Victoria (ship)

Did You Know?

• The Victoria was named after the Minim convent of Our Lady of Victory of Triana in Seville, where Magellan took his oath of allegiance to Charles I.
• After the circumnavigation, Victoria was repaired, bought by a merchant shipper, and sailed for almost another fifty years before being lost with all hands on a trip from the Antilles to Seville about 1570.

Construction

The Victoria was built at the shipyards of Ondarroa in Biscay, though for a long time it was thought to have been constructed in Zarautz. Originally called Santa Maria, it was owned by pilot Domingo Apallua and his son Pedro Arismendi. A notarial document from 1518 shows the ship had previously been used for trade between Castile and England. Royal Castilian officials bought it for 800 gold ducats, a price the owners accepted reluctantly. Magellan renamed the vessel Victoria after the Santa María de la Victoria chapel in Seville where he prayed.

Crew

The voyage began with about 265 men across five ships; only 18 returned alive on Victoria. Luis de Mendoza was her initial captain. On 2 April 1520, after establishing a settlement at Puerto San Julian in Patagonia, a mutiny involving three captains broke out. Mendoza and Gaspar Quesada, captain of Concepcion, were executed and their remains hung on gallows on the shore; Juan de Cartagena, captain of San Antonio, was marooned. After Magellan's death on 27 April 1521 at the Battle of Mactan, Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão were elected leaders. On 1 May 1521, Rajah Humabon of Cebu invited most of the crew to a banquet ashore, where they were killed or poisoned, including Barbosa and Serrão. Pilot João Carvalho then became captain of Victoria, but near Borneo in August he was deposed and Juan Sebastián Elcano took command for the remainder of the expedition. Many men died of malnutrition and scurvy. Three survivors left written records: Elcano wrote a letter to the Emperor; Francisco Albo kept a log book; and Antonio Pigafetta wrote a detailed first-person account later published as 'Le voyage et nauigation'.

Voyage

On 21 December 1521, Victoria sailed alone from Tidore in Indonesia after the other ships left due to lack of rations. The ship was in terrible condition, with torn sails and kept afloat only by continuous pumping. It returned to Spain with a shipload of spices whose value exceeded the cost of the entire original fleet.

Legacy

A vignette of the ship forms the logo of the Hakluyt Society, a London-based text publication society founded in 1846. A replica was built in 1992 for the Universal Exposition in Seville and is now operated by the Fundación Nao Victoria; between 2004 and 2006 it repeated the original journey, though taking a slightly different route. To commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the first circumnavigation, the Fundación Nao Victoria commissioned another replica, launched on 11 February 2020, which arrived in Seville on 9 March 2020 for permanent exhibition next to the Torre del Oro. In 2006, an entrepreneur from Punta Arenas began a project to build a replica for Chile's bicentennial; it was completed by 2011.