Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (46 page)

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.

O
nce 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.

J
ust 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.”

O
n 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.”

C H A P T E R   X I I I
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.

O
n 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.