The Voyage of Magellan

April 27 – May 1, 1521

It was a disoriented, shell-shocked group of sailors who steered their longboats away from the island of Mactan and back in the direction of Cebu City. As they did so, they sailed past the boats of King Humabon, which continued to hang about in the same spot from which they had watched the recent battle take place without lifting a finger to rescue their supposed allies. Indeed, a frisson of fear shivered through the Europeans in the longboats as they passed by, a fear that these Filipinos might now move to finish the job that Lapu Lapu’s warriors had begun. Certainly they could have made short work of the exhausted sailors if they had chosen to attack. And perhaps if Humabon had been with them, he would have ordered them to do just that. But he was not, and they did not. The longboats passed by them unmolested, entered the harbor of Cebu City, and tied up alongside their mother ships.

The sailors who had remained aboard the ships hardly needed to ask what had transpired at Mactan. They needed only look at their bedraggled comrades, needed only note the conspicuous absence of their captain general and observe the tears streaming down the face of Enrique.

In a strictly material sense, the position of the fleet really wasn’t all that greatly altered. Yes, it had lost some men when men were already in short supply, but the quick thinking of Magellan and Espinosa had saved the large majority of the invasion force. The expedition still had three ships to its name, one of them equipped with cannons, and a supply of muskets and heavy crossbows that served as a potent force multiplier.

In a psychological and political sense, however, the fleet’s position was very much altered, and very much for the worse. The aura of supernatural invincibility which Magellan had worked so hard to cultivate — the same aura which allowed Hernán Cortés to conquer the Aztec Empire and Francisco Pizarro to conquer the Incas, despite disparities in number that were no more extreme than those confronting these first Europeans in the Philippines — had blown away in an instant like smoke from a musket. Humabon knew now that his visitors were far from infallible. Meanwhile the failure of his warriors to come to the aid of the Europeans demonstrated that the relationship between the two parties was, at best, more ambiguous and ambivalent than Magellan had chosen to believe. The harbor in which the ships were anchored no longer felt to the sailors like the friendly port of pleasure which it had been for the past fortnight. Should they make a break for the open sea right away? Would Humabon try to stop them if they did? No one aboard the ships knew where they stood anymore, and everyone vaguely dreaded to find out.

But the most pressing crisis of all, which had to be addressed before any other decisions could be made, was a crisis of command. Perhaps thanks to the mutinous impulses within the officer ranks which he had constantly had to guard against, Magellan had never formally assigned anyone to the role of his second-in-command and anointed successor. This now left the fleet with no obvious captain general, even as the deaths of Magellan and Cristóvão Rebêlo also left two of the three ships without captains.

Knowing that this crisis had to be addressed immediately to head off the very real prospect of anarchy, Espinosa called all of the officers who were still with the fleet to the Trinidad on his own recognizance almost as soon as he climbed out of his longboat. Upon getting the word, Captain Serrano of the Concepción ordered the launch that was to carry him and his senior staff to the flagship to make a stop at the Victoria before continuing on. He shouted up to the sailors on that ship’s deck to release Duarte Barbosa, who was still being held in chains in the hold. Barbosa emerged blinking in the late-afternoon sunlight to be given a hasty summation of what had happened at Mactan. He wasted no time in petty jubilation at the downfall of his persecutor. He simply took a spot among the other officers in the launch as if he had been there all along.

The meeting that took place on the quarterdeck of the Trinidad was a tense, testy affair. The decision-making hole that was usually filled by Magellan, micro-managing and setting the agenda at every turn, was positively yawning. Even those who had had little use for the man in the past now felt his absence keenly. For if there was one thing that could be said for Ferdinand Magellan, it was that he was a good man to have in charge in a pickle, which this most definitely was.

The first order of business was to find captains for the Trinidad and Victoria. Juan Sebastián Elcano promptly put himself forward as an ideal candidate. Currently the ship’s master of the Concepción, he had narrowly escaped execution after joining with Juan de Cartagena’s troupe to foment the Easter Mutiny at Puerto San Julián. Since then, however, he had done much to redeem himself, by serving Captain Serrano and Captain General Magellan well. Now, his old ambitious side came back to the fore; he felt that he had done his penance, proved his mettle, and earned the captaincy of one of the ships. Sadly for his ambitions, though, Espinosa and some of the other officers were not yet willing to trust him in such a role. When his bid for promotion was voted down, Elcano slipped into a bitter sulk that only served to confirm his comrades’ lingering distrust.

