Over the Edge of the World

Chapter X The Final Battle

Are those her ribs through which the Sun

Did peer, as through a grate?

And is that Woman all her crew?

Is that a DEATH? and are there two?

Is DEATH that woman’s mate?

As the Armada de Molucca approached the sandy, palm-shaded shores of Cebu, the crew members could see that the island was home to the most prosperous people they had encountered so far on the voyage. They watched village after village emerge as if by magic from the obscurity of the jungle; the inhabitants looked placid and well fed and not particularly startled by the strange ships. Their huts, rising on stilts in groups of five or six, resembled homesteads or even small estates. Overhead, tall palm trees blotted out the sky and cast wide swaths of shade. In front, extending from the water’s edge, fishing lines crisscrossed the shallow water, and, a little farther from land, speedy proas, some powered by brightly colored sails, others by paddle, traveled out to greet the arriving fleet. No longer did the men of the armada have to contend with nomadic giants or wandering tribes living at the end of the world. Here was civilization, or at least a semblance thereof. “At noon on Sunday, April 7,” Pigafetta recorded, “we entered the port of Cebu, passing by many villages, where we saw many houses built upon logs. On approaching the city, the Captain General ordered the ships to unfurl their banners. The sails were lowered and arranged as if for battle, and all the artillery was fired, an action which caused a great deal of fear to those people.”

Once the ships dropped anchor, Magellan dispatched his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, “as ambassador to the King of Cebu,” along with the slave Enrique to serve as an interpreter. Arriving on land, Rebêlo and Enrique “found a vast crowd of people together with the king, all of whom had been frightened by the mortars.” To reassure the distraught inhabitants, Enrique explained that it was the fleet’s custom to discharge their weapons “when entering such places, as a sign of peace and friendship.” His words had their intended effect, and soon the local chieftain was asking what he could do for them.

Enrique stepped forward again and announced that his captain owed allegiance to the “greatest king and prince in the world, and that he was going to discover the Moluccas.” His captain had decided to pass this way “because of the good report which he had of him from the king of Limasawa and to buy food.” Impressed, the king welcomed the visitors, but he advised, “It was their custom for all ships that entered their ports to pay tribute.” Only four days before, a junk from Siam “laden with gold and slaves” had called on the island and paid its tribute. To back up his story, the king produced an Arab merchant from Siam who had remained behind. The merchant explained that it was necessary to pay tribute to the local rulers in exchange for safe passage, and he urged Magellan to follow his example.

Magellan scorned the Arabs’ live-and-let-live approach to the islanders and refused to pay anyone. He saw the local populace as prey, as helpers, and as heathen, not as equals, and he intended to claim their territory for Spain and their souls for the Church. Negotiations between Magellan and the king of Cebu broke down when Magellan—through Enrique—insisted that his king was the greatest in all the world, and the Armada de Molucca would never pay tribute to a lesser ruler. He ended by declaring, “If the king wished peace he would have peace, but if war instead, [then he would have] war.”

At this point, the merchant from Siam uttered a few words that Pigafetta took to mean, “Have good care, O king, what you do, for these men are of those who have conquered Calicut, Malacca, and all India the Greater. If you give them good reception and treat them well, it will be well for you, but if you treat them ill, so much the worse it will be for you.” Enrique seconded the merchant’s advice; if the king refused to yield, the Captain General “would send so many men that they would destroy him.”

The king shrewdly replied that he would confer with his chieftains and return the next day. As a sign of his peaceful intentions, he offered the landing party “refreshments of many dishes, all made from meat and contained in porcelain platters, besides many jars of wine” and sent them happily stumbling back to their waiting ships, where they told Magellan (and the ever-present Pigafetta) the details of the exchange. Despite his belligerent words, Magellan possessed one diplomatic asset, the king of Limasawa, who had come along on this leg of the journey, and was pleased to “speak to the king of the great courtesy of our Captain General.”

The local king’s soothing words had the desired effect, and on Monday morning, the armada’s notary, accompanied by Enrique, held a formal meeting with the king of Cebu—“Rajah,” or King Humabon, in Pigafetta’s transcription. This time, Humabon offered to pay tribute to the most powerful king in the world, rather than demanding it for himself. The impasse was broken. Magellan acknowledged Humabon’s generous offer and announced he would “trade with him and no others.” Prompted by the king of Limasawa, the Cebuan ruler offered to become blood brothers with Magellan; the Captain General had only to send “a drop of his blood from his right arm, and he would do the same as a sign of the most sincere friendship.” Almost despite himself, Magellan had found a home in Cebu.

