The Voyage of Magellan

June 21 – July 31, 1521

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” observed the Greek philosopher Heraclitus not long after the time of Homer. The people of Brunei might beg to differ. For, in a world in which change can often seem the only constant, the little city-state perched on the northwestern coast of Borneo has long been an oasis of stasis. Since 1967, Brunei has been ruled by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, the 29th in an unbroken line of absolute monarchs that, according to official records, stretches all the way back to 1363.

In some other important ways as well, the Brunei of today resembles the place which the Trinidad and Victoria visited during the summer of 1521: then as now, it was very, very rich, and it was a Muslim state. Still, there are areas of differentiation between Brunei’s past and present to be discerned, where the wisdom of Heraclitus proves to hold true after all. The foundation of the modern country’s wealth is petroleum, that Pyrrhic  black gold which has permitted creakily archaic forms of government to persist in so many places even as it strangles  the evolution of social life. In 1521, however, Brunei was the proud centerpiece of a less passive, more diverse trading economy and empire. From the interior of Borneo flowed camphor, wood, hornbill, rhinoceros horn, bezoar stones, rattans, gold, bird feathers and nests, gum and wax into Brunei; from the sea on its other side came pearls, mother-of-pearl, sea cucumbers, and cowrie and turtle shells. And from its many more distant trading partners came slaves, ironware, brassware, silverware, ceramics, and silks and other textiles. The reigning Sultan Bolkiah of Brunei — the fifth in the unbroken line that stretches to his modern-day namesake — was Muslim, but only recently so, having become the first of his lineage to convert just a few years earlier.  (This is not acknowledged in the official Bruneian histories, which insist that the very first sultan back in 1363 was already a Muslim, but it is nevertheless the case.)

The Trinidad and Victoria became the first European vessels ever to enter the harbor of Brunei on the morning of July 9, 1521, following a passage of two and a half weeks from Palawan, during which they had been ably guided around the treacherous reefs that mark the northern shore of Borneo by the three Bruneian guides Antonio Pigafetta had managed to hire. Upon their arrival, it was immediately clear to the sailors that this port city was a place before which even the prosperity of Cebu City paled. The fact was that they had come to the very nerve center of the Southeast Asian maritime trade, which had been trucking along merrily for centuries before any Europeans began to encroach on its routes. The view of the docks and city ahead was obscured by junks displaying all manner of strange insignia, with still more ships awaiting their turn to tie alongside. The largest of these were several times the size of the Spanish ships. Beyond the forest of masts ahead, the European sailors could glimpse rank upon rank of solidly built warehouses, waiting on the shoreline to give and receive their contents. People of all colors and descriptions filled the spaces in between the dockside buildings, the babble of their dozens of languages wafting out over the water. Soaring high above the tableau could be seen the towers of an immense palace or citadel that stood further inland and was obviously the seat of power. All told, Brunei made the great trading ports of Europe look positively provincial. Amidst its hustle and bustle, nobody seemed to have noticed the two battered new arrivals of unprepossessing size and strange construction.

Captain General Carvalho was a little bit intimidated by it all, as just about anyone might well be. He consulted with the three guides he had picked up at Palawan, who told him that they were willing, for a small additional fee, to go ashore first and lay the necessary groundwork with their countrymen for diplomacy and trade. Carvalho, being in no hurry to send more of his own men into another foreign city after what had happened two months ago, readily agreed to this plan. So, the Trinidad’s launch delivered the trio of Bruneians to an unused corner of a pier and bid them farewell. Then the sailors on the ships settled down to wait, keeping teams primed at the capstans and sails in case another hasty departure proved necessary.

The next day, just when Carvalho was beginning to wonder whether his hirelings had simply absconded with their payment, three boats emerged from the tangle of commerce around the docks and came toward the ships. The lead boat was magnificent, with a prow and stern that seemed to be made of pure gold and a crown of peacock feathers flying above a flag of white and blue that was almost big enough to serve it as a sail. But it was no sailboat: a score of rowers pushed it along with pearl-handled oars, while an equal number of ornately costumed musicians kept time for them on pipes and drums. When the boat reached the Trinidad, eight old men in silken robes were carried up to the ship’s deck on the backs of strong young lieutenants or slaves. Two more henchmen spread a fine red carpet out over the rough wooden planking on the quarterdeck for the old men to stand on.

