Over the Edge of the World

Chapter IX A Vanished Empire

The upper air burst into life!

And a hundred fire-flags sheen,

To and fro they were hurried about!

And to and fro, and in and out,

The wan stars danced between.

Physically and emotionally exhausted, Magellan climbed partway to the crow’s nest to see the prospect for himself. His men, many of them about to succumb to scurvy, starvation, and dehydration, their tongues swollen, breath foul, and eyes glassy, raised their shaggy heads to glimpse their salvation. As the islands grew more distinct in the morning light, the lookout shouted again, “¡Tierra!” and gestured to the south, where cliffs rose from the sea. Overjoyed, Magellan awarded the fortunate lookout a bonus of one hundred ducats.

The first landmass Navarro had spotted was likely mountainous Rota. Thanks to the earth’s curvature and the angle from which the armada approached, it initially appeared to be two islands. Rota’s deceptive appearance confused Pigafetta, and has led to centuries of debate concerning which landmasses the lookout actually spotted. The other island, the one where the armada would eventually land, is now Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States. About thirty miles long, covering 209 square miles, Guam is the largest of an archipelago of volcanic islands known as the Marianas, which lie about three thousand miles west of the Hawaiian Islands.

For Magellan, the landfall on Guam came as a mixed blessing. Although the island provided shelter from the misery he and his men had endured during their ninety-eight-day Pacific cruise, nothing about it suggested they were anywhere near their goal, the Spice Islands. Nevertheless, it was land. Since leaving the western mouth of the strait, Magellan had traveled more than seven thousand miles without interruption: the longest ocean voyage recorded until that time.

On Wednesday, the 6th of March, we discovered a small island in the north-west direction, and two others lying to the south-west,” Pigafetta wrote of the momentous event. “One of these islands was larger and higher than the other two. The Captain General wished to touch at the largest of these islands to get refreshments of provisions.” Pigafetta even sketched this sight for his diary, but the illustration, depicting three irregular blobs floating in a shimmering sea, is so crude that it has no value for navigation. Even more confusing, Pigafetta followed the practice of his time and placed north at the bottom of his maps and south at the top. The completed drawings suggest that after the journey’s conclusion he furnished a rough description to an illustrator, who turned Pigafetta’s sketch into a charming and colorful cartoon in which the ocean’s azure blue was accented with flecks of gold and the islands seemed to float on the surface like giant potatoes. Nevertheless, his images are the only surviving cartographic record of the voyage.

Albo’s log for the same day includes a slightly different and more scrupulous account of their discovery. “On this day we saw land and went to it, and there were two islands, which were not very large, and when we came between them we headed to the southwest, and we left one to the northwest.” And he adds, ominously, “We saw many small sailboats approaching us, and they were going so fast they seemed to fly.” The secret of their astonishing velocity was the unusual design of their sails, which caught Albo’s attention. “They had mat sails of a triangular shape, and they went both ways, for they made of the poop the prow, and of the prow the poop, as they wished, and they came many times to us.”

Albo was getting his first good look at the highly maneuverable outrigger canoe known as a proa, and often called a “flying proa,” because it was able to attain speeds of up to twenty knots and seemed to fly over the water’s surface, exactly as Albo recorded. The proa’s secret of speed derived from its unusual design. Unlike European sailing vessels, its prow and stern were identical, but its sides were different: the windward side was rounded for maximum aerodynamic efficiency, and the leeward side was flat. The interchangeability of the stern and prow, combined with a maneuverable lateen sail, meant it could head into the wind without strain, and coast from one island to another without having to come about.

The proas approaching Magellan’s fleet were manned by a Polynesian tribe now known as the Chamorros, although this was not the name by which it was known in Magellan’s day. Initially, Magellan’s crew referred to all the tribes they encountered in the Pacific as Indios, Indians, in the mistaken belief that the Indies must be nearby. Succeeding generations of Spanish visitors gave the indigenous people of Guam the name “Chamurres,” which derived from the local name for the upper caste; later, they were called Chamorros, the old Spanish word for “bald,” or in Portuguese, “clean-shaven,” possibly in reference to the Chamorran men’s habit of shaving their heads.

How Guam and thousands of other isolated islands came to be inhabited has puzzled ethnologists to this day. Migrations from Southeast Asia gradually fanned out across the Pacific, into what we today call Melanesia and Polynesia, beginning about three or four thousand years ago, perhaps in light craft reminiscent of the outrigger canoes that advanced on Magellan’s fleet. Today’s Chamorros are a mixture of Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Mexican, and Spanish, and speak a distinct language, also called Chamorro. Whether the tribe whom Magellan first encountered that morning in 1521 was the direct ancestor of the region’s current inhabitants remains an open question.

Four hours after sighting land, the Armada de Molucca, surrounded by a welcoming party of outrigger canoes, entered a deep turquoise lagoon of exceptionally warm, clear water. As they approached, the sailors could see beaches, rocky cliffs, and steep, thickly forested slopes. The verdant landscape contained a paradise of springs, streams, and waterfalls: everything a sailor who has been too long at sea could want. The possibility of deliverance put the entire crew on edge. Jubilation alternated with watchfulness. The moment of contact between two societies, until now wholly ignorant of one other’s existence, had finally arrived.