The next day, Tuesday, Magellan had more good news: The Limasawan king announced that Humabon was preparing a great feast to send to the ships “and that after dinner he would send two of his nephews with other notable men to make peace with him.” After gratefully receiving the food, Magellan decided to make another show of force and trotted out an armor-clad seaman, whose demonstration of European-style combat predictably alarmed the Cebuan emissary, “who seemed more intelligent than the others.” Once again, Magellan turned the situation to his advantage: “The Captain General told him not to be frightened, for our arms were soft toward our friends and harsh toward our enemies; and as handkerchiefs wipe off sweat so did our arms overthrow and destroy all our adversaries and the enemies of our faith.” The lesson had its intended effect.

Once Magellan had alternately impressed and intimidated the Cebuans, relations between the two proceeded like a tale in a storybook. The king’s nephew came aboard Trinidad, accompanied by a retinue of eight chieftains, to swear loyalty. Holding court, Magellan played the part of a magnanimous potentate with gusto: “The Captain General was seated in a red velvet chair, the principal men of the ships on leather chairs, and the others on mats upon the floor. The Captain General asked them through an interpreter . . . whether that prince . . . had the authority to make peace. . . . The Captain General said many things concerning peace, and that he prayed to God to confirm it in heaven. They said they had never heard such words, but that they took great pleasure in hearing them. The Captain General, seeing that they listened and answered willingly, began to advance arguments to induce them to accept the faith.”

Rising from his special chair, Magellan abruptly changed the subject, wanting to know who would succeed the king after his death. “They replied that the king had no son, but many daughters, and that this prince who was his nephew had as wife the king’s eldest daughter, and for love of her he was called prince. And they said moreover that, when the father and the mother were old, no more account was taken of them, but the children commanded them.” This state of affairs struck Magellan as contradictory to the Commandments, and he proceeded to explain some basic tenets of the Bible. “God made the sky, the earth, the sea, and everything else and that He had commanded us to honor our fathers and mothers, and that whoever did otherwise was condemned to eternal fire; that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, our first parents; that we have an immortal spirit.” His oratory must have been highly persuasive because “all joyfully entreated the Captain General to leave them two men, or least one, to instruct them in the faith.” Magellan explained that he could not leave anyone behind with them, but if they wished, the armada’s priest, Father Valderrama, would gladly baptize the Cebuans, and when they returned, they would bring priests and friars to instruct them. Pigafetta reported that the chieftains, Magellan, and the onlookers all became so excited by the prospect that everyone “wept with great joy.” What significance the highly emotional baptismal rite held for the Filipinos can only be guessed, but it meant something very specific to Magellan. Baptism, a word derived from the Greek baptismos, meant immersion and carried with it the idea of cleansing the soul of sin and rebirth into the Christian faith.

Before he began in earnest, Magellan cautioned the Cebuans not to convert to Christianity simply to win his favor, and promised not to “cause any displeasure to those who wished to live according to their own law.” But, he said, the Christians would get preferential treatment. “All cried out with one voice that they were not becoming Christians through fear or to please us,” Pigafetta recorded, “but of their own free will.” Magellan was so encouraged by this response that he promised to leave behind a suit of armor—just one—in gratitude.

He also raised the highly sensitive subject of sex between his men and the Cebuan women. “We could not have intercourse with their women without committing a very great sin, since they were pagans; and he assured them that if they became Christians, the devil would no longer appear to them, except in the last moment at their death.” Magellan implied that it was a lesser sin to become intimate with Cebuan women who had been baptized, and the crew, as ravenous for sex as they were for food, immediately took advantage of the loophole. But there is no suggestion that he became intimate with any of the Cebuan women; he found fulfillment of a more spiritual nature. “The Captain embraced them weeping, and clasping one of the prince’s hands and one of the king’s between his own, said to them that he would give them perpetual peace with the king of Spain.”

After mutual assurances and reassurances had been exchanged, it was time for another feast. Once again, Magellan was the fortunate recipient of island hospitality in the form of “rice, swine, goats, and fowls,” all given with profuse apologies for their inadequacy.

The Cebuan women performed an elaborate consecration before slaughtering the hogs. The ceremony began with the sound of gongs, after which the celebrants appeared with three serving dishes, two holding rice cakes and roast fish wrapped in leaves, the other a coarse fabric made from palm trees. The women then spread the cloth on the ground, whereupon two elderly women, each holding a bamboo trumpet, wrapped themselves in it. “One of them puts a kerchief with two horns on her forehead, and takes another kerchief in her hands, and dancing and blowing on her trumpet, she thereby calls out to the sun. She with the kerchief takes the other standard, and lets the kerchief drop, and both blowing on their trumpets for a long time, dance about the bound hog.” The dancing and music continued for quite some time, until one of the old women, after taking ritual sips of wine with her artificial horn, sprinkled the residue on the hog. “She is given a lance, and while dancing and clasping a lighted torch in her mouth, thrusts the instrument four or five times through the heart of the hog, with sudden and quick strokes.” After the slaughter, the women unwrapped themselves, and, with other women they selected—no men allowed—devoured the contents of the three dishes. “No one but old women consecrate the flesh of the hog, and they do not eat it unless it is killed this way.”

