November 6 – December 18, 1521
It is commonplace in our day and age to walk into a supermarket and see great piles of pineapples, oranges, and avocados that have reached the sales bins across staggering distances. How different must be the lives of the people who cultivated them, we might think as our fingers caress the fruits of their labors. We might marvel – or maybe scoff? — that we live in a world that transports foodstuffs so far just to give pampered shoppers like us a little bit more variety in the local produce section. We might be tempted to imagine that this a new development, a symptom of the modern globalized condition. It is not. People have been expending heroic efforts to provide others with a fresh taste on the tongue since long before the word “globalization” was coined.
Clove trees, for example, grew only in the Maluku Islands of the South Pacific until fairly recently. And yet their aromatic dried flower buds started to travel incredibly far from their home islands at an incredibly early date. Modern archaeologists have discovered them in household pantries in the ruins of the Bronze Age city of Terqa, in present-day Syria. This suggests that a long-distance trade in cloves had already begun 700 years before the Trojan War. Globalization as a reality if not a concept is older than we think.
For centuries, the Philippine city of Manila served as the hub of the trade in cloves; from here they reached China, India, and most of the other civilizations of Asia. Surviving Chinese documents dating from around the time of Jesus Christ instruct courtiers to be sure to chew cloves in order to sweeten their breath before entering the presence of the emperor. It was through China and India that tiny quantities of cloves eventually made their way to Europe, via the fabled overland Silk Roads. They were so rare and precious in Christendom as to become almost mystical treasures, delicacies beyond compare for the refined palettes of kings and popes. Small wonder that they were ascribed all manner of curative properties. They were believed to improve one’s vision when applied directly to the eyeball, to cure colds when rubbed onto the forehead, and when swallowed to improve digestion and to increase male potency.
The Moluccans — the Austronesian-speaking peoples who live in Maluku — bestowed the gift of cloves upon a broader world whose extent and even existence they could scarcely comprehend. They had no native tradition of writing, but they were already a culture in flux in that respect and others before they met their first Europeans. For Islam came to their islands around half a century prior to the Trinidad and Victoria, bringing with it the Arabic script. An unusually rigid set of mores surrounding sex and marriage predated its arrival in Maluku; these may have made the transition to the faith more straightforward here than it was in places like Brunei. Even a married woman’s father or brother was not allowed to be alone with her under any circumstances. The European sailors were most definitely not going to find in Maluku the orgiastic free-for-all that they had enjoyed in so many other places on their long journey.
More than anything else, the Moluccans had always been tremendous traders, who understood the value that foreigners placed upon their cash crops — not only cloves, but also mace and nutmeg — and used it to maximal advantage, to obtain everything from cloth to weaponry. The gateway to the Moluccan spice trade was a cluster of four small islands — Ternate, Tidore, Moti, and Makian — in the northwestern part of the archipelago. Each of them was the barest tip of a volcano sticking out of the ocean. Yet Ternate and Tidore especially grew rich and powerful by acting as the merchants for the rest of Maluku.
The people of these islands lived well by any standard, with a diet to die for. Their nutritional staple was a sort of bread made from the sago palm, often sweetened with palm sugar and supplemented by coconuts, mangoes, almonds, citrus fruits, breadfruits, and jackfruits. Seafood, pork, and goat meat were also commonplace at their tables. In keeping with their sexual mores, the habits of dress of the urban classes at least were remarkably modest; both men and women covered their chest with a baju blouse and wrapped their lower half in a sarong that stretched from the waist to the knees or the ankles. They dyed their clothing in a rainbow of colors, the brighter the better. The Moluccans may have been modest, but they were not a dull people.
