Chapter 22
The Land of Promise
Cagayan Sulu and Palawan
Short of food again, the fleet reaches Palawan, the land of promise: rice cooked in lengths of bamboo, bananas as thick as an arm, rice wine and cockfights.
June 1521
Heading west-southwest, they anchor at a small, almost empty island called Caghaian. The people here are Muslims, Pigafetta says, banished from a great island called Burne. They carry blowpipes with small quivers full of poisoned darts at their sides, daggers with hilts of gold and precious stones, and small breastplates made of buffalo horn. Strangely, they call the Europeans holy beings.
There is almost no food on the island, only huge trees. And the men are starving again.
Pigafetta does not describe the hunger of these weeks in detail, but one sentence gives it away. When they finally reach a place with food, he writes, they named it the land of promise, “because we suffered great hunger before we found it. We were often on the point of abandoning the ships and going ashore in order that we might not die of hunger.”
They had crossed the Pacific. Now they were close to giving up among islands where other ships traded every year.
June 1521
The land of promise is Palawan, a long green island. There is rice, ginger, pigs, goats, chickens, coconuts, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, roots that taste like turnips, and bananas half a fathom long and as thick as an arm, “excellent,” with smaller ones that are better still. The people cook rice inside lengths of bamboo in the fire, and it keeps better than rice cooked in clay pots.
The king makes peace in his own way. He cuts himself lightly on the chest with one of the Europeans’ knives, touches the blood to the tip of his tongue and his forehead, and the Europeans do the same.
The people farm, and hunt with blowpipes that fire thick darts tipped with poison, with an iron spear point fixed to the end of the pipe for when the darts run out. They value brass rings and chains, bells and knives, and above all copper wire for tying their fishhooks. They keep large, very tame roosters that they will not eat, out of a kind of reverence, but they make them fight. Each owner bets on his own bird, and the winner takes the stakes. They make a distilled rice wine, Pigafetta notes, “stronger and better than that made from the palm.”
A local pilot agrees to guide them to Burne, the great island to the southwest.