The Voyage of Magellan

April 4 – 26, 1521

Following in the wake of King Kolambu’s little boat like whales behind a dolphin, Magellan’s ships sailed west at an unhurried pace, skirting around the northern side of the squat Philippine island which we now know as Bohol. Then the lookouts spotted dead ahead another island. Kolambu signaled with gestures and shouts that this island was their destination.

As usual, Antonio Pigafetta tried to transcribe the new island’s native name into his journal; he wound up with Zzubu. It was a good effort, all things considered: we know the island today as Cebu, just the ninth biggest of the Philippines but one that punches above its weight in many respects, being one of the modern archipelago nation’s major hubs of industry, commerce, and population. Indeed, it was this already in Magellan’s time.

In reaching the edge of the world that the Europeans knew by sailing the long way around, Magellan had returned to that part of the world replete with civilizations whose perspectives extended well beyond the local — that part of the world where international trade, bureaucratic forms of government, literacy, and all of the other traditional markers of advanced civilization were the norm. The dominant power here, casting a long shadow over everything around it, was China, a place that was still as much legend as reality to these first European interlopers in its sphere of influence. The very first European expedition to reach China proper had done so just four years before Magellan arrived in the Philippines, when a dozen or so Portuguese ships had sailed out of the South China Sea and up the Pearl River to the great trading port of Guangzhou, where they were accorded a less than rapturous reception.

Cebu and some other islands of the Philippines, by contrast, had been trading with the gigantic neighbor to their west for hundreds of years. Less than a century before, Cebu had been visited by the Chinese Dragon Fleets of the legendary eunuch admiral Zheng He, who had gone as far as East Africa and the Persian Gulf in ships at least four times the size of any of Magellan’s. The more recent Chinese emperors had failed to continue Zheng’s project, ceding in so doing the chance to colonize the rest of the world to the Europeans. Nevertheless, the smaller, flat-bottomed Chinese sailing ships known as junks remained a common sight in Cebu, along with Chinese people and the Chinese language.

But by no means was Chinese the only foreign language to be heard there. Cebu and the other rich islands of the Philippines were junction points in a thriving web of culture, commerce, and invention that extended for thousands of miles around them. Thanks to this exchange of goods and ideas, the Filipinos had become metallurgists and agriculturalists, engineers and accountants. They had been writing things down for over a half a millennium at the very least; the oldest Filipino writing to be unearthed to date stems from around AD 900. The script used then was still the one in common use at the time of Magellan. In a potent testament to just how interlinked this region of the world had become long before Vasco da Gama made landfall in Asia for the first time on behalf of Portugal and the rest of the European continent, the Filipino script seems to have been borrowed not from China but from the far more distant land of India.

All of which is to say that the encounter which was about to take place between Magellan’s fleet and the people of Cebu was sure to be a very different proposition from the fleet’s earlier encounters with native peoples; this was to be a meeting of mutually literate, highly developed civilizations. In some senses, the Filipinos of Cebu actually had the advantage of their visitors. For while Europeans still knew nothing of the Philippines, the Philippines already knew something of them. Reports of the Portuguese explorers and traders who were swarming around Malaysia and other points south and west had reached the Philippines some time ago. Even the traditions of monotheism that the Europeans brought with them were by no means unknown there. Although the islands had no direct experience as of yet with Christianity, Muslim missionaries from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Siam had converted large swaths of the archipelago to their related faith. For example, the city of Manila on the largest Philippine island of Luzon, today the capital of the Philippine nation-state, was at this time a city governed under Muslim law.

At noon on April 7, 1521, King Kolambu led Magellan’s ships into the harbor of the biggest city on Cebu — so big that it shared its name with that of the island itself. Ahead lay dozens of boats and junks of all sizes, come to visit a thriving port large enough to compete with many a European one. Determined to display strength right from the start, Magellan ordered the Trinidad’s cannons to be fired as the ships dropped anchor in the harbor. The noise and smoke assured that anyone in Cebu City who had failed to notice the new arrivals to this point most definitely noticed them now.  But for all that, no one came out to greet the ships. The onus of initiating contact was, it seemed, on the noisy visitors.

