Chapter 24
The Walking Leaves
The north coast of Borneo
Repairing the ships on the coast of Borneo, Pigafetta finds trees whose fallen leaves get up and walk. He keeps one in a box. They are leaf insects.
August 1521
Both ships are leaking badly, and they need a quiet place to haul them out and repair them. On the way, one of them runs onto shoals near an island called Bibalon “because of the carelessness of its pilot,” but they get her off.
Then, Pigafetta reports as calmly as ever, a sailor on that ship carelessly snuffs a candle and drops it into a barrel full of gunpowder. He snatches it out again at once, “without any harm.” Had he been a moment slower, there would have been no more voyage and no more book.
They capture a boat loaded with coconuts on its way to Burne. Its crew runs to hide on a small island. Three other boats escape behind some islets. The expedition that set out to trade is living more and more like pirates.
August–September 1521
At the northern tip of Borneo, near an island called Cimbonbon, they find what Pigafetta calls “a perfect port for repairing ships.” They lack many of the things they need, and the work takes forty-two days. Everyone labours, he says, one at one thing and one at another. The hardest job of all is going barefoot into the forest to cut wood.
The place is full of wildlife. They see a wild boar swimming from one island to another and chase it down in the ship’s boat. Its head is two and a half spans long, with huge tusks. There are large crocodiles on land and in the sea, and oysters and shellfish of every kind. Two giant clams yield twenty-six and forty-four pounds of meat. They catch a small fish with a head like a pig’s and two horns, whose body seems to be a single bone, shaped like a saddle on its back.
For six weeks the two ships lie on their sides on the beach, their hulls scraped and caulked and patched. It is the longest rest of the voyage, and in a way the strangest: a hundred men camped on the edge of an unknown forest, halfway round the world, waiting for the tar to dry.
September 1521
Then