A Singular Captain

by John Regan

  Chapter 18

  The crocodiles weren’t so bad, Pigafetta thought; it was the wild boars that were the problem – angry beasts with huge tusks that could charge out of the forest without warning. The only way to escape them was to climb a tree and wait until they went away. As long as you kept your eyes open you could usually see a crocodile on the shore but boars could often take you by surprise. The sailors working as loggers tried not to stray too far from the ship, hauled over on her beam ends with her masts protruding into the trees, but as time went by they had to venture deeper into the forest inhabited by boars, snakes, spiders and other perils not normally encountered at sea.

  They had to search for a particular tree, called anime, which exuded a resin used by the natives for caulking their ships instead of pitch. Trinidad had no pitch left in the bosun’s store. The accountant, going back through the records, had found an invoice dated March 16, 1519 for five quintals of pitch that had never been delivered – further evidence of Bishop Fonseca’s swindling.

  The resin was heated in a cauldron until it turned into a liquid like glue, which was then forced into the gaps between the planks. They could only work at low tide, while the crocodiles basked in the sun, and for this reason the repair of Trinidad had occupied nearly six weeks. Pigafetta delighted in the discovery of giant oysters and a fish that he described as having a head like a pig and a body that was only a single bone like a saddle on its back. He found a certain tree that had leaves with feet, and if anyone touched that leaf it ran away. He kept one of those leaves in a bowl for a week and, when he touched it, it ran around the bowl. It did not eat or drink but lived only on air, and this was a marvellous thing.

  In all this time they saw no people on the island but many praus sailing past and in order to get food it was necessary to capture these boats, either by chasing them in the longboat or sending Victoria after them with her cannons. In this way they obtained pigs and chickens and coconuts enough to survive, but sometimes they also ate wild boar. Crocodile is no good to east and hard to catch.

  One of the praus that Victoria captured coming from Brunei had a governor of Palawan aboard, but not the governor they knew from before. When Elcano signalled them to lower their sail they refused and Victoria fired her cannons and then attacked with crossbow and musket and killed many men until the prau yielded and they took her for a prize.

  On this prau were not many things to eat but mostly camphor, which grows in Brunei, and Elcano’s men were angry. The governor of Palawan said if they would let him go free, within seven days he would give them four hundred measures of rice, twenty pigs, twenty goats and one hundred and fifty chickens. Elcano’s men did not believe him but let the prau go free anyway, because it was useless.

  The governor returned in seven days and gave them four hundred measures of rice, twenty pigs, twenty goats and one hundred and fifty chickens. Elcano’s men were so surprised that they gave the governor a suit of yellow damask, fifteen ells of linen and to his sons they gave a blue hat and a robe of green cloth and other things. The governor learned that the armada searched for the Spice Isles, and said his prau had a pilot who knew about the Spice Isles. This pilot came aboard Victoria to show the way.

  Trinidad refloated on the high tide of the full moon and did not leak and they fired the cannons to celebrate. It was now two years since the ships had sailed from Sanlùcar and the accountant called a meeting of the democratic council.

  “I am not a navigator and so must rely on you, Elcano, to lead us to the Spice Isles.”

  “They can’t be far away,” Elcano said. “We have a pilot now who says he knows the way. We see signs everywhere, and even live cinnamon trees.”

  “But what we came for is cloves. That is our charter from the king. As far as I know, there are only five islands in the world where the clove tree grows.”

  “Magellan knew where they are,” Pigafetta said.

  “So he said,” Elcano said, “but, typical of Magellan, he never confided in anyone. Kept everything to himself, like the true tyrant he was.”

  “He said the Spice Isles lie on the equator and here we are nearly nine degrees of north latitude and getting farther away from the equator, not closer.”

  “So, you are a navigator now are you, Pigafetta?”

  “I only know what the captain general said. And his comrade, Francisco Serrano lives there so we should try and find him. But we have to go southwards, not northwards.”

  “You just leave the navigating to me, Pigafetta,” Elcano said.

  “He also said, before he died, that we should be trading for food, not gold or swords with jewelled hilts,” Pigafetta said, “and now we are nearly run out of food except for the governor of Palawan.”

