THE SUMA ORIENTAL was for many centuries known only from an extract printed in Italy by Ramusio, Marco Polo’s editor; but Ramusio did not know the name of the author of this lost book. It was not published in full until the Hakluyt Society’s 1944 edition. The manuscript copy from which that version was made was discovered in 1937 in the Bibliothèque de la Chambre des Députés, Paris, after a long search by Portuguese scholar Armando Cortesão, and translated and edited by him in the years just before and during World War II. This copy, the Paris Codex, which is early, is bound in with a rutter (a nautical manual and an atlas) by Francisco Rodrigues. The Hakluyt edition reproduces Tomé Pires’ text in both English and Portuguese and includes facsimiles of the many beautiful maps that were included in the rutter – which, in turn, concerns sailing directions through the archipelago east of Malacca.
One of the pages of the Paris Codex has the word Osório inscribed on it in a later hand and this is thought to be the name of the man who originally owned it: Bishop Jerónimo Osório of Silves (1506–80), an historian and book collector, sometime friend and companion of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Or it might have been out of the library of his nephew, also Jerónimo, also a bibliophile. The folio is said to have been taken after the English captured a Portuguese ship off the Azores; or else it was part of a library the Earl of Essex saved before he sacked Faro in the Algarve in 1596, and sent to the Bodleian in Oxford. Either way, the folio with the two books made its way into the collection of French hydrographer M. de Fleurieu (1738–1820) and thence into the Paris library where Cortesão found it.
All of Tomé Pires’ other works are lost – the book sent to the viceroy of India in 1524 in which he gave an account of the riches and greatness of China; another dealing with weights and measures of all the different places of the east; a third about drugs and where they grow. There were likely further writings covering the period from 1524 until his death about 1540, not long before Mendes Pinto encountered his daughter on the banks of the Grand Canal. The one book that does survive is not a literary work, nor a book of adventures, nor a history, nor even a geography, but a trade compendium, describing what may be bought and sold at each port from Suez to the almost mythical Aru, mentioned towards the end of the list quoted above, where birds of paradise could be obtained. And yet at times Pires does attain to a rare quality, particularly when this merchant of fact writes of the fabulous city of Malacca:
There is an infinity of other islands. There is no reason to say more, only that all have gold and slaves and trade with one another, and the small ones do this in the larger ones that have been mentioned, and the larger ones trade with Malacca, and Malacca with them, spending and bartering the merchandise … Goods from all over the east are found here; goods from all over the west are sold here. There is no doubt that the affairs of Malacca are of great importance, and of much profit and great honour. It is a land [that] cannot depreciate, on account of its position, but must always grow. It is at the end of the monsoons, where you find what you want, and sometimes more than you are looking for.
FERDINAND MAGELLAN is perhaps one who found more than he was looking for. In the popular mind Magellan (in Portuguese, Fernão de Magalhães) is the first person to have circumnavigated the earth, even though he died at Mactan, Cebu, in the Philippines, before the voyage was half over. The circumnavigation was anyway inadvertent; what Magellan, like Columbus, was trying to do was find a sea route to the Spice Islands by sailing west, on the assumption that they would turn out to be on the Spanish side of the Tordesillas line. For Magellan, although a Portuguese, was in the service of the Spanish Crown. He was also, although this too is often overlooked, experienced as a servant of the Estada da Índia, having spent nearly a decade in the east during the bloody first years of the Portuguese conquest.
He was born, probably at Oporto, probably in 1480, into the minor Portuguese nobility and in his youth was a page at the royal court in the service of Queen Leonor, wife of John II. He made his first voyage into the east in 1505 with the fleet of Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy of India; was present at the naval battle outside of Diu in 1509 when the Portuguese shattered an Egypto-Gujarati counter-offensive; and may have fought in the battle for Goa in 1510. He was certainly at Malacca in 1509, when he rescued Francisco Serrão, who would later captain one of the three ships that made the epochal first voyage to the Moluccas, during the failed first attempt to take the city; and again for the successful siege in 1511. At one time he was said to have himself gone to the Moluccas with Serrão and António de Abreu; but this is now thought to be unlikely. Nevertheless his close connection with Serrão (they may have been related) and the letters Serrão subsequently sent him from Ternate, where he had established himself as a quasi-independent agent of influence, probably helped Magellan in his campaign to persuade the Spanish Crown to sponsor his voyage. Serrão grossly exaggerated the distance between Malacca and the Moluccas, magnifying his own achievement and incidentally suggesting the Spice Islands might indeed be in the Spanish zone.