During the fifteenth century, the Moluccans traded principally with Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula; from here their cloves and other spices were sent up to Manila for wider distribution. In 1511, however, Malacca was conquered by the Portuguese, in an operation that involved Ferdinand Magellan. As we learned many pages ago now, Magellan’s best friend Francisco Serrão set off from Malacca in search of the Spice Islands shortly afterward. His ship was sunk in a storm after a series of adventures, but he and six or seven others were rescued and brought at last to Ternate. Serrão never left Maluku thereafter. From Ternate, he set up a lucrative trade in cloves with the Portuguese who now occupied Malacca, pleasing the local sultan so much that he was given the hand of the latter’s daughter in marriage and a palace of his own in which to dwell. Through the letters he sent back to his old friend from Ternate, he inspired Magellan in his own enterprise.
This, then, was the backstory into which the remnants of that enterprise sailed in November of 1521. The conscripted native pilot pointed the Trinidad and Victoria toward the island he knew best: Tidore, the great political and commercial rival of Ternate. The sultan of Tidore had gnashed his teeth in frustration at the trading arrangement which Serrão had established with the Portuguese on the island just to the north. When his lieutenants reported a pair of European ships sailing toward his own island, he saw his chance to make a similarly lucrative arrangement for himself. He would attempt to do so, of course, with no real idea whatsoever of what Spain and Portugal were or how or why they were so opposed to one another. Nor did the sailors on the Spanish ships that were now approaching have any idea about the internal politics of Maluku. It would truly be a case of the blind meeting the blind.
Late on the afternoon of November 8, 1521, the Trinidad and Victoria dropped anchor in the harbor of Tidore under humid, glowering skies, the flagship letting fly another salvo from its cannons to mark their arrival. The sailors saw before them a tidy little port, nowhere near so busy or so architecturally impressive as Brunei, yet obviously prosperous in its own right. Instead of a citadel, the scene was crowned by the mountain peak that reared high and sheer behind the city. Their memories of what had happened on Cebu being as vivid as ever, the sailors did nothing right away, being content to wait and see what reaction the salvo provoked ashore.
That night, the native pilot who had guided them here leaped overboard and swam for shore. The sailors greeted his escape with a shrug; he had served his purpose. No one bothered to go after him, and no one ever saw him again.
The next morning a beautifully carved boat detached itself from a pier and moved toward the ships. As it drew nearer, the sailors could see a trim figure sitting under a silk umbrella between two columns of rowers. The baju that covered his chest was of the purest white, trimmed with shining golden threads at the ends of the sleeves; his bare feet poked out of the bottom of his equally understated but equally rich sarong. A silken veil covered his face, and a garland of flowers was perched on top of his head. His apparel might have read as effeminate on another man, but the regal way he carried himself transcended such labels. A young boy sat with him, similarly clad and bearing a golden scepter. Four servants stood at their beck and call. Golden vases and caskets surrounded the little party, filled with who knew what exotic substances.
The boat pulled up alongside the Trinidad, and one of the servants shouted up to the ship’s deck. Antonio Pigafetta found that he could understand the man well enough. The words were those of a polite greeting to the strangers from afar, and an invitation to send their leader down to confer with Sultan Mansur of Tidore, who was evidently the personage taking pride of place in the boat. Gómez de Espinosa and Pigafetta clambered down the ropes. This was the moment of truth, when they would find out for certain if they had actually arrived at their goal and, just as importantly, find out whether the people who lived here were willing to receive them and to trade with them.
They had, and they were. Sultan Mansur was all smiles and bonhomie as he confirmed that, yes, his island was a part of Maluku. He gestured to one of his servants, who reached into one of the golden caskets and pulled out a handful of sweet-smelling flower buds, then offered them to the two Europeans. Espinosa and Pigafetta sniffed cautiously, then popped a couple of the dried buds into their mouths. They knew instantly that they were cloves. After more than two years of travail, the Magellan expedition had reached the Spice Islands. Unable to restrain himself, Pigafetta shouted the good news back up to the men on deck. A spontaneous hurrah erupted from both vessels. At long last, it was mission accomplished.
Placidly unperturbed by all of the commotion, Sultan Mansur explained that he had been awaiting the strangers: he had dreamed recently of two such ships as theirs coming to his island. He had even betaken himself outside on the night of the dream and confirmed the prophecy by peering at the Moon. Pigafetta invited him to come aboard the Trinidad, and the sultan graciously accepted.