Asked who was in charge here, Pigafetta gestured to Carvalho. In unison, the old men directed a half-bow in the latter’s direction, and yet another henchman came forward to offer the captain general a large rectangular object, covered with a cloth of beautiful yellow silk. Carvalho accepted the offering rather gracelessly, it being so big that he could barely get his arms around it, and heavy to boot. Setting it down on the deck less gently than he might have wished to, he violated a hundred protocols by pulling the silk covering away with no further ado. Underneath was an open-topped box made of a shiny wood, painted all over with orange and jasmine flowers. Inside the box were exotic fruits the likes of which the sailors had never seen, a rainbow of mouth-watering colors sparkling in the morning sun, the exotic bounties of all of East Asia.

Pigafetta did his best to communicate his captain general’s thanks to the old men, but they seemed utterly disinterested in conversation with these weather-beaten strangers; Pigafetta got the distinct sense that they considered him and his friends to be thoroughly inconsequential barbarians. They just sat there gazing inscrutably forward while their their underlings aboard the two other, more plebian-looking boats tied up alongside the Trinidad and Victoria, then proceeded to haul aboard cruder crates containing fowls, goats, sugarcane, and a potent rice wine. (The presence of this last marked Brunei as a culture still in transition from its older belief systems to Islam.) Once the cargo had all been delivered, the old men stood up and departed without another word, taking their red carpet with them. The sailors were happy for the provisions, but they couldn’t deny the feeling of condescension which had clung to the visit from beginning to end.

The sense of being the charity case of some higher power they didn’t fathom only intensified over the days that followed. The three Bruneian guides who had shown them the way here never returned; having already extracted their payment for services rendered before leaving to report the existence of the Europeans to the government of Brunei, they evidently considered their business with them complete. Instead, every day for almost a week, two unassuming boats — little more than cargo barges really — came out to the ships bearing a fresh stock of victuals. The periods of privation they had endured had changed all of the sailors’ relationships to food forever; they were thrilled to be eating well while they idled there in the harbor. Yet they had no clue what was going on behind the scenes, didn’t know whether their fate was being deliberated somewhere in the halls of the citadel that loomed over the harbor or, indeed, whether anyone there had taken any real notice of them at all. Carvalho grew more fidgety with each passing day, and his nervousness infected all of the sailors around him.

At last, there came one noonday the same ornate boat that had visited on the first day, bearing the same group of old men. Once again the pipes and drums beat out time for the rowers as it approached. Once again the old men were borne up to the deck of the Trindad by their younger companions. Once again the red carpet was rolled out for the old men to stand upon.

This time, however, the old men spoke, in a language that Pigafetta could partially understand. It was clear that the Europeans were not the first strange-talking foreigners the welcoming delegation had dealt with in their time. Working their way patiently through the language barrier, the old men conveyed that their ruler — their sultan — had decreed that the ships could remain in the harbor for as long as they liked, and that food would continue to be delivered each day. The sultan was always interested in learning about new lands and peoples, they said. In that spirit, they offered to take a few of the sailors back with them, to meet personally with him and his court.

This was just the message that Carvalho had been waiting for. Yet the memories of what had happened when a similar offer had been delivered at Cebu City were still raw. Carvalho said, reasonably enough on the face of it, that his position of captain general precluded putting himself so blatantly in harm’s way. Gómez de Espinosa, however, was determined to go, despite his own position of captain of the Victoria. The hard-bitten old soldier being the farthest thing from a smooth-tongued diplomat, Juan Sebastián Elcano volunteered to become the head envoy, with an eager Antonio Pigafetta at his right hand to serve as translator. Four ordinary sailors, unsure whether they should feel privileged or condemned by their selection, rounded out the party.

