Iago had been right about the wind. A heavier surf was running now and, although they began the disembarkation safely enough in the lee of the ship, the swell dashed itself against the Santa Margarita’s weather side with such violence that occasionally she shuddered with the impact. Gathering up bundles of belongings and told off in twos and threes, passengers and crew clambered down into the outrigged proas to be paddled ashore by the Chamorros. In their haste to get clear of the surf several of the craft were overset. While the Chamorros swam merrily ashore, Marmolejo was one of those who fell into the sea and was only pulled from it after a struggle since he was weighed down by his heavy, sodden woollen habit. Ordóñez too fell in. He was wearing armour and drowned before he could be dragged clear of the breakers. His body was carried up to the line of palms and laid out ready to be buried.
As each proa reached the sandy strand it was met by several lance-bearing warriors who closed each group of survivors and conducted them into the vegetation and along narrow footpaths to their villages. Thus broken up into small groups, the Spanish were cheated of their fort and from that moment of fragmentation were reduced to helplessly small factions.
Most were taken and concealed in huts in the village they learned was called Atetito and it was here that Iago and his two followers were brought. Iago had been at some pains to dissociate himself from the Spanish, in particular Peralta and the other so-called gentlemen. He had felt the parturition inevitable after the deprivation of his sword so that the accusations of Olalde and Calcagorta did not surprise him. Neither did he attribute their hostility to the denouncements of the crazy Arrocheros; these had merely provided a pretext, seized avidly by Olalde and his cronies.
Iago had instructed Ximenez to dress himself in his finest and therefore most durable clothes. He had also been told to gather as much negotiable iron as it was possible for him to carry and to fill another small knapsack for Iago to carry. Ah Fong was told to put on the grey silk dress that Ximenez had bought for her in Cavite and which, despite being stained by sea water, transformed her androgynous appearance. She had also dressed her hair and, though somewhat dishevelled, bore the appearance of a person of quality. Moreover, since Iago had noticed the readiness with which the Chamorros traded with both Ah Fong and the two remaining Filipino women, seeing in them not so much their gender as their racial distinction from the Spanish men, he thought that she might prove the key to their survival.
He had urged her to negotiate a separate passage ashore with the fisherman from whom she had bought the flying fish, and this saw them safely to the beach where, although they were met by a group of spearmen, the fisherman had guaranteed that they would be taken to his own hut. They were among the last to leave the Santa Margarita and they slept that night in comparative safety – just as the fisherman had promised.
In the following days a series of tragedies unfolded. The first death occurred through natural causes. To the intense sadness of all, Fray Mateo Marmolejo failed to recover from his soaking, but died of a fever two days after landing. His soul was accompanied to Heaven by a requiem Mass that, against the inclinations of their hosts, the few assembled Holy Ones left alive managed to sing. Agustin in particular mourned his Brother, and seemed fatally marked by his death. Eight of the marineros also died of wounds, diarrhoea, broken bones or severe contusions acquired in the disembarkation. Agustin busied himself with their last rites and burials, moving among the sick unimpeded by the Chamorro people who, he thought, had encountered priests before.
Indeed, it was clear that the Chamorros had not adopted a policy of slaughtering the Spaniards wholesale. Rather, from time to time it seemed to Iago that the death of a few removed the threat of trouble from the rest, so that the stoning and clubbing of the six men in that first improvised boat that had upset in the surf established the natives as masters of the strangers. Iago was apt to attribute this vague hostility to the folly of the Spanish in trying to force the Chamorros to pump the Santa Margarita. He had long seen such behaviour among those who had adopted him for the arrogance that it was. Now, such hauteur begged for humiliation and he strove to detach himself from any charge of it, separating himself from Peralta and his chief and most influential officers, Olalde and Calcagorta, who saw no reason for subtle discourse with the natives of Çarpana. Nevertheless, for some days a kind of peace reigned. The Chamorro people were not unkind to them, though they were careful to keep them apart. In general the natives provided them with food, but they showed a marked revulsion to those unable to control their bowels.
