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

by Laurence Bergreen

  For the Armada de Molucca and the Spanish expeditions that followed, palang was just one of many unacceptable customs practiced by the islanders. It was said that the Filipino families of the ruling class resorted to infanticide by burying the victims or hurling them into the sea. Also, unmarried women regularly underwent abortions to make it easier to find a husband. Virginity was actually considered such a serious liability that “professional deflowerers” could be engaged to take care of the problem. The Filipinos emphasized female sexual pleasure, and women even had access to artificial penises to assuage their lust. The Spanish, especially the clergy who came after Magellan, were intent on eliminating the practice, which they felt was nearly as repugnant as palang itself.

  It can be said that Magellan’s do-or-die emphasis on conversion interfered with precious cultural traditions, but he saw matters quite differently: He was engaged in a mission to rescue a benighted people from barbarism in this world and perdition in the next. In contrast to his pragmatic crew members, who considered themselves travelers through an alien landscape, Magellan conducted himself as if he were an instrument of the Lord. He believed that Providence had sent him to the Philippines to bring Christianity to the heathen and considered the local customs as grave social ills. In Magellan’s mind, Christianity offered the best, and the only cure.

  Magellan found that the Cebuans were organized and skillful in their barter practices; they relied on a remarkably accurate system of weights, measures, balances, and scales. Accordingly, he ordered his men to bring ashore their merchandise and open up for business. The Europeans offered their usual assortment of metal and glass objects, knives and beads and nails, and the islanders rushed to offer gold in return. However, “The Captain General did not wish to take too great a quantity of gold, so that the sailors might not sell their share in the merchandise too cheaply, because of their lust for gold, and he should therefore be constrained to do the same with his merchandise, for he wished to sell it at as high a price as possible.”

  Meanwhile, Pigafetta recorded the local language. The Cebuan dictionary he compiled was even more detailed and thorough than his primitive effort with the Patagonian giants. He took the trouble to include Cebuan names for parts of the body, the sun and stars, common plants and objects, and, for the first time, numerals. As before, Pigafetta worked in a vacuum, guided by the dictates of his intuition and common sense, since there was very little precedent and absolutely no professional standard for the ambitious task of writing down words and definitions for an entire oral tradition. Despite the obstacles, he managed to devise a phrase book that might be useful for subsequent expeditions that happened to pass through Cebu.

  The man . . . lac. The woman . . . perampuan. The youth . . . benibeni. The married woman . . . babai. The chin . . . silan. The spine . . . lieud. The navel . . . pussud. Gold . . . boloan. Silver . . . pilla. Pepper . . . malissa. Cloves . . . chiande. Cinnamon . . . manna. A ship . . . benaoa. A king . . . raia.

  On Sunday morning, April 14, King Humabon’s baptismal cere-

  mony unfolded with all the pageantry that Magellan could muster. The day before, crew members had constructed a platform in the village square, festooned with palm branches and other decorative vegetation. A complement of forty seamen, including Pigafetta, clambered into the longboats. Two wore gleaming armor and stood just behind the king of Spain’s banner as it waved benignly in the gentle ocean breeze. Once again, Magellan planned to fire his artillery, but this time he took the precaution to explain to the king that “it was our custom to discharge them at our greatest feasts.” Having given fair warning, the crew fired their weapons at the moment they disembarked, marking the formal commencement of the event.

  Magellan appeared, Humabon approached, and as the two embraced, the Captain General revealed that he had bent the rules of protocol in the king’s favor. “The royal banner was not to be taken ashore except with fifty men armed as were those two, and with fifty musketeers; but so great was his love for him that he had thus brought the banner.” Pigafetta wrote little about this banner, but it was probably the Royal Standard of the Catholic Kings, in use since 1492, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. It featured the eagle of Saint John with inverted wings, and it might have included symbols of the kingdoms of Spain—León, Aragón, Castile, Sicily—as well as arrows and possibly a scroll. The reverence that Magellan accorded the flag, along with his familiarity with exactly how it was to be displayed—accompanied by fifty soldiers in armor and fifty musketeers—showed his devotion to King Charles, even here, on these distant shores, and how misplaced were the longstanding suspicions that he remained secretly attached to Portugal.