In return for this elaborately consecrated food, Magellan conferred a bolt of white linen, a red cap, strings of glass beads, and a gilded glass cup on the prince. (“Those glasses are greatly appreciated in those districts,” Pigafetta commented.) There was more; Magellan asked Pigafetta to give Humabon a “yellow and violet silk robe, made in Turkish style, a fine red cap, some strings of glass beads, all in a silver dish, and two gilt drinking cups.” By the time the feast ended, the Cebuans regarded Magellan as something more than a man; he was a powerful and beneficent god. The adulation rubbed off on the volatile Captain General, who increasingly believed himself to be divinely inspired, his expedition a manifestation of God’s will. It was a dangerous delusion.

When Magellan finally left Trinidad to make his triumphal entry into Cebu, the occasion proved every bit as majestic as he could have wished. A delegation from the ships, including an excited Pigafetta, landed on Cebu to greet Humabon, dressed in regal splendor to greet his guests: “When we reached the city we found the king in his palace surrounded by many people. He was seated on a palm mat on the ground, with only a cotton cloth before his private parts, and scarf embroidered with the needle about his head, and necklace of great value hanging from his neck, and two large gold earrings fastened in his ears set round with precious gems. He was fat and short, and tattooed with fire in various designs. From another mat on the ground he was eating turtle eggs, which were in two porcelain dishes, and he had four jars full of palm wine in front of him covered with sweet-smelling herbs and arranged with four small reeds in each jar by means of which he drank. Having duly made reverence to him, the interpreter [Enrique] told the king that his master thanked him very warmly for his present, and that he sent this present not in return for his present but for the intrinsic love which he bore him. We dressed him in the robe, placed the cap on his head, and gave him the other things; then kissing the beads and putting them on his head, I presented them to him. He, doing the same, accepted them. Then the king had us eat some of those eggs and drink through those slender reeds. . . . The king wished to have us stay to supper with him, but we told him that we could not stay.”

Impressive as they were, these exchanges were a mere prelude. The excitement began when the prince escorted Pigafetta and several others to his raised hut. They climbed ladders and within found “four young girls were playing—one, on a drum like ours, but resting on the ground; the second was striking two suspended gongs alternately with a stick wrapped somewhat thickly at the end with a palm cloth; the third, one large gong in the same manner; and the fourth two small gongs held in her hand, by striking one against the other, which gave forth a sweet sound. They played so harmoniously that one would believe that they possessed good musical sense.”

The Europeans noticed more than musical ability; the girls were bare-breasted and extremely alluring. “Those girls were very beautiful and almost as white as our girls and as large. They were naked except for palm cloth hanging from the waist and reaching to the knees. Some were quite naked and had large holes in their ears with a small round piece of wood in the hole. . . . They have long black hair, and wear a short cloth about the head, and are always barefoot. The prince had three quite naked girls dance for us.” Reluctant to contradict Magellan’s prohibition against intercourse with native women until they converted to Christianity, Pigafetta refrains from describing the frolicking and lovemaking with the female musicians, but he leaves no doubt about the evening’s outcome.

All around them similar celebrations of European-Cebuan amity involving ordinary villagers and sailors were taking place that night. The one question is whether Magellan participated as well, but, given his restraint and self-denial throughout the voyage, it is unlikely that he yielded to the temptations of the flesh, even on this occasion.

When they returned to the ships that night, the four emissaries were greeted with sobering news: Two shipmates lay near death. The next morning, April 10, Martín Barreta, a passenger, succumbed to the lingering effects of the scurvy he had suffered during the ninety-eight days of the Pacific crossing. Hours later, Juan de Areche, a sailor, breathed his last.

In the morning, Pigafetta and Enrique returned to the island to make arrangements for Christian burials for both men, which meant consecrating a cemetery on Cebu, complete with a cross. The king, as accommodating as ever, said he wished to worship the cross as soon as it was erected. Magellan turned the occasion into a religious lesson for the islanders’ benefit. “The deceased was buried in the square with as much pomp as possible, in order to furnish a good example. Then we consecrated the place and in the evening buried another man.”