At first, the Chamorros—hundreds of them in their small, maneuverable canoes—encircled the fleet. “Fearing nothing, they got aboard, and there were so many of them, especially in the flagship, that some of our men asked the captain to have them thrown out,” de Mafra related. The Chamorros, taller and stronger than the Europeans, boarded the flagship and stole everything they could—rigging, crockery, weapons, and anything made of iron—as the crew, in their weakened condition, pleaded with Magellan to force them to leave.

Eventually, one sailor summoned the strength to retaliate. “The boatswain of the flagship slapped one of those Indians for a small reason, and the Indian slapped him back. Insulted, the boatswain stabbed him in the back with a machete that he carried on his waist.” At that, the Chamorros—a “mob of barbarians,” de Mafra now called them—hurled themselves overboard. “Once they were aboard their shoddy boats they began fighting with their sticks, for they had nothing else. Some arrows were cast at them from the ships, but, being so many, the Indians managed to wound some of our men.”

In the middle of the fracas, a second wave of Chamorros skimmed across the azure water in their proas, and, to the Europeans’ astonishment, distributed food to the starving sailors. Once they had fed the Europeans, the Chamorros took up their sticks and began fighting again, this time more viciously.

De Mafra described how the Captain General narrowly averted disaster. “Magellan, seeing that the number of people was increasing, ordered those in the ship to stop throwing arrows; with this, the Indians stopped, the fighting subsided, and they resumed selling food as before, the kind of food in those islands being coconuts and fish aplenty, which were purchased in exchange for some glass beads brought from Castile.” Magellan’s show of restraint turned out to be just the right gesture. The modest yet historic encounter between the Armada de Molucca and a few dozen outrigger canoes contained in microcosm the conflicting impulses of the European colonialist adventure—from initial innocence and curiosity through confusion, fear, and bloodshed, all of it resolving in commercial activity.

If only matters had ended on this harmonious note. Unaccustomed to European concepts of trade and property, the Chamorros, while happy to feed the sailors, failed to comprehend that some things aboard ship were simply off limits. “Whilst we were striking and lowering the sails to go ashore, they stole away . . . with the small boat called the skiff, which was made fast to the poop of the captain’s ship,” wrote Pigafetta. To judge from the chronicler’s description, the Chamorros had made off with Magellan’s personal dinghy. The robbery could only be interpreted as an insult to the Captain General himself.

The next day, Magellan, “much irritated,” according to Pigafetta, retaliated. He was not about to let thieves make off with his personal vessel. He ordered forty men into the two remaining longboats. Rowing mightily, the crews pushed past the reef’s spume and reached the shore—the first landing by Europeans on an inhabited Pacific island. Then they went on a rampage. “The Captain General in wrath went ashore with forty armed men, who burned some forty or fifty houses together with many boats, and killed seven men,” Pigafetta related without comment. The sailors who remained on board the ships, many close to death from the effects of scurvy, implored the landing party to return with the internal organs of the slain Chamorros, which they thought would cure their scurvy. Their willingness to turn to cannibalism shows how desperate they had become.

During the rampage, the stunned Chamorros offered no resistance, and the Europeans held their fire. But their crossbows were brutally effective. “When we wounded many of this kind of people with our arrows, which entered inside their bodies,” Pigafetta wrote, “they looked at the arrow, and then drew it forth with much astonishment, and immediately afterwards they died. Others who were wounded in the breast did the same, which moved us to great compassion.” Amid the carnage, Magellan “recovered the small boat, and we departed immediately, pursuing the same course.”

Although Pigafetta mentions only a frenzied raiding party, he spent considerable time ashore over the course of the next few days, and recorded his carefully considered impressions of Chamorro society. “These people live in liberty and according to their will,” he remarked, clearly disturbed by the lack of a well-defined social order. Like Magellan, he felt at home in a hierarchical, authoritarian society in which loyalty to the king and the Church mattered most. During the mutinies he had faced, Magellan had always struggled to defend the social order and maintain his primacy over rebellious captains and crew members. But here, on the open waters of the Pacific, was a tribe that lived by different rules, or no rules at all. Chamorro society appeared to be assembled horizontally rather than vertically. If there was a leader, Magellan could not determine who it was. Subsequent Spanish visitors to the island learned that the structure of Chamorro society was actually intricate and subtle; it was matrilineal and heavily committed to ancestor worship. Chamorran women performed the central roles in family life, and although Chamorro men had appeared hostile to Magellan, their bellicose gestures were essentially ritualistic; they merely played at war.

Captivated by the Chamorros’ habits, Pigafetta recorded simple ethnographic details. “Some of them wear beards, and have hair down to their waist. They wear small hats . . . made of palm leaves. The people are as tall as us, and well made. . . . When they are born they are white, later they become brown, and have their teeth black and red.” Their teeth were stained from constantly chewing the betel nut, called pugua or mama’on by the locals. It grew on the areca tree, which resembles a coconut palm. They frequently chewed the nuts along with the betel leaf, pupulu, which tasted fresh and peppery. The islanders preferred the hard reddish nut variety called ugam, with its granular texture. It was their chewing gum, their tobacco, their coveted tradition.

This was the first time the men in the crew had laid eyes on women since their departure from the strait three months earlier, and they were a source of fascination. “The women also go naked,” Pigafetta was pleased to observe, “except when they cover their nature with a thin bark, pliable like paper, which grows between the tree and the bark of the palm. They are beautiful and delicate, and whiter than the men, and have hair loose and flowing, very black and long, down to the earth. They do not go to work in their fields, nor stir from their houses, making cloth and baskets of palm leaves.”

