After a month in the seaway no one doubted that they had found the legendary paso. Three hundred miles of it lay behind them, and now unfamiliar birds flew overhead, a sure sign of another ocean ahead. Another fork confronted them. After ordering San Antonio and Conceptión to spend a maximum of five days investigating the southeastern route—Trinidad and Victoria would wait here—Magellan called a meeting of his officers. He faced a decision—whether to sail home with news of their discovery or continue on to the Spice Islands—and he wanted their reports on the amount of provisions left. All told the same story: soon they would be running short. The holds contained three months of supplies, no more. Estevão Gomes, pilot of the San Antonio, argued vehemently that they should turn back. Stores were not the only consideration, he said; the ships were badly in need of refitting. Furthermore, no one knew the distance between them and the islands. If it was far, the entire fleet might perish on the merciless ocean, victims of thirst and starvation, their fate forever unknown.
It was good advice. Magellan chose to ignore it. They would push on, he said; no doubt there would be hardships, but even if they had to eat the leather on the ships’ yards, he would keep his promise to King Carlos, trusting to God to help them and provide them with good fortune (“de pasar adelante y descubrir lo que había prometido”). The captains were enjoined, on pain of death, from telling their men of the supply shortage. Gomes was unconvinced, however; the prospect of sailing onward frightened him even more than Magellan’s threat of death and mutilation for mutineers. He decided to quit the armada with his ship. During the scouting of the southeastern channel, San Antonio, with Mesquita in command, showed Serrano’s Concepción its heels. Serrano did not know precisely what had happened, but since desertion by the capitán-general’s cousin was impossible, he inferred that the pilot had led a successful revolt against the captain. Magellan had to face the hard fact that his biggest ship, with the bulk of his stores, was headed homeward. He was now down to three bottoms, and the supply situation, bad as it had been, was now worse. Yet he never considered altering his course. In an order issued “in the Channel of Todos los Santos, off the mouth of the Rio del Isleo, on November 21, fifty-three degrees south of the equator,” he declared that as “capitán-general of this armada” he had taken the “grave decision to continue the voyage.”
His resolution was strengthened when another pinnace, sent ahead, reappeared on the third day with the electrifying news that Balboa’s Mar del Sur had been found. Hurrying there, the admiral looked out on the prize Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and Pinzón had sought in vain: the mightiest of oceans, stretching to all horizons, deep and blue and vast with promise. Its peaceful, pacífico appearance inspired his name for it, though that came later. In that first rapturous moment he could not speak. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he was overcome by emotion, and his reserve broke. Don Antonio writes that “il capitano-generale lacrimó per allegrezza”—Magellan had burst into tears.
THE LITTLE armada’s 12,600-mile crossing of the Pacific, the greatest physical unit on earth, is one of history’s imperishable tales of the sea, and like so many of the others it is a story of extraordinary human suffering, of agony so excruciating that only those who have been pushed to the extremes of human endurance can even comprehend it. Lacking maps, adequate navigational instruments, or the remotest idea of where they were, they sailed onward for over three months, from November to March, moving northwestward under frayed rigging, rotting sails, and a pitiless sun.
Even for the age of discovery, Magellan’s situation was unique. Previous explorers had known that if all else failed, they could always return to Europe. That option was closed to him. Ignorant of South America—having started from the mouth of a strait known only to him—he had no base to fall back upon. Once he had left the eastern horizon behind, he had to sail on—and on, and on.
He had no way of knowing the true width of the Pacific. All the information available to him vastly underestimated its extent.
In Europe it was assumed that everything depended upon the location of Ptolemy’s Terra Australis Incognita, a necessary balance for a spherical world, without which the entire planet would topple over. But some assumptions had been made, and Magellan was acting upon them. In fact they were all wrong. Had he been told the actual distance that lay ahead of his small boats, he would have been incredulous; no one in Europe had ever dreamed that so broad a sea even existed. It was as though all his sources of information—the cartographers, astronomers, and cosmographers of the time—had conspired to betray him. Schöner’s globe, then thought reliable, put Japan only a few hundred leagues west of Mexico. Indeed, everything Magellan had read or heard had encouraged him to believe that after a short cruise he would raise Dai Nippon. Instead he was lost on the earth’s greatest ocean, a trackless seascape so enormous that if all the earth’s landmasses were dumped into it, thousands of miles of water would still remain.