It was therefore agreed that Kolambu, who knew the king of Cebu City personally, would go ashore first, accompanied by Enrique and a young Portuguese officer named Cristóvão Rebêlo who was very highly thought of by Magellan. (Rebêlo was almost certainly related to the captain general in some way, being named in the latter’s will; on the basis of this, it has been suggested that he may even have been Magellan’s illegitimate son, but this is only speculation.) Pigafetta too begged for permission to join the party, and to this Magellan agreed.

They took a launch to the nearest dock. Springing out of the boat, Kolambu led them with no further ado into a dense warren of streets which he obviously knew almost as well as those of his own capital. The houses here were as well made as the ones of Europe, albeit built on stilts, as was the norm in this part of the world where typhoons were a fairly regular occurrence. As was also the norm among Pacific islanders, the people around them wore scant clothing if they wore any clothing at all. Yet this was clearly the result of a warm climate and a lack of the European shame of the body rather than any poverty or inability, for finely made gold jewellery and gemstones abounded, as did the rich smell of spices and perfumes. The four lonely ambassadors wore more clothing, but were nevertheless as exposed as they could possibly be here in the midst of this city of tens of thousands. Yet no one made any overtly aggressive moves against them.

Kolambu led the others to the narrow entrance of a walled courtyard, spoke a few words to the guards there, and ushered his friends inside. Suddenly they all stood before the king of Cebu City. His name, Kolambu told his companions, was Humabon.

This King Humabon was a short, fat man, wearing a finely woven cloth around his waist and an elaborate Arab-style turban on his head. He bore a necklace of gold that was so heavy that it seemed difficult for him to fully raise his head. A pair of almost equally enormous golden earrings inlaid with all manner of precious stones spilled halfway down his torso. His face was painted with orange and red flames. He sat on a palm mat, a study in practiced nonchalance, eating tortoise eggs from china dishes and sucking palm wine from a gourd through a cane straw, the better to avoid upsetting the fortune in gold and gems hanging from his neck and ears. He made no move to rise, plainly expecting his visitors to pay obeisance to him.

This Kolambu and Enrique duly did, bowing down to touch their foreheads to the ground. But the European dignity of Rebêlo and Pigafetta would permit only an awkward half-bow from each. Humabon took this in through heavy-lidded eyes. Then he spoke for the first time, in a quiet but authoritative voice. “Why did you discharge your cannons inside my harbor?” he asked in his native tongue.

Enrique rushed to answer without pausing to translate to the Europeans. “It is the custom of these people who employ me to do so when they arrive at a port as a signal of peace and friendship,” he fibbed. “Firing cannons does honor to the king of the land being visited.”

Humabon was still for a tense moment, as if trying to decide whether to challenge this claim. But in the end he only nodded his head ponderously. “Who is your master, and what does he seek here?” he asked.

“I serve Captain General Ferdinand Magellan, who has come from across the ocean in the service of the greatest king in all the world,” said Enrique. A stir went through the courtyard at these words, what with the implied insult they represented to King Humabon.

Another man in the latter’s entourage now spoke up — a man whom the envoys had already noticed, because he was the only one present whose chest was covered. He was dressed in the distinctive robes of a Muslim. “Look well, oh King, what you do,” he said in the language of Cebu, thickly accented but understandable. “These people have already brought chaos to the islands south of us and to India. They bode no good. You would do well to expel them immediately.”

“This man is mistaken,” Enrique cut in. “We are not the people to whom he refers. We serve the king of Spain rather than Portugal. I promise you that the king of Spain is unimaginably more powerful than his rival. You would do well to become his friend now, while you have the chance.”

