The Voyage of Magellan

March 6 – 9, 1521

Incredulity, relief, thankfulness… all of these emotions and more swept through the ranks of sick, starving sailors in the wake of the cry from the Victoria’s lookout that he could see land off the starboard bow. With an energy they hadn’t known they had, the men ran, hobbled, or crawled to the starboard gunwales, eyes straining to see that which the lookout had seen. Magellan himself burst out of his cabin and hoisted his lame and emaciated frame up to his flagship’s poop deck with the same purpose in mind. Through the early-morning haze and the fog of their privation, the sailors could indeed see a vague dark hump out there on the horizon, so indistinct at first that they feared it was a mirage. But as the ships moved along, its presence grew steadily more undeniable.

Suddenly there came another shout from the Victoria’s keen-eyed lookout. He had spotted yet more land, he yelled, off the port bow this time. Was it the irregular shoreline of the continent of Asia that they were approaching? No one could say.

For the next few hours, the fleet continued to sail due west, while the picture of just what it was that lay ahead became gradually clearer. Alas, it was not a continent, but rather two separate islands which the ships would soon be sailing between. The more southerly of the pair looked to be the more promising. It was not only larger than its companion but more accessible, ringed by sandy beaches where the other offered only rocky cliffs. Magellan ordered the fleet to turn south and make for this larger island.

Hardly had the ships changed course when their crews saw several dozen graceful little shapes detach themselves from the darker mass of jungle ahead and glide toward them. Each of the watercraft was topped by a sharply canted lateen sail like the wing of a dragonfly, painted in vivid swirls of black, white, and red. As the boats came closer, the sailors were able to make out the first human beings other than one another whom they had seen since their hasty departure from Puerto San Julián the previous August. They were fine specimens of the species, tall and muscular, black-haired and tawny-skinned, and unashamedly naked but for little peaked caps made from palm leaves that they wore on their heads. Their teeth were dyed black and red. Clearly people for whom the ways of water were a way of life, they stood effortlessly upright on the slender hulls of their vessels, which consisted of two canoes bound together with vines beneath the canted piebald sails, with other bits and bobs dangling in the water to add maneuverability and stability, thereby adding to their insectoid appearance.

Indeed, the strange-looking little vehicles were swifter and more agile than they seemed like they ought to be. Their prows and sterns were interchangeable; they seemed able to reverse course instantaneously with just a few arcane manipulations on the part of their drivers, regardless of the direction of the wind or current or anything else. In all respects, they were far beyond the ability of any European boat maker to produce. The tubby, square-rigged ships of the fleet looked clumsy and dumb next to the happy vessels that dashed and darted around and between them, reminding Antonio Pigafetta of the playful dolphins that had mocked him and his fellow pathetic ship-bound sailors in Tierra del Fuego.

The people on the boats were waving and shouting words that the sailors could not understand. Magellan asked his faithful Malaysian slave Enrique, who had been brought along on this journey expressly to serve as a translator, what the natives around them were saying, but he could make no more of their language than anyone else.

In the decades to come, the Spanish would learn to call these people the Chamorro, after the word by which they themselves referred to their highest caste. The Chamorro had been living in these islands since before Ramses the Great had reigned in Egypt, having long ago traveled incredible distances over the open ocean in their tiny boats to reach the isolated archipelago. They may have numbered as many as 50,000 souls in the early sixteenth century. They were a micro-civilization unto themselves, with a complicated caste-based social structure that descended through the female rather than the male line. Their religion and cosmology centered around ancestor worship, while gathering, farming, and fishing provided the food they needed — in fact, a diet that was much richer and more varied than that of the typical European peasant of Magellan’s time. They were superb fly fishermen, who sailed well out to sea in their boats with fishing poles not that far removed from the ones that fishermen use today. All told, their lives were by no means unpleasant. Within each caste and village, possessions were held in common, with no notion of private ownership. Skirmishes between villages were not entirely unknown, but they tended to be more performative than earnest. The only weapons of war the Chamorro knew how to make were simple slings and lances. Mostly they preferred to laugh and play and dance when their work was done, to swim and to race their boats, which were as sophisticated in their design and construction as their weapons were primitive.

