Elcano and the First Circumnavigation of the World Book 2
Copyright© 2026 by Mark West
Chapter 13
We were 40 prisoners whose lives had been spared but who were forced to work at tasks that required strength rather than skill. We were divided into four groups of ten under the supervision of men who Magellan trusted. These men were his Master-at-Arms, Espinosa, maestres Baltasar Genovés from the Santiago and Juan Bautista de Punzurol from the Trinidad, and the German Anes who had been hired as a gunner, but promoted to maestre of the Victoria after the arrest and execution of Salamon. I was assigned to the group under the command of Baltasar Genovés. As his name implies, Genovés was from Genoa in Italy. Although the language we used for work was Castilian, where two people from the same region spoke together on private matters they used their own language. So, Elorriaga and I had normally spoken in Basque which was why I had used that language when I attempted to persuade him to join or not to impede the mutiny. Genovés and Punzurol were both Italians, so they used that language if they did not want us prisoners to understand what they were saying. However, they did not know about the time I had spent in Italy, and that I had learned enough of the language to understand them when they spoke privately.
From this I learned that there were two important tasks that would have to be addressed immediately. The first was that we needed to build shelter for the crews of the naos because they would need to live there while we carried out the second task – careening the naos. While we sailed, and especially while we were at anchor, small sea snails and other types of sea life attached themselves to the hulls of the ships. Over time, these small marine animals could cause great damage to the hull by boring holes in the wooden timbers. This was what had caused the leak on the San Antonio just after we had left the Mar Dulce and which had almost caused her to sink. The hull of a ship was usually scraped clean in a dry dock, but we did not have access to this facility as the nearest dry dock was in the Canary Islands. The only solution we had was to careen the ships.
Careening a ship involved a lot of hard labour. First, the ship had to be sailed into shallow water where all the heavy equipment that could be offloaded had to be removed and stored safely ashore. Then cables were attached to the masts and the nao was slowly pulled over so that it rested on one side. When the nao was securely in position on the shore, we had to remove all things that grew on the hull by scraping the timbers with iron implements. Antonio Varesa, the boy sailor who had been the object of Salamon’s desire, and of his death, was assigned to the crew where I worked. He had been a boy sailor on the Victoria and had gladly joined in the mutiny because of his hatred for what Magellan had done to his lover. He was also from Genoa, so it was natural for him to speak to Baltasar Genovés in their native language. By listening to them speak, I learned that the groups would be divided into those who would help to build cabins and those who would go inland in search of food.
I feared that the groups searching for food might encounter the race of savages that had cruelly killed and eaten the party of Solís, and that the same fate might befall them. So, I quickly told Baltasar Genovés that I had experience of building a cabin in which to pass the winter when I was shipwrecked on the Grand Banks. Of course, I told him this information in Castilian as I did not want to betray the fact that I could speak Italian. Luckily, I was believed and I was assigned to a group which had to build a cabin.
I explained to the others in my group what we needed to do to make the cabin proof against the winter weather. As the naos would be careened one at a time, we only needed to build two cabins for the crew of the ship that would be hauled on shore, as they could not sleep and cook on the nao when it was lying on its side, and two for the 40 men who had been judged to have taken part in the mutiny as we needed to shelter from the bitter cold of winter after we had spent a long day working outside without being clad in clothing that would protect us from the harsh weather.
The main problem with constructing a cabin in that place was that there were few trees growing nearby. When I was shipwrecked near the Grand Banks, we had an abundant source of trees nearby with which to construct our cabin. However, here the main feature was a grassy plain that stretched for kilometres, but very few trees. We needed wood to build the cabins, so the best solution was to use some of the Brazilwood that the people who lived in the camp at Rio de Janeiro had given to us when they saw that we were not going to stay with them. This wood is valuable in Europe and that is why the Portuguese fleet visits there once a year to load their ships with it and take it back to Portugal to sell. But for us, the wood was used to build the cabins.
As the wood was already cut, it did not take long to construct the four cabins using the same technique as we had used in that winter so many years before. We began by building two cabins so that we would have some place warm to sleep at night. Each cabin became the sleeping quarters for 20 men who had been sentenced to hard labour after the mutiny ended. With the assistance of the carpenters of the fleet, we managed to build both cabins in two weeks as they were only intended to be places where we could sleep sheltered from the cold weather. When we had built the rafters, we covered them with a double layer of sailcloth to keep us dry in case of rain. There was no fireplace but the heat produced by 20 bodies lying on the dirt floor kept us from feeling too cold.
When we had finished building the first two cabins, we then constructed two more for the crew of the ship that was going to be careened. And when those were ready, we were sent to begin the task of careening the naos and cleaning their hulls. In total, we spent one month in building rough cabins to be used as shelters by about 80 men at any time. Meanwhile, two other groups had gone to look for food. When they returned with some strange sheep that had very long necks we could not believe that such animals existed. This was indeed a wondrous place where we had first seen the geese that we had to skin rather than pluck their feathers, and now we ate the meat of sheep with very long necks.