Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (43 page)

The ship was
Concepción,
one of the three vessels that had escaped the massacre at Cebu the previous day. Since then, the survivors had tried to navigate the three large vessels around the uncharted shoals and islands of the Philippines, but they soon discovered that they were hopelessly shorthanded. To add to their problems,
Concepción’s
master, Juan Sebastián Elcano, complained that shipworms infested the hull. Magellan, had he been alive, would have ordered the men to undertake arduous repairs, but the survivors adopted a more pragmatic approach and decided to burn the ship to prevent it from falling into the hands of an enemy who might use it against them. The crew transferred the contents of
Concepción
—her provisions, rigging, sails, fittings, weapons, and navigational devices—to the two other ships,
Trinidad,
still the flagship of

the fleet, and
Victoria.
And then, on the night of May 2, 1521, the empty ship was set ablaze in symbolic, and wholly unconscious, expiation of the fleet’s sins.

A
hasty vote among the sailors placed Espinosa in command of
Victoria,
while João Lopes Carvalho, the Portuguese pilot, won election as the new Captain General. Elcano, the master of
Victoria,
silently cursed the new Captain General, who might be a talented pilot but was incapable of imposing discipline on the unruly fleet. In Brazil, Carvalho had attempted to bring his mistress on board; although he did not succeed, their child had been traveling with the fleet ever since. Elcano had no respect for a leader who set such a poor example for the others.

The new command placed Pigafetta in a vulnerable position. He had always identified himself as a Magellan loyalist, but the Captain General’s inner circle—his slave, Enrique; his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo; his cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita; and his brotherin-law, Duarte Barbosa—had all perished or disappeared. Only Pigafetta survived. He believed he would continue to serve as the expedition’s chief chronicler, as well as its chief interpreter, because he alone had troubled to make a methodical study of the Malay tongue. He lacked Enrique’s facility with it, but he knew how to make himself understood and obtain information. Equally important, he was familiar with Filipino customs, ranging from
casicasi
to
palang
, and could make himself useful as the expedition’s emissary to the strange and changeable islanders all around them. Carvalho and the newly elected leaders of the expedition agreed, and Pigafetta’s role in the post-Magellan era was, if anything, enhanced. As for his diary, he continued to maintain it, and to keep its contents to himself.

After the multiple tragedies the armada had suffered in the Philippines, commercial considerations ruled their actions. Never again would they erect crosses or insist on mass conversions. Everything was different now. Knowing they were lucky to be alive, the men turned their attention to reaching the Spice Islands, where they hoped to find safety, supplies, and the precious commodity they had sailed halfway around the world to find.

Carvalho faced the task of leading the fleet’s two remaining ships southward through the archipelago to the Moluccas, but the arrival of the rainy season in the Philippines and its storms often made navigation next to impossible. They had adapted to sailing over vast stretches of open water, but now they had to thread their way through a labyrinth of islands. For the short distances and intricate maneuvering involved, they needed a reliable map or, failing that, a guide familiar with these waters, but after their horrific experiences on Cebu and Mactan, the sailors were reluctant to call at strange islands and ask for help. Who could guess the real intentions of the islanders lurking in the shadows of the palm trees?

Occasionally, the fleet was approached by
balanghai
powered by rowers chanting in unison. Whenever possible, Pigafetta asked the rowers for directions to the Moluccas, but the others kept their relations with the islanders to a bare minimum.

C
arvalho, aided by Albo, the pilot, veered from one island to another, following a meandering but generally southerly course through the labyrinth of the Philippine archipelago to the Moluccas. Albo’s methodical record, barely mentioning the ambush at Cebu, tracked the fleet’s wanderings, as if the ships were wounded beasts in search of a healing sanctuary.

