The Voyage of Magellan

March 9 – April 4, 1521

As he watched the island of Guam fade away into sea and sky at the stern of his flagship, Magellan was supremely confident that more land would soon be visible ahead — in fact, a vastly larger body of land, the continent of Asia. But hours and then days passed by, during which the anticipated cry from the lookouts peering eagerly ahead failed to materialize. Annoyance in the ranks gave way to concern, concern to real alarm. The food and water of Guam had revived the sailors to some extent, but many of them were still extremely weak. Indeed, on the very day that the fleet left Guam, another sailor — the only Englishman to sign on with the expedition — succumbed to the ravages of scurvy, against which relief had arrived just a little too late in his case. This raised the death toll since leaving the comforting embrace of the South American coast to twenty men in all.

After a few more days of seeing nothing but ocean ahead, some of the officers began begging Magellan to order a return to Guam for a lengthier stay. Even the pilot Carvalho no longer expressed himself with much confidence, being utterly stymied by this ocean that just went on and on beyond all reason or logic, where nothing was where he expected it to be. But the captain general was adamant: west was the only direction he would travel now. Even the biggest ocean had to end somewhere, he insisted.

Luckily, the wind and weather continued to be almost unnervingly favorable to his intention, sweeping the fleet across the ocean’s broad back at a steady clip of more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) per day, as if Poseidon himself was reaching a long arm down to push it bodily along. On March 16, 1521, Magellan was rewarded for his persistence, when a lookout shouted that he could see a mountain peak climbing into view on the horizon.

As the ships drew closer, however, it became clear that this land too belonged to no continent. Instead they had found yet another island — or rather islands. For it was soon revealed that there were an awful lot of them here, that they had found an archipelago whose islands were packed much tighter than the attenuated chain of the Marianas. Magellan named his discovery the San Lázaro Islands, because March 16 was the feast day of Saint Lazarus. In 1543, they would be renamed the Philippines by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, in honor of the firstborn son of the still reigning Charles I, the future King Philip II of Spain.

These Philippine Islands stretch from north to south over a distance of 1152 miles (1854 kilometers), with a total land area roughly equivalent to the nation of Italy. Two-thirds of that area is taken up by just two islands, Luzon in the north and Mindanao in the south. The rest are smaller — usually much, much smaller. The Filipinos themselves have long told a joke about the number of islands their archipelago includes. The total depends, they say, on whether you’re counting at high tide or low tide. As of this writing, the official number of islands is 7641, but this count will almost certainly increase in the future as yet more pebbles poking out of the endless Pacific blue are charted. Just 2773 of the islands have been judged significant enough to be honored with names.

The Philippine island which the fleet’s lookouts had spotted first is the one we call Samar, the third largest of the bunch. Unfortunately for Magellan’s purposes, it is ringed almost all the way around with treacherous reefs and sheer cliffs. Unwilling to chance such a tricky landing with his sick and exhausted crews, the captain general bypassed it in search of a more welcoming beach. The ships sailed around Samar’s southern tip, where they found another, far smaller but more approachable island of about 12 miles (20 kilometers) in length. They anchored off one of its beaches for the night, and in the morning the first group of Europeans ever to tread the soil of the Philippines climbed out of their longboats and fanned out to explore it. They found no signs of human habitation, but they did find abundant freshwater and edible vegetation. Some of the men returned to report that they had seen traces of gold in the island’s streams. Magellan therefore named the place Aguada de Buenos Signos: “Good Signs Water Hole.”

That evening, he permitted his men to slaughter the last of the pigs they had brought with them from Guam and to make a barbecue there on the beach. The sickest of the men were brought ashore to rest and recover their strength in this oasis of plenty. Magellan himself moved his flag of command to the island. Much to everyone’s relief, it appeared that the captain general was prepared to stay a while before pressing on.

The next morning — that of March 18 — a few bleary-eyed early risers looked out to the ocean to see a phalanx of sailboats similar in construction to those they had encountered at Guam bearing down upon the exposed stretch of beach. These sailors raised a frantic hue and cry, sending their comrades tumbling out of their leafy bowers all around them. Magellan strode into the midst of the chaos and confusion to take charge. He ordered Gómez de Espinosa to retreat into the jungle at his back, accompanied by twenty men with muskets. “Fire only on my signal!” he barked. Meanwhile he ordered everyone else to gather every small object of metal or glass that he could find, and to give the best of them to him.