Well aware that the usual array of trinkets would never do here, the sailors ransacked the ships’ holds to find tribute — they no longer balked at such a word — that might be worthy of such a self-evidently rich monarch as the one they were about to meet. They came up with some bolts of cloth, some golden goblets and vases, some paper and writing implements, even the imposing chair that Magellan had used as his pseudo-throne during his last week alive in Cebu City. It all looked a little pathetic laid out there on the deck, but it was the best they could do. The diplomatic delegation boarded the boat with their gifts and set off, the pipes and drums blaring in their ears.

The boat took them to the dockside and left them there with instructions only to wait. The sailors were obliged to do so for fully two hours, by which time the evening was fast closing in. Suddenly they saw a sight to take the breath away. Out of the gloaming emerged two enormous elephants, their bodies covered in acres of silk brocade; each beast had a wooden superstructure that looked weirdly nautical perched on its back. The dozen handlers who walked alongside the elephants, looking like tiny jungle monkeys in contrast to their charges’ immensity, waved their staffs in unison, and the animals obediently knelt down on all four knees. Two men walked up to lean ladders against their girths. In a daze, the sailors climbed aboard, dragging the chair they intended to offer as tribute awkwardly up behind them. They settled themselves onto plush couches that put it to shame, and the elephants stood up again, lifting them unnervingly high above the city streets. In this unexpected fashion, they entered Brunei proper.

They did so at a fault line of history, when Brunei was caught between the beliefs of the past and the newer Muslim faith. Despite the latter, clothing here was still considered an optional accessory, not a necessity. But the view of the Bruneian men’s nether equipment which this casual attitude toward the body granted the sailors showed that even those who had not yet learned modesty had adopted the practice of circumcision.

Most of all, though, the countless markets and bazaars through which the elephants ambled showed that Brunei was rich. Every conceivable staple and delicacy seemed to be on sale here. Roadside stands overflowed with cinnamon, ginger, oranges, lemons, sugarcane, melons, gourds, cucumbers, cabbage, and onions. Cages displayed horses, water buffalo, goats, chickens, geese, crows, and even more elephants. Apothecaries sold quicksilver and brilliant dyes of every imaginable color. Shop windows displayed all manner of manufactured objects in bronze, iron, glass, porcelain, wool, and other fabrics; even eyeglasses, a relatively recent European invention, were a dime a dozen here. Speaking of which: most trade was conducted using metal coins stamped with the visage of the very same sultan whom the sailors were hopefully soon to meet.

The elephants halted and knelt in front of a large building with an official air about it. Thinking they had arrived at the place where their audience with the sultan was to be held, the sailors rushed to display their shabby gifts to the small, neatly dressed man who was standing at the front door to greet them. He smiled indulgently, and laboriously explained to Pigafetta that this was only a way station of sorts, that they were still on the relative outskirts of the sprawling city. They would eat dinner and rest here tonight, he said, and would visit the sultan in his citadel tomorrow.

That night they dined on food that put even King Humabon’s table to shame: Pigafetta counted 32 varieties of meat and fish, washed down by copious quantities of rice wine. The cutlery was made of pure gold, the plates and cups of finest china; glittering oil-burning chandeliers lit the dining room. After the meal was through, the sailors went to sleep on the first real beds they had lain on since leaving Spain, with cotton-stuffed mattresses and silk sheets of a quality that King Charles would not have sniffed at. It was like sleeping on a cloud.

The morning brought a breakfast commensurate with the dinner, followed by more waiting around. Noon had come and gone before the elephants returned at last to bear them onward. In the full light of day, they could see that guards or constables were posted all over the city to maintain order, armed with swords, spears, and bucklers that looked to be of very good quality. It was becoming clearer with every passing hour that this was a civilization as advanced as their own — or perhaps more so.

Their destination was a fortress to give pause to any European army, ringed by a stout brick wall as thick as three men were tall, with towers placed at intervals all around its circumference. The sailors could see the muzzles of cannons bristling from the top of the wall — iron cannons that were far bigger than the handful of pea-shooters that were mounted on the Trinidad.

