A Singular Captain

by John Regan

  Chapter 12

  On the day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the armada anchored in the river that Serrano had discovered and Magellan named it Santa Cruz, not only for the date but also for the vera cruz that blazed overhead at midnight.

  One of the giants captured in Port St Julian had been transferred to San Antonio and the other remained shackled to a deck frame. Pigafetta gave him warm clothes and a foul weather cape and treated his lacerated ankles with balsam. The captain general refused to remove his fetters until he was baptised. Evidently, baptism would prevent him from jumping overboard, or perhaps Magellan did not want his crew contaminated by an unbaptised cannibal.

  Pigafetta began a dictionary of Patagonian words and at the same time taught him Spanish words so he might understand what was going on around him, and Latin words so he could receive the sacrament and be baptised into the Christian faith. At the very least, he needed to be able to recite ‘Pater noster, qui est in coelis…’ which were utterly meaningless to him.

  In Santa Cruz, Pigafetta proudly presented the giant to the priest and, with little ceremony, he was baptised Paul; he who achieved enlightenment on the road to Damascus. The fetters were struck off and Paul immediately jumped overboard and struck out for shore. Fortunately, the longboat was tied astern. A crew jumped into it and set off in pursuit. It nearly capsized in the battle to get the giant aboard but finally he was subdued and his hands and feet tied.

  Back on board, the captain general ordered the chains replaced around his ankles.

  “Captain General,” Pigafetta said, “he is not a dog and has committed no crime. Why is he being punished?”

  “For his own salvation, Pigafetta. Sometimes it is necessary to be cruel to be kind.”

  “At least, let him be free of the chains. Let him live in the bosun’s store.”

  The captain general agreed to section off part of the bosun’s store and henceforth Paul lived in a cage but had to be kept on a leash when released for exercise and ablutions. Pigafetta’s next big task in communication was to make Paul understand it was in his own best interest not to attempt escape. Even lions and tigers and cannibals can be trained to obedience, although perhaps not to an understanding of Holy Communion – the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Holy Communion as a form of cannibalism became a preoccupation with Pigafetta.

  As Serrano had said, the river abounded in fish. Salted and smoked, they were added to the stores. There could never be too much food but they needed to eat it before it went rotten. The season of storms was not yet past and the captain general feared onshore winds like those that wrecked Santiago but the crucible of the mutiny, or perhaps the fact that he now had captains he could trust, caused him to call a conference in Trinidad’s main cabin. Captains Serrano, Barbosa and Mesquita together with pilots Albo, Carvalho, Gomez and San Martin gathered to hear his plan to carry on with the task the king had given him as soon as the weather appeared stable. It hardly needed explanation, as it had not varied since the day they left Seville. San Martin had survived the strappado’s fifth degree of persuasion and resumed his duties as pilot and fleet astrologer, straddling the line of demarcation between the science of navigation and the art of astrology.

  The only opposition came from Gomez, San Antonio’s pilot and formerly Trinidad’s.

  “Captain General, by observation, as you well know, we are already in latitude fifty-one degrees and still no strait has been found; only stormy seas, stony shores, ice, snow, sea wolves and cannibals. How do you persist in believing there is a passage to the South Sea? I suggest there are only two options: either take the easterly course by way of the Cape of Good Hope or else abandon the scheme altogether and return to Spain to refit and restock.”

  Pigafetta suspected the most likely fate awaiting Magellan if he returned to Spain was the same as that which befell Vasco Nunes de Balboa. He also suspected the captain general knew it and so did Gomez. Magellan’s victory over Cartagena was his own death knell. He could never return to Spain.

  Pigafetta expected the captain general to produce the Martellus map with its evidence of a passage at the end of the Dragon’s Tail, but he did not do so. Instead, he repeated the dogma, “This fleet is bound for the Spice Isles by way of El Paso and if El Paso does not lie around the next headland, then we will continue until we find it.

  “How far south do you propose to go, Captain General, leading the fleet into greater danger and discomfort?”

  “I propose to go on until we find it, Gómez. Seventy-five degrees of latitude will not be too far. You and your men are well clothed now, in cloaks and shoes of sealskin. We’ve had the whole winter for preparations. It’s time to go on. The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Be strong and of good courage, be not afraid or dismayed for the Lord thy God is with thee wherever thou goest.’”

  “Captain General, the bible can’t feed us when we starve or save us when we drown or warm us when we freeze.”

  “Did the children of Israel wander in the desert forty years in the grace of God? And was Moses not plagued by his own people, who had no faith?”

  “We don’t live in Old Testament times. This is fifteen twenty.”