These Pacific natives approached  in what struck Magellan as a more polite and dignified fashion than the thieving Chamorro of Guam; it almost seemed as if they had been expecting their European visitors. They appeared to be a relatively prosperous people; they looked sleek and well-fed, with  golden rings dangling from their ears and golden bracelets running up their arms. Their faces were painted and they wore elaborate cloth headdresses. Otherwise their attire was minimal, consisting of loincloths at most, except for the elderly leader of the delegation, who wore a skirt embroidered with what looked like real silk of the finest quality. This man strode up calmly to the captain general, who presented him with the usual array of trinkets: red caps to complement the headdresses, plus looking glasses, combs, bells, and ivory figurines. The chieftain seemed pleased enough with the gifts, offering in return smoked fish, juicy figs, sweet oranges, plump chickens, and a delicious wine not that dissimilar from the tuba of the Chamorro. He seemed to signal at the conclusion of the meeting that he would return shortly with more booty.

And this he did, bringing gifts beyond reckoning for the sick and hungry men: not only fish, fruit, meat, and alcohol, but also breads, oils, and vinegar, all derived in one way or another from the life-giving coconut palms. In an ecstasy of wonder backed up by no hard data whatsoever, Antonio Pigafetta wrote in his journal that just two coconut trees must be sufficient to support a family of ten Filipino natives indefinitely.

The sailors spent an idyllic week there on the little island, relaxing and eating lavishly of the victuals which arrived in a never-ending stream from the canoes of their new friends. As always, Pigafetta labored tirelessly to communicate with the natives. He learned that they lived on another small island nearby, whose name he did his best to transcribe in his journal, ending up with Zuluam. It was a noble effort, all things considered. Today we still know their island by the name which they tried to communicate to him back then: Suluan. Pigafetta learned that the heretofore uninhabited island on which he stood had a name as well, which he transcribed as Humunu; we know it today as Homonhon. (It is no longer uninhabited, boasting a population of about 4700.)

Magellan more or less behaved himself around these people. He didn’t attempt to kidnap any of them, nor did he offend them in any other way. The closest he came to crossing a line was when he invited a small delegation to join him aboard the Trinidad. Unable to resist a modest demonstration of power, he ordered the ship’s cannons to be fired all at once. Pigafetta writes that the Suluanians “were so much afraid that they wished to jump from the ship into the sea.” This was, of course, exactly the reaction the captain general had wished to provoke.

That said, these Suluanians did much on their side to make the European sailors feel hopelessly ill-suited to their surroundings. For the natives swam like fish, whereas very few of the sailors could do more than tread water. It was hard for them not to be jealous of the Suluanians, watching them race and frolic in the white and blue of the coral-streaked depths. One day Pigafetta was fishing off the deck of the Trinidad. He leaned over a bit too far in his enthusiasm for his task and went somersaulting head over heels into the ocean. He would surely have drowned if one of the odd native sailboats hadn’t happened to be floating nearby. He grabbed desperately onto a corner of its sail. The Suluanians who were lounging onboard at first tried to push him away, seeing as he was close to capsizing their vessel. It took them quite some time to grasp that he was being neither playful nor deliberately malicious, but that he actually couldn’t swim — a concept as bizarre to them as an adult who had never learned to walk. Once they finally did understand, they pulled him out of the water and delivered him back to his ship, watching him scramble up the ropes to safety with what looked for all the world like expressions of pity on their faces. How, they seemed to be wondering, could any living creature be so inadequate to its situation?

Such little crises aside, though, life was good on Homonhon. It was so good, in fact, that Magellan felt he couldn’t allow it to continue for very long, lest he lose his crew to its pleasures entirely. Watching his men gorging themselves on coconuts and figs, he felt like Odysseus watching his own men in the land of the lotus eaters: “Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit, lost all desire to send a message back, much less return, their only wish to linger there with the lotus eaters, grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey dissolved forever.”

