September 27 – November 6, 1521
Coconuts have their virtues, but a steady diet of almost nothing but coconuts can be enough to try anyone’s patience. The sailors of the Trinidad and Victoria were already heartily sick of the nut-like fruits long before they left Balabac. So, when they spotted an enormous junk ahead whilst crossing the Sulu Sea which separates Palawan from Mindanao, they looked at it much as a starving lion might a tasty herd of gazelles on the savanna.
Gómez de Espinosa and his partners in command were as hungry for a change of diet as the rest of the men, and remembered well how quickly the last junk they had waylaid had capitulated. After so many months in strange seas, having witnessed so much death and destruction along the way, they were less inclined to be scrupulous about such matters than they might once have been. The Trinidad fired a warning shot across the bow of the junk. Then Antonio Pigafetta shouted over the water, ordering its captain to heave to and prepare to be boarded. The junk did so with gratifying alacrity.
Just like his predecessor off the coast of Borneo, the Filipino captain of this vessel seemed flabbergasted to have been attacked in this way. He allowed his crew to be rounded up by the musket- and sword-waving Europeans who poured aboard his ship. The Filipino crew then stood and watched while the pale-skinned buccaneers looted their cargo hold, emerging from below with dozens of heavy sacks of rice, plus twenty live pigs, another score of goats, and no fewer than 450 chickens still in their cages. They also took figs, sugarcane, and many barrels of palm wine, along with miscellaneous pieces of weaponry and decorative objects. Feeling a little bit guilty when this act of unabashed piracy was finished, they gave the Filipinos some bolts of cloth and other trinkets before sailing away.
These sops to the conscience could not disguise the fact that a line had been crossed. They were no longer even bothering to pay lip service to the old pretensions of imperial diplomacy or the spreading of God’s word to the benighted peoples of the Earth. Instead of worrying their heads over such niceties, the sailors ate better that night than they had since leaving Brunei, and continued to enjoy the stolen food for many days to come. From now on, they had tacitly decided, they wouldn’t hesitate to take what they needed from behind the barrel of a gun. The option of force had always been there as a last resort; going forward, they were prepared to make it their first.
On the other side of the Sulu Sea, the ships met with the Zamboanga Peninsula of Mindanao for a second time, some distance south of where they had turned away from it the previous spring. Now they turned south, looking for the lowest extremity of the misshapen island so that they could resume their eastward progress.
When they found what they were looking for, they found as well some of the most unique of all the inhabitants of this part of the world. In the Basilan Strait, which separates Mindanao from the much smaller Philippine island of Basilan just to its south, they met a tribe of the Bajau people, who surprised and charmed them so much that they forgot their willingness to take a harder — and when necessary, piratical — line with the natives they encountered. The Bajau were and remain a far-flung collective of “sea gypsies,” who live in floating villages of tethered boats and barges. By the time the European sailors got over their amazement that anyone could live so, the friendly Bajau were already swarming around their ships like the playful dolphins of Tierra del Fuego, waving and hallooing up at them. No sailor had the heart to point a weapon at such guileless souls.
The Bajau lifestyle has been sadly constrained in modern times by the strictures of nation-states and geopolitics. In the sixteenth century, however, they could still go wherever the fish were, roaming the waters around Malaysia, Borneo, and the southern Philippines on the trail of their catch. The Bajau are quite possibly the best natural divers that humanity has ever produced. They deliberately puncture their eardrums at an early age so as to be able to dive longer and deeper — as deep as 100 feet (30 meters) below the surface of the Pacific blue, where they spear the fish that they eat and the delicate, delicious sea cucumbers that they mostly trade to others. For sea cucumbers have long been believed to enhance male potency and fertility, and on this basis command a premium to this day in marketplaces and bazaars throughout East Asia.
