The crew was tempted to remain among the Bajau because the men heard that on two nearby islands they could find the best cinnamon grown anywhere. Next to cloves, cinnamon was the most valuable spice; the temptation to fill their ships with the fragrant spice proved almost irresistible. “Had we stayed there two days, those people would have laden our ships for us, but as we had a wind favorable for passing points and certain islets which were near the island, we did not wish to delay.”
Just before they left, they got their first, tantalizing look at the fabled cinnamon tree: “It has but three or four small branches and its leaves resemble those of the laurel. Its bark is the cinnamon, and it is gathered twice a year.” In Malay, Pigafetta noted, the unprepossessing tree was called caiu (sweet) mana (wood). The men conducted a quick, probably illicit transaction, exchanging two large knives for about seventeen pounds of cinnamon, worth enough on the docks of Seville to buy an entire ship. They expected to obtain far more cinnamon, along with nutmeg, pepper, mace, and many other precious spices, once they reached their goal.
Just when it seemed that a measure of order had returned to the fleet, they attacked a large proa to obtain information about the whereabouts of the Moluccas. In a bitter struggle, they slaughtered seven of the eighteen men on board the little craft. Pigafetta mentioned the matter only in passing, without remorse. In the past, the needless deaths of the Chamorros and the Patagonian giants had caused sorrow and guilt, but by now he had become desensitized to the business of killing, which he reported with less emotion than he would a passing storm. Pigafetta’s lack of fellow-feeling reflected the entire crew’s frame of mind. It is one of the outstanding ironies of the voyage that the closer they came to fulfilling their mission, the more they lost their sense of mission, which Magellan, for all his faults, had done so much to impart.
Before leaving the unlucky proa in their wake, the armada spared the life of one of its occupants, the brother of Mindanao’s ruler, who insisted that he knew the way to the Moluccas. Making good on his promise, he guided the armada on a different course; they had been traveling northeast, but he took them to the southeast, toward the Moluccas. Along the way, they passed a cape inhabited by cannibals, and the crew studied these fabled creatures with rapt attention. The cannibals were every bit as frightening as their reputation: “shaggy men who are exceedingly great fighters and archers. They use swords one palmo in length and eat only raw human hearts with the juice of oranges and lemons.” The crew members naturally kept their distance, and listened closely to their captured guide’s account of the tribe as if they were tourists on safari. In all likelihood, they had encountered members of the Manobos tribe, who did on occasion practice a ritual cannibalism in which they devoured the heart or the liver of their enemies. But no European hearts were consumed that day.
The armada had just reached the southernmost part of Mindanao when the ships were swept by the strongest storm they had encountered since the life-threatening gales off the eastern coast of South America, but once again, they received brilliant supernatural reassurance that they would safely reach their goal. “On Saturday night, October 26, while coasting by Birahan Batolach, we encountered a most furious storm. Thereupon, praying to God, we lowered all the sails. Immediately our three saints appeared to us and dissipated all the darkness. St. Elmo remained for more than two hours on the maintop, like a torch; St. Nicholas on the mizzentop; and St. Clara on the foretop. We promised a slave to St. Elmo, St. Nicholas, and St. Clara, and gave alms to each one.” The storm passed, and the shaken crew members once again gave thanks for their lives, raised the sails, and the fleet recommenced its southeasterly voyage. They were only two hundred miles from the Spice Islands, yet they spent weeks zigzagging blindly throughout the Sulawesi and Maluku seas without knowing how to reach their destination.
At the island Pigafetta called Cavit, the crew members struck again, capturing two more pilots and ordering them to take the fleet to the Moluccas on pain of death. “Laying our course south southwest,” Pigafetta tells us, “we passed among eight inhabited and uninhabited islands, which were situated in the manner of a street. Their names are Cheaua, Cauiao, Cabaio, Camanuca, Cabalizao, Cheai, Lipan, and Nuza”—all members of the Karkaralong group, located at the southern tip of Mindanao.