Chief among these was Captain Gonzalo Manuel, commander of the captain-general’s guards. He had spent much of the voyage prostrated by seasickness and otherwise under the influence of Olalde and now he seemed unable to throw off the diarrhoea brought on by the avid consumption of fruit. Since this had proved a rapid specific against the scurvy, Manuel’s fate was an ironic one. Suddenly one morning, when walking through Atetito with two Chamorros after helping them carry a catch of fish back to the village, Manuel was taken with an uncontrollable spasm. Groaning and tugging at his belt, he hurried off the track to squat urgently between two huts and void himself. A moment later he had left a stinking yellow runnel in the hard, dry earth.
His Chamorro escort wrinkled their noses against the stench and backed away, while a bare-breasted woman ran from the adjacent hut, screaming her outrage at the unfortunate man as he sought to button himself. The noise drew the attention of a crowd, most of whom were young men and boys who came running up. The cause of the row was obvious and – such was the Chamorros’ disgust – that the youngsters picked up stones and circling Manuel, threw them at him. One struck his head, then another and he instinctively crouched down, trying to protect his head before another stone hit him in the lower face. With a cry of pain he fell back and rolled in his own filth.
More cries of revulsion assailed him as he strove to rise, only to be met by another barrage of stones. The assault was remorseless and purposeful; the aim of the throwers was accurate, the force all that they could muster. The stones struck him repeatedly in such numbers and with such violence that, in a few moments, Manuel was beaten unconscious. Here he lay while the stones reduced him to a bloody pulp until his body ceased to twitch.
Had the Spanish acquiesced in their fate and lived peaceably among the simple Chamorros until a não from Acapulco hove in sight, more might have survived, but it was not in the nature of certain men to possess their souls in patience. As a result their bodies paid the price. Peralta, Olalde and Calcagorta had been insufficiently separated. In the beginning the nature of their close relationship was not understood by the Chamorro chiefs, who thought it better to keep the men who had made the agreement aboard the Santa Margarita together, where they might best be supervised.
Neither Olalde nor Calcagorta were men who could accept their fates lying down and Peralta, fearful of losing his illusory powers as captain-general, was obliged to go along with them in their noisy protests and their insistence upon forms of respect quite alien to the Chamorros. Not that the Indians were entirely ignorant of the Spaniards’ ways. They had some inkling of what it meant when the great silk banners Peralta had insisted were brought ashore were hoisted by Diego de Llerena to the top of a palm tree. Olalde and Calcagorta, with Llerena’s help, had engineered a touching ceremony in which a small residue of gunpowder had been fired in a dried-out arquebus to intimidate the Chamorros and salute the banner presented to the Santa Margarita seven months earlier by the episcopate of Manila. Hardly had the ceremony concluded than a Chamorro cut the halliards and the brilliant oriflamme fluttered to the ground.
With a roar of outrage, Olalde rushed forward, his sword drawn. His intention to strike the offending Indian was thwarted by Alacanadre, who stepped in front of him and, catching Olalde unawares, knocked him down and took up Olalde’s dropped sword.
‘Hold hard, Don Pedro,’ Alacanadre cried, ‘you will have us all killed . . .’
Olalde staggered to his f
eet, red with humiliation and fulminating at the disliked Alacanadre’s intervention until Peralta called to him to consider the wisdom of the master of camp. But matters were swiftly taken out of their hands, for the Chamorro whom Olalde had sought to kill had run off and now returned with a swelling crowd. Seeing Alacanadre with a sword they suddenly ran forward and, seizing him, dragged him away, ignoring the protests of Peralta and the others, and restraining them from following. It was only later they learned what had happened to Miguel de Alacanadre.
The colonel had been taken to the other side of Atetito where a shallow pit had been dug, ready perhaps for some such exemplary execution. Having thrown the Spanish officer into the pit he was stoned to death. Then he was left for a day in the sun, attracting the flies, the kites and the gulls who picked first at his eyes and face. He lay exposed for long enough for several of the Spaniards to be escorted past in order to learn his fate. One of these was Diego de Llerena.
The following day the tough contramaestre broke away from his conductors with whom he was going down to the beach and ran back to the pit in which Alacanadre’s stinking corpse decomposed. Here he began scrabbling at the earth in an attempt to cover Alacanadre’s body and prevent its desecration by the carrion-eaters. Finding a piece of wood he tried using this as a spade to better and more quickly effect his objective, but his actions offended the Chamorros. Running after him they attempted to push him into the pit on top of the corpse. But Llerena was less easy to overcome, fighting off his attackers so that he stood defiant on the edge of the pit panting in the stench given off by Alacanadre’s body and brandishing the short piece of wood like a club.