They soon encountered an island populated by Negritos, aboriginal pygmies with dark skin, as their name indicates. After an unsuccessful hunt for food, the fleet approached a towering island clad in dense foliage cut by steep channels and waterfalls flowing from hidden springs. Here and there the shore suddenly cleared to offer an inviting, if narrow, stretch of beach. This was Mindanao. The idyllic setting soothed the chastened yet hard-bitten crew, who dropped their guard long enough to establish friendly relations with a local ruler named Calanoa, who appeared eager to make peace. Calanoa, Pigafetta wrote, “drew blood from his left hand marking his body face, and the tip of his tongue with it as a token of closest friendship, and we did the same.” Despite his offer of friendship, he was unable, or unwilling, to feed the crew.

After the ceremony, Calanoa invited Pigafetta ashore as a sign of respect, but Pigafetta does not explain why he alone received this honor. Perhaps his facility with the Malay language had impressed the chieftain, or perhaps the invitation gave him an opportunity to prove his usefulness to Carvalho and the other leaders of the expedition. Pigafetta boldly accepted the invitation, even after witnessing the recent massacre. One explanation for Pigafetta’s sudden courage might be that Calanoa had put him at ease; another might be that he had no intention of returning to the fleet, that he had seen enough of death and disaster at sea and preferred to live out his days as an honored guest among the islanders and, especially, their beautiful women.

“We had no sooner entered a river than many fishermen offered fish to the king”—so food was available after all. “Then the king removed the clothes which covered his privies, as did some of his chiefs; and began to row while singing past many dwellings which were upon the river. Two hours after nightfall we reached the king’s house. The distance from the beginning of the river where our ships were to the king’s house was two leagues.” Isolated from his crew mates, Pigafetta was now at the mercy of his hosts, but if he felt fear, he left no trace in his diary.

“When we entered the house, we came upon many torches of cane and palm leaves,” he continued. “The king with two of his chiefs and two of his beautiful women drank the contents of a large jar of palm wine without eating anything. I, excusing myself as I supped, would only drink but once.” It was a scene familiar to Pigafetta, the drinking, and feasting, and women; he might have been back on Limasawa, in the days before the massacre. At his ease, and inquisitive as ever, he observed food preparations: “They first put in an earthen jar . . . a large leaf lining the entire jar. Then they add the water and the rice, and after covering it allow it to boil until the rice becomes as hard as bread, when it is taken out in pieces.” (In recording this recipe, Pigafetta became the West’s first guide to Oceanic cuisine.) After the meal, the chieftain offered Pigafetta two mats for sleeping, one fashioned of reeds, the other of palm leaves. “The king and his two women went to sleep in a separate place, while I slept with one of the chiefs.”

In the morning, Pigafetta explored the island, devoting special attention to huts, whose fittings gleamed with gold. Gold seemed to be on display everywhere; there was, he said, “an abundance of gold. They showed us certain small valleys, making signs to us that there was as much gold there as they had hairs, but that they had no iron or tools to mine it, and moreover that they would not take the trouble to do so.”

Over a midday meal of rice and fish, Pigafetta courteously asked Calanoa for an audience with the queen. The chieftain agreed, and the two of them trudged up a steep hill to pay their respects to her. “When I entered the house, I made a bow to the queen, and she did the same to me, whereupon I sat down beside her. She was making a sleeping mat of palm leaves. In the house there were a number of porcelain jars and four bells . . . for ringing. Many male and female slaves who served her were there.”

If Pigafetta had ever considered seeking refuge on this island with its abundant gold, the temptation waned. After his audience with the queen, he clambered aboard a waiting
balanghai
, along with the chieftain and his retinue, and they glided along the serene river toward the ocean. When he least expected it, the tranquil surroundings were disturbed by an appalling spectacle: “I perceived to the right, on a small hill, three men hanging from a tree which had its branches cut off.” Once again, he was struck by the stark contrast between the splendor of the setting, the peaceful, generous, and open nature of the inhabitants, and the macabre reminders of brutality that lurked just out of sight. Who were these people, Pigafetta asked, and why did they meet such a gruesome ending?

“Malefactors and thieves,” Calanoa grimly explained. The
balanghai
approached
Trinidad,
and Pigafetta bid farewell to his hosts and rejoined the fleet. It had been, over all, a pleasant interlude, with the exception of the nightmarish vision of the men hanging from bare trees.