  Once the priest baptized Humabon, the king took the name of Charles, after Magellan’s sovereign. Next, the king of Limasawa took the name of John. Even the Siamese merchant was swept up in the religious fervor and decided that he would convert, too, taking the name of Christopher. The baptism was more successful than Magellan had dared to hope.

  “Then all approached the platform joyfully,” Pigafetta wrote. “The Captain General and the king sat down on chairs of red and violet velvet, the chiefs on cushions, and the others on mats. The Captain General told the king through the interpreter that he thanked God for inspiring him to become a Christian; and that he would more easily conquer his enemies than before.” The king declared that although he wished to become a Christian, his chieftains still resisted the idea.

  The Captain General instantly summoned the recalcitrant chieftains and, as Pigafetta tells it, warned that “unless they obeyed the king as their king, he would have them killed, and would give their possessions to the king.” This was a nearly complete reversal of Magellan’s earlier declaration, when he insisted that no one would be forced to become a Christian, though he might give preferential treatment to the converts. This declaration ran contrary to the Church’s doctrines concerning the baptism of adults; they were supposed to be voluntary, for one thing, and, more important, based on faith, not fear. Magellan might have been bluffing so that the conversion could proceed rapidly; it is difficult to imagine him, or his men, staging a massacre of the generous and good-natured islanders they had just befriended. In any event, the chieftains swiftly agreed to obey Magellan and converted.

  Gratified, Magellan announced that when he returned from Spain, he would bring so many soldiers with him that the king would be recognized “as the greatest king of those regions, as he had been the first to express a determination to become a Christian.” Swept along by Magellan’s fervor, the king lifted his hands to the sky, profusely thanked the Captain General, and even asked that some of his sailors stay behind to instruct the others in Christianity. This time Magellan relented and said he would appoint two men to stay here with the king, but in return, he wished to take “two children of the chiefs with him” to visit Spain, learn Spanish, and describe the wonders of that country on their return to Cebu.

  At last the general baptism was ready, and Magellan, dressed in splendid white apparel, presided over the throng. “A large cross was set up in the middle of the square. The Captain General told them that if they wished to become Christians as they had declared on the previous days, they must burn all their idols and set up a cross in their place. They were to adore that cross daily with clasped hands, and every morning after their custom, they were to make the sign of the cross (which the Captain General showed them how to make); and they ought to come hourly, at least in the morning, to that cross, and adore it kneeling.” Magellan also explained that he was dressed in white “to demonstrate his sincere love toward them”—his recent threat to kill them notwithstanding. He continued to bestow Christian names on the converts. “Five hundred men were baptized before mass,” Pigafetta reports.

  The ceremony ended on a solemn note, with the king and the other chieftains, now Christians, declining Magellan’s offer of dinner aboard Trinidad, but embracing as brothers in the same faith, while the ships discharged their artillery and the jarri
ng blasts reverberated throughout the island kingdom.

  After dinner, the women took their turn at conversion, and their ceremony proved to be even more emotional. Father Valderrama, along with Pigafetta and several crew members, returned to the island to baptize the queen, who brought a retinue of forty women. She made a regal impression on the Europeans. “She was young and beautiful,” Pigafetta noted, “and was entirely covered with a white and black cloth. Her mouth and nails were very red, while on her head she wore a large hat of palm leaves in the manner of a parasol, with a crown about it of the same leaves, like the tiara of the pope.”

