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The voyage resolved itself into a game of mutinous cat-&-mouse, with starvation, disease and storms putting in their savage claws. When the big mutiny broke out at Bay St. Julien. Magellan made a real killing. He drew and quartered one Spanish captain, decapitated the second, marooned the third. Eight seamen were hung, 40 others imprisoned without food. For their edification Magellan offered the chained exhibit of a big friendly savage who. before he starved to death three weeks later, had almost chewed himself out of his shackles. When Magellan's cruelty threatened to alienate even his own bodyguard, he arranged to shipwreck the 40 mutineers on a reef, succeeded only in losing a ship. At the Strait of Magellan his food ship St. Anthony deserted, was never heard from again. Scurvy struck in the Pacific, rations shrank to leather ship fittings, sawdust, rats, dead comrades' giblets. After 98 days of this horror, having sighted only two barren islands, they reached fertile Guam. By this time his men had chalked 85 murders against Magellan. Out of the 540 days the voyage had lasted, only two weeks, when they feasted at St. Lucy's Bay on roast peccary, manioc bread, batata and native women, could have been called pleasant.
In the Ladrones (the Islands of the Thieves). Magellan christened the friendly but overcurious natives with a blood bath, burned their village. Gonzalo with three others had the bad luck to be ashore when the natives returned to attack the ship, which fled for good. Only one of the four to escape, he lived in a cave until his quick wit and civilized gadgets awed the natives into accepting him as a reborn god. From then on his Eden-like life was complicated by nothing more serious than the easily outwitted jealousy of a native chief and by the natives' insistence that he take a beautiful 14-year-old girl as his mistress to prepare her, according to strict native custom, for her husband. Gonzalo balked for moral reasons (senseless abstractions to the tribesmen) and because he really wanted to marry her. In time, having won enough prestige to make his own law. he settled down happily with his "tawny Venus'' and raised a family. Nearly eight years later, when a Spanish vessel appeared, he engineered a trap to kill its crew. But in a sudden burst of homesickness for Spain he swam to the ship to identify himself. A few hours on board was enough. That night he slid over the side and struck out happily for shore.