With this candidate off the table, the pickings of qualified men were slim indeed. Espinosa was asked if he would take a ship, but he pleaded that he was not up to such an assignment, being a soldier rather than a sailor first, second, and last. After much debate, the assembly voted to place a Portuguese officer named Luis Affonso de Goes, who had neither distinguished nor disgraced himself to this point, in charge of the Victoria. And they opted to forgive Barbosa for the error of judgment that had so incensed their recently deceased captain general and entrust him with a ship once again. At first they thought to give him the Concepción, while Serrano, who no one could deny was the best and bravest mariner of all among them, took the Trinidad. But, displaying his usual loyalty to his men and disregard of personal glory, Serrano said that he would prefer to stay with the Concepción. So, Barbosa wound up with the plum assignment of captain of the Trinidad.

Next came the question of overall command of the fleet. Again, Juan Rodriguez Serrano was the obvious choice to succeed Magellan as captain general, but he would be hobbled in that role by his insistence on remaining with the Concepción, which lacked the Trinidad’s cannons. Unable to come further, the officers voted for the time being to split the command of the fleet between Serrano and Barbosa. Thus the latter crowned one of the more dramatic changes of individual fortune in the annals of the sea, rising from prisoner in the hold of one ship to captain of another and co-captain general of an entire fleet — albeit a small one — in the span of just a few hours.

At last, the officers could turn their attention to the most fraught question of all, that of what they were to do next. An immediate departure was one option, but speaking against it was the fact that the ships’ holds were none too well stocked with food; Magellan had been more interested in cementing his relationship with Humabon and converting the king’s subjects to Christianity in these last few weeks than he had been in preparing the fleet to resume its journey. With the sun already setting over the officers’ conclave, it was decided to sit tight for at least one more night. In the morning, Barbosa promised, he would talk the situation over with Enrique, who at the moment was off crying for his master in a corner somewhere. If it seemed advisable, he would send Enrique ashore to find out just where matters stood with Humabon. Who knew? Maybe the bonds of friendship and religion would still prove strong enough to at least let the Europeans trade for the food they needed before they departed.

The next morning, Barbosa sought out Enrique just as he had said he would. He found him down below, huddled in a nest of blankets with his face to the inner hull, no longer weeping but still painfully despondent. None too gently, Barbosa gripped the slave by the shoulder and pulled him around to face his better. “We had thought to send you to Humabon, to find out where we stand with him,” he said without preamble.

Enrique blinked as he tried to process this demand from a man whom he had last seen disgraced and in chains. “I was told by my master that I would be set free after his death,” he said in his oddly precise, clipped Spanish.

Barbosa was a nervous and stressed man, and his ire rose on the instant. He failed utterly to appreciate that the man who now lay before him represented the fleet’s only way of communicating complex thoughts to the Filipinos who surrounded it, and was for that reason arguably the most important man of them all. “I fear you’ve fallen victim to delusions of grandeur after all your hobnobbing ashore,” Barbosa sneered. “You were the property of Ferdinand Magellan. Now you are the property of the expedition he served. If and when you return to Spain, you will be the property of the captain general’s wife. Like all slaves, you will either obey the orders you are given or be punished for your failure to do so. So which will it be, your duty or the whip?”

These cruel words bored deep into Enrique’s soul. For a decade, he had suffered the scorn of these white men. In recent weeks, he had pulled their irons out of the fire again and again, doing things for them that they could not possibly have done for themselves, and still Duarte Barbosa felt justified in speaking to him in tones that he wouldn’t have used to address the most lowly deck swab among the rest of his crew. The one exception to the rule of scorn had been Magellan, who had respected Enrique’s intelligence and treated him almost as an equal at times. But now Magellan was dead. Had he lied when he said that, should Enrique outlive him, he would do so as a free man? Enrique refused to believe that of his former master. It must be these new would-be masters of his that had chosen to ignore Magellan’s wishes in this matter. For they still needed him, and it was easier for them to hector and threaten a man who looked like he did than it was for them to speak to him politely.