  “Let us leave Magellan out of the conversation,” Elcano said. “He is dead.”

  “No he isn’t,” Pigafetta said.

  Although Trinidad was still officially the flagship, and the accountant captain general, Elcano took the lead in Victoria and Espinosa followed in his wake. Elcano set a course of east by south, which would take them back to the vicinity of Mactan and Cebu, whence they had departed six months before. No progress had been made in the search for the Spice Isles since Magellan’s death.

  Next day, in the early afternoon, they raised a junk to the south and Elcano signalled a course alteration to intercept. The breeze was moderate, good sailing weather, and the range rapidly closed, with the armada and the junk on near reciprocal courses. Elcano signalled line of battle and Espinosa ordered Master Andrew to prepare his guns.

  First, Pigafetta saw the puff of blue smoke from Victoria’s starboard side and some time later heard the report and then saw the splash of the projectile, probably stone, across the junk’s bows. Victoria immediately wore ship to reverse course, a manoeuvre that brought the two ships on to parallel paths, with Victoria slightly ahead of the junk. Aboard Trinidad, Espinosa also brought his ship around but went the other way so that, before long, the junk was caught between the two, both converging on her. Victoria sent another shot across her bows.

  “Master Andrew,” Espinosa called down to the gunner on the main deck. “Do you want to try for her rudder?”

  “Too far.”

  “What about her main mast then?”

  “We might get the sail.”

  “Shoot, then.”

  One cannon roared. A miss. A second shot fell short. Victoria sent off a round that fell astern of the junk. Master Andrew’s next effort smashed the batten at the bottom of the mainsail, which immediately blew into ribbons. A cheer went up from Trinidad’s main deck and then they hoisted out the longboat for a boarding party.

  The junk yielded no livestock but only dried fish and coconuts, but in the hold they found Chinese porcelain and silk clothes embroidered with dragons. They kept some of the men from this junk to assist with working the ship. After three days, Victoria led the way into an anchorage not far from where they had anchored after fleeing from Cebu. Elcano and the pilot came across from Victoria in a pinnace to consult with the council.

  “My pilot tells me these are the Spice Isles,” he said, “although we have been in these parts before. The island is called Subanin.”

  Pigafetta was sure these were not the Spice Isles. He went ashore with the landing party and they pulled the boat up on the beach by a grove of cinnamon trees. The pilot waved his hand towards them and said, “Caumana; caumana.”

  “No, no,” Pigafetta said. “We want cloves, chauché ; not cinnamon, caumana.”

  This pilot thought spices meant cinnamon and did not know about cloves.

  The numbers man decided they may as well trade some cinnamon, and in the nearby village he bought seventeen pounds of the bark known as caumana, or sweet wood, at a cost of two knives. On the markets of Seville or Lisbon, seventeen pounds of cinnamon would pay for a large house.

  Elcano left the pilot behind on that island and set a north-easterly course, following the coast of a large and mountainous
island and getting farther away from the equator, as Pigafetta mumbled to himself. They sailed by a cape where the men they had kept from the previous junk said there were tall hairy men who were very fierce and fought with swords and bows and arrows. These men ate only raw human hearts sprinkled with lemon juice, they said.

  Then they sailed by a fleet of fishing boats owned by people who had no land but ate only fish and only went on the land for fresh water. When one of these people got sick the others performed a dance to draw out the evil spirit and trick it into going into a certain boat, which they then set adrift so the evil spirit was carried away. These waters had many such boats drifting with no people on board but only evil spirits who never die but live forever on the sea.

  When they next saw a junk coming, Espinosa said he would obtain his own pilot without waiting for Elcano and ordered his men to clear away for action. He altered course to pass to windward of the junk and Master Andrew stood by his guns. It may have been a lucky shot, but the second shell carried away her main mast, which came crashing down and fell over the side. Espinosa hove to with sails flat aback and allowed Trinidad to drift down on to the disabled junk. Usually, this was enough to subdue a native craft but this one fought back with spears and arrows, her crew shouting defiance from the deck. Several dropped dead with the first volley of musket fire and the rest either fell on their faces or leaped overboard. Grapples secured the junk alongside and the men-at-arms swarmed aboard, followed by Espinosa and Pigafetta.

