Unable to make a landfall, they were carried by substantial trade winds over astounding distances. “We made each day fifty or sixty leagues or more,” Pigafetta wrote of their seemingly miraculous progress westward. “And if our Lord and the Virgin Mother had not aided us by giving good weather to refresh ourselves with provisions and other things we had died in this very great sea. And I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.”
Their progress north was so rapid that they crossed the equator on February 13. Magellan was utterly confounded by this time. He had expected to reach the Spice Islands long before this point in the voyage; according to the maps he had studied, he had already covered the entire Pacific and should have been in Asia by now. Worse, he had entered Portuguese waters, as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas; if he discovered that the Spice Islands lay squarely within Portuguese territory, the finding would defeat the purpose of the expedition, and he could not claim them for Spain. To add to the pressure, he was running out of water, and his men were dying of scurvy. He needed to find safe harbor soon, if he was to survive the ordeal of crossing the Pacific.
Deliverance finally came ninety-eight days after the fleet left the strait. At about 6:00 A.M. on March 6, 1521, two landmasses slowly rose from the sea; they appeared to be about twenty-five miles away. Eventually, a third mass came into view. From his perch in a crow’s nest sixty feet above deck, Lope Navarro, Victoria’s lookout, peered into the indistinct glow, trying to distinguish between these promising outlines and mere cloud formations. Throughout that anxious morning, the ships made directly for the shapes at a rate of about six knots.
When Navarro was convinced of their true nature, he announced from on high, “¡Tierra!”
Tierra! Tierra!
The shrill cry tore through the silent morning. Tierra! “These sudden words made everyone happy,” de Mafra recalled of that miraculous sighting of land, “so much so that he who showed less signs of joy was taken for a mad man, as anyone who has found himself in such conditions would understand.”
C H A P T E R I X
A Vanished Empire
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
Physically and emotionally exhausted, Magellan climbed partway to the crow’s nest to see the prospect for himself. His men, many of them about to succumb to scurvy, starvation, and dehydration, their tongues swollen, breath foul, and eyes glassy, raised their shaggy heads to glimpse their salvation. As the islands grew more distinct in the morning light, the lookout shouted again, “¡Tierra!” and gestured to the south, where cliffs rose from the sea. Overjoyed, Magellan awarded the fortunate lookout a bonus of one hundred ducats. The first landmass Navarro had spotted was likely mountainous Rota. Thanks to the earth’s curvature and the angle from which the armada approached, it initially appeared to be two islands. Rota’s deceptive appearance confused Pigafetta, and has led to centuries of debate concerning which landmasses the lookout actually spotted. The other island, the one where the armada would eventually land, is now Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States. About thirty miles long, covering 209 square miles, Guam is the largest of an archipelago of volcanic islands known as the Marianas, which lie about three thousand miles west of the Hawaiian Islands.
For Magellan, the landfall on Guam came as a mixed blessing. Although the island provided shelter from the misery he and his men had endured during their ninety-eight-day Pacific cruise, nothing about it suggested they were anywhere near their goal, the Spice Islands. Nevertheless, it was land. Since leaving the western mouth of the strait, Magellan had traveled more than seven thousand miles without interruption: the longest ocean voyage recorded until that time.
On Wednesday, the 6th of March, we discovered a small island in the north-west direction, and two others lying to the south-west,” Pigafetta wrote of the momentous event. “One of these islands was larger and higher than the other two. The Captain General wished to touch at the largest of these islands to get refreshments of provisions.” Pigafetta even sketched this sight for his diary, but the illustration, depicting three irregular blobs floating in a shimmering sea, is so crude that it has no value for navigation. Even more confusing, Pigafetta followed the practice of his time and placed north at the bottom of his maps and south at the top. The completed drawings suggest that after the journey’s conclusion he furnished a rough description to an illustrator, who turned Pigafetta’s sketch into a charming and colorful cartoon in which the ocean’s azure blue was accented with flecks of gold and the islands seemed to float on the surface like giant potatoes. Nevertheless, his images are the only surviving cartographic record of the voyage.
Albo’s log for the same day includes a slightly different and more scrupulous account of their discovery. “On this day we saw land and went to it, and there were two islands, which were not very large, and when we came between them we headed to the southwest, and we left one to the northwest.” And he adds, ominously, “We saw many small sailboats approaching us, and they were going so fast they seemed to fly.” The secret of their astonishing velocity was the unusual design of their sails, which caught Albo’s attention. “They had mat sails of a triangular shape, and they went both ways, for they made of the poop the prow, and of the prow the poop, as they wished, and they came many times to us.”
Albo was getting his first good look at the highly maneuverable outrigger canoe known as a proa, and often called a “flying proa,” because it was able to attain speeds of up to twenty knots and seemed to fly over the water’s surface, exactly as Albo recorded. The proa’s secret of speed derived from its unusual design. Unlike European sailing vessels, its prow and stern were identical, but its sides were different: the windward side was rounded for maximum aerodynamic efficiency, and the leeward side was flat. The interchangeability of the stern and prow, combined with a maneuverable lateen sail, meant it could head into the wind without strain, and coast from one island to another without having to come about.