This caused another stir in the courtyard. There was another pregnant pause. Then: “I had thought that all of these pale-skinned peoples were one,” said Humabon with a wave of a pudgy hand. “But very well, so be it. You may pay the usual tribute and then stay and trade as long as you wish.” And with that, he turned back to his eggs.

But Enrique disturbed his equanimity by speaking up again. “My master does not pay one-sided tariffs or tributes,” he said. “He would prefer to have peace with your people, but not at any such price to his honor. If you persist in insulting him in this way, he will be forced to make war upon you instead.”

The proud king and the proud slave stared at one another, while Kolambu and the other Filipinos who were gathered in the courtyard gasped and Rebêlo and Pigafetta looked nervously from one face to the next, having no idea what was going on. Once again, Humabon took his time to answer. “My lieutenants tell me that you come with only three ships,” he said at last. “You will have a hard time conquering a city of this size with that paltry force.”

“We have the same fire sticks that the Portuguese have — more and better ones, in fact,” said Enrique. “And if they are not sufficient, we can return with many more ships and men and weapons. As I said, my master serves a king more powerful than any other. The ships you see in your harbor are only the tip of his spear.

“But my master Magellan is not unreasonable,” he continued, more mildly now. “Perhaps a mutual tribute would be acceptable to all.”

Humabon considered, then nodded abruptly. “Yes, this would be acceptable to us,” he said.

Whereupon Enrique pressed his advantage. “You may prepare and send your tribute at your convenience, and my master will surely reply in kind.”

And to this as well Humabon agreed, much to the astonishment of everyone around him. The slave had overmastered the king.

Humabon now called for meat and wine for his guests, while Enrique explained to the perplexed Rebêlo and Pigafetta what had just transpired. Pigafetta was amazed. He could swear that his captain general’s heretofore humble slave had physically grown in stature since returning to the part of the world that had made him. But he was soon distracted from this wonderment by the wonders of a feast worthy of Homer.

A maid brought water soon in a graceful golden pitcher
and over a silver basin tipped it out
so they might wash their hands,
then pulled a gleaming table to their side.
A staid housekeeper brought on bread to serve them,
appetizers aplenty too, lavish with her bounty.
A carver lifted platters of meat toward them,
meats of every sort, and set beside them golden cups
and time and again a page came round and poured them wine.
They reached out for the good things that lay at hand,
and when they’d put aside desire for food and drink
they set their minds on other pleasures,
song and dancing, all that crowns a feast.

The music for the after-dinner revels was played on wind instruments, complex amalgamations of bladders and bellows that reminded Pigafetta of nothing so much as Scottish bagpipes. He writes in his journal that the girls who came out to dance with them “were naked except from the waist to the knees, where they wore a wrap made of palm-tree cloth, which covered their middles, and some were quite naked.” He fails to elaborate on what else transpired between the men and the girls over the rest of the evening.

When the feast was over, a thoroughly sated Rebêlo and Pigafetta returned to the flagship, while Enrique and Kolambu stayed behind to continue their diplomacy. This time, no sailor with the fleet questioned Enrique’s loyalty.

Two days later, their trust was vindicated, as the two men returned with extraordinary news: they had persuaded Humabon to come to the Trinidad personally the next day, to exchange tribute and enter into a formal alliance with the Spanish empire.  Magellan had his carpenters build an imposing chair on the poop deck of his flagship that evening. The next morning, he covered it with a red velvet blanket, and draped an equally rich red velvet robe over his own person. It was from this imitation of a royal throne, and dressed thusly in the garb of a king, that he would conduct his negotiations with Humabon.

