Chapter 28
The Parting
Tidore, the Moluccas
As the ships make sail from Tidore, the Trinidad springs a leak. She stays behind for repairs, and the Victoria, with sixty aboard under Juan Sebastián Elcano, sets off west for home alone.
18 December 1521
On Wednesday morning the fleet is ready. The kings of Tidore, Gilolo and Bacan and a prince of Ternate all come out to escort them. The Victoria makes sail and stands off a little, waiting for the Trinidad.
The Trinidad cannot raise her anchor. And then she begins to leak, badly, from somewhere in her bottom. The Victoria returns to anchor, and they start unloading the flagship to find the leak. The water, Pigafetta writes, is “rushing in as through a pipe,” but no one can find where it comes in. All that day and the next they work the pumps, and it does no good.
The king comes at once. He sends five of his men into the water, and they stay under for more than half an hour without finding the hole. He sends for three men from the far end of the island who can stay under longer. They dive with their hair loose, hoping the current will draw it towards the leak. They stay down a full hour and still find nothing.
Then the king, weeping, asks who will now go “to Spagnia to my sovereign, and give him news of me.”
19–20 December 1521
A decision is made. The Victoria will leave now, while the east winds hold, and sail west round Africa. The Trinidad will stay, be repaired, and when the west winds come, sail east across the Pacific to Darien, on the isthmus of Panama, which Spain already holds.
The king says he has two hundred and twenty-five carpenters to do the work, and that he will treat all who stay as his own sons. He says it so earnestly, Pigafetta writes, “that he made us all weep.”
On the Victoria, they worry that the ship is too heavily loaded and will open up at sea, so they take out sixty quintals of cloves. Some of her men ask to stay behind on Tidore. They fear, Pigafetta says, that the ship will not last the voyage to Spain, “but much more for fear lest they perish of hunger.”
They have crossed one ocean already. They know what the next one might cost.
Saturday, 21 December 1521
On St. Thomas’s day, the king brings them the two pilots they have paid to guide them out of the islands. The men staying behind spend the morning writing letters to carry home to Spain, and the Victoria does not leave until noon.
Then the two ships fire their guns in farewell, “and it seemed as though they were bewailing their last departure.” The men who are staying row alongside for a little way. Then, “with many tears and embraces, we departed.”
João Carvalho stays with the Trinidad and fifty-three men. On the Victoria, Pigafetta writes, “we comprised forty-seven men and thirteen Indians.” Her captain is Juan Sebastián Elcano.
Of the five ships that left Seville, one is now left to finish the voyage. She is small, old, leaking and dangerously overloaded, her hold packed with cloves. Ahead lie the Banda Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Cape of Good Hope, the whole length of the Atlantic, and every Portuguese fort and fleet between here and home.