A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [126]
He told them nothing, gave them nothing. Resolving to force any revolt into the open but not to lose, he kept the Castilians at a safe distance. During the first, ten-week leg of the voyage, from Spain to Brazil, the other vessels were ordered to follow in the flagship’s wake. Late each afternoon a lantern was hung from Trinidad’s fantail. Under standing orders, they were required to keep it in sight, and when the lamp flashed a signal at sunset each day the four subordinate galleons—San Antonio (Cartagena), Concepción (Gaspar de Quesada), Santiago (Juan Serrano), and Victoria (Luis de Mendoza)—approached the flagship’s stern to receive orders for the three night watches.
The dons fumed. Cartagena, as senior captain and skipper of the fleet’s largest vessel, attempted to serve as their spokesman. He merely provoked a snub. The Spanish captains were baffled by their commander’s sailing direction. They had assumed that he would take them directly to the New World. Instead, when they reached 27 degrees north latitude, he changed their course. Now they were paralleling the African coast. He had an excellent reason for this. Before leaving Spain a reliable informant had brought him ominous news: Manuel of Portugal had sent two flotillas to intercept him. They would be lying athwart the direct route to Brazil. Magellan had decided to evade them; he would skirt Africa and then cross the Atlantic Narrows. Had he told his skippers that, they would have understood at once. But he was taciturn by nature and distrusted them anyway. So when Cartagena called out from his deck, asking where he was taking them, Magellan replied: “¡Que le siguiessen Y no pidiessen más cuenta!” (“Follow me and don’t ask questions!”)
Furious, the offended don answered this insult with one of his own. For three successive days he absented himself from the sunset ritual, remaining below and sending his quartermaster topside with instructions to address the fleet commander, not as capitán-general, which custom required, but merely as capitán. Magellan ignored the slight, feigning indifference, then called a meeting of all armada officers aboard the flagship. Again Cartagena tried to question him; again the admiral disregarded him. He was deliberately inciting insubordination, and when he succeeded—when the young nobleman lost his temper and shouted that he would refuse to obey future orders—Magellan put him under arrest. He seized him, snapped, “Sed preso” (“You are my prisoner”), and turned him over to a nearby alguacil, or master-at-arms. Another Spanish officer, Antonio de Coca, replaced Cartagena on San Antonio’s quarterdeck. The other three Castilian officers stood mute and the moment passed. For the present, at least, the admiral’s authority as capitán-general had survived defiance.
On Tuesday, November 29, 1519, Trinidad’s lookout raised the Brazilian coast, and two weeks later the five ships sailed into the bay of Rio de Janeiro, discovered by the Portuguese eighteen years earlier. Although Magellan never confided in anyone, in Rio he held the first of his many talks with a member of the expedition, a youth who, after the voyage, was to become his biographer. Antonio Pigafetta was a member of the Venetian nobility who had come aboard representing the signory of Venice. Don Antonio’s mission was to observe and report home on the spice trade, but soon his chief interest, and his idol, was the capitán-general. In his diary he began entering copious descriptions of the admiral’s every move, noting, for example, that in Rio Magellan tasted pineapple for the first time and converted all the natives on shore to Christianity.
Delighted with the weather and the local women, the fleet’s crews would have preferred to linger in Rio indefinitely, but their leader ordered them to hoist sail; according to Schöner’s