The expedition had left Sanlúcar with 420 casks of wine. All were drained. One by one the other staples vanished—cheese, dried fish, salt pork, beans, peas, anchovies, cereals, onions, raisins, and lentils—until they were left with kegs of brackish, foul-smelling water and biscuits which, having first crumbled into a gray powder, were now slimy with rat droppings and alive with maggots. These, mixed with sawdust, formed a vile muck men could get down only by holding their noses. Rats, which could be roasted, were so prized that they sold for half a ducat each. The capitán-general had warned them that they might have to eat leather, and it came to that. Desperate to appease their stomach pangs, “the famine-stricken fellows,” wrote Antonio Pigafetta, who was one of them, “were forced to gnaw the hides with which the mainyard was covered to prevent chafing.” Because these leather strips had been hardened by “the sun and rain and wind,” he explained, “we were obliged to soften them by putting them overboard four or five days, after which we cooked them on embers and ate them thus.”
The serenity of the Pacific maddened the crews. Yet, as Don Antonio realized, it also saved them: “But for the grace of God and the Blessed Virgin in sending us such magnificent weather, we should all have perished in this gigantic ocean.” Some died anyhow; nineteen succumbed to starvation and were heaved overboard. Those left were emaciated, hollow-cheeked wraiths, their flesh covered with ulcers and bellies distended by edema. Scurvy swelled their gums, teeth fell out, sores formed inside their mouths; swallowing became almost impossible, and then, for the doomed, completely impossible. Too weak to rise, some men sprawled on decks, cowering in patches of shade; those able to stand hobbled about on sticks, babbling to themselves, senile men in their early twenties.
No other vessels crossed their path; indeed, in the six months that passed after they left San Julián they did not encounter another soul. False hopes were raised twice, about halfway through their ordeal, when islands were sighted which proved to be uninhabited and with no bottom for anchoring. Finally, on March 6, 1521, when the life expectancy of the hardiest of them could have been measured in days, they made a genuine landfall. It was Guam in the Marianas, then a nameless isle which, they found, was inhabited by hostile Micronesians—natives who were alienated, perhaps, by the stench emanating from the very bowels of the three wretched ships. Nevertheless Guam provided them with a reprieve. After a warrior party had paddled out to the fleet and stolen a skiff, Magellan sent forty armed men ashore to recover it. They returned with the skiff, and, far more important, fresh water, fish, fruit, poultry, and meat.
Pressing on after three days of convalescence, Trinidad, Conceptión, and Victoria sighted the large Philippine island of Samar on March 16, and then, south of it, tiny Suluan and its neighbor, Homonhon, in the entrance to what is now Leyte Gulf. According to Pigafetta, the capitán-general believed that he had found the Moluccas, but that is highly improbable; Magellan was too skillful a navigator, and knew Oceania too well, to have confused north and south latitude. The Spice Islands were over a thousand miles away. The likeliest
explanation for Don Antonio’s confusion is that the admiral, realizing there was no hope of wrenching the Moluccas away from Portugal, had decided to make amends by staking another claim in the name of the Spanish king. And that is precisely what he did, declaring the archipelago, together with all men and beasts therein, to be the property of His Christian Majesty, the sovereign of Castile and Aragon. *
He had chosen to go ashore on Homonhon because it appeared to be uninhabited; his men were too sick to cope with another unfriendly reception. But some natives, beaming with hospitality, crossed over from Suluan bringing quantities of oranges, palm wine, fowls, vegetables, and an abundance of two nutritious delicacies new to the Europeans: bananas and coconuts. When the admiral responded with gifts of bright kerchiefs, bells and bracelets of brass, gaudy red caps, and colored glass beads, they were delighted.