They passed under a raised portcullis and were deposited in a courtyard as big around as several city blocks. Still clutching their tribute, which was looking more pathetic than ever amidst all the size and splendor around them, the sailors walked through a towering marble archway and up a long marble staircase, wide enough for 50 men to march abreast. At the top, they passed through a narrower archway into the largest indoor space any of them had ever seen; its silk-covered walls and ceiling were  big enough to enclose the hulls of both of the ships they had arrived on and still have room to spare.

The reception hall was built on four levels, increasing in elevation as one moved further down its length; it was social rank set in stone. The lowest part, in which the sailors and their minders now stood, was filled with milling officials, courtiers, and supplicants. More of the same, but of a more prosperous and refined appearance, filled the second rank. The third was occupied by 300 warriors, seated cross-legged on the floor, each with a long, naked rapier lying poised for action in his lap. And beyond them, on a raised platform like a theatrical stage, sat the sultan on his throne. He appeared to be about 40 years of age, and was as corpulent as King Humabon. The sailors could just make out the movement of his jaws as he chewed placidly on some betel nut, bouncing a young boy — presumably his son — on his knee. A row of five scribes sat on each side of his throne, ready and waiting to write down every word that came out of his mouth. The quantity of recorders would soon begin to seem excessive, given that he tended to say surprisingly little.

A courtier explained to the sailors some of the niceties of royal protocol. Foreigners like them were allowed to go no further than this lowest level of the reception hall, but at some point the sultan would deign to recognize them. When he did so, they must signal their obeisance to him, by joining their hands together over their heads, raising and lowering first their left and then their right foot, bringing the palms to their lips, and then displaying their open hands to the sultan. They were not to attempt to speak or even to look directly at him. They could communicate only through intermediaries. The courtier rehearsed the dance of obeisance with them patiently. Espinosa in particular grumbled and rolled his eyes, but he too learned and practiced the pantomime, clumping around on the silken carpet like a bull on a ballet stage.

Finally the moment came. “The king recognizes his latest foreign visitors,” said the courtier loudly. The sailors felt all of the eyes in the hall turn upon them, taking in their raggedy clothing and unkempt hair and beards, incongruous if not hilarious amidst so much well-groomed opulence. But they dutifully muscled their way through the dance, basically correctly if not gracefully, whilst keeping their own eyes fixed to the carpet at their feet. “His Majesty is curious who you are and where you come from,” said the courtier when they were finished. Pigafetta explained as best he could and presented the tribute, which the courtier and his sultan accepted without comment.

The conversation that followed was belabored to say the least. First Pigafetta had to find a way to convey his meaning to the courtier through the language barrier. When the two men thought they had it all sorted, the courtier would go over to a brass tube sticking out of the wall and speak into it. His words would be received by an attendant posted at the tube’s other outlet, behind the guards near the far end of the hall. This attendant would then approach the sultan; kneeling at the foot of the stairs leading up to the stage, he would relay the message. Then the sultan would formulate a laconic if not cryptic response, which despite its brevity often took him several minutes of methodical chewing to come up with, like a cow serenely working its cud. Once he had spoken, the process had to be repeated in reverse.

Pigafetta was aware that he was navigating dangerous terrain. Just as had been the case with the Filipinos, these Bruneians were naturally predisposed to conflate this Spanish expedition with the Portuguese who were swarming in such numbers to the south. Man of few words though he was, the sultan did make it clear that he didn’t like these encroachments on his trade routes one bit. Pigafetta was at pains to explain that the ships on which he and his comrades had come were not Portuguese, that they had no more love for the latter than the sultan did, but he never knew for sure whether his meaning was getting through. After several hours of sporadic and inconclusive dialog, shot through with long pauses when the sultan’s attention wandered elsewhere for a while, the courtier abruptly informed Pigafetta that the audience was over. With no further ceremony, the sailors were shepherded back to their elephants to spend another night at the same house where they had slept the night before.