Once again a crowd was rapidly summoned; stones were picked up and others went in search of more, for the area had been denuded the day before and Llerena prevented anyone from recovering those heaped against Alacanadre’s body. But the inevitable assault began and soon Llerena was the target of another remorseless attack. But Llerena was a Basque, a pelota player of skill, and for several minutes he successfully dodged or struck out of the way a number of stones with his wooden club. Eventually, however, with some two hundred shouting Chamorros surrounding him and perhaps half that number hurling small rocks at him, he began to succumb.
For a moment it seemed as though numbers and the hail of stones would overwhelm him, but then Llerena showed the immensity of his strength and raw courage, suddenly staggering forward waving his extemporized club. Once among the nearest Chamorros, the others ceased throwing stones for fear of hitting their friends. Llerena, a big and imposing figure, literally waded through the crowd and it drew back, almost letting him go as if in admiration of his bravery. At last he broke out of the ring, limping calmly away, back towards the hut where he was held. Curiously, the Chamorros seemed satisfied and let him go.
The next day his custodians came for him and took him down to the beach. All seemed to have been forgiven and forgotten, for they indicated that he was going fishing and he boarded the proa. A few minutes later, its sail hoisted, it skimmed off across the sparkling blue sea, heading for the blue peaks of a distant island. Diego de Llerena, contramaestre of the Santa Margarita, had bought his freedom on the neighbouring island of Tinian.
That same day the Chamorro chiefs who had concluded the agreement aboard the Santa Margarita came before Peralta and noisily demanded a council. By dint of pidgin, gestures and the uncertain services of a tall Chamorro who knew a few words of Spanish and Fray Agustin who knew something of the Chamorran tongue, they made it known to Peralta that the behaviour of his people was unacceptable.
Rodrigo de Peralta, in a florid and demonstrably arrogant declamation that needed little or no translation, declared the action of the Chamorros to be heathen and outside God’s laws. The imprecations that he called down upon Atetito and the other villages where the handful of survivors were being kept fell upon deaf ears. The chiefs came for an earnest of the Spaniards’ future conduct. Agustin eventually grasped this simple request and told Peralta.
‘Excellency, they desire nothing more nor less than the gold chain you wear as a guarantee of our peaceable behaviour.’
An outraged Peralta put up his hand to clutch the gold chain and pendant that depended upon his breast. ‘That is impossible!’ he exclaimed. ‘Quite impossible! It is my own, my father . . .’
‘Excellency, I beseech you, this is not a moment for pride of possession, your life, our lives, depend upon you relinquishing it.’
‘But my honour . . .’
‘It is your duty, Excellency. You are the captain-general . . .’
‘Don’t you tell me my duty!’
The debate was terminated by the senior of the Chamorro chiefs. He stepped forward and struck Agustin in the chest. The Franciscan was not expecting the blow and fell backwards. The chief’s hand swung in a swift movement and made to seize the pendant on Peralta’s breast. But the captain-general turned away and the chief was frustrated. As Peralta stepped away those about him moved forward, two of the guards drawing their swords. Someone called for Calcagorta, who was absent from Peralta’s company, but by the time word had reached the gunner, Peralta and those with him had been seized.
Carried bodily down to the beach by two of the largest men, the captain-general struggled in vain. The two Chamorros stumbled out into the shallows with their burden, then lifting the writhing Peralta high above their heads they dashed him against the sharp limestone reef. The blood spurted from Peralta’s cuts and, bending, the two Chamorros picked him up again, then dashed him a second time against the rock. After the third time he had been thus cast down one of them removed the gold chain and, leaving Rodrigo de Peralta’s broken but still living body to bleed to death and the incoming tide to carry him away, they brought the chain and presented it to the chiefs.
Summoned too late to intervene and frightened by the implacable nature of what he had just witnessed, Joanes de Calcagorta watched from the partial concealment of the palm trees.