  “Thoroughly modern rascals.”

  Was Gomez the successor to Cartagena and was another mutiny looming? Pigafetta pitied the next man to suggest turning back.

  The Alfonsine Tables predicted an eclipse of the Sun at eight minutes past ten o’clock on the morning of 11 October, 1520, Cadiz time. This could be another opportunity to determine the longitude and the captain general and all his pilots were on deck to observe the phenomenon, together with every other man in the armada. Pigafetta had never seen an eclipse of the Sun and he released Paul from his cage to let him watch too, keeping a line around his neck secured to a belaying pin.

  Magellan and the pilots observed the Sun’s altitude at frequent intervals. The Sun’s maximum altitude would allow calculation of the latitude but what they really wanted to know was the longitude, or time. The Moon’s shadow crept across the face of the Sun, taking a bite out of it, and twilight descended on the land. Birds in the trees went noisily to roost, the stars came out and Paul went mad, leaping and prancing and pointing at the sky, calling ‘Setebos! Setebos! until Pigafetta feared he would choke himself on the rope.

  The Sun became a dark ball with a ring of fire around it and then began to reappear as the Moon travelled across its surface and daylight re-emerged.

  The navigators were disappointed in the result of the experiment. It took about fifteen minutes for the Moon to cross the face of the Sun. In this latitude, fifteen minutes corresponds to about four degrees of longitude and that represents an error margin of nearly fifty Roman leagues. The eclipse gave no answer to the question, ‘How many leagues in a degree of longitude?’ or ‘How big is the world?’ God was still not releasing His secrets.

  Andres de San Martin, the navigator/astrologer, became highly agitated.

  “This is extraordinary. Not only do we have a solar eclipse, but we also have Venus in conjunction.”

  “What does that mean?” the captain general asked.

  “It means Sun, Moon, Earth and Venus are all in one straight line. In all my years, I have never seen such a thing.”

  “Is it good or bad?”

  “I don’t know, but it is certainly amazing. I shall have to consult the spheres.”

  The navigators had another concern. Observations showed that the variation of the compass needle, or the difference between the direction of the pole and the direction indicated by the compass, had changed by nearly ten degrees since Rio. That meant the ship did not sail in the direction the navigator thought when relying on the compass, a very plausible cause of shipwreck. The compass needed frequent calibration to adjust for the Earth’s invisible changing forces as they ventured farther into unknown seas where, no doubt, further mysterious forces lurked.

  Paul had curled up on deck, whimpering like a whipped dog. Pigafetta fetched him a ladle of water from t
he butt and decided to wait a while before putting him back in his cage. He had no words to explain solar eclipses to the Patagonian.

  Whether the omen revealed by San Martin was good or evil, the captain general decided to move on. With no Santiago to scout ahead, Magellan took the lead in Trinidad, southwards, ever southwards. Surely not far now. The coast had begun to trend westwards, which was a promising sign.

  It looked like a spit extending out into the sea from a low headland backed by sand hills, then cold savannah country typical of Patagonia and tall, snow-covered mountains in the distance. Magellan ordered a course alteration to clear the shoal, and opened up a large bay beyond. The cape, although not especially remarkable, was prominent enough to deserve a name and, this being the feast day of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, 21 October, that was the name it received.

  The idea of eleven thousand virgins was enough to make a man’s mouth water, Pigafetta thought, especially after being at sea so long, but he knew the story of the mass martyrdom was probably fictitious. What a waste if it had been true. The New World was already littered with the names of saints, mythical or otherwise. He wondered why Magellan didn’t call it Cape Sandspit or Cape Pointy Hill for the rocky mound just beyond the shoreline; something descriptive anyway. The shore was as barren as that at Port St Julian, with low shrubs and few trees.

  The wind had been a light offshore nor-westerly, unusual for afternoons, and often the precursor of a southerly buster. The bay offered some protection to the south-east and the captain general signalled his intention to the fleet and set about reducing sail. He rounded the cape and came to anchor in a depth of five fathoms. San Antonio, Victoria and Concepción followed suit. After dark, numerous fires were seen on the southern shore and Magellan named it Tierra del Fuego, or Land of Fire, which, at least, was an appropriate name Pigafetta thought.

  “Cannibals,” the captain general said. “We shall have to keep a lookout tonight.”