What followed was like none of the earlier negotiations with native princes that had taken place on the flagship. The sailors were so overjoyed at having reached their goal that they forgot their usual superiority complex completely. They saw Sultan Mansur as the living embodiment of their success, and treated him with appropriate reverence. The officers kissed his hand one by one as he climbed over the gunwale, then led him up to the quarterdeck, where a chair — not as fine as the one that had been donated to the sultan of Brunei, but as fine as the ship’s carpenters could make — had been hastily covered in red velvet to serve Mansur as a throne. He took his seat upon it, and the officers sat down at his feet. Pigafetta stood beside the sultan, translating like a trusted vizier while the monarch told the assemblage about his island and its neighbors. After Pigafetta had reciprocated by telling the Europeans’ story, the sultan said that he would be honored to fill their ships’ holds with all of the cloves they could carry and whatever else the sailors wished, as a token of friendship for them to carry back to their king. He even hoped, he said, that he would be able to make the trip back to this land of Spain himself someday, to look this King Charles of theirs in the eye and affirm his friendship personally. In the meantime, the sailors bestowed upon him a flag of Spain to fly next to his own. The boy with the scepter — the sultan’s son, naturally — was showered in toys and trinkets by two ships’ worth of adoptive doting uncles. When the sultan and his son left the Trinidad some hours after they had come, the sailors said farewell with yet another salute from the cannons, done this time not as a show of strength but out of sincere gratitude for their warm reception.
Espinosa and Pigafetta left with the sultan, to feast at his table and introduce themselves to his minsters. Pigafetta had plenty of opportunity to satisfy his appetite for gossip during and after the dinner. He learned about Serrão’s brilliant career on Ternate, and found out that he had died only eight months before — i.e., at very close to the same time as his old friend Ferdinand Magellan. It was rumored in some quarters that Sultan Mansur’s spies had poisoned the foreigner who had done so much for the economy of the rival island, but this was only a rumor; he may just as easily have died of natural causes. However he had perished, the Europeans felt quietly glad that Serrão was no more. For he was, after all, a Portuguese, and they had come here under the flag of Spain.
But despite the passing away of his mortal shell, Serrão still loomed over these volcanic gateways to Maluku, seemed to float like a presence up out of Hades on the warm vapors that issued from the islands’ many sulfurous cracks and seams. Just two days after the first meeting with Sultan Mansur, a boat arrived in the harbor of Tidore bearing, as one of its handlers shouted across the water, the crown prince of Ternate and the widow of Francisco Serrão. Most disconcertingly of all, the native man who did the shouting did so in heavily accented Portuguese. Espinosa stalled for time while he sent Pigafetta ashore to find out whether receiving the delegation was permissible in the eyes of Sultan Mansur. The latter displayed his typical unflappable equanimity. “Do just as you please,” he told Pigafetta with a lazy wave of the hand.
This permission having been duly relayed, Espinosa rowed out in a launch to meet the boat. He had an amiable enough conversation with the visitors, who seemed blessedly little cognizant that the interests of Spain and Portugal were at odds in this part of the world — or, perhaps more to the point, that Spain and Portugal were separate entities at all. The delegation from Ternate made no immediate demands of Espinosa, and he made no offers to them. Their mission appeared to have been one of intelligence-gathering and a bit of preliminary glad-handling.
Two days later, another boat from Ternate hailed the ships. This time, the Portuguese words that wafted across the water all too plainly issued from a Portuguese mouth. Espinosa’s blood ran cold for a moment. Yet the man’s tone was polite, even good-natured. He seemed genuinely happy to be greeting the enemy. Scanning the horizon, Espinosa could see no other vessels, whether of European or native construction, behind this one. There was just one man on one small boat with a few native rowers to get him where he wished to go. Not knowing what else to do, Espinosa granted the first person from their home continent whom the sailors had met since leaving the Canary Islands permission to come aboard his flagship.