Humabon arrived wearing an only slightly less weighty load of gold and jewels around his neck and head than the last time Rebêlo and Pigafetta had seen him. Waddling up to the captain general, he enfolded him in a bear hug — Magellan was by now getting used to this custom — and handed him a small vial containing a thick red liquid. It was, he hardly needed to explain by now, some of his own blood. Magellan accepted it with suitable solemnity. Next Humabon told him that the rest of his tribute was waiting on the boat on which he had arrived, whose deck was stacked to the height of a man with baskets full of rice, pigs, goats, and fowls. Magellan offered in return fine cloth, glass, and even some china and gold which he had recently acquired from Kolambu’s people. (If Kolambu was offended by this re-gifting, he didn’t say anything about it.) And so the delicate issue of tribute was put behind the two parties.

Yet it did not feel like a meeting of equals; through brazenness and cleverness, Enrique and Magellan had shifted the balance of power in their own favor. Magellan sat down on his velvet throne in his velvet robe, leaving Humabon and his entourage to gather at his feet like supplicants.  Now the captain general began to expound on the One True Religion of Christianity. Through the good offices of the tireless Enrique, he told them of the creation of the world, of Adam and Eve, of the Flood, of the coming of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice on the cross, of the Heaven which was vouchsafed to believers and the Hell which awaited unbelievers, of the pope in Rome who was God’s chosen representative on Earth and the king of Spain who was above all other mortals except the pope. Magellan offered the Filipinos the classic colonial bargain. “The captain general told them not to become Christians from fear of us, or to please us,” writes Pigafetta, “but that if they wished to become Christians they must do it willingly, and for the love of God, for even though they should not become Christian, no displeasure would be done them, but those who became Christians would be more loved and better treated by us than the others. The captain general then said that if they became Christians he would leave them the arms which the Christians use, and that his king had commanded him to do so.”

With the muskets and cannons he had thus been promised positively dancing in his eyes, Humabon said that he did wish to become a Christian. The two leaders joined hands and swore that they would live in peace together and fight as allies in war against the enemies of either. They sealed the pact by drinking one another’s blood. That done, Magellan asked the king to join him in a prayer, the latter’s first to the One True God. Humabon settled his bulk carefully to his knees next to the little captain general, and copied his gestures as Magellan asked God to bless their alliance.

Humabon gave his new friends free run of Cebu City. The eager sailors who explored the city’s streets in the days that followed discovered a commercial center of amazing sophistication. These Filipinos conducted their business in coin currency, abetted by a system of weights and measures as rigorously specified as those of Europe, with scales that were every bit as accurate as well. The sailors were shocked to learn that gold was almost as cheap as iron here: fourteen weights of iron would get you ten weights of gold. Armed with this information, they returned to the markets with whatever small scraps of the base metal they could scrounge up in their pockets, to exchange it for the precious metal that they would be able to sell for a healthy sum back in Europe.

Most of all, though, the sailors marveled at the sexual practices of their hosts. “The males, large and small, have their penis pierced from one side to the other near the head, with a gold or tin bolt as large as a goose quill,” wrote a fascinated Pigafetta. “In both ends of the same bolt, some have what resembles a spur, with points upon the ends; others are like the head of a cart nail. I very often asked many, both old and young, to see their penis, because I could not credit it.” He was still more surprised to be told that this procedure was undertaken primarily to enhance the pleasure of the woman. His surprise had two grounds, one of them likely more relatable to the modern reader than the other.

The one was that taking such a load of hardware inside her sounded like torture for a woman, not pleasure — and yet the men insisted to Pigafetta that their women “would not have communication with them” if they refused the procedure. Pigafetta was told that the enhanced penis forced both parties to make only slow movements, thereby stretching the duration of the sex act to 24 hours or more. Needless to say, it is difficult to believe that this could truly have been the norm. For if it was, how would the people of Cebu have ever gotten anything else done?

The other ground for Pigafetta’s surprise was that so prioritizing the woman’s pleasure was simply inconceivable to the sixteenth-century male European mindset. The wide-eyed Italian was even more flabbergasted when he was shown the “artificial penises” that some Filipino women used when no man was to hand.