In their pleasure the capitán-general found a kind of retroactive exoneration. The port officials in Sanlúcar had laughed at his cargo manifests listing such gewgaws. Indeed, the privy council in Valladolid had at first balked when it found itself being billed for, among other trifles, a thousand mirrors, fifty dozen pairs of scissors, and twenty thousand noisemakers. He had explained that he anticipated possible difficulties in establishing rapport with strange natives, and his service in the Orient had convinced him that trinkets would smooth the way. After he had once more paraded his knowledge of islands — even exhibiting his Malayan slave Enrique—the privy council had deferred to his judgment, but the ridicule of the officious panjandrums on the docks had rankled him.
Enrique was still with him, and now, three years after he had been a privileged spectator at his master’s royal audience, this retainer unexpectedly presented him with a gift beyond price. On March 25, during their second week in the Philippines, the expedition moved on to the neighboring island of Limasawa. They were in the Visayan Islands, a part of the enormous Philippine archipelago which is linked, culturally and linguistically, with Sumatra and Malaya. Shortly after they had landed on the new island Magellan heard a great cheering and, moving toward the noise, found his servant surrounded by merry natives. It took a while to sort things out. Born in the Visayans, Enrique had been sold into slavery in Sumatra and sent to Malacca, where Magellan had acquired him. Since leaving the Malayan Peninsula in 1512, he had accompanied his owner to India, Africa, Portugal, Spain, and, for the past eighteen months, on this voyage. An apt linguist, he was fluent in both Portuguese and Spanish, but here on Limasawa, for the first time since his childhood, he had overheard people speaking his native language. He had joined in, and they had welcomed him as one of their own.
The significance of this incident was enormous. Enrique was merely happy, chattering away in Malayan, but Magellan was ecstatic. Both were back on familiar ground, which meant that by sailing westward they had returned to the lands where they had first met. Obviously Enrique was the first circumnavigator of the world. By completing the circuit of the globe, the expedition had provided the first empirical proof that it was a sphere.
IN CHRISTENDOM it was Semana Santa, Holy Week. A full year had passed since the San Julián mutiny. The paso had been found and threaded, the great ocean crossed, and the earth circumnavigated. Magellan and his men were rejoicing, riding high on a cloud of euphoria, which was both understandable and ominous—ominous because they were celebrating in one way, he in another, and the two would become irreconcilable. They entered a collision course after April 7, when Magellan spent three days sailing his flota to the much larger island of Cebu, between Leyte and Negros. There the interplay between the commander and his crews took on overtones of dramatic conflict, which was to end tragically.
The seamen were expressing their jubilation in the immemorial manner of men who have cheated death. They were mostly young, and after two weeks of rest and a restorative diet they felt virile. None had known female companionship since leaving Brazil at the end of 1519, five seasons earlier. Even if the girls on Cebu had been sheathed in Mother Hubbards, the crews’ discipline would have yielded to lust. As it was, by custom only married women wore clothing. The youths were surrounded by naked, nubile maidens who stirred uncontrollable desire in sailors who had been raised in a society which regarded nudity as prurient. The proximity of the sexes provided maximum temptation, the dense jungle offered maximum opportunity, and the predictable result was a saturnalia. The men ran wild. Afterward they said that the Filipino maidens preferred white lovers, finding them exotic and more vigorous than native boys. Of course, that was what they would say. Yet there has never been any suggestion that their advances were resisted. Apparently the apposition of the two cultures created a powerful sexual tension. The crewmen, being Christians, were afflicted with a sense of sin which increased their carnal appetites, while the guiltless, innocent girls enjoyed wanton tumbles beneath the banyans and, afterward, the gift of a mirror, a bracelet, a bangle, or a knife.