The little figure who bounded over the gunwale was all hearty laughter and handshakes. Eyes shining like suns from a face so hairy that it was hard to see where beard ended and eyebrows began, he greeted the sailors as if they were long-lost family. Geopolitics seemed the farthest thing from his mind as he joked and hugged and slapped backs, expressing over and over again how thrilled he was to be in the company of his own kind again. “Is Captain General Magellan among you?” he asked out of the blue. A stunned silence followed. How did he know the name of their fallen leader?
There seemed little point in prevarication. “I regret to say that Captain General Magellan is with God now,” Espinosa said stiffly.
The little man’s face fell in apparently sincere regret. “A pity,” he said. “I have heard so much about him, and did so look forward to meeting him.”
Gradually, the sailors teased his story out of him. His name was Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, he explained. He was one of the officers who had sailed from Malacca with Francisco Serrão all those years ago, and he had been the last of them still at his side when that man had died. A year ago, he said, when Serrão was still alive, a Portuguese ship passing through Maluku had warned the two of them to be on the lookout for Magellan’s fleet, which had escaped all attempts to intercept it in the Atlantic and might — just might — still be seeking a westward route to these very islands. Serrão had been surprised — to put it mildly — when he heard that his friend had switched sides in the battle for empire, yet he couldn’t help but relish the fact that the seed his letters had planted had flowered so splendidly as this. “A westward voyage to Maluku!” he had said, shaking his head in wonderment. “Bravo, Ferdinand! Bravo!” He and Alfonso had dearly hoped that Magellan would turn up in their midst one day. And now two of his ships had done just that — but both Magellan and Serrão were dead. The Fates could be cruel mistresses.
Alfonso was nothing if not a born raconteur. And the sailors, for their part, were delighted to have someone new from the world they had left behind to talk to. Still, as they plied him with some of the last of their palm wine and shared some of their own tales of adventure, they were constantly trying to figure out where he stood with regard to them. After all, he was an agent of the Portuguese king, and they were trying to break that monarch’s secret monopoly in a trade good that was literally worth more than its weight in gold.
Alcohol does tend to loosen tongues; at three o’clock in the morning, Pigafetta finally asked the question that was on all of his shipmates’ minds. “Aren’t you supposed to be rushing to report us to your people on Malacca instead of sharing our wine?” An awkward pause ensued. “Or have you already done that?” he said by way of afterthought, giving voice to the fear that loomed foremost for all of them.
Alfonso laughed in his hearty, roguish way. “I was wondering when we would get around to that,” he winked. “Let us say that I am an… independent agent. When you spend enough time in these remote parts of the world, the politics of Europe begin to seem rather… remote.”
Espinosa grasped his meaning in a flash. “We could use a man like you, who knows something of these seaways and of Portuguese habits, to help us get home,” he said. “Would you like to sail with us?”
Alfonso smiled. “I might be convinced, in the name of my friend’s friend whom I so wanted to meet and other… considerations,” he said. “But I would need to bring my wife with me.”
All eyes turned to Espinosa. It had, of course, been Magellan’s firm policy to allow no women to sail with his fleet. The expedition had broken from that rule only once since his death, during the inglorious tenure of João Lopes Carvalho as captain general, and just look how that had turned out. Now, though, Espinosa thought the benefits were worth the risk. “Agreed,” he said with a brisk nod. “But let her remain in her home until shortly before we sail.”
Alfonso being amenable to these terms, he agreed to join the crew of the Trinidad for, as Pigafetta wrote in his journal, “a large salary.” If nothing else, he made the life of his new shipmates much more lively.
