Chapter 25
The Road to Maluco
The Sulu Sea and Mindanao
Lost among the islands, the fleet seizes boats and pilots by force, until one pilot points to four islands on the horizon and says that they are Maluco.
Early October 1521
Off the southern tip of Palawan they meet a junk coming from Burne, carrying the governor of Palawan. They signal it to lower its sails. When it refuses, they take it by force and plunder it.
They tell the governor he can have his freedom if, within seven days, he delivers four hundred measures of rice, twenty pigs, twenty goats and a hundred and fifty chickens. He does, and more: coconuts, bananas, sugarcane and jars of palm wine.
Something about his generosity shames them. “Seeing his liberality,” Pigafetta writes, they return some of his daggers and guns, and give him a flag, a yellow damask robe and fifteen fathoms of cloth. They give his son a blue cloak and his brother a green robe, “and we parted from them as friends.” It is one of the stranger sentences in the book: they kidnapped a man, ransomed him for food, and parted as friends.
Then, at last, they turn southeast, towards the Moluccas.
October 1521
They cross a stretch of sea where the water is very deep but full of floating grass, “as though we were entering another sea.” To the south lie two islands, Zolo and Taghima, where pearls are found. The king of Burne’s great pearls came from here, Pigafetta learns. He married the daughter of the king of Zolo, heard from her that her father owned two extraordinary pearls, and came one night with five hundred war boats. He carried off the king and two of his sons, and would not release them until the pearls were handed over.
Along the coast of Mindanao, at two settlements called Cavit and Subanin, grows the best cinnamon in the world, Pigafetta is told. Nobody wants to stop. The wind is right for rounding a headland. So they trade from the ship without anchoring, two large knives taken from the governor of Palawan for seventeen pounds of cinnamon.
He describes the tree: three or four cubits high, as thick as a finger, with leaves like a laurel’s. The bark is the cinnamon, harvested twice a year. The people call it caiu mana, “sweet wood.”
Near here, he adds, live people who spend their whole lives on boats.
October 1521
Heading for a great city on Mindanao to ask the way to the Moluccas, they seize a boat by force and kill seven of the eighteen men aboard. The survivors are all chiefs of that city, “as well built as any whom we had seen.” One of them says he is the brother of the king, and that he knows where the Moluccas are.
They turn southeast on his directions.
He tells them tales as they sail. On a cape of Mindanao near a river, he says, live hairy men called Benaian, fierce fighters and archers who eat only raw human hearts with orange or lemon juice. Pigafetta writes it down without comment, as he writes down everything. Whether the king’s brother believed it, or simply enjoyed frightening his captors, we will never know.
The men who sailed from Seville as traders now have to kidnap guides to find the islands they came for. And the guides, as it turns out, have plans of their own.
Saturday, 26 October 1521
On the night of Saturday the 26th of October, off the southern coast of Mindanao, a ferocious storm hits them. They lower all the sails and pray.
“Immediately our three saints appeared to us and dissipated all the darkness.” St. Elmo stands on the maintop like a torch for more than two hours, St. Nicholas on the mizzen, and St. Clare on the foremast. In gratitude they promise a slave to the three saints, and give alms to each of them.
It is one of those moments where the sixteenth century looks back at us, unashamed. Pigafetta sees no contradiction in thanking the saints with a human being.
The storm passes. They take shelter in a harbour between two islands, Sarangani and Candighar, where there is gold and there are pearls. There they seize two more pilots by force to take them to the Moluccas.
Late October 1521
They sail south-southwest past a chain of eight small islands laid out, Pigafetta says, “in the manner of a street.” At the end of the chain is a beautiful island called Sanghir, ruled by four kings. The wind is against them, and they tack back and forth off its coast for hours.
That night the prisoners make their move. One of the pilots taken at Sarangani slips over the side and swims for the island. So does the king’s brother from Mindanao, carrying his small son with him.
The boy cannot keep his grip on his father’s shoulder in the dark water, and he drowns.
Pigafetta gives it one sentence, and it is one of the saddest in the book. The fleet sails on, with one pilot left to show the way.
Wednesday, 6 November 1521
On Wednesday, the 6th of November, four tall islands appear on the horizon to the east. The pilot who is still with them says that those four islands are Maluco.
“Therefore we thanked God,” Pigafetta writes, “and as an expression of our joy discharged all our artillery.”
“It was no wonder that we were so glad, for we had passed twenty-seven months less two days in our search for Malucho.”
Twenty-seven months. Two hundred and thirty-seven men have become about a hundred, and five ships have become two. Magellan, who dreamed up the voyage, lies unburied on a beach on Mactan. But the Spice Islands are there, rising blue out of the sea. Pigafetta notes with some satisfaction that the Portuguese had claimed these waters could not be sailed, because of shoals and dark skies. The Portuguese, he says, were wrong.