The proas approaching Magellan’s fleet were manned by a Polynesian tribe now known as the Chamorros, although this was not the name by which it was known in Magellan’s day. Initially, Magellan’s crew referred to all the tribes they encountered in the Pacific as Indios, Indians, in the mistaken belief that the Indies must be nearby. Succeeding generations of Spanish visitors gave the indigenous people of Guam the name “Chamurres,” which derived from the local name for the upper caste; later, they were called Chamorros, the old Spanish word for “bald,” or in Portuguese, “cleanshaven,” possibly in reference to the Chamorran men’s habit of shaving their heads.
How Guam and thousands of other isolated islands came to be inhabited has puzzled ethnologists to this day. Migrations from Southeast Asia gradually fanned out across the Pacific, into what we today call Melanesia and Polynesia, beginning about three or four thousand years ago, perhaps in light craft reminiscent of the outrigger canoes that advanced on Magellan’s fleet. Today’s Chamorros are a mixture of Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Mexican, and Spanish, and speak a distinct language, also called Chamorro. Whether the tribe whom Magellan first encountered that morning in 1521 was the direct ancestor of the region’s current inhabitants remains an open question.
Four hours after sighting land, the Armada de Molucca, surrounded by a welcoming party of outrigger canoes, entered a deep turquoise lagoon of exceptionally warm, clear water. As they approached, the sailors could see beaches, rocky cliffs, and steep, thickly forested slopes. The verdant landscape contained a paradise of springs, streams, and waterfalls: everything a sailor who has been too long at sea could want. The possibility of deliverance put the entire crew on edge. Jubilation alternated with watchfulness. The moment of contact between two societies, until now wholly ignorant of one other’s existence, had finally arrived.
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bsp; At first, the Chamorros—hundreds of them in their small, maneuverable canoes—encircled the fleet. “Fearing nothing, they got aboard, and there were so many of them, especially in the flagship, that some of our men asked the captain to have them thrown out,” de Mafra related. The Chamorros, taller and stronger than the Europeans, boarded the flagship and stole everything they could— rigging, crockery, weapons, and anything made of iron—as the crew, in their weakened condition, pleaded with Magellan to force them to leave.
Eventually, one sailor summoned the strength to retaliate. “The boatswain of the flagship slapped one of those Indians for a small reason, and the Indian slapped him back. Insulted, the boatswain stabbed him in the back with a machete that he carried on his waist.” At that, the Chamorros—a “mob of barbarians,” de Mafra now called them—hurled themselves overboard. “Once they were aboard their shoddy boats they began fighting with their sticks, for they had nothing else. Some arrows were cast at them from the< ships, but, being so many, the Indians managed to wound some of our men.”
In the middle of the fracas, a second wave of Chamorros skimmed across the azure water in their proas, and, to the Europeans’ astonishment, distributed food to the starving sailors. Once they had fed the Europeans, the Chamorros took up their sticks and began fighting again, this time more viciously.
De Mafra described how the Captain General narrowly averted disaster. “Magellan, seeing that the number of people was increasing, ordered those in the ship to stop throwing arrows; with this, the Indians stopped, the fighting subsided, and they resumed selling food as before, the kind of food in those islands being coconuts and fish aplenty, which were purchased in exchange for some glass beads brought from Castile.” Magellan’s show of restraint turned out to be just the right gesture. The modest yet historic encounter between the Armada de Molucca and a few dozen outrigger canoes contained in microcosm the conflicting impulses of the European colonialist adventure—from initial innocence and curiosity through confusion, fear, and bloodshed, all of it resolving in commercial activity.
If only matters had ended on this harmonious note. Unaccustomed to European concepts of trade and property, the Chamorros, while happy to feed the sailors, failed to comprehend that some things aboard ship were simply off limits. “Whilst we were striking and lowering the sails to go ashore, they stole away . . . with the small
boat called the skiff, which was made fast to the poop of the captain’s ship,” wrote Pigafetta. To judge from the chronicler’s description, the Chamorros had made off with Magellan’s personal dinghy. The robbery could only be interpreted as an insult to the Captain General himself.
The next day, Magellan, “much irritated,” according to Pigafetta, retaliated. He was not about to let thieves make off with his personal vessel. He ordered forty men into the two remaining longboats. Rowing mightily, the crews pushed past the reef ’s spume and reached the shore—the first landing by Europeans on an inhabited Pacific island. Then they went on a rampage. “The Captain General in wrath went ashore with forty armed men, who burned some forty or fifty houses together with many boats, and killed seven men,” Pigafetta related without comment. The sailors who remained on board the ships, many close to death from the effects of scurvy, implored the landing party to return with the internal organs of the slain Chamorros, which they thought would cure their scurvy. Their willingness to turn to cannibalism shows how desperate they had become.
