Over the Edge of the World

Chapter XII Survivors

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;

Yet never a breeze up-blew;

The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,

Where they were wont to do;

They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—

We were a ghastly crew.

Ten thousand miles from Spain, in a remote corner of the Philippine archipelago, a ship was burning. The blaze turned night into day, and its reflection formed hypnotic patterns on the inky, swelling sea. As it hissed and sent a pungent vapor skyward, the blaze consumed the ship’s timbers down to the water’s edge. The dull red glow from the waterborne bonfire was visible for miles around. The next morning, thick smoke from the dying embers of the charred hull turned day into night.

The ship was Concepción, one of the three vessels that had escaped the massacre at Cebu the previous day. Since then, the survivors had tried to navigate the three large vessels around the uncharted shoals and islands of the Philippines, but they soon discovered that they were hopelessly shorthanded. To add to their problems, Concepción’s master, Juan Sebastián Elcano, complained that shipworms infested the hull. Magellan, had he been alive, would have ordered the men to undertake arduous repairs, but the survivors adopted a more pragmatic approach and decided to burn the ship to prevent it from falling into the hands of an enemy who might use it against them. The crew transferred the contents of Concepción—her provisions, rigging, sails, fittings, weapons, and navigational devices—to the two other ships, Trinidad, still the flagship of the fleet, and Victoria. And then, on the night of May 2, 1521, the empty ship was set ablaze in symbolic, and wholly unconscious, expiation of the fleet’s sins.

A hasty vote among the sailors placed Espinosa in command of Victoria, while João Lopes Carvalho, the Portuguese pilot, won election as the new Captain General. Elcano, the master of Victoria, silently cursed the new Captain General, who might be a talented pilot but was incapable of imposing discipline on the unruly fleet. In Brazil, Carvalho had attempted to bring his mistress on board; although he did not succeed, their child had been traveling with the fleet ever since. Elcano had no respect for a leader who set such a poor example for the others.

The new command placed Pigafetta in a vulnerable position. He had always identified himself as a Magellan loyalist, but the Captain General’s inner circle—his slave, Enrique; his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo; his cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita; and his brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa—had all perished or disappeared. Only Pigafetta survived. He believed he would continue to serve as the expedition’s chief chronicler, as well as its chief interpreter, because he alone had troubled to make a methodical study of the Malay tongue. He lacked Enrique’s facility with it, but he knew how to make himself understood and obtain information. Equally important, he was familiar with Filipino customs, ranging from casicasi to palang, and could make himself useful as the expedition’s emissary to the strange and changeable islanders all around them. Carvalho and the newly elected leaders of the expedition agreed, and Pigafetta’s role in the post-Magellan era was, if anything, enhanced. As for his diary, he continued to maintain it, and to keep its contents to himself.

After the multiple tragedies the armada had suffered in the Philippines, commercial considerations ruled their actions. Never again would they erect crosses or insist on mass conversions. Everything was different now. Knowing they were lucky to be alive, the men turned their attention to reaching the Spice Islands, where they hoped to find safety, supplies, and the precious commodity they had sailed halfway around the world to find.

Carvalho faced the task of leading the fleet’s two remaining ships southward through the archipelago to the Moluccas, but the arrival of the rainy season in the Philippines and its storms often made navigation next to impossible. They had adapted to sailing over vast stretches of open water, but now they had to thread their way through a labyrinth of islands. For the short distances and intricate maneuvering involved, they needed a reliable map or, failing that, a guide familiar with these waters, but after their horrific experiences on Cebu and Mactan, the sailors were reluctant to call at strange islands and ask for help. Who could guess the real intentions of the islanders lurking in the shadows of the palm trees?

Occasionally, the fleet was approached by balanghai powered by rowers chanting in unison. Whenever possible, Pigafetta asked the rowers for directions to the Moluccas, but the others kept their relations with the islanders to a bare minimum.

Carvalho, aided by Albo, the pilot, veered from one island to another, following a meandering but generally southerly course through the labyrinth of the Philippine archipelago to the Moluccas. Albo’s methodical record, barely mentioning the ambush at Cebu, tracked the fleet’s wanderings, as if the ships were wounded beasts in search of a healing sanctuary.

They soon encountered an island populated by Negritos, aboriginal pygmies with dark skin, as their name indicates. After an unsuccessful hunt for food, the fleet approached a towering island clad in dense foliage cut by steep channels and waterfalls flowing from hidden springs. Here and there the shore suddenly cleared to offer an inviting, if narrow, stretch of beach. This was Mindanao. The idyllic setting soothed the chastened yet hard-bitten crew, who dropped their guard long enough to establish friendly relations with a local ruler named Calanoa, who appeared eager to make peace. Calanoa, Pigafetta wrote, “drew blood from his left hand marking his body face, and the tip of his tongue with it as a token of closest friendship, and we did the same.” Despite his offer of friendship, he was unable, or unwilling, to feed the crew.

After the ceremony, Calanoa invited Pigafetta ashore as a sign of respect, but Pigafetta does not explain why he alone received this honor. Perhaps his facility with the Malay language had impressed the chieftain, or perhaps the invitation gave him an opportunity to prove his usefulness to Carvalho and the other leaders of the expedition. Pigafetta boldly accepted the invitation, even after witnessing the recent massacre. One explanation for Pigafetta’s sudden courage might be that Calanoa had put him at ease; another might be that he had no intention of returning to the fleet, that he had seen enough of death and disaster at sea and preferred to live out his days as an honored guest among the islanders and, especially, their beautiful women.

“We had no sooner entered a river than many fishermen offered fish to the king”—so food was available after all. “Then the king removed the clothes which covered his privies, as did some of his chiefs; and began to row while singing past many dwellings which were upon the river. Two hours after nightfall we reached the king’s house. The distance from the beginning of the river where our ships were to the king’s house was two leagues.” Isolated from his crew mates, Pigafetta was now at the mercy of his hosts, but if he felt fear, he left no trace in his diary.

