Part IX · The Way Home
Chapter 29
The Victoria Alone
The Banda Sea
The Victoria sails on alone through the Banda Sea, past the only islands in the world where nutmeg and mace then grew.
Late December 1521
The Victoria threads south between the islands with her two pilots from Tidore, past names Pigafetta records one after another: Caioan, Laigoma, Sico, Giogi, Caphi. On Caphi, he is told, live a race of tiny people, “as small as dwarfs,” who are “amusing people.” The king of Tidore has conquered them.
They pass Bacan and turn west-southwest, then southeast when the pilots warn them of shoals. At two degrees south they come to an island called Sulach. Its people, Pigafetta is told, have no king, go naked, and eat human flesh, as do the people of many islands around it, whose names he dutifully lists.
He writes these things down with the same flat attention he gave to Patagonia and Brazil. Some of it is hearsay, some is prejudice, and some is fact. He rarely tells us which. But he never stops listening.
The ship is so heavy that she wallows in any sea. The pumps are worked every watch. Over their heads, the new sails show the cross of St. James.
Early January 1522
They reach Buru, a large island at three and a half degrees south, where there is rice, pigs, goats, chickens, coconuts, sugarcane and sago. There are also fruits Pigafetta has never seen. One is the jackfruit, which he calls nangka: knobbly on the outside, and full of small red fruits with a seed like a large bean, tasting of chestnuts. Another is yellow outside and white inside, and when cut it is like a pear, “but more tender and much better.”
Ten leagues to the east is Ambon, where the Muslims live by the sea and the heathens inland. Thirty-five leagues south lies Banda, twelve small islands, six of which grow nutmeg and mace. It is one of the richest places on earth for its size.
“As it was a trifle outside of our course,” Pigafetta writes, “we did not go there.”
The Victoria already has all the cargo she can carry. What she needs now is not spices but food, a sound hull, and luck.
January 1522
Among three small islands a fierce storm hits the ship, and the crew vows a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guidance if they survive. Running before the storm, they reach a tall island. Before they can shelter there, violent gusts come down off its mountains and the currents grip the ship.
The island is Malua, which we call Alor. Pigafetta dislikes its people. He calls them “savage and bestial” and “the ugliest people who live in those Indias.” But his description is exact. For war they wear pieces of buffalo hide decorated with small shells, boars’ tusks and goat tails. Their hair is piled high and held with long reed pins. Their beards are wrapped in leaves and pushed into little bamboo tubes, “a ridiculous sight.” When they first see the ship they come down armed with bows. A few presents, and they are friends.
The Victoria stays a fortnight to caulk her leaking sides. There is wax here, fifteen pounds for a pound of old iron, and pepper, both long and round, growing in the fields on arbours. Before they leave they seize a man to guide them to an island where they can get food.
January 1522
Their old pilot from the Moluccas tells them about an island nearby called Arucheto. The people there are no more than a cubit tall, he says, but they have ears as long as their bodies. They sleep on one ear and cover themselves with the other. They go shaven and naked, run very fast, speak in shrill voices, and live in caves underground, eating fish and a white substance that grows under tree bark.
“However,” Pigafetta adds, “we did not go there because of the strong currents in the water, and the numerous shoals.”
It is easy to laugh at this. But it matters that he wrote it down as something he was told, not something he saw. Throughout the book he is careful, most of the time, to say which is which. The walking leaves he kept in a box. The long-eared people he only heard about. Five centuries later, it is still possible to trust him, because he so often tells us how he knows.
On Saturday, the 25th of January 1522, the Victoria leaves Alor.