The Chamorro saw no reason to fear these stodgy giant vessels that were now in their midst, crewed by these pale-faced, bedraggled newcomers who seemed to already have one foot in the grave. While Magellan looked for a suitable spot to anchor off the shore of their island, they grew ever bolder in their approaches to the ships. Suddenly one boater leaped nimbly from his vessel to one of the ropes dangling down the Trinidad’s hull. He then pulled himself hand over hand to emerge on deck. Barely glancing at the gaunt Europeans who slouched or sat there, he waved, whistled, and called to his comrades on the water. More Chamorro leaped onto the ships, until they swarmed over the decks with an energy the Europeans couldn’t possibly match, fiddling with this, carrying that away with them. They seemed more entranced by the objects they found that were made of glass and metal, materials they had never seen before, than they were by the men aboard. They pawed over the ships from stem to stern, stripping iron clamps from the rigging and brass handles from the wheels, even pawing through the pockets of half-comatose sailors to come away with spoons, lockets, and tools. Having no pockets of their own, they tucked their booty away in their thick manes of hair.

One formerly burly sailor aboard the Trinidad roused himself to push one of the Chamorro roughly away. He was answered by a return push that sent him sliding across the deck on his bottom. The scene grew even more chaotic. The Chamorro seemed to be mocking the Europeans, howling and laughing and making a sort of pantomime of fighting.

Magellan was not a man who responded well to mockery. He was on the verge of commanding his men to break out the muskets that were stored below deck when another sight brought him up short. The Chamorro who continued to pour over the gunwales now came bearing big armloads of scrumptious fruit and fish and coconuts. It seemed that they had recognized the affliction from which their visitors suffered and had dashed off to fetch relief. The fresh food was a vision of paradise. The sailors fell upon the victuals like the starving men they were, thanking their saviors with tears in their eyes as they stuffed their scurvy-ravaged mouths.

The Chamorro pointed and gestured toward the shore, clearly inviting the sailors to join them there. Then they sprang into the water one by one and swam back to their boats. The sailors stood and watched, surrounded by what remained of the impossible feast that had been brought to them, trying to process what had just happened. With no further ado, the Chamorro unfurled their boats’ little sails again and cruised off into the approaching sunset. Shaking his head, as bemused as everyone else, Magellan announced that he would call these islands the Isla de las Velas Latinas: the “Islands of the Lateen Sails.”

But then a sailor shouted and pointed to a larger boat that could be seen amidst the retreating flock of dragonflies. It was the Trinidad’s longboat. While the crew of the flagship had been distracted by the food, some of the merry-prankster natives had apparently climbed into the smaller vessel that was tethered to its stern and set it free. Then, incredibly, they had figured out how to work its very different rigging well enough to sail away in it. Many a sailor shook his head and laughed at the sheer cheekiness of the act.

Magellan, however, was never known for his sense of humor. Incensed, he renamed the two islands on the instant the Isla de los Ladrones: the “Islands of Thieves.” They would continue to be known by that disparaging name until 1668, when they and their mates further to the north would be formally rechristened the Marianas in honor of Mariana of Austria, who was then the queen regent of Spain. “Guam” would not come to be accepted as the name of the island in the Marianas which Magellean’s fleet now approached until even later. It is a contraction of a word in the Chamorro language that can be roughly translated as “resources” or “place of resources,” which this island certainly is in contrast to the vast emptiness that surrounds it. At 214 square miles (554 square kilometers) in area, with a width of about 30 miles (50 kilometers) at its broadest point, it is in fact the largest single landmass for a radius of 1500 miles (2400 kilometers) all around it. In light of this, it bears repeating that Magellan was incredibly lucky to have turned due west just at the right moment for his course to take him directly to it. (The smaller island just to its north we know as Rota.)

The ships dropped anchor close enough to the shore of Guam that the sailors could see trees laden with fat coconuts and mangoes, could glimpse freshwater streams that ran down from the higher terrain at the island’s center. But no matter how inviting it might look, Magellan regarded the island now as hostile territory. He told his master-at-arms Gómez de Espinosa to put together a landing party made up of the 40 fittest sailors; Pigafetta, who always wanted to be where the action was, talked his way into its ranks as well. In the morning, they would reclaim the Trinidad’s longboat, by force if necessary. Then they would set about collecting provisions — again, with or without the permission of the islanders themselves.

So, after a night filled with dreams of coconuts and mangoes, a rather underwhelming strike force set out at dawn on March 7, 1521. The 40 sailors who crowded into the remaining two longboats had been selected for their relative fitness, but the key qualifier there is “relative.” Although their bellies were fairly full for the first time in weeks, they were still little better than walking skeletons. Thankfully for them, they carried a great equalizer in their scrawny arms: crossbows and muskets, weapons the likes of which the peaceful, playful Chamorro couldn’t even conceive.