“When we entered the house, we came upon many torches of cane and palm leaves,” he continued. “The king with two of his chiefs and two of his beautiful women drank the contents of a large jar of palm wine without eating anything. I, excusing myself as I supped, would only drink but once.” It was a scene familiar to Pigafetta, the drinking, and feasting, and women; he might have been back on Limasawa, in the days before the massacre. At his ease, and inquisitive as ever, he observed food preparations: “They first put in an earthen jar . . . a large leaf lining the entire jar. Then they add the water and the rice, and after covering it allow it to boil until the rice becomes as hard as bread, when it is taken out in pieces.” (In recording this recipe, Pigafetta became the West’s first guide to Oceanic cuisine.) After the meal, the chieftain offered Pigafetta two mats for sleeping, one fashioned of reeds, the other of palm leaves. “The king and his two women went to sleep in a separate place, while I slept with one of the chiefs.”

In the morning, Pigafetta explored the island, devoting special attention to huts, whose fittings gleamed with gold. Gold seemed to be on display everywhere; there was, he said, “an abundance of gold. They showed us certain small valleys, making signs to us that there was as much gold there as they had hairs, but that they had no iron or tools to mine it, and moreover that they would not take the trouble to do so.”

Over a midday meal of rice and fish, Pigafetta courteously asked Calanoa for an audience with the queen. The chieftain agreed, and the two of them trudged up a steep hill to pay their respects to her. “When I entered the house, I made a bow to the queen, and she did the same to me, whereupon I sat down beside her. She was making a sleeping mat of palm leaves. In the house there were a number of porcelain jars and four bells . . . for ringing. Many male and female slaves who served her were there.”

If Pigafetta had ever considered seeking refuge on this island with its abundant gold, the temptation waned. After his audience with the queen, he clambered aboard a waiting balanghai, along with the chieftain and his retinue, and they glided along the serene river toward the ocean. When he least expected it, the tranquil surroundings were disturbed by an appalling spectacle: “I perceived to the right, on a small hill, three men hanging from a tree which had its branches cut off.” Once again, he was struck by the stark contrast between the splendor of the setting, the peaceful, generous, and open nature of the inhabitants, and the macabre reminders of brutality that lurked just out of sight. Who were these people, Pigafetta asked, and why did they meet such a gruesome ending?

“Malefactors and thieves,” Calanoa grimly explained.

The balanghai approached Trinidad, and Pigafetta bid farewell to his hosts and rejoined the fleet. It had been, over all, a pleasant interlude, with the exception of the nightmarish vision of the men hanging from bare trees.

Still unable to pinpoint the Spice Islands, the fleet weighed anchor “and laying our course west southwest, we cast anchor at an island not very large and almost uninhabited.” They were veering seriously off course, heading west into the Sulu Sea, toward China, rather than south to the Spice Islands. In its wanderings, the fleet called on the island of Caghaian, as Pigafetta designated it. Once again, he enthusiastically went ashore to establish relations with the islanders, but this time other crew members accompanied him. Their mission: to find enough food to restock their rapidly dwindling stores before they starved.

Only a short distance from their previous anchorage, the fleet encountered a far more predatory culture. “The people of that island are Moros”—Moors—“and were banished from an island called Burne”—Borneo. “They go naked as do the others. They have blowpipes and small quivers at their side, full of arrows and a poisonous herb. They have gold daggers whose hafts are adorned with gold and precious gems, spears, bucklers, and small cuirasses of buffalo horn.” Fortunately, these menacing-looking warriors believed that the European intruders were “holy beings” and spared them from harm. But the ravenous sailors found no food to speak of and, growing desperate, the armada embarked on a twenty-five-league detour to the northwest, almost directly away from the Spice Islands.

The search for food grew more frantic. “We were often on the point of abandoning the ships in order that we might not die of hunger,” Pigafetta wrote. At last they arrived at “the land of promise, because we suffered great hunger before we found it.” The island was called Palawan, and it divides the Sulu Sea from the South China Sea. Although the fleet was getting even farther from its goal, Palawan offered a tropical paradise to men who had endured so much for so long. “The winds are mild, the sun warm, the sea teeming with fish,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison of the island. “The land is so fertile that for more than half a year, after the main crops are gathered, people have nothing to do but enjoy themselves.”

Their stomachs growling and their heads spinning from fatigue and hunger, the sailors rushed through another casicasi ceremony with the local chieftain and then gorged themselves with “rice, ginger, swine, goats, fowls,” and “figs . . . as thick as the arm.” Pigafetta declared these “figs,” actually bananas, to be “excellent” fare. That was not all; the grateful crew members also sated themselves with coconuts, sugarcane, and “roots resembling turnips in taste.” Pigafetta pronounced their wine, distilled from rice, to be exceedingly light and refreshing, far superior to the rough palm brew they had been drinking for weeks. Hours before, they had been so desperate that they contemplated the prospect of relinquishing the safety of their ships to forage for food. Now they offered thanks to God for saving them from starvation.

When he had filled his belly, Pigafetta once again became an amateur anthropologist. He charmed his island hosts into displaying their exotic weapons for him: “They have blowpipes with thick wooden arrows more than one palmo long, with harpoon points, and others tipped with fishbones, and poisoned with an herb; while others are tipped with points of bamboo like harpoons and are poisoned. At the end of the arrow they attach a little piece of soft wood, instead of feathers. At the end of their blowpipes they fasten a bit of iron like a spear head; and when they have shot all their arrows they fight with that.” In this culture, Pigafetta found, the fascination with combat included their animals. “They have large and very tame cocks, which they do not eat because of a certain veneration they have for them. Sometimes they make them fight with one another, and each one puts up a certain amount on his cock, and the prize goes to him whose cock is the victor.” The more closely he looked at cultures like these, the more he began to see disturbingly familiar suggestions of his own.