  The women now participated in a very different sort of ceremony. “We conducted her to the platform, and she was made to sit down upon a cushion, and the other women near her, until the priest should be ready. She was shown an image of our Lady, a very beautiful wooden child Jesus, and a cross. Thereupon, she was overcome with contrition, and asked for baptism amid her tears. We named her Johanna, after the Emperor’s mother [ Juana the Mad]; her daughter, the wife of the prince, Catherina; the queen of Limasawa, Lisabeta; and the others each [received] a distinctive name. Counting men, women, and children, we baptized eight hundred souls.”

  As more conversions occurred spontaneously in the following days, the entire population of Cebu embraced Christianity, and soon the inhabitants of other islands were making their way to Father Valderrama for the same reason. In all, 2,200 souls converted, without a shot being fired in anger.

  The scenes of conversion seemed touching and inspiring at first glance, but on closer inspection, they were incongruous and improbable. Theater had won the day. The rapidity with which the Cebuans accepted Christianity was suspect, but neither Magellan nor Pigafetta saw beyond the outward signs of faith to the lack of sincerity, conviction, and understanding that lay beneath. Thousands of islanders had converted to Christianity, but for how long? A tribe that converted so easily could readily accept another religion, or none at all.

  By mid-April 1521, Magellan’s trajectory as an explorer reached its zenith. He had quelled vicious mutinies, made good on his promise to discover the strait, navigated uncharted reaches of the Pacific Ocean, and claimed the Philippines, among other lands, for Spain, converting thousands of islanders in the process. But his erratic behavior—sometimes beneficent, sometimes menacing, occasionally both—suggests that his accomplishments had gone to his head and caused him to take an increasingly zealous approach to religious matters. Throughout the voyage, he had displayed a penchant for piety, but he now went further, threatening to kill those who defied his crusade. This time, Magellan intended to carry out his threat.

  “Before that week had gone,” Pigafetta wrote, “all the persons of that island, and some of the other islands, were baptized.” But there were holdouts. Magellan sent word to the recalcitrant chieftains that if they did not convert immediately and swear allegiance to King Charles, he would confiscate their property, a European concept that was nearly meaningless to the islanders, and he vowed to punish them with death, a threat they understood but chose to ignore. To demonstrate his seriousness, Magellan sent a band of his men to wreak havoc. “We burned one hamlet which was located on a neighboring island, because it refused to obey the king or us. We set up a cross there, for those people were heathen,” Pigafetta said, without a trace of remorse as the smoldering ashes sent a sickening plume into the sky.

  The neighboring island was called Mactan.

  As the Mactan hamlet burned, and all its inhabitants fled, Magellan forced the potentates of Cebu to adopt more authoritarian and hierarchical methods of exercising power, in the Spanish mode. First, he gathered various chieftains and coaxed them into swearing obedience to Humabon, who in turn had to swear loyalty to the king of Spain. “Thereupon, the Captain General drew his sword before the image of our Lady, and told that king that if anyone so swore, he should prefer to die rather than break such an oath.” Next, Magellan endowed Humabon with a red velvet chair, “telling him that wherever he went he should always have it carried before him by one of his nearest relatives; and he showed him how it ought to be carried.” Humabon, in return, presented Magellan with a special gift: two large earrings made of gold, two gold armlets, and two gold bands to be worn above the ankles. But the king was mistaken if he thought Magellan regarded those precious tokens as equal in importance to the power symbolized by the velvet chair.

  For all his apparent success in bringing the islanders to Christianity, Magellan was troubled by signs that the conversions were incomplete, and might be undone. Despite his orders, for example, they had failed to burn their idols; in fact, they continued to make sacrifices to them, and he demanded to know why. Everywhere Magellan looked, there seemed to be an idol mocking him; they were even arrayed along the shore, and their appearance was disturbing to European sensibilities. “Their arms are open and their feet turned up under them with the legs open,” wrote Pigafetta. “They have a large face with four huge tusks like those of a wild boar, and are painted all over.”

  In their defense, the islanders explained that they were propitiating the gods to aid a sick man; he was so sick that he had been unable to speak for four days. He was not just any man, he was the prince’s brother, considered the “bravest and wisest” on the entire island. But Christianity could not help him, for he had not been baptized.

