Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

by Laurence Bergreen

  The Chinese experiment in maritime diplomacy and trade lasted for a single generation, but the rapacious and daring Europeans were here to stay. By the time Magellan arrived in the Philippines, Chinese influence was rapidly waning, and even a modest fleet such as the Armada de Molucca could have a major impact on the region. The era of Chinese colonization had ended; the era of Spanish colonization was just beginning.

  The sprawling Philippine archipelago did not exist on European maps, and neither Magellan nor his pilots knew what to make of their discovery. Magellan led his ships closer to the island of Samar, but within a mile or two of the shore, he found only unforgiving cliffs rising from the water, and nothing resembling a safe harbor. He changed course once more, heading for diminutive Suluan, where the armada dropped anchor for a few hours’ respite.

  It was the fifth Sunday in Lent, with Easter fast approaching. Appropriately, Lent is dedicated to Lazarus, risen from the dead, and like him, the surviving crew members had overcome illness to regain their strength and persevere. Magellan decided to name the archipelago after Lazarus, but twenty-two years later, another European explorer, Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, reached these islands and later named them Las Islas Filipinas—the Philippines—after King Philip of Spain.

  Magellan’s next landfall proved more satisfying than Samar. Homonhon Island did have a safe harbor, and Magellan, with tremendous relief, finally gave the order to drop anchor. He led his men ashore, to an oasis of dense rain forest, palm trees, and abundant water, where they erected two sheltering tents. At last they were free of the stench of the ships’ holds. Instead, their nostrils twitched with the mingled fragrances of palm trees, wet sand, and decaying vegetation. They slaughtered a sow they had brought from Guam and prepared a great feast for themselves. For a time, their bellies were full, and the long-suffering sailors content.

  On Monday, March 18, they saw a boat bearing nine men approach from the direction of Suluan. Calculating the risks and rewards inherent in their second encounter with the peoples of the Pacific, Magellan made certain that arms were at the ready; at the same time, he assembled a different sort of arsenal: shiny trinkets, in case the encounter turned out to be peaceful.

  This time, Magellan handled the situation confidently. “The Captain General ordered that no one should move or say anything without his leave,” Pigafetta wrote. “When those people had come to us in that island, forthwith the most ornately dressed of them went toward the Captain-General, showing that he was very happy at our coming. And five of the most ornately dressed remained with us, while the others who stayed at the boat went to fetch some who were fishing, and then they all went together. Then the captain, seeing that these people were reasonable, ordered that they be given food and drink, and he presented them with red caps, mirrors, combs, bells . . . and other things. And when those people saw the captain’s

  fair dealing, they gave him fish and a jar of palm wine, which they call in their language vraca, figs more than a foot long [bananas] and other smaller ones of better flavor, and two coconuts. . . .A nd they made signs with their hands that in four days they would bring us rice, coconuts, and sundry other food.”

  Perhaps they had found Paradise, after all, or at least a respite from an expedition well into its second year. Each day Magellan fed coconut milk supplied by the generous Filipinos to the sailors still suffering from scurvy. Pigafetta meanwhile became intrigued with the Filipinos’ method for fermenting palm wine. “They make an aperture into the heart of the tree at its top . . . from which is distilled along the tree a liquor . . . which is sweet with a touch of greenness. Then they take canes as thick as a man’s leg, by which they draw off this liquor, fastening them to a tree from the evening until next morning, and from the morning to the evening, so that the said liquor comes little by little.”

  Perhaps under the influence of too much Filipino palm wine, Pigafetta marveled at the coconut and all its uses. “This palm bears a fruit, named cocho, which is as large as the head or thereabouts, and its first husk is green and two fingers thick, in which are found certain fibers of which those people make the ropes by which they bind their boats. Under this husk is another, very hard and thicker than that of a nut. . . . And under the said husk there is a white marrow of a finger’s thickness, which they eat with meat and fish, as we do bread, and it has the flavor of an almond. . . . From the center of this marrow there flows a water which is clear and sweet and very refreshing, like an apple.” The Filipinos taught their visitors how to produce milk from the coconut, “as we proved by experience.” They pried the meat of the coconut from the shell, combined it with the coconut’s liquor, and filtered the mixture through cloth. The result, said the chronicler, “became like goat’s milk.” Pigafetta was so moved by the coconut’s versatility that he declared, with some exaggeration, that two palm trees could sustain a family of ten for a hundred years.