Even now, as they approached their goals, they were bedeviled by misfortune. On November 2, Pedro Sánchez, a gunner aboard Trinidad, attempted to fire an arquebus; the weapon exploded, killing him, and two days after that, another Trinidad gunner, Juan Bautista, died in a gunpowder explosion.
Unable to sail close enough to the wind to pass a cape, the fleet had to double back and forth past the point until the wind changed. As they did, three of their captives, two men and a boy, jumped ship and swam for their lives toward a nearby island. “But the boy drowned,” Pigafetta relates, “for he was unable to hold tightly to his father’s shoulder.”
On the ships sailed, gliding past the islands of Sanguir, Kima, Karakitang, Para, Sarangalong, Siao, Tagulanda, Zoar, Meau, Paginsara, Suar, Atean: a string of emeralds set in gleaming sapphire. And then, on November 6, 1521, they saw four more islands shimmering on the horizon. “The pilot who still remained with us told us that those four islands were the Moluccas,” Pigafetta recorded. After losing three ships and more than a hundred men—half the crew— they were finally on the doorstep of the Spice Islands . . .
. . . Ternate . . .
. . . Tidore . . .
. . . Motir . . .
. . . Makian . . .
They stretched from north to south, four small islands, each no more than six miles across. To the south lay a fifth Spice Island, Bacan, which was considerably larger.
The Moluccas actually comprise about one thousand islands of varying sizes, but for Europeans of the sixteenth century, the Moluccas referred to just those five islands. The best-known among them were Ternate and Tidore, volcanic islands whose steep cones towered about a mile above the sea, imparting an impressive solidity to the tiny landmasses. Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, writing in 1609, described Ternate’s volcano as a “dreadful burning of mountain flames.” He guessed that winds “kindle that natural fire, or the matter that has fed it for so many ages. The top of the mountain, which exhales it, is cold, and not covered with ashes, but with a sort of light cloddy earth, little different from the pumice stone burnt in our fiery mountains.” Volcanic ash enriched the soil on islands where the spices grew, and the moist climate also promoted lush growth; this combination made them unique sources for spices. The occasional volcanic eruptions terrified those who beheld them, and gave Ternate and the other islands a magical reputation. It would not have been more marvelous to see a dragon or the lost city of Atlantis rising from the depths of the sea than to witness an eruption in the Moluccas.
“Look there, how the seas of the Orient are scattered with islands beyond number,” wrote the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões in The Lusíads about the spell cast by the Spice Islands:
See Tidore, then Ternate with its burning
Summit, leaping with volcanic flames.
Observe the orchards of hot cloves
Portuguese will buy with their blood . . .
All these exotic sights and more were now within the grasp of the Armada de Molucca. “So we thanked God, and for joy we discharged all our artillery,” Pigafetta wrote. “And no wonder we were so joyful, for we had spent twenty-seven months less two days in our search for the Moluccas.”
C H A P T E R X I I I
Et in Arcadia Ego
The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
On November 8, 1521, the Armada de Molucca entered the harbor of Tidore, firing a joyful salute. They dropped anchor in twenty fathoms and fired another round of artillery, the report of the guns echoing off the island’s tranquil hills. In the humid climate, the strong scents of clove and cinnamon
wafted across the water, reviving the weary crew members with the promise of riches.
The following day, an emissary from Tidore floated out to the ships in a luxurious proa, his head protected from the sun by a silk awning; his son, bearing a ceremonial scepter, was at his side. They were accompanied by a pair of ritual hand washers bearing sweet water in jars made of gold, and two other bearers carrying a gold casket filled with an offering of betel nuts. The emissary introduced himself as al-Mansur, a Muslim name, but the officers came to know him by the Spanish version, Almanzor. He appeared to be in his forties and rather rotund.
