Over the Edge of the World

Chapter XIII Et in Arcadia Ego

The harbour-bay was clear as glass,

So smoothly it was strewn!

And on the bay the moonlight lay,

And the shadow of the Moon.

On November 8, 1521, the Armada de Molucca entered the harbor of Tidore, firing a joyful salute. They dropped anchor in twenty fathoms and fired another round of artillery, the report of the guns echoing off the island’s tranquil hills. In the humid climate, the strong scents of clove and cinnamon wafted across the water, reviving the weary crew members with the promise of riches.

The following day, an emissary from Tidore floated out to the ships in a luxurious proa, his head protected from the sun by a silk awning; his son, bearing a ceremonial scepter, was at his side. They were accompanied by a pair of ritual hand washers bearing sweet water in jars made of gold, and two other bearers carrying a gold casket filled with an offering of betel nuts. The emissary introduced himself as al-Mansur, a Muslim name, but the officers came to know him by the Spanish version, Almanzor. He appeared to be in his forties and rather rotund.

Almanzor’s theatrical arrival was calculated to announce that he was an important personage: the king of Tidore and an enthusiastic astrologer. As intended, the officers recognized that gaining Almanzor’s goodwill would be vital because he was the gatekeeper to the cloves, which they had come so far to find. But Almanzor’s little kingdom was in constant peril, and he needed these visitors from afar as much as they needed him, or his spices.

From his resplendent proa, Almanzor enthusiastically welcomed the fleet. “After such long tossing upon the seas, and so many dangers, come and enjoy the pleasures of the land, and refresh your bodies, and do not think but that you have arrived at the kingdom of your own sovereign,” he declared, according to Pigafetta. And then Almanzor startled them all by announcing that he had dreamed of their arrival, and they had fulfilled his prophecy.

Almanzor boarded Trinidad under the watchful eyes of the officers, who offered him the velvet-covered chair of honor. Almanzor lowered himself into it, but conveyed the impression that he was accommodating them by consenting to sit, after which he “received us as children” in Pigafetta’s astonished words. For all his graciousness, Almanzor had a stubborn streak; he refused to bow or even to tilt his head even when it was necessary. When he was invited to enter Trinidad’s cabin, he refused to stoop, as her crew members routinely did. Instead, he mounted the upper deck and descended from above, his head rigidly erect.

In conversation, Almanzor revealed that he was familiar with Spain, and even with its great and powerful ruler, King Charles. He insisted that he and the people of Tidore fervently desired to serve the king and his kingdom, an assertion that immediately made the officers suspect that Almanzor had another agenda that involved switching his allegiance from the Portuguese to the Spanish. The officers were correct. A decade earlier, the father of the island’s current ruler had encouraged the Portuguese to set up a trading station, in part because he wished to loosen the Arab stranglehold on the islands’ crops.

The experience left a bitter legacy on both sides. The Portuguese came to detest the Moluccans with the passion of a jilted lover. At the outset, the Portuguese had hoped to break the Chinese and Arab monopoly on spices and grow fat on the proceeds, fatter even than their neighbor and rival, Spain. They would then assert control over the global economy. But the islanders turned out to be devious partners, murderous and slippery; most infuriating of all, they continued to sell spices to anyone with a ship capable of carrying them away. Portugal never got its monopoly and blamed the rulers and inhabitants of the islands.

João de Barros, a Portuguese court historian, expressed the official attitude toward the inhabitants of the Spice Islands: “In everything but war they are slothful; and if there be any industry among them in agriculture or trade, it is confined to the women,” he declared, enumerating their failings. “Altogether, they are a lascivious people, false and ungrateful, but expert in learning anything. Although poor in wealth, such is their pride and presumption that they will abate nothing from necessity; nor will they submit, except to the sword that cuts them. . . . Finally, these islands, according to the account given by our people, are a warren of every evil, and contain nothing good but their clove tree.” Barros came to consider the clove itself as the ultimate source of evil in this region. “Though a creation of God,” he wrote, the spice was “actually an apple of discord and responsible for more afflictions than gold.”

No wonder Almanzor had grown tired of the Portuguese; and no wonder he preferred Spaniards (although he did not realize that many of the crew were Portuguese). But there was more. Local politics also influenced Almanzor’s thinking. At the time, Tidore was embroiled in a conflict with its island neighbor, Ternate, still in the Portuguese grip, and Almanzor thought these representatives of the Spanish crown could make powerful allies in the struggle.

The triumvirate of officers—Elcano, Espinosa, and Méndez—quickly made trading pacts with Almanzor and bestowed so many gifts that he asked them to restrain their overwhelming generosity because “he had nothing worthy to send to our king as a present, unless, now that he recognized him as a sovereign, he should send himself.”

On November 10, Carvalho and a small detachment went ashore, and for the first time the men of the Armada de Molucca set foot on the Spice Islands.

Antonio Galvão, the Portuguese administrator who arrived at the Spice Islands a few years later, evoked the ethereal landscape that greeted the armada’s crew as they looked at their surroundings: “The shape of most of these islands is that of a sugarloaf, with the base going downward into the water, surrounded by reefs at little more than a stone’s throw; at ebb tide one can go there on foot. One can put into the islands through some channels in the reef which outside is very high; and there is no place to anchor except in certain small sandy bays: a dangerous thing! They look gloomy, somber, and depressing. That is always the way they strike the onlooker at first sight; for always, or nearly always, there is a large blanket of fog on their summits. And for the greatest part of the year the sky is cloudy, which makes it rain very often; and if it does not, everything withers but the clove tree, which prospers. And at certain intervals there falls a dismal, misty rain.”

