Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (47 page)

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.”

O
n 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.”

O
n 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.

O
n 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.