Almanzor’s theatrical arrival was calculated to announce that he was an important personage: the king of Tidore and an enthusiastic astrologer. As intended, the officers recognized that gaining Almanzor’s goodwill would be vital because he was the gatekeeper to the cloves, which they had come so far to find. But Almanzor’s little kingdom was in constant peril, and he needed these visitors from afar as much as they needed him, or his spices.
From his resplendent proa, Almanzor enthusiastically welcomed the fleet. “After such long tossing upon the seas, and so many dangers, come and enjoy the pleasures of the land, and refresh your bodies, and do not think but that you have arrived at the kingdom of your own sovereign,” he declared, according to Pigafetta. And then Almanzor startled them all by announcing that he had dreamed of their arrival, and they had fulfilled his prophecy. Almanzor boarded Trinidad under the watchful eyes of the officers, who offered him the velvet-covered chair of honor. Almanzor lowered himself into it, but conveyed the impression that he was accommodating them by consenting to sit, after which he “received us as children” in Pigafetta’s astonished words. For all his graciousness, Almanzor had a stubborn streak; he refused to bow or even to tilt his head even when it was necessary. When he was invited to enter Trinidad’s cabin, he refused to stoop, as her crew members routinely did. Instead, he mounted the upper deck and descended from above, his head rigidly erect.
In conversation, Almanzor revealed that he was familiar with Spain, and even with its great and powerful ruler, King Charles. He insisted that he and the people of Tidore fervently desired to serve the king and his kingdom, an assertion that immediately made the officers suspect that Almanzor had another agenda that involved switching his allegiance from the Portuguese to the Spanish. The officers were correct. A decade earlier, the father of the island’s current ruler had encouraged the Portuguese to set up a trading station, in part because he wished to loosen the Arab stranglehold on the islands’ crops.
The experience left a bitter legacy on both sides. The Portuguese came to detest the Moluccans with the passion of a jilted lover. At the outset, the Portuguese had hoped to break the Chinese and Arab monopoly on spices and grow fat on the proceeds, fatter even than their neighbor and rival, Spain. They would then assert control over the global economy. But the islanders turned out to be devious partners, murderous and slippery; most infuriating of all, they continued to sell spices to anyone with a ship capable of carrying them away. Portugal never got its monopoly and blamed the rulers and inhabitants of the islands.
João de Barros, a Portuguese court historian, expressed the official attitude toward the inhabitants of the Spice Islands: “In everything but war they are slothful; and if there be any industry among them in agriculture or trade, it is confined to the women,” he declared, enumerating their failings. “Altogether, they are a lascivious people, false and ungrateful, but expert in learning anything. Although poor in wealth, such is their pride and presumption that they will abate nothing from necessity; nor will they submit, except to the sword that cuts them. . . . Finally, these islands, according to the account given by our people, are a warren of every evil, and contain nothing good but their clove tree.” Barros came to consider the clove itself as the ultimate source of evil in this region. “Though a creation of God,” he wrote, the spice was “actually an apple of discord and responsible for more afflictions than gold.” No wonder Almanzor had grown tired of the Portuguese; and no wonder he preferred Spaniards (although he did not realize that many of the crew were Portuguese). But there was more. Local politics also influenced Almanzor’s thinking. At the time, Tidore was embroiled in a conflict with its island neighbor, Ternate, still in the Portuguese grip, and Almanzor thought these representatives of the Spanish crown could make powerful allies in the struggle. The triumvirate of officers—Elcano, Espinosa, and Méndez— quickly made trading pacts with Almanzor and bestowed so many gifts that he asked them to restrain their overwhelming generosity because “he had nothing worthy to send to our king as a present, unless, now that he recognized him as a sovereign, he should send himself.”
On November 10, Carvalho and a small detachment went ashore, and for the first time the men of the Armada de Molucca set foot on the Spice Islands.