  Their idyll lasted a week, each day bringing with it new discoveries and a growing intimacy with their genial Filipino hosts. “These people entered into very great familiarity and friendship with us, and made us understand several things in their language, and the name of some islands which we saw before us,” Pigafetta commented. “We took great pleasure with them, because they were merry and conversable.”

  But Magellan nearly destroyed the idyll when he invited the Filipinos aboard Trinidad. He incautiously showed his guests “all his merchandise, namely cloves, cinnamon, pepper, walnut, nutmeg, ginger, mace, gold, and all that was in the ship.” Clearly he felt he was no longer among thieves. His trust was amply rewarded when the Filipinos appeared to recognize these exotic and precious spices and tried to explain where they grew locally, the first indication that the armada was approaching the Spice Islands. Magellan’s reaction can be easily imagined. Perhaps he would reach the Moluccas after all.

  He then did his guests a signal honor, or so he thought, by ordering his gunners to discharge their “artillery”—the awkward arquebuses. The roar shattered the silence and reverberated against the distant hills of Homonhom, terrifying the Filipinos who, afraid for their lives, “tried to leap from the ship into the sea.” This might have been a gaffe, an excess of enthusiasm. Or was Magellan trying to impress these defenseless islanders, and himself, with the power of his weapons? At the very least, the display was a cruel practical joke on a tranquil tribe that had only helped and protected him and his men. Magellan quickly reassured the frightened Filipinos and coaxed them into remaining on board; at the same time, he could not fail to notice that his weapons conferred absolute power over the islanders, should he ever feel the need to exert it.

  After a week in Homonhom, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor on Monday, March 25, while light rain dappled the water’s surface. As the three black ships were about to head out of the harbor on a west southwest course, deeper into the Philippine archipelago, toward the Moluccas, Pigafetta committed a rare lapse of judgment.

  “I went to the side of the ship to fish, and putting my feet upon a yard leading down into the store room, they slipped, for it was rainy, and I fell into the sea, so that no one saw me. When I was all but under, my left hand happened to catch hold of the clew-garnet of the mainsail, which was dangling in the water. I held on tightly, and began to cry out so lustily that I was rescued by a small boat. I was aided, not, I believe, indeed through my merits, but through the mercy of that font of charity”—by which he meant the Virgin Mary. Had Pigafetta not been rescued, he would have drowned on the spot, or been rescued by the Filipinos, and would have spent the rest of his life with them, unable to tell his incredible tale.

  The following night, the crew spied an island distinguished by a dull red glow, the unmistakable sign of campfires, and they knew they were not alone. In the morning, Magellan decided to risk approaching, and in a now familiar ritual, they were greeted by another small boat, this one bearing eight warriors with unknown intentions.

  Magellan’s slave, Enrique, addressed them in a Malay dialect, and to Magel
lan’s astonishment, the men appeared to understand him and replied in the same tongue. No one, not even Magellan, knew how Enrique managed to converse with the islanders, but the slave’s background provides some valuable clues. Magellan had acquired Enrique ten years earlier in Malacca, where he was baptized, and he had followed his master ever since across Africa and Europe. If Enrique had originally come from these islands, been captured as a boy by slave raiders from Sumatra, and sold to Magellan at a slave mart in Malacca, the chain of circumstances would account for his understanding the local language. But beyond that, it meant that Magellan’s servant was, in fact, the first person to circle the world and return home.