So, on the morning of March 25, 1521, Magellan announced abruptly that the time had come to sail onward. It was a grumbling, reluctant crowd of sailors who packed themselves into the longboats and returned to the ships. Still, they were far healthier than they had been a week ago.

Waving a fond farewell to their friends from Samar, the sailors guided their ships cautiously into what we know as Leyte Gulf, just east of the island of the same name, the eighth largest in the Philippines. Here one of the biggest naval battles in the history of the world would be fought in 1944. Now, though, all was peaceful as the ships sailed southward, paralleling the coast of the island. Their crews could see the lights of human inhabitants on the island at night, but they didn’t stop until they had rounded the cape at the bottom of Leyte. On the morning of March 28, they were passing between the small island we know as Limasawa and the previously mentioned Mindanao, the second largest in all the Philippines, when a boat approached from the direction of the latter. The ships dropped their anchors and waited for these latest visitors to arrive.

The boat was a little bigger than those seen at Guam and Homonhon, carrying eight people and looking much more conventional to European eyes in its mode of construction. The evident captain was shouting across the waves as it approached. Magellan listened keenly for a moment, then looked over at his faithful slave Enrique, who was likewise straining his ears to catch the words as they wafted across the water. Magellan didn’t need to ask the question; “Do I hear what I think I hear?” was written all over his face. Enrique answered him with a huge grin and a nod. The man was speaking a language close to that of Enrique’s homeland of Malaysia, a language that Enrique could more or less understand. This fact meant that, by sailing westward, the fleet must finally have reached the outer edges of that part of the world the Portuguese had explored by sailing east. The gruff old captain general and his swarthy servant all but capered about the quarterdeck together while the rest of the sailors looked on in shock, having no idea what was prompting this behavior. It may very well have been the happiest moment of Ferdinand Magellan’s life. His great enterprise seemed on the verge of fruition.

The Philippine Islands can actually be considered just one part of an even larger grouping known as the Malay Archipelago, which extends north as far as Taiwan, west as far as Sumatra, and south and east as far as New Guinea and the Maluku Islands — i.e., the Spice Islands which had been haunting Magellan’s dreams for so many years. The consensus among modern-day anthropologists  and archaeologists has it that most of the current human inhabitants of these islands are the descendants of a single people who began to fan outward from the mainland of Asia dozens and dozens of centuries ago. This people has now vanished from the mainland, but its progeny abide, across the width and breadth of the Malay Archipelago and beyond. The evidence for a common shared ancestor includes genetic similarities among the islanders and, perhaps even more importantly, similarities in language;  many of the widely scattered inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago speak a language that is part of the Austronesian family, of which more than 1200 variants have been identified.

The most probable theory to be derived from our best current evidence is that the ur-people left or, more likely, were driven out of the Asian mainland around 4000 BC, emigrating first to Taiwan. From there, they moved south to reach Mindanao by 3000 BC and Timor by 2500 BC; moved west to reach Java and Sumatra by 2000 BC; moved east to reach the Maluku Islands and New Guinea by 1600 BC, thus completing their colonization of the Malay Peninsula.  But they didn’t stop even there. In later centuries, they somehow crossed staggering watery distances to reach Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, and even Madagascar.

These Austronesians were not always the first people to live on the islands they settled. They pushed out or pushed to the margins others who already dwelt on some of them, including in the Philippines. The first Filipinos whom Magellan’s expedition met, whom Enrique could not understand, were presumably one of these earlier, marginalized groupings. Many historians have wondered at Enrique’s ability to understand even the Filipinos from Mindanao. For Austronesian is a language family, not a language in itself, and by no means are all of its languages immediately mutually comprehensible; the isolation caused by distance and water ensured that the language of each successive group of colonists diverged from the one they had left home with in relatively short order. For example, the language of the Chamorro people of Guam is also in the Austronesian family, and yet Enrique could not understand it. Some historians have gone so far as to speculate that Enrique may in fact have been born in the Philippines and then willingly or unwillingly emigrated to Malacca, where Magellan acquired him. If so, this would make him the first person in history to complete a circumnavigation of the Earth, a claim to fame which would have been cemented on the day when he returned to the islands where he had been born as part of Magellan’s expedition. It strikes me as more probable, however, that Enrique may just have been one of those lucky souls who are born with a natural ear for language, and that he had had the opportunity to hear and practice many tongues while living and working in the port of Malacca, which was regularly visited by vessels from the Philippines.