S
till unable to pinpoint the Spice Islands, the fleet weighed anchor “and laying our course west southwest, we cast anchor at an island not very large and almost uninhabited.” They were veering seriously off course, heading west into the Sulu Sea, toward China, rather than south to the Spice Islands. In its wanderings, the fleet called on the island of Caghaian, as Pigafetta designated it. Once again, he enthusiastically went ashore to establish relations with the islanders, but this time other crew members accompanied him. Their mission: to find enough food to restock their rapidly dwindling stores before they starved.

Only a short distance from their previous anchorage, the fleet encountered a far more predatory culture. “The people of that island are Moros”—Moors—“and were banished from an island called Burne”—Borneo. “They go naked as do the others. They have blowpipes and small quivers at their side, full of arrows and a poisonous herb. They have gold daggers whose hafts are adorned with gold and precious gems, spears, bucklers, and small cuirasses of buffalo horn.” Fortunately, these menacing-looking warriors believed that the European intruders were “holy beings” and spared them from harm. But the ravenous sailors found no food to speak of and, growing desperate, the armada embarked on a twenty-five-league detour to the northwest, almost directly away from the Spice Islands.

The search for food grew more frantic. “We were often on the point of abandoning the ships in order that we might not die of hunger,” Pigafetta wrote. At last they arrived at “the land of promise, because we suffered great hunger before we found it.” The island was called Palawan, and it divides the Sulu Sea from the South China Sea. Although the fleet was getting even farther from its goal, Palawan offered a tropical paradise to men who had endured so much for so long. “The winds are mild, the sun warm, the sea teeming with fish,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison of the island. “The land is so fertile that for more than half a year, after the main crops are gathered, people have nothing to do but enjoy themselves.”

Their stomachs growling and their heads spinning from fatigue and hunger, the sailors rushed through another
casicasi
ceremony with the local chieftain and then gorged themselves with “rice, ginger, swine, goats, fowls,” and “figs . . . as thick as the arm.” Pigafetta declared these “figs,” actually bananas, to be “excellent” fare. That was not all; the grateful crew members also sated themselves with coconuts, sugarcane, and “roots resembling turnips in taste.” Pigafetta pronounced their wine, distilled from rice, to be exceedingly light and refreshing, far superior to the rough palm brew they had been drinking for weeks. Hours before, they had been so desperate that they contemplated the prospect of relinquishing the safety of their ships to forage for food. Now they offered thanks to God for saving them from starvation.

When he had filled his belly, Pigafetta once again became an amateur anthropologist. He charmed his island hosts into displaying their exotic weapons for him: “They have blowpipes with thick wooden arrows more than one palmo long, with harpoon points, and others tipped with fishbones, and poisoned with an herb; while others are tipped with points of bamboo like harpoons and are poisoned. At the end of the arrow they attach a little piece of soft wood, instead of feathers. At the end of their blowpipes they fasten a bit of iron like a spear head; and when they have shot all their arrows they fight with that.” In this culture, Pigafetta found, the fascination with combat included their animals. “They have large and very tame cocks, which they do not eat because of a certain veneration they have for them. Sometimes they make them fight with one another, and each one puts up a certain amount on his cock, and the prize goes to him whose cock is the victor.” The more closely he looked at cultures like these, the more he began to see disturbingly familiar suggestions of his own.

W
hen the crew had rested and loaded provisions onto the ships—provisions for which their weeks in the Pacific had taught them to barter skillfully—they weighed anchor, and on June 21, 1521, prepared to leave Palawan. This time, they had on board a local pilot, a Negrito who gave his name as Bastião, and said he was a Christian, but he vanished just before the fleet left the harbor. In search of a replacement, Carvalho ordered the fleet to encircle a large
balanghai
. Feigning peaceful intentions, the armada captured all three of the
balanghai
’s pilots, believing that they would lead the way to the Spice Islands at last, but these pilots—all Arabs—complicated matters by directing the armada southwest, toward Brunei, an Arab stronghold, rather than southeast, toward the Moluccas.