew member, the sentences they received, and Magellan’s clemency, all to no avail. Mesquita was ordered to remain in prison, while the mutineers went free. The ringleaders, Gomes and Guerra, even had their travel expenses to and from court reimbursed, while Mesquita, considered guilty until proven otherwise, was ordered to pay travel costs out of his own, threadbare pocket.
In their depositions, the crew members skillfully played on Spanish fears that Magellan was a Portuguese tyrant after all, a cunning agent of his native land who skillfully assembled the Armada de Molucca at Spain’s expense merely to destroy it and to dupe King Charles. They embellished this stereotype with fresh horrors: Magellan was a murderer who tortured honorable Spanish officers with connections in the highest possible place, the Church. They told the tragic tale of Cartagena—a Castilian officer!—who, through no fault of his own, was left to rot on a remote island by Magellan. As if that were not wicked enough, the Captain General left a priest to the same miserable fate.
This was an accomplished argument, but it was not flawless. For one thing, the mutineers had difficulty explaining why they had not rescued Cartagena as they retraced their route home. Fortunately, they generated enough shock and anti-Magellan hysteria in Seville that their inconsistent behavior was overlooked, for the present. Instead, the authorities focused on the accusation that Magellan had tortured loyal Spanish officers at Port Saint Julian, and not only abused them, but dismembered and disemboweled them, and placed his victims’ heads on stakes.
On May 26, Archbishop Fonseca—Cartagena’s father—delivered his response to the depositions, and it became apparent that the mutineers’ conspiracy to distort the truth had worked as planned. The bishop expressed shock and dismay at Magellan’s treatment of Cartagena and Quesada. It seemed incredible that Spanish officers would be capable of mutiny, and there was no excuse for drawing and quartering one man and marooning the other. So the mutineers went free, for now, though a taint of suspicion clung to them, and they did not receive the back pay they claimed was due them. “We told the officers and seamen . . . to look for a means to earn a living without wasting more time,” Recalde noted. “They have begun to look for work. We request Your Majesty to let us know what to do regarding said salary.”
In Magellan’s absence, his wife, Beatriz, became an object of suspicion, as if she were somehow involved with events at the other end of the world. The Casa de Contratación cut off her financial resources, and in a memorandum to the king suggested a convenient excuse for not paying her. “The wife of Ferdinand Magellan, as authorized by Your Majesty, has 50,000 maravedís in this House due the said Magellan as captain. . . . We doubt whether we should pay these claims considering the outcome of the voyage. . . . Inasmuch as we do not have the funds right now to pay them the first trimester of this year, we shall not pay them until Your Majesty advises us what to do.”
The vindictive Archbishop Fonseca had even more punitive measures in store for Magellan’s family. He ordered Beatriz and their young son to be placed under house arrest; they were forbidden to return to Portugal while the inquiry continued. Of course, she had no way of knowing that her husband had died only weeks before, on April 27, in the battle of Mactan, followed by her brother, Duarte Barbosa, who died on May 1 in the massacre at Cebu. And so throughout her captivity she waited, Penelope-like, for them to return home from their wanderings.
But Fonseca was almost as suspicious of the mutineers as he was of Magellan loyalists. He ordered Gomez, Guerra, and several other ringleaders to be brought to him in custody, insisting that they travel separately because they might continue to conspire. He told them he was making plans to send a caravel to Port Saint Julian to retrieve Cartagena and the priest. How the mutineers must have regretted their hasty decision to leave those two in the wilderness. Had Cartagena, who had always despised Magellan, returned to Spain, he would have done more than anyone else to blacken Magellan’s reputation and to win vindication and even honor for the mutineers.
No one besides Mesquita spoke up on Magellan’s behalf. The Spanish officials clearly planned to prevent him from returning in triumph to claim the lands, titles, and riches promised him by King Charles. But they had no way of knowing that their precautions were unnecessary, that Magellan was already dead. Mesquita, whose chief crime was being Magellan’s cousin, remained confined in jail for another year, during which he frequently proclaimed his innocence, to no avail.