by Jack Turner
Portugal’s first expedition in search of the Moluccas left in 1511. In December of that year, shortly after the fall of Malacca, António de Abreu set off in charge of three small vessels. With the assistance of local guides, the Portuguese found their way to the Bandas, where they filled their hulls to overflowing with nutmeg and mace. With no room remaining for cloves, de Abreu resolved to return to Malacca with two of the expedition’s three ships, leaving behind a companion by the name of Francisco Serrão to carry on the search without him.
The northern Moluccas were a more elusive goal for the Portuguese, although in time they would prove a more valuable asset. After various tribulations, including shipwreck in the Banda Sea and getting hopelessly lost among the islands, Serrão eventually made it to Ternate in 1512, on a junk stolen from pirates on whom he turned the tables. Forming an alliance with the sultan of the island, he worked his way into local favour by assisting Ternate in its desultory conflict with neighbouring Tidore – a condition as constant as the annual visitation of the monsoon. The original Lord Jim, he married a local woman (who may have been a daughter of sultan Almanzor of Tidore; if so, an adroit act of marriage diplomacy) and built himself a small fort and trading post – it still stands – from which he sent back a steady stream of cloves to Portugal. He would remain in the Moluccas for the rest of his life.
On the surface, everything was going Lisbon’s way. The immediate and troubling question was whether the Portuguese had any legal claim to their conquests. To many experts the possibility of Spanish ownership under the terms of Tordesillas looked like a probability. At the time the earth’s circumference was still greatly underestimated, no one having the slightest inkling of the vast breadth of the Pacific. All authorities agreed that the Spice Islands lay only a few days’ sailing west of the Mexican coast, a misconception that would not be corrected for several years. According to the document regarded at the time as the single most authoritative description of the world, the Suma de Geografia of Martim Fernandez de Enciso, written in 1519, the eastern meridian as defined at Tordesillas fell at the mouth of the Ganges – which made the Moluccas Spanish.
While the cosmographers speculated, troubling reports and rumours filtered in. The sheer distance they had to travel from India east to the Moluccas had come as an unpleasant surprise to de Abreu and Serrão. Given the great distance they had covered, it seemed not at all unlikely that they had passed out of the Portuguese hemisphere, into Spain’s. The secrecy with which the Portuguese shrouded their voyages served only to encourage further speculation; one reason why so few contemporary maps survive is that they were treated with the secrecy of classified documents. The Spaniards smelled a rat. To many it looked as if the Portuguese were not conquerors, but trespassers.
One of those who shared this suspicion was a Portuguese nobleman from the remote province of Trás-os-Montes, Fernão de Magalhães, or, as he is known in the English-speaking world, Magellan. A veteran of Portugal’s early years in the Indies, he had waded ashore at the conquest of Malacca alongside Serrão, whose life he had saved. When his friend sailed east to the Moluccas Magellan headed west, to India and then back to Portugal. But he never renounced his ambition to revisit the Indies, and the Spice Islands in particular. Over the course of the next few years he and Serrão maintained a regular correspondence via the junks Serrão sent back laden with cloves from Ternate. It was clear from Serrão’s letters that the Moluccas lay a good deal further east than the Portuguese authorities would publicly admit. Largely on the basis of his communications with Serrão, Magellan’s suspicion that the Moluccas lay in the Spanish half of the globe grew to conviction.
Conviction soon ripened into action. Magellan wrote to Serrão that he would come and join him soon, ‘if not by the Portuguese way, then by Castile’s’: that is, he would sail west from Europe to the Spice Islands, avoiding the Portuguese zone entirely. The idea seemed eminently feasible. Provided his assumptions about the circumference of the earth were correct, the voyage would be shorter than the long trip around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Technically, in strictly navigational terms, there was nothing stopping him; politically, on the other hand, the idea was dynamite.