Magellan was back in Portugal in time to take part in the capture in 1513 of the Moroccan city of Azamor. Here he was wounded in the leg and ever after walked with a limp. When the city had fallen he was appointed quadrilheiro mor, or officer in charge of distribution of booty. This was always an invidious position to hold and Magellan was soon charged with misappropriation of goods. He made matters worse by returning without leave to Lisbon to petition the king for an increase in stipend, which was refused. Dom Manuel I sent him back to Morocco to face the charges; they were dropped but his chance of further patronage from the Portuguese Crown had gone west as well. Hence his decision to transfer his services to Spain.
Magellan was brave, resourceful and independent minded; also secretive, taciturn and obsessive. A driven man and a driver of men. He went to Seville with his grand scheme in 1517; had himself formally naturalised as a subject of Don Carlos I; and began to gather the support he needed to convince the king that a southwest passage to the Moluccas was possible, desirable and could be accomplished without transgressing the Portuguese zone of influence. He may also have had in mind the fabled gold of Tarshish and Ophir, at this time identified with the Lequeos or Ryukyu Islands which had already, also in 1517 – though perhaps without Magellan’s knowledge – been visited by the Portuguese. This was an ancient quest: the Bible several times mentions these two places and many Europeans believed it was there that Solomon got the gold for his temple; when Columbus found the New World, one of his many claims was that these were the lands he had found.
There is a misunderstanding here. What the Bible (1 Kings 10:22) in fact says is that Solomon had a navy of Tarshish that he sent to get the gold, along with silver, ivory, apes and peacocks, precious stones and algum trees (pine, or sandalwood, or perhaps even cloves) that were to be found at Ophir. Tarshish, rather than some exotic far-flung kingdom, was more likely a port on the Mediterranean; possible locations include the Levant (Hiram of Tyre sent ships along with those of Tarshish to Ophir), Crete, Carthage, even Tartessos in Spain itself. All of these are plausible; it is beguiling to think that ancient voyages into the Erythraean Sea continued to inspire navigators in the early Renaissance nearly two millennia later.
Ophir, by contrast, was certainly somewhere east of Suez – Solomon built a fleet at Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom, in order to make the voyage there. Again, there are many possible locations for Ophir, which could have been anywhere from the African shores of the Red Sea, Yemen or Somalia to coastal Iran or Pakistan or western India. Peacocks are an Indian (blue) and a South East Asian (green) bird but were known in the Mediterranean from at least 1000 BCE and probably earlier; and Ophir could have been an entrepôt. But for Magellan and his contemporaries Tarshish and Ophir were usually spoken of in the same breath and were to be found somewhere beyond the confines of the known world, quite possibly in the unknown seas and lands west of the Amer
icas.
THE PREPARATIONS FOR Magellan’s voyage, in a fleet called the Armada de Molucca, took place in an atmosphere of confusion and intrigue fostered by Portuguese agents determined to wreck the expedition before it began. These efforts were counter-productive, convincing the Spanish that their rivals must indeed have something to hide or protect. The ships, five in all, were small and old and dilapidated and, even after refitting, could not have inspired confidence. Don Carlos had hoped to recruit Spanish crews but this proved to be impossible; all five pilots were Portuguese and there were perhaps another thirty-five Lusitanians, some enlisted as Spaniards, among the combined crews of 237 men. As well as thirty Italians there were twenty Frenchmen, along with Flemings, Germans, Levantines, mixed bloods of various sorts and a single Englishman, a master gunner from Bristol named Andrew who died in the Pacific. One appointment, that of Juan de Cartagena as captain of the third ship, the San Antonio, and veedor-general, responsible for royal financial interests, was certainly made to counter-balance the Portuguese prominence in command positions.