Although these latest Filipinos were more comprehensible than those from Sulan had been, they were also less trusting. They kept a careful distance from the flagship while Enrique conducted a long shouted dialog with them that was further complicated by the differences in dialects. It was an incongruous scene to say the least: the collective futures of three ships full of Europeans hung on the negotiating skills of a single dark-skinned slave. At last, Enrique turned and spoke in Magellan’s ear. With a brisk nod, the captain general ordered another array of trinkets — especially red cloth, which Enrique told him the Filipinos would particularly appreciate — to be tied to a crude plank raft and set adrift. The Filipinos rowed over to retrieve these tributes. Then they waved and turned their boat toward shore. A hundred pairs of questioning eyes focused on Enrique. “Just wait,” he said.

Two hours later, two more, far larger boats appeared, each of them a good 80 feet (25 meters) long. Under an awning in the one sat a figure who was obviously a chieftain or king. Unlike his underlings, who were largely naked, he wore a shift of cotton which stretched from his waist to his knees. Every inch of exposed flesh on him was covered with tattoos. He had shoulder-length, jet-black hair, topped by a silk headdress. Two huge golden earrings dangled from his ears; a dagger with a hilt of gold hung from an ornately carved wooden sheath wrapped around his waist. He listened to Enrique’s words with polite gravity, but refused his invitation to board the Trinidad. After more discussion, he did agree to let a few of his courtiers do so.

These men jumped lithely to the rope ladder which the sailors let down and joined Enrique and Magellan on the quarterdeck. One of them bore a bar of solid gold, which he attempted to present to Enrique. With a shake of the head, Enrique indicated that his captain general was the appropriate recipient. So, it was Magellan who solemnly accepted the gift. But then the courtier turned back to Enrique for more inscrutable negotiations. Finally, Enrique turned to Magellan. “They have invited me to join them ashore,” he said in a strangely authoritative voice. “The rest of you must wait here. I will return in the morning.” Much to the surprise of all those around him, Magellan meekly agreed to this plan.

A tense evening and night followed. Many a sailor scoffed that they had surely seen the last of Enrique, that the slave had seized this chance to regain his freedom. Wouldn’t any of them have done the same in his shoes? But Magellan remained serenely confident in his slave’s loyalty.

His faith was justified the next morning — Good Friday, as it happened — when they all saw the king’s boat returning, with both the monarch and Enrique onboard, the latter waving and shouting that all was well. Whatever Enrique had said and done during the last hours had plainly worked. For this time, the king, whose name an attentive Pigafetta recorded as Kolambu, showed no hesitancy whatsoever about coming aboard the flagship. He marched right up to the quarterdeck and engulfed the little captain general in an enormous bear hug, bringing an involuntary giggle to the lips of many a sailor. Then he handed over three porcelain dishes covered with breathtakingly intricate engravings of leaves and rice, treasures which looked as out of place in these rough-hewn surroundings as an ape on horseback. Such beauty as this was far beyond the capabilities of any European artisan; it was the reason that European ships would soon be jostling to reach China, in order to bring back just such “china” as this, so identified with the country that it took the same name. Right now, though, Magellan and his men could only gape in astonishment that Asian “heathens” could be responsible for such beauty. The rolls of red and yellow cloth, knives, and mirrors that they could offer in return seemed a poor recompense indeed.