In its essentials, of course, Magellan’s plan was nothing new: the idea of a westward voyage to the Spice Islands was the same as Columbus’s scheme a few decades earlier, the chief difference being that Magellan was aware of the chief obstacle in his way, in the form of America. Sailing west across the Atlantic, he aimed to drop down south around the bottom of South America or through a south-west passage, then cruise west to the Spice Islands. Only the outlines of what happened next are clear. As with Columbus before him, the first problem was securing the necessary capital. Back in Portugal, all Magellan’s efforts to finance his scheme ended in failure. Perhaps feeling personally slighted by the king’s refusal to grant him a pension, at some point disenchantment with Portugal and King Manuel set in. He may have been a casualty of court bickering and intrigue – a common fate for returnees from the Indies. Whether or not he divulged the full extent of his suspicions to the king is uncertain, but unlikely. If he did, the king would rather not have known: he had no interest in raising any more doubts over his claim to the Spiceries. Either way, having failed to generate any interest in his plan, Magellan went to Spain in search of richer pickings. Abandoning the land of his birth, he arrived in Seville on 20 October 1517.
Success across the frontier was not long in coming. Freed from the encumbrances of Portuguese court politics, Magellan joined forces with Cristóbal de Haro, the Portuguese agent of the Fuggers, the German banking dynasty that had provided the Portuguese crown with capital for the early spice fleets. Like Magellan, de Haro had also abandoned Portugal in search of a more cooperative royal client, his relationship with Manuel having soured, perhaps as a result of the king’s clumsy efforts at price fixing and insistence on a royal monopoly on all trade in spices. Between the two of them, the exiles from Portugal had the capital and the requisite expertise. By 1519, over increasingly shrill protests from the court in Lisbon, they secured the third element necessary for success, in the form of the backing of the Spanish crown.*
Of all the great voyages of the age of discovery, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe has good claim to be the greatest, whether in terms of the privations endured or the sheer audacity of the enterprise. Five black ships sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519, with a complement of about 270 men. Ambitious as it was in conception, the journey was hugely complicated by its commander’s innocence. There were volumes of speculation, but as yet no one knew where or for that matter whether the American continent ended, nor, if there was one, where the purported passage was to be found. Magellan may have imagined that the River Plate fitted the bill, but sailing upstream they soon found the water turning sweet and their way blocked. Exploring dozens of bays and inlets, each time they were forced to turn back in disappointment. The expedition was racked by fear, ennui and fatigue. Tensions between Magellan and his Spanish captains culminated in a mutiny at midnight on Easter day, suppressed by the execution of one of the mutineers; another was left to the tender mercies of the natives. Only as winter lifted, after yet more fruitless searches up every inlet, did Magellan finally lead the survivors through the maze of sea and islands at the southern tip of the continent, passing through a desolate fire-bearing country – Tierra del Fuego, as he dubbed it – then through 325 miles of icy squalls, mists and fogs in the straits that now bear his name. This was, already, an astonishing achievement, but it came at a price. When they entered the Pacific on 28 November 1520, only three of the original five ships remained.
The survivors found the new ocean calm, whence ‘Pacific’. Its tranquillity, however, was deceptive. Like Columbus before him, Magellan had premised his plan on a mistaken assumption of the earth’s circumference, but in this case almost catastrophically so, with the upshot that he had no inkling of the vast expanse of ocean still ahead of
him. For fourteen weeks the survivors inched north and west, tormented by fickle winds and consumed by doubts, their food and water all but gone, forever imagining that the Moluccas were just over the horizon. (As it was, they were extremely lucky to have taken a course assisted by a westward current – an oceanic conveyer belt. Had they sailed a little further to the north or south they would almost certainly have perished.) When supplies ran out early in the crossing, the crew was reduced to a diet of ship’s biscuits softened in rancid water; when the biscuits were gone they mixed sawdust with rat droppings and chewed on the leather of the yard arms with teeth that rattled in their blackened, scurvy-ridden gums. When land was finally sighted on 6 March 1521, the crew had been still further reduced by malnutrition, sheer exhaustion and despair. They had survived no fewer than ninety-nine days without fresh food or water.