The ever-curious Pigafetta also describes the interior of the Chamorros’ huts, so it is likely that the Europeans and the Chamorros enjoyed other, more enjoyable encounters than their violent first meeting. Members of the crew probably stayed overnight because Pigafetta was able to offer vignettes of their domestic life. “Their houses are constructed of wood, covered with planks, with fig leaves, which are two ells in length: they have only one floor; their rooms and beds are furnished with mats, which we call matting, which are made of palm leaves, and are very beautiful, and they lie down on palm straw, which is soft and fine.”

During his visit, Pigafetta examined the Chamorros’ most advanced piece of technology, their highly maneuverable proas, paying special attention to their ingenious counterweight. “Some are black and white, and others red. And on the other side of the sail they have a large spar pointed at the top. Their sails are of palm leaf sewn together like a lateen sail to the right of the tiller. And they have for steering oars certain blades like a shovel. And there is no difference between the stern and the bow in the said boats, which resemble dolphins jumping from wave to wave.” He even included a crude sketch showing a small vessel with two oarsmen facing each other; in the middle of the craft, a single mast holds a lateen sail, and most strikingly, the counterweight balancing the hull, projecting straight toward the viewer. Curiously, Pigafetta (or whoever made these sketches for him) depicted the Chamorros as water-borne warriors in hoods and tunics, giving them a decidedly European appearance; in reality, they were naked, or nearly so.

The European visitors were surprised to find that the Chamorros possessed very few arms; their most dangerous weapon consisted of a stick with a fishbone attached to one end, and it was used not for combat but to catch flying fish. It now appeared that the armada’s initial encounter with the Chamorros might have been a tragic misunderstanding, because Pigafetta, trying as usual to communicate with the local populace, determined that they had been startled more than anything else. “According to the signs they made,” he wrote, the Chamorros thought that “there were no other men in the world besides them.” If this was the case, and the armada had disturbed an isolated island society, the Chamorros’ hostile response becomes understandable, as does their fascination with Trinidad’s skiff, the one piece of equipment in the armada that bore resemblance to their own canoes. In addition, the Chamorros had no concept of private property, and so they believed the newcomers’ possessions belonged to one and all. On this basis, they had been equally pleased to share their food and supplies with the starving intruders. Nevertheless, Pigafetta and Magellan decided that the Chamarros’ worst offense was their thievery, and the Captain General christened the island, as well as two others nearby, the Islas de los Ladrones—the Islands of the Thieves.

A more accurate name might have been the Islands of the Sharers.

On March 9, 1521, as the armada left the island, the Chamorros reacted with anger, perhaps feeling insulted or betrayed by the unexpected departure. Over a hundred proas took to the water. “They approached our ships, showing us fish, and feigning to give it to us. But they threw stones at us, and then ran away, and in their flight they passed with their little boats between the boat which is tied at the poop and the ship going at full sail; but they did this so quickly, and with such skill, that it is a wonder.”

As Magellan led his enfeebled crew out of the harbor, they observed the effects of the violence they had visited on the Chamorros. “We saw some of these women, who cried out and tore their hair, and I believe that it was for the love of those whom we had killed,” Pigafetta recorded.

Although the fruit and vegetables they had acquired would soon begin to restore the scurvy-ridden crew to health, one was too sick to recover. Master Andrew of Bristol, as he was listed in the fleet’s roster, died, and his earthly remains joined those of his other deceased shipmates in watery repose. The only British crew member, he had served as the fleet’s master gunner; the post was immediately filled by Hans Bergen, a Norwegian.

Once again, the fleet plunged blindly into the expanses of the western Pacific, with no clear idea how to reach the Spice Islands.

Had Magellan tarried among the Chamorros, he might have learned valuable lessons about navigating across the Pacific. Like other island tribes, the Chamorros had techniques for identifying distant landmasses. They were adept at reading the ocean swells to maintain a course; they could distinguish between distracting swells raised by winds in the area and the widely spaced, regular swells useful for orienting a ship. The swells contained other clues to the whereabouts of remote islands, because they tended to bounce off islands or even to curve around them. By studying the patterns of the swells, an experienced navigator could make educated guesses about the distances and locations of various islands.

Island tribes also studied birds for signs of land. By simply following a bird’s trail at the end of the day, when it flew to its nest after a day’s fishing on the open ocean, island navigators could reach land.

They studied clouds. The higher islands in the Pacific interfere with the trade winds, causing mist and vapors to collect above the landmasses. Magellan’s lookout had seen this effect when he first spied land and was unable to distinguish the island of Guam from the surrounding clouds. Even the underside of clouds contained valuable information because they reflected the color of the ocean directly below. If the underside happened to be tinged with jade, it was likely reflecting the greenish shallow water covering an atoll or reef.

They also sensed patterns in the placement of the islands, which tended to be scattered in long archipelagos; if they found one island, they would know approximately where to look for others.