A light dawned inside Enrique. These Europeans needed him… but he didn’t need them. He was on the doorstep of a city filled with people who looked very much like him, who spoke a language close to the one he had grown up with. And yet his shipmate was not just cruel enough but stupid enough to treat him this way, when his fate rested in the palm of Enrique’s hand.

All of this and more flashed through the slave’s mind. But he said only three words to his idiot interlocutor: “I will go.” This Barbosa received with a self-satisfied smirk that did much to confirm the slave’s next course of action. If his new masters didn’t intend to free him of their own accord, there were other ways of attaining both his freedom and some sweet revenge.

An hour later, Barbosa and Espinosa stood together on the quarterdeck of the Trinidad, watching as the launch that carried Enrique on his latest mission of diplomacy made its cautious way to the quayside. It was not attacked when it drew alongside and unloaded its human cargo; this certainly seemed like a good sign. The two men continued to watch until the lone figure of Enrique disappeared into the warren of streets that led toward Humabon’s palace.

Barbosa turned to his companion with a smile. “Do you know, the fellow told me he thought he was to be freed just because Magellan is no longer with us,” he said with a wry shake of the head. “I had to give him what-for.”

These words reminded Espinosa of the cryptic final words of the captain general, which he had completely forgotten under the press of events: “Enrique shall have his freedom.” He managed a wan smile in Barbosa’s direction, but he wondered if they would ever see the slave again. He rather suspected not. And nor could he blame him.

He was therefore much surprised when the following morning brought the sight of Enrique standing on the dock waving toward the ships. The Trinidad’s launch was duly dispatched to pick him up. When it returned with its charge, Enrique told Barbosa and Espinosa that King Humabon wished to express his sincere condolences for the death of Magellan and to apologize for the “mix-up” that had kept his warriors from coming to the captain general’s aid at Mactan. He would like to say these things in person in a couple of days at a special banquet, one to which all of the officers and even any ordinary seamen they wished to bring along were invited. Once they had all eaten their fill and cleared the air about recent events, they could discuss how to move their friendship forward.

To almost everyone with the fleet, this seemed the happiest of all possible news. It dangled before them the prospect of a reset to the situation of just a few days earlier, before Magellan had made the disastrous, vainglorious decision to attack Mactan with such an inadequate force. Although the officers in charge of the fleet now were less inclined to imagine themselves becoming the rulers of a united, Christian Philippines than Magellan had been, they did see a chance to set aside all of the talk of conversion and salvation and concentrate on filling their ships’ holds with the gold and spices that were everywhere in Cebu City, materials that stood to make them all wealthy men if they could bring some of them back to Spain. As far as they were concerned, the work of empire-building — both in the temporal sense and in that of the Kingdom of God — could wait for another day.

There were only two doubting Thomases urging caution: the usual suspects in that regard, Espinosa and Serrano. The former’s experience of battle had made him a keen observer of men. He hadn’t liked Enrique’s shifty, even more than typically inscrutable manner as he delivered his message. Nor did he like the way Enrique kept himself to himself afterward, receiving the gratitude of his shipmates — including that of Barbosa, who went so far as to attempt a backhanded apology for what had transpired between the two earlier — with strikingly little emotion or enthusiasm. Those final words of Magellan kept echoing in Espinosa’s mind. He broached with Barbosa the idea of promising the slave his freedom and offering to drop him off at a port of his choosing with a substantial sum of money in his pocket before the fleet left this part of the world. But Barbosa was not so grateful or contrite as to be receptive to this idea, so Espinosa let it drop. This was a horrible mistake.