The next morning only one elephant waited in front of their lodgings. The official in charge there patiently explained to them that just five of them were to return to their ships while the other two stayed behind as the sultan’s “guests.” Pigafetta promptly volunteered to be one of those who remained, but, rather strangely, the man didn’t want the only one of the strangers who could communicate with him in language, however imperfectly. The functionary made it clear that the honor of remaining was instead to fall to Espinosa and Elcano, whom he correctly understood to be the highest ranking members of the party. The Europeans could see no option but to comply with his wishes. So, the two chosen ones stood and watched as their five companions climbed up the ladder onto the little porch atop the elephant’s broad back; Pigafetta was on the verge of tears as he did so, so extreme was his frustration at missing this chance to learn more about yet another strange culture. Instead he and the four ordinary sailors were delivered back to their vessels to share their tales of the splendors and wonders of Brunei with the rest of their shipmates.

At that point, no one aboard knew what was to happen next. But everyone was unnerved by what actually did: nothing whatsoever. Each morning at the same time, the Bruneian barges came out to feed the visitors, but otherwise no one paid any more attention to them. The life of the great city continued on around them, day after day. As it did so, no one in Brunei seemed the slightest bit interested in the strangers in their midst.

Paralyzed by his memories of the massacre at Cebu City, Carvalho did absolutely nothing to force a reckoning. This drove Pigafetta half crazy; convinced that they had stumbled into some social ritual that they didn’t understand, he begged for permission to take a launch ashore and try to reopen the lines of communication, only to have his captain general reject his entreaties each time. Eventually Carvalho began to broach the idea of simply sailing off again, leaving the hostages — or whatever the men still ashore were to the Bruneians — to their fate. For all anyone knew, they might be dead already, he said. The contrast with Ferdinand Magellan, who for all his other faults had never left a loyal man behind, could hardly have been more stark. Luckily for the hostages, Carvalho’s proposal met with strident opposition among their once and hopefully future shipmates. Espinosa, who had displayed such fealty, bravery, self-discipline, and cleverness throughout the expedition, was by now the most beloved single officer of them all. Carvalho soon realized that he would likely have a mutiny on his hands if he tried to order a departure without him. So, he continued to do nothing, as the days turned into weeks and morale and discipline aboard the ships sank lower and lower. Pigafetta paced the deck like a tiger in a cage. Carvalho cut no more relaxed a figure; he sat on the poop deck most of each day staring out across the water, waiting for an attack to come.

On the morning of July 29, 1521, he saw that which he had been dreading. Hundreds of boats emerged from the maze of docklands, each carrying a battalion of armed men. Leaping to his feet, Carvalho raised the same hue and cry that the sailors had heard at Cebu City: “They are coming! To sea! For your lives!” Their scruples about the hostages forgotten in the heat of the moment, the men scrambled into action. In their haste to get underway, those aboard the captain-less Victoria jerked the capstan into motion too roughly; the anchor chain broke, leaving the dead weight at its other end at the bottom of the harbor and leaving the ship with only one anchor remaining. Fortunately, there were no other mishaps, the wind was blowing fair, and the boats coming toward them were maintaining an oddly lackadaisical pace for an assault force. The ships made it out of the inner harbor well before the boats reached them.

As they passed through the harbor’s mouth, however, they met two gigantic junks sailing directly toward them from the opposite direction. In a flash, the sultan’s dastardly plan became clear to Carvalho. He intended to trap the Trinidad and Victoria between the armada of small boats and the two behemoths. Only audacity could save the day now, he decided. He shouted for his men to unlimber the flagship’s cannons and to bring the Trinidad about so that it could unleash a broadside at the nearest junk. The cannons fired, filling the air with smoke and noise, sending up waterspouts well short of their target. Before they could be reloaded to try again, the junks surprised everyone by showing their sterns to the European ships. The blood lust of battle having now well and truly come over him, Carvalho ordered his own charges to set off in hot pursuit. Before anyone could stop to think about what was happening or why, the hunted became the hunter.

These ponderous Asian vessels had been built for cargo capacity, not for speed; for all that the Spanish carracks were not exactly svelte themselves, they had little trouble overtaking their quarry. At Carvalho’s orders, Pigafetta shouted across the water separating the Trinidad from the closest junk. In his pidgin Austronesian, he yelled for the ship to strike its sails and prepare to be boarded, or face another salvo from the flagship’s cannons. Remarkably, it complied with his demand.

