Chapter 7
The Island of Sails
Guam, in the Marianas
Legazpi’s fleet reached Guam on 22 January 1565. Hundreds of Chamorro canoes came out to trade, and Legazpi took possession of the island for Spain. After a ship’s boy was killed, his soldiers hanged three captives and burned houses, and the fleet sailed on 3 February.
22 January 1565
On 22 January land rises ahead: high, green and mountainous. The pilots say it is the Philippines. Urdaneta says it is the Ladrones, and he is sure when the boats come out, because they carry triangular sails of woven palm mat, “which the inhabitants of the Filipinas do not make.” He is right again.
Fifty or sixty canoes surround the fleet, with six or eight people in each. They are “as light as the wind,” Legazpi wrote, and another Spaniard marvelled that they sailed into the wind or across it “with so much swiftness … that it is a thing to marvel at.” The people laugh and shout, each crew inviting the strangers to its own village.
This is Guam, the island where Magellan’s men landed in 1521 and called the whole group the Islands of Thieves.
23 January 1565
The next morning the fleet anchors in a good harbour, and the canoes come back in hundreds: more than four or five hundred, some men counted. The Chamorro will not come aboard, so all the trading is done over the side. They sell rice, yams, coconuts, sugarcane, ginger, and bananas better than any in Mexico, for scraps of cloth and the face cards from old packs of playing cards, which they hang round their necks. Then the Spaniards bring out nails.
“Chamurre, chamurre,” the people call: friends, friends. Fray Andrés de Urdaneta, the prior, tries the words he remembers from his last visit, nearly forty years before, and counts to ten in their language, which delights them. One of them says a name: Gonzalo.
Late January 1565
The trading turns sour. Some bundles of rice turn out to be mostly sand and grass, and the coconut oil is watered. When the Spaniards complain, the Chamorro show fight. They pull nails out of the ships’ sides, and take a piece of a rudder from the *San Juan*. When the ships put in for water, stones fly, and Captain Juan de la Isla is hit.
Legazpi takes possession of the island in the king’s name, and the friars say Mass ashore. Urdaneta suggests they settle here and send a ship straight back to Mexico. Legazpi refuses: his orders are for the Philippines.
Early February 1565
A ship’s boy goes ashore with the water party, falls asleep in a palm grove, and is killed. Legazpi sends Mateo del Saz ashore with a hundred men. They capture four people. Three of them, all wounded, are hanged on the spot where the boy died. The fourth is kept aboard, to be taken to Mexico. Many houses are burned.
One of the Spaniards thought it slight punishment, done “so that when Spaniards … anchor there another time, the natives shall give them a better reception.”
On 3 February the fleet sails west for the Philippines.