Yet even his irrepressible presence failed to relieve Espinosa of the anxiety that still plagued him in the midst of this affable, welcoming paradise. For the fact remained that they were in a place that had established connections with Portugal, where Portuguese ships came occasionally if not frequently. And Espinosa knew now as well that the Portuguese were still thinking about Magellan’s expedition, still keeping an eye out for it if no longer actively scouring the oceans. How long would it be until word of the strange ships’ presence here made it back to Malacca via one of the native junks and boats that plied the seaways between the islands? The Trinidad and Victoria were dangerously exposed. Each successive day here was, Espinosa sensed, another roll of the dice. Like Odysseus when he was in the clutches of the gorgeous nymph Calypso, he just wanted to be quit of paradise and on his way home.
But the sultan who was to provide him with a cargo of cloves to take with him refused to be hurried. He had decided to personally lead a fleet of boats to the nearby island of Bacan, where, so he said, the best cloves of all could be found. He departed on this mission with considerable fanfare on November 15. Espinosa would have looked churlish in the extreme if he had dared to complain that the sultan was taking such steps to ensure that his new friends left his island with only the best of the best. But that didn’t keep Espinosa from chafing in silence; as far as he was concerned, any old cloves would have done just fine.
The possibility of discovery by the Portuguese wasn’t the only worry keeping Espinosa up at night. He went down into the Trinidad’s hold with Carvalho and the ship’s master to have a close look at the patched-up hole in the side of the hull, the crudely bandaged wound that had come courtesy of the storm the ships had weathered on their way to Maluku. The boards that extended out beyond the patched area showed signs of splitting, raising legitimate concerns about the structural integrity of the hull as a whole. But set against these concerns was the harsh reality that repairing the damage properly would require hauling the ship out of the water for the third time since leaving Spain. Nobody was in a hurry to do that again. The ordinary sailors shuddered to think of the backbreaking work it would entail so close on the heels of the last refit, while Espinosa was, as we’ve seen, in a desperate hurry to get away before any Portuguese came to investigate the stories of pale-faced strangers in Maluku that might be reaching them even now. Just to compound the difficulties, there was a lack of good timber on Tidore; the trees here were mostly soft scrub and bamboo. Pigafetta might ask Sultan Mansur if it was possible to import wood from elsewhere, but doing so would take still more time. Espinosa decided to have his carpenters shore up the gash as well as possible without pulling the ship out of the water and hope for the best. If it did start to leak on the way home, they could search for a more secluded island on which to repair it properly.
So, the days drifted by, while Espinosa fretted and the other sailors luxuriated in their surroundings. And well they might: these Spice Islands were everything Serrão had told Magellan they were in his letters. The sailors were free to go where they would when not on duty, as long as they obeyed Espinosa’s strict orders to respect the ways of their hosts and, most of all, to keep their hands off their women. For one of Alfonso’s tales involved seven Portuguese drifters who had visited Maluku aboard a native junk that they had somehow commandeered. They had tried to have their way with some of the women on Bacan, only to be seized and executed for their crimes. Espinosa made sure that every sailor heard this story before venturing ashore for the first time. Its moral was simple: “Don’t mess this up for all of us. Not now, not after all we’ve been through to get here.” Thankfully for everyone involved, the sailors listened and complied.
They compensated for the lack of women as well as wine — this was, we must remember, a Muslim sultanate, and a bit more mature of one than Brunei — with plenty of song and with the other pleasures of an equatorial climate that positively caressed the soul with its benevolence. To these sixteenth-century sailors, who knew nothing of modern geology, the volcanic island seemed like a place of magic. It was a natural sauna, wreathed in a perpetual cloud of steam, with temperatures that seldom went much above or below 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), day or night. In the long term, the relentlessly balmy weather might have started to feel oppressive, but right now it felt like a heavenly reprieve from the harsh real world, a Shangri La made manifest.
The commandment to keep his distance from the women didn’t prevent Pigafetta from inquiring into the Moluccans’ conjugal arrangements with his standard level of interest. He learned that Sultan Mansur had a harem of 200 women at his beck and call. “The sultan eats alone, or with his principal wife, on a kind of raised dais,” Pigafetta wrote with perchance a hint of jealousy, “from which he can see all the other women sitting round, and he decides upon the one who most pleases him to come to him. No one without special permission from the sultan can see those ladies, and if anybody by day or by night were found near their house he would be killed immediately.” Unsurprisingly, the sultan’s issue was prodigious: he had no fewer than 26 children.