For his part, Serrano grounded his misgivings in more abstract philosophy. It seemed to him that anything that seemed like it was too good to be true probably was. King Humabon’s actions confused him. Why deliberately abandon his allies from afar at the crucial moment — only the truly naïve could credit Humabon’s claims about a communication snafu of some sort leading to the inaction of his warriors at Mactan — only to pay renewed obeisance to them now, just when he had the upper hand? It just didn’t make sense — unless, that is, a second double cross was in the offing. Serrano too came to Barbosa to express his concern, to say that walking into the jaws of the lion so trustingly might not be the right course of action. Barbosa answered him simply by saying that he for one intended to go; it was up to Serrano himself whether he wished to follow suit. Hearing that most of the officers intended to go as well — forced to live on short shipboard rations as they now were, they could already taste the meats and other pleasures of Humabon’s court — Serrano’s sense of duty wouldn’t allow him not to join them; he was already wracked with enough guilt over his failure to join the attack on Mactan. It would have been better for himself and the expedition he served had he been less dutiful. For Barbosa, although a competent captain, would soon be shown to be a less astute judge of human nature.

The appointed day of the banquet was May 1, 1521. On that day, a delegation of 25 men, including among their numbers the cream of the fleet’s remaining brain trust, climbed into a longboat. There were the Co-Captains General Barbosa and Serrano, the Victoria’s newly appointed Captain de Goes, Master-at-Arms Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the fleet’s best pilot João Lopes Carvalho, the expedition’s last priest Pedro de Valderrama, and of course the inscrutable Enrique. Of the senior officers, only Juan Sebastián Elcano chose to stay behind, less as a result of any particular misgivings or forebodings than because he was still pouting at not being given a ship to command in the staffing shuffle. Antonio Pigafetta, on the other hand, wanted desperately to come, but his cheek was still swelled up to the size of a mango, thanks to the poisoned arrow that had grazed it on Mactan. Barbosa and Serrano feared the sight would be too palpable a reminder of that disaster in the presence of King Humabon. So, unusually, Pigafetta too stayed behind, frustrated half to death at what he was about to miss. Before long, he would have good reason to thank his god for the poisoned arrow that kept him safely aboard the Trinidad.

From the moment the men left the longboat that had brought them to the dock, the bad feelings in the bellies of Serrano and Espinosa only intensified. Espinosa didn’t like the way Humabon’s honor guard hemmed them in in front and behind as they entered the narrow streets of Cebu City. Not needing to play as central a role as Serrano did as a captain general, Espinosa positioned himself at the margins of the group, peering worriedly down every alley and street crossing, trying to convince himself against his soldierly sixth sense that Humabon’s proffered hand could very well be exactly what it claimed to be.

Alas, his sixth sense had it right. The other shoe dropped with horrific suddenness. The guards in front stopped so abruptly that the delegation following behind almost ran into them. Two gates that happened to be on either side of the road just at this spot then swung open to reveal an execution squad standing with spears and knives already in hand. “It’s a trap!” shouted Espinosa at the top of his lungs, drawing the sword he had concealed inside his baggy sailor’s pants.

The warning made no difference. Filipinos bore down on the sailors from all four sides, hacking, slashing, and stabbing. As Homer would have said, the victims in their cage were

wild, like herds stampeding, driven mad as the darting gadfly
strikes in the late spring when the long days come round.
The attackers struck like eagles, crook-clawed, hook-beaked,
swooping down from a mountain ridge to harry smaller birds
that skim across the flatland, cringing under the clouds
but the eagles plunge in fury, rip their lives out — hopeless,
never a chance of flight or rescue — and people love the sport —
so the attackers routed suitors headlong down the hall,
wheeling into the slaughter, slashing left and right
and grisly screams broke from skulls cracked open —
the whole floor awash with blood.

Valderrama died before he could tell report back to his Church the thousands of Filipino souls he had saved; de Goes died before he could do anything at all in his new role of the Victoria’s captain; Barbosa died, his elevation from prisoner to captain general having proved as brief-lived as it was meteoric. Sailors who had survived storms, shipwrecks, insurrections, cold, heat, scurvy, starvation, thirst, and that recent hell on the beach of Mactan were cut down like so much hapless livestock in this narrow Philippine street. Most never even got a chance to scream. Certainly none of them had time to notice how Enrique, his face as unreadable as ever, stepped delicately aside to observe the killing of the shipmates who had depended upon him so completely in recent weeks but never could bring themselves to respect him as a man just like them.