Pigafetta spent enough time on Cebu to become familiar with local burial customs, and was impressed by their sophistication and parallels to European practices. He found that women took the leading role in the rites, which started simply and then grew in power. “The deceased is placed in the middle of the house in a box. Ropes are placed about the box in the manner of a palisade, to which many branches of trees are attached. In the middle of each branch hangs a cotton cloth like a curtained canopy. The most principal women sit under those hangings, and are all covered with white cotton cloth, each one by a girl who fans her with a palm-leaf fan. The other women sit about the room sadly. Then there is one woman who cuts off the hair of the deceased very slowly with a knife. Another who was the principal wife of the deceased lies down upon him and places her mouth, her hands, and her feet upon those of the deceased. When the former is cutting off the hair, the latter weeps; and when the former has finished the cutting, the latter sings.” After five or six days of mourning, “They bury the body in the same box which is shut in a log by means of wooden nails and covered and enclosed by wooden logs.”

A few days later, Pigafetta confided to his diary that he, along with other men of the fleet, had been intimate with the women of Cebu. That was not surprising in itself; far more extraordinary were the bizarre sexual customs practiced by both sexes, especially palang, or genital stretching.

“The males, large and small, have their penis pierced from one side to the other near the head, with a gold or tin bolt as large as a goose quill,” Pigafetta observed, scarcely believing his eyes. “In both ends of the same bolt, some have what resembles a spur, with points upon the ends; others are like the head of a cart nail. I very often asked many, both old and young, to see their penis, because I could not credit it.” Fascinated by the devices, Pigafetta studied them closely. “In the middle of the bolt is a hole, through which they urinate. The bolt and spurs always hold firm.”

Pigafetta naturally wondered how the women of the island tolerated palang during sexual intercourse. Surely the bolts injured or hurt them. Not at all, the Cebuan men told him. “Their women wish it so, and said that if they did otherwise, they would not have communication with them.” And they proceeded to explain precisely how palang, in their experience, actually enhanced sexual gratification for both men and women. In the process, Pigafetta received a graphic lesson in the art of love, Cebuan style. “When the men wish to have communication with their women, the latter themselves take the penis not in the regular way and commence very gently to introduce it [into the vagina], with the spur on top first, and then the other part. When it is inside, it takes its regular position; and thus the penis always stays inside until it gets soft, for otherwise they could not pull it out.”

Palang was not confined to men. Women also used it, starting in infancy. “All of the women from six years and upward have their vaginas gradually opened because of the men’s penises,” he learned. Having sexual intercourse with palang prolonged the act; the bolts and spurs discouraged sudden movements; and it was believed to intensify the pleasurable sensations experienced by both sexes. One of the most difficult things for the Europeans to understand was that palang was intended to enhance female pleasure by stimulating a variety of sensations in the vagina. Intercourse using palang lasted as long as a day, or even more, as the two lovers remained locked in an embrace of passion.

Pigafetta’s clinical description contained enough detail to suggest that he observed the islanders having intercourse, and he came away both excited and dismayed by what he saw. “Those people make use of that device because they are of a weak nature,” he decided, equating weakness with pleasure-loving. He went on to explain that “they have as many wives as they wish, but one of them is the principal wife.” Both the practice of palang, with its emphasis on increasing pleasure, and polygamy, which Pigafetta associated with it, ran counter to Catholic teachings. For all these reasons, Pigafetta found palang disconcerting and, to prove his point, he insisted, “All the women loved us very much more than their own men,” presumably because the unadorned Europeans lacked the cumbersome accessories.

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

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

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

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

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

On Sunday morning, April 14, King Humabon’s baptismal ceremony unfolded with all the pageantry that Magellan could muster. The day before, crew members had constructed a platform in the village square, festooned with palm branches and other decorative vegetation. A complement of forty seamen, including Pigafetta, clambered into the longboats. Two wore gleaming armor and stood just behind the king of Spain’s banner as it waved benignly in the gentle ocean breeze. Once again, Magellan planned to fire his artillery, but this time he took the precaution to explain to the king that “it was our custom to discharge them at our greatest feasts.” Having given fair warning, the crew fired their weapons at the moment they disembarked, marking the formal commencement of the event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The neighboring island was called Mactan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning the situation to his advantage, Sula asked Magellan for a boatload of armored warriors to fight against Lapu Lapu’s men. Magellan, never one to back down, declared that he would send not one but three longboats filled with warriors. Thanks to Magellan’s belligerence, Sula came out the clear winner; rather than placing his soldiers at Magellan’s disposal, Magellan now placed his men at Sula’s service.

And so the battle lines were drawn.