When the crew had rested and loaded provisions onto the ships—provisions for which their weeks in the Pacific had taught them to barter skillfully—they weighed anchor, and on June 21, 1521, prepared to leave Palawan. This time, they had on board a local pilot, a Negrito who gave his name as Bastião, and said he was a Christian, but he vanished just before the fleet left the harbor. In search of a replacement, Carvalho ordered the fleet to encircle a large balanghai. Feigning peaceful intentions, the armada captured all three of the balanghai’s pilots, believing that they would lead the way to the Spice Islands at last, but these pilots—all Arabs—complicated matters by directing the armada southwest, toward Brunei, an Arab stronghold, rather than southeast, toward the Moluccas.

This was a hazardous crossing, replete with shoals and sandbanks, and the fleet needed the pilots’ assistance to reach Brunei. Even Albo, the resolute pilot, became agitated on this leg of the journey. “You must know that it is necessary to go close to land, because outside there are many shoals,” he complained in a rare outburst, “and it is necessary to go with the sounding lead in your hand, because it is a very vile coast, and Brunei is a large city, and has a very large bay, and inside it and without it there are many shoals; it is necessary to have a pilot of the country.” Reaching the mouth of the harbor, the fleet followed junks whose pilots were familiar with the route to safety. At last, they dropped anchor in the harbor of Brunei, in the midst of a realm of enchantment and luxury that would surpass anything they had previously experienced on the voyage.

The next day, July 9, what appeared to be a proa appeared on the horizon, but as it approached, the crew realized it was a much larger vessel “whose bow and stern were worked in gold. At the bow flew a white and blue banner surmounted with peacock feathers.” Trailing the ornamental proa were two smaller vessels. To add to the theatrical nature of the scene, musicians on board serenaded the shocked Europeans. “Some of the men were playing on musical instruments and drums,” Pigafetta noted in disbelief.

The proa’s crew signaled with elaborate gestures that they wished to board, and “eight old men, who were chiefs, entered the ships and took seats in the stern upon a carpet. They presented us with a painted wooden jar full of betel and areca (the fruit which they chew continually), and jasmine”—a shrub whose white and yellow flowers released a soft, almost cloying scent into the sea-permeated air—as well as orange blossoms, whose sweet intoxicating perfume the crew members had not sampled since Seville. The old chiefs brought much more: bolts of yellow silk cloth, two cages filled with flapping fowl, jars filled with sublime rice wine, and bundles of sugarcane. After depositing their offerings aboard Trinidad, the chiefs did the same with Victoria.

Their generosity toward the armada likely stemmed from a case of mistaken identity. Most of these regions had been visited by the Portuguese, who, traveling a different route, had pioneered trading relationships with the local Arab rulers. Ginés de Mafra described the rajah of Brunei as a “friend of the Portuguese and an enemy to the Castilian, whom he hates.” That made the Armada de Molucca an interloper, but many of the crew were Portuguese and appeared to be the latest emissaries of the Portuguese crown.

That night, the men, craving distraction from their trials, tasted the local rice wine, found it to their liking, and drank themselves into oblivion.

The fleet remained anchored off Brunei for six peaceful days, allowing the men to recover, at least partially, from the violence that had marked the last few weeks. From the decks of their ships, the men could see an assortment of elevated houses constructed over a complicated series of waterways, piers, and boardwalks. Behind the city, tall palms stood as sentries. At night, dim fires flickered in the distance and sent slender plumes skyward. If the sailors listened carefully, they could hear faint voices from the shore echoing across the surface of the water, or even a kind of primitive music consisting of gongs and bells and chanting. It was a scene of domestic tranquillity transplanted to an exotic setting, but the men were afraid to leave their ships and explore the unknown.

The fleet’s isolation ended when their benefactor dispatched a convoy of proas to beguile and seduce them. Arriving “with great pomp,” Pigafetta wrote, they “encircled the ships with musical instruments playing and drums and brass gongs beating. They saluted us with their peculiar cloth caps which cover only the top of their heads. We saluted them by firing our mortars without stones [bullets]. Then they gave us a present of various kinds of food, made only of rice. Some were wrapped in leaves and were made in somewhat longish pieces, some resembled sugarloaves, while others were made in the manner of tarts with eggs and honey. They told us that their king was willing to let us get water and wood, and to trade at our pleasure.”

The king’s messenger promised to help them with all their needs. “The messenger was an old man,” de Mafra recalled, “handsome and well-dressed. He wore gold jewelry on his fingers, neck, and ears.” He wanted to know where they were going, and when they spoke of the Moluccas, he scoffed; there was nothing there but cloves, he advised, but if they were determined to go, he would supply a pilot for each ship. “For this our men thanked him, and then asked whether there was in that land any pitch with which to caulk the ships.” After months in tropical water, the hulls badly needed reconditioning. The messenger explained that “they caulked their own boats with a pitch they made with coconut oil and wax, for which they could send out some people to town, where they could find many things to buy.” And again he invited the men to stay awhile and sample the pleasures of Brunei.

The repeated entreaties from the mysterious island ruler eventually had their intended effect, and the crew members reciprocated by sending a delegation consisting of Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms, still on the job; Elcano, the would-be Captain General; two Greek sailors; Carvalho’s illegitimate Brazilian son; Pigafetta; and one other sailor. The delegation transferred from Trinidad to the proa, bearing gifts salvaged from the wreckage of the fleet: “a green velvet robe made in the Turkish manner, a violet velvet chair, five brazas of cloth, a cap, a gilded drinking glass, a covered glass vase, three writing books of paper, and gilded writing case.” The crew thoughtfully brought along separate tributes for the queen, should there be one: “Three brazas of yellow cloth, a pair of silvered shoes, and a silvered needle case full of needles.”

