The unsuccessful efforts to repair Trinidad’s mysterious leak and the deliberations leading to the decision that Victoria would return alone consumed five days. Just before Victoria left Tidore, the crew members loaded her with as many cloves as they could salvage from Trinidad, but once they saw Victoria riding low in the water, “mistrusting that the ship might open,” they lightened her by removing sixty quintals of cloves and storing the spices in the trading house.
Victoria was so dilapidated that many crew members refused to board her. They preferred to remain with Trinidad in Tidore until she was repaired. Still others stayed behind because they feared that those aboard Victoria would “perish of hunger” long before they reached Spain. So the crew divided itself between the two ships, each man seeking the lesser of two evils: Victoria, the flimsy vessel that would depart for Spain immediately, or the much larger Trinidad, which needed weeks if not months of repairs before she could begin her journey home. Dangers abounded both on land and at sea; starvation and shipwreck imperiled those who sailed, while headless marauders or poison might fell those who remained behind.
In the end, Carvalho was designated captain of Trinidad, and Elcano took over the command of Victoria. Among the fifty-three men who cast their lot with Trinidad were Ginés de Mafra, the pilot; Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms (and second in command to Carvalho); and Hans Vargue, a German gunner. Pigafetta faced the most critical decision of the entire journey: Which ship would he join? His instinct for survival had stood many tests, and he elected to go along with Elcano aboard Victoria; that ship would carry him among her crew of about sixty men, including sixteen Indians. Although he detested the Basque mariner, he clearly had more confidence in Elcano’s seamanship than in Carvalho’s.
Each ship in the divided fleet contained a memoirist, Pigafetta aboard Victoria and de Mafra aboard Trinidad. The Venetian resumed his passionate, eloquent descriptions of the Indies, while de Mafra—“a man of few but true words,” by his own account—stuck to a more practical report of what he perceived as bad judgment and missed opportunities.
Early on the morning of December 21, Almanzor, ever helpful, came aboard Victoria for the last time, delivering two pilots, paid for by the crew, to guide the ship safely through the maze of islands and shoals. The king then took his leave. Familiar with the tides, the pilots insisted that early morning was the most advantageous time to depart, but the men who remained behind persuaded Victoria to delay a few hours while they wrote long letters for her to carry home to Spain. Finally, at noon, it was time to leave the Spice Islands. “When that hour came,” Pigafetta recalled, “the ships bid one another farewell amid the discharge of the cannon, and it seemed as though they were bewailing their last departure. Our men [remaining behind] accompanied us in their boats a short distance, and then with many tears and embraces we departed.”
This should have been a festive occasion, the ships bulging with spices, heading for home port and the prospect of a grand reception from King Charles, but the damage to Trinidad dramatically altered the final leg of this voyage around the world and mocked the proud legend painted on her sails. The crew faced more than the ordinary pangs of leaving port for another long journey at sea, although those pangs—the monotony of life at sea, the nights interrupted by watches, the gradual diminution of their fresh food to a diet of salted dried meat, salted biscuit, and salted dried fish—were hard enough to bear, but now, in addition to all that, they knew their lives would be at risk the moment they were out of sight of the Spice Islands.
Despite the obstacles they had faced, the men of the armada had always taken comfort in the knowledge that they had extra ships at their disposal. Even two ships had a reasonable chance of making it back to Seville, but one ship was hardly equal to the task, no matter how skillful the crew’s seamanship, or how favorable the winds. One ship, alone on the high seas, was always at the mercy of storms, shoals, pirates, termites, or faulty navigation. On the high seas, no king could protect them, and at least one sovereign, the king of Portugal, wanted them dead. (Of all the captains in the armada, only Magellan had fully appreciated the full extent of Portuguese malice toward him.) Yet they had no choice but to face the tests presented by the ten-thousand-mile-long route home.
Chapter XIV Ghost Ship
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.
Laden with cloves and about sixty survivors, Victoria left the island of Tidore on December 21, 1521. Heading southwest, she called at a small island nearby to load firewood, and resumed her southerly course toward one of the most dangerous stretches of ocean in the world: the Cape of Good Hope.
Embarking on the final leg of the unprecedented journey around the world should have been an occasion for relief among the homeward-bound crew members, but it was not. The character of the expedition had changed completely; the Armada de Molucca finally had its spices, but it had lost its soul. The absence of Magellan’s guiding hand, his fierce discipline, even his quixotic delusions of grandeur, left the two remaining ships and their crew members without a sense of overriding purpose. Only survival mattered now.
Even if the crew survived the voyage home, they were anxious about the reception they would receive in Spain. Although they had no knowledge of San Antonio’s arrival in Seville seven months earlier, they suspected that the mutineers aboard that ship might have made it back and succeeded in discrediting Magellan. Elcano and Victoria’s crew feared they would be arrested and jailed for treason the moment they tied up at the dock. Desertion might have been an appealing option among the grim choices facing the sailors, except for their fear of cannibals inhabiting the islands surrounding them. In the end, staying aboard ship served as the best strategy to forestall disaster. They found themselves prisoners of peculiar circumstances, hostages to a situation created largely by those who had predeceased them.
Even Antonio Pigafetta, so determined to bring the news of Magellan’s accomplishments back to Europe, was at a loss for words, content simply to note the islands Victoria passed: Caion, Laigoma, Sico, Giogi, and Caphi, all part of the Moluccas. On the advice of local pilots, he recorded, “We turned toward the southeast, and encountered an island that lies in a latitude of two degrees toward the Antarctic Pole, and fifty-five leagues from Maluco. It is called Sulach [later called Xulla], and its inhabitants are heathens.” Here Pigafetta briefly resumed his amateur anthropology: “They have no king, and eat human flesh. They go naked, both men and women, only wearing a bit of bark two fingers wide before their privies.” Cannibals seemed to be everywhere; Pigafetta listed ten islands to be avoided at all costs.
Two days after Christmas, the ship found anchorage in Jakiol Bay, where the crew obtained fresh, and much needed, supplies, along with an Indonesian pilot who knew his way around these islands. Under his guidance, the crew sailed on as if in a trance, heading south, narrowly avoiding Moors and cannibals, coral reefs and hidden sandbars. Eventually, Victoria put the Indonesian islands astern, passing through the Alor Strait and eluding pirates. As a lone vessel laden with spices, Victoria was especially vulnerable to predators.