The decision to fight threw the armada into a state of alarm. Magellan’s inner circle immediately recognized that they had reached another turning point in the expedition. For the first time since their arrival in these lush islands, they seriously questioned Magellan’s judgment, if not his sanity. “A man who carried on his shoulders so momentous a business had no need to test his strength,” Ginés de Mafra observed. “From victory . . . he would benefit little; and from the opposite, the Armada, which was more important, would be set at risk.” Juan Serrano, the captain of unlucky Santiago, passionately argued against entering into a needless battle. Converting natives was all to the good, but their primary mission was to reach the Spice Islands; that was what their orders from King Charles commanded them to do. He reminded Magellan that they had already suffered many casualties and could not afford more loss of life. Assembling a force large enough to face the islanders meant the ships would stand nearly empty and thus become vulnerable to attack; in the worst-case scenario, they might lose the battle and their ships. Even Pigafetta, among the most fervent believers in Magellan, cautioned the Captain General against taking drastic and unnecessary measures against Lapu Lapu. But no matter how many times they all implored him to follow a peaceful and practical strategy, Magellan refused to back down. “We begged him repeatedly not to go, but he, like a good shepherd, refused to abandon his flock.”

In the face of criticism, Magellan did make two minor concessions. He reduced the number of men to a bare minimum, and he ordered his ships to keep far from shore. These crucial strategic decisions would place the entire enterprise at a tremendous disadvantage as the battle unfolded.

Without realizing it, Lapu Lapu had done just the right thing to incite Magellan to battle. He could not resist a challenge and thrived on confrontation. Throughout the voyage, he had put down mutinies, braved storms, navigated the strait, and crossed the Pacific, all with single-minded determination. He had even offered his head if a converted islander failed to recover. Each time, Magellan had succeeded, and he was convinced that the battle of Mactan would fit the same pattern. He would emerge victorious, not because of superior manpower or strategy, but because it was God’s will. His officers, however, did not share his faith in divine intervention. They had no choice but to go along with the Captain General, and so they did, for the sake of form. At the same time, they planned to remain at a safe distance. If Magellan wanted to try to take Mactan virtually single-handed, with only a few amateur warriors at his side, so be it. His officers would leave him to his fate.

The Captain General gave the order to prepare for attack, and his men donned armor, this time for actual combat, not for show. Their ranks included Pigafetta; Magellan’s slave, Enrique; and his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo; along with a cadre of Cebuans in their own small vessels. The Cebuans were under orders not to fight, but merely to observe the “Spanish lions” hunt their prey.

“At midnight, sixty of us set out armed with corselets and helmets, together with the Christian king, the prince, some of the chief men, and twenty or thirty balanghai. We reached Mactan three hours before dawn.” Magellan declared that he did not wish to fight, which must have come as a relief to his apprehensive men; instead, he sent a message to Lapu Lapu that if he would simply “obey the king of Spain, recognize the Christian king as their sovereign, and pay us our tribute, he [Magellan] would be their friend; but that if they wished otherwise, they should wait to see how our lances wounded.” This was the same arrangement Magellan had offered the other islanders, who had readily accepted either of their own free will or after a brief show of force. Based on his recent experiences, Magellan anticipated a ragged band of nearly naked warriors who would flee the moment he fired his artillery, and whose flimsy bamboo spears would be useless against impenetrable Spanish armor.

Lapu Lapu refused to yield and sent back a message boasting of his weapons’ strength; his lances, he said, were made from stout bamboo, and his stakes “hardened with fire.” At the same time, Lapu Lapu asked Magellan to postpone his attack “until morning, so that they might have more men.” At first, Lapu Lapu’s absurd request baffled Magellan’s men, but later it was revealed as a delaying tactic. “They said that in order to induce us to go in search of them; for they had dug certain pits between the houses in order that we might fall into them.”

As he considered the request and the possible motives behind it, Magellan lost precious time, along with the advantages of darkness and a favorable tide. The shallow water meant that the longboats had to keep away from the beach, which was bad enough; worse, the big ships had to stay even farther back, in deep water. The increased distance from the longboats to the shore meant that Magellan’s men would be completely exposed to Lapu Lapu’s spears for a much longer period of time as they waded to land, and it meant that the ships would be so far from the scene of battle that their crossbows and artillery would be useless.

By the time Magellan ordered his men to charge, the sky had already begun to glow with the approaching dawn. “Forty-nine of us leaped into the water up to our thighs, and walked through the water for more than two crossbow flights before we could reach the shore,” Pigafetta wrote. By this reckoning, the distance was about two thousand feet, nearly half a mile, and a very dangerous half mile that was, because the men were completely unprotected. “The other eleven men remained behind to guard the boats.” Meanwhile, the Cebuan king, prince, and soldiers, confined to their light, maneuverable balanghai, looked on, powerless to affect events. They acted under orders from Magellan himself, who had repeatedly warned them to stay clear of the fighting.