After a short trip over water, the delegation reached an elaborate city “entirely built in salt water,” said Pigafetta, “except the houses of the king and certain chiefs. It contains twenty-five thousand fires”—that is to say, hearths indicating family units. “The houses are all constructed of wood and built up from the ground on tall pillars. When the tide is high, the women go in boats through the settlement, selling the articles necessary to maintain life. There is a large brick wall in front of the king’s house with towers like a fort, in which were mounted fifty-six bronze pieces, and six of iron.” The gunpowder for these weapons was likely imported from China, where it was invented. After months of drifting among more primitive (though none the less dangerous) tribes, the armada had finally reached a civilization at least as advanced as their own.

After waiting in the proa for two hours, Pigafetta, Elcano, and the others were rewarded with the spectacle of “two elephants with silk trappings, and twelve men, each of whom carried a porcelain jar covered with silk in which to carry our presents.” The members of the delegation were invited to mount the elephants, and from their swaying eyries, they surveyed the landscape. Their grins can be readily imagined. The elephants lurched forward, carrying the members of the armada toward the dwelling of the “governor,” while “twelve men preceded us afoot with the presents in the jars.”

Reaching their destination, the elephants knelt, discharging their astonished passengers, who immediately sat down to a great feast. After they ate and drank their way into a state of pleasant stupefaction, they were treated to “cotton mattresses, whose lining was of taffeta and the sheets of Cambaia.” It was the first night the men had slept on mattresses and linen since they had left Seville, but few remained awake long enough to savor the sublime comfort, because they fell into a deep sleep. As they slept, servants constantly tended large candles fashioned from white wax and oil lamps, adjusting the wicks and finally snuffing them when the sun rose.

At noon the next day, the men awoke and remounted the elephants and proceeded to the king’s palace, while onlookers treated them with a respect reserved for great dignitaries. “All the streets from the governor’s to the king’s house were full of men with swords, spears, and shields, for such were the king’s orders.” Dismounting, they passed through a courtyard to a “large hall full of many nobles,” perhaps as many as three hundred, and came upon an extraordinary scene: “We sat down upon a carpet with the presents in the jars near us. At the end of that hall there is another hall higher but somewhat smaller. It was all adorned with silk hangings, and two windows, through which light entered the hall . . . opened from it. There were three hundred foot soldiers with naked rapiers at their thighs to guard the king. At the end of the small hall was a large window from which a brocade curtain was drawn aside so that we could see within it the king seated at a table with one of his young sons, chewing betel. No one but women were behind him.” They were cautioned not to speak directly to the king. Should they wish to say anything, they were to inform a servant, who would pass it on to a functionary of slightly higher rank, who would then tell the governor’s brother, who would in turn whisper the message through a “speaking-tube” passing through the wall, where another servant would intercept it and relay it to the king. As if that were not sufficiently off-putting, they were instructed to kowtow. “The chief taught us the manner of making three obeisances to the king with our hands clasped above the head, raising first one foot and then the other and then kissing the hands toward him, and we did so, that being the method of the royal obeisance.”

Once they had completed these formalities, Pigafetta explained that they wished only to make peace and to trade. The king, through his intermediaries, happily cooperated. Take water and wood, he offered, trade as you wish, and he ordered his minions to place a cloth made of gold and silk brocade on his visitors’ shoulders. For a moment, they resembled their hosts, “all attired in cloth of gold and silk which covered their privies,” and carrying “daggers with gold hafts adorned with pearls and precious gems,” but then the ornamental cloth was quickly and mysteriously removed. Of greater importance, the king conferred samples of cinnamon and cloves, the spices his guests had been seeking for nearly two years. It appeared they were now on the Spice Islands’ doorstep.

“That king is a Moro,” or Muslim, Pigafetta observed, “and his name is Rajah Siripada. He was forty years old and corpulent. No one serves him except women who are daughters of the chiefs. He never goes outside of his palace, unless he goes hunting.” No less than ten scribes wrote down his every action “on very thin tree bark.” These people also had a written language, another indication of how advanced they were.

Ceremony pervaded every aspect of life in Brunei, and after the audience with Rajah Siripada, the Europeans were ceremoniously returned atop elephants to the “governor’s house” accompanied by seven bearers carrying the presents bestowed on them by the ruler. When they dismounted, each man received his present, which the bearers carefully placed on the left shoulder, and in return, “We gave each of those men a couple of knives for his trouble.”

That evening, nine servants came to the house, each man carrying a large tray, and “each tray contained ten or twelve porcelain dishes full of veal, capons, chickens, peacocks, and other animals, and fish.” Pigafetta claims they dined on thirty-two different kinds of meat, in addition to the fish. “At each mouthful of food we drank a small cupful of their distilled wine from a porcelain cup the size of an egg. We ate rice and other sweet food with gold spoons like ours.”

Even now, nearly a century after the era of the Treasure Fleet, Chinese wares were everywhere. Pigafetta mentions porcelain (“a kind of very white earthenware”); silk; and, amazingly enough, “iron spectacles.” Eyeglasses are thought to have been invented in Venice, but it appears likely that the Chinese also developed techniques for grinding glass, and this technology had found its way to Brunei. Even the kingdom’s currency revealed a pronounced Chinese influence. “The money coined by the Moors in those parts is of metal, pierced at the center for stringing. And it bears only, on one side, four marks, which are letters of the great king of China.” All the men were curious to inspect two giant pearls “as large as eggs” owned by the king. “They are so round they cannot lie still on a table,” Pigafetta marveled. After considerable negotiation, and even more tributes, the officers of the armada made their wishes known, and the king reluctantly displayed the two giant pearls.

