Part VI · Holding On
Chapter 20
Hungry Months
Cebu and the islands around it
After the San Pedro left, the Spaniards at Cebu waited more than a year for help. Food ran so short that some soldiers ate cats and rats; expeditions went out to buy or take rice from other islands; and two plots to steal a ship and desert were discovered, and their leaders hanged.
Summer and autumn 1565
All through the summer the people of Cebu sell the Spaniards palm wine, *tuba*, and the soldiers drink it “with good appetite, saying that they did not miss the wine of Castilla.” Legazpi, worried about drunkenness and fights, bans it from the camp. The trade goes on “secretly and at night.”
Traders come from farther away. A few Muslim merchants from Luzon arrive, led by a man the Spaniards call Magomat, with silver and small coins, wanting to see how the strangers trade; through them come two small junks from Mindoro, with iron, tin, porcelain, Chinese silk and perfumes. Legazpi sends word with them to the king of Luzon that he would like to meet him.
On All Saints’ Day, 1 November, about the hour of Mass, fire runs through the settlement. Twenty houses burn, among them the friars’ house and the hut where Mass is said. No one can tell whether it was set.
28 November 1565
Food is short, and the soldiers grumble that they may take nothing from the people without paying. Some of them begin to plot.
The plan is to seize the patache *San Juan*, rob the trading junks of Borneo, Luzon and Mindoro, and sail for home by the Strait of Magellan, or, if the winds are wrong, to the Portuguese at Malacca, who would welcome deserters. The *San Pablo* and the new frigates are to be sunk so that no one can follow. More than forty men are in it, some of them foreigners.
On 28 November, the day set for it, the master of the *San Pablo* gives the plot away. Its leader, a Venetian called Pablos Hernández, tries to escape by dressing as a friar, then gives himself up “to die as a Christian.” He is hanged, with the fleet’s French pilot, Pierres Plin, and a Greek. The others are pardoned. Legazpi gives the foreigners one order: from now on, they are to speak nothing but Spanish.
Early 1566
The hunger gets worse. Some soldiers eat cats and rats. The people of Cebu send canoes to other islands to buy rice for the Spaniards, and come back late and with little, perhaps on purpose, the Spaniards think, hoping hunger will drive them away.
So Legazpi sends his own men out, to buy food where they can and take it where they cannot. Goiti brings boatloads of rice from villages that make peace. Mateo del Saz sails as far as Butuan, overstays his forty days, and comes back with more than a thousand *fanegas* of rice and the news that he has taken possession of the coasts of Mindanao, Negros and Panay. At Baybay, on Leyte, where enemies of Cebu are raiding its allies, the Spaniards find the villages empty, kill a few pigs, burn the houses and hang the people they catch.
1566
On one of these voyages, on the coast between Leyte and Samar, Goiti hears of a Christian called Juanes, who has lived among the people for more than twenty years, married a chief’s daughter, and is tattooed like any warrior of the islands. When at last they find out about him, he turns out to be not a Spaniard but a Mexican Indian, left behind by Villalobos’s fleet.
While the camp is weakened by so many expeditions, a second mutiny is planned, to steal a boat from the Luzon traders and sail to the Moluccas. Its leader, a soldier named Carrión, is hanged with one other. He “knew but little,” the record says, “but presumed to know it all, and talked too much.”
Still no ship comes from Mexico.