As Magellan’s men awkwardly waded through the water to the beach, they were confronted by armed warriors prepared for a battle to the death. The Mactanese emerging from the jungle numbered not in the dozens, as expected, but, according to Pigafetta’s reckoning, fifteen hundred—all from the village Magellan had just destroyed. The ratio of Mactanese fighters to Europeans was thirty to one. Magellan had boasted that just one of his armored men was worth a hundred island warriors; his estimate was about to be put to the test.

“When they saw us, they charged down upon us with exceeding loud cries, two divisions on our flanks and the other on our front. When the Captain General saw that, he formed us in two divisions, and thus did we begin to fight. The musketeers and crossbowmen shot from a distance for about a half hour, but uselessly; for the shots only passed through the shields, which were made of thin wood and the [bearers’] arms.” The artillery failed to have any effect on the enemy; the Europeans’ predicament grew worse, and the battle intensified. “The Captain General cried to them, ‘Cease firing! Cease firing!’ but his order was not heeded. When the natives saw that we were shooting our muskets to no purpose . . . they redoubled their shouts. When our muskets were discharged, the natives would never stand still, but leaped hither and thither, covering themselves with their shields. They shot so many arrows at us and hurled so many bamboo spears (some of them tipped with iron) at the Captain General, besides pointed stakes hardened with fire, stones, and mud, that we could scarcely defend ourselves.”

The besieged Europeans, protected by their armor, awkwardly made their way through this deadly gauntlet to the shore. “The beach where they landed is very low,” de Mafra recalled, “so they left the skiffs very far from the shore. Reaching it, they saw a big village in a palm grove, but there was nobody to be seen.” Magellan, instead of rethinking the situation, ordered the men to do the one thing that was most likely to incite the Mactanese: “Burn their houses in order to terrify them,” in Pigafetta’s words. Predictably, “When they saw their houses burning, they were roused to greater fury.”

The Europeans set fire to one house, driving fifty warriors armed with swords and shields from their hiding place into the open. “They charged down upon our men,” said de Mafra, “striking them with their swords. In the midst of this skirmish, one of those heathens slashed a Galician [crew member] with his sword, cutting his thigh, and he later died as a result. Our men, wanting to avenge this, charged against the heathens, who beat a retreat, and as our men were chasing them, they came out of a path at the backs of our men, as if it had all been planned as an ambush, and, with earsplitting shouts, pounced on our men and began to kill them.”

As the mayhem grew, the Europeans suffered more casualties. “Two of our men were killed near the houses, while we burned twenty or thirty houses,” Pigafetta reported. Even their armor failed to protect the men against all the arrows flying in their direction. “So many of them charged down upon us that they shot the Captain General through the right leg with a poisoned arrow.” It was only now, too late, that Magellan realized the gravity of his situation. He finally gave the order to retreat, even though his men were stranded far from their longboats. More than forty of the Europeans scattered as best they could, while six or seven diehards, Pigafetta included, stuck by the wounded Captain General as the Mactanese pressed the attack: “The natives shot only at our legs, for the latter were bare; and so many were the spears and stones that they hurled at us, that we could offer no resistance. The mortars in the boats could not aid us as they were too far away. So we continued to retire for more than a good crossbow flight from the shore, always fighting up to our knees in water. The natives continued to pursue us, and picking up the same spear four or six times, hurled it at us again and again. Recognizing the Captain General, so many turned on him that they knocked his helmet off his head twice, but he always stood firmly like a good knight, together with some others. Thus did we fight for one hour, refusing to retire farther.”

All this time, no one came to the aid of Magellan and his small band fighting for their lives—no Cebuans in their balanghai, and no reinforcements from the ships. Pigafetta explains that the “Christian king”—faithful Humabon—“would have aided us, but the Captain General charged him before we landed not to leave his balanghai but to stay to see how we fought,” an order that Humabon was only too glad to obey. At last, some Cebuan converts showed up in their balanghai, but by then it was too late. Friendly fire from the ships felled many of them before they came to Magellan’s aid; perhaps the seamen mistook them for adversaries rather than allies. Meanwhile, Magellan was rapidly weakening from the effects of the poisoned arrow in his leg, as the implacable Mactanese closed in and the two sides fought hand to hand.