For celestial navigation, island tribes employed a significantly different system than the Europeans used. Instead of relying on instruments, they developed a so-called star compass, a mental construct in which points along the endless, undifferentiated horizon were determined by places where stars and constellations rose and set. With this construct, island navigators subdivided the horizon into thirty-two segments, just as European compass bearings did. Rather than rely on terms equivalent to north, south, east and west, the island system named the points after the star or constellation. Unlike the European system, the thirty-two segments migrated with the stars, resulting in irregular bearings. In addition, the island navigator assumed that his proa was stationary, and the reference points on earth and in the sky were on the move. His reference point was the vessel, not landmarks, not even the stars. This custom may have derived from a common illusion experienced by sailors that their vessels seem to be motionless while landmarks slide by: hence the European sailor’s tendency to say that an island falls astern of the boat, as if the island itself were on the move.

In the preliterate societies that Magellan encountered, the island system of navigation worked as well as, if not better than, the flawed European system, which still lacked the ability to determine longitude accurately.

Magellan set a westward course, journeying deeper into the unexplored reaches of the Pacific in his quest for the Moluccas. The revitalized fleet enjoyed another marvelous week of sailing downwind, making seven or eight knots—top speed.

On March 16, a lookout spied the mountains of a large island rising from the sea in pale majesty. The fleet had reached the eastern edge of the Philippine archipelago—more than seven thousand islands, most of which cover less than a square mile. Today, the two largest are known as Luzon and Mindanao. Magellan’s lookout had glimpsed the third largest island in the archipelago, Samar. The Philippines are situated almost directly south of Japan, and north of Borneo. Magellan sensed he was getting close to the Spice Islands, but he did not realize how close.

Accounts of Philippine history begin abruptly in 1521, with Magellan’s arrival. But centuries before, these islands were well known to Chinese and Arab traders, who, with their superior sailing technology, profitably trafficked among them and developed sophisticated trading networks with the native societies. Archaeological evidence suggests that trade between mainland Asia and the Philippines had become highly evolved as early as A.D. 1000. Chinese junks, distinguished by their three tall, featherlike sails stiffened with battens, became a familiar and welcome sight in the Philippines. The prevalence of commerce in the Philippine archipelago brought islanders out of their isolation and spread Asian cultural influences, especially writing, along with their goods. By the time Magellan arrived, Filipinos who dwelled near oceans and inland waterways had long been literate.

Chinese exploration of the Philippines reached its commercial peak during the years 1405 to 1433, when the Treasure Fleet ruled the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Its immense ships ranged as far as the east coast of Africa to collect precious items and tributes for the emperor. They were eight or nine times longer than Columbus’s ships and five or six times longer than any in Magellan’s armada. For sheer size, the Treasure Fleet was unrivaled until the zenith of the British navy in the nineteenth century. Despite its importance and unique character, the Treasure Fleet is little known in the West, even today. It was the creation, in many respects, of one man whose accomplishments rivaled and in some ways surpassed the more celebrated exploits of Columbus and Magellan: Cheng Ho.

In 1381, the Chinese army seized control of the mountainous province of Yunan, in southern China, and captured a young boy named Ma Ho, the son of a devout Muslim. Along with other young prisoners, he was castrated at the age of thirteen, a common practice in China, where eunuchs engaged in servant occupations. Ma Ho won an appointment as a servant to the fourth son of the Chinese emperor, Prince Zhu Di. Tens of thousands of eunuchs held such positions, which became so coveted that the Chinese eventually prohibited self-castration to discourage the overwhelming number of office seekers. In this competitive environment, Ma Ho rose to the rank of officer on the strength of his military and diplomatic skills. Later, the prince conferred the name Cheng Ho on his loyal and capable servant, and as Cheng Ho he played his pivotal role at the height of the Ming dynasty. (In the Pinyin transliteration of Chinese, he is now known as Zheng He, but he is still usually called Cheng Ho.) He was a giant of a man, seven feet tall, of considerable girth, endowed with a robust personality to match his stature and position. His complexion was said to be “rough like the surface of an orange,” and “his eyebrows were like swords and his forehead wide, like a tiger’s.”

His star rose even higher when his patron, Zhu Di, became emperor in 1402. Zhu Di placed administrative authority in the hands of the eunuchs who had helped him come to power, among them Cheng Ho. Having rid his kingdom of enemies, the emperor decided to give himself a suitable name. He picked Yongle, which means “lasting joy.” To pursue his goals of building an international commercial empire, Zhu Di named Cheng Ho as admiral, and placed him in charge of an ambitious and in some respects quite un-Chinese mission, that of building and leading a Treasure Fleet to explore the oceans.

Cheng Ho oversaw the operation of huge shipyards in Nanking, the planting of thousands of trees to provide wood for the ships, and the establishment of a school to train interpreters in foreign languages. Cheng Ho hastened to complete a fleet consisting of fifteen hundred wooden ships, including the largest sail-powered vessels ever built. They were extraordinarily luxurious, with staterooms, gold fittings, bronze cannon (for display rather than combat), and silk furnishings. Their seaworthiness was greatly enhanced by bulkheads, watertight compartments whose design was inspired by the chambers of the bamboo stalk. It would be several centuries before Western ships incorporated the same technology.

The Treasure Fleet assembled along the Yangtze River in Nanking in readiness for its first epic voyage, beginning in 1405. It consisted of 27,800 men, in contrast to the 260 men that made up the Armada de Molucca. Each of the Treasure Fleet’s larger ships—some as long as five hundred feet—carried nearly a thousand men. Others were devoted solely to transporting horses; still others carried water, or troops, or weapons, should they be needed to defend the fleet. Some ships carried only food, in case the crew found nothing to eat on distant shores; others carried large tubs of soil to cultivate fruits and vegetables. The luxury might have been responsible for preventing scurvy among the crew.