  As the islanders “came alongside the ship, unwilling to enter but taking a position at some little distance,” the Captain General attempted to entice them with a “red cap and other things tied to a bit of wood.” Still, they remained at a distance. Finally, Magellan’s peace offerings were set out on a plank pushed in the canoe’s direction. The men in the boat enthusiastically seized the gifts and paddled back to shore, where, Magellan presumed, they displayed their trophies to their ruler.

  “About two hours later we saw two balanghai coming. They are large boats . . . full of men, and their king was in the larger of them, being seated under an awning of mats. When the king came near the flagship, the slave spoke to him. The king understood him, for in those districts, the kings know more languages than the other people. He ordered some of his men to enter the ships, but he always remained in his balanghai, at some little distance from the ship, until his own men returned; and as soon as they returned he departed.” Magellan tried to conduct himself as a gracious visitor, but he was outdone by the generosity of the king, who proffered a “large bar of gold and a basketful of ginger.” Magellan politely but firmly refused to accept this tribute, but he remained on such friendly terms with the natives that he moved his ships’ anchorage closer to the king’s hut for the night, as a symbol of their newfound allegiance.

  This encounter with indigenous people was shaping up as the armada’s most peaceful and successful since their delirious layover in Rio de Janeiro. A king willing to give gold and ginger might have other resources, and perhaps even women, but experience had shown Magellan that opening gestures could be deceptive, if not outright dangerous.

  The next day, Good Friday of 1521, Magellan put his relationship with the islanders to the test. He sent Enrique ashore on the island of Limasawa. Even today, as part of southern Leyte in the Philippines, Limasawa is a remote, inaccessible island remarkable for its broad, clean, inviting beaches, occasionally interrupted by unusual rock formations and caves. Although Magellan was the first European explorer to reach Limasawa, he was not the first outsider to find safe harbor here. Without realizing it, he had arrived at an important trading post. Chinese traders had been calling at the island for five centuries, their junks bearing sophisticated manufactured items such as porcelain, silk, and lead sinkers; the islanders traded for these items with products from their beaches and forests: cotton, wax, pearls, betel nuts, tortoiseshells, coconuts, sweet potatoes, and coconut leaf mats. The Limasawans enjoyed a reputation for hospitality and, more important, honesty. In 1225, Chau Ju Kuo, a Chinese merchant, described the orderly process of trading; the Limasawans, he said, efficiently carried away the Chinese goods they had been given and always returned with the arranged payment. So the appearance of the armada, while unusual, was not wholly unanticipated by the islanders, who were prepared to engage in trade with their guests.

  Once he was ashore, Enrique asked the Limasawan ruler, Rajah Kolambu, to send more food to the fleet, for which payment would be rendered. As instructed, he added “that they would be well satisfied with us, for he [Magellan] had come to the island as friends and not as enemies.” The king responded favorably to the request and came himself, along with “six or eight men,” all of whom boarded the flagship. “He embraced the Captain General to whom he gave three porcelain jars covered with leaves and full of raw rice and two very large orades”—the dorado, a fish. In return, Magellan “gave the king a garment of red and yellow cloth made in the Turkish fashion, and a fine red cap. . . .T hen the Captain General had a collation spread for them, and told the king through a slave that he desired to be casicasi with him. The king replied that he also wished to enter the same relations with the Captain General.”

  This was a strong statement. To be casicasi meant that Magellan wished to become blood brothers with the island king, a ceremony requiring the mingling of their blood. “Both cut their chests,” said de Mafra, “and the blood was poured in a vessel and mixed together with wine, and each of them drank one half of it.”

  Magellan’s attitude toward indigenous people had undergone a revolution. Where he had been content to convert, kidnap, and, when it suited his whim, even kill the giants of Patagonia, he felt a genuine kinship with this Filipino ruler. He took the king into his confidence and was soon trying to explain how the Armada de Molucca had navigated its way across the globe. “He led the king to the deck of the ship that is located above at the stern and had his sea-chart and compass brought. He told the king how he had found the strait in order to voyage thither, and how many moons he had been without seeing land, whereat the king was astonished.”