After their second night ashore, the delegation rode by elephant back to the ocean, and boarded their crude and confined ships. The familiar creaks filled their ears, and the familiar reek of stagnant water filled their nostrils. Not everyone returned, however. According to Ginés de Mafra, only four men made it back to the fleet while three—the two Greek sailors and Carvalho’s son—remained ashore. (De Mafra forgot to mention that Elcano and Espinosa were also among the missing.) The Europeans suspected that they were all being held against their will and anxiously awaited their safe return.

Shortly after dawn on July 29, more than one hundred proas, organized into three groups, appeared out of nowhere, bearing down on the armada.

For the first time since the massacre three months earlier, the crew feared for their lives. They broke out their halberds, crossbows, and arquebuses, knowing that they were badly outnumbered, because each proa carried a full complement of warriors. To complicate matters, two great junks—de Mafra claims three—had anchored just behind the armada during the night. No one aboard Trinidad or Victoria noticed the junks at the time, but it now appeared that the proas intended to drive the armada toward the junks, whose crew would overwhelm the Europeans and take them as prisoners, or worse.

“Upon catching sight of them, imagining that there was some trickery afoot, we hoisted our sails as quickly as possible, abandoning an anchor in our haste,” Pigafetta wrote. As the armada began to gain speed in the water, some crew members jumped aboard the junks and captured four warriors. The men-at-arms fired their weapons at their adversaries, “killing many persons,” according to Pigafetta. Several of the menacing proas, frightened by the armada’s vehement response, veered away. De Mafra, a more cynical commentator than Pigafetta, was bewildered by the battle. How would such behavior lead to the recovery of the three lost crew members? Nevertheless, the battle raged on, as the armada turned its guns on one of the huge junks. They ordered the junk to drop sail, and when her captain refused, the Europeans opened fire at the rudder; still her crew refused to comply. The Europeans swarmed aboard the junk, where they discovered that her captain was not the murderous pirate they had imagined. “Their captain said that he served the king of Luzon and that while with a fleet to an island he had been cut off from the rest of the ships by a storm, and that being near the island he had resolved to call on it to repair his vessel, since the local king was a relative of Luzon’s king.” After that, Carvalho and the captain fell into secret conversation, to the dismay of the armada’s officers, who had risked their lives to disable and board the junk. In hushed tones, the wily captain offered Carvalho jewels, two cutlasses, and a dagger “with golden hilts and guards inlaid with many diamonds,” all for his personal use. The gifts had their intended effect: “Having received these presents,” according to de Mafra, “our captain released the junk and its people, something which everyone later regretted because they saw that under their poor-looking cotton garments, most of those men were wearing silk clothes with gold embroidery.”

Pigafetta recognized the transaction as a simple case of bribery, and his opinion of Carvalho, never high to begin with, fell several notches. Had they held the captain hostage, Pigafetta believed, Rajah Siripada would have paid a tremendous ransom for him, far more than the bribe that Carvalho had accepted. As Pigafetta interpreted local politics, the captain was needed to battle the heathens who threatened the rajah’s Muslim empire.

The matter did not end there. The extent of the Europeans’ confusion became apparent when Rajah Siripada revealed that the proas had no intention of attacking the armada. They were actually on their way to attack the Arabs’ enemies when the armada got in the way and thwarted their battle plan. “As a proof of that statement, the Moros showed some heads of men who had been killed, which they declared to be the heads of heathens.” Once they realized their mistake, the armada’s officers awkwardly struggled to make amends with the rajah. At the same time, they requested that the detained men, including Carvalho’s illegitimate son, be returned. But Rajah Siripada refused. He had lately pampered the Europeans, treating them to elephant rides and mattresses, to feasts and gifts of precious jewels; he had even granted them a personal audience, and they had repaid his generosity by meddling in his internal affairs and letting the troublesome captain go. As a result, the rajah insisted on holding his hostages, at least for the present.

Carvalho responded with an insult of his own. He decided to keep sixteen of the prisoners they had captured at sea, as well as another prize, three extraordinarily beautiful women. He declared that he would present them to King Charles, a plan that the other officers enthusiastically seconded. Magellan had always forbidden the presence of women and slaves (his own slave excepted) aboard the ships because he believed that their presence would become divisive, and Carvalho’s captives proved Magellan’s belief correct. Soon everyone on board Trinidad was aware that Carvalho had turned the women prisoners into his personal harem, and he was busy taking liberties with all three. This behavior so incensed the other officers that they muttered threats to kill Carvalho, who bartered for his life, and his harem, with liberal gifts of gold and jewels from the loot he had received from the captain of the captured junk. In the end, Carvalho was spared, and he even kept his harem, but he lost all authority in the eyes of his men. As the officers realized, if they took bribes and maintained harems, they would become pirates themselves.

Carvalho’s unscrupulous behavior made Pigafetta long for Magellan’s icy sense of duty and discipline; without those driving forces, the expedition’s sense of moral imperative melted away amid the luxuriant Indonesian heat.

At length, the rajah released two hostages, Elcano and Espinosa, whom the messengers promptly returned to the waiting fleet. They said they had been detained separately, “treated well,” and knew nothing about the mysterious flotilla of proas bearing down on the armada. But where were the others? Elcano and Espinosa explained to Carvalho that the two Greek sailors had decided to desert. The story seemed unlikely, but there was no way to confirm it. Magellan, had he been alive, would have immediately launched a search for the deserters, but Carvalho did not lift a finger. He was naturally more interested in the fate of his young son; with long faces, Elcano and Espinosa said they had heard the boy had died ashore, but they did not know for certain.

That was only the beginning of Carvalho’s misfortunes. On September 21, 1521, the other officers decided to replace him. The change of command did not amount to a mutiny, and Carvalho was neither attacked nor restrained; he was simply told to step down, and he did, returning to his former post as pilot.

