A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [142]
The revulsion was felt on all levels of native life. In a particularly striking act of backsliding, Cebu’s rajah reverted to paganism and deceit. On the Thursday following the tragic and pointless battle, Humabon, as he again called himself, sent a message to the fleet. Twenty-nine Spaniards—the best officers and most skillful pilots—were invited to dine ashore with him. According to Don Antonio, who declined to attend, two of the guests, growing suspicious, slipped away from the feast and returned to their ships. They had thereby saved their lives; the others, including Duarte Barbosa and Serrano, were cruelly slain. Terrified, the crews aboard Trinidad, Victoria, and Concepción fled with the tide, blindly groping their way through the archipelago. Off the Philippine island of Bohol, between Cebu and Mindanao, the three galleons became two. Concepción was leaking badly, and since there weren’t enough seamen to nurse her along—since its departure from Sanlúcar the flota had lost 150 men—she was set afire and sunk.
On November 6, 1521, after four months of wandering through the Indonesian islands, Victoria reached the Moluccas. There she was joined by Trinidad—Magellan’s flagship. But Trinidad would never again see European waters. She was on her last legs. It was not for lack of seamanship. Her captain now was Gómez de Espinosa, who had been Magellan’s point man in suppressing the San Julián mutiny nineteen months earlier. But Gómez was luckless now. After sailing northward to a point off Hokkaido—trying to reach Panama—the capitán-general’s old flagship was first driven south by high winds, then pursued by a Portuguese fleet. António de Brito, the fleet’s commander, had heard of Magellan’s expedition but not his death. He wanted to arrest him and clap him in irons. Finally cornering Trinidad in Ternate, in the Moluccas, he impounded her papers and stripped her of sails and gear. During a squall she “broke up,” Morison notes, “and became a total loss.” Brito’s report to Lisbon testifies to the cruelty of the age. He had beheaded one member of Trinidad’s crew—because the man was Portuguese, he declared, he was a deserter—and had considered putting all the ship’s complement to the sword. Instead, he wrote, “I detained them in Maluco because it is an unhealthy country, with the intention of having them die there.” Something like that happened; only four of Trinidad’s crewmen survived and eventually made it back to Europe.
Victoria, more fit, sailed homeward carrying twenty-six tons of spices in her hold. It was the expedition’s penultimate irony that her captain was Juan Sebastián del Cano, who, a year and a half earlier, had been among the leaders of the San Julián mutiny. He and his pilot, Francisco Albo, completed the expedition’s circling of the globe. They did it superbly. Unlike Magellan, they faced no unknown waters; the seas beyond their prow were familiar and charted. There was, however, a challenge of another sort. Because her sails bore the royal cross of Castile and Aragon, Victoria was a fair prize for the Portuguese, and Manuel’s empire had become so huge that Cano and Albo, sailing halfway round the world, had to avoid all ports of call in Malacca, the Indies, Africa, and Mozambique. The Cape Verde Islands—known as Ilhas do Cabo Verde since becoming part of the Portuguese royal domain in 1495—should also be avoided if at all possible. All hands, according to Pigafetta, took a vow to die rather than fall into the hands of the Portuguese (“Ma inanti determinamo tutti morir che andar in mano dei Portoghesi”).
For the pilot this meant plotting one long detour after another in a shaky, battered, worm-eaten ship reeking of decay; a listing wreck of groaning timbers taking in water from every seam, manned by sickly figures as they crept across the Indian Ocean, round the tip of Africa, and, in extremis, up Africa’s west coast—altogether, a voyage of 17,800 excruciating