What made the islands seem alive to the first European explorers were the active and highly unpredictable volcanoes rising to the sky. “Some of these islands spit fire and have warm waters like hot springs. And they are so thickly crowded with groves as to look like one big mass of them, and they are therefore hiding places for evil doers,” Galvão warned. As a result of the volcano’s ejecta raining down on the islands, the soil “is black and loose; and in places there is clay and gravel, which is unstable because it lies on the rock where it does not take hold. And however much it may rain, the water stands only a while before it is absorbed.”

Of supreme importance were the spices themselves, especially the cloves. The armada’s men had seen cloves, smelled cloves, and tasted cloves, but only now did they find cloves growing in the wild—not just a few trees scattered here and there, but a dense, impenetrable forest of cloves. “The hills in these five islands are all of cloves,” wrote Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa, after his visit to the Spice Islands in 1512. “[They] grow on trees like laurel, which has its leaf like that of the arbutus, and it grows like the orange flower, which in the beginning is green and then turns white, and when it is ripe it turns coloured, and then they gather it by hand, the people going amongst the trees.”

On their first visit to Tidore, the armada’s leaders reached an agreement with Almanzor recognizing Spain’s sovereignty over the island, even though it violated the Treaty of Tordesillas. Once these formalities were over, the leaders wanted to obtain the spices as quickly as they could, before local strife drove them away. The men had seen too many warm receptions turn violent for them to believe that Almanzor would keep his word for very long.

For the Europeans of the armada, a treaty was, above all, a written document, but for the Tidoreans, only the oral expression carried the force of law. To record commercial transactions, the inhabitants of the Spice Islands occasionally wrote on palm leaves or paper imported from India, using a system borrowed from the Chinese, but when they made treaties, they relied on oral rather than written communication. Both sides managed to overcome their differences to seal the bargain, and with the treaty in force, the king of Tidore advised the armada’s officers that he did not have enough cloves on hand to satisfy their needs, but he offered to accompany them to Bacan, where he assured them that they would find as much as they wanted. But before the officers began filling the ships with spices, they inquired after one of their own: Francisco Serrão, the author of the letters that had inspired Magellan’s voyage to the Spice Islands.

None of the Europeans knew what had become of this legendary figure. The most recent information—and it was only gossip—was that he and a small band of Portuguese adventurers arrived at Ternate, where they allied themselves with the island’s ruler, Rajah Abuleis. In the eyes of the authorities, Serrão and his band of Portuguese adventurers had become little more than mercenaries; like Magellan, they were willing to switch loyalties to Spain in exchange for a better deal. Now, Serrão’s fate assumed great importance to the armada, which was starved for leadership. It was possible that he was still in the Spice Islands, and, if so, the armada’s officers hoped to reunite with him. He might even take command of the fleet in Magellan’s stead, if he were still alive.

The reunion was not to be. Almanzor revealed that Serrão had died eight months before, about the time of Magellan’s death, but the king concealed the whole story behind Serrão’s end. The facts were these: After his arrival in the Spice Islands in 1512, Serrão had chosen sides in a power struggle between the rulers of Tidore and Ternate, and he served as admiral of the Ternate navy, such as it was. The two island kingdoms battled for years, with Ternate, under Serrão’s leadership, winning every time. To make peace, Serrão forced Tidore to give up the sons of its rulers as hostages and forced Almanzor to marry off his daughter to his enemy, the king of Ternate, whose child she bore.

Almanzor neither forgot nor forgave the terrible humiliations Serrão had inflicted on him. “Peace having been made between the two kings,” Pigafetta relates, “when Francisco Serrão came one day to Tidore to trade cloves, the king of Tidore had him poisoned with . . . betel leaves. He lived only four days. His king wished to have him buried according to his law”—meaning Muslim rites—“but three Christians who were his servants would not consent to it. He left a son and a daughter, both young, born by a woman whom he had taken to wife in Java the Great, and two hundred barrels of cloves. He was a great friend and a relative of our good and loyal dead Captain General.” The vendetta did not end there. Ten days later, the king of Ternate, “having driven out his son-in-law, the king of Bacan, was poisoned by his daughter, the wife of the said king, under pretext of wishing to conclude peace between them.” He lingered two days before he died.

The fleet’s officers realized that Serrão’s death contained disturbing echoes of Magellan’s. Each had taken sides in a protracted struggle between two island kingdoms, and each had acted harshly in his dealings with the enemy. Eventually, the warring tribes formed common cause, and the formerly heroic outsider paid for his bold deeds with his life. These cautionary tales reminded the officers to resist the temptation to fight anyone else’s battles. Despite their sorry history, the unhappy inhabitants of these two islands hoped that the distant but powerful king of Spain, about whom they had heard, could bring lasting peace where their own efforts had failed.

On Monday, November 11, the rulers of Ternate began their diplomatic offensive.

One of the king’s many sons came out to the fleet in a proa, accompanied by Serrão’s widow, a Javanese, and their two children. The sight of the approaching craft caused Espinosa to panic, for he had cast his lot with Ternate’s enemy, Tidore. What was he to do? Almanzor, who remained near at hand, calmly advised Espinosa to act as he saw fit.

