Chapter 20
The Banquet
Cebu, the Philippines
Days after Mactan, Rajah Humabon invites the fleet’s officers to a feast. It is a trap: the new commanders, Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão, are among the men killed, and the ships flee Cebu.
28–30 April 1521
The fleet elects two new commanders: Duarte Barbosa, Magellan’s brother-in-law, and João Serrão, the former captain of the Santiago. The four men who had been trading ashore bring the goods back to the ships.
Enrique, the interpreter, has been slightly wounded, and he stays in his bunk. He will not go ashore to do his work. Barbosa, commanding the flagship, shouts at him. His master may be dead, Barbosa tells him, but that does not make him free. When they get back to Spain he will still be the slave of Doña Beatriz, Magellan’s widow. If he does not go ashore, he will be flogged.
Enrique gets up and says nothing, as if the words mean nothing to him. Then he goes ashore to see King Humabon. He tells the king the ships are about to leave, and that if the king follows his advice, he can take the ships and everything in them. Together, Pigafetta says, they make a plan. Enrique comes back to the ship and behaves “more cunning than before.”
Wednesday, 1 May 1521
On the morning of the 1st of May, King Humabon sends word that the jewels he promised for the king of Spain are ready. He invites the commanders and their companions to dine with him and receive them.
Twenty-four men go ashore. Among them are Barbosa, Serrão, and the fleet’s astrologer, Andrés de San Martín. Pigafetta does not go. His face is still badly swollen from the poisoned arrow at Mactan.
Soon two men come back: the pilot João Lopes Carvalho and the fleet’s constable. On the way to the feast they saw the man who had been healed “by a miracle” lead the priest off to his own house, and something about it frightened them. They left and returned to the ships.
“Scarcely had they spoken those words,” Pigafetta writes, “when we heard loud cries and lamentations.”
1 May 1521
The ships weigh anchor at once, move in close to the shore, and fire their guns into the houses. Then, through the smoke, they see João Serrão brought down to the water’s edge in his shirt, bound and wounded. He cries out to them to stop firing, or the islanders will kill him.
They shout to ask whether the others are dead. All of them, he says, except the interpreter.
Serrão begs them to ransom him with some of the trade goods. But Carvalho, his close companion, will not let the boat go ashore. Pigafetta suspects that Carvalho and those with him wanted to stay masters of the ships. Serrão, weeping, begs them not to sail so quickly, because they will kill him. Then he cries out that he prays God will ask for his soul from João Carvalho, his friend, on the Day of Judgement.
The ships sail. “I do not know,” Pigafetta writes, “whether he is dead or alive.”
Within five days the expedition has lost its captain-general, both his successors, its astrologer, and more than thirty men. A few weeks earlier, Cebu had welcomed them as friends.