Feeling rather like the dog that caught the merchant’s wagon, the sailors brought their ships alongside the junk, which was so huge that there was room for the Trinidad and Victoria to line up bow to stern next to it. Its gunwale was so high that, in order to reach it, the sailors would have to climb up the junk’s side in the same way they climbed onto the decks of their own ships from their launches and longboats. Keenly conscious of the absence of Espinosa — always the man to lead an operation like this one — Carvalho delegated the command of a boarding party to a mild-mannered fellow named Martín Méndez. He was a purser, more clerk than warrior, notable chiefly for having somehow managed to maintain an appearance of pudginess through all of the hardships of the past 22 months. Yet there were precious few other candidates for leadership roles left by now. If things kept going as they were, Pigafetta might soon find himself leading charges. (Come to think of it, he would probably be happier to do so than Méndez currently was…)

On this occasion, though, charging into battle wasn’t quite what it’s been cracked up to be. Méndez and twenty sailors clambered up the ropes that the Asians had conveniently left hanging down the side of their vessel’s hull and leaped over the gunwale, brandishing swords and straining to look appropriately fierce. They were greeted by confused faces, belonging to people who all too evidently had no idea why these two mouse-sized ships had assaulted their own elephantine one so rudely. The crew of the junk put up no resistance whatsoever to the boarding party, appeared to have no weapons at all to hand. Méndez shouted down, not without a certain note of pride in his voice, that the junk had been secured. Perhaps a life of derring-do wasn’t such a bad fit for him after all.

Carvalho now climbed the ropes cautiously to make his presence known, with Pigafetta trailing right behind him. It wasn’t hard to identify the captain of the junk; in contrast to his naked or semi-naked underlings, he was swathed in enough gold and silk to clothe a harem — which, as it turned out, was exactly what he had in his hold, along with enough other exotic treasures to fill ten carracks. Pigafetta relayed to his comrades that the junk hailed from Luzon, the largest and richest of all the Philippines Islands, lying farther north than the Spanish ships had ever ventured in their own wanderings through that archipelago. It was by now abundantly clear that the pincer maneuver Carvalho had imagined had been just that, a figment of his imagination. The Filipino captain was honestly baffled as to why his ship — the farthest thing from a ship of war — had been attacked by these bizarre foreigners. But he was willing to negotiate to put this incident behind him and get on with the assignment that had brought him to Brunei.

Upon hearing this, Carvalho took the Filipino captain by the elbow and led him gently away, out of the hearing of even Pigafetta. A tense dialog ensued, conducted with hands and feet and heads and facial expressions more than with words. Some items changed hands, after which the two men parted, Carvalho returning to his own folk looking thoroughly pleased with himself, visibly weighted down by a small fortune in jewels and gold which he had secreted about his person. A few minutes later, the Filipino captain emerged from a hatch with three bare-breasted girls in tow; he led them over to Carvalho and bestowed them on him with a smile and a half-bow. Carvalho now announced that his business was finished here, and ushered the sailors and their three fetching new shipmates back over the gunwale and down the ropes. As soon as they were aboard the Trinidad again, he shut the girls up inside the cabin that had once belonged to Magellan, who must surely have been rolling in his grave at the prospect. Carvalho, on the other hand, was obviously pleased with his spoils.

The Spanish and Filipino vessels went their separate ways. As they were doing so, the flotilla of warrior-laden boats that had sparked the whole incident could just be made out on the horizon, sailing in the opposite direction from the ships they had been assumed to be hunting. Nothing had been as Carvalho had thought it was.

Nevertheless, having been led to commit an act of blatant piracy by his mistaken assumptions, Carvalho was all for leaving Brunei behind forever. Even now, though, the idea met much opposition. Pigafetta spoke up, as he had been doing more and more of late. “It seems to me that we may have miscalculated the sultan’s intentions,” he said, placing a diplomatic emphasis on the first-person pronoun so as not to shame his captain general unduly. “Let me take a launch back into the harbor with just a few others, if any are willing to volunteer. We will try to find out where matters stand and what has become of Espinosa and Elcano. The rest of you can wait here with the ships. If we don’t return within four days, you can sail on with a clear conscience.”