All this should have been anticipated. It had been, in the sense that Magellan’s standing orders forbade it. But orders do not enforce themselves, particularly under such circumstances. A martinet was needed, and Magellan was exhibiting a strange passivity, wholly out of character and entirely inadequate to the crisis. He did attempt one corrective measure; on his orders the fleet chaplain, Pedro de Valderrama, denounced sexual intercourse with pagan women as a mortal sin. Unfortunately the only consequence of that was an irreverent farce; before mounting the girls, seamen baptized them, thus desecrating a holy rite and reducing the padre’s threat to a joke. The Filipino men, of course, did not find it laughable. Their pride was deeply wounded. As the debauchery continued, fathers and brothers decided that their hospitality was being exploited, and for husbands the humiliation was even greater. The writhing women in the bush were not only sisters and daughters; many were also wives. Some of the seamen were running amok in harems, where gifts of mirrors and bracelets were also appreciated. The situation was volatile, deteriorating, and building dangerously.
Although venery was the most flagrant of the crews’ offenses, it was not the only one. Other standing orders of the armada were being flouted, and by officers as well as men. Indeed, the worst offender was the capitán-general’s brother-in-law. Since the fall Magellan’s most trusted captains had been Duarte Barbosa, captain of Victoria, and the Castilian Juan Serrano, Concepción’s commander. Private trade with the natives was forbidden to all members of the armada, yet some officers, Victoria’s skipper among them, were surreptitiously bartering iron, new to the islands and obviously useful, for gold and pearls, which, to Philippine peasants who hadn’t the remotest idea of their value on the other side of the world, were commonplace and useless. Barbosa was also guilty of drunkenness, absence without leave, and a record of prurience which was remarkable even in the midst of what had become, in effect, a festival of lechery. During this critical period Magellan’s mind was on other things, but after marines brought his brother-in-law staggering back to his ship after a three-day binge, the capitán-general had to act. Barbosa was arrested, shackled, demoted, and deprived of his command.
Had the admiral hewed to that line, restoring order by brandishing the whip, he might have survived the voyage to enjoy the fruits of his great success. But in those heady days, carried away by his sense of exultation, he too had abandoned himself to excesses. As his men wallowed in indulgence, he was exploring another extreme. Since his arrival in the Philippines he had been gripped by a religious fever. It was not an immaculate piety; like the European missionaries who followed him to far lands over the next four centuries, he confused evangelical zeal with colonial imperialism. Even as he converted Filipinos to Christianity, he also expected them to accept Spanish sovereignty. He saw no divided loyalties in this, no dual objectives; to him it was one crusade, with crucifix and flag advancing together.
EASTER’S ARRIVAL on March 31, their first Sunday at Limasawa, had provided an opportunity which, the devout Magellan believed, was God-sent. He had seized it by entertaining his hosts on L
imasawa with a theological version of bangles and beads—a flamboyant Mass. Padre Valderrama was asked to celebrate the services with flair, and the flota’s officers were ordered to provide him with every possible assistance. Their commander wanted a show, and he got it. An altar having been brought ashore, a glittering cross was attached to it. The priest, wearing his vestments, performed Eastertide rituals, after which the capitán-general and his men approached in twos, kissed the crucifix, and received the host while gunners aboard the ships fired volleys and all hands cheered.
The armada’s guests that morning had been Rajah Colambu, whose Mindanao jurisdiction included Suluan, and his brother Siaui. Already Magellan was singling out influential chieftains for attention—men who, once they had accepted Christ, could rule in the king’s name until royal administrators arrived from Spain. The Easter spectacle had served its purpose admirably. After Valderrama’s Mass the two guests of honor had knelt before the altar, imitated the movements of the supplicants who had preceded them, and then, according to one account, ordered native carpenters to build a cross so large that when it had been “set on the summit of the highest mountain in the neighborhood, all might see and adore it.” Before their departure, Magellan had told the brothers that if they should find themselves at war with other, pagan, natives, his men and ships would be at their disposal. If that force did not prove adequate, he would return from Spain with one which was.
A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age Page 29