Unlike the Armada de Molucca, the Treasure Fleet did not conquer or claim distant lands. Although the Chinese considered themselves culturally superior to the outside world, they had no interest in establishing a colonial or military empire. Rather, the goal was to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the “barbarians” beyond their borders and to conduct scientific research. The unique Chinese philosophy of exploration received eloquent expression in a tablet said to have been written by the emperor himself at the height of the Treasure Fleet’s activity.

We rule all under heaven, pacifying and governing the Chinese and the barbarians with impartial kindness and without distinction between mine and thine. Extending the way of the ancient sage emperors and the enlightened kings so as to accord with the will of heaven and earth, we desire all distant countries and foreign domains each achieve its proper place under heaven.

At sea, the ships of the Treasure Fleet remained in touch with one another through a system of flags and lanterns, similar to the techniques employed by Magellan; they also used bells, gongs, and even carrier pigeons for communication. They measured time with burning graduated incense sticks. They navigated with compasses. Chinese pilots also employed a measuring instrument known as a qianxingban to fix their latitude, using the Southern Cross as their reference point. Cheng Ho often consulted a twenty-one-foot-long nautical chart that he unrolled section by section as his journey progressed. Like the portolan charts employed by Spanish and Portuguese navigators a century later, it contained landmarks, compass bearings, and detailed directions for sailing from one point to another. Chinese navigators also learned to steer by the stars, relying on maps of the heavens to supplement their master charts. Chinese constellations differed from those traditionally used in the West; their great reference points were known as the Lantern and the Weaving Girl.

In rough weather, Chinese sailors prayed fervently to be spared from drowning, just as Magellan’s crew did. In their case, the Chinese prayed to the Celestial Spouse, a Taoist goddess. Deliverance from storms came in the form of the same Saint Elmo’s fire that signaled salvation to Magellan’s crew. Like Magellan’s sailors, the Chinese mariners considered the appearance of the spectral light a sign of safety conferred on their commander by divine forces.

The Treasure Fleet’s first important destination was Calicut, on India’s southwestern coast. Chinese explorers had reached this city overland eight centuries before, but the Treasure Fleet’s arrival prompted an outpouring of generosity from Calicut’s ruler, who conferred lavish gifts in the form of sashes made of finely spun gold, pearls, and precious stones.

While in Calicut, the men of the Treasure Fleet became aware of an unusual legend in which characters named Moses and Aaron figured prominently, along with a golden calf. The mysterious legend was recorded by the Treasure Fleet’s official chronicler, Ma Huan, who performed approximately the same function for Cheng Ho as Antonio Pigafetta did for Magellan. He wrote of a “holy man named Mouxie [Moses], who established a religious cult; the people knew that he was a true [man of] heaven, and all revered and followed him.” As it happened, the holy man had a younger brother with “depraved ideas.” According to the story, he made a “gold calf and said, ‘This is the holy lord; everyone who worships it will have his expectation fulfilled.’ He taught the people to listen to his bidding and to adore the gold ox, saying, ‘It always excretes gold.’ The people got the gold, and their hearts rejoiced; and they forgot the way of Heaven.” Later, when Mouxie returned, “He saw the multitude, misled by his younger brother . . . corrupting the holy way; thereupon he destroyed the ox and wished to punish his younger brother; [and] his younger brother mounted a large elephant and vanished.” This was, of course, a modified version of the biblical account of Moses and Aaron, but the Chinese did not understand its true origins. They assumed it came from India because that was where they first heard it.

Cheng Ho returned from the Treasure Fleet’s first voyage as a national hero, and he was soon making plans for future voyages. He stayed in China for the second voyage, and returned to sea for the third, commanding a fleet of forty-eight ships and thirty thousand men. With an eye to the future, they established trading posts and warehouses wherever they went. So it went for three more voyages, each lasting approximately two years as the Treasure Fleet established and maintained the first international maritime trading network. The Treasure Fleet explored the African coast all the way south to Mozambique, the Persian Gulf, and many other points throughout Southeast Asia and India. The lure and romance of ocean exploration spread throughout China. “We have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high,” Cheng Ho wrote, “and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course like that of a star, traversing the savage waves as if treading a public thoroughfare.”

In 1424, the emperor, Zhu Di, died. His funeral was as excessive as his life, involving ten thousand mourners who watched as he was buried along with sixteen of his concubines. The unfortunate women had been hanged or ordered to take their own lives in preparation for the event. Their tomb was surrounded by a mile-long line of stone carvings representing soldiers, beasts, and officials. His son, Zhu Gaozhi, canceled all future voyages for the Treasure Fleet. Like other rulers during the Ming dynasty, Zhu Gaozhi was caught between followers of the Confucian traditions, who urged him to look inward and disdain traffic with foreigners, and the eunuchs, who encouraged international trade and grew rich off the proceeds. Zhu Gaozhi allied himself with the Confucians, and the admiral Cheng Ho, once the most powerful man in China next to the emperor, was reassigned to Nanking. The great shipyards, where thirty thousand men once toiled, fell silent as shipbuilding ceased.

