On September 15, 1519, the fleet of Ferdinand Magellan was finally ready to get underway. Five ships left the port of Sanlucar: the Trinidad, the flagship of the captain-general; the San Antonio, commanded by Juan de Cartagena; the Concepcion, with Gaspar de Queseda as captain; the Santiago, commanded by Juan Rodriguez de Serrano; and the Vittoria, the only ship destined to return from this voyage, with Louis de Mendoza in command.
The fleet had barely gotten underway when the first crisis developed. At a conference between the captains and Magellan, Juan de Cartagena suddenly demanded a division of command, claiming that Charles I had appointed him joint commander of the expedition. Though Magellan put an immediate end to all such speculations by putting Cartagena under arrest in care of Louis de Mendez, things improved little from that moment on.
The voyage proceeded slowly against unfavorable winds and heavy rains, and not until 56 days later did they reach the Brazilian coast near today’s Recife. Magellan knew that the Portuguese had already established an outpost at that cape, and he continued southward just within sight of the coast. Two weeks later, on December 13, they passed Cape Frio, and that afternoon entered into a spectacular bay past the now-famous Sugar Loaf and into the mouth of a river which Colhoe had discovered in January, 1502, and which he had named River of January – Rio de Janeiro. At last the sailors were able to go ashore and recover from more than two months at sea. They replenished their supplies, and two weeks later were ready to push off into the unknown regions to the south.
Now began the serious search for a strait in a region so foreign that even the familiar stars were beginning to disappear beyond the horizon. The Great Bear dipped below the northern horizon, and the Southern Cross had risen brightly, outshining even the brilliant Orion. The ships stayed as close to the shore as they dared, investigating every opening that looked promising. By January 8, they passed Montevideo, and entered the bay where Juan Solis had died four years earlier, but after a short investigation realized that this opening, too, was no strait, but merely a river.
A difficult part of the voyage had now begun. The farther they pressed southward along this strange coast, the colder it grew, and they were hit by one violent storm after another. Winter was beginning in the Southern Hemisphere, and everywhere the mainland appeared rugged and bare and covered with snow. By the end of March, they had reached Bahia San Julian, near the 49th parallel, and Magellan ordered living quarters to be built ashore to wait out the winter.
But the sailors, accustomed to the warmth of sunny Spain, had enough of this inhospitable coast. Officers and crews alike began to grumble that Magellan was leading them all to their doom; that he would lure them on for months, even years, in the pursuit of this dream of finding a strait which probably did not exist at all. The snow, the freezing rain, and the bitter cold, all that on short rations, discouraged even the toughest among them. During the night of Palm Sunday, three of the captains and their crews staged an unsuccessful mutiny, which was brought under control with the help of Captain Serrano and the crew of the Santiago.
This time, however, Magellan was determined to set an example. In a formal court martial, Mendoza, Cartagena, Queseda and three others were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. Mendoza, killed during the mutiny, was taken ashore and quartered – a brutal practice of those days, which was to ensure that a criminal’s body would not be able to rise on Judgment Day. Queseda was hanged, and Cartagena and a chaplain who had stirred up the crews to mutiny, were abandoned ashore. The sailors who had taken part in the mutiny were pardoned, partly because many had also helped in bringing the mutiny to a quick end again.
For five and a half months, Magellan and his men stayed in this inhospitable land, and many weeks passed before they met any natives on this deserted shore. Then one day suddenly a man appeared “of giant stature . . . he marveled greatly, and made signs with one finger raised upward, believing that we had come from the Heavens . . .” The Indian was painted all over and dressed in animal skins, and his feet looked so enormous that Magellan called him patagon – big foot. His country is still known today as Patagonia.
Finally, on August 24, with the earliest signs of the Antarctic spring, the carefully overhauled ships set sail again. As they departed the shores of Patagonia, the crews watched Cartagena and the chaplain kneeling on the water’s edge, crying for mercy, and that was the last anyone ever saw of them. And more than fifty years later, an English expedition under Francis Drake would execute another convicted mutineer on this very same sinister spot.