If the genital piercing really was undertaken at the behest of the women, however, said women found the European sailors exotic enough that they were willing to receive their penises in unmodified form. “All of the women loved us very much more than their own men,” bragged a self-satisfied Pigafetta, right after declaiming against the “weak nature” of the Filipinos that led them to focus so much on sex in the first place. Anyway, the sailors certainly had their fun in Cebu City.

As we’ve seen, Magellan the military commander generally trumped Magellan the devout Christian when it came to these matters; the former was seasoned enough to know that allowing his men this relief valve now could prevent a dangerous explosion later on. But, as we’ve also seen, he tended to hold his officers to a higher standard, even as he had been growing more temperamental and erratic in many respects since the fleet’s time in Tierra del Fuego. When Duarte Barbosa, the captain of the Victoria, failed to turn up for a scheduled meeting early one morning aboard the Trinidad and then could not be located aboard any of the three ships, Magellan flew into one of his worst rages yet. He ordered Gómez de Espinosa to find the missing man ashore and drag him back in irons. Barbosa would be a captain no more, Magellan shouted; he was giving the Victoria to his young countryman Cristóvão Rebêlo as a reward for having conducted the initial negotiations with King Humabon with such aplomb.

Espinosa and Captain Serrano of the Concepción were fairly horrified by this plan. This infraction aside, Barbosa had actually led the Victoria quite well since taking the ship over from the mutinous Luis de Mendoza a year earlier. Meanwhile the betrayal of the San Antonio had in an ironic way solved the heretofore constant problem of insubordination in the ranks; for once, no one with the fleet was actively plotting mutiny. Why reopen the door to dissension by sacking a competent and well-liked captain for the relatively minor crime of oversleeping and missing a routine meeting whilst the fleet was anchored in a friendly port? And why send all of the wrong messages in the process, by promoting in his stead a callow Portuguese who was already widely seen by the largely Spanish crews of the ships to be the beneficiary of special favors from the captain general?

Espinosa and Serrano argued all of this with Magellan, but to no avail; prideful man that he was, few things could have angered him more than the insult of being casually stood up in this way. So, Espinosa had no choice but to order a party of his men to track Barbosa down ashore. Unsurprisingly, they found the captain sleeping in a bower with several nubile Filipino companions. It was a decidedly rude awakening that he now experienced. He was hauled back to the Victoria in chains and cast down into the hold, while his crew looked on, appalled at the treatment that was being meted out to a captain they had grown to respect. Then they were peremptorily informed that an inexperienced young foreigner who could barely speak Spanish was to take his place. It isn’t hard to imagine the effect all of this had on their morale. Espinosa and Serrano could only shake their heads at this, the latest of a growing number of unforced errors on the part of their captain general.

Magellan himself, however, was becoming increasingly convinced that he was literally an agent of God, and as such he could not fail in anything he did. All of his years of struggle for respect and prominence had unexpectedly and abruptly culminated in these weeks of triumph. He no longer spared a thought for the vision of the Spice Islands that had been haunting him for so many years. For these islands he had stumbled on instead seemed every bit as rich and desirable if not more so. They were, after all, completely virgin territory, with no preexisting claims from Portugal or any other empire to contend with. Magellan saw himself becoming the de-facto king of a united Philippines, living a life of which even his old friend Francisco Serrão would have been envious. Perhaps he would stay here permanently from now on, sending just one or two of his ships west to Spain — the circumnavigation of the world which that would represent still barely registered with him — to inform King Charles of his early success and request the conquistadors he would need to cement his rule over the entirety of the archipelago. He would become a new Prester John, the sovereign leader of a paradise straight out of a book of myth.

Of course, the impulse behind or justification of such a European drive to dominate was always the need to Christianize the benighted inferior races of the world. A man like Magellan saw little distinction between accepting Jesus Christ as one’s supreme lord and savior and accepting King Charles I as one’s supreme earthly liege. As befitted his new role of God’s chosen agent of mass conversion, Magellan traded his red velvet robes of royalty for a priestly vestment of purest white, which he had salvaged from the clothing left behind by Bernard Calmette, the man of God whom he had marooned alongside Juan de Cartagena back in Puerto San Julián. Pedro de Valderrama, the one officially anointed priest who still remained with the expedition, found himself thoroughly sidelined by Magellan, who evidently now considered himself a full-fledged priest in his own right, by godly if not papal fiat.

