The Roteiro of "the Genoese Pilot" is one of ten surviving accounts of Magellan's voyage by a crew member, and it covers the fate of the Trinidad and crew after Antonio Pigafetta—who wrote the expedition's primary account—departed Tidore to return to Seville. Lord Stanley of Alderley translated this version and used it as the first account he presented in his 1874 collection on Magellan.
The Roteiro's story
While some historians have discounted the Roteiro's value—"humdrum," "boring"—it opens an interesting subplot in the Magellan story. The account was likely written by Juan Bautista de Punzorol (Giovanni Battista di Polcevera) or León Pancaldo (Pancado) (Torodash, 1972: 319; Morison, 1974: 322). The two Genoese signed on to the Trinidad, Bautista as master and Pancaldo as an able seaman. After the Trinidad and Victoria fled Brunei, Bautista became the Trinidad's pilot with Pancaldo assisting. It was the two of them who tried to navigate the flagship, commanded by Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, back across the Pacific but northward, heading ultimately toward the Isthmus of Panama. There, they knew, Spain was beginning construction of ships on the Pacific coast to explore Balboa's South Sea without need for a strait (Joyner 1992: 220–26).
With no knowledge of the monsoon winds in the Philippine Sea and beyond, the pilots and crew struggled from the beginning. Before long, the crew ran low on provisions, and cold temperatures and scurvy began to take a toll. The Trinidad sailed to a point in the North Pacific roughly 43° N and 165° E of Greenwich—well east of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, where a severe storm served a final blow. The resulting damage was severe enough that Espinosa and his officers were forced to turn around and make their way back to the Moluccas (Joyner 1992: 220–26). The Trinidad had departed Tidore with fifty-four European crew members; thirty-three of them died from scurvy and starvation during a half-year journey (Joyner, 1992: 222–25).
Desperate, Espinosa sought help from the Portuguese, sending a letter to Ternate, the nearby island sultanate where the Portuguese had set up a base. A Portuguese fleet commanded by Antonio de Brito had recently arrived, and the Trinidad's surviving crew were forced to surrender to Brito in November 1522. Brito confiscated the ship's papers, books, and charts, including the Roteiro.
Earlier, Brito was on Java when he received news that two Spanish ships had visited Tidore—likely a surprise at a time when ships the Venetians were the only other Europeans venturing into the Indian Ocean. Brito's suspicion that the ships were from Magellan's fleet were soon confirmed, making him the first European official in the region to learn of Magellan's Pacific crossing—a key milestone in the first circumnavigation, showing that sailing westward from Europe to eastern Asia was in fact possible (Joyner, 1992: 224). Brito used the Roteiro in his report back to Portugal's King Manuel (Torodash, 1972: 319).
Bautista and Pancaldo
Brito planned to execute the Trinidad's officers following the decapitation of Pedro de Lorosa, a merchant who joined the fleet at Tidore. But Brito had second thoughts and sent seventeen prisoners to Malacca, keeping Bautista, Pancaldo, and another crewman behind on Ternate, where he expected a fever outbreak would kill them. He later shipped them to Malacca with orders that they be executed, but in Malacca they were sent on to Cochin, on the Indian coast. There, the two were befriended by Genoese sailors who stowed them away aboard a Portuguese ship, but they were caught at sea and removed in irons at Mozambique (Joyner, 1992: 241–243).
Bautista died in Mozambique in 1526. As for Pancaldo, he stowed away on a ship bound for Portugal and was allowed to return to Spain in 1527 after some time in a Lisbon prison. He was one of only four crew who sailed on the Trinidad from Tidore to return to Spain.
Over the next few years, Pancaldo turned down offers to sail with Portuguese and French expeditions and settled briefly with his wife in Genoa. But in 1537, he returned to sea as captain of the Santa Maria, an old Genoese cargo vessel loaded with merchandise, bound for the Spanish in Peru—a use for the newly discovered strait (Joyner, 1992: 241–243).
But the heavily laden ship proved unable to navigate the strait, so Pancaldo returned up the South American coast, where the ship stumbled upon the new settlement of Santa Maria del Buen Aire (Buenos Aires).
Santa Maria proved an ominous name for Bautista's ship, the Santa Maria, for there it ran aground, and Bautista spent his final years on the Patagonian coast he had explored with Magellan two decades earlier, dying there in 1540 (Joyner, 1992: 285-286).
The document
Charles Nowell does not include the Roteiro in his collection of three Magellan accounts, Magellan's Voyage Around the World. Nowell called the work “informative but uninteresting, as he tells his story in a humdrum way,” and Martin Torodash in his "Magellan Historiography" goes further, saying "Nothing very useful can be gained from . . . this rather boring account" (Nowell, 1962: 6; Torodash 1972: 319).
However, the Genoese Pilot continues the epic told in Antonio Pigafetta's journal, providing an eye-witness account of the Trinidad's—and its crew's—fate after the Victoria separated from it on December 21, 1521.
Read the Genoese Pilot's Account of Magellan's Voyage here and see Stanley's full collection, The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, at Project Gutenberg and on the Internet Archive, on Wikisource.
By John Sailors, Enrique's Voyage.
Sources
- Pigafetta, Antonio, Baron Henry Edward John Stanley of Alderley. The First Voyage Around the World by Magellan. United States: Franklin, 1963, 246-47, from Gaspar Correa's account.
- Torodash, Martin. "Magellan Historiography." United States: 1971.
- Joyner, Tim. Magellan. Camden, United States: International Marine, 1992.
- Nowell, Charles Edward. Magellan’s Voyage Around the World: Three Contemporary Accounts. United Kingdom: Papamoa Press, 2018.
- Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European discovery of America. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Copyright 2025, by John Sailors. All rights reserved.