But the European sailors were most intrigued by the mouth-watering aroma of cinnamon that came wafting up from the cakes which the friendly sea gypsies brought out to their ships. When Pigafetta asked whence the Bajau got the spice, he was told that the southern tip of Mindanao teemed with cinnamon trees, that the gypsies had been harvesting them as a sideline to their usual trade in seafood. Pigafetta asked his new friends to show him these fragrantly edible trees. He described the cinnamon tree in his journal like the alien life form it was to him: “It is a small tree, not more than three or four cubits high, and of the thickness of a man’s finger, and it has not got more than three or four little branches. Its leaf is like that of a laurel. The cinnamon which comes to us is its bark, which is gathered twice in the year. Its wood and leaves when they are green have the taste and force of the bark itself. Here it is called cainmana, since cain means ‘wood’ and mana ‘sweet.'”
Had they been so inclined, the sailors might have been able to fairly fill their holds with cinnamon, which was second only to cloves as the most valuable spice of all back in Europe. But Espinosa had instilled in them his own determination to see their mission through according to the directive that had been signed by King Charles. And so, after lingering for a few pleasant days among the Bajau, they prepared to move on. Before they did so, they traded the sea gypsies two ornate daggers which they had stolen from the last junk for seventeen pounds (7.5 kilograms) of cinnamon. Combined with the great piles of fresh fish which the Bajau gave them, it made the eating aboard even better for the next little while.
The ships now struck out due east, across the Moro Gulf, the largest of its kind in the Philippines. Not that they knew it was a gulf: the sailors hoped that the next land they saw would be one of the Spice Islands rather than yet another piece of Mindanao.
They soon met a boat, a clumsy, barge-like affair with a crew of eighteen men. These responded immediately to Pigafetta’s hails, but not quite in the way he had intended. They brought their boat directly up alongside the Trinidad, ignoring Pigafetta’s shouted warnings to back away; perhaps they were one of those groups of natives whose language was not in the Austroasian family. They began climbing the ropes dangling down from the larger vessel’s hull. This unnerved the sailors, especially given that these Filipinos “were better made and more robust than all those we had seen hitherto,” as Pigafetta wrote in his journal. The climbers had large swords slung across their backs.
The shoe was on the other foot; now it was the Europeans who were baffled and alarmed by strangers who showed no respect for their ships’ sovereignty. Espinosa did his best to calm the sailors, to get them to wait for some proof of what the boarders’ intentions really were. But just as the first burly boarder stepped over the gunwale, an incident that he remembered all too well from the brief stay on Guam repeated itself. One nervous man pulled the trigger on his musket; the weapon went off with a sharp crack and its target collapsed to the deck. More musket shots followed. When Espinosa finally managed to restore a semblance of order, he saw through the acrid smoke that seven men had been killed; their corpses lay on the deck of the Trinidad or in their boat, or were fast disappearing beneath the waves, depending on whether they had fallen. The survivors cowered below, awed and terrified by the sudden onslaught of explosive violence.
With a disgusted shake of the head, Espinosa ordered the bodies on deck to be thrown down to their comrades. The Trinidad and Victoria sailed away with no further ado, leaving the luckless boat bobbing forlornly behind them.
The ships continued to sail east, until one day there came the lookout’s call that everyone had been waiting for: there was land directly ahead. Perhaps this was one of the Spice Islands! Head pilot Elcano decided to turn 45 degrees to starboard and follow the coastline.
Days went by with no change in the shoreline passing on the port side. The sole exception was a large bay, the one we know as Sarangani Bay. Penetrating inside, the sailors found it to be ringed with settlements. Leery of being trapped within the enclosed body of water, Espinosa ordered the ships to turn about and exit the bay as hastily as they had entered it, leaving in their wake dozens of native boats who were already coming out to investigate. Those who lived on the shore of the bay would swap stories for years to come of the two phantom ships of strange design that had appeared in their midst and then vanished again; in time, they would enter the realm of legend.
At last, the Trinidad and Victoria reached the promontory we call Tinaca Point, at the very southernmost tip of Mindanao. The sailors were growing hungry again; all of the food they had stolen or been given since leaving Balabac was gone, and the coconuts they had gathered on that island were likewise almost completely eaten. Just to the south of Tinaca Point, the keen-eyed lookouts spotted another island. The ships turned in that direction to investigate. The sailors could see only a single village from the sea, a primitive-looking place that did not smack of the tales they had heard about the Spice Islands. Still, there was a large trading boat anchored here. Espinosa decided to send a party ashore in search of food and information.