During the rampage, the stunned Chamorros offered no resistance, and the Europeans held their fire. But their crossbows were brutally effective. “When we wounded many of this kind of people with our arrows, which entered inside their bodies,” Pigafetta wrote, “they looked at the arrow, and then drew it forth with much astonishment, and immediately afterwards they died. Others who were wounded in the breast did the same, which moved us to great compassion.” Amid the carnage, Magellan “recovered the small boat, and we departed immediately, pursuing the same course.”
Although Pigafetta mentions only a frenzied raiding party, he spent considerable time ashore over the course of the next few days, and recorded his carefully considered impressions of Chamorro society. “These people live in liberty and according to their will,” he remarked, clearly disturbed by the lack of a well-defined social order. Like Magellan, he felt at home in a hierarchical, authoritarian society in which loyalty to the king and the Church mattered most. During the mutinies he had faced, Magellan had always struggled to defend the social order and maintain his primacy over rebellious captains and crew members. But here, on the open waters of the Pacific, was a tribe that lived by different rules, or no rules at all. Chamorro society appeared to be assembled horizontally rather than vertically. If there was a leader, Magellan could not determine who it was. Subsequent Spanish visitors to the island learned that the structure of Chamorro society was actually intricate and subtle; it was matrilineal and heavily committed to ancestor worship. Chamorran women performed the central roles in family life, and although Chamorro men had appeared hostile to Magellan, their bellicose gestures were essentially ritualistic; they merely played at war.
Captivated by the Chamorros’ habits, Pigafetta recorded simple ethnographic details. “Some of them wear beards, and have hair down to their waist. They wear small hats . . . made of palm leaves.
The people are as tall as us, and well made. . . . When they are born they are white, later they become brown, and have their teeth black and red.” Their teeth were stained from constantly chewing the betel nut, called pugua or mama’on by the locals. It grew on the areca tree, which resembles a coconut palm. They frequently chewed the nuts along with the betel leaf, pupulu, which tasted fresh and peppery. The islanders preferred the hard reddish nut variety called ugam, with its granular texture. It was their chewing gum, their tobacco, their coveted tradition.
This was the first time the men in the crew had laid eyes on women since their departure from the strait three months earlier, and they were a source of fascination. “The women also go naked,” Pigafetta was pleased to observe, “except when they cover their nature with a thin bark, pliable like paper, which grows between the tree and the bark of the palm. They are beautiful and delicate, and whiter than the men, and have hair loose and flowing, very black and long, down to the earth. They do not go to work in their fields, nor stir from their houses, making cloth and baskets of palm leaves.” The ever-curious Pigafetta also describes the interior of the Chamorros’ huts, so it is likely that the Europeans and the Chamorros enjoyed other, more enjoyable encounters than their violent first meeting. Members of the crew probably stayed overnight because Pigafetta was able to offer vignettes of their domestic life. “Their houses are constructed of wood, covered with planks, with fig leaves, which are two ells in length: they have only one floor; their rooms and beds are furnished with mats, which we call matting, which are made of palm leaves, and are very beautiful, and they lie down on palm straw, which is soft and fine.”
During his visit, Pigafetta examined the Chamorros’ most advanced piece of technology, their highly maneuverable proas, paying special attention to their ingenious counterweight. “Some are black and white, and others red. And on the other side of the sail they have a large spar pointed at the top. Their sails are of palm leaf sewn together like a lateen sail to the right of the tiller. And they have for steering oars certain blades like a shovel. And there is no difference between the stern and the bow in the said boats, which resemble dolphins jumping from wave to wave.” He even included a crude sketch showing a small vessel with two oarsmen facing each other; in the middle of the craft, a single mast holds a lateen sail, and most strikingly, the counterweight balancing the hull, projecting straight toward the viewer. Curiously, Pigafetta (or whoever made these sketches for him) depicted the Chamorros as waterborne warriors in hoods and tunics, giving them a decidedly European appearance; in reality, they were naked, or nearly so.
The European visitors were surprised to find that the Chamorros possessed very
few arms; their most dangerous weapon consisted of a stick with a fishbone attached to one end, and it was used not for combat but to catch flying fish. It now appeared that the armada’s initial encounter with the Chamorros might have been a tragic misunderstanding, because Pigafetta, trying as usual to communicate with the local populace, determined that they had been startled more than anything else. “According to the signs they made,” he wrote, the Chamorros thought that “there were no other men in the world besides them.” If this was the case, and the armada had disturbed an isolated island society, the Chamorros’ hostile response becomes understandable, as does their fascination with Trinidad’s skiff, the one piece of equipment in the armada that bore resemblance to their own canoes. In addition, the Chamorros had no concept of private property, and so they believed the newcomers’ possessions belonged to one and all. On this basis, they had been equally pleased to share their food and supplies with the starving intruders. Nevertheless, Pigafetta and Magellan decided that the Chamarros’ worst offense was their thievery, and the Captain General christened the island, as well as two others nearby, the Islas de los Ladrones—the Islands of the Thieves.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 23