  Some time before midnight, Pigafetta was wakened not by cannibals but by cracking thunder and the sound of pelting rain. Grabbing his foul weather cape, he rushed on deck, where the captain general was already giving orders to set a staysail and mizzen and heave up the anchor. With a suddenness they had come to know and respect, the wind had blown up a gale of rain and sleet, not from the south-east, as expected, but from the north. If the wind continued veering it would put them on a lee shore – the same perilous condition that had caused the loss of Santiago. The captain general called all hands on deck. While men heaved on capstan bars to bring the ship up to her anchor and break it out of the mud, others fought flogging canvas to try and get some headway on her. Sheet lightning exploded in the sky and ripped the black night apart into blinding brilliance, followed by the crack of thunder louder than a hundred cannons.

  The anchor broke free and the ship got under way. The captain general, wrapped in a sealskin cloak like most of his crew, set course for the relative safety of the open sea guided only by the lodestone floating in the binnacle and illuminated by a flickering oil lamp that threatened to go out at any moment. Nothing could be seen of the other three ships and nothing would be seen before dawn, if then.

  The captain general told Pigafetta to go below but remained on deck himself all night. Dawn came slowly and only turned the black sky into grey soup. When Pigafetta returned on deck, the ship was sailing under staysail and spanker, relatively comfortable except for seas breaking over the low waist deck. Heading in a roughly east-sou-east direction, at least she was not in danger of running aground.

  Choosing his moment between the seas breaking aboard, Pigafetta made a dash up to the fo’c’sle to check on Paul. He found the giant sleeping peacefully, oblivious of the mayhem all around.

  As the rain began to ease, visibility improved until the smudgy shape of a black-hulled ship could be seen to windward and astern. It was not until early afternoon that she could be identified as Victoria. There was no sign of San Antonio or Concepción.

  By mid-afternoon the captain general deemed it safe to head back towards shore along with Victoria and to catch a couple of hours’ sleep, putting Punzarol on watch. By nightfall the wind had fallen to a breeze, the clouds had cleared and it was a beautiful clear, starry night and the ship went back to anchor in the same place as before, followed by Victoria. As the captain general had often impressed upon Pigafetta, the worst storm eventually blows over and, no matter how bad things might look, it was only necessary to persevere in order to triumph. By next day the weather had returned to what might be called normal – a light westerly wind by morning and an easterly sea breeze in the afternoon.

  There was still no sign of San Antonio and Concepción. Magellan wondered out loud whether San Antonio, with Gomez as her pilot, may have suffered a second insurrection and Mesquita his second mutiny, but such an explanation could not account for the absence of Concepción under John Serrano, even though Elcano, the mutineer, was still master there. What deep currents ran in that man?

  The Casa de Contratación, in its voluminous regulations, specified the procedure to be followed if ships in company lost contact with one another. A message was to be buried in a container on high ground and marked by a large cross on a tree or, if no trees were available then on a spar. The nearest trees here were a long way inland and a spar was selected from the stock that had been replenished at Port St Julian.

  They landed on a beach in the longboat and found the rotting carcase of a whale and native middens where giants had left the shells and bones of their feasts. There was also a cemetery where they had left their own bones, which looked the same as European bones only bigger. Pigafetta spent an interesting hour or so examining bones and shells and a skull, not in the least worried about ghosts. The captain general buried his message at the top of the midden and erected the spar flying the Habsburg eagle over it. The priest celebrated mass to establish the true faith in this land. With a few hail Maries, the whole of Patagonia from Cabo de Santa Maria to Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins was claimed in the name of his Most Excellent Majesty, Don Carlos, Holy Roman Emperor. Claimed from whom? Pigafetta wondered. He thought he should probably inform Paul as a matter of courtesy that his country had been appropriated by the king of Spain but he didn’t know the Patagonian words for Holy Roman Emperor. Or perhaps Don Carlos claimed the land from God, who undoubtedly held the title, but Moses showed rather more humility in similar circumstances.

  They returned aboard Trinidad and the captain general said tomorrow they would go in search of the missing ships but that afternoon San Antonio and Concepción appeared from the south west, as if from out of the land itself, with banners flying and cannons booming, and Pigafetta was astonished that they should appear from that direction and also agog as to what they had to celebrate with banners and cannon fire. He could barely restrain his impatience as the two ships furled sails, dropped their anchors and lowered boats, which approached the flagship all too slowly.

  “What is it?” the captain general called as soon as they came within earshot.

  “We have found it,” Serrano shouted back, waving a pennant with his own coat of arms, which was similar to Magellan’s. “El Paso! We have found it.”

  Magellan watched speechlessly as the boats approached and the two captains climbed aboard. The trumpet fanfare was omitted in the excitement.

  “We found it, Ferdinand,” Serrano cried again and threw his arms around the captain general. “El Paso. El Paso. We found El Paso!”

