Espinosa decided to leave behind four men to operate a trading post on the island of Tidore. The post would store cloves and serve as a symbol of Spanish rule in the Spice Islands. The four men stationed there were, Ginés de Mafra recalled, “Juan de Campos and Luis de Molino and a Genoese and a certain Guillermo Corco.” While serving time at their remote outpost, they picked up alarming intelligence: “Some Indian merchants who had come there to buy cloves told them that a Portuguese armada was coming from India to the Moluccas because they had learned of the Castilians’ presence there.” They, too, wanted to establish an outpost, but more than that, they planned to seize control of the spice trade. The four men left behind suddenly found themselves vulnerable to both Portuguese marauders and to the island’s residents, whose loyalties could be purchased or transferred with a show of force.
Setting sail, Espinosa backtracked and followed an easterly course through waters the fleet had already explored, past Gilolo and Morotai, and into the Philippine Sea, all the way to the island of Komo, where Trinidad took on more provisions. From this point on, stout easterly headwinds got the better of his navigational skills, and he took a more northerly course. The choice proved disastrous. Although he now understood how large the Pacific Ocean was, his ideas about the location of landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere were deeply flawed. He mistakenly believed that Asia was connected to the American continent, and that misunderstanding led him to assume that if he sailed far enough north, he would catch benign westerly winds. But soon after his departure, the monsoon season started in earnest, bringing with it a seemingly endless succession of storms and drenching rains.
“After ten days of sailing,” according to de Mafra, “we arrived at one of the Islands of the Thieves.” Their position was uncannily close to the armada’s first landfall after the ninety-eight-day ordeal of crossing the Pacific during the voyage out. “There Gonzalo de Vigo stayed, much tired of the travails.” Nor was he the only one to desert—in all, three crew members fled, preferring to take their chances on a remote Pacific island rather than remain aboard Espinosa’s ship of doom. (De Vigo remained in the Philippines for the rest of his life; the other two deserters were killed by islanders.)
De Mafra wrote that Trinidad “sailed to the northeast until she reached 42 degrees North.” Espinosa faced winds of ever-increasing intensity, and soon storms overwhelmed the isolated ship. A more ill-advised global detour cannot be imagined. One can only wonder what he was thinking as he sailed as far north as Japan, into ever more frigid waters, because this course took him away from his goal of reaching Darién.
Scurvy returned to plague the men, and its miseries made the living envy the dead. “At this point many began dying,” said de Mafra, “and one of them was opened to see what it was that they were dying of, and his body was found to be as if all its veins had burst open because all the blood had spread all over the interior of his body. Henceforth, whenever anyone fell sick he was bled because it was thought that the blood was suffocating him, but they kept dying all the same and did not elude death, so thenceforward the sick men were considered helpless and left untreated.” Scurvy ultimately claimed the lives of thirty men, leaving only twenty to carry on. In their frail and bewildered state, the handful of survivors sought an explanation for their suffering. “Some claimed that it was because of the venom poured by the Ternate Indians into the well where they had collected water for the voyage,” de Mafra suggested.
Even Espinosa admitted that his course placed the ship in peril, first from the weather, and then from illness: “It became necessary for me to cut the castles and quarter-deck because the storm was so big and the weather so cold that aboard the ship that we could not cook any food. The storm lasted twelve days and because the people did not have any bread to eat, most of them lost weight and when the storm had passed and the people could once again cook food, on account of the many worms we had, it gave them nausea, which affected most people.”
Finally, Espinosa came to his senses. “When I saw the people suffering, the contrary weather, and [realized] that I had been at sea for five months, I turned back to the Moluccas, and by the time we got to the Moluccas . . . it had been seven months at sea without taking [on] any refreshments.”
After a brief respite at the Islands of the Thieves to collect water, Espinosa commanded Trinidad to resume her retreat toward Tidore, but as he approached his goal, he received shocking news. On May 13, five weeks after Trinidad’s departure from Tidore, a fleet of seven Portuguese ships, all looking for Magellan and the Armada de Molucca, had arrived at the island. Their leader was António de Brito, bearing a royal appointment as governor of the Spice Islands.
His Portuguese soldiers, heavily armed, imprisoned the four crew members Espinosa had left behind to maintain a trading post. Then Brito turned his attention to Almanzor, the king of Tidore, demanding to know how he could have allowed the Spanish to maintain a post on his island. Almanzor pleaded for mercy, explaining that the Spanish had forced him to yield, but now that Captain Brito had come to rescue Almanzor from the Spanish, he would gladly switch his allegiance back to the Portuguese. Captain António de Brito, whose cynicism concerning Almanzor’s protestations can be imagined, reclaimed the Spice Islands in the name of Portugal.
Espinosa dispatched a boat bearing a letter for Captain Brito, begging for sympathy. He told a pathetic tale. His ship was in bad condition, down to its last anchor; one storm could send her to the bottom. And he was in desperate need of supplies. Had Magellan been alive, he would never have been so foolish as to write a letter to the Portuguese captain charged with capturing him, and the last thing he would have done was to reveal his whereabouts and weaknesses to the enemy. He would have known there was no chance of mercy from the Portuguese.
Rather than the compassion Espinosa expected, the letter only made Brito gloat. After searching the Indies for three years, the Portuguese governor now knew exactly where the Armada de Molucca was located, and once he had captured the crew, he would treat them as cruelly as he wished.
A few days later, a Portuguese caravel with twenty armed men stormed Benaconora, the harbor where Espinosa had sought refuge. The soldiers boarded Trinidad, expecting to overwhelm the crew, but were repelled by the grievous spectacle of men near death, a foul and unhealthy stench that no one dared to brave, and a ship on the verge of sinking. Everything Espinosa had said in his letter to Brito was true; Trinidad and her crew were in desperate condition and offered no threat to the Portuguese.
Unmoved, the Portuguese soldiers arrested Espinosa and sailed Magellan’s fetid and decrepit flagship to Ternate. There Brito took possession of Trinidad’s papers, logbooks, quadrants, and astrolabes. Included in the haul were the diary of Andrés de San Martín and, it is said, Magellan’s personal logbook. Brito ordered the ship stripped of all her sails and rigging, and in this condition, she rode helplessly at anchor until a severe storm hit the island. The winds smashed apart the remains of the once-proud ship, her precious cargo of cloves sank, and the splintered remnants of her hull washed ashore. The flagship of the Armada de Molucca ended up as driftwood.
Espinosa had squandered his chance for glory. If he had succeeded in guiding Trinidad home, he would have earned a place in history and a fortune for himself. Instead, his indecision claimed the lives of over a score of men, half the remaining assets of the armada, a valuable cargo of cloves, and the records maintained by Trinidad’s officers, including Magellan himself.