“Fearing lest we also be taken prisoner by certain caravels,” Pigafetta recorded, “we hastily departed.”
It was July 15, 1522.
With barely enough men to handle the ship, Elcano took Victoria along a northerly course to her rendezvous with destiny in Spain. The diarists’ silence concerning the final weeks of the circumnavigation suggests both their distaste for Elcano’s barely legitimate authority and the suffering they endured from scurvy, other forms of malnourishment, depression, and exhaustion. Each day, familiar, well-charted landmarks along the coast of North Africa slid past, bringing no cheer, markers on a voyage to disgrace and prison—or so it seemed to the handful of men occupying their ramshackle ship.
Leaks constantly threatened to scuttle Victoria, and the men, in their exhausted condition, were forced to work the pumps night and day, simply to stay afloat. Their incessant labor paid off, and by July 28, Tenerife swung into view, signaling the beginning of a new course toward the Azores to negotiate the northerly winds. Elcano, still in command, approached the Azores, hoping to take on the fresh provisions they desperately needed and depart before the Portuguese, who claimed these islands, pursued them, but he wisely judged the maneuver too dangerous to attempt.
As they worked the pumps, the ship’s crew discerned Cape Saint Vincent to the north on September 4. It would be the last important landmark they observed before reaching their goal, and it was a fitting sight, for Sagres, the location of Prince Henry the Navigator’s academy, was located right on the cape; the developments that he had pioneered there a century before had culminated in this strange, difficult, and heroic voyage. Cape Saint Vincent disappeared in the mists as the “Portuguese trades” bore Victoria and her skeleton crew east toward the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, its waters churning just as they had three years earlier, when the ship, part of the proud Armada de Molucca, began the expedition to the Spice Islands.
On Saturday, September 6, 1522, we entered the bay of San Lúcar with only eighteen [European] men, the majority of them sick, all that were left of the sixty men who had left the Moluccas. Some died of hunger; some deserted at the island of Timor; and some were put to death for crimes.” So wrote Antonio Pigafetta, in an elegiac mode.
His cryptic reference to “crimes” has given rise to speculation that Elcano had to endure a mutiny during the final weeks of the voyage, and might have sunk to the same level of cruelty as Magellan had in quelling the uprising. Yet the mutiny, if there was one, must have been pathetic and halfhearted, because no other diarist has a word to say on the subject. More likely, the crimes mentioned by Pigafetta were the mundane deeds of desperate men, crimes such as the theft of Trinidad’s cloves or the dwindling food supply. Or the malefactors might have been one of the Indians still aboard the ship. The armada had captured a number of prisoners during its travels through Indonesia, some of them pilots, others hostages to be used as bargaining chips, and still others women whose chief role was to serve in a harem. The fleet’s roster, so scrupulous and detailed concerning European crew members, offers little help in tracking the Indians taken aboard during the voyage. Even Pigafetta, who recorded the sad history of John the Giant with great interest and compassion, evinces little interest in later captives and offers no hint concerning their fates, but such prisoners would likely be the first to desert or to be condemned to death for their transgressions.
At last, Pigafetta allowed himself a moment of pride concerning the chief accomplishment of the Armada de Molucca. “From the time we left that bay until the present day, we sailed fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leagues”—nearly sixty thousand miles—“and furthermore completed the circumnavigation of the world from east to west.” The distance the armada traveled was fifteen times longer than that covered by Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, and correspondingly more dangerous.
To complete her journey around the world, Victoria and her decimated crew had to make one last passage, from the harbor of Sanlúcar de Barrameda along the Guadalquivir River into Seville. Elcano sent for a small boat to tow the battered craft and her exhausted crew to the teeming city, now abuzz with talk and excitement concerning the unprecedented voyage. Although her hull was in such poor condition and leaking so copiously that the men had to keep pumping all the way just to stay afloat, Victoria completed her journey along the river to Seville and tied up at a quay on September 10.
Under the scrutiny of representatives of the king and his financiers, dock workers unloaded the precious cargo that Victoria had traveled around the world to collect: cloves. Even without the other four ships, the amount of cloves in Victoria’s hold was sufficient to turn a profit for the expedition’s backers. The king’s agents were pleased to note that the cloves were of first quality, far exceeding those obtained from merchants who had acquired them in the traditional manner, from middlemen using land routes. The cloves filled no less than 381 sacks, weighing 524 quintals. Their value came to 7,888,864 maravedís. By royal order, the cargo passed directly to the expedition’s backer, Cristóbal de Haro. Within weeks, he was in possession of the precious cloves, which he dispatched to his brother Diego in Antwerp for sale. The profits were divided between the Haros and the nearly insolvent Spanish crown.
Beyond the profits from spices, the completion of Magellan’s voyage finally gave the Spanish a water route to the Spice Islands, if they wanted it. In terms of prestige and political might, the achievement was the Renaissance equivalent of winning the space race—a competition between the world’s two great maritime superpowers, Spain and Portugal, for territory of vital economic and political importance. In a sudden reversal of the balance of power, Spain was poised to control the spice trade and, by extension, global commerce.
The day after arriving in Seville, the eighteen European survivors, attired only in their ragged shirts and breeches, did penance. Their number included Elcano; Francisco Albo, the pilot; Miguel Rodas, a ship’s master; Juan de Acurio, the boatswain; Hernando Bustamente, the barber and medic; Antonio Pigafetta, whose eloquent, occasionally X-rated journal became the primary source of information about the entire voyage; and twelve seamen who, through luck and caution, had managed to survive where so many of their cohorts had perished. Walking barefoot, holding a candle, each world traveler slowly walked, still getting accustomed to the unusual feeling of solid, unshakable land beneath his feet. Elcano led the gaunt, weary pilgrims through Seville’s narrow, winding streets to the shrine of Santa María de la Victoria, where they knelt to pray before the statue of the blessed Virgin and Child. They returned to Seville as sinners and penitents rather than conquerors. Their voyage had commenced as a Shakespearean drama, bristling with significance and passion, starring the heroic Magellan, but three years had taken a dreadful toll and the journey was ending as a play by Samuel Beckett. The survivors were shell-shocked, tentative, and chastened by all they had seen and experienced.
As curious onlookers watched, they rose and hobbled in bare feet over a wooden pontoon bridge across the Guadalquivir River and proceeded to another shrine, Santa María del Antigua, in Seville’s massive cathedral. The grandeur of the cathedral dwarfed the little band of mariners as they trudged through the square to the chapel.