“An Indian hurled a bamboo spear into the Captain General’s face, but the latter immediately killed him with his lance, which he left in the Indian’s body. Then, trying to lay his hand on his sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because he had been wounded in the arm with a bamboo spear. When the natives saw that, they all hurled themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only larger.” The wounded leader “turned back many times to see whether we were all in the boats,” Pigafetta took care to note, and without that concern, “Not a single one of us would have been saved in the boats, for while he was fighting, the others retired to the boats.” Meanwhile, the scimitars’ repeated blows took their mortal toll. “That caused the Captain General to fall face downward, when immediately they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. Thereupon, beholding him dead, we, wounded, retreated as best we could to the boats, which were already pulling off.”

At that moment, the Cebuan warriors finally came to the Europeans’ aid. They charged into the water, brandishing their swords, and drove off the Mactanese, who displayed little desire to make war on their neighbors. When the water had cleared, the Cebuans dragged the exhausted survivors into their balanghai and delivered them to the armada’s longboats, which remained curiously distant from the scene of battle.

This was not the dignified, pious ending that Magellan had envisioned for himself during those pressured months of preparation in Seville. No paupers would say prayers in his memory, no alms would be distributed in his name, no masses would be said for him in the churches of Seville. Not one maravedí from his contested estate would go to his wife or young son, or to his illegitimate older son, who had been killed in battle at his side in Mactan harbor. He would not be buried in the tranquil Seville cemetery he had picked out for himself; none of the plans he had carefully set out in his will would come to pass. Instead, pieces of his body, driven by the winds and tide, washed up on the sands of Mactan.

In Magellan’s death, Pigafetta, who had fought at his side, saw a shining example of nobility, heroism, and glorious acceptance of fate. In the most emotional, eloquent entry of his entire diary, he memorialized his slain leader, whom he had revered. “I hope that . . . the fame of so noble a captain will not become effaced in our times. Among the other virtues that he possessed, he was more constant than anyone else in the greatest adversity. He endured hunger better than all the others, and more accurately than any man in the world did he understand sea charts and navigation. And that his was the truth was seen openly, for no other had had so much natural talent nor the boldness to learn how to circumnavigate the world, as he had almost done. . . .” Almost . . . perhaps the saddest and most telling word in Pigafetta’s eulogy.

“That battle was fought on Saturday, April 27, 1521,” he concluded. “The Captain General died on a Saturday because it was the day most holy to him. Eight of our men were killed with him, and four Indians who had become Christians and who had come afterward to aid us were killed by the mortars of the boats. Of the enemy, only fifteen were killed, while many of us were wounded.” The dead included Cristóvão Rebêlo, Magellan’s illegitimate son and constant companion on the voyage; Francisco Gómez, a seaman; Antonio Gallego, a cabin boy; Juan de Torres, a man-at-arms; Rodrigo Nieto, who had been Cartagena’s servant but had switched his loyalty to Magellan; and Anton de Escovar, who lingered for two days after the battle.

Pigafetta’s eulogy makes clear that he was genuinely devastated. He had left Europe as a young man of literary inclination, eager to explore the world as Magellan’s guest, and now his Captain General was dead, and the identity of his successor uncertain. What Pigafetta had experienced of the world beyond Europe could only alarm him. Instead of monsters, magnetic islands, boiling seas, and mermaids, he had encountered fierce storms, cruelty and suffering, and widely scattered humans living in conditions unimaginable to him, people who were as likely to kill him as assist him. Most frustrating of all, the armada had come all this way, halfway around the world, sacrificed dozens of men, including Magellan, and had yet to reach the Spice Islands.

In death, Magellan was not a hero to everyone, not even to those who had admired his daring and skill. His loyalists believed he had courted death by picking an unnecessary quarrel with the Mactanese, who held all the military advantages. In his misguided quest for glory, Magellan had squandered lives and the resources of the armada; his reckless conduct grieved other crew members, but more than that, it angered them. In de Mafra’s judgment, Magellan’s final campaign amounted to “madcap foolhardiness which the unfortunate Magellan attempted . . . when he could have done some much better things instead.” In the name of King Charles, Magellan had pillaged and betrayed his hosts, and paid the ultimate price.

The circumstances leading to Magellan’s spectacular, gory death were not, as has often been suggested, an aberration, the result of an unusual tactical error or inexplicable lapse of judgment. Rather, it was the direct outcome of his increasingly belligerent conduct in the Philippines, where he burned the dwellings of people who could easily have been converted to Christianity by diplomacy rather than force. Through frequent displays of his military might, Magellan convinced the islanders—and himself—that he was omnipotent. It was only a matter of time until he provoked a confrontation with enemies who held a decisive advantage from which faith alone could not protect him. His thirst for glory, under cover of religious zeal, led him fatally astray. In the course of the voyage, Magellan had managed to outwit death many times. He overcame natural hazards ranging from storms to scurvy, and human hazards in the form of mutinies. In the end, the only peril he could not survive was the greatest of all: himself.

