Chapter 32
The Lost Day
The Cape Verde Islands
At the Cape Verde Islands the men learn it is Thursday, though by Pigafetta’s careful diary it is Wednesday. Sailing always west, following the sun, they had lost a day.
May–June 1522
For two months the Victoria sails northwest up the Atlantic, without a single stop for fresh food or water. The rice runs down. The water in the casks goes foul. Twenty-one men die in that time.
When the dead are dropped over the side, Pigafetta notices something he cannot explain. The Christians sink face upwards, looking at the sky. The Indians from the Moluccas and Timor sink face down. He records it as a fact and leaves it there. It is perhaps the grimmest detail in the book: how many times he must have watched to be sure.
“Had not God given us good weather,” he writes, “we would all have perished of hunger.”
The crew are too few now to work the ship properly. The pumps never stop. The men who can still stand stand watches for those who cannot. In the end, “constrained by our great extremity,” Elcano decides he has no choice. He will have to put in at a Portuguese island, and hope.
Wednesday, 9 July 1522
On Wednesday the 9th of July they reach Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, a Portuguese colony. They send the boat ashore for food with a story ready. They have come from the Americas, they say. Their foremast broke at the equator, and while they were repairing it, their captain-general went on to Spain with the other two ships. With that tale and some trade goods, they get two boatloads of rice.
Before the boat goes, Pigafetta gives the men an errand. Ask the people on shore what day it is.
It is Thursday, they are told.
On the Victoria it is Wednesday. “We were greatly surprised,” Pigafetta writes, “for it was Wednesday with us, and we could not see how we had made a mistake; for as I had always kept well, I had set down every day without any interruption.”
He is right. He has not made a mistake. The answer, he learns later, is that “as the voyage had been made continually toward the west and we had returned to the same place as does the sun,” they have lost a day. Every day they sailed west, the sun rose a few minutes later for them than for anyone left behind. Added up over three years, it came to exactly one day.
July 1522
The boat goes back for more rice. This time it does not return. The Portuguese have seized it with thirteen men. As Pigafetta later hears in Spain, one of the men told the Portuguese that their captain was dead, and that they were not going to Spain at all. The Portuguese quickly worked out where the ship had really come from.
Aboard the Victoria they see Portuguese caravels getting ready, and they do not wait. They raise sail and flee, leaving their thirteen shipmates behind.
Now there are only about twenty men left, many of them sick, to work a leaking ship through the last two thousand miles. They pump day and night, taking turns at the handles. The water gains on them anyway.
They sail northwest, far out towards the Azores, to come at Spain from the open ocean, where no Portuguese squadron is likely to be waiting. Nobody records those last eight weeks in any detail. There was nothing to write about but the pumps, the hunger, and the horizon.