Espinosa and the other officers aboard Trinidad stiffly welcomed the visitors, bestowed gifts on them, and watched closely for signs of trouble. Meanwhile, Pigafetta, drawing on his linguistic skills, fell into conversation with a servant named Manuel, who said he served a Portuguese governor named Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, who had come to the Spice Islands with Serrão and lived there still. Manuel claimed that while considerable enmity still existed between the kings of Tidor and Ternate, the rulers of Ternate were also in favor of Spain, and he assured the officers that they were as welcome on Ternate as they were on Tidore.

Taking the servant at his word, Pigafetta went ashore to see the Spice Islands for himself. Always intrigued by the local sexual customs and the women, he felt greatly disappointed by the females of Tidore, calling them “ugly,” a word he rarely uses elsewhere in his chronicle. Both men and women went about naked, or wore only a scanty loincloth “made from the bark of trees,” he noted. Tidore was not to be the scene of Filipino-style orgies, because the men “are so jealous of their wives that they do not wish us to go ashore with our drawers exposed for they assert that their women imagine that we are always in readiness.” Pigafetta meant that the European-style breeches made the sailors appear to be erect.

Despite the apparent sexual exclusivity of the inhabitants, Pigafetta heard that the local rulers had fathered dozens of children. He wondered if there was any truth to the story, and found that the profligacy of the island rulers exceeded even his imagination: “The kings have as many women as they wish, but only one principal wife, whom all the others obey. The king of Tidore had a large house outside the city, where two hundred of his chief women lived with a like number of women to serve them. When the king eats, he sits alone or with his chief wife in a high place like a gallery where he can see all the other women who sit about the gallery; and he orders whoever best pleases him to sleep with him that night. After the king has finished eating, if he orders those women to eat together, they do so, but if not, each one goes to eat in her chamber. No one is allowed to see those women without permission of the king, and if anyone is found near the king’s house by day or by night, he is put to death. Every family is obliged to give the king one or two of its daughters. That king had twenty-six children, eight sons, and the rest daughters.” And on a neighboring island, Gilolo, the situation was even more extreme. Two kings shared the island; one had 600 children, the other 525.

Those were Muslim kings, Pigafetta noted. “The heathens do not have so many women; nor do they live under so many superstitions, but adore all that day the first thing they see in the morning when they go out of their houses. The king of those heathens, Rajah Papua, is exceedingly rich in gold, and lives in the interior of the island.”

Once again, Pigafetta set about compiling a dictionary of words and phrases, with heavy emphasis on parts of the body and procreation. He worked swiftly, and his dictionary of the Malay dialect spoken in the Spice Islands blossomed into his most elaborate effort at lexicography.

Trading for spices got under way with astonishing speed. The king of Tidore gave orders to prepare a trading house—probably recovered from the days of the Portuguese occupation—to accommodate the new arrivals, and by Tuesday, November 12, four days after they had dropped anchor in Tidore harbor, the Armada de Molucca was in business. “We carried almost all our goods thither, and left three of our men to guard them. We immediately began to trade in the following manner. For ten brazas of red cloth of very good quality, they gave us one bahar of cloves, which is equivalent to four quintals and six libras.” A quintal of cloves equaled one hundred pounds, and it was the most important unit for measuring the value of a spice shipment.

The men of the fleet valued their take according to the quintalada they received. A quintalada was a percentage of the storage space set aside for the crew members and officers. Following the instructions King Charles gave to Magellan on May 8, 1519, each significant member of the armada received a specific number of quintaladas. Once they paid one twenty-fourth of the amount to the king, they could keep the rest for themselves. Magellan, as the Captain General, was naturally awarded the largest amount: sixty quintals plus another twenty quintaladas. The other officers received almost as much, and on down through the roster of boatswains, gunners, caulkers, coopers, the barber, and the master-at-arms. Even the priests received allotments.

Over the next several days, trading continued at a feverish pace. “For fifteen brazas of cloth of not very good quality, one quintal and one hundred libras; for fifteen hatchets, one bahar; for thirty-five glass drinking cups, one bahar (the king getting them all); for seventeen catis of silver, one bahar; for twenty-six brazas of linen, one bahar; for twenty-five brazas of finer linen, one bahar; for one hundred and fifty knives, one bahar; for fifty pairs of scissors, one bahar; for forty pairs of caps, one bahar; for ten pieces of Gujarat cloth, one bahar; for three of those gongs of theirs, two bahars; for one quintal of bronze, one bahar.” The men of the armada traded the gongs, the knives, and other items pirated from the Chinese junks they had raided en route for the cloves. In return for these trinkets, they received a haul that a sailor might expect to see once or twice in a lifetime.

A detachment of well-armed crew members guarded the post, but as they knew from tragic experience, staying ashore overnight posed special hazards, even in a peaceful setting. Almanzor earned a measure of trust by warning them not to venture beyond the post at night, or they might encounter a renegade cult of men who appeared to be headless, and who carried with them a poison ointment. Anyone coming into contact with the ointment “falls sick very soon and dies within three or four days.” The king explained that he had tried to discipline these menacing presences, and even had many of them hanged, but they still posed a danger. Forewarned (if scared out of their wits), the guard successfully avoided them.

As trading proceeded, Almanzor did all he could to put the armada at ease, even when the officers revealed that they were holding sixteen captives, taken from islands they had visited. Perhaps their existence could no longer be concealed, or the space they occupied could be more profitably devoted to cloves or cinnamon. To the officers’ surprise, the confession delighted the king, and he asked to take possession of the captives “so that he might send them back to their land with five of his own men that they might make the king of Spain and his fame known.” There was also the ticklish matter of Carvalho’s harem of three captive women, whom the officers delivered to Almanzor for his personal use.