  The understanding nearly unraveled when Magellan decided to one of his gunners to demonstrate an arquebus, and the spectacle, all smoke and fire and noise, made the “the natives . . . greatly frightened.” Recent experience should have warned Magellan that a show of force was courting disaster, but he could not resist the urge to impress the king with the power of European weapons.

  Magellan gave an even more astonishing demonstration as he brought out one of his men, who was dressed in armor from his knees to his neck; then three other Europeans, “armed with swords and daggers . . . struck him on all parts of the body.” As the blows fell and glanced off the armor, the clank of metal on metal echoing across the water, “the king was rendered speechless.” The king seemed to think that these visitors possessed superhuman powers. No man could have withstood the shower of blows, yet the armored soldier had done just that.

  Gratified by the king’s reaction to the swordplay, Magellan instructed Enrique, his slave and translator, to tell the king that “one of those armed men was worth one hundred of his own men” and boasted that his armada brought with it two hundred warriors equipped with armor and weapons—swords, halberds, and daggers. The message was plain: A wise leader would do well to keep Magellan as an ally rather than antagonize him. Recovering from the shock of what he had seen, the king hastily agreed that a single warrior in armor was worth one hundred natives.

  Magellan’s Armada de Molucca carried enough weaponry to equip a small army. The sheer number of weapons reflected the growing reliance on arms in Spain and Portugal. Both nations depended on gunpowder, which had appeared in Europe at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Gunpowder was slow to reach the Iberian peninsula, but once it caught on, the Spanish and the Portuguese embarked on an arms race with a sense of deadly urgency. Local gunpowder works sprang up all over Spain; and eventually a government-sponsored gunpowder plant appeared in Burgos. The demand for gunpowder grew along with the demand for guns and cannon, and the number of foundries across Spain and Portugal increased as both countries armed themselves to compete for global dominance. It was only a matter of time before weapons found a place aboard the ships of both nations, at first to defend their harbors, and later to protect crews on voyages of exploration. The most powerful weapons aboard Magellan’s ships were the three lombardas. This was a cannon made of wrought iron. Designed for use at sea, it was equipped with rings to lift it on and off ships. Aboard the deck of a ship, the lombarda rested in a wooden cradle to which it was securely lashed. It could fire almost anything—stones, iron, and lead projectiles, but the most lethal shot consisted of an iron cube covered with a leaden sheath. To fire a lombarda, the gunner held a flaming taper to a touch hole leading to a small chambe
r holding priming powder; this in turn set off the main charge, expelling the shot with a great concussive roar as the lombarda shuddered in its massive cradle. The lombarda was not accurate, but its heavy projectile could inflict considerable damage on a hull. The fleet also carried seven breech-loading guns called falcones. They were smaller than the lombardas, and light enough for sailors to carry them into the longboats. The fleet also carried three pasamuros, another type of gun; nearly sixty versos, a crude rifle that could fire stone shots; fifty shotguns; three tons of gunpowder; and at least that weight in cannonballs.

  Although these firearms could be exceedingly effective, they were also unreliable. Each time a gunner fired a weapon, he risked injury or death. Guns and cannon were liable to blow up or sputter harmlessly. The arquebus posed special dangers. It employed a matchlock, a small pan holding the gunpowder beside the gun barrel; its nine-foot-long match, or fuse, had to be lit at all times, which eliminated surprise in night combat. To maintain the match’s length, the gunner pulled it by hand, risking injury. Even if a dexterous gunner managed to get off a shot, the bullets could not penetrate armor, and their effective range was less than a few hundred feet. At that moment, gun manufacturers were phasing out the awkward matchlock in favor of the wheel lock, which produced a spark, but the improvement came too late for Magellan’s gunners to take advantage of it. If his expedition had left only a year later, he would have carried more advanced guns with him, and the outcome of his voyage might have been very different.