Antonio Galvão, the Portuguese administrator who arrived at the Spice Islands a few years later, evoked the ethereal landscape that greeted the armada’s crew as they looked at their surroundings: “The shape of most of these islands is that of a sugarloaf, with the base going downward into the water, surrounded by reefs at little more than a stone’s throw; at ebb tide one can go there on foot. One can put into the islands through some channels in the reef which outside is very high; and there is no place to anchor except in certain small sandy bays: a dangerous thing! They look gloomy, somber, and depressing. That is always the way they strike the onlooker at first sight; for always, or nearly always, there is a large blanket of fog on their summits. And for the greatest part of the year the sky is cloudy, which makes it rain very often; and if it does not, everything withers but the clove tree, which prospers. And at certain intervals there falls a dismal, misty rain.”
What made the islands seem alive to the first European explorers were the active and highly unpredictable volcanoes rising to the sky. “Some of these islands spit fire and have warm waters like hot springs. And they are so thickly crowded with groves as to look like one big mass of them, and they are therefore hiding places for evil doers,” Galvão warned. As a result of the volcano’s ejecta raining down on the islands, the soil “is black and loose; and in places there is clay and gravel, which is unstable because it lies on the rock where it does not take hold. And however much it may rain, the water stands only a while before it is absorbed.”
Of supreme importance were the spices themselves, especially the cloves. The armada’s men had seen cloves, smelled cloves, and tasted cloves, but only now did they find cloves growing in the wild—not just a few trees scattered here and there, but a dense, impenetrable forest of cloves. “The hills in these five islands are all of cloves,” wrote Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa, after his visit to the Spice Islands in 1512. “[They] grow on trees like laurel, which has its leaf like that of the arbutus, and it grows like the orange flower, which in the beginning is green and then turns white, and when it is ripe it turns coloured, and then they gather it by hand, the people going amongst the trees.”
On their first visit to Tidore, the armada’s leaders reached an agreement with Almanzor recognizing Spain’s sovereignty over the island, even though it violated the Treaty of Tordesillas. Once these formalities were over, the leaders wanted to obtain the spices as quickly as they could, before local strife drove them away. The men had seen too many warm receptions turn violent for them to believe that Almanzor would keep his word for very long.
For the Europeans of the armada, a treaty was, above all, a written document, but for the Tidoreans, only the oral expression carried the force of law. To record commercial transactions, the inhabitants of the Spice Islands occasionally wrote on palm leaves or paper imported from India, using a system borrowed from the Chinese, but when they made treaties, they relied on oral rather than written communication. Both sides managed to overcome their differences to seal the bargain, and with the treaty in force, the king of Tidore advised the armada’s officers that he did not have enough cloves on hand to satisfy their
needs, but he offered to accompany them to Bacan, where he assured them that they would find as much as they wanted. But before the officers began filling the ships with spices, they inquired after one of their own: Francisco Serrão, the author of the letters that had inspired Magellan’s voyage to the Spice Islands.
None of the Europeans knew what had become of this legendary figure. The most recent information—and it was only gossip—was that he and a small band of Portuguese adventurers arrived at Ternate, where they allied themselves with the island’s ruler, Rajah Abuleis. In the eyes of the authorities, Serrão and his band of Portuguese adventurers had become little more than mercenaries; like Magellan, they were willing to switch loyalties to Spain in exchange for a better deal. Now, Serrão’s fate assumed great importance to the armada, which was starved for leadership. It was possible that he was still in the Spice Islands, and, if so, the armada’s officers hoped to reunite with him. He might even take command of the fleet in Magellan’s stead, if he were still alive.
The reunion was not to be. Almanzor revealed that Serrão had died eight months before, about the time of Magellan’s death, but the king concealed the whole story behind Serrão’s end. The facts were these: After his arrival in the Spice Islands in 1512, Serrão had chosen sides in a power struggle between the rulers of Tidore and Ternate, and he served as admiral of the Ternate navy, such as it was. The two island kingdoms battled for years, with Ternate, under Serrão’s leadership, winning every time. To make peace, Serrão forced Tidore to give up the sons of its rulers as hostages and forced Almanzor to marry off his daughter to his enemy, the king of Ternate, whose child she bore.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 35