  All the men on deck gave a cheer and threw their hats in the air and some performed little two-step dances on the spot. El Paso!

  “This deserves a glass of wine at least.”

  “We couldn’t get the anchor up,” Serrano said in the cabin, “and we started dragging. I thought we were done for. ‘Oh no, it’s Santiago all over again,’ I thought. ‘Nothing to lose,’ I thought, so I said my prayers and had the cable cut. I got up a staysail and I heard breakers ahead, and then I could
see them, but then I saw a gap in the breakers and I thought, ‘Mother of God, it’s a river.’ So I steered for the gap and we shot through a channel but then it opened out and I thought, ‘This is a queer sort of river.’ Then there was another channel and we shot through that and out into another bay and I realised it couldn’t be a river. It was a big bay. Anyhow, I dropped the spare anchor and this time it held and pretty soon San Antonio arrived and also anchored up. Sheer Providence, Ferdinand. Sheer Providence. There is clear water down to the south. ”

  The captain general started laughing and then he started crying at the same time and tears rolled down his cheeks into his black beard and for a time he was not capable of speaking.

  “Clear water. Deep water,” Serrano said, “but I have to warn you we did not actually see a way out but that water had to be going somewhere. It doesn’t flow upstream like that.”

  “No,” Magellan said. “God has answered our prayers.”

  He crossed himself.

  “This is El Paso, the Dragon’s Tail.”

  Next morning the four ships weighed anchor and proceeded through the two sets of narrows and into the large bay beyond. Serrano and Mesquita had discovered that the channel forked into two equal arms, one to the southeast, the other southwest. The captain general sent San Antonio and Concepción into the south-easterly channel, himself taking the other with Victoria. The four ships were to rendezvous back at the fork in three days unless the channel proved a dead-end, in which case the ship should pursue the other channel.

  These were channels of extraordinary beauty between mountain barriers where rank upon rank of rugged ranges marched away into the distance, high peaks covered with snow catching the pale sunlight so they seemed to radiate their own orange glow. Waterfalls tumbled down forested hillsides over cliffs and into the sea and blue glaciers groaned and fractured, discharging ice into the channel with loud reports.

  The south west channel soon turned nor-westerly and narrowed so the captain general began to fear it would lead to nowhere, but deep water held right up to the cliffy banks. The wind came from right ahead, funnelling through the gorge, and the bluff-bowed vessels zigzagged through black water, tack upon tack, clawing for every inch of headway against the wind. Men held their breaths while the captain general, sculptured in stone with nerves of steel, stood on course towards the rock walls.

  “Captain General, mayn’t we come about?” Punzarol blurted.

  “Hold your peace!”

  Not until the bowsprit nearly grazed the bushes did he give the order to come about. Sheets let fly, braces were hauled, sails flogged and the valiant, faithful ship squared away on the other tack, only to repeat the manoeuvre against the other wall of the gorge.

  As the setting sun struck firelight from snowy peaks, Trinidad led the way into a sheltered cove and, the leadsmen finding no bottom, made fast with warps to trees ashore. Victoria followed suit. Here were found fat, juicy mussels, seals, birds that seemed to progress across the surface of the water by rowing with their wings and, when the nets were cast next day, good hauls of fish, and so the captain general called this place River of Sardines, with fish as long as your arm.

  After two days, Concepción joined Trinidad and Serrano reported he had explored two deep inlets that proved dead ends.

  “And what of San Antonio?”

  “I thought they must have come on ahead,” said Serrano in surprise. “We’ve seen nothing of them since the first day.”

  It grieved the captain general to give up hard-won miles of westing but he sent Duarte in Victoria all the way back to the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, Serrano in Concepción to explore the inlets recently discovered. Five days of fruitless search brought the three remaining ships together again and the captain general called a conference on the flagship.

  Since San Martin’s discovery of the conjunction of Venus with the eclipse of the Sun, the captain general had retained him aboard Trinidad in case he should find the significance of that event. It seemed to Pigafetta that Magellan‘s Christian faith had taken on an astrological tinge, nudged by mysterious forces like the changing variation of the compass needle, which had been a shock to him.

  To darken the main cabin, San Martin hung a curtain adorned with stars, crescent moons and signs of the zodiac over the stern gallery windows. In each corner he lit incense sticks and filled the room with the scent of rosemary and laurel, just like a church. He had borrowed a compass from the captain general and he placed it on the table beside a row of four lighted candles.

  When captains Serrano and Barbosa arrived in the smoke-filled room they both looked shocked.

