Page:The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 (Volume 01).djvu/321

 run short in future, provided that they used them for necessity and for the preservation of health, and not for pleasure and luxury: that nothing had yet been done worthy of much admiration, nor such as could give them a reasonable ground for returning; that the Portuguese not only yearly, but almost daily, in their voyages to the east, made no difficulty about sailing twelve degrees south of the tropic of Capricorn: what had they then to boast of, when they had only advanced some four degrees south of it; that he, for his part, had made up his mind to suffer anything that might happen, rather than to return to Spain with disgrace; that he believed that his companions, or at any rate, those in whom the generous spirit of Spaniards was not totally extinct, were of the same way of thinking: that he had only to exhort them fearlessly to face the remainder of winter; that the greater their hardships and dangers were, the richer their reward would be for having opened up for the emperor a new world rich in spices and gold.

Magellan thought that by this address he had soothed and encouraged the minds of his men, but within a few days he was troubled by a wicked and disgraceful mutiny. For the sailors began to talk to one another of the long-standing ill-feeling existing between the Portuguese and the Castilians, and of Magellan's being a Portuguese; that there was nothing that he could do more to the credit of his own country than to lose this fleet with so many men on board: that it was not to be believed that he wished to find the Moluccas, even if he could, but that he would think it enough if he could delude the emperor for some years by holding out vain hopes, and that in