Chapter 27
The Clove Harvest
Tidore, the Moluccas
Pigafetta goes ashore on Tidore to see how cloves grow and describes the clove tree better than anyone in Europe ever had. The ships fill their holds with the spice they crossed the world to buy.
14 November 1521
That afternoon the Portuguese trader Pedro Afonso de Lorosa arrives in a small boat. Before he can even land, the king calls him over and tells him, half joking, to answer the Spaniards truthfully whatever they ask, “even if he did come from Tarennate.”
Lorosa has been sixteen years in the Indies, several of them in the Moluccas. He tells them things that make their blood run cold. The king of Portugal knew all about Magellan’s fleet. Furious that a Portuguese had gone over to Spain, he sent ships to the Cape of Good Hope and others to the Cape of Santa Maria, near the River Plate, to stop them. When he learned that Magellan had found another sea, he ordered his commander in India to send six ships to the Moluccas. The ships were diverted to fight the Turks in the Red Sea. A great galleon was sent after them instead, and was held back by shoals and contrary winds near Malacca.
The Portuguese have been trading here in secret for years, Lorosa says, so that the king of Spain would never find out.
He stays with them until three in the morning. They ply him with promises of good pay, and he agrees to sail back to Spain with them.
17 November 1521
On Sunday, Pigafetta goes ashore to see how cloves grow, and he describes it better than anyone in Europe ever had.
The clove tree is tall and about as thick as a man’s body. Its leaves are like a laurel’s and its bark is dark. The cloves grow at the ends of the twigs, ten or twenty in a cluster. When they sprout they are white, when ripe red, and when dried black. They are picked twice a year, around Christmas and around midsummer. The trees grow only in the mountains, he says. Planted in the lowlands, they die. Nearly every day he watches a mist come down and wrap itself around one mountain or another, “on account of which those cloves become perfect.” Each family owns its own trees and watches over them, although nobody cultivates them.
Nutmeg grows here too. The fruit is like a small quince, and under its first rind lies the mace, “a brilliant red,” wrapped around the nut.
The people eat bread made from the pith of a palm, which they call sagu. They wear cloth made from bark soaked and beaten until it is as fine as raw silk. And the men of Tidore are so jealous of their wives, Pigafetta reports with amusement, that they will not let the sailors come ashore unless their drawers are properly covered.
25–26 November 1521
Late on Sunday night the king comes back from gathering cloves, gongs playing, and passes between the ships. On Monday he sends seven hundred and ninety-one cathils of cloves, the first real cargo of the whole voyage. The ships fire their guns to celebrate.
The next day the king makes a speech. It is not the custom, he says, for any king to leave his own island, but he has done it for love of the king of Castile. He hopes they will go home quickly and come back with ships enough to avenge his father, who was murdered on the island of Buru and thrown into the sea. And he invites them to a feast, as is the custom when the first cloves are loaded, to pray for a safe voyage home.
The Europeans freeze. Three Portuguese were murdered from ambush at the very place where they take on water. The islanders have been seen whispering with the prisoners. And they all remember Cebu. They send word that they cannot come, because they must leave soon.
The king comes to the ships at once. He is astonished, he says. He came only to help them. Then he has his Koran brought, kisses it, lifts it four or five times above his head, and swears by Allah, nearly in tears, that he will always be the king of Spain’s faithful friend. Ashamed, they promise to stay another fortnight, and give him the royal signature and the banner.
They learn afterwards that some of the island chiefs had urged him to kill them all, as a favour to the Portuguese. He had refused.
Early December 1521
The king proclaims that anyone with cloves may bring them to the ships, and for two days the Europeans trade “with might and main.” Boats come from every island. The young governor of Makian comes with a fleet of his own.
The trade goods run out. So the men start trading everything else they own. Four fathoms of ribbon buy a bahar of cloves. A pair of brass chains buys a hundred pounds. And then, Pigafetta writes, “when we had no more merchandise, one man gave his cloak, another his doublet, and another his shirt, besides other articles of clothing, in order that they might have their share in the cargo.”
The ships sit lower and lower in the water.
As the day of departure nears, the king grows sad. He tells them he is like a child at the breast who knows its dear mother is leaving it alone. He begs them to leave him some guns for his defence. He warns them to sail only by day among these islands, because of the shoals. They answer that if they want to reach Spain they must sail day and night. Then, he says, he will pray to his God every day to bring them home safely.
Lorosa comes aboard with his wife and all his belongings, to go to Spain. A prince of Ternate turns up in a war boat to seize him. They refuse to let him aboard.
15–16 December 1521
On Sunday the king of Bacan arrives, to marry his brother to one of the king of Tidore’s daughters. He comes in a war boat with a hundred and twenty rowers in three banks on each side, keeping time to the gongs, under banners of white, yellow and red parrot feathers. Two more boats follow, full of girls for the bride.
The kings’ manners fascinate Pigafetta. Kings do not set foot on each other’s islands, so the king of Tidore goes out to greet his guest on the water. The king of Bacan rises from his carpet and stands to one side of it. The king of Tidore will not sit on it either, but sits on the other side, so nobody sits on the carpet at all. The king of Bacan gives five hundred patola, cloths of gold and silk from China, as the bride price.
The next day the king of Tidore sends a banquet to his guest, carried by fifty women dressed in silk, walking two by two with a man between each pair, with ten old women as mace-bearers. On the way back, the women capture some of the sailors, who have to buy their freedom with little trinkets.
That same day the men bend new sails onto the yards. Each bears the cross of St. James of Galicia, with the words: “This is the sign of our good fortune.”
17 December 1521
The king of Tidore is given guns taken from the captured junks, some of the ships’ culverins, and four barrels of powder. Each ship takes on eighty butts of water. The king has already sent a hundred men to cut firewood for them on a nearby island.
The king of Bacan comes ashore, preceded by four men with drawn daggers, and swears before everyone that he will always serve the king of Spain. He will keep the cloves the Portuguese left on his island for the next Spanish fleet. He sends the emperor a slave, some cloves, and a present that will cause a sensation in Europe: two dead birds of extraordinary beauty.
They are the size of thrushes, with small heads, long beaks and long thin legs. Pigafetta says they have no wings, but instead long feathers of many colours, like great plumes. They fly only when the wind blows. The people say they come from the earthly paradise, and they call them bolon diuata, “birds of God.”
That same day each of the kings of the Moluccas writes to the king of Spain to say they wish always to be his true subjects.