Part VI · Lost Among Islands
Chapter 21
The Burning of the Concepción
Bohol and Mindanao
About 115 men are left of the 237 who sailed from Seville, too few to sail three ships. Off Bohol the survivors strip the Concepción of everything useful and set her on fire.
Early May 1521
Eighteen leagues from Cebu, off the island of Bohol, the survivors take stock. There are not enough of them left to sail three ships. They strip the Concepción of everything useful, stow the best of it in the Trinidad and the Victoria, and set her on fire.
Pigafetta gives this a single sentence. The men who watched her burn must have felt it more. She had carried them through the Atlantic storms, the winter at San Julián, the mutiny, the strait and the Pacific.
Command passes, according to other records, to João Lopes Carvalho, the pilot who had lived in Brazil and who refused to save João Serrão on the beach at Cebu. He is an experienced seaman and he knows these waters a little. But he is not Magellan. With no clear idea where the Moluccas lie, the two remaining ships begin to wander south and west through the islands, trading where they can and taking what they cannot buy.
About a hundred and fifteen men are left, of the two hundred and thirty-seven who sailed from Seville.
May 1521
They sail south-southwest along the coast of a large island Pigafetta calls Panilongon, where, he says, “black men like those in Etiopia live.” Then they come to a great island, Mindanao, whose king wants to make peace with them.
The ritual is different here. The king draws blood from his left hand and marks his body, his face and the tip of his tongue with it, “as a token of the closest friendship,” and the Europeans do the same.
Then Pigafetta does something remarkable. He goes ashore alone, with the king, to see the island.
It is only a couple of weeks since the massacre at Cebu, where men who went ashore to eat with a friendly king never came back. Pigafetta is the only European for miles, in the hands of a ruler whose language he barely speaks. He does not mention being afraid. Perhaps his curiosity was simply stronger than his fear. Perhaps, after everything, he had decided that most people were what they seemed.
May 1521
They go up a river in the king’s boat. Fishermen offer the king fish as they pass. Then the king takes off his clothes, as do some of his chiefs, and starts to row, singing, past the houses along the bank. Two hours after dark they reach the king’s house.
It is lit with torches of cane and palm leaves. Before supper the king, two of his chiefs and two of his beautiful wives drink a whole large jar of palm wine without eating anything. Pigafetta, making the excuse that he has already eaten, drinks only once. Supper is rice and very salty fish on porcelain dishes. He notes how they cook the rice, in a clay jar lined with a large leaf, until it is as firm as bread. He sleeps on a reed mat with one of the chiefs.
In the morning he walks around the island. He sees plenty of gold in the houses but very little food. The king takes him up a hill to meet the queen, who is weaving a sleeping mat of palm leaves among hanging porcelain jars and metal gongs. They point out valleys where gold is as plentiful “as the hairs of their heads,” they say, but they have no iron to dig it.
On the way back down the river, he sees three men hanging from a tree with its branches cut away. He asks why. The king says they were thieves.