Just as he had the cinnamon tree, Pigafetta made it a point to examine the mysterious source of cloves. He took a longboat out to Bacan, to visit the sultan as he was supervising the gathering of the cloves there and to study the trees on which they grew.
The tree from which cloves are gathered is high, and its trunk is as thick as a man’s body, more or less, according to the age of the plant. Its branches spread out somewhat in the middle of the tree, but near the top they form a pyramid. The bark is of an olive color, and the leaves very like those of the laurel. The cloves grow at the end of little branches in bunches of ten or twenty. These trees always bear more fruit on one side than the other, according to the seasons. The cloves are white when they first sprout, they get red as they ripen, and blacken when dry. They are gathered twice in the year, once about Christmas and the other time about Saint John’s Day. The clove tree does not live except in the mountains, and if it is transferred to the plain it dies there.
The leaf, the bark, and the wood, as long as they are green, have the strength and fragrance of the fruit itself. If these are not gathered when just ripe they get so large and hard that nothing of them remains good except the rind. It is said that the mist renders them perfect, and indeed we saw almost every day a mist descend and surround one or other of the above-mentioned mountains. Among these people everyone possesses some of these trees, and each man watches over his own trees and gathers their fruit, but does not do any work round them to cultivate them. This tree does not grow except in the Maluku Islands.
Sultan Mansur returned from Bacan on November 24. The sailors heard him before they saw him; dozens of drummers aboard his boats pounded their instruments in unison to mark his entrance to the harbor, creating a hubbub almost as loud as and far more sustained than any cannon salvo.
Espinosa would have preferred to begin loading the cloves onto the ships on the very day of the sultan’s return, but this was not to be. Pigafetta was made to understand that the sultan wished to hold a farewell party — nay, a veritable civic festival for the Europeans, a full month of revels. This news put all of the sailors on edge; not for the first nor the last time, everyone thought back to the bloody party King Humabon had thrown them in Cebu City. Espinosa told Pigafetta to return to the sultan and politely decline the offer, to explain to him that the ships really needed to be on their way as soon as possible.
Much to Espinosa’s consternation, Pigafetta came back with an unhappy Sultan Mansur himself in tow. It seemed that Mansur, who was anything but a dullard, had cottoned onto the sailors’ mistrust. Vacillating theatrically between disappointment and indignation, he pointed out that he had no trouble entrusting his person to his guests, and reiterated the honor he had done them by going to fetch a cargo of cloves for them personally. He pulled out a gilt-bound copy of the Koran and kissed it, declaring as he did so his spirit of friendship toward the Europeans, a spirit which he could maintain only as long as they reciprocated in kind. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke — whether real or crocodile, no one could say for sure. The Europeans were backed into a corner. After a quick consultation with Juan Sebastián Elcano and Martín Méndez, Espinosa turned to Pigafetta. He gritted his teeth as he spoke: “Tell him that we are grateful for his kindness and the honor he now wishes to do us. We would be pleased to stay for two weeks more.” This compromise seemed to satisfy the sultan, much though it taxed Espinosa.
Sultan Mansur may not have had the treachery of King Humabon in his heart, but he did quite plainly have local politics on his mind. Each day over the ensuing fortnight, while the sailors were being feted and banqueted in a lavish fashion, a procession of visitors from other Moluccan islands came to Tidore to see the strangers from the other side of the world. There were governors and official dignitaries, who were allowed to bow hello and relay a few words of welcome through Pigafetta. But there were also hundreds of ordinary tourists who had climbed into their own rough-hewn boats to come out and observe the spectacle of the year if not the decade. The Spanish ships and their sailors became celebrity attractions, the port of Tidore something of a circus. Needless to say, this was exactly what Espinosa would have preferred not to happen. He felt more keenly with each passing day that they were playing with fire in allowing their presence here to be advertised so widely. But what could they do? Although they were a long way from Rome, the dictum of “when in Rome…” nonetheless applied.