All day on Saturday, April 13, 1521, the people of Cebu City cleaned and decorated for a very special occasion. The next morning, Magellan came ashore in his robes of white with 40 of his men, and proceeded to take his place on one of two thrones that had been moved into the city’s central square. Next to to him sat King Humabon. Enrique sat on a cushion between the two to act as translator, while thousands of Humabon’s subjects looked and listened on every side. Through Enrique, Humabon agreed to Magellan’s injunctions to burn all of the idols his people had worshiped previously and replace them with Christian crosses. Then Magellan took Humabon by the hand and led him to a font that had been set up in the square. He personally baptized the king of Cebu, who took the Christian name of Charles after the monarch who reigned in Spain. The enterprising but far less politically important King Kolambu, who been all but forgotten amidst the pomp and circumstance of the last week or so, then got his chance to be baptized as well, under the name of John. Fifty more dignitaries from the two kings’ courts followed suit. Even the Muslim trader who had so strongly urged Humabon to eject his Christian visitors now took the plunge, choosing the eminently Christian name of Christopher for himself. When this first, most critical round of baptisms finally came to an end, the crowd roared its approval, while the gunners aboard the Trinidad fired off a booming salute from the harbor.

Now Pedro de Valderrama was able to make himself useful, as the ordinary citizens of Cebu City lined up before the baptismal font to follow their king’s example. The first in line was Humabon’s queen, who took the Christian name of Joanna, the mother of Charles I of Spain. Another 800 Filipinos received the cleansing water of God after her on that first day alone.

The mass baptisms continued apace in the days that followed. While Valderrama dunked and blessed with assembly-line efficiency, Magellan performed most of the other duties of a priest. Each morning, he preached lengthy, haranguing sermons against the holdouts in Cebu City who still refused to give up their pagan ways. One afternoon, he was told of a sick man who still had idols in his house; he needed them, so the man said, to help him get better. Magellan promptly marched over to the house in question. He charged inside and baptized the man without bothering to ask his permission. The man pronounced himself cured on the spot, and Magellan went away feeling pleased with himself. We moderns might be forgiven for suspecting that, in reality, the poor invalid just wanted this crazy-eyed fanatic out of his grill.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be a Machiavelli to detect the realpolitik behind Cebu City in general’s enthusiastic embrace of such a profoundly foreign faith. For the politics of the Philippines were as divided and divisive as those of Europe; King Humabon was constantly jockeying for advantage against rival monarchs and city-states. He could all too easily see the utility in allying himself to these newcomers with their muskets and cannons, at least for the time being. Thus the edict that went out from his palace, saying that conversion to the religion which the leader of the foreigners was so weirdly determined to press upon Cebu City was, shall we say, highly desirable for each and every citizen thereof to accept.

One day Humabon complained to Magellan about a village on the edge of Cebu City’s sphere of influence whose residents were not heeding the call of the Christian god with the proper alacrity. Magellan immediately offered to lend Humabon some of his musketeers. After helping Humabon’s warriors to burn the place, the Europeans left a large cross behind in the village square to remind the residents of what had brought this violence upon them and of what they needed to do to prevent a recurrence.

Magellan might have been well served to look past his haze of zealotry and pay heed to an omen of the sort which a pagan like Homer would have readily recognized for what it was. “Every evening toward midnight,” writes Pigafetta, “there used to come to the city a black bird of the size of a crow, which perching on the houses whistled and caused all the dogs to howl, and these double cries lasted four or five hours.” Alternatively, Magellan might have opened his Bible to the Book of Proverbs, to remind himself that “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

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