Magellan’s death may also have been the result of one final mutiny by his own disenchanted sailors. Although Pigafetta and other eyewitnesses provide a detailed account of the Captain General’s actions during the fight in Mactan harbor, the whereabouts and actions of his backup is open to question—and to suspicion. During his amphibious landing, Magellan and his coterie expected the gunners aboard his ships to cover them with fire that would disperse the island warriors. Pigafetta, a gentleman, not a soldier or a seaman, believed the tide made it impossible for their ships to anchor close enough to the raging battle to be effective, but even after several hours of fighting, they failed to dispatch reinforcements in their longboats; indeed, the most striking element of Pigafetta’s account of the battle of Mactan concerns the inexplicable isolation of Magellan and his small band. The Cebuans eventually intervened, but not Magellan’s own men, a circumstance that makes no sense, unless the crew members refused to come to the Captain General’s aid or their officers ordered them to stay put. From the standpoint of the men in the ships, this mutiny had the advantage of being easy to disguise; the revolt consisted of what they failed to do rather than what they did. In effect, they allowed the Mactanese to do the dirty work for them; they left Magellan to die the death of a thousand cuts in Mactan harbor.

Antonio Pigafetta was among the few men of the armada who saw the Captain General’s death in a different, more glorious light. He was no tyrant and engendered no anger or disloyalty; his end embodied the Portuguese ideal of submission to fate, no matter how tragic, in the service of a noble principle. Magellan seemed even greater because he was doomed; he had become a martyr to a cause greater than himself. Even so, the chronicler’s own record tells a more ambiguous story, one in which light and shadow are virtually inseparable, and in which Magellan is both heroic and foolish, perspicacious yet blind, a man of his time who was trying to escape his time, a visionary whose instincts outran his ideals.

Magellan was generally at his best, and a far more sympathetic character, when he was the underdog. At such moments, his best qualities came to the fore: tenacity, cunning, and courage. When his plan to reach the Spice Islands was turned down by the king of Portugal—not once, but many times—Magellan successfully assembled and promoted a mission to the king of Spain. When mutineers seized three of his ships in Port Saint Julian (and nearly captured a fourth), Magellan immediately, and with little assistance from others, managed to reclaim the vessels, one by one, to end the mutiny. When his officers doubted the existence of the strait, Magellan found it; when they quailed at the prospect of entering the Pacific Ocean, he proceeded to sail into its roiling waters. And it took the massed forces of fifteen hundred men to kill him.

After the furious battle ended, the hacked pieces of the explorer’s corpse drifted aimlessly in the water near the beach at Mactan until the victorious warriors claimed them. That afternoon, Magellan’s distraught loyalists urged Humabon to send a message to Lapu Lapu, requesting the remains of Magellan and the other victims of the battle of Mactan; they even offered to pay as much as the victors wanted in exchange for the nine fallen soldiers.

Lapu Lapu’s reply was shockingly arrogant: “They would not give him for all the riches in the world. . . . They intended to keep him as a memorial.” That might have been the case, but nothing of Magellan was ever recovered, not even his armor.

Today, in the Philippines, the tragic encounter between Magellan and Lapu Lapu is seen from a radically different perspective. Magellan is not regarded as a courageous explorer; instead, he is portrayed as an invader and a murderer. And Lapu Lapu has been romanticized beyond recognition. By far the most impressive sight in Mactan harbor today is a giant statue of Lapu Lapu, his bamboo spear at the ready, as he gazes protectively over the Pacific. There is no other record of Lapu Lapu or his reign; were it not for his battle with Magellan, his name would be lost to history.

Within the harbor, a white obelisk commemorates the ferocious battle between the Europeans and the Filipinos, and it offers two sharply varying accounts of the events. One face presents the European point of view: “Here on 27th April 1521 the great Portuguese navigator Hernando de Magallanes, in the service of the King of Spain, was slain by native Filipinos.” The other portrays the conflict from the Filipino perspective: “Here on this spot the great chieftain Lapu Lapu repelled an attack by Ferdinand Magellan, killing him and sending his forces away.” This version is naturally more popular in the Philippines, where the name Magellan is often regarded with loathing and even gloating at the circumstances of his death. Every April, Filipinos restage the battle of Mactan on the beach where it occurred, with the part of Lapu Lapu played by a film star, and Magellan by a professional soldier. Thousands turn out to witness the reenactment between the nearly naked Filipino warrior and the armor-clad invader who eventually falls face down into the surf.