Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (38 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so the battle lines were drawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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