That would have been the end of the Treasure Fleet, had Zhu Gaozhi lived. But he died a few years later, and his twenty-six-year-old son—Zhu Di’s grandson—turned to the palace eunuchs, who quickly restored the Treasure Fleet to its former glory. In 1431, on its seventh voyage, the fleet consisted of 300 ships and 27,500 men. Cheng Ho was charged with restoring peaceful relations between China and the kingdoms of Malacca and Siam. After completing the mission, part of the fleet sailed on and probably reached northern Australia. This much has been strongly suggested by Chinese artifacts recovered in Australia and by the oral traditions of the Aborigines. The remarkable journey turned out to be the Treasure Fleet’s last adventure; Cheng Ho, who inspired the enterprise, died on the voyage home.

The emperor mothballed the Treasure Fleet, shut down the Nanking shipyards, and destroyed records documenting its accomplishments. Chinese science and technology, especially regarding exploration, fell into decline. By 1500, an imperial edict made it a capital offense for a ship with more than two masts to put to sea; in 1525, officials set about destroying the larger ships of the Treasure Fleet. China abandoned the huge transoceanic trading empire created by the Treasure Fleet and, guided by Confucian precepts, turned inward, never to explore the ocean again.

Cheng Ho’s voyages demonstrated that China was once the most powerful nation in the world, a seagoing empire that Spain or Portugal would have feared and envied, had they known of its reach. The reputation of the Treasure Fleet never made it to European shores. Portuguese and Spanish explorers sailed into the vacuum of power left by China. Like the Chinese, they came in search of wealth, but quite unlike them, they fiercely battled for territory, for commercial and political advantage over one another, and for religious conquest.

Driven by these imperatives, European progress into the regions formerly under the spell of Chinese commerce was swift. In 1498, Vasco da Gama and his men came across evidence of the vanished Chinese presence in East Africa: natives wearing green silk caps adorned with fringe. The inhabitants spoke of white ghosts wearing silk: a distant memory of the Treasure Fleet, which had visited these shores eighty years before. Now, in 1521, Magellan’s Armada de Molucca arrived in the Philippines, claiming vast territories renounced by China. Magellan, like other Europeans, had no direct knowledge of the Treasure Fleet, but he and his men kept stumbling across artifacts of the vanished Chinese empire: silk, porcelain, writing, and sophisticated weights and measures were everywhere in evidence.

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. . . . And 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 Magellan’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. . . . Then 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 ask 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 chamber 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.

For real fighting, the weapons that mattered most were more traditional swords, knives, and pole weapons, which Spain had brought to a high level of refinement. The ships carried nearly one thousand spears (four for every member of the crew), several hundred steel-tipped javelins and pikes, and a dozen lances. They also carried halberds—an especially nasty weapon consisting of a blade mounted on a shaft with two handles. Properly used, a halberd could slice a man in two. There were at least sixty crossbows, and hundreds of arrows to supply them.

To complement the weapons, the fleet carried one hundred sets of armor (rather than the two hundred Magellan had claimed), consisting of corselets, cuirasses, helmets, breastplates, and visors. Magellan brought his own deluxe armor, which included a coat of mail, body armor, and six swords. His helmet was topped with bright plumage. With their firearms and armor, the men of Magellan’s fleet believed they were the masters of all they surveyed. As far as Magellan was concerned, the combination of firepower and armor gave the armada unequaled power over the people of the islands, a belief that would cost him dearly.

Once Magellan finished his military display, he formally requested that two emissaries inspect the island’s huts and food stores. The king rapidly assented, and the Captain General chose Pigafetta and another crew member, whose name the attention-loving chronicler ignored. After his months at sea, keeping out of harm’s way during the mutiny and narrowly avoiding disaster when he fell overboard, this was Pigafetta’s great opportunity to distinguish himself as a diplomat.

The moment he stepped ashore, he encountered luxury the likes of which he had not seen since leaving Spain. “When I reached the shore, the king raised his hands toward the sky and then turned toward us two. We did the same toward him as did all the others.” He made a regal spectacle, “very grandly decked out,” and “the finest looking man that we saw among those people.” His hair, “exceedingly black,” hung to his shoulders, and he wore two large golden earrings. “He wore a cotton cloth all embroidered with silk, which covered him from the waist to the knees. At his side hung a dagger, the haft of which was somewhat long and all of gold, and its scabbard of carved wood. He had three spots of gold on every tooth, and his teeth appeared as if bound with gold.” Tattoos covered every inch of his glistening, perfumed body. The women, Pigafetta noticed, “are clad in tree cloth from their waist down, and their hair is black and reaches to the ground. They have holes pierced in their ears which are filled with gold.” Gold was everywhere, in jewelry, goblets, and dishes; it was evident throughout the king’s dwelling. The precious metal, Pigafetta learned, was readily mined on the island in “pieces as large as walnuts and eggs.”

Everyone, it seemed, chewed constantly on a fruit that resembled a pear. “They cut that into four parts, and then wrap it in the leaves of their tree, which they call betel. . . . They mix it with a little lime and when they have chewed it thoroughly, they spit it out. It makes the mouth exceedingly red. All the people in those parts of the world use it, for it is very cooling to the heart, and if they ceased to use it they would die.”