Next came the absurd and ignominious anti-climax. Soon after arriving in the territory of the modern Philippines, Magellan threw away his life in a pointless skirmish with what the chronicler of the expedition calls ‘an almost naked barbaric nation’. It was an utterly ludicrous death, the result of trying to impress a local chieftain with the power of Christian arms, the more ironic for coming at the end of such a hellish crossing. ‘Thus did this brave Portuguese, Magellan, satisfy his craving for spices.’
Even now, however, the survivors still had much sailing ahead of them. With no clear idea of where they were or where to look they visited ‘an infinity of islands, always searching for the Moluccas’. Finally, Magellan’s Malay slave (a relic of his time in the Indies) identified the unmistakable twin cones of Ternate and Tidore rising above the horizon. While the small Portuguese garrison on Ternate looked on in astonishment and dismay, the crew fired their cannons in joy and proceeded to neighbouring Tidore, where they bought cloves ‘like mad’. The narrator’s relief is palpable: ‘It is no wonder that we should be so joyful, for we had suffered travail and perils for the space of twenty-five months less two days in the search for Molucca.’
After a brief stop for rest and resupply, the shrinking band of survivors made plans for home. At this point Magellan’s flagship, the Trinidad, sprang a serious leak in its worm-eaten bottom. The crew repaired the hull as best they could and made an unsuccessful attempt to sail back across the Pacific to Mexico, but after a fruitless battle against adverse winds and currents they were compelled to return to the Moluccas, whereupon ship and crew were promptly captured by the Portuguese. Only four crewmembers would ever see Spain again.
Meanwhile the other surviving vessel, the Victoria, headed west.* There were still another nine months of hard sailing before the ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned north, passing along the entire western length of Africa and across the Straits of Gibraltar, to Spain. On 6 September 1522 the Victoria limped into its home harbour of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, fourteen days short of three years since leaving. Of the expedition’s original complement of over 270 only eighteen had survived. A harbourside observer commented that the ship was ‘more full of holes than the best sieve, and these eighteen men more fatigued than the most exhausted horses’.
By his premature death, Magellan had forfeited the fortune and glory for which he had abandoned his country; as a Portuguese in the service of Spain he won only the opprobrium of his motherland and the suspicions of his adopted country. (Had he lived to return to Spain he would, almost certainly, have fallen foul of court intrigue.) The honours went to the survivor who piloted the Victoria back into Sanlúcar, a native of Guetaria by the name of Juan Sebastián de Elcano, one of the participants in the mutiny against Magellan at Port St Julián. But to the survivor went the spoils. Elcano was rewarded with a coat of arms with the device of a globe set above two cinnamon sticks, twelve cloves and three nutmegs, flanked by two Malay kings grasping branches of a spice tree, blazoned with the motto ‘Primus circumdedisti me’ – ‘You were the first to encompass me’.
As the durable Spaniard had outlasted his Portuguese commander, so it seemed on the larger stage of diplomacy. When the Victoria limped back into harbour the tables appeared to have been turned. With a claim staked on Tidore, the Spanish crown now had a physical presence to back up its theoretical claim to sovereignty over the Moluccas. Yet even now there were more twists and turns in store. The border town of Badajoz was the scene of fierce debates between Spanish and Portuguese diplomats, the key issue the still unanswerable question of the Moluccas’ exact longitude. (As a matter of fact, they were indeed in the Portuguese zone, though that could not be confirmed for many years yet.) The Spanish pointed to their presence on Tidore; the Portuguese called them trespassers; the Spanish flung back the same insult. Talks ground on, one futile deposition succeeding another. In the end, a settlement came not from the diplomats but from the accountants of the royal treasury in Madrid. By the terms of the treaty of Zaragoza of 1529, the impecunious Spanish monarch, deaf to the pleading of his counsellors, traded his claim to the Spice Islands for the sum of 350,000 ducats, so as to pay for the ceremonies attending his forthcoming marriage. The Spanish claim to the Moluccas, purchased with so much ingenuity, sweat, cash and blood, was sold to fund a royal wedding.