Just around the next curve in the shoreline, the longboats came upon a sheltered beach, where their flagship’s stolen helpmate lay unguarded. The sailors landed the other two longboats alongside the one that had been stolen. A well-worn trail led up from the beach. Leaving half a dozen men behind to guard their vessels, the party set off, each man trying to adjust to the odd sensation of standing on unmoving solid ground again after months spent treading boards that pitched and rolled beneath him. “Fire only upon my orders!” Espinosa hissed urgently. While they walked, they plucked mangoes off the trees they passed and ate them, letting the sweet juices run down their chins, hardly able to believe this bounty that was ripe for the taking all around them.

They topped the hill, and saw a little village of strangely tall houses lying in a valley below. One moment, the hilltop  around them was empty. The next, it was full of Chamorro, chattering and laughing, waving in their faces primitive lances made from sturdy sticks capped with sharpened fish bones. Wishing to avoid bloodshed if at all possible, no matter how bellicose his captain general had become, Espinosa repeated his injunction to his men to keep their cool. They stood stock still while the bizarre pantomime continued all around them. In time, the ring of natives began to widen; Espinosa sensed from their gestures that the performance was over and they were becoming a greeting delegation, bidding their visitors welcome to their village.

He was about to breathe a sigh of relief that the danger was passed when one nervous young sailor was jostled by one of the Chamorro. He raised his crossbow reflexively; the native simply stared at him, obviously having no idea what the weapon’s purpose might be. By accident or deliberately, the sailor pulled the trigger, unleashing the deadly bolt into the other man’s chest at point-blank range. His victim “drew it forth with much astonishment and immediately afterward he died,” writes Pigafetta. A second later the air was filled with the thunks of crossbows and the blasts of muskets as the other sailors mimicked their undisciplined comrade. The Chamorro ran off into the jungle, but not without leaving seven of their number dead or dying on the ground behind them.

Cursing, Espinosa evaluated the new situation. He was keenly aware of how fragile and vulnerable his sad little platoon really was. The best option now, he thought, was to put the natives on the back foot by taking an ultra-aggressive stance; if the Chamorro could no longer be convinced to love their visitors, they could at least be taught to fear them. The party continued down the trail to the village, now with weapons raised belligerently. By the time they reached it, all of its inhabitants had fled, except for a number of striking black chickens who still wandered its byways.

The village was not the camp of any band of bloodthirsty savages; it spoke more of order and peace. Each of the long, narrow wooden houses was mounted on tall pillars made of stone, such that it looked rather like a giant centipede that might just scuttle away at any moment. Rope climbs were used to reach the entryways to the houses, whose front stoops were higher than a man’s head. Inside, they were surprisingly well appointed, with beds, mats, and furniture not unskillfully made from wood, leaves, and straw. A smokehouse for preserving fish and a warehouse filled with fruit and other supplies stood at one end of the village, whose center was marked by a communal fire pit. Terraced fields ringed the hamlet, planted with breadfruit, yams, taro, bananas, sugarcane, and rice. Life among these people showed every sign of being snug, settled, comfortable, and harmonious, free from the existential fears and dreads of life back in “civilized” Europe.

But Espinosa gave his men no time for soul-searching. Having decided that aggression was his only option, he went all in on the new stance. After they had stripped the warehouses of food and killed all of the chickens they could catch, his men set to work burning the buildings to the ground — or at least to the tops of their stone pillars. The smoke of this wanton destruction rose high over the green hills of Guam. When it disappeared, all that would be left of the village would be the pillars, sticking out of the charred ground like broken teeth poking out from the rotten gums of a scurvy-ridden sailor.

The landing party returned to the beach. There they pressed their three longboats into service to carry food and water back to the ships — first that which had been stolen from the village, then whatever could be gathered from the abundance of nature that lay all around. Empty Barrel after empty barrel was ferried from ship to shore, to be filled with freshwater and coconut milk, until all of the nearby coconut trees had been thoroughly denuded. Empty crate after empty crate made the round trip as well, to be filled with mangoes and bananas and other types of fruit, prime sources of just the nutrients the sailors’ bodies had been missing. The men needed little encouragement to work like dogs; the awareness that they were still lost in the midst of an ocean whose extent they had never imagined spurred them on. Who knew how far they might have to sail to reach the next source of sustenance?

