Chapter 4
The Land of Verzin
The bay of Santa Lucia (Rio de Janeiro)
In the bay of Santa Lucia, now Rio de Janeiro, the crews trade with the people of Verzin. A fishhook buys five or six chickens, and a single playing card buys six.
St. Lucy’s Day, 13 December 1519
They sail into a great bay on St. Lucy’s day and name it after her, the Bay of Santa Lucia. Today it is the harbour of Rio de Janeiro. The sun is at the zenith. Pigafetta, sweating, notes that it is hotter here than it ever was on the equator.
The people who come out to meet them have had no rain for two months. On the day the ships arrive, it rains. The coincidence makes a deep impression. The people say the strangers must have come from the sky and brought the rain with them. From that moment the Europeans are welcome.
At first, Pigafetta says, the people believe the ships’ small boats are the ships’ children. They think the great ships give birth to them when they are lowered into the sea. And when the boats lie alongside, as they usually do, the people believe the ships are nursing them.
It is one of the loveliest images in the whole account, and it shows something about Pigafetta. He wants to understand how the world looks from the other side.
December 1519
Then the trading begins, and Pigafetta records the prices with delight. One fishhook or one knife buys five or six chickens. A comb buys a pair of geese. A small mirror or a pair of scissors buys enough fish to feed ten men. A bell or a leather lace buys a basket of sweet potatoes. He calls them batate, “as long as turnips,” and says they taste like chestnuts.
For a single playing card, a king of diamonds, the people give Pigafetta six chickens, “and thought that they had even cheated me.” He enjoys the joke on both sides.
There are pineapples, which he calls the most delicious fruit to be found anywhere. There is tapir meat, which tastes like beef, and there is sugarcane. There are parrots, eight or ten for one mirror, and little yellow monkeys that look like tiny lions. After the salt meat and foul water of the crossing, it is paradise. The men eat, drink and sleep ashore, and the sick begin to recover.
December 1519
The people of this coast live in long houses they call boii. Each one holds a hundred men with their wives and children, “and they make a great racket.” They sleep in cotton hammocks, which Pigafetta spells amache, tied to the beams by each end, with a fire burning on the ground beneath.
They have no iron and use stone tools instead. Their canoes are hollowed out of a single huge tree with stone hatchets, and each one carries thirty or forty men. Paddling, “black, naked, and shaven,” they remind Pigafetta of the damned souls in the marshes of the river Styx.
They paint their whole bodies and faces. The men pull out their beards, and many wear three round stones set into holes in the lower lip. They dress in parrot feathers, with a great round arrangement of the longest feathers at the back, “and it is a ridiculous sight.” Their chief is called the cacich. They are as tall and well built as Europeans, Pigafetta says, and they live to 125 or 140 years old. He did not check that last claim.
December 1519
Pigafetta’s guide to all this is the pilot João Lopes Carvalho, a Portuguese who lived on this coast for four years and had a son here with a local woman. The boy will sail with his father when the fleet leaves.
It is Carvalho who tells him why these people eat their enemies. It is not because the flesh is good, Pigafetta learns, but because it is an old custom, and the story is that it began with a mother. An old woman had an only son, and enemies killed him. Some time later her friends captured one of the killers and brought him to her. When she saw him, remembering her son, she ran at him “like an infuriated bitch” and bit him on the shoulder. He escaped and fled home. He showed his people the marks and told them his captors had tried to eat him. From then on, whenever either side took a prisoner, they ate him.
They do not eat a body all at once, Carvalho says. Each man takes a piece home and smokes it. Every week he eats a small bit with his other food, to remind himself of his enemies. Pigafetta writes this down in the same even tone he uses for the price of chickens.
December 1519
Other things he writes about more uneasily. The women work the fields and carry everything on their heads. Their husbands walk beside them with bows of brazil-wood, out of jealousy. The women carry their babies in cotton nets that hang from their necks. The men offer the sailors one or two of their young daughters as slaves for a single hatchet or large knife. But they will not give up their wives for anything.
Mass is said twice on the shore. The people kneel through it with hands clasped and raised, “with so great contrition” that Pigafetta finds it a great pleasure to watch. They build the Europeans a house, thinking they have come to stay. When the fleet leaves, they cut a great quantity of brazil-wood to give them.
“Those people,” Pigafetta concludes, “could be converted easily to the faith of Jesus Christ.” It is the first time he says it. He will say the same of almost everyone he meets, until the fleet reaches people who already have a faith of their own.
26 December 1519
Before they leave, Pigafetta makes his first word list. Millet is maiz. Flour is hui. A fishhook is pinda, a knife tacse, a comb chigap, scissors pirame, a bell itanmaraca. “Good, better” is tum maragathum.
It is a short list, but it starts a habit that will make his book one of the most valuable records of its time. Wherever the fleet goes, he will sit down with someone, point at things, and write down the words.
Pigafetta does not record everything that happens at Santa Lucia. Magellan uses the stay to settle the case of the Victoria‘s master, Antonio Salamón. He is condemned and strangled on the beach, the first man of the fleet to die, and at the fleet’s own hands.
After thirteen days in the bay, on the 26th of December, the ships put to sea again. They are loaded with fresh food and water, and they turn south along the coast.