Everyone agreed that this was a good plan. Indeed, so beloved was Espinosa that half of the sailors aboard were ready to volunteer to accompany the hardy little Italian. Pigafetta selected the three sailors he thought best suited for the mission and set off in a launch.

The boat arrived in the harbor at dawn. The place showed no signs of hostility or emergency. Pigafetta thought he recognized the junk which Carvalho had robbed tied up peacefully next to one of the largest quays. He and his friends steered their launch well away from it. They found a short empty stretch of pier on the opposite side of the harbor. Pigafetta had the sailors bring the launch as close to the dock as they could, then leaped across the intervening few feet of water. “Keep watch on this spot,” he called to them. “I will return here if I can.” Then he set off into the great metropolis, alone and unarmed, half expecting to be waylaid and imprisoned or killed as soon as he was spotted.

He was not. Reinforcing the theme that had held sway ever since the Europeans first arrived in this confounding place, no one could care less about his presence. Pigafetta decided to make for the sultan’s citadel, whose towers dominated the city’s skyline. From there, he might be able to retrace the route the elephants had taken to arrive at the building where he had said farewell to Espinosa and Elcano a fortnight earlier. Thankfully, his innate sense of direction was strong. Dusty, hungry, and thirsty from a day spent exploring the urban catacombs, he fetched up at last at the tidy hotel near sunset. Walking boldly up to the guards at the front door, he asked to see the official in charge.

That diffident little man emerged after several long minutes, displaying the first real interest in Pigafetta that the Italian had prompted since walking back into the city. Emerging right behind him, looking clean, well-groomed, and well-fed, were Espinosa and Elcano. Pigafetta had never been so glad to see anybody in his life; he threw his arms around Espinosa before he could stop himself, much to the gruff old soldier’s discomfiture.

It slowly emerged that Espinosa and Elcano’s exile and the lack of communication during the past two weeks stemmed from barriers of language and custom — i.e., exactly the sort of communication cock-up that Pigafetta had suspected. The ersatz innkeeper had been as much at a loss as Carvalho over the last fortnight. It turned out that the keeping of “hostages” was part of an elaborate political ritual. It was a way for the hosts to show respect for their guests by wining and dining the most elevated of the envoys, even as it was a way for the guests to show their faith in their hosts by leaving some of their own number in their hands. The Bruneians had expected the visitors to return to the docks the very next day to continue their diplomacy. The official left in charge of Espinosa and Elcano hadn’t known what to think or do when the Europeans had failed to do so, then persisted in remaining absent for day after day after day. For their part, Espinosa and Elcano had wondered if they should try to leave the guesthouse of their own accord, but didn’t know what reaction this would provoke. To complete the comedy of errors, Pigafetta learned that the boats full of warriors which had been sent to “attack” the Spanish ships had actually been on their way to deal with a troublesome local chieftain further down the coast of Borneo; if the Trinidad and Victoria had simply stayed put, the boats would have rowed right past them.

A relieved Pigafetta joined Espinosa and Elcano in filling his belly with the fine Bruneian victuals one last time and sleeping a sleep of deliverance on a soft Bruneian mattress. After breakfast the next day, the Bruneian official, although still rather bemused and confused by recent events, agreed to provide an elephant to take his three guests to the spot on the bad end of the docklands to which Pigafetta directed him. The three Europeans stood on the pier shouting and waving their hands, ignored as usual by the Asian sailors and dockworkers who were busy loading and unloading the ships all around them. With a loud hurrah of their own, their three friends in the launch came over to pick them up.

It was a joyous reunion, but not quite enough of one to displace in Pigafetta’s memory the look of concern — or was it contempt? — that he had seen in Espinosa’s eyes the night before at dinner, when the latter had been told of all that Captain General Carvalho had and hadn’t done over the past two weeks. The epic adventure of Magellan’s voyage into the unknown had descended into farce since the tragic death of its hero. And it struck Epinosa that, as long as João Lopes Carvalho remained the steward of the hero’s legacy, that state of affairs was unlikely to change.

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