As the hours went by, some Chamorro began to venture up to the edge of the beachhead perimeter which Espinosa had staked out. They made no overtly threatening gestures, and the busy sailors were soon paying them little heed. A few natives even came with carts laden with fat, succulent pigs or with gourds of tuba, a fermented alcoholic drink made from the sap of coconut palms.They indicated through gestures that they were eager to trade these things for glass beads and metal trinkets. These were bargains the sailors were thrilled to make.

Only Antonio Pigafetta had the free time and curiosity to attempt to learn more about these natives, the fourth distinct indigenous people which the expedition had encountered since leaving Spain. He sneaked along behind some of the Chamorro traders as they left the beachhead with their shiny treasures and returned to a different village from the one that had been razed. From a hidden vantage point, he looked down on this settlement. Inevitably after so many months away from any sight of a female form, he was most captivated by the Chamorro women.  His longing for them fairly throbs off the pages of his journal: “The women go naked, except that they cover their nature with a thin bark, pliable like paper, which grows between the tree and the bark of the palm. They are beautiful and delicate, and whiter than the men, and have their hair loose and flowing, very black and long, down to the earth. They do not go to work in the fields, nor stir from their houses, where they make cloth and baskets of palm leaves. The women anoint their bodies and their hair with oil of sesame…”

When not peeping from the jungle, Pigafetta tried his best to communicate with the Chamorro men who hung around the beachhead. In particular, he tried to learn from them just where this island was actually located and what other land might be close by. Through much patient effort, he was able to find out that there were more islands to the north, but that all of these were even smaller than the one on which he now stood. More auspiciously, when he asked about larger pieces of land, his interlocutors kept pointing vaguely to the west.

Pigafetta rushed to inform his captain general of this intelligence. For his part, Magellan was as inclined as ever to underestimate distances in this part of the world, despite just such an underestimation having so recently almost been the death of him and all of his men. Now, he believed he must surely have reached the very doorstep of the Asian mainland, that this must be the land to which the pointing Chamorro were referring. On the basis of no more evidence than their vague gestures, Magellan decided that Asia proper was probably no more than one day’s sailing from here. While the mainland wasn’t the Spice Islands, it would be a better place than this one to take stock and take bearings, with a handy coastline waiting to be followed south to the latitude of the expedition’s intended destination. As if all that wasn’t motivation enough to leave quickly, Magellan had also, as we’ve seen, taken a pronounced dislike to this island and its inhabitants, whose playful attitude was the polar opposite of his glowering sense of duty and piety.

So, the order went out that the fleet would depart already on the morning of March 9, barely 48 hours after the first sailors had gone ashore on Guam. Every sailor gorged himself the evening before departure, knowing that his food would be rationed once again on the morrow.

As the capstans turned and the anchors were raised that morning, the Chamorro came out as well in their graceful little boats. This time, though, they kept their distance from the larger vessels. The honor guard they provided couldn’t help but remind the sailors of the Tupi version of same that had accompanied them as they left Rio de Janeiro a lifetime ago, but the mood was decidedly more ambivalent this time. Some of the Chamorro men waved and shouted at the ships in what seemed a friendly manner, but others seemed to scowl and make threatening gestures. Most oddly of all, there were some women to be seen on the boats now, perching on the twin hulls no less dexterously than the men. These wailed and tore at their hair — “for love,” Pigafetta surmised, “of the seven whom we had killed.” On that inconclusive note, the fleet sailed away from these charming people whom its captain general had never even attempted to understand, disappearing into the hazy blue of yet another fine Pacific morning.

This generation of islanders would go on to tell their children about the three days the dour pale-faced strangers with their deadly sticks of fire and smoke had spent among them. They must have thought of the episode as a singular event in their people’s long, generally uneventful history. But, sadly for them, it would not remain singular for very long. Within five decades, Spaniards would return to officially claim their home for themselves. And within a couple of centuries after that, the number of living Chamorro would be reduced to just 10 percent of the current total, thanks to the disease and brutality their Spanish colonizers would bring with them. The Chamorro were a people with a knack for finding the joy in life; in that sense, perhaps they were the wisest of all humans. One can only hope that these particular Chamorro enjoyed as much as possible their last few decades of peace and freedom.

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