The Voyage of Magellan

May 1 – June 21, 1521

Propelled by fear, habit, and a steady wind at its back, the fleet sailed south by southwest out of Cebu City for almost 24 hours, passing between the islands of Cebu to the west and Bohol to the east. By the morning of the second day, however, the adrenaline rush of the breakneck flight from danger was fading. When a cape at the western tip of Bohol presented the undermanned ships with shallower water, their frazzled, leaderless crews furled sails and dropped anchors there by a sort of tacit mutual agreement.

Needless to say, the question of what to do next loomed enormous for every man aboard the ships. Their situation was a dire one by any standard. A wishful thinker might have been able to wave away the losses sustained at the Battle of Mactan, even if one of those losses had been the captain general who had gotten them this far in the face of so much adversity. The losses sustained at Cebu City, however, were of another order of magnitude entirely. The personnel shortage had now become acute. The fewer than 100 men who remained with the expedition were painfully inadequate for three ships of this size; just keeping them sailing in a reasonably orderly fashion would require that almost every man be on duty more or less around the clock. Clearly this wouldn’t be tenable for very long.

If anything, the shortage of skilled personnel was still more pressing than the shortage of general seamen. After the fleet’s very best pilot Estevão Gomes had stolen its biggest single ship the San Antonio out from under its captain general’s nose the previous November, there had still been five men left who were capable of taking astrolabe readings and doing the other basic tasks of day-to-day navigation. This was no longer the case. Two of those navigators had died during the hellish Pacific crossing, while another was killed in the massacre at Cebu City. These losses left the Concepción with nobody at all who was capable of plotting a course for it if it should be separated from the other ships, which was always a possibility with vessels that were so dependent on the vagaries of wind and weather. Additionally, none of the ships had a captain left; all three of the gentlemen who had most recently held that title had also walked to their deaths at Cebu City, joining in oblivion two immediate predecessors in their roles who had failed to return from Mactan.

With their best and their brightest mostly gone, the ships were lost amidst a confusing maze of islands whose inhabitants had proved themselves to be as devious as any European, even as the ships’ holds were almost empty of food. By now, head pilot João Lopes Carvalho had a somewhat better idea of where this damnable archipelago must lie in relation to the places that were already known to Europeans, but this knowledge provided scant comfort. For everyone knew that, in order to get home to Spain, the fleet would have to sail south and then west around the continent of Asia — i.e., right through the heart of Portugal’s maritime empire. The only other conceivable way out of this mess was back the way it had come. But, to a man, the sailors would take all of the warships of Portugal at once over another encounter with the endless emptiness of the South Pacific, to be followed by, should they be lucky enough to survive that travail a second time, a return to Antarctic storms and frost. The circumnavigation of the world to which nobody had heretofore given all that much thought had now become the only viable way forward in the minds of everyone.

Thankfully, there were at least a few experienced officers left. Gómez de Espinosa especially understood that the first order of business had to be the re-institution of some semblance of a chain of command if the fleet was to remain a fleet and not a chaotic rabble. So, for the second time in the span of a week, he took the initiative upon himself to call all of the officers to the Trinidad.

It was a sadly reduced conclave by comparison with the last one, what with the participants’ numbers being reduced by more than half. In this sense, of course, it was very much a reflection of the central quandary plaguing the whole fleet. The officers shuffled their crew rolls around every which way, but they couldn’t overcome the implacable reality of too many ships and too few men. In particular, no one had a solution for the problem of the navigator they lacked; unless and until someone developed a method for putting one man in two places at once, one of the ships would be sailing blind.

“So don’t take three ships,” growled Espinosa after his colleagues had been about their fruitless staffing contortions for a goodly while. When they all looked at him in confusion, he elaborated with growing impatience. “You say we don’t have the manpower to sail three ships. So sink one of them and use the men you do have to sail the other two. Problem solved.”

As soon as he said it, it was obvious to everyone that his really was the only solution, dismaying though it might have been. It was quickly accepted as such, and the discussion moved on to which ship should be sunk. It was definitely not going to be the Trinidad and its cannons. That narrowed down the choice to the Victoria or Concepción. Almost a year removed from their last refit in Puerto San Julián, both of those ships — all three of them, in truth — were leaking quite badly once again. But the least seaworthy of them all was the Concepción; Captain Serrano had been struggling mightily in the months before his death to contain an infestation of shipworms in its hull. Thus it was decided that the Concepción’s life must end so that its two companion vessels and the men who sailed them could have a better chance of living on.