In return for his generous assistance, Almanzor asked only that the Europeans “kill all the swine that we had in the ships,” in accordance with Muslim dietary laws, “for which he would give us an equal number of goats and fowls.” Their food supply assured, the Europeans happily complied with the request. “We killed them in order to show him a pleasure and hung them up under the deck. When those people happen to see any swine they cover their faces in order that they might not look upon them or catch their odor.”

If any member of the Armada de Molucca paused in the midst of his chores to reflect on these days in the Spice Islands, he could only marvel at how fortune, after punishing the fleet for months, had now chosen to favor it.

On the afternoon of November 13, Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, Francisco Serrão’s companion, hailed the fleet from a proa. He excitedly explained that the king of Ternate had given permission for the visit and instructed him to answer all questions truthfully, adding, in royal jest, “even if he did come from Ternate.” There followed one of the more remarkable reunions in the Age of Discovery. In a time when travelers separated from their native cultures were often never heard from again, here was the Portuguese explorer standing before the armada’s officers after a ten-year silence, in good humor and eager to impart vital intelligence concerning Armada de Molucca.

From Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa’s detailed recollections, the officers learned that the implacable Portuguese authorities had been pursuing the armada around the globe: “He told us that he had already been sixteen years in India, and ten in the Moluccas, and that it was many years since the Moluccas had been secretly discovered, and that one year less fifteen days ago a great ship from Malacca had come there and left with a cargo of cloves.” And this ship was still looking for the armada.

Her captain was Tristão de Meneses, a Portuguese. And he [Pedro Alfonso] asked him what news there was in Christendom; and he had replied that a fleet of five ships had sailed from Seville to discover the Moluccas in the name of the King of Spain, with Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese, as captain. And that the King of Portugal, in anger that a Portuguese should oppose him, had sent some ships to the Cape of Good Hope, and as many to Cape St. Mary, where cannibals lived, to guard and forbid the passage, and that he had not found them.

According to Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, the Portuguese pursuit of the Armada de Molucca did not stop there, and he ended his tale with a bombshell:

A few days earlier a caravel with two junks had been there to learn news of us. But the junks went to Bacan to load cloves with seven Portuguese. And because they did not respect the king’s wives and subjects, although the king had often told them not to behave thus, and since they refused to abstain and withdraw, they were put to death. And when the men of the caravel learned this, they immediately returned to Malacca, leaving the junks with four hundred bahars of cloves and as much merchandise as would purchase another hundred bahars. Moreover, he told us that every year many junks come from Malacca to Bandan to take and load mace and nutmeg, and from Bandan to Molucca to get cloves. And that these people go with their junks from Molucca to Bandan in three days, and from Bandan to Malacca in fifteen. And that the King of Portugal had already secretly enjoyed Molucca for ten years, that the King of Spain should not know.

This last piece of information explained why King Manuel had refused Magellan four times; a water route such as Magellan proposed, no matter how daring, threatened to disturb Portugal’s lucrative but clandestine trade in spices. Spain, with no such secret relationship, would naturally benefit from Magellan’s plan. How strange and wrongheaded to imagine, as did the mutineers and those whom they influenced in Spain, that Magellan attempted to subvert the fleet to aid Portugal. After fleeing Portugal, Magellan had been as loyal to Spain as he claimed to be.

The officers of the armada plied Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa with alcohol, so the revelations came thick and fast. Not until three o’clock in the morning did the exhausted wanderer reach the end of his tale. Amazed and persuaded by his stories, the officers begged him to join their number by “promising him good wages and salaries.” A man without a country, he agreed. After eluding the agents of the Portuguese crown for so long, he would live to regret this decision.

On Friday the fifteenth of November,” wrote Pigafetta, “the king told us that he was going to Bacan to fetch the said cloves that those Portuguese had left there, and he requested of us two presents to give to the two governors of Motir in the name of the king of Spain. And passing through our ships, he wished to see how we fired out hackbuts, crossbows, and culverins, which are larger than an arquebus, and the king fired three shots of a crossbow, for that pleased him more than the other weapons.”

Still more gunplay ensued when Iussu, the king of Gilolo—“very old, and feared through all those islands for the great power that he had”—also paid a courtesy call on the armada on Saturday, prompting another exchange of gifts. “Since we were friends of the king of Tidore,” he advised, “we were also his, because he loved him like his own son, and if any of us ever went into his country he would do him very great honor.”

He returned the next day to ask the armada to demonstrate its firearms, and the gunners gladly complied. “He took the greatest pleasure in it,” Pigafetta noted. “He had been a great fighter in his youth, as we were told.”

Later that day, Pigafetta finally had his chance to examine cloves carefully. These aromatic, humble bushes (Syzygium aromaticum) had inspired the voyage that had cost so many lives, and moved the destinies of empire around the world. Kingdoms in the East and West alike depended on them for economic support, and they provided the incentive for the emerging world economy. Centuries before Magellan, the Chinese had imported cloves, which were believed to have medicinal value. They were also used to flavor food and to sweeten breath. Europe found even more applications for the clove. Its essence, when applied to the eyes, supposedly improved vision. Its powder, when applied to the forehead, supposedly relieved fevers and colds. If added to food, it supposedly stimulated the bladder and cleansed the colon. If consumed with milk, it supposedly made intercourse more satisfying. It was miraculous, precious, and wonderful in all respects.