Magellan was instructed never to go ashore himself but to send officers and take hostages. No arms, axes or iron were to be sold to natives met along the way; native women were not to be touched; cards and dice were banned. These standard precautions were supplemented, unusually, by another giving any officer the right to report in writing, uncensored, on the conduct of the expedition. The Armada de Molucca was also directed to avoid any transgression into the Portuguese zone – a difficult order to follow when no one was sure exactly where the line of demarcation lay. It was also said, many years later, that if Magellan failed to find a southwest passage, he was to take the African route to the east; or even to sail along the presumed coast of Terra Australis, the Great South Land that, in Ptolemy’s geography as reinvented by map-maker Lopo Homem in 1519, extended in a great sweep south from Brazil to make of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans one enormous mare clausum.
Trouble began not long after the fleet passed the Cape Verde Islands, perhaps because the Spanish officers were disquieted by Magellan’s secretiveness and his route southwards (the typical Portuguese way) when they thought he should have been sailing west across the Atlantic towards the Americas. The insolent Juan de Cartagena was relieved of his command and placed under arrest for insubordination. Then, after Brazil had been sighted, and the estuary of the River Plate and the more southerly Gulf of San Matías explored, over Easter 1520 a mutiny broke out at the winter quarters at Puerto San Julián.
Only one of the four other captains accepted Magellan’s invitation to a mass and a feast on the flagship. The conspirators, led by Juan de Cartagena and Gaspar de Quesada, took over the other three ships. Magellan acted swiftly: on the pretext of arranging a conference he sent men with concealed arms on to the Victoria, whose captain, Luis de Mendoza, was stabbed to death. The retaken ship joined the two others in a blockade of the harbour mouth and the mutiny collapsed. At the subsequent trial forty men were condemned to death, including the Basque, Juan Sebastián del Cano, whom the mutineers had placed in command of the San Antonio; in the event only one, Quesada, was executed. His body, along with that of Mendoza, was quartered beneath the gibbet where, nearly sixty years later, the bones were found by Francis Drake, who turned off a recalcitrant of his own at the same spot.
That winter the Santiago was lost on a reconnaissance south but the crew survived and returned with tales of big-footed giants, the Patagonians. In August, Magellan departed Puerto San Julián with his four remaining ships; Juan de Cartagena and an accomplice, a priest named Padre Sanchez de la Reina, with some wine and bags of biscuits, were left behind; their fate is unknown. On St Ursula’s Day the Armada de Molucca saw a cape that was named after her Eleven Thousand Virgins; and beyond it certain inlets of the sea … which had the appearance of the strait. During the complex passage of this 300-mile-long strait another ship, the San Antonio, was lost – she had in fact been seized by a disaffected Portuguese named Estêvão Gomes who sailed her back to Spain. He was perhaps a coward and had previously suggested that, the strait having been located, they should all return and refit for another expedition.
On 28 November 1520 the armada passed Cabo Deseado, the cape of desire, and entered the ocean Magellan called Pacific, allegedly in an attempt to calm his still-mutinous men. Balboa had seen this sea from the heights of Darien; he had called it Mare del Sur, wading into its waters and claiming them for Spain; his men had paddled a short way out into it by canoe. But Magellan and his men were the first Europeans to sail across it, a journey that took a hundred days during which, the chronicler Antonio Pigafetta wrote, we ate only old biscuit turned to powder full of worms and stinking with the odour of urine the Rats had made on it, after eating the good part. And we drank putrid yellow water. This starveling diet was supplemented with sea-soaked cattle hides and the aforementioned rats, which cost half a crown each one. And even so we could not get enough of them. But the ocean was calm, living up to its name, and seemed empty: sailing interminably northwest before the trade winds, in all that vast expanse they saw only two small uninhabited islands, one an outlier of the Tuamotus, the other in the Line Islands.
On 6 March 1521 Magellan’s long transverse of the great ocean ended at Guam, where trouble began almost immediately. The Spanish wanted fresh supplies while the islanders wanted anything they could get their hands on, including a small boat at the Trinidad’s stern. Magellan went ashore with forty men, burning houses and boats and killing seven locals. He called the islands – he saw Rota and Saipan as well as Guam – the islands of ladrones, or robbers; they are now the Marianas. The expedition sailed on to the Philippines, which they called the Islas de San Lázaro, and where they met men who could converse with Magellan’s Malaccan slave Enrique. They had reached Asia at last.