Two members of the delegation did manage to break through the first rush of ambushers by throwing themselves against the cordon who were coming up from behind. These two were Espinosa, who had his sword to help him, and Carvalho, who escaped strictly by dint of luck and quick thinking. They ran back the way they had come at full tilt. The street had been cleared of citizenry in honor of the lambs who were being led to the slaughter. Now, the footsteps and the heaving breath of the two officers echoed eerily down the urban tunnel as they ran for their lives.

The longboat in which they had arrived was just pushing away from the quay, the few sailors who were left onboard having taken a few moments to buy some fresh fish and pineapples from nearby stalls. Espinosa and Carvalho redoubled their strides, yelling and waving as they bore down on the dock. The sailors in the longboat looked at them in confusion, momentarily paralyzed. The fugitives jumped over the few feet of water separating the boat from the dock. “To the ship! Now!” Espinosa shouted while the boat was still rolling alarmingly under the impact of the unorthodox boarding. Recovering their wits, the sailors obliged; Espinosa and Carvalho too picked up oars to aid their efforts.

They had covered about half of the distance to the Trinidad when a commotion broke out on the dock behind them. They saw Serrano burst out of another street, having apparently led his would-be executioners on a merry chase indeed. Unfortunately, half a dozen of them were still on his heels. A rare European sailor who could swim, Serrano threw himself into the water and thrashed toward the longboat. Espinosa ordered it brought about to pick him up.

But tragically for Serrano, the Filipino pursuers still had their spears. A big, burly warrior lifted his above his head and, displaying a graceful pose worthy of a piece of ancient Grecian statuary, hurled it toward his quarry. It arced elegantly through the air, to embed itself neatly into the back of the retreating swimmer’s neck. In an instant, the head of the most loyal, courageous, and competent of all the expedition’s captains — past, present, or future — disappeared beneath the water forever.

With a curse, Espinosa ordered the longboat brought about to face the flagship again. As it approached its destination, he stood up to shout and wave at the baffled sailors peering down from the decks of the Trinidad and its two companions. The phraseology was garbled at this distance, but the import of the few words the sailors could catch was clear enough: “Ambush! Trap! Get Away! For Your Lives!”

Seeing the crusty master-at-arms, normally so calm and steady, in such a state of near panic moved the sailors almost more than did his words. Lacking the officers who usually orchestrated their actions, the crew worked in common cause by a sort of group muscle memory. By now, more than nineteen months after leaving Spain, even those of them who had been the greenest back in Seville were well-seasoned old salts. The capstans spun, the sails were unfurled, the rudders unlimbered. By the time Espinosa and Carvalho clambered up the ropes that dangled down from the side of the Trinidad, that ship and the two others were already beginning to get underway.

Thankfully, there was a decent breeze. The wind was blowing toward the south, so that was the direction the ships turned as they cleared the harbor. The lookouts who climbed the masts without needing to be told to do so searched the horizon anxiously for Filipino pursuers behind or in front, but no such dreaded objects materialized. It seemed Humabon’s plan had been to cut off the head of the fleet quietly in the depths of Cebu City, and only then to send his boats full of warriors into the harbor to deal with the body. In this respect at least, the Europeans had gotten the jump on him rather than the other way around.

So, in this ignominious fashion, Magellan’s expedition departed the Philippine island of Cebu, leaving its captain general and the corpses of more than 30 of its other best officers and men behind. There would go another four decades and more before the next group of Europeans would come to Cebu to push their religion and their other strange ways upon the Filipinos there. By then, King Humabon and his junior partner King Kolambu would both be dead, as would Enrique.

In the meantime, though, Enrique became one of Humabon’s most trusted lieutenants. Together they wiped all trace of Christianity from Cebu City and its environs; although the faith was destined to come back to the Philippines with a vengeance eventually, it most definitely wasn’t going to happen on their watch. Enrique made just one concession in the case of himself. As a reminder of that other life he had once lived on the other side of the world and the master in whose employ he had lived it, he kept a crucifix given to him personally by Ferdinand Magellan, the only European who had ever bothered to get to know him as a human being. As far as Enrique was concerned, the rest of that business about Christ could go the way of the men whose slaughter on the streets of Cebu City the now-former slave had so cunningly engineered. Such was the price they had had to pay for underestimating him. His revenge was a dish he was pleased to have served cold.

---

Did you enjoy this chapter? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

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