When Brito perused the logbooks, he became incensed because they contained damning evidence of the armada’s route through Portuguese waters and its attempts to snatch the Spice Islands away from Portugal. The source of the intelligence was impeccable: the records of the fleet’s official astronomer, Andrés de San Martín. To make matters worse, Brito discovered that the astronomer had secretly altered the location of various lands to obscure the embarrassing fact that the ships had wandered into the Portuguese hemisphere, at least as it was defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. With this information, Brito had his motive for revenge.
His first victim was Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, the Portuguese renegade who had joined the fleet when it first called at the Spice Islands. He was beheaded.
Brito then considered executing several sailors and pilots, but preferred that they die a slow death in the tropical heat. He later reported to the king of Portugal, “So far as concerns the master, clerk, and pilot . . . it would be more to your Highness’s service to order their heads to be struck off than to send them [to India]. I kept them in the Moluccas because it is a most unhealthy country, in order that they might die there, not liking to order their heads to be cut off, since I did not know whether your Highness would be pleased or not.” Brito based his judgment of the climate on his own troops’ suffering; of the two hundred under his command, only fifty survived. The Portuguese governor did spare the lives of two men, a boatswain and carpenter, but he did so only to press them into service for the Portuguese. He sent the rest of the crew to a fortress under construction on the island of Ternate, with orders to help build it. The timber used to construct the Portuguese fort, and the cannon to protect it, came from the wreck of Trinidad, formerly Magellan’s flagship and the symbol of Spanish sea power in the Indies.
Espinosa, now just another prisoner, at first refused to comply with Brito’s humiliating dictates, but eventually he was forced to go along: “I was rewarded for my labor by threats of being hanged from the yardarms and the seizure of the ship loaded with cloves and all of the equipment.” The Portuguese clapped several of his men into leg irons, and even Espinosa himself, “dishonoring me and saying that I was a thief in front of all the native people and not paying respect to me at all, and saying”—and this was the ultimate insult—“‘Now we’ll see [who will prevail], the King of Spain, or that of Portugal.’”
Espinosa was forced to admit that the Portuguese, not the Spanish, remained firmly in control of the Spice Islands.
Trinidad’s voyage came to its heartbreaking end in October 1522. Now there was only one ship left of the five comprising the original Armada de Molucca. This was Victoria, under Elcano’s command, and her prospects of returning to Seville appeared even less certain than Trinidad’s.
Six months earlier, Elcano had tried repeatedly to set a course around the Cape of Good Hope, each time without success, but without serious damage either. After weeks of failed attempts, Victoria finally sought refuge in a harbor located in South Africa, perhaps Port Elizabeth. More disappointment ensued when a scouting party found no helpful natives, in fact, no people of any kind; and no food. Burning precious calories, the explorers climbed a hill to survey the landscape only to realize that, after all their attempts, they had yet to double the cape. It still lay ahead of them, far to the west.
With the greatest of reluctance, Victoria put to sea once more, battling a set of weather conditions found nowhere else on earth, the result of the interaction between the Agulhas current and ever-changing winds. The Agulhas current runs from the northeast to southwest, following the contour of the continental shelf, often at speeds of up to six knots. As if the current did not pose a sufficient threat, the ship also had to battle giant waves and gales that can change from northeasterly to southwesterly in a matter of minutes.
The wind was an even more dangerous force than the current. The major wind belts around southern Africa are influenced by two high-pressure systems, the South Atlantic High and the Indian Ocean High, which form part of the so-called subtropical ridge. The Coriolis effect deflects these winds to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, and they blow around in a counterclockwise direction. Such systems are also called “anticyclones.” Winds can reach up to one hundred miles an hour, and Victoria experienced blasts powerful enough to sheer away her fore-topmast and main yard.
Sixty-foot-high rogue waves, monstrous walls of water, inflicted additional misery on the crew. Each upsurge threatened to swallow the fragile little ship, but somehow she managed to emerge from the churning troughs in one buoyant piece and to surge forward into the next wall of water. After a while, the mauling Victoria received came to seem, if not routine, then predictable. The sea had its own patient rhythm of destruction.
Given the wretched and chaotic existence the men endured, the logs and diaries covering this segment of the journey are understandably sparse and occasionally in conflict with one another. Albo, the pilot, and Pigafetta, whose records are generally in close agreement, diverge over milestones they reached by as much as two weeks. Apparently, they were too preoccupied, and the ship too unsteady, to make detailed note-taking possible.
The constant pummeling exhausted the crew, and simply finding a quiet moment to consume a few handfuls of barely edible food, usually rice, came to seem a major accomplishment, and getting through the day a miracle of sorts. Of course, the weather continued to batter the boat by night as well, so there was no rest for the crew, nor safe harbor, nor cooking fire, nor soft dry blanket, nor guarantee that their misery would end anytime soon. They might double the cape in a matter of days, but then again they might never be able to accomplish the feat. And if they were forced to turn back, the prospect of starvation in the open stretches of the Indian Ocean or death at the hands of the Portuguese awaited them. And so they tried again and again, fleeing for their lives, hoping to cheat death just one more time.
Just when it seemed that the cape was impassable, the wind shifted slightly and the storms relented briefly. Elcano seized the moment to round Cape Agulhas, the point farthest south on the African continent, with the Cape of Good Hope coming up quickly, almost easy to handle in comparison.
Fighting churning waters, sailing as close to the wind as he dared, Elcano finally drove his ship around the Cape of Good Hope. Pigafetta wrote, with evident relief, “Finally, by God’s help, we doubled that cape . . . at a distance of five leagues.” It was only a guess, for the cape lay shrouded in fog and mist, an invisible, menacing presence now falling behind. They had survived one more ordeal, and that was enough to give thanks to a merciful Lord.
By now it was May 22, 1522, the winds had abated, and Victoria was at last able to proceed on a northerly course. Elcano led the weather-beaten ship and her worn-out crew into what is now called Saldanha Bay, just north of Cape Town, where the men rested. There is no record that they thought of themselves as heroic for having outlasted the storms surrounding the Cape of Good Hope; there was no longer any boldness or swagger about them. They had suffered too much for that; the sea had not killed them, but it had humbled them, and they were simply grateful to be alive. Nothing else mattered in comparison with that singular fact.
When the men recovered a bit of their strength, there was work to be done. They occupied themselves loading enough water and wood to see them home. For once, they were not alone because they shared the bay with a Portuguese ship plying the India route. Elcano imprudently risked making his presence known to the Portuguese captain, who saluted and sailed away, two ships at the end of the world pursuing their disparate goals.