  The armada was now well practiced in piracy. While some men-at-arms stood guard over the junk’s crew, others knocked out the wedges securing the hatch beams, stripped back the tarpaulin and peered down into the hold. This ship had a cargo of sawn timber for building houses or boats, rice in bags, coconuts, urns of palm oil and a couple of bags full of little black sticks with a strong scented smell. A man in the hold passed up a handful.

  “What’s this?”

  Pigafetta crushed one in his fingers, smelled it, tasted it, chewed it and then said almost in wonder, “Cloves. Espinosa, these are cloves. This ship has been to the Moluccas.”

  Espinosa tasted one for himself and broke into a smile.

  “Black gold.”

  Stepping around the dead bodies on deck, they walked aft to where the remainder of the crew sat with their backs against the bulwark, guarded by three men-at-arms with cocked crossbows and bare swords. There were eleven of them, including a boy about six or seven years of age, all bare-chested in sarongs.

  “Ask which one is the captain,” Espinosa said.

  The captain stood up to identify himself. Pigafetta showed him the handful of cloves and said, “You have been to Maluku.”

  The captain shrugged.

  “Tell him I want him to show us the way,” Espinosa said.

  The captain shrugged again.

  “Tell him if he shows the way to the Moluccas I will not sink his ship. If he refuses, I will sink his ship.”

  The captain’s face had no expression and he seemed to be gazing at a point somewhere beyond Pigafetta’s right shoulder.

  “Tell him again,” Espinosa said.

  Pigafetta repeated the threat, which had no apparent effect. Then the young boy got up and took hold of the captain’s hand.

  “Ah; your son?” Pigafetta asked.

  With an all but imperceptible nod, the captain acknowledged this.

  “Tell him if he does not show us the way I will take his son anyway.”

  Pigafetta hesitated over this. It did not sound like Espinosa. The brawny master-at-arms who had not hesitated to assassinate Quesada in Port St Julian did not seem the type to make war on children. Perhaps he was bluffing, Pigafetta decided, and translated the threat faithfully.

  For the first time, he got a reaction from the captain. He put his arm around his son’s shoulders.

  “It is far,” he said.

  “How far?”

  “In my ship, seven days. In your ship, I know not.”

  “Tell him he can have gifts of Turkish robes and white linen and red hats.”

  “I must bury my dead,” the captain said. He said a Moorish prayer before pitching them over the side.

  Now, at last, the armada was put on a southerly course, or at least south-east, to skirt around the many small islands offshore from the big one. To the east was the open sea and out of that sea after a few days came a great storm more ferocious than any yet.

  “Tai fung,” said the pilot as the wind shrieked and waves crashed right over the ship. The spirit of St Elmo appeared at the masthead and they prayed to St Helen, St Nicholas and St Clare and the pilot prayed to his god, Allah, and his son also, and when the storm ended, no one knew which god had saved them. Although the sky cleared and the wind eased, it stayed in the wrong direction and the ships could make no headway, tacking back and forth, unable to round a headland to the south. For a day and a night the pilot never left the deck, saying “Maluku” and pointing into the eye of the wind that made his goal impossible in this bluff-bowed, clumsy ship that could not sail into the wind. One time, as the ship approached the shore, requiring her to haul off yet again, he cried “Maluku” and pointed to the south, gathered up his son on his back and leaped overboard. With his son clinging to his back he struck out for the shore but his little son could not hold on to his father’s shoulders and was lost to the sea and the father was seen no more.

  It was necessary to find another pilot, which they did by capturing the captain of a prau. Now in three degrees of latitude by Elcano’s observation of the Sun, Pigafetta peered forward in expectation. The pilot named the islands going by: Chiama, Parachita, Lentua and many more, each with its own rajah, so indeed it seemed this pilot was a true guide.

  On November sixth 1521, twenty seven months since leaving Seville, four islands rose out of the sea high in the east; perfect conical shapes wearing hats of cloud and the pilot said this was Maluku and Elcano ordered the cannons fired for joy and all gave thanks to God. He also ordered the flag of Castile hoisted to the masthead to signify that Spain claimed possession.