As the sailors had suspected, these islanders had no spices or other riches to share with their visitors from the other side of the world. Yet they were warm and welcoming, and their island did at least have an abundance of coconut trees for the harvesting, their waters plenty of fish for the catching. Pigafetta learned that the islanders called their home Sarangani, the same name by which we still know it today. (Sarangani Island is not to be confused with the aforementioned Sarangani Bay of Mindanao.)
But Pigafetta’s most intriguing conversation was one he had with two other visitors to the island rather than with its permanent residents. These were two men who together commanded and navigated the trading boat that lay in the harbor, a sharing of power whose exact nature was never entirely clear to the European sailors. When the Italian chronicler turned diplomat asked these two about the Spice Islands — which he had long since learned to refer to by their Austroasian name of the Maluku Islands, or simply Maluku — they nodded with as much easy familiarity as a Spaniard might show if he was asked the position of the Canary Islands. They actually visited the islands in question fairly frequently, they said. They stated with a confidence born of that experience that the archipelago Pigafetta sought lay some distance south and slightly east of Sarangani.
This was the next best thing to Sarangani itself being a part of Maluku. All of Pigafetta’s inquiries during the ships’ Pacific perambulations to date had been met only with hand waves and the vaguest of directions. Now, though, here were two men who said that they knew precisely where the Spice Islands lay, who had visited them many times for themselves. After so many disappointments and false starts, it felt like being told that Atlantis was real, and here is where you can find it.
Without pausing to consult with his superior officers, Pigafetta offered the two native pilots whatever their hearts desired as payment for guiding the Europeans to Maluku: gold, silver, cloth, mirrors, virtually anything that was to be found in the hold of the Trinidad or Victoria other than muskets or crossbows. The traders turned it all down. Placidly chewing on chunks of seasoned fish fat, a habit in these parts, they explained that they had just come from the south, and that a major storm — possibly a fearsome typhoon — was brewing there. Even as they sat here on Sarangani, they could feel its gathering presence around them. The only wise decision was to stay where they were for the time being. Maybe in a fortnight or so, once the storm had blown itself out, they would be willing to consider a trip south.
Pigafetta didn’t know how to take this; the air felt perfectly normal to him. Ever since the ships had left South America behind, this Pacific Ocean had more than lived up to the name bestowed upon it by Ferdinand Magellan, had presented nothing but smooth sailing. To be sure, Pigafetta had heard occasional talk of storms among the natives — had heard them muttering this word “typhoon” quietly to one another from time to time, as if they feared to wake a malevolent spirit of the sea by evoking his name — but he had yet to personally experience any winds that were more than brisk. He and his shipmates had just about convinced themselves that storms didn’t exist in this new ocean. He wondered now whether the traders were just toying with him. His excitement at talking to men who had actually been to the Spice Islands quickly metastasized into an overweening impatience. Even if the traders were on the level when they spoke about a storm to the south, he had no desire to cool his heels for two weeks on yet another jungle-encrusted rock. He could practically smell the spices of paradise already.
When he returned to the flagship, he found that the officers there felt the same as he did. Even the generally pragmatic and patient Espinosa, the final arbiter when push came to shove, wanted to be off tomorrow on the trail of Pigafetta’s intelligence, not in two weeks. Indeed, he was the first to suggest an action that he would probably not have countenanced a year earlier. “I think we are agreed that we have no wish to stay here any longer than absolutely necessary,” he said in his matter-of-fact way. “One option is to sail on without guidance, but we have run that risk before to no avail. It would be better to have pilots with us who know these seas. If they will not come willingly, there are other methods we could employ…”
The sailors spent the next couple of days gathering food and stashing it in the holds; as they did so, the weather remained as placid as ever. Then, in the dead of night, a team led by Espinosa and Pigafetta came stealthily ashore in the Trinidad’s longboat and made their way to a guesthouse that was currently occupied by the two traders and a young son of one of them. Bursting inside, the press gang told the two men in no uncertain terms to come with them. The one trader begged to be allowed to bring his son along; to this the Europeans reluctantly agreed. Despite the latter’s best efforts to keep the operation quiet, the commotion inside the building woke the rest of the village. A crowd of Saranganians had gathered outside by the time the kidnappers emerged. These formed a tight ring around their quarry as they made their way down to their longboat and back out to sea. The Trinidad and Victoria left at dawn, with their two reluctant guides and the one confused child aboard.
