Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
demanding the surrender of his ship. The captain had no alternative
but to cut and run, leaving thirteen invaluable crewmen behind.
The leaking, undermanned vessel wallowed northwards along
the African coast. Every league nearer home was bought with more
death, more water shipped, more men collapsing with fatigue and
sickness at their posts. It seemed that success would be denied just
as it was becoming a possibility. The men urged Elcano to jettison
some of the cargo to lighten the ship. He refused, and for a compel-
ling reason: the spices on board the
Victoria
were valuable enough
to pay the costs of the expedition and yield a handsome profit. The
powerful courtiers and merchants who had backed Magellan would
not look kindly on a captain who had deliberately wasted their in-
vestment. And it would avail Elcano nothing to insist that he had
done so to save his ship and his men. So for two more months the
Victoria
pursued her uncertain course back to Spain.
On 8 September she came slowly to her berth in Seville. The
first task of Elcano and his men was to give thanks to God for their
deliverance and to pray for their dead companions. Barefoot, hag-
gard, most of them clad in tatters, they marched up from the har-
bour, carrying lighted candles, to the church of Santa Maria de la
Victoria. One observer said that each one looked 'more emaciated
than any old worn-out hack horse'. There were eighteen of them.
Another seventeen later returned from prison in the Moluccas and
the Cape Verde Islands. Three million years earlier, human beings
had appeared on this planet. Now the planet had been symbolically
claimed by their descendants.
In Seville and in their home towns and villages the returning
mariners were received as heroes. Like astronauts in our own gen-
eration, they were men who had endured the unspeakable and seen
the unimaginable, men with strange tales to tell to their wide-eyed
neighbours. Elcano himself was summoned to the royal court at Val-
ladolid, to be honoured by the king - but only after he had satis-