Sixteen
Don Baldivieso
Peralta was not the only one killed that afternoon. In fact all of those assembled about him were carried off and murdered, one by one. Some were stoned, others flung violently upon the sharp limestone; all those who witnessed Peralta’s defiance of the request of the Chamorro chiefs paid the price for their captain-general’s intransigence except for Agustin, who was saved by his habit and his few words of Chamorro. Ironically it was Peralta’s most significant accomplishment as Guillestigui’s successor but it cost him his life. It also contributed to Calcagorta’s anxieties and yet – such is the vanity of human aspiration – in spite of fear and the unravelling of the Spanish cause, the gunner assumed the title of captain-general with the confidence that one who held it had some meaning in the tiny world that was the island of Çarpana.
Although the village of Atetito was small, the segregation of the survivors ensured that it was some time before Iago learned what had occurred. In fact the Chamorro people, having by their murder of Peralta and his guard removed the source of Spanish arrogance, afterwards willingly accorded the dead Spaniards a burial ceremony according to their own rites. It was by being summoned to attend this that Iago discovered what had happened.
The burial of the shattered bodies of Peralta and his fellows was conducted by Agustin and one of the Franciscan lay brothers. Sancho was among the last of the dwindling band of Holy Ones who, by now, were resigned to martyrdom. After the brief committal and interment the Spaniards were conducted back to their various huts. Iago was sensible of the wisdom and the rationale of the Chamorros, but he was disturbed by the absence at the Mass of Calcagorta and the remaining handful of Basques, sensing that they were meditating trouble. Also missing from the obsequies of Peralta and his last companions in arms was Don Baldivieso de los Arrocheros.
Iago was at a loss to know quite what had happened to the deranged merchant. Consequently he charged Ximenez with discovering the whereabouts of these lost souls in the knowledge that the dwarf, closer in
stature to the native Chamorros, had in the days he had lived among them established a curious rapport with the indigenous population.
‘Ximenez find out more in one day than proper-fella find out in a whole year,’ he said to Ah Fong who, in her sensitive and intuitive way, knew that of the three of them it was Iago himself whose life was in the greatest danger. Ah Fong felt this exposure acutely; although she knew she might outlive her beloved husband, she could not exist without him in any of the strange worlds into which he had led her since their betrothal in the far-off province in which she was born.
Not that she resented this; on the contrary, she knew that Iago’s lust had saved her from being sent into a brothel, or sold to an old mandarin as an amusing bauble for a senile imperial official. Iago, the long-nosed fan kwai, had graced her life with something beyond the grasp of her imagination and, coming from a land and culture where life was cheap, she worshipped her lover in a manner peculiar to herself.
Iago comprehended something of this, but not the depth to which it extended. Yet this curious relationship had made itself manifest to many during the protracted labours of the Santa Margarita, exciting most of all an envy in many male bosoms, among them Calcagorta and Don Baldivieso de los Arrocheros. Calcagorta, a man of deep passions and shallow convictions, had regarded Iago’s revealed love with a simple, pure jealousy. He not only lusted after women in a general sense, he lusted after a love as specific as that which clearly existed between the sobrasaliente Don Iago Fernandez and the beautiful Chinese butterfly who had emerged from the ambiguous chrysalis that had come aboard at Cavite. For this simple reason Calcagorta had embraced the notion of Iago as a Portuguese spy with enthusiasm. A man who dissembled over the sex of his ‘servant’ was clearly complex enough not to be trusted. Joanes de Calcagorta was a man for whom the simple rule of cause and effect ran no deeper than the combustion in a saker’s chamber. In fact, just as his gunner’s mind gave no thought to the moral issue of the target at which he aimed, he had no interest in any evidence to support the contention that Iago was a spy. It did not much matter to him whether or not the stranger who had come aboard at the last minute at Cavite was engaged in espionage or not. Indeed since the two kingdoms that shared a peninsula had been united, the assertion was extreme and unlikely. The fact that anti-Lusitanian prejudice had been born in Calcagorta from boyhood stood as one prop to his contention. The other rested upon the fact that Iago had demonstrably practised a deception and lied about the sex of his supposed ‘servant’. Such ‘facts’ allied to envy were sufficient to damn him in Calcagorta’s eyes.
The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita Page 27