The officers settled on an awkward triumvirate to command the fleet. The purser, Martín Méndez, became the fifth Captain General, and Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa took over the captaincy of Trinidad, still the flagship. Elcano gnashed his teeth in frustration, having been bypassed yet again in favor of men with lesser skills but greater rank. No one could forget that he had participated in the mutiny against Magellan and served his time in chains. Since then, he had rehabilitated himself, but some stain of dishonor clung to him. Still, he could console himself with becoming the captain of Victoria. Because neither Espinosa nor Méndez had firsthand navigation experience, Juan Sebastián Elcano, the veteran Basque mariner, became the unofficial head of the expedition.

To be a Basque meant, and still means, to be a historical anomaly. The Basques are the oldest ethnic group of Europe, a breed apart ever since Paleolithic times. In their province in northern Spain, next to the French border, the Basques speak a distinct language, actually, eight dialects of a distinct language. No direct link between the Basque tongue and another language has been identified. Over the centuries, various monarchs had attempted to annex the Basques, and although King Ferdinand finally conquered them in 1512, and Basques became fervent Catholics, the fiercely independent Basque culture persisted.

The sea loomed large in the lives of Basque men; they were born facing the sea, they lived by the sea, they died at sea. It was into this highly idiosyncratic and tenacious culture that Juan Sebastián Elcano was born in 1487 in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa. His name, usually given as Elcano or Del Cano, is said to have derived from Elk-ano, a Basque word for a district of fields. From his youth in Guipúzcoa, the center of the Basque fishing industry, Elcano was destined for the sea. Of his eight siblings, at least two brothers became mariners, and one sister married a pilot. At twenty, Elcano found work ferrying Spanish soldiers in ships, although he had undoubtedly gone to sea much earlier. Two years later, he found work aboard an expeditionary ship taking Spanish forces and matériel to Africa, where the king’s soldiers engaged Arabs in battle; his duties included overseeing the ship’s cargo—gold to pay the soldiers—and weapons. By the time he was twenty-three, Elcano became the owner and captain of his own ship, a large vessel weighing two hundred tons. He offered his services to Spain, which refused to pay him; the situation forced him to borrow to pay his crew members, and ultimately he had to sell the ship to pay his debts, which involved him in more trouble, for it was illegal to sell an armed Spanish ship.

Elcano took refuge in Seville, where he attended the Casa de Contratación’s School of Navigation, receiving formal training as a pilot, probably from the boastful and controversial Amerigo Vespucci, who served as head of its board of examiners. Students received credit in the form of beans won from their instructor; if they successfully completed a course, they were awarded a dry bean; if unsuccessful, they received a shriveled pea. Under Vespucci’s supervison, Elcano learned his navigation, was awarded his bean, and became a master pilot.

With his new credentials, he applied for a position as a pilot for the Armada de Molucca, but even here Elcano’s business troubles continued to haunt him, for many of the officials of the Casa de Contratación were Basques, including the chief accountant, who came from the same little province as Elcano and might detect Elcano’s old financial transgressions. As luck would have it, a relative who worked at the Casa and was willing to overlook Elcano’s problems recommended him to Magellan, who in turn appointed Elcano master of Concepción at a salary of 3,000 maravedís per month. Even better, he received six months’ pay in advance—18,000 maravedís, a small fortune for a young man from a modest Basque family. Although he would have to pay for his furnishings out of the advance, he would still have a considerable amount left over. By combining his salary with his share of the expedition’s profits, he would become wealthy. Once Elcano accepted his position, he recruited other seamen for the voyage, and in the end, ten Guipúzcoans wound up on the armada’s rolls, largely through Elcano’s efforts.

Just before the fleet departed from Seville, Elcano was called to testify before a formal board of inquiry in Seville, where he testified that Magellan was a “discreet and virtuous man and careful of his honor.” After that brief moment of prominence, Elcano blended into the background, and even though he was among the mutineers at Port Saint Julian, he made little impression on his fellow crew members. In his entire chronicle of the voyage, Pigafetta did not mention even once the name of the Basque mariner who now led the armada.

After thirty-five days in Brunei, the fleet was ready to make the final assault on the Moluccas. They had reason to believe they were approaching the Spice Islands at last, because they were now following the path of an earlier European traveler, Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna, who had published a popular account of his travels, including his visit to the Spice Islands, in 1510. (He had reached the Spice Islands by traveling east along the overland route rather than west over water.) Varthema was a pioneer many times over, the first European to become wealthy by trading in gems in India, and among the first to gain a sustained look behind the veil of Islam. He even claimed to be the first nonbeliever to visit Mecca, at the risk of his life. Soon after, he arrived in the Spice Islands, where he was transfixed by the sight of the fabled clove tree. “The tree of the cloves is exactly like the box tree,” he wrote, “that is, thick, and the leaf is like that of the cinnamon, but it is a little more round. . . . When those cloves are ripe, the said men beat them down with canes, and place some mats under the said tree to catch them.” He observed how the people of Molucca traded in their precious resource, and was not impressed: “We found that they were sold for twice as much as nutmegs, but by measure, because these people do not understand weights.”

Distracted and overextended, the surviving men of the fleet lacked Varthema’s cunning and ability to blend into the surroundings. From the moment the fleet weighed anchor, the ships ran into serious navigational trouble. Sailing downwind out of the harbor of Brunei, Trinidad ran aground as she attempted to round a point; the shoal could have sliced the hull open. The accident was caused solely by the pilot’s negligence, according to Pigafetta, “but by the help of God we freed it.” Actually, they had to wait for four hours, praying that the hull would remain intact until the tide rose and freed the ship.

Shortly afterward, a sailor “snuffed a candle into a barrel full of gunpowder, but he quickly snatched it out without any harm.” An explosion could have destroyed the ship and claimed many lives. Mishaps like these would never have occurred on Magellan’s watch, and in each case, the undisciplined fleet had been lucky to survive a mistake of its own making, but how long would their luck hold?