The most elevated of all the curiosity seekers was the sultan of Bacan, come to see for himself the people who were about to carry off the fruit of his island. He arrived in a boat with 120 rowers, for whom time was kept by an almost equal number of cymbalists. The cacophonous vessel was crowned by impossibly bright streamers in white, yellow, and red, made from an immense number of bird feathers woven skillfully together, a labor that must have required years. Hewing to the aforementioned dictum about Rome, the Trinidad honored the royal boat with a cannon salute, and the Bacanian sultan signaled his friendship by sailing twice around the Spanish ships while the cymbals crashed, the oarsmen sang, and the banners waved. He then gave the Europeans two beautiful stuffed birds of the same sort that had donated their feathers to his banners. “He told us that these birds come from the terrestrial paradise, and they call them bolon dinata, this is, ‘divine birds,'” wrote Pigafetta in his journal. Thus the name we still know them by today: birds-of-paradise.
The loading of the ships proceeded amidst all of the celebrations, albeit in a more desultory manner than Espinosa might have wished. It was a point of protocol for the Moluccans not to allow the Europeans to help with this labor, even as they themselves were willing to devote no more than a few hours per day to the task, however much the sailors tried to gently prod them. As the planned date of departure drew nearer, there were also provisions for the long voyage home to be thought of. The Moluccans donated thousands of loaves of their dense sago bread, which the sailors hoped would prove as durable and life-sustaining as the hardtack they had loaded in Spain; it certainly tasted better, even in its most unadorned form. Just as critically, the sultan managed to procure a stock of good timber for carpentry underway even though little wood that was harder than bamboo grew on his own island. Still more remarkably, he provided plenty of fresh pitch, the first the ships had been able to take aboard since the Canary Islands.
When the fortnight of celebrations was about to expire, Pedro Alfonso fetched his native wife, a quiet woman who wrapped herself in even more garments than was the Moluccan norm. She and her husband made a marital bower for themselves behind a wall of curtains in a dark corner of the Trinidad’s overstuffed hold. It would have to do, Espinosa concluded.
Alas, the planned day of departure came and went, and still the loading was not finished. The Moluccans were working more lackadaisically than ever, sending Espinosa into paroxysms of impatience. He raged in private, yet he dared not say anything to Sultan Mansur — not after witnessing the veiled threats that had followed his last attempt to depart on his own rather than his host’s schedule. At long last, on December 17, the ships were stuffed with as much food and cloves as they could safely carry, and then some. Their holds were so full of crates that the crews would have to sleep on deck. This would not be comfortable, but it was a sacrifice the men insisted they were willing to make for the riches the cloves represented back in Europe. Even Elcano and Carvalho, both seasoned seamen who ought to have known better, didn’t protest their vessels’ dangerously overburdened state. Greed outweighed good sailing practice.
Their luck had held despite all of the delays; they had seen no sign of any more Portuguese after making the acquaintance of Pedro Alfonso. Espinosa formally thanked the sultan for his many kindnesses, and informed him that the ships would depart the next day.
December 18 dawned unusually bright and clear for these generally vapor-enshrouded islands. The carnival atmosphere in and around the harbor was at a fever pitch. Five different bands were playing at once, creating crashing waves of clashing sound that made it impossible for the sailors to think, much less to talk. Adding to the din were hordes of onlookers on shore and on boats, waving and cheering their farewells below bright banners that were sometimes as big as one of the ships’ mainsails. A royal honor guard was to accompany the ships on the first stage of their voyage. Aboard the colorful boats that constituted it could be seen the sultans of Tidore, Bacan, and several regions of the large island of Halmahera.
All was in readiness. The captains shouted their orders, the sailors turned the capstans and worked the ropes, and the Trinidad and Victoria got underway on the next stage of their epic voyage — the first leg of the long trip home.
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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)