Practical steps are a surefire remedy for existential angst; with that hard but eminently sensible decision now made, some of the gloom lifted from the assembly. Next came the question of command. For the second time in a week, Juan Sebastián Elcano offered to take one of the ships, only to be rejected yet again by his distrustful colleagues. Instead Carvalho took the captaincy of the flagship Trinidad, and with it command of the expedition as a whole. In these sorely reduced circumstances, Espinosa’s old excuse that he was a soldier rather than a sailor no longer held water, so to speak. He agreed to take the Victoria. Pilots, ship’s masters, and other personnel were likewise moved around to make ends meet. Some ordinary seamen had to be elevated into the officer ranks. This was a sharp breach with the usual protocol of the strictly hierarchical European social structure, but one that was as unavoidable as a Captain Espinosa.

With those decisions made, it was time to bid a fond farewell to the Concepción. Everything aboard the ship that was of use — food, drink, masts, sails, anchors, ropes, chains, everything down to and including stray nails — was off-loaded to its two companions. Several barrels of powder went the other way from the Trinidad.

Late on the afternoon of May 2, 1521, the half a dozen men who still remained aboard the Concepción smashed all but one of the barrels of powder with hammers to make a heap of the explosive stuff in one corner of the cargo hold. They drilled a hole in the side of the last barrel and used it to create a long spiral of powder, a fuse leading up to the main pile. Then they went up on deck. Most of the sailors climbed into the launch that lay alongside the ship, but one brave soul stayed aboard. Peering down into the cargo hold from above, he dropped a burning taper onto one end of the fuse. It failed to light. He tried again, then again. Finally, he saw a glow and heard the distinct hiss of powder burning. With a shout, he scrambled down into the launch faster than he ever had before. The other sailors pushed off, working the oars frantically to get away. Just when they and the men aboard the Trinidad and Victoria were beginning to think the fuse must have stopped burning short of its destination, a second sun ripped the ocean and sky wide open. When the sailors were able to look again, they saw that the Concepción was now nothing but a pile of hissing, smoking debris. It had become their sacrifice to the mercurial gods of the sea, freely offered up in the hope that they would be spared more of the tribulations that had so pitilessly reduced their numbers over these last months. By nightfall, no sign could be seen that any ship called the Concepción had ever existed. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

It was time to move on. The remaining two ships — even those with the greatest delusions of grandeur could no longer imagine this pair of vessels to be a “fleet” — resumed their southerly course. A couple of days later, the lookouts saw a large island dead ahead; although they didn’t realize it at the time, the land they saw was actually a part of the sprawling, misshapen Philippine island of Mindanao, on whose northeasterly tip they had met King Kolambu. The ships now turned away from his kingdom, paralleling the coast of his island in a westerly and southerly direction. After what had happened at Cebu City, no one was exactly eager to meet more Filipinos. At the same time, though, doing so was likely their only way of obtaining the food which they so urgently needed. So, it was with mixed joy and trepidation that the sailors spotted a small fishing village well down the emerald coastline of Mindanao’s Zamboanga Peninsula and dropped anchor alongside it.

They needn’t have fretted so much. Here, well away from the commercial and cultural centers of the Philippines once again, the reception they were accorded smacked more of King Kolambu’s open-hearted enthusiasm than the studied nonchalance of King Humabon during those first hours in Cebu City. A boat came rowing out to greet the ships almost as soon as they arrived, and over the Trinidad’s gunwale climbed a smiling local chieftain. Unable to communicate very well in language, he settled for one of the rituals of blood with which the sailors had become so familiar; he drew a dagger across the palm of his hand and smeared the liquid that welled forth over his breast and face, even licked some of it up. A quick-thinking Antonio Pigafetta, whose swollen cheek was finally returning to normal, promptly imitated these actions, much to the chieftain’s delight.

