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history, Costa was a fool. He attempted to coerce Magellan, and when that failed he tried to intimidate the Spanish king, first telling him that Portugal would regard continued support of the venture as an unfriendly act, then that Magellan and Faleiro wanted to return home but had been denied permission to leave Seville—a lie which, when exposed, resulted in the cold dismissal of the bumbling envoy. Nevertheless, attempts to sandbag the undertaking continued, and some of them were a nuisance. When Magellan began signing up crewmen, Sebastian Álvarez, Portugal’s consul on the spot, urged them to desert. He also spread vicious rumors; cornering the flota’s four Spanish captains, he whispered to them that their capitán-general was a double agent who planned to lower Spain’s colors, raise Portugal’s, and defect with the entire armada.

This ugly seed fell on fertile ground. Only one of the four was an experienced professional mariner; the other three were haughty young dons, Castilian courtiers held in high favor by their sovereign, resentful of their subordination to a foreigner. Thus the enterprise began to accumulate difficulties long before its five anchors were weighed. Because of Álvarez’s dirty tricks—he fed gossips tales that the mission was highly dangerous and the vessels unseaworthy—the recruitment of seamen bogged down. Those who finally signed on were the dregs of the waterfront: ragged, filthy, diseased drifters who babbled to one another in broken Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, English—even Arabic. Meddlesome officials of the port of Seville tried to reject the Portuguese among them, including several who were Magellan relatives; Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law; and Estevão Gomes, one of the ablest pilots in either Iberian country.

The capitán-general was thwarted again and again. He ordered equipment; it failed to arrive. Funds which had been promised by Carlos and his privy council miscarried. Magellan, his patience endless, successfully appealed to the king and royal agents. Finally he confronted the most intractable obstacle: his partner. Faleiro, who had never been to sea, insisted that they share a joint command. It was an impossible demand; had it been met, the ships would not have survived the first leg of their long journey. Precisely how the admiral deflected this challenge is unknown. Some accounts say that Faleiro was declared insane; others tell of an imperial edict appointing him commander of a second expedition, which never sailed. In any event, he turned his maps and astronomical tables over to Magellan, and the five bowsprits finally took the bone in their teeth on September 20, 1519, sailing westward before the wind, under taut sails bearing Spain’s royal cross of St. James.

The capitán-general watched the mainland recede in the wake of Trinidad—his flagship, or capitana. Then he opened an unsettling, last-minute dispatch from his father-in-law, relaying reports of a conspiracy between three of the Spanish noblemen. The leader was Juan de Cartagena, commander of San Antonio and an intimate of the bishop of Burgos, thought by some to be the bishop’s bastard. When the right moment arrived, Diego Barbosa had been told, Cartagena would give the signal for a mutiny.

BARBOSA was no alarmist. The hostility of the dons was real. One of them had precipitated a violent public row with Magellan before the fleet had even left Seville, and it is not unlikely that the

Magellan’s Armada de Molucca sails from Spain

Castilians had decided to get rid of him after he had disclosed his planned route. He had no choice but to take the warning seriously, and it provided the voyage’s first test of his leadership. His response was revealing, if not altogether reassuring. If patience and thoroughness were among his traits, so were an extraordinary passion for secrecy, insistence upon ruthless discipline, and determination to dominate his subordinates at any cost. To plot mutiny, if the report was true, was criminal, but the dons’ feelings of resentment were not. Nor were they unreasonable. As holders