The word “clove” is derived from clou, the French word for nail, and the shape of its dried flowerbud is indeed reminiscent of a nail. The trees are slow to mature; from seedling to crop can take as long as seven or even eight years. Until it reaches the age of twenty-five or thereabouts, a clove tree will yield approximately eight pounds of the precious spice each year, depending on fluctuations in the climate. The ideal soil for growing cloves could be found in the Spice Islands: a deep, loamy, well-drained volcanic soil. Drenching rain is essential. The islands receive about one hundred inches of rain a year, ideal for cloves. The clove buds vary in length from one-half to three-quarters of an inch, and they contain up to 20 percent essential oil. The principal component is eugenol, an aromatic oil that imparts to cloves their distinctive, smoky flavor.

Harvesting cloves requires considerable care because the buds are fragile. The trick is to pull the buds away from the stems without damaging the branches; this was usually done by using the hand as a brush to sweep clusters of buds into waiting baskets or extended aprons. Once harvested, the buds were placed in the open for a few days to dry out. When desiccated, the stems and heads of the clove turn brown, and their weight is reduced by as much as two-thirds. Even after they are packed, they continue to lose moisture and weight, though at a much slower rate.

Now that Pigafetta was face-to-face with the source of all this wealth and struggle, he described it with obvious fascination:

The clove tree is tall and as thick as a man’s body or thereabouts. Its branches spread out somewhat widely in the middle, but at the top they have the shape of a summit. Its leaves resemble those of the laurel, and the bark is of a dark color. The cloves grow at the end of the twigs, ten or twenty in a cluster. Those trees generally have more cloves on one side than on the other, according to the season. When the cloves sprout, they are white, when ripe, red, and when dried, black. They are gathered twice per year, once at the nativity of our Savior and the other at the nativity of St. John the Baptist; for the climate is more moderate at those two seasons. . . . When the year is very hot and there is little rain, those people gather three or four hundred bahars in each of those islands. Those trees grow only in the mountains, and if any of them are planted in the lowlands near the mountains, they do not live. The leaves, the bark, and the green wood are as strong as the cloves. If the latter are not gathered when they are ripe, they become large and so hard that only their husk is good. No cloves are grown in the world except in the five mountains of those five islands. . . . Almost every day we saw a mist descend and encircle now one and now another of those mountains, on account of which those cloves become perfect.

Nutmeg was almost as important and valuable as cloves, and Pigafetta offered this description of its appearance in the wild: “The tree resembles our walnut tree, and has leaves like it. When the nut is gathered it is as large as a small quince, with the same sort of down, and it is of the same color. Its first rind is as thick as the green rind of our walnut. Under that there is a thin layer, under which is found the mace. The latter is a brilliant red and is wrapped about the rind of the nut, and within that is the nutmeg.”

In the early hours of Monday, November 25, Almanzor sailed out to the fleet in his proa to the resonant accompaniment of gongs. As he passed between the armada’s ships, he announced that the cloves would be ready for delivery within four days. Overjoyed, the men of the armada fired their weapons to celebrate the event and to impress the king.

Later the same day, the men began to load what eventually amounted to 791 catis of cloves, about 1,400 pounds. “As those were the first cloves which we had laden in our ships, we fired many pieces.” The more spices they took on board, the more anxious the men of the armada became to return to Spain before another disaster befell them.

Now that the Europeans finally had their hands on the spices, Almanzor chose this moment to involve them in local politics, explaining that he wanted his visitors to return to the islands as soon as possible with even more ships. Even though the officers had experienced the bitter lessons of becoming ensnared in local vendettas, they blithely assured Almanzor they would help him. Content with this vague promise of assistance, the king invited everyone ashore for a banquet to celebrate the occasion.

The innocent gesture immediately sent the men of the armada into a panic because it reminded them of both the massacre at the banquet on Cebu and of Serrão’s death by poisoning. Suddenly, the officers of the armada saw signs of impending doom wherever they looked; for example, “We saw those Indians speaking very low to our captives.” Even the recently cleaned streets of the village, visible from the boats, appeared ominous. But they could not spurn the king’s invitation because they depended on his goodwill for access to the spices. “Some of us, supposing that this was some treachery . . . were in great doubt and of contrary opinion to those who wished to go to the banquet, saying that we ought not to go ashore and reminding them of another such misfortune.” Rather than go ashore, the officers offered to invite the king onto their ships, where they would bestow gifts on him, and even leave behind four men who wished to remain in the Spice Islands. (And good luck to those who remained in this dangerous place; they would certainly need it.)

Accepting the counteroffer, Almanzor immediately boarded Trinidad, boasting that he “entered there as safely as into his own houses.” As the suspicious sailors listened, he said he was “greatly amazed” to hear that the armada was about to weigh anchor and sail away. “The space of time for lading the ships was thirty days,” he explained. He meant no harm, or so he said, and only wanted to help them obtain their spices and journey home safely. “He besought us that we should not leave at once, seeing that it was not yet the season for navigation among those islands, and also because of the rocks and reefs that were around the island of Bandan, and also because we might easily have encountered the Portuguese.” These were all persuasive arguments, as the officers realized. And he demonstrated his sincerity by saying that if the armada wanted to leave now, he would do nothing to stop it; he requested only that they take back all the gifts they had conferred on him “because the kings his neighbors would say that the king of Tidore had received so many gifts from so great a king”—that is, King Charles—“and had given him nothing, and they would think that we had departed only for fear of some deception and treachery, whereby he would always be named and reputed a traitor.”