By now Magellan certainly knew where the Moluccas lay, away to the south, and probably planned to recuperate, take on supplies and prepare himself and his men for what lay ahead – conflict with the Portuguese was more than likely. Instead, he became fatally embroiled in local politics. At Cebu the rajah, Humabon, impressed by the expedition’s artillery and warned by a Moorish merchant that these were the men who had conquered Calicut and Malacca, accepted Spanish protection and, along with his wife and 500 subjects, had himself baptised into the Catholic Church.
Neighbouring vassal chiefs were not so amenable and Magellan, perhaps afflicted by hubris, decided to bring them into line. With sixty of his own men, along with Humabon and several hundred Cebuans, he went to subdue Lapulapu, the rajah of Mactan. Against his instructions and after foolishly asking his Cebuan allies to stay in their boats and watch so they could see how well the Spanish fought, Magellan personally led forty-nine men ashore. They were vehemently opposed by about 1500 defenders who, before the Spanish muskets and crossbows were in range, attacked so strongly that a retreat was ordered. But the Spanish were too far from the ships for covering cannon fire to be effective and, while his men fled towards the boats, Magellan was hacked to death in the water. His death was a precursor to Cook’s and to many others.
This catastrophe was followed closely by another: the rajah of Cebu, having lost confidence in his new-made friends, invited a hastily reconstituted leadership ashore for a banquet at which he said he would give them promised gifts of jewels for the king of Spain. It was a trap; those who went ashore to dine, twenty-seven in all, including both newly appointed leaders, were killed. It is said that Enrique, Magellan’s Malaccan slave, who understood the speech of the natives of Cebu, actively colluded with the rajah in his plan to slaughter the expedition’s leaders. This was because they had failed to honour Magellan’s will, which promised Enrique freedom upon his master’s death.
After these two disasters, and the exigencies of the voyage so far, during which many had died of scurvy, only 115 of the original 237 were left to continue the voyage south to the Spice Islands; and only two ships, the Victoria and the Trinidad, remained: the third, the Concepci
ón, without enough crew to man her, was burned at Bohol. This remnant wandered from Cebu to Mindanao to Palawan and thence down the east coast of Borneo as far as Brunei before turning north again, rounding the top of the great island and sailing through the Sulu Sea. They at last reached Tidore, an authentic spice island, in November 1521.
Francisco Serrão, Magellan’s correspondent, was recently and mysteriously dead, perhaps poisoned by the rajah of Ternate, perhaps by a disenchanted lover. Ternate, the notional Portuguese base, is just south of Tidore; relations between the rajahs of these two volcanic islands were byzantine and antagonistic and their centuries-old feud intensified as they tried variously to ally themselves with the new European powers. Soon after the Victoria and the Trinidad arrived at Tidore a freelance Portuguese came over from Ternate and told the Spanish his rajah was disaffected with the Portuguese; and that the viceroy of India had ordered the Spanish fleet to be searched out and destroyed if and when it reached the Moluccas. Nevertheless, over a period of two months, trade and protection agreements were negotiated and so many cloves bought that some – 60 quintals – had to be left behind for fear of overloading the ships.
When it was time to depart the Trinidad was found to be so leaky as to be unseaworthy; it returned to port for repairs before setting out on a futile attempt to retrace the voyage back across the Pacific to Darien. On the Victoria her new captain, del Cano, made the epochal and enigmatic decision to return to Europe by sailing into the west: that is, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and north through the Atlantic; and so he did, departing from Timor with, as one writer remarked, a shipload of spices but nothing to eat. It was a voyage as bad, if not worse, than that across the Pacific. Del Cano resisted the temptation to stop at Mozambique to seek help; but was forced by hunger to put in at the Cape Verde Islands, where the pretence that they came from America was soon exposed and those of the already diminished crew who went ashore were taken prisoner by the Portuguese.
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