That very evening — the night of October 26, 1521 — the storm about which the traders had tried to warn Pigafetta slammed into the ships like the judgment of God for the sailors’ recent deeds. Caught out in the open ocean, there was nothing to do but lower the sails, hold on tight, and “betake ourselves to prayer,” as Pigafetta wrote. The tempest that pummeled the ships now was the equal of anything they had met in the Atlantic, giving the lie once and for all to Magellan’s name for this ocean. Amidst the furious onslaught of wind and waves, where up was down and down was up, Pigafetta saw his old friend Saint Elmo arcing and sparking from the masts above. Splayed out on the deck, to which he was lashed by ropes tied to wrists and ankles, he lowered his head and prayed all the harder to the patron saint of sailors.
Whether due to the heavenly discharges above or some other cause, a barrel of gunpowder exploded aboard the Trinidad with a flash that seared itself on the retina. Two sailors who were down in the hold working the bilge pumps were blown bodily out of a gaping hole that appeared on the starboard side of the hull. They were devoured by the watery maelstrom beyond, never to be seen again. Thus they became the last members of the expedition to die on the outward journey to the Spice Islands; “So near and yet so far” might have been inscribed on their tombstones, if they had only been fortunate enough to be buried under any.
The other sailors had no time for mourning: a torrent of water was pouring in through the hole. The Trinidad looked sure to sink within minutes. For once, Gómez de Espinosa, that dauntless man of decision and action, was at a complete loss. Abandoning ship in a storm such as this seemed as certain a death sentence as remaining aboard.
For once, though, someone else jumped into the breach where Espinosa was dumbfounded. João Lopes Carvalho was, whatever his other failings, a seasoned mariner. “May I take the helm, Captain?” he shouted above the wind. “I’ve been through storms such as this before!”
Espinosa was wise enough to know when he was over his head. “You have the helm, Pilot!” he answered.
Carvalho unleashed a stream of orders that Espinosa couldn’t begin to follow. The apparent gist of them seemed insane to him, but what did he knew? The sailors set to work raising the mainsail — in a gale such as this! — angling the canvas so that it ran almost parallel with the hull. Then Carvalho yelled for the man at the rudder to turn it hard to port, to try to bring the ship broadside to the wind. Doing so was a protracted struggle; many gallons of water were already sloshing around down below, and the rudder was above the waves almost as often as it was beneath them. But slowly, painfully, creaking in its every joint and seem, the faithful old ship came around. “Hold on!” shouted Carvalho to his captain and every other man on deck.
Seconds later, a smack of wind like a thunderclap rammed the mainsail. The ship listed wildly to port while the sailors on deck clung to whatever handhold they could find. Espinosa and Pigafetta found themselves dangling from an almost vertical surface, peering down into a black maw that wanted nothing more than to devour them as it just had their two shipmates. The rigging above cried out in agony. Espinosa looked around for his pilot. He was nowhere to be seen. Had he fallen off the capsizing ship?
Then he heard Carvalho’s voice from under his feet, shouting more orders. Holding tight to the forward railing of the quarterdeck, he peered down into the hold.
A damage-control party had been formed under Carvalho’s direction. A gaggle of men had roped themselves to the elevated side of the inner hull, and were frantically hammering sheets of planking around and over the gaping hole, which was now exposed to the sky. Below them, on what had once been the port wall of the hold, other men scrambled about in the salty water, choking and gasping. Despite their plight, these handed wood up to the carpenters. Every twenty seconds or so, the wind would slacken momentarily and the ship would bob back over to its natural orientation, sending a fresh blast of water through the hole and sending sailors rolling about above and below deck like children’s tops. Then the ship would list over once again, the ropes and canvas would squeal, and the half-drowned rats below would lift themselves from the deck to resume the battle.