Here, at last, was the underlying reason why Almanzor wanted the armada to stay: to save face in front of the neighboring rulers. If he could maintain an alliance with his powerful visitors, he would impress and intimidate the jealous rulers of the other islands, but if he lost the visitors’ favor, if they dismissed him as insignificant, he would appear vulnerable to the rival kings.

The officers began to appreciate what Magellan had always refused to acknowledge in his dealings with islanders: their presence placed both sides in peril. There were hazards for the Europeans (the islanders might massacre them), and there were hazards for the islanders themselves (the Europeans might take their women or disturb the local balance of power). Seeing himself as a savior who, in the name of Christianity and the king of Spain could do no wrong, Magellan remained blind to such nuances. But his pragmatic successors, chastened by experience, listened carefully to the king, both to protect their own lives and their precious cargo of spices.

The king became even more emotional as he sought to appeal to their hearts as well as their minds. “He had his crown brought and, first kissing it and setting it on his head four or five times,” Pigafetta observed in astonishment, “he said in the presence of all that he swore by Allah, his great god, and by his crown which he had in his hand, that he desired to be forever a very loyal friend of the King of Spain. And he spoke these words almost weeping.”

The king’s tears softened the officers’ hearts, and they decided to stay another fifteen days. To strengthen their shared bond of loyalty to the king of Spain, the officers gave the grateful Almanzor a royal banner displaying the insignia associated with Charles.

The king was apparently sincere in his goodwill toward the crew, but what about the other islanders? A few days later, the crew members heard that the lesser chiefs had urged Almanzor to kill all the Europeans because “it would give great pleasure to the Portuguese.” The king sternly replied that he would not harm the visitors under any circumstances, “knowing the King of Spain and because he had made peace with us and plighted his faith.” Although Almanzor had proved himself to be a man of his word, the crew members were right to be cautious. Even if he protected them, others might not follow his orders. By remaining aloof, yet carefully attuned to the king of Tidore, the armada, which had sailed into so many disasters, averted another, and perhaps final, calamity.

Working feverishly throughout the last days of November and the early days of December, the men of the Armada de Molucca purchased and stored cloves until they had no more trinkets, caps, bells, mirrors, hatchets, scissors, or bolts of cloth to exchange for spices, and no more room to store the aromatic treasure. The ships reeked of the fragrant cloves; every breath the sailors drew was permeated with the scents of wealth, ease, and luxury.

The various kings of the Spice Islands paid daily visits to the ships, and the crew kept them entertained by firing off their weapons and engaging in mock swordplay. Despite the deep mistrust lingering between the islanders and the Europeans, a bond had formed between the two peoples. It was based, in part, on a mutual dislike of the Portuguese authorities (and the kings remained oblivious to the fact so many of the officers and crew happened to be Portuguese), but more than that, a genuine rapport developed between the armada’s crew and the inhabitants of Tidore, which only complicated leave-taking.

On Monday, December 9, Almanzor, whom Pigafetta unselfconsciously took to calling “our king,” brought three betel-bearing women on board Trinidad to impress them with the power and glory of the king of Spain. Almanzor was followed closely by the king of Gilolo, who asked plaintively for one last blast of their guns, and, if they pleased, a final demonstration of swordplay and armor.

After the exhibition, Almanzor, who may have injected his own feelings into the matter, confided that Gilolo’s king was bereft, “like a child who was taking milk and knew his sweet mother, who on departing would leave him alone; but that more especially he would remain desolate, because he had already known us and tasted some of the things of Spain.” Tearfully accepting that the armada must leave, he advised the departing sailors to sail only by day to avoid the shoals strewn throughout these waters. When the officers informed him that they planned to sail “day and night,” he told them he would pray daily for their safety.

The decorous leave-taking was marred only by an incident concerning Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa. Ever since his decision to return with the fleet to Spain he had remained in seclusion aboard Trinidad, out of harm’s way. With the departure only days away, the son of Ternate’s king, Chechili, traveled out to the fleet in a “well-manned proa,” seeking to lure Lorosa into his vessel.

Fearing that he would be kidnapped and killed, Lorosa refused to go along, declaring that he was returning to Spain, “Whereupon,” said Pigafetta, “the king’s son tried to enter the ship, but we refused to allow him to come aboard, as he was a close friend of the Portuguese captain of Malacca, and had come to seize the Portuguese [Lorosa].”

Frustrated in his attempt to capture Lorosa, Chechili returned to his island, venting his wrath on those who had let Lorosa go.

On December 15, the king of Bacan and his brother approached the fleet in the largest native vessel the crew had seen. Three tiers of oarsmen—120 men in all—propelled the craft through the water, “and they carried many banners made of white, yellow, and red parrot feathers.” Its progress was announced by the sound of gongs, used to synchronize the oarsmen’s strokes. It was accompanied by two proas “filled with girls.” As it happened, the king’s brother was about to marry Almanzor’s daughter, and the girls were intended as presents for the couple.

A summit meeting between kings unfolded with elaborate protocol. “When they passed near the ships, we saluted them with our artillery, and they in salute to us sailed round the ships and the port.” Afterward, “our king,” the king of Tidore, “came to congratulate him as it is not the custom for any king to disembark on the land of another king. When the king of Bacan saw our king coming, he rose from the carpet on which he was seated, and took his position at one side of it. Our king refused to sit down upon the carpet, but on its other side, so no one occupied the carpet. The king of Bacan gave our king five hundred patols, because the latter was giving his daughter as wife to the former’s brother. The said patols are cloths of gold and silk manufactured in China, and are highly esteemed among them. Whenever one of those people died, the other members of his family clothe themselves in those cloths in order to show him more honor.”