  “We’re having a séance are we, brother-in-law?” Duarte said.

  “San Martin believes he might be able to solve the mystery of the missing ship.”

  They took their places around the table with San Martin at the head.

  “I have thought upon the eclipse of a few weeks ago and I can’t emphasize enough the importance of Venus in the line-up of the planets, which I have here represented by four candles. As I’m sure you know, Venus represents the feminine principle in the cosmos and is the opposite of Mars, which represents the masculine.”

  “The Sun and the Moon are similarly masculine and feminine opposites and an eclipse of the Sun by the Moon can be seen as an act of procreation, with the Moon absorbing the Sun’s vital force, just as the man plants the seed of life in the woman. In this case, with the involvement of Venus, we have an excess of the feminine and that leads to aberration.”

  “It is no accident that we have simultaneously detected an aberration in the compass, a change of about ten degrees in the variation since we left Rio. I illustrate that by placing the compass beside the line of the eclipse. If we had Mars in the line of the eclipse instead of Venus, then the compass variation would be in the opposite direction. Similarly, if I were to place the compass on the other side of the line of planets, then the variation would be in the opposite direction.”

  “It is clear that the compass is being deflected by an excess of feminine force emanating from the eclipse, which is the same as a deficit of masculine force. It is due to travelling so far in the southern hemisphere, which is the female hemisphere.”

  “So, what does that have to do with the missing ship, Pilot?” Duarte said.

  “Just this. The name of the missing ship is San Antonio, a masculine name. Your ship, Victoria, is feminine. This ship is Trinidad, the Trinity, neither masculine nor feminine. Since San Antonio has disappeared, we have a deficit of the masculine.”

  San Martin closed his eyes and covered his temples with his hands and swayed his upper body left and right.

  “I see San Antonio’s captain, Mesquita, lying on the deck with shackles on his ankles. I see blood on his face. He is not dead. His eyes are blinking but he is in pain.”

  “At least he’s still alive,” Duarte said.

  “I see more. I see the pilot, Gomez. He is standing over Mesquita and he is laughing.”

  “Gomez!” the captain general said. “I knew it.”

  At the moment of triumph this was the cruellest act of treachery yet. San Antonio was the biggest ship and held the greatest store of the fleet’s provisions. Her default was a serious matter affecting all the rest. The supply of biscuit was perilously low, the wine finished. Salted seal and fish were now almost the only source of food.

  “Brother-in-law,” Duarte said, “you can’t be expected to go on after this. You have acquitted yourself with honour. Let’s go back to Spain.”

  “No.”

  “The king will understand. It’s only prudent to call a halt.”

  “We go forwards, not backwards.”

  “You’re becoming quite obsessive about this, you know.”

  “Do you join the voices of the traitors?”

  “No, no, no, by no means, brother in law. You have my full support, whatever you decide.”

  “I decide to go on. If we have to eat the leather off the y
ards, we go on. If we have nothing left to drink but the urine of rats we go on. While ever there is breath left in this body we go on.”

  “I’m sure that’s the correct decision, brother-in-law,” Duarte said, and went back to his ship shaking his head.

  Magellan never doubted that this was El Paso, for the water was deep and clear and always salty but progress was slow against the wind, almost always from the west. The strongest evidence was the twice-daily ebb and flood of the tide under the invisible force of the Moon. By the grace of God there seemed to be a safe haven every few leagues; very deep so the ships tied up to trees on shore after each days’ sailing, which left the men exhausted from frequent tacking. All experienced seamen agreed that this was the most beautiful and terrible strait in the world and should be called Magellan’s Strait because the captain general found it when everyone said he could not.

  His problem was who to trust when so many had proved deceitful and once again he called upon the master-at-arms for a vital duty.

  “Espinosa, I believe we are approaching the end of El Paso and I want you to take the longboat and survey ahead. If you don’t find the exit in ten leagues come back and report to me.”

  “It shall be done, Captain General.”

  The ships lay over in a snug cove to await Espinosa’s report, which came the very next day. He returned from his expedition in the longboat foaming along before the westerly wind with a bone in her teeth, flags flying, Espinosa in the bows waving his arms and shouting at the top of his voice:

  “We’ve found it! We’ve found it! The South Sea.”

  Men hauling nets and coopers sealing barrels dropped their work and stared, then gave wild whoops of exultation. Only the captain general, standing like a statue on the quarterdeck, seemed unaffected by the news but Pigafetta was close enough to observe the tears rolling down his cheeks. It was the second time he had seen the captain general cry and it moved him deeply, but he dare not say so.