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Chapter 33
Eighteen Men
Sanlúcar and Seville
On 6 September 1522 the Victoria reaches Sanlúcar with eighteen men under Juan Sebastián Elcano. Of the 237 who had sailed, they were the only ones to come home in the ship that went all the way round.
Saturday, 6 September 1522
On Saturday, the 6th of September 1522, the Victoria enters the bay of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the same bay she left three years earlier. On board, Pigafetta writes, are “only eighteen men and the majority of them sick, all that were left of the sixty men who left Malucho. Some died of hunger; some deserted at the island of Timor; and some were put to death for crimes.”
He does the sum for his reader. “From the time we left that bay until the present day, we had sailed fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leguas, and furthermore had completed the circumnavigation of the world from east to west.”
That is one sentence, with no flourish. It is the first time in human history that anyone could write it.
Pigafetta was one of them. So was Elcano, their captain. So was Francisco Albo, the pilot whose log fixed their positions across the Pacific, and a handful of seamen, a gunner, a barber, a cabin boy grown into a man. They were Spaniards, Basques, Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, a German. Of the 237 who had sailed from that same bay, they were all that came home in the ship that went all the way round.
8–9 September 1522
On Monday, the 8th, the Victoria is towed up the Guadalquivir and anchors at the quay of Seville, and fires all her guns.
On Tuesday the eighteen come ashore. They walk through the city “in shirts and barefoot, each holding a candle,” to the shrine of Santa María de la Victoria, after which their ship was named, and then to Santa María de la Antigua, to keep the vow they made in the storm among the islands.
Seville turns out to watch. These men have seen things nobody in the city can imagine, and they look it: gaunt, sick, sunburned, barely able to walk.
In the ship’s hold there are some twenty-five tons of cloves. When they are sold, they will cover the whole cost of the expedition: five ships, three years, and more than two hundred men who did not come back.