Be that as it may, Magellan and Kolambu got on like a house on fire right from the start, forming a bond that was doubtless abetted by the diplomatic spin which Enrique put on each of their words in the process of translating them. After the two had sat down to the best meal that could be assembled from the scanty fare aboard the ship, Magellan showed Kolambu every part of the vessel. He told him of the long voyage that had brought the ships here and the suffering they had all so recently endured in crossing the Pacific. He showed him the compasses, astrolabes, and charts which they had used to find their way. He explained something of the complications of European sails and rigging. He showed him weapons and armor, and arranged to fire the Trinidad’s cannons yet again as a demonstration of their capabilities. Being properly forewarned of what would happen thanks to the good offices of Enrique, and being not unfamiliar with the concept of gunpowder (it was, after all, another invention of nearby China), Kolambu was duly impressed but not terrified by the explosions in the way the Suluanians had been.

Magellan asked Kolambu about the exotic spices which he sought. He was told that they were not common among Kolambu’s own people, but that they could be found a fairly short distance to the south. Was Kolambu referring to the Spice Islands themselves? It sounded to the captain general as if he might be.

At the end, Kolambu squeezed Magellan in another bear hug and asked him to become his casicasi, or “blood brother.” Enrique explained that this entailed each man drinking some of the other’s blood. In light of Magellan’s Christian horror at anything that smacked of paganism or cannibalism, everyone was shocked by his behavior yet one more time when he agreed to the ceremony. Kolambu ran a sharp dagger across his chest, so that the blood welled out angrily. Magellan gritted his teeth and did the same. A quantity of the crimson nectar was collected from each of their wounds and mixed into a glass with wine. Then each drank down the other’s vital essence along with his own. And with that, casicasi the two men became.

Yet, for all that Kolambu was friendly, he was clearly no fool. Once again, he offered to take only Enrique ashore with him that evening. (One does have to suspect that the demonstration of the Europeans’ weapons only confirmed him in that decision.) Pigafetta, who had been nipping at the heels of Kolambu, Enrique, and Magellan throughout the day, couldn’t restrain himself. He begged his captain general to ask permission for him to go as well. Magellan nodded once and put the inquiry to Enrique and so to Kolambu. Much to Pigafetta’s delight, Kolambu acceded to the request. Thus the eager little Italian too climbed into the Filipino boat, albeit a good deal less dexterously than his companions. It was an act of tremendous bravery to deliver himself into the hands of these strangers, who would be able to kill or kidnap him on a whim. But such was his curiosity about them that he hardly thought of it in that way.

The boat took them all to a snug harbor on the northwestern coast of Mindanao. As they climbed onto the wharf, Kolambu and Enrique raised their hands to the sky in what was evidently a sign of thanks to some deity for their safe return from the ocean’s bosom. Pigafetta dutifully mimicked the gesture.  Then he and Enrique followed the king to a lovely seaside terrace. Wine was served. Kolambu gripped a golden goblet in his right hand and showed his fist to Pigafetta. The Italian was momentarily startled; it looked as if the king was about to strike him. But he soon recovered his composure and mimicked this gesture too. Kolambu then moved his fist to touch that of his guest. The Filipinos, it seems, may be the inventors of the fist bump.

The meal consisted of heaping platters of rice and sizzling, fragrant pork. This caused Pigafetta a crisis of conscience, for devout Catholics like him were expected to refrain from eating meat on Friday, and especially on Good Friday. But the spirit of diplomacy and fellowship, not to mention the smell of the meat and the sense of relief at having found his way back to some of the luxuries of civilization, quickly overwhelmed his duty to God. He drank and ate his fill. Then he followed the king to his palace, which was similar to the buildings he had seen on Guam, being a frame of wood covered with fig and palm leaves, standing high above the ground on stilts; the only obvious differences were that this building was much larger than any made by the Chamorro, and that its legs were made of timber rather than the stone pillars employed by those islanders to the east. Pigafetta and Enrique were shown to their bedchamber. After kissing Kolambu’s hands to wish him goodnight, they slept peacefully on a bamboo mat, their heads resting on pillows made from palm leaves. The next morning, they saw the same boat which they had arrived in being prepared to take them back to their ship. Pigafetta’s trust had been well-placed; no harm to him had ever been contemplated.

Kolambu, Enrique, and Pigafetta were joined aboard the royal boat by another man who was dressed and adorned almost as spectacularly as the first-named. He was introduced as Siani:  Kolambu’s brother, the lord of his own fiefdom just south of this one on the same island of Mindanao.