It was an ignoble end to the enterprise. Many voices – among them de Haro’s – were raised in protest at the king’s short-termism. With the annual profit from the islands estimated at 40,000 ducats, the settlement represented less than a decade’s return. Compounding the investors’ disappointment was the fact that so far these profits had failed to materialise. Even the return of the Victoria had brought de Haro and the other investors little cheer. Among the quayside celebrations, one of the interested parties prepared a breakdown of the expedition’s costs and returns in a document unearthed three hundred years later by the scholar Martín Fernández Navarrete. Known as the ‘discharge document’, this unadorned summary of inputs and outputs makes for fascinating reading. Though at only eighty-five tons the second-smallest vessel of the expedition, the leaking hold of the Victoria yielded 381 bags of cloves, the legacy of the frantic buying that followed its arrival on Tidore. The net weight was calculated at 520 quintals, one arroba and eleven pounds: 60,060 pounds, or 27,300 kilograms. There were also samples of other spices: cinnamon, mace and nutmeg, plus, oddly, one feather (a bird of paradise?).
In the debit column alongside is a listing of expenses: weapons, victuals, hammers, lanterns, drums ‘para diversión’, pitch and tar, gloves, one piece of Valencian cochineal, twenty pounds of saffron, lead, crystal, mirrors, six metal astrolabes, combs, coloured velvets, darts, compasses, various trinkets and other sundry expenses. Taking into account the loss of four of the five ships, the advances paid to the crews, back pay for the survivors and pensions and rewards for the pilot, it emerges that once the Victoria’s 381 bags of cloves had been brought to market the expedition registered a modest net profit. For the investors it was a disappointment, paltry in comparison with the astronomical returns then being enjoyed by Portuguese in the East; but it was a profit nonetheless. The conclusion must rate as one of accountancy’s more dramatic moments: a small hold-full of cloves funded the first circumnavigation of the globe.
The Scent of Paradise
It is an orchard of delights. With all the sweetness of spices.
Paradise as described in the Cursor Mundi,
a Northumbrian poem written c.1325.
Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, the three standard-bearers of the age of discovery, were spice-seekers before they became discoverers. Many lesser names followed where they had led. In the wake of their first groping feelers into the unknown, other navigators, traders, pirates and finally armies of various European powers hunted down the source of the spices and squabbled, bloodily and desperately, over their possession.
After the early successes of the Iberian powers, the spice trade took a Protestant turn. At the close of the sixteenth century English and Dutch traders made their first appearance in Asian waters, impelled by a desire for spice, as Conrad would phrase it, that b
urned in their breasts ‘like a flame of love’. Better organised and more ruthless than any traders yet seen in Atlantic or Asian waters, they fought off the Catholic powers, each other and all Asian rivals and smugglers for the advantage of bringing spices direct to Amsterdam’s Herengracht or London’s Pepper Lane.
At the hands of the northern newcomers Portugal’s Estado da India endured a protracted, undignified senescence, though it was barely a century old. Raiders preyed on the corpse and lopped off the choicest pieces. The first Dutch ships called at the North Moluccas in 1599, returning to Amsterdam low in the water from the weight of the cloves they carried: ‘So long as Holland has been Holland,’ one crewmember claimed, ‘such richly laden ships have never been seen.’ The English followed them east in 1601, James Lancaster leading a fleet under the auspices of the newly formed ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ – better known as the East India Company.* Sailing from the Javanese port of Bantam, an English pinnace reached the Bandas and their nutmeg groves in March 1603. Others followed, setting sail in vessels with such optimistic names as Clove or Peppercorn. With a toehold on the tiny islands of Ai and Run, James I was, for a time, proud to style himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’. For the sake of their nutmeg the latter two tiny islands shade Bermuda as England’s first overseas possessions.