Another snippet from “Over the Edge of the World” by Laurence Bergreen. I can’t think of a book I’ve read in recent years that has left me more agape, more vexed, and more maddened than this one. I’ve tossed this book aside on more than one occasion, muttering, “Oh, Magellan!” in any number of ways: awed, frustrated, angry. I mean, the man is DEAD and I still feel personally invested in his behavior! He is driving me absolutely batty.
You MUST read this book, if for no other reason than to be able to say, “At least I’m not Magellan.” Believe it or not, this is actually comforting to me right now.
Anyway …..
Last time out, we had the whole big mutiny hoodang. Well, prepare, yo’selves, peeps, as this post will surely be the hoodangiest of ’em all so far.
Now Magellan was feeling a bit put out about the challenge to his authority and the hate and all, so what’s a coup’ed out capitan to do?
Bring da pimp hand, peeps, fo’ shizzle.
First of all, Magellan had to tidy up one messy bit of business: what to do with the body of Victoria’s captain who’d laughed at Magellan’s order to surrender and gotten himself killed for it. Well, Magellan did what anybody in his shoes would have done, naturally, and had his body drawn and quartered, then spitted and displayed, a big ol’ bloody warning of the potential fate of traitors and other annoying people. But, you never know, maybe it was done tastefully, with draping and umbrellas. Like Christo.
Shortly after all this rumpus and death and artistic expression, Magellan decided to throw a secular inquisition party, hosted by his cousin as judge — who, by the way, had been promoted to captain of one of the ships, over the heads of several more qualified men. He was not a very popular fellow and no one signed his yearbook in the end.
There were a few obvious instigators of the Easter mutiny. We’ll get to them later, but this inquisition was to assess who, among the common riffraff, was complicit with the rebel leaders. After two weeks of deliberating, Magellan and cousin were having a difficult time trying to find overt acts of disloyalty discrete from the overall “wrong place at the wrong time” status of many of the sailors. So Magellan did what anybody in his shoes would have done, naturally, and chose two hapless sailors to be his scapegoats.
Now, barbaric methods of torture had made a huge splash back in 1478 during that festival of friendliness known as the Spanish Inquisition. I imagine little random joes heard ghastly whispers in muddy alleys and whispered to the next joe who whispered to the next joe until lots of little random joes knew lots more than they should about barbaric methods of torture. Of course, this is all just part of “Tracey’s Theory of The Telephone Game and its Role in Human History,” but still ….
All that to say that through one way or another, Magellan was well-versed in the ways of torture — and apparently, employing torture was well within the authority bestowed on him by King Charles of Spain, who’d granted him the “power of rope and knife.”
And, boy, did he use it.
Scapegoat#1 was treated to a gentle, early Pilates limb-lengthening known as the strappado. Bergreen describes it:
The strappado was administered in five stages of increasing agony. In the first degree, the victim was stripped, his wrists were bound behind his back, and he was threatened until he confessed. If he refused, he was subjected to the second degree. In it, the victim’s arms were raised behind his back by a rope attached to a pulley secured overhead, and he was lifted off his feet for a brief period of time, and given another chance to confess. If he still refused, he faced the third degree of the strappado, in which he was suspended for a longer period of time, which dislocated his shoulders and broke his arms. Once again, he was given another chance to confess. If he still failed to make a satisfactory confession, he was subjected to the fourth degree: The victim was suspended and violently jerked, which inflicted excruciating pain. Few victims of a methodically administered strappado lasted beyond this point without confessing. In certain cases, there was a fifthe degree as well. In the final phase of the strappado, weights were attached to the victim’s feet and they were often heavy enough to tear the limbs from his tormented body.
(Scapegoat #1) suffered the full five stages of the strappado.
In the final phase of Magellan’s strappado, cannonballs were secured to the man’s feet. He survived the torment. He actually survived.
Unbelievably, Scapegoat #2’s punishment was even worse. It’s believed he may have suffered a variation of a procedure called The Wooden Horse, where a victim is “secured with metal bars to a hollowed-out bench, his feet higher than his head.”
Begreen continues the quote from an early account that describes this torture:
“As he is lying in this posture, his arms, thighs, and shins are tied round with small cords or strings, which being drawn with screws at the proper distances from each other, cut into his very bones, so as to no longer be discerned. Besides this, the torturer throws over his mouth and nostrils a thin cloth, so that he is scarce able to breathe through them, and in the meanwhile, a small stream of water like a thread, not drop by drop, falls from on high upon the mouth of the person lying in this miserable condition, and so easily sinks down the thin cloth to the bottom of his throat so that there is no possiblility of breathing, his mouth being stopped with water, and his nostrils with cloth, so that the poor wretch is in the same agony as persons ready to die and breathing their last. When this cloth is drawn out of his throat, as it often is, that he may answer to the questions, it is all wet with water and blood, and is like pulling his bowels through his mouth.”
Whatever was done to Scapegoat #2 beyond this, he did not survive his ordeal.
After the torture of the scapegoats, forty other men were sentenced to death as well. But since the expedition needed the men in order to continue, Magellan, in a fit of mercy, I guess, commuted the sentences of the condemned men to hard labor.
He was not so compassionate towards the rebel leader and his servant. The mutiny’s leader was sentenced to death. The leader’s servant was offered these tasty options: lovely cake or yummy pie.
Oh, all right. It was really: kill or be killed. Whatever, okay? Potato-Potahto.
So the servant chose “kill” and was forced to stand on the deck of the ship, wielding a sword, and cut his master’s head off. He did so, but not before politely asking the man for forgiveness while his head was still attached. Apparently, though, the master was feeling a tad churlish at the thought of becoming a two-piece and withheld forgiveness from his servant executioner.
After death, he was drawn and quartered and added to Magellan’s grisly gallery of “This Could Happen To You, Too, Popeyes.”
Only days later, a sailor who had made an earlier, failed attempt at mutiny was discovered to be conspiring yet again, this time with a priest. Magellan wanted them executed, but couldn’t bring himself to condemn a priest to death. So he did what anybody in his shoes would have done, naturally, and devised this alternate punishment: When the fleet departed Port Saint Julian after their winter respite, the two men would be left behind to fend for themselves.
Magellan’s resolve on this matter did not waver. When the fleet weighed anchor several weeks later, the two men were abandoned on a small island with no boat or firewood. They were given small rations of bread and wine, but apart from that, they were simply left to their new lives, in the middle of nowhere, with volatile natives living nearby. As the ships sailed out to the open ocean, the two men could be seen, prostrate on the shore, begging, begging, begging for mercy.
(In the next Magellan Monday ….. hmm, I’m just guessing now …. Magellan will piss you off??)