With so many important men dead, just about everyone left alive was stepping up and stepping into new roles. This was certainly the case with Pigafetta, who virtually alone among the sailors had managed to learn some of the language of the Filipinos. With no one who was better suited to the task to hand, the official chronicler of the expedition now took on Enrique’s old role of head diplomat. After spending some time in halting conversation with the chieftain, he volunteered to accompany that worthy ashore all by himself, to find out what he could learn and try to obtain some food for the ships. We should not fail to appreciate what a brave choice this was, particularly in light of what had happened to the last group of sailors who had accepted Filipino hospitality.

The boat carried Pigafetta and his hosts to the fishing village and then a couple of miles inland via one of the many small rivers that emptied into the ocean here. It deposited them close to the courtyard of the chieftain’s palace, which looked like a smaller, far shabbier version of King Humabon’s in Cebu City. Nevertheless, Pigafetta supped well enough on rice and fish and palm wine, then slept peacefully on a cane mat under the stars. These people appeared to be none too prosperous even by comparison with the subjects of King Kolambu, but Pigafetta was able to convey to them him and his friends’ urgent need for food. He was delivered back to the ships the next day with some pigs, goats, chickens, and rice, as much as could be spared — not a huge bounty by any means, but enough to sustain his hungry shipmates for at least a few days.

This second stop at Mindanao marked the beginning of a period of none too purposeful wandering through the southern extremities of the Philippines and places just beyond. The fact was that the new Captain General Carvalho wasn’t quite sure what to do at this point. He felt trapped between Scylla and Charybdis. To the north of him was the richer part of the Philippines, whose people had just killed about 40 of his comrades. Meanwhile the ocean not that far to the south was presumably full of Portuguese ships, who would treat these Spanish interlopers in their midst no more kindly than had King Humabon in the end. So, Carvalho chose to tramp the seaways in between like a nautical vagabond, hoping for some remedy for his difficulties to drop out of the sky. Decisiveness was not his forte.

To begin with, the ships pointed their bows due west, in which direction, so the chieftain had told Pigafetta, they would find richer settlements, with more food and succor to spare. The Philippine rainy season had now set in, bringing with it day after day of torrential downpours. These were not violent, windblown storms like the expedition had encountered in the Atlantic, but rather a constant drenching that weighed down the canvas of the sails and slowed the ships’ progress. The rains did at least ensure that there was no shortage of freshwater to drink. Food, alas, was a different story.

Following some days at sea, the ships struck land at a woebegone little island which seemed to give the lie to the last chieftain’s promise of a plenitude to the west. The meager stores the sailors had obtained from said chieftain were now completely gone, and hunger was setting its cruel teeth into their bellies. Yet there was little help for their plight to be found on this island, which we know today as Mapun. Apart from a handful of blowgun-toting natives who seemed almost as hungry as the sailors, it was home only to “some large trees, but little victuals,” as Pigafetta wrote in his journal. Even the curious Italian wasn’t inclined to object when Carvalho decided to press on immediately in search of some more abundant place of refuge and recuperation.

More fearful than ever of running into the Portuguese, Carvalho elected to turn northwest after leaving Mapun in order to ensure that Spain’s rivals remained a healthy distance away. It was one of the few really good decisions he made as captain general, in that the new course brought the ships in relatively short order to the long, stringbean-shaped island of Palawan, the fifth largest in the Philippines. They now swung about to the northeast and made their way up its eastern coast, looking for a settlement large enough to supply their needs. This they found at a sheltered harbor which today serves the metropolis of Puerto Princesa, the capital of the island and of the Philippine administrative district that is centered on it. In 1521, this spot was the home of a king whose name Pigafetta did not deign to record in his journal, but whose realm was comparable to that of Kolambu in size, riches, importance, and friendliness. Pigafetta wasted no time in walking Carvalho through yet another blood ritual with the local king.

Palawan proved to be an ideal compromise between the perils of the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated Cebu City and the hardscrabble poverty of the last couple of ports of call. Pigafetta was moved to declare it a “promised land,” what with its rich pickings of “pigs, goats, fowls, yams, bananas, coconuts, sugarcane, turnips, and rice.” Such staple foodstuffs were more precious than gold to the hungry men, more delicious than the daintiest delicacies.  The sailors ate their fill, then went on to enjoy a few weeks of rest and relaxation among the locals — not least, among the local women.