Pigafetta had little time to gape. “The king took me by the hand; one of his chiefs took my companion, and they led us under a bamboo covering, where there was a balanghai as long as eighty of my palm lengths. . . . We sat down upon the stern of that balanghai, constantly conversing with signs. The king’s men stood about us in a circle with swords, daggers, spears, and bucklers. The king had a plate of pork brought in and a large jar filled with wine. At every mouthful, we drank a cup of wine. . . . The king’s cup was always kept covered, and no one else drank from it but him and me. Before the king took the cup to drink, he raised his clasped hand toward the sky, and then toward me; and when he was about to drink, he extended the fist of his left hand toward me. At first, I thought he was about to strike me. Then he drank. I did the same toward the king. They all make those signs toward one another when they drink.”

Dinner was announced, and a royal feast it was. “Two large porcelain dishes were brought in, one full of rice and the other of pork with its gravy.” Out of respect for the king, Pigafetta, an observant Catholic, forced himself to overlook one of his own religious customs. “I ate meat on Holy Friday,” he confessed, “for I could not help myself.” During the meal, Pigafetta gave the king a presentation that made almost as large an impression as Magellan’s show of force: it was the power of the written word. Pigafetta coaxed the king to name various objects surrounding them, and recorded a phonetic transcription. “When the king and the others saw me writing, and when I told them their words, they were all astonished.”

After the demonstration, “We went to the palace of the king”—in reality, a “hay loft thatched with banana and palm leaves. It was built up high from the ground on huge posts of wood and it was necessary to ascend it by means of ladders.” Once everyone had clambered inside the flimsy structure, “The king made us sit down there on a bamboo mat with our feet drawn up like tailors. After a half-hour a platter of roast fish cut in pieces was brought in, and ginger freshly gathered, and wine. The king’s eldest son, who was the prince, came over to us, whereupon the king told him to sit down near us, and he accordingly did so.” More feasting ensued; Pigafetta claimed that he held his own, but “my companion became intoxicated as a consequence of so much eating and drinking.” Eventually, the king, his appetite sated, retired for the night, leaving the prince behind. Pigafetta and the besotted prince slumbered in the rickety palace on bamboo mats “with pillows made of leaves.”

In the morning, the king returned, took Pigafetta “by the hand” once more, and offered him another lavish meal, but before the feasting could resume, the longboat came to fetch the Europeans. Magellan had finally had enough; in addition, Easter was fast approaching. Pigafetta’s reluctance to return to the fetid, barracks-like surroundings of Trinidad can be imagined. “Before we left, the king kissed our hands with great joy, and we his. One of his brothers, the king of another island, and three men came with us. The Captain General kept him to dine with us, and gave him many things.”

Early on the morning of Sunday, the last of March, and Easter Day, the Captain General sent the chaplain ashore to celebrate mass,” wrote Pigafetta of that holiday. They explained the importance of the occasion to the king, so that he would not feel it necessary to feed everyone again, but neither he nor his royal brother could resist, and they sent two freshly slaughtered pigs to the Europeans. And then some of the islanders decided to worship alongside them.

Once the mass began, the islanders gradually fell under its incantatory spell, barely comprehending the rite’s significance, but, to judge from Pigafetta’s description, feeling its spiritual power nonetheless. “When the hour for mass arrived, we landed with about fifty men, without our body armor, but carrying our other arms, and dressed in our best clothes. Before we reached the shore with our boats, six weapons were discharged as a sign of peace. We landed; the two kings embraced the Captain General and placed him between them. We went in marching order to the place consecrated, which was not far from the shore. Before the commencement of mass, the Captain General sprinkled the entire bodies of the two kings with musk water. The mass was celebrated. The kings went forward to kiss the cross as we did, but they did not participate in the Eucharist. When the body of our Lord was elevated, they remained on their knees and worshiped Him with clasped hands. The ships fired all their artillery at once when the body of Christ was elevated, the signal having been given from the shore with muskets. After the conclusion of the mass, some of our men took communion.”

After the solemn observance, it was time to celebrate. To amuse and impress his hosts, Magellan organized a fencing tournament, “at which the kings were greatly pleased.” Next, Magellan ordered his men to display the cross, complete with “nails and the crown,” and explained to the kings that his own sovereign, King Charles, had given these objects to him, “so that wherever he might go he might set up those tokens.” Now he wished to set up the cross on their island, “for whenever any of our ships came from Spain, they would know we had been there by that cross, and would do nothing to displease them or harm their property.” Magellan wanted to place the cross “on the summit of the highest mountain,” and he explained the many benefits of displaying it as he proposed. For one thing, “Neither thunder, nor lightning, nor storms would harm them in the least,” and for another, “If any of their men were captured, they would be set free immediately on that sign being shown.” The kings gratefully accepted the cross as a totem, without having any idea of what it actually meant.

Magellan inquired about the islanders’ religious beliefs. “They replied that they worshiped nothing, but that they raised their clasped hands and their faces to the sky; and that they called their god ‘Abba.’” Magellan indicated that their god sounded reassuringly familiar, “And, seeing that, the first king raised his hands to the sky, and said that he wished it were possible for him to make the Captain General see his love for him.”

The discussion turned to politics. Magellan asked if the king had any enemies; if so, Magellan would “go with his ships to destroy them and render them obedient.” By doing so, he hoped to strengthen their bond, and establish a permanent Spanish presence in the newly discovered archipelago. As it happened, the king said there were “two islands hostile to him, but . . . it was not the season to go there.” Hearing this, Magellan turned warlike: “The Captain General told him that if God would again allow him to return to those districts, he would bring so many men that he would make the king’s enemies subject to him by force.” This was a curious offer because nothing in Magellan’s charter from King Charles mentioned fighting tribal wars or mass conversions to Christianity; he was supposed to “go in search of the Strait,” demonstrate that the Spice Islands belonged to Spain, and return in ships laden with spices. Now he put aside his commercial goals in favor of conversions and conquest. Magellan ordered his men back into formation; they fired their guns into the silent sky as a farewell gesture, “and the captain having embraced the two kings, we took our leave.”

