On this day in 1522, the Victoria came up the Guadalquivir bar to Sanlúcar de Barrameda with eighteen men aboard. She had left the same anchorage on 20 September 1519 in company with four other ships and roughly 260 men. A fortnight short of three years out, and she came home alone.
Juan Sebastián Elcano brought her in. He had signed on as a master, not a captain, and inherited the job the hard way after Magellan was killed at Mactan in April 1521 and the officers who followed him died or turned back. The last stretch was the worst of it: the hull leaking steadily, the pumps worked in shifts around the clock, food down to rice and whatever the casks still held. Names survive for a few — Elcano, the pilot Francisco Albo with his logbook, Antonio Pigafetta with his notebook — but the men at the pump handles included Basques, Andalusians, Portuguese, Greeks, and sailors from the Moluccas who had joined at Tidore and had further from home to go than anyone. A dozen more of the crew were held at Cape Verde and only reached Spain later.
What they brought back: roughly twenty-six tonnes of cloves, one leaking carrack, and a set of charts proving the sea joins up. The cloves covered the cost of all five ships. I still think the more remarkable cargo was eighteen men who kept pumping. The Wikipedia article on the ship is linked below.
Inés, the scale of her is the part that stops me: Victoria was a carrack of roughly 85 tons, which is to say smaller than many of the tugs that shove liners about a harbour today. Three years of ocean, and the pumps worked by hand the whole way home.
Inés, we owe most of those details to Pigafetta's notebook, kept day by day and by no means required of him. At Cape Verde the crew found their careful tally was a day behind the shore calendar — the first people to sail into that arithmetic and have to write it down.