  Magellan seized on the illness to demonstrate the healing power of Christian faith. Burn your idols, he commanded, believe in Christ, and only Christ, and, if the sick man is baptized, “he would quickly recover.” Magellan was so adamant that if the sick man failed to recover, he would allow Humabon to “behead him, then and there.” In fact, he would insist. Humabon, compliant as always, “replied that he would do it, for he truly believed in Christ.” Magellan was convinced that his life depended on the outcome of the baptism, and it did. If the sick man failed to recover, the cause of Christianity would lose all credibility, and Magellan, undone by his fanaticism, would very likely lose his head.

  He prepared carefully for the ordeal, relying on a show of power and a display of ritual to preserve the sick man’s life. Once again, Pigafetta was in the thick of things: “We made a procession from the square to the house of the sick man with as much pomp as possible. There we found him in such condition that he could neither speak nor move. We baptized him and his two wives, and ten girls. Then the Captain General asked him how he felt. He spoke immediately and said that by the grace of our Lord he felt very well. That was a most manifest miracle. When the Captain General heard him speak, he thanked God fervently. Then he made the sick man drink some almond milk, which he had already prepared for him.” The miraculous healing made a tremendous impression on the trusting islanders, who now revered Magellan as they would a god. He was more powerful than their idols, yet he walked among them.

  Magellan made the most of his victory, revealing a tenderness and compassion he had previously held in abeyance, and thus won even more glory and adulation from the Cebuans. “Afterward, he sent him a mattress, a pair of sheets, a coverlet of yellow cloth, and a pillow. Until he recovered his health, the Captain General sent him milk, rosewater, oil of roses, and some sweet preserves. Before five days the sick man began to walk. He had an idol that certain old women had concealed in his house burned in the presence of the king and all the people.” In the following days, Magellan, inflamed with biblical fervor, destroyed other idols arrayed along the shore, and incited the agitated islanders to follow his example. “The people themselves cried out, ‘Castile! Castile!’ and destroyed those shrines.” The campaign to rid the island of idols consumed Magellan and the Cebuans, who vowed to burn all they could find, even the idols concealed in Humabon’s dwelling.

  For a brief time, Magellan made his peace. All the hamlets on Cebu and the neighboring islands paid him tribute, presumably gold, and gave his men food in exchange for Christianity and faith healing. Life seemed tranquil, for a change, and the men, enjoying their nights with their island lovers, revelin
g in the exotic sexual practices of Cebu, were reluctant to leave.

  In the midst of this serenity, one ominous sign—a “jet black bird as large as a crow”—appeared over the island huts around midnight each night, and “began to screech, so that all the dogs began to howl; and that screeching and howling would last four or five hours.” The Europeans found it impossible to get a decent night’s sleep ashore while the racket lasted, and they earnestly inquired about the disturbance, “But those people would never tell us the reason for it.” To superstitious sailors, the relentless screeching might have been a portent of impending disaster.

  On April 26, the island of Mactan beckoned the armada. Its chief, Sula, sent one of his sons to Cebu, where he presented Magellan with an offering of two goats. He would have brought more, he explained, but the king with whom he shared the island, Lapu Lapu, had thwarted him. Lapu Lapu was the chieftain who had stubbornly resisted converting to Christianity, and whose village Magellan had burned to the ground.

  Caught between two intransigent warriors, Lapu Lapu and Magellan, Sula tried his hand at diplomacy. He told Magellan that Lapu Lapu was married to his sister and would cooperate in the end, but Lapu Lapu remained adamantly opposed to the European invader. Sula abruptly reversed himself and offered to place his soldiers at Magellan’s disposal to fight Lapu Lapu. The combined forces might be able to get rid of Lapu Lapu altogether. Magellan refused the offer and said he wanted to “see how the Spanish lions fought” without any help.