Magellan and the crew members returned briefly to their ships to retrieve the cross, and then made an exhausting ascent to the summit of the highest mountain in the area. “After the cross was erected in position, each of us repeated a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, and adored the cross; and the kings did the same. Then we descended through their cultivated fields, and went to the place where the balanghai was. The kings had some coconuts brought in so that we might refresh ourselves.”

Considering his work done, Magellan announced his intention to depart in the morning. Despite all the pigs and rice and wine the kings had bestowed on them, the Captain General declared he needed even more food, and the kings recommended the island of Cebu as a convenient place to forage. Magellan’s decision to sail on to Cebu troubled Pigafetta, who described it as “ill-fated.” But Cebu itself did not pose any danger to Magellan; rather, it was his determination to form an alliance with friendly local rulers by making war on their enemies. Looking for trouble, he was sure to find it eventually.

Magellan asked the king for local pilots to escort the fleet to Cebu, and the king happily complied, but in the morning, he asked “for love of him to wait two days until he should have his rice harvested and other trifles attended to. He asked the Captain General to send him some men to help him, so that it might be done sooner; and said that he intended to act as our pilot himself.” Magellan agreed, “But the kings ate and drank so much that they slept all day. Some said to excuse them that they were slightly sick.”

Their departure delayed for forty-eight hours, Magellan fell to trading with the islanders, but he immediately ran into obstacles. “One of those people brought us . . . rice and also eight or ten bananas fastened together to barter them for a knife which at the most was worth three catrini”—a Venetian coin of little value. “The Captain General, seeing that the native cared for nothing but a knife, called him to look at other things. He put his hand in his purse and wished to give him one real.” The native refused the valuable coin. “The Captain General showed him a ducado, but he would not accept that, either.” Magellan kept offering coins of increasing value, but met with the same reaction; the native “would take nothing but a knife.” Finally, Magellan relented and gave it to him. Later, when a crew member went ashore to fetch water, he was offered a large crown made of gold in exchange for “six strings of glass beads,” but Magellan blocked the trade, “so that the natives should learn that at the very beginning that we prized our merchandise more than their gold.” The gold was far more valuable than the glass beads, but Magellan did not want the islanders to know how precious the Europeans considered gold. He instructed his men to treat it as just another metal. The ruse worked, and the armada, trading iron for gold, pound for pound, acquired vast riches. The gold they had acquired so easily would be worth a fortune in Spain, but the spices Magellan expected to find were even more valuable than the gold.

The armada resumed its wanderings through the Philippine archipelago, dodging reefs so treacherous that even their native pilots hesitated. Along the way—it is impossible to know precisely where—they called at an island Pigafetta named Gatigan. Ashore, the crew members were fascinated by the profusion of bats; “flying foxes,” they called the creatures as they swooped low over the ships and darted into the dense jungle in search of their main nourishment, fruit. The flying foxes reached astonishing proportions; Pigafetta claimed that they were as large as eagles. The fearless sailors even captured one of the creatures and ate it. The bat flesh, he claimed, tasted like that of a fowl.

Leaving Gatigan unscathed, the fleet continued on to Cebu. In his log, Francisco Albo traced their course as they threaded their way through the enchanted island realms: “We left Limasawa and went north toward the island of Seilani, after which we ran along the said island to the northwest as far as 10 degrees. There we saw three rocky islands, and turned our course west for about 10 leagues where we came upon two islets. We stayed there that night and in the morning went toward the south southwest for about 12 leagues, as far as 10 and one-third degrees. At that point we entered a channel between two islands, one of which is called Mactan and the other Cebu. Cebu, as well as the islands of Limasawa and Suluan, extend north by east and south by west. Between Cebu and Seilani we spied a very lofty land lying to the north, which is called Baibai. It is said to contain considerable gold and to be well stocked with food, and so great an extent of land that its limits are unknown.”

Albo warned that the route, for all its lovely scenery, concealed hazards. “From Limasawa, Seilani, and Cebu, from the course followed to the south, look out for the many shoals, which are very bad. On that account a canoe which was guiding us along that course refused to go ahead. From the beginning of the channel of Cebu and Mactan, we turned west by a middle channel and reached the city of Cebu.”

As a succession of warm, humid days and passionate nights in the Philippines passed, discontent among the crew subsided. For once, there was no talk of mutiny. All the crew members were aware of the armada’s achievements. They had conquered an immense ocean and dispelled a thousand years of accumulated misconceptions about the world. They had sailed all the way from the West to the East, demonstrating that the earth was a globe. And they were beginning to savor the available women, exotic food, and tantalizing hints of the Spice Islands of which they had dreamed for so long. Yet a shadow hung over Magellan. Even if the rest of the expedition went flawlessly, and he did not lose another ship or sailor in his quest for spices, there would be hell to pay when he returned to Spain for marooning Cartagena and the priest. He could never return home with honor, and so he pressed on, a fugitive from society and a captive to the winds of fate.