Pedro Alfonso was entirely correct when he told Captain Espinosa what his sentence would be if he was captured by his countrymen. The last the rest of the crew of the Trinidad saw of him was when he was being bundled away in chains by Admiral Brito’s men, quaking with fear. That night, a priest came to see him in the dark hole into which he had been cast on the island of Ternate. Early the next morning, he was dragged to a clearing next to the Portuguese fort that was being built there. Under the first rays of rosy-fingered dawn, an executioner’s axe separated his head from his body. He was buried in an unmarked traitor’s grave.
His former shipmates were treated only slightly better. Brito’s initial instinct to sympathize with them for the terrible ordeal they had undergone evaporated when he began to peruse the logbooks he had seized, which documented the fleet’s movements in exhaustive, damning detail. They told how, in addition to Maluku, the Trinidad and its companion vessels had visited Brazil and a whole host of islands in the Pacific, all of which had been explicitly reserved for Portugal in a treaty brokered by Pope Alexander VI, God’s personal spokesman on Earth. As far as Brito was concerned, his prisoners had not just disobeyed international law; they had disobeyed their Holy Father, thereby sinning against God himself. This was how the admiral chose to frame the issue, at any rate. He made his opinion of the prisoners known in a letter to his king, saying that “it would be more to Your Highness’s service to order their heads to be cut off.” But, “not knowing whether Your Highness would be pleased or not” if he was to execute them, he chose to “keep them in Maluku.”
Thus these sailors who had already suffered so much now found that their suffering had barely begun. They were pressed into service as slave labor to help Brito build his fortress. None of them were spared; despite his rank, Captain Espinosa was made to toil alongside his men. One does have to wonder whether Sultan Mansur of Tidore ever saw the old soldier in his altered circumstances when he came to Ternate from time to time to re-pledge his troth to the Portuguese. Did their eyes ever meet? And if so, what passed between them in that glance?
So, the three years that the men had spent as explorers were followed by three more, vastly harder years as slaves, first on Ternate, then at various other Portuguese possessions between Maluku and India. One of the prisoners managed to escape from the port of Kochi, India, by stowing away on a ship bound for points west. He believed that, once he was inevitably discovered, it would be easier for the crew to employ him as another hand on deck than to keep him in chains below or to deliver him back where he had come from — and as far as we know, he wasn’t wrong in this calculation.
The shipmates he left behind had been dying one by one for years. Juan Bautista Punzorol, the hapless young navigator who had done the best he could, was among the group who lived through plague and starvation at sea only to expire from overwork and neglect on land. By the end of 1525, when they were noticed in their plight by a kindhearted Italian priest, only a few of the prisoners were left alive; amazingly, among the survivors was Gómez de Espinosa, who simply refused to die, no matter what the Fates threw at him. The priest wrote both King Charles of Spain and King John of Portugal, describing the slaves’ pitiable condition and asking whether they hadn’t suffered enough. Could the two monarchs not agree that they had paid sufficiently for their crimes, if crimes they were?
The priest’s letter set some slow-grinding diplomatic gears in motion, and at last, in July of 1526, Espinosa and two other sailors — the last of the 52 men who had remained on Tidore after the Victoria’s departure in December of 1521 — were delivered to Lisbon by a Portuguese trader, an event that marked the completion of their own, decidedly circuitous circumnavigation of the world. Even now, their travails weren’t completely over: they were held as prisoners in the Portuguese capital for seven more months while the wheels of diplomacy ground further. Finally, in February of 1527, Espinosa and the two others were returned to Spain, not quite seven and a half years after they had sailed away from that country on a fine early autumn day when the very wind in the canvas seemed to sing a song of possibility. They came back on a bleak winter day, dumped without ceremony at the border by a jailer’s wagon; they were the last of those from Magellan’s expedition who would be lucky enough to return home at all to actually do so. Their bodies were bent and broken, their souls torn and frayed, but they had made it back alive. Like pilgrims, they set out on foot for the great port of Seville.
Once they reached the city, the first question on their lips was what had become of the rest of the expedition. And so they learned of the return of the mutineers aboard the San Antonio — this piece of news prompted no more than a grunt and a glower from Espinosa — and of how the Victoria too had made it back to Spain. Old Espinosa raised a fist in triumph upon hearing this; to his soldierly mind, it marked the mission as a success, justifying the steep price in suffering that it had exacted from all of them. Then he started to ask more questions. He had so many, many questions.
He learned that Juan Sebastián Elcano had navigated the treacherous politics of the Spanish court as skillfully as he had guided the Victoria from the Spice Islands back to Spain. Just a few days after the crew had offered their thanks to God for their deliverance, the harbormaster in Seville had received orders from his king to send a handful of the survivors to Valladolid, where Charles was currently holding court. The five names specifically requested were those of Elcano, Martín Méndez, Antonio Pigafetta, Francisco Albo, and Hernando Bustamente. (Albo had been Elcano’s understudy in navigation in much the same way that Juan Bautista Punzorol had been that of João Lopes Carvalho, while Bustamente had been the last ship’s master of the Victoria.) But as it happened, Pigafetta was already gone from Seville by the time the summons arrived, having set off for Italy with his cherished journal in hand. Meanwhile Méndez, after holding up so well during the voyage, had fallen seriously ill upon reaching home, and was excused on that basis. The other three men obeyed the summons, having no idea what sort of reception to expect.
What they got in Valladolid vacillated between a hero’s welcome and a criminal inquiry. King Charles seemed inclined to be merciful and generous, but Bishop Fonseca was as suspicious and as influential as ever. For his part, Elcano had no intention of surviving the most epic voyage in the history of the world only to end up dying on a gallows back in Spain. Reading which way the winds were blowing in the Spanish court as adeptly as he had the winds at sea, he excused his participation in the Easter Mutiny by telling the bishop what he most wanted to hear: that Elcano and his fellow mutineers had felt compelled to rise up because Magellan had been a bad leader whose real sympathies still lay with the land of his birth rather than his adopted homeland — that the captain general “did not wish to carry out the instructions entrusted to him by His Majesty.” Then, too, Elcano was at pains to give the “disgraceful” treatment that Magellan had meted out to the bishop’s son a prominent place on his list of grievances against the man. If his testimony was not that of an upstanding hero, it is nevertheless hard to condemn him overmuch for saying what he needed to say in order to retain his life, his freedom, and his good standing with his king.
But even as he did the needful to keep his own neck out of a noose, Elcano did no favors for the perpetrators of that later, more successful mutiny that had brought the San Antonio back to Spain alone. His testimony cast serious doubt upon the justness of the verdict of the last court of inquiry, which had elected to punish only Álvaro de Mesquita, the one man aboard the San Antonio who had remained steadfastly loyal to his captain general. In truth, this was a can of worms that no one at court really felt like opening again, but Bishop Fonseca did deign to allow Mesquita to be set free from the prison cell in which he had been languishing for months. Understandably enough, Mesquita immediately returned to his native land of Portugal, wanting nothing more to do with Spanish notions of justice.
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