The festivities resumed the next day, when Almanzor dispatched fifty women “all clad in silk garments from the waist to the knees” with a banquet for the king of Bacan. “They went two by two with a man between each couple. Each one bore a large tray filled with other small dishes which contained various kinds of food. The men carried nothing but the large wine jars. Ten of the oldest women acted as macebearers. Thus did they go to the proa, where they presented everything to the king, who was sitting upon the carpet under a red and yellow canopy.” The crew members watched this ceremony with fascination and longing, because during their weeks in the Spice Islands, they had refrained from the orgies that highlighted their earlier layovers. Catching sight of the yearning sailors, the women decided to have a little fun and boarded one of the ships, where they “captured” them; in all likelihood, the hostages did not put up much resistance. The flirtatious game continued until “it was necessary to give them”—the women—“some little trifle in order to regain their freedom,” Pigafetta commented.

More industrious crew members busied themselves in bending and decorating the sails for the ships, restoring the rigging, and making sure the vessels would be able to withstand the rigors of the journey home. When hoisted, the sheets revealed a freshly painted design: an elaborate cross and beneath it the legend, “This is the sign of our good fortune.”

As that bold legend indicated, the officers and crew of the armada were proud of their accomplishments. Their voyage finally demonstrated what Columbus and so many other explorers had failed to show, that a water route to the Moluccas existed, and that it was possible to reach the East by sailing west. Those who had survived the grueling journey could look back on countless moments of courage and even heroism that helped to bring them to this place, and they could console themselves with dreams of glory and avarice.

As the hour of departure approached, the pace of activity quickened. The fleet took on board eighty casks of water and a supply of wood cut by one hundred laborers assigned to the task by the king of Bacan, who rallied to the cause of the armada and Spain. To seal the alliance, he arranged a meeting on the neighboring island of Mare with representatives of the armada (including Pigafetta) and Almanzor. The ceremony was impressive: “Before the king walked four men with drawn daggers in their hands. In the presence of our king and of all the others he said that he would always remain in the service of the king of Spain, and that he would save in his name the cloves left by the Portuguese until the arrival of another of our fleets, and he would never give them to the Portuguese without our consent.”

To demonstrate his good faith, he gave the armada a slave as a present for the king of Spain; two additional bahars of cloves (he would have sent ten, but the ships were so heavily laden with spices that there was no room); and “two extremely beautiful dead birds,” which caught Pigafetta’s imagination. “The people told us that those birds came from the terrestrial paradise, and they call them bolon diuata, that is to say, ‘birds of God.’” The birds of paradise, as they came to be known throughout Europe, were as celebrated as the cloves, a token of heaven on earth. Maximilian of Transylvania reported that the Moors believed the birds were born in Paradise, spent the entire lives aloft, never falling from the sky until they died. Anyone who retrieved their skins and wore them in battle was supposed to be protected from harm. So these were extremely valuable presents, as Pigafetta realized at the time.

On the day of departure, the kings of all the Spice Islands assembled on the island of Mare to see the fleet off. Victoria weighed anchor and set sail, standing off the harbor awaiting Trinidad, the flagship, to join her. The ships’ gunners fired their artillery one more time, but in the midst of the excitement, Trinidad’s cables fouled and to the dismay of everyone, she began taking on water. None of the eyewitnesses supplied a reason for the near-disaster; most likely, the ship had not been adequately repaired during the long layover on Cimbonbon. But the leak was worse than ever, and she was in danger in losing her cargo of spices.

With her sister ship in distress, “Victoria returned to her anchorage, and we immediately began to lighten Trinidad to see whether we could repair her. We found that the water was rushing in as through a pipe, but we were unable to find where it was coming in. All that and the next day we did nothing but work the pump.” The work was grueling, but necessary. The loss of Trinidad would have been a disaster, depriving the armada of the rewards of its long-sought-after spices. Even worse, Victoria lacked room to hold the crews of both vessels. The arduous pumping continued until the men were exhausted, “but we availed nothing.” Laden with spices, the flagship of the fleet was on the verge of sinking at her mooring.

After all the pomp and circumstance, not to mention the gongs, girls, and parrot feathers surrounding the fleet’s departure, the situation was humbling, indeed. And it was just the sort of mishap that Magellan would likely have prevented, because he had always been meticulous about the condition of his ships and saw to it that they were seaworthy at all times. Trinidad had fallen into disrepair from sheer neglect, and with that ship disabled, the officers’ hasty decision to burn Concepción returned to haunt them. Not even Magellan would risk taking one, and only one, ship all the way from the Spice Islands back to Spain.

As soon as Almanzor—“our king”—heard about the plight of Trinidad, he sprang into action, boarding the afflicted ship and prowling below deck, trying to locate the source of the damnable leak, but without success. Then, “He sent five men into the water to see whether they could discover the hole. They remained more than one half hour under water, but were quite unable to find the leak.” The ship was listing badly, and desperate measures were required. “Seeing that he could not help us and the water was increasing hourly, [he] said almost in tears that he would send to the head of the island for three men, who could remain under water a long time.” Almanzor went in search of them, as the ship slowly but unmistakably settled into the water.