It went on like this for longer than anyone could reckon. Each time the ship heeled over again, Espinosa was sure it was the last time, that it would roll all the way this time, or that the masts would be swept clean off by the howling wind. But the stubborn ship refused to give up the fight, any more than the men in its bowels. Each time the Trinidad righted itself, the torrent of water that poured into the hold was a little bit less than before.
At last, the leak was more or less stopped. Clambering topside again, Carvalho issued a fresh barrage of orders, to lower the mainsail and let the wind and waves have their way with the Trinidad again. In comparison to what had come before, riding out the rest of the storm felt almost routine.
By morning, the storm had spent itself, and both ships were still afloat, thanks to the grace of Saint Elmo, the heroism of Carvalho and the Trinidad’s crew, and the hard labor that all of the sailors had put in to return both vessels to seaworthiness back on Balabac. In full hearing of all of his crew, Espinosa praised Carvalho. “You were a better man than I was last night,” he said. The real message was unspoken, but no less recognized by everyone: Carvalho had redeemed himself.
Their native guides insisted that they had all been incredibly lucky; the storm they had just lived through hadn’t been a full-fledged typhoon after all, they said. The sailors shook their heads at this. The storm had seemed plenty violent to them. Still, they were willing to acknowledge that luck had been with them. The ships hadn’t even been driven that far apart; the Victoria soon found the Trinidad, guided by the signal fire which the crew of the latter managed to get burning on the poop deck. As the Victoria approached, those aboard it were surprised to see most of the crew of the drifting flagship bailing water out of the hold, several lines of bucket-passing sailors whose ranks included Espinosa, Carvalho, and Pigafetta. This was no time for standing on hierarchical protocol.
While everyone was distracted by these practicalities, a cry went out from a lookout who had climbed the Trinidad’s mainmast once again. As he shouted, he pointed to two heads that could be seen bobbing in the water. It seemed that one of their guides had jumped overboard with his son — so eager was he to get away from this ship of fools who were so heedless of the dictates of the sea. A day earlier, any such escape attempt would have met with prompt and swift pursuit. Now, though, the longboats and the launches were mired on deck under piles of rope and debris, the sailors distracted by more pressing problems. Between buckets, they watched as the boy, who had been riding on the man’s shoulders, appeared to slip off and disappear beneath the waves. A few minutes later, his father disappeared from view as well, swallowed by either distance or the water; it was impossible to tell which.
The sailors shrugged and returned to the business at hand. Happily, they still had one guide left to see them through to the Spice Islands. They put a guard on him, and the ships proceeded on their way as soon as the Trinidad was safely able to do so.
They had weathered the brunt of the storm, but it had left many smaller gales and squalls in its wake. Thankfully, these pushed the ships in just the direction they wanted to go, sometimes at a well-nigh terrifying velocity; it was as if the god of the sea, having extracted his final pair of sacrifices from them during the storm, had now decided just to speed them to their destination and be done with it. Each day at noon, the pilots Elcano and Carvalho took fresh astrolabe readings, and were always freshly astonished at how far they had gone since the last one.
They had almost made it all the way to the Equator on November 6, when the lookouts spotted a brown and green mountain peak flickering out of the endless blue on the horizon, surrounded by a halo of clouds or steam. Within a few more hours, they could make out a whole series of such shapes ahead, a line of islands stretching before them like a string of milky jewels resting on a sapphire bodice. Their captive guide gestured sullenly; these, he said, were the islands they had kidnapped him and his friend to help them reach.
Disregarding his dwindling stock of gunpowder, Espinosa ordered the Trinidad to fire its cannons to mark the occasion. Two years and one and a half months after leaving Spain, after having suffered and caused incalculable hardship and death, Ferdinand Magellan’s great enterprise had finally reached its goal. The Spice Islands lay dead ahead. The sailors could only hope that they were all they had been cracked up to be.
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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)