Damaged by running aground, Trinidad’s hull needed repairs; in fact, both ships leaked rapidly, and the constant seepage meant that the men had to take exhausting turns at the pumps just to keep them afloat. It became apparent to all that they would have to recondition the fleet for the first time since the painstaking overhaul conducted during the grim winter in Port Saint Julian.

Arriving on the island of Cimbonbon, the armada spent the next forty-two days on repairs. Pigafetta describes their refuge as a “perfect port for repairing ships,” for it was remote from waterborne traffic, and tranquil, but the work itself was difficult to perform efficiently, “as we lacked many things for repairing the ships.” The difficult and exhausting task, made even more taxing by the Indonesian heat, was absolutely necessary if the ships were to be seaworthy. “During that time, each one of us labored hard at one thing or another. Our greatest fatigue, however, was to go barefoot to the woods for wood.” Wandering in the shade, they were attacked by wild boar. They managed to kill one of the beasts as it was swimming across the harbor, pursuing it in a longboat. They also found a wide variety of fish and amphibious life, including “large crocodiles,” giant oysters five or six feet long and weighing hundreds of pounds, and a curious fish with a “head like a hog and two horns. Its body consisted entirely of one bone, and on its back it resembled a saddle. And they are small.” To judge from this description, this might have been the squamipen, or angelfish, the brightly colored, highly compressed fish found in the region.

Another natural marvel to be found on Cimbonbon was worthy of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: “trees . . . which produce leaves which are alive when they fall and walk. . . . They have no blood, but if one touches them, they run away.” With childlike enthusiasm, Pigafetta managed to capture a specimen. “I kept one of them for nine days in a box. When I opened the box, the leaf went round and round it.” These walking leaves have been identified as phyllium, insects whose flat, broad back resembles a leaf, including scars and stems; it is a remarkable example of camouflage. In flight, or when moving, these insects reveal bright colors, but when they rest in a tree, they melt into the shadows, and avoid the sharp-eyed birds that prey on them.

Once the arduous renovations were completed, the fleet resumed its search for the Spice Islands on September 27. Days later, the fleet sighted a large junk from the island of Pulaoan, bearing the local ruler. “We made them a signal to haul in their sails, and as they refused to haul them in, we captured the junk by force, and sacked it. [We told] the governor if [he] wished his freedom, he was to give us, inside of seven days, four hundred measures of rice, twenty swine, twenty goats, and one hundred and fifty fowls.” The governor tried to mollify the marauders with a liberal tribute of coconuts, bananas, sugarcane, and especially palm wine, all of which had their intended effect. The contrite Europeans returned the firearms and daggers they had taken from the governor, along with tributes of their own, cloth, a flag, a “yellow damask robe,” and other trinkets. “We parted from them as friends,” Pigafetta noted with satisfaction, and the search for the Spice Islands resumed.

Traveling southeast, they came upon a weird outcropping in the ocean. It seemed to Pigafetta that the sea was “full of grass, although the depth was very great.” Passing the outcropping, he thought they were “entering another sea.” Actually, they were still in the vicinity of Mindanao, traveling along its western coast until they arrived at another island Pigafetta calls Monoripa. “The people of that island make their dwellings in boats and do not live otherwise,” he observed of the Bajau, the sea gypsies who were widely scattered throughout the area, adjusting their moorings to avoid the monsoon. Of all the tribes the armada encountered, the Bajau were among the most enigmatic.

They are thought to have flourished well before the armada’s arrival, when the Chinese were exploring the region. The Bajau developed a brisk trade in a Chinese delicacy, trepang, or sea cucumber. This leathery echinoderm, normally a few inches in length, grew to extraordinary dimensions in the area, occasionally as long as three feet. It was considered an aphrodisiac, the ginseng of the sea.

Long after the Chinese presence faded, the Bajau remained. Each anchorage usually served an extended family that spread across several boats, as little as two or as many as six. They fished together, shared food, and maintained relationships with other families through intermarriage. The boats were only thirty feet from stem to stern and six feet amidships, but far more spacious than proas or balanghai. Their living areas were sheltered by poles supporting mats made from palm fronds, and each boat had its clay hearth for cooking.

Bajau fishermen employed handheld lines and spears to catch hundreds of other edible species in addition to trepang. On moonless nights, they fished by lantern. They preserved their catch much as Europeans did, by salting and drying. Their activities were confined almost exclusively to the sea; they owned no land, but they held small islands in common devoted to burials, and when necessary they went ashore for fresh water. They were not at all predatory; when attacked, the Bajau usually fled across the water. More conventional tribes on shore considered the waterborne, nomadic Bajau unreliable and not subject to any one set of laws or beliefs. Over time, many of them became Muslims, but they retained some of their earlier customs. They practiced trance dancing and called on mediums to purge the community of evil spirits or illness. The evil forces were led to a particular boat, which was set adrift in the open sea to wander eternally. The custom might serve as a metaphor for the entire Bajau culture, always adrift.

The crew was tempted to remain among the Bajau because the men heard that on two nearby islands they could find the best cinnamon grown anywhere. Next to cloves, cinnamon was the most valuable spice; the temptation to fill their ships with the fragrant spice proved almost irresistible. “Had we stayed there two days, those people would have laden our ships for us, but as we had a wind favorable for passing points and certain islets which were near the island, we did not wish to delay.”

Just before they left, they got their first, tantalizing look at the fabled cinnamon tree: “It has but three or four small branches and its leaves resemble those of the laurel. Its bark is the cinnamon, and it is gathered twice a year.” In Malay, Pigafetta noted, the unprepossessing tree was called caiu (sweet) mana (wood). The men conducted a quick, probably illicit transaction, exchanging two large knives for about seventeen pounds of cinnamon, worth enough on the docks of Seville to buy an entire ship. They expected to obtain far more cinnamon, along with nutmeg, pepper, mace, and many other precious spices, once they reached their goal.

