Their prayers concluded, the remnants of the first crew to circle the globe dispersed. They shed the rags they had brought with them from the sea, donned new clothing, and sought out their modest homes.
In a bustling square in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, there is today a small marble plaque mounted high on the stone façade of a well-worn building. The plaque’s tarnished inscription commemorates the eighteen survivors of the first-ever circumnavigation of the globe:
Juan Sebastián Elcano
Captain
Francisco Albo
Pilot
Miguel de Rodas
Master
Juan de Acurio
Boatswain
Martín de Judicibus
Sailor
Hernando Bustamente
Barber
Hans of Aachen
Gunner
Diego Carmona
Sailor
Nicholas the Greek, of Naples
Sailor
Miguel Sánchez, of Rodas
Sailor
Francisco Rodrigues
Sailor
Juan Rodríguez de Huelva
Sailor
Antonio Hernández Colmenero
Sailor
Juan de Arratia
Sailor
Juan de Santandres
Ordinary seaman
Vasco Gomes Gallego
Ordinary seaman
Juan de Zubileta
Page
Antonio Pigafetta
Passenger
In the entire list, only Elcano, the captain; Albo, the pilot; Bustamente, the barber; and Pigafetta, Magellan’s chronicler, could be considered notable members of the armada’s original roster. The others, for the most part, were ordinary men, many still in their twenties or even younger, the overlooked servants of more powerful officers and specialists. No matter what their status, they had surveyed more of the world than anyone else before them; by accident or design, their names belong among history’s great explorers.
They had seen a great deal, and although they failed to understand much of what they experienced, they had made records for others to study, enlarging the Europeans’ knowledge of the world. They had circled the globe, only to demonstrate that the world was now a larger place than previously imagined, not smaller. Seven thousand miles had been added to the globe’s circumference, as well as an immense body of water, the Pacific Ocean. They had learned that beyond Europe, people existed in astonishing profusion and variety, as tall as the giants of Patagonia and as short as the pygmies of the Philippines, as generous as the courtiers of Brunei, and as violent as the inhabitants of Mactan. Banished were phenomena such as mermaids, boiling water at the equator, and a magnetic island capable of pulling the nails from passing ships. All these discoveries came at the cost of over two hundred lives and extreme hardship. No other voyage had been as prolonged and complicated as this one; no other voyage during the Age of Discovery would ever equal it for ambition and daring.
The expedition had ended, but its effects on Spain, and on world history, were just beginning.
Chapter XV After Magellan
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.
As the skeleton crew guided the weather-beaten Victoria along the Guadalquivir River to her mooring in Seville, Juan Sebastián Elcano employed his considerable skills of persuasion in a letter to King Charles to boast of the voyage’s multifaceted accomplishments and to justify his assumption of command after Magellan’s death.
By the florid and long-winded standards of the era, the dispatch was a marvel of concision:
Most High and Illustrious Majesty:
Your high Majesty will learn how we eighteen men only have returned with one of the five ships which Your Majesty sent to discover the Spice Islands under Captain Ferdinand Magellan (to whom glory); and so that Your Majesty may have news of the principal things which we have passed through, I write to say briefly this:
First, we reached 54° S of the Equator where we found a Strait which passed through Your Majesty’s mainland to the Sea of India, which Strait is of 100 leagues and from which we debouched; and, in the time of three months and twenty days, encountering highly favorable winds, and finding no land save two small and uninhabited islands; afterward we reached an archipelago of many islands quite abundant in gold. We lost by his death Captain Ferdinand Magellan, with many others, and unable to sail for want of people, very few having survived, we dismantled one of the ships and with the two remaining sailed from island to island, seeking how to arrive, with God’s grace, at the Isles of Maluco [Spice Islands], which we did eight months after the death of the Captain; and there we loaded the two ships with spices. . . .
Having departed the last of these islands, in five months, without eating anything but wheat and rice and drinking only water, we touched at no land for fear of the King of Portugal, who had given orders in all his dominions to capture this fleet. . . . We arrived at the islands of Cape Verde, whose governor seized my boat with thirteen men, and sought to throw me and all my men into a ship which was sailing from Calicut to Portugal charged with spying . . . but we resolved, with common accord, to die before falling into the hands of the Portuguese. And so with very great labor at the pumps, which we had to work day and night to free her of water, and as exhausted as any man ever was, with the aid of God and of Our Lady, and after the passage of three years, we arrived. . . .
Your Majesty will know best that what we should esteem and admire most is that we have discovered and made a course around the entire rotundity of the world—that going by the occident we have returned by the orient.
After boasting of his feats of discovery, Elcano turned to the commercial aspects of the expedition and petitioned the king to excuse the men who had suffered so greatly for him from having to pay duties on profits from their personal store of spices:
I beg Your Majesty, in view of the many travails, sweats, famine, and thirst, cold and heat that these people have endured in the service of Your Majesty, to give us grace for the fourth and twentieth of their property and of what they brought with them. And with this I close, kissing the feet and hands of Your high Majesty.
Written on board the ship Victoria, in Sanlúcar, on the 6th day of September of 1522.
The Captain
Juan Sebastián Elcano
The first account of the first journey around the world, Elcano’s letter was dispatched from Sanlúcar de Barrameda even before the ship reached Seville—an indication of Elcano’s eagerness to offer explanations. But his letter did little to clear up the mystery of how Magellan died; nor did Elcano explain how he, a Basque mariner, emerged as the fleet’s Captain General. And any connection between the two events—Magellan’s fall and Elcano’s rise—was similarly obscured. The letter concealed more than it revealed. Many serious questions loomed concerning the voyage: mutinies, the sailors’ licentious behavior and outright orgies with women in distant lands, which had been expressly forbidden by the king; and, most important of all, Magellan’s conduct at sea and accusations of torture.
King Charles never mourned the loss of the Captain General, even though Magellan had always regarded the young sovereign as the paragon of all virtues, the recipient of all his loyalties and efforts, the justification of all his suffering. And Magellan’s fanatical devotion was not returned in kind. Charles felt no sense of kinship with the ardent Portuguese mariner who had presented himself at Valladolid four years before, pleading for royal backing of an expedition. The armada’s many scientific and geographic discoveries and the claiming of dozens of islands and lands for Spain made little impression on this preoccupied sovereign, who, through lifelong habit, merely considered such tributes his due. King Charles barely acknowledged that, thanks to Magellan’s efforts, he now laid claim to much of the known world, at least for a short time. Eventually, he took to boasting about the expedition because it had returned with a shipload of cloves, the aromatic equivalent of gold. He counted the number of bahars of cloves aboard the battered Victoria and ignored the number of souls Magellan and the priests had converted to Christianity. For Charles, the Armada de Molucca could be considered a commercial success; that was all, and that was enough.