The two kings spent most of that day huddled with Magellan and Enrique in the captain general’s cabin. No one knew quite what they were talking about. Kolambu and Siani left the ship that evening without taking anyone with them.

All became clear the next day: March 31, 1521, which was also Easter Sunday, the second to come around since the expedition had left Spain. And what a difference a year had made! The first Easter Mass had been celebrated, if you could call it that, next to the frigid waters of Puerto San Julián, with the specters of failure, mutiny, privation, and an encroaching Antarctic winter hanging heavy in the air. This one, Magellan now informed his men, was to be celebrated in a semitropical paradise, surrounded by genial new friends, and would be followed by feasting and dancing to the heart’s content.

The sailors piled into the longboats and launches, leaving behind only those despondent few who had drawn the short straws which meant that they had to stay behind as the skeleton crews of the anchored ships. Magellan stood up in the prow of the lead boat and pointed the way to the place where the Filipino kings had told him to land the previous day. A crowd of welcomers waited at a cleared lawn close to the shore, a sort of park or commons that was obviously used regularly for ceremonies and celebrations. The kings were waiting there to greet Magellan as he walked up at the head of his men. They hugged him tightly yet again, and he sprinkled them with rosewater in honor of the holy day. The carcasses of two pigs could be seen and smelled roasting on spits nearby, making it hard for the sailors to concentrate their minds to the devotions at hand.

Just as he had done the year before, Magellan conducted the Easter Mass himself. The kings played along amiably. It would be a stretch to say that they converted to Christianity then and there, any more than Pigafetta had converted to their belief systems when he imitated Kolambu’s gesture of thanks to the heavens two days before. Yet in these ebullient circumstances, it was a stretch that Pigafetta was just about ready to make: “The two kings went to kiss the cross like us, and at the elevation of the body of our lord they were kneeling like us, and adored our lord with joined hands. After Mass had been said, each one did the duty of a Christian, receiving our lord.”

Once the solemn ceremonies were finished, the sailors fell to eating and drinking that which their hosts had so generously provided for them. Europeans blended with Filipinos in an atmosphere of cheer and good fellowship to equal the legends of the first North American Thanksgiving. Some of the sailors did the sword dance, a Spanish tradition in which they waved and swirled their blades in one another’s faces in mock combat. There were Filipino women present as well as men, wearing long skirts around their waists but nothing above beyond their long black hair and the golden rings in their ears. The sailors eyed them hungrily, and found that their interest was reciprocated in many cases. More than one mismatched couple disappeared into the bushes for a while, despite this being the holiest of all Christian holy days.

Once the feast was over, Magellan produced a huge cross which he had had some of his carpenters make, and asked the kings to take him to a high place so that he could erect it for their benefit. “After accepting this cross, you will be taken under the protection of Jesus Christ, and neither thunder, lightning, nor tempest will do you harm,” he told them. “And if any more of my people should come to your island, they will see this cross and know that you and they are friends.” The kings agreed to do this, presumably failing to realize that in accepting the cross they were tacitly accepting the status of vassals to the great Spanish empire. Everyone went up to the highest nearby hill together, and the cross was set up in that place of honor.

As evening set in and the sailors prepared to return to their ships, Magellan made one final request of Kolambu. He asked him to furnish him with a pilot to guide the fleet to those places to the south where the spices he sought could be found. Kolambu said that he would do more than that: that he would personally be the fleet’s guide, if Magellan would have him. The captain general readily agreed to this, and thus it was decided that Kolambu would sail in front of the fleet in his royal boat when the anchors were raised once again. First, though, the fleet would spend several more days here, to take on provisions and to further recover from the horrors of the Pacific crossing.

Pigs, chickens, goats, rice, ginger, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, millet, wax… all were given freely, and received just as gladly. Truly the sailors felt like they had been privileged to drink the milk of paradise. They were sure when they set off again on April 4, now with Kolambu sailing before them as their guide, that even greater riches and pleasures than the ones they had just enjoyed lay ahead of them in these heavenly islands of plenty.

---

Did you enjoy this chapter? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it and to gain free access to the ebook versions of all completed series. You can pledge any amount you like.

(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)