Although Victoria had passed the supreme navigational test, the torments afflicting her crew were not over yet. On June 8, 1522, she crossed the equator again; this was the fourth time since the departure from Seville. “Then we sailed northwest for two months continually without taking on any fresh food or water,” Pigafetta reported. Inevitably, scurvy returned to devastate the crew. “Twenty-one men died during that short time. When we cast them into the sea, the Christians went to the bottom face upward, while the Indians always went face downward.” The victims included Martín de Magallanes, Magellan’s young nephew, who had sailed as a passenger. Despite everything he had endured, Pigafetta retained his touching faith. “Had not God given us good weather, we would all have perished from hunger.” The survivors summoned the strength to go on.
“Finally, constrained by our great extremity, we went to the islands. On Wednesday, July 9, we reached one of the Saint Jacob islands”—by which Pigafetta meant Santiago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of West Africa, the very same islands that had served as the marker for the line of demarcation under the Treaty of Tordesillas. The islands remained a Portuguese stronghold, a center for commerce in materials and in men. The seas surrounding the Cape Verde Islands were familiar to Portuguese mariners, too familiar, in fact, for Victoria’s safety. The farther north she journeyed, the more likely she was to encounter vindictive Portuguese authorities.
As soon as Victoria dropped anchor in the port of Ribeira Grande, on Santiago Island, Espinosa dispatched a longboat for food needed by the starving crew. Fearing that the Portuguese would likely pounce, the men crafted a story designed to elicit sympathy and avoid uncomfortable facts: “We had lost our foremast under the equinoctial line (although we had lost it under the Cape of Good Hope), and when we were restepping it, our Captain General had gone to Spain with the other two ships.”
The cover story omitted any mention of their visit to the Spice Islands, the precious cloves they were carrying, Magellan’s death, the mutinies, their doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, among other incursions into Portuguese waters, and, most important of all, their nearly complete circumnavigation of the globe. Instead, they posed as an unlucky, storm-battered Spanish cargo ship, hardly worth troubling over. The ruse seemed to work, and Pigafetta exulted, “With those good words, and with our merchandise, we got two boatloads of rice.”
As an afterthought, Elcano told his men to confirm the date with the Portuguese, just to make sure the ship’s log remained accurate after nearly three years’ record-keeping. The reply—Thursday—baffled the sailors. “We were greatly surprised for it was Wednesday with us, and we could not see how we had made a mistake; for I had always kept well, and had always set down every day without interruption.” How could they have omitted a day? As they learned later, “It was no error, but as the voyage had been made continually toward the west, and we had returned to the same place as does the sun, we had made a gain of twenty-four hours.” But this miscalculation meant that they violated their faith by eating meat on Fridays, and celebrating Easter on a Monday.
This was no mere bookkeeping oversight: Albo, Pigafetta, and the rest of the survivors erred because the international date line did not yet exist. No Western cosmologist or astronomer, not even Ptolemy, had anticipated that a correction would be necessary to compensate for sailing around the globe. It took the first circumnavigation to demonstrate the need for a twenty-four hour gain. By general agreement, the international date line now extends west from the island of Guam, in the Pacific Ocean.
As Victoria was about to slip away from Santiago Island, Elcano made a serious mistake. “On Monday, the fourteenth [of July],” wrote Albo, “we sent the ship’s boat ashore for more rice. It returned the next day, and went back for another load. We waited until night, but it did not return. Then we waited until the next day, but it never returned.” Something had gone awry, but no one aboard the ship knew what it was. One possibility was that the four Indians who had gone ashore to fetch rice tried to purchase food with cloves. When the Portuguese authorities saw this contraband, which could only have come from the Spice Islands, they became deeply suspicious of Victoria.
That was not all. While on the island of Santiago, one of the sailors let slip that their Captain General, Ferdinand Magellan, was dead. Pigafetta’s all-too-brief mention of the incident suggests that whoever revealed Magellan’s death also revealed that Elcano and the others were afraid to return to Spain, a remark calculated to raise suspicions. The sailor suspected of betraying secrets was Simón de Burgos, a Portuguese who had passed himself off as a Castilian to join the armada. His concealed identity might have had an innocent explanation—he simply wanted to find work, and with restrictions on the number of Portuguese crew members, pretending to be Spanish was the only way around the problem—or it might have been more sinister. It is possible that once he was among his fellow Portuguese in Santiago, he felt free to reveal his identity and betray his long-suffering crew members in exchange for favors. The severity of the subsequent Portuguese reaction to Burgos’s admissions—assuming he was the source—suggests that he exposed still more about the expedition, including its visit to the Moluccas and incursion into Portuguese waters—all inflammatory matters.
Burgos was not the only crew member who tried to seek asylum from the Portuguese. Elcano had revealed the true nature of the expedition to a Portuguese captain shortly after Victoria doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and in the distant Spice Islands, Espinosa had also implored the Portuguese to come to his rescue. Assuming that many of the crew felt the urge to surrender to the Portuguese for the sake of survival, Burgos’s admission might be seen as a diplomatic feeler rather than a betrayal of men who had suffered and died for each other. The crew, near death after three years of incessant journeying, deserve a measure of sympathy. To these beaten-down men, throwing themselves on the mercy of the Portuguese seemed a reasonable strategy for survival.
In practice, however, their attempt to disclose the true nature of the expedition as a prelude to defection failed miserably. “We went nearer the port,” Albo continues, “to discover the reason of the delay, whereupon a vessel came out and demanded our surrender, saying that they would send us with the ship that was coming from the Indies, and that they would place their men in our ship, for thus had their officials ordered.”
Victoria’s officers stoutly resisted. “We requested them to send us our men and the ship’s boat. They replied that they would bear our request to their officials. We answered that we would take another tack and wait. Accordingly, we tacked about and set all our sails full, and left with twenty-two men, both sick and well.” The number probably included eighteen Europeans and four captives acquired en route. Twenty-two men: all that remained of the approximately 260 who had left Seville with the armada three years earlier. Twenty-two survivors of an endless succession of calamities, storms, scurvy, drowning, torture, execution, war, desertion, and now this final indignity: capture by the Portuguese. The prisoners included Martín Méndez, the fleet’s accountant; Ricarte de Normandia, a carpenter; Roland de Argot, a gunner; four sailors; an apprentice seaman, Vasquito Gallego; and two passengers who had avoided misfortune until this point in the journey.