After an anxious night, Almanzor reappeared with the men by the first light of dawn. “He immediately sent them into the water with their hair hanging loose so that they could locate the leak by that means.” Water entering into ship would draw strands of their hair into its current. But even these men failed to locate the leak, and when they emerged, grim-faced, from the water, the king finally broke down in tears. Who among them, he pleaded, would be able to return to Spain now and tell King Charles about the loyalty of the king of Tidore?

Pigafetta and the others tried to calm the distraught ruler by describing their new plan for returning to Spain. “We replied to him that Victoria would go there in order not to lose east winds that were beginning to blow, while the other ship, until being refitted, would await the west winds and go then to Darién, which is located in another part of the sea in the country of Yucatán.” In other words, Elcano would take Victoria on a westerly course, which was the most direct route back to Spain. But it brought special dangers because it cut a swath through the Portuguese hemisphere, as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. If Portuguese navigators captured a Spanish ship loaded with spices in their waters, they would be merciless. Trinidad’s course home promised even greater risks. Once she was repaired, she would try to catch favorable winds carrying her along an easterly course to the American continent. Her cargo of spices would then be transferred to mules, and the beasts would carry the spices to another Spanish fleet heading for Seville.

As devoted and helpful as ever, Almanzor pledged no fewer than 250 carpenters to perform “all the work” required to return Trinidad to seaworthiness, and he promised to treat all the sailors who remained behind as if they were his own sons, vowing that “they would not suffer any fatigue beyond two of them to boss the carpenters in their work.” The king’s sincerity and generosity finally wore away the officers’ skepticism: “He spoke these words so earnestly that he made us all weep.”

The unsuccessful efforts to repair Trinidad’s mysterious leak and the deliberations leading to the decision that Victoria would return alone consumed five days. Just before Victoria left Tidore, the crew members loaded her with as many cloves as they could salvage from Trinidad, but once they saw Victoria riding low in the water, “mistrusting that the ship might open,” they lightened her by removing sixty quintals of cloves and storing the spices in the trading house.

Victoria was so dilapidated that many crew members refused to board her. They preferred to remain with Trinidad in Tidore until she was repaired. Still others stayed behind because they feared that those aboard Victoria would “perish of hunger” long before they reached Spain. So the crew divided itself between the two ships, each man seeking the lesser of two evils: Victoria, the flimsy vessel that would depart for Spain immediately, or the much larger Trinidad, which needed weeks if not months of repairs before she could begin her journey home. Dangers abounded both on land and at sea; starvation and shipwreck imperiled those who sailed, while headless marauders or poison might fell those who remained behind.

In the end, Carvalho was designated captain of Trinidad, and Elcano took over the command of Victoria. Among the fifty-three men who cast their lot with Trinidad were Ginés de Mafra, the pilot; Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms (and second in command to Carvalho); and Hans Vargue, a German gunner. Pigafetta faced the most critical decision of the entire journey: Which ship would he join? His instinct for survival had stood many tests, and he elected to go along with Elcano aboard Victoria; that ship would carry him among her crew of about sixty men, including sixteen Indians. Although he detested the Basque mariner, he clearly had more confidence in Elcano’s seamanship than in Carvalho’s.

Each ship in the divided fleet contained a memoirist, Pigafetta aboard Victoria and de Mafra aboard Trinidad. The Venetian resumed his passionate, eloquent descriptions of the Indies, while de Mafra—“a man of few but true words,” by his own account—stuck to a more practical report of what he perceived as bad judgment and missed opportunities.

Early on the morning of December 21, Almanzor, ever helpful, came aboard Victoria for the last time, delivering two pilots, paid for by the crew, to guide the ship safely through the maze of islands and shoals. The king then took his leave. Familiar with the tides, the pilots insisted that early morning was the most advantageous time to depart, but the men who remained behind persuaded Victoria to delay a few hours while they wrote long letters for her to carry home to Spain. Finally, at noon, it was time to leave the Spice Islands. “When that hour came,” Pigafetta recalled, “the ships bid one another farewell amid the discharge of the cannon, and it seemed as though they were bewailing their last departure. Our men [remaining behind] accompanied us in their boats a short distance, and then with many tears and embraces we departed.”

This should have been a festive occasion, the ships bulging with spices, heading for home port and the prospect of a grand reception from King Charles, but the damage to Trinidad dramatically altered the final leg of this voyage around the world and mocked the proud legend painted on her sails. The crew faced more than the ordinary pangs of leaving port for another long journey at sea, although those pangs—the monotony of life at sea, the nights interrupted by watches, the gradual diminution of their fresh food to a diet of salted dried meat, salted biscuit, and salted dried fish—were hard enough to bear, but now, in addition to all that, they knew their lives would be at risk the moment they were out of sight of the Spice Islands.

Despite the obstacles they had faced, the men of the armada had always taken comfort in the knowledge that they had extra ships at their disposal. Even two ships had a reasonable chance of making it back to Seville, but one ship was hardly equal to the task, no matter how skillful the crew’s seamanship, or how favorable the winds. One ship, alone on the high seas, was always at the mercy of storms, shoals, pirates, termites, or faulty navigation. On the high seas, no king could protect them, and at least one sovereign, the king of Portugal, wanted them dead. (Of all the captains in the armada, only Magellan had fully appreciated the full extent of Portuguese malice toward him.) Yet they had no choice but to face the tests presented by the ten-thousand-mile-long route home.