Just when it seemed that a measure of order had returned to the fleet, they attacked a large proa to obtain information about the whereabouts of the Moluccas. In a bitter struggle, they slaughtered seven of the eighteen men on board the little craft. Pigafetta mentioned the matter only in passing, without remorse. In the past, the needless deaths of the Chamorros and the Patagonian giants had caused sorrow and guilt, but by now he had become desensitized to the business of killing, which he reported with less emotion than he would a passing storm. Pigafetta’s lack of fellow-feeling reflected the entire crew’s frame of mind. It is one of the outstanding ironies of the voyage that the closer they came to fulfilling their mission, the more they lost their sense of mission, which Magellan, for all his faults, had done so much to impart.

Before leaving the unlucky proa in their wake, the armada spared the life of one of its occupants, the brother of Mindanao’s ruler, who insisted that he knew the way to the Moluccas. Making good on his promise, he guided the armada on a different course; they had been traveling northeast, but he took them to the southeast, toward the Moluccas. Along the way, they passed a cape inhabited by cannibals, and the crew studied these fabled creatures with rapt attention. The cannibals were every bit as frightening as their reputation: “shaggy men who are exceedingly great fighters and archers. They use swords one palmo in length and eat only raw human hearts with the juice of oranges and lemons.” The crew members naturally kept their distance, and listened closely to their captured guide’s account of the tribe as if they were tourists on safari. In all likelihood, they had encountered members of the Manobos tribe, who did on occasion practice a ritual cannibalism in which they devoured the heart or the liver of their enemies. But no European hearts were consumed that day.

The armada had just reached the southernmost part of Mindanao when the ships were swept by the strongest storm they had encountered since the life-threatening gales off the eastern coast of South America, but once again, they received brilliant supernatural reassurance that they would safely reach their goal. “On Saturday night, October 26, while coasting by Birahan Batolach, we encountered a most furious storm. Thereupon, praying to God, we lowered all the sails. Immediately our three saints appeared to us and dissipated all the darkness. St. Elmo remained for more than two hours on the maintop, like a torch; St. Nicholas on the mizzentop; and St. Clara on the foretop. We promised a slave to St. Elmo, St. Nicholas, and St. Clara, and gave alms to each one.” The storm passed, and the shaken crew members once again gave thanks for their lives, raised the sails, and the fleet recommenced its southeasterly voyage. They were only two hundred miles from the Spice Islands, yet they spent weeks zigzagging blindly throughout the Sulawesi and Maluku seas without knowing how to reach their destination.

At the island Pigafetta called Cavit, the crew members struck again, capturing two more pilots and ordering them to take the fleet to the Moluccas on pain of death. “Laying our course south southwest,” Pigafetta tells us, “we passed among eight inhabited and uninhabited islands, which were situated in the manner of a street. Their names are Cheaua, Cauiao, Cabaio, Camanuca, Cabalizao, Cheai, Lipan, and Nuza”—all members of the Karkaralong group, located at the southern tip of Mindanao.

Even now, as they approached their goals, they were bedeviled by misfortune. On November 2, Pedro Sánchez, a gunner aboard Trinidad, attempted to fire an arquebus; the weapon exploded, killing him, and two days after that, another Trinidad gunner, Juan Bautista, died in a gunpowder explosion.

Unable to sail close enough to the wind to pass a cape, the fleet had to double back and forth past the point until the wind changed. As they did, three of their captives, two men and a boy, jumped ship and swam for their lives toward a nearby island. “But the boy drowned,” Pigafetta relates, “for he was unable to hold tightly to his father’s shoulder.”

On the ships sailed, gliding past the islands of Sanguir, Kima, Karakitang, Para, Sarangalong, Siao, Tagulanda, Zoar, Meau, Paginsara, Suar, Atean: a string of emeralds set in gleaming sapphire. And then, on November 6, 1521, they saw four more islands shimmering on the horizon. “The pilot who still remained with us told us that those four islands were the Moluccas,” Pigafetta recorded. After losing three ships and more than a hundred men—half the crew—they were finally on the doorstep of the Spice Islands . . .

. . . Ternate . . .

. . . Tidore . . .

. . . Motir . . .

. . . Makian . . .

They stretched from north to south, four small islands, each no more than six miles across. To the south lay a fifth Spice Island, Bacan, which was considerably larger.

The Moluccas actually comprise about one thousand islands of varying sizes, but for Europeans of the sixteenth century, the Moluccas referred to just those five islands. The best-known among them were Ternate and Tidore, volcanic islands whose steep cones towered about a mile above the sea, imparting an impressive solidity to the tiny landmasses. Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, writing in 1609, described Ternate’s volcano as a “dreadful burning of mountain flames.” He guessed that winds “kindle that natural fire, or the matter that has fed it for so many ages. The top of the mountain, which exhales it, is cold, and not covered with ashes, but with a sort of light cloddy earth, little different from the pumice stone burnt in our fiery mountains.” Volcanic ash enriched the soil on islands where the spices grew, and the moist climate also promoted lush growth; this combination made them unique sources for spices. The occasional volcanic eruptions terrified those who beheld them, and gave Ternate and the other islands a magical reputation. It would not have been more marvelous to see a dragon or the lost city of Atlantis rising from the depths of the sea than to witness an eruption in the Moluccas.

“Look there, how the seas of the Orient are scattered with islands beyond number,” wrote the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões in The Lusíads about the spell cast by the Spice Islands:

See Tidore, then Ternate with its burning

Summit, leaping with volcanic flames.

Observe the orchards of hot cloves

Portuguese will buy with their blood . . .

All these exotic sights and more were now within the grasp of the Armada de Molucca. “So we thanked God, and for joy we discharged all our artillery,” Pigafetta wrote. “And no wonder we were so joyful, for we had spent twenty-seven months less two days in our search for the Moluccas.”