Pigafetta especially spent many hours with the Palawan Filipinos, improving his grasp of the language of this region of the world and learning something of their way of life. He learned how they made blowpipes from bamboo trunks and used them to shoot arrows made from wood, reeds, and fish bones, tipped with poisons made from “a certain herb”; how they strung their fishing poles with the brass wire which they purchased from traders who sometimes visited them from a much larger island to the south; how they loved to gamble on cock fights, a pastime which is still, for better or for worse, a staple of Philippine social life — in fact, one which has spread from there across much of the former empire of the Filipinos’ erstwhile colonial master Spain.

But the colonization of the Philippines still lay in a fairly distant future in 1521. For the time being, Magellan’s talk of Philippine subjugation had been suspended, not to be resumed for another few decades. Under Carvalho’s watch, there was likewise no more talk of conversion to the One True Faith, nor even of political alliances with the empire of King Charles. Carpe diem was the expedition’s new watchword.

One dreamy day on Palawan passed much like another. Here among so many of the trappings of paradise, it was easy to lose track of time. Even the weather was uniform; on the island, the high temperature hovers around 88 degrees Fahrenheit (31 degrees Celsius) more or less every day of the year. This year’s harvest had already been brought in, leaving the people with little more to do than chat and swim and play and frolic. Not for the first time on this voyage, the sailors marveled that these alleged primitives had it so much better in so many ways than the typical European peasant in the heart of enlightened Christendom, and wondered who was really outsmarting whom. Mostly, though, they were content to set aside any deep thinking and simply enjoy their beach-combing life of ease for as long as it lasted. The trauma of Mactan and Cebu City receded a little bit more into the past with each successive day they spent in paradise. Freed from the strictures of the duty-conscious Ferdinand Magellan, they wiled away the hours like schoolchildren on a long, careless summer break.

That said, there were occasional, disquieting signs that even this heavenly paradise was not entirely beyond the reach of temporal politics. One day there arrived a trading boat whose captain was, so he claimed, a Christian, converted by those other Christians who were to be found to the south. Carvalho tried rather aggressively to hire this man to be his guide through those dangerous waters, but he slipped away with his boat in the dead of night, evidently and understandably worried that this might be a job which he wouldn’t be permitted to refuse. This incident cast a new shadow of worry over the sailors. Would word eventually get back to the Portuguese of the other Christian strangers who were skulking about beyond the northern edge of their trading empire?

Just a few days later, a rakishly proportioned junk flying sails of a dozen impossibly bright hues entered the harbor; if the European sailors had only been familiar with the text in question, they might have called the ship a vision out of the One Thousand and One Nights. And indeed, it was crewed by Muslims. To reach here, they had sailed their colorful vessel northward from the gigantic island of Borneo, which we now know to be the third largest island in the entire world. Their junk carried gold, silks, spices, and worked objects in its hold to put even Cebu City to shame; this was the source of the brass wire which the fishermen of Palawan so coveted. Its crew revealed to Pigafetta, who was there to meet them on the dock along with the rest of a welcoming delegation, that the Portuguese had as yet made only limited inroads in Borneo, and those only around the southern half of the island. The sultanate of Brunei on its northern half, whence they hailed, was the richest independent state to be found between  China and India, with a modest but genuine territorial empire of its own. In fact, Palawan was formally considered a part of that empire, the king who now hosted the two Spanish ships having pledged his allegiance as a vassal of Brunei. The Bruneian sailors promised Pigafetta that he and his friends would be welcome in their homeland, where they would join countless other traders and tourists of every imaginable race and culture.

Pigafetta rushed to share this latest intelligence with Carvalho. The latter was not generally one for taking risks, but he decided that the risk of visiting northern Borneo was worth it. He sent his tireless Italian envoy back to the Bruneians, with orders to recruit at least a few of their number to join the Spanish ships’ crews for long enough to guide them to their city. After much bribing, wheedling, and cajoling, Pigafetta returned with three of the Bruneians in tow. By this time, Carvalho had already sent out shore parties to round up the sailors that were lollygagging all around the harbor.

They spent the next day more purposefully, stocking their ships’ holds with supplies. And the morning after that — the morning of June 21, 1521 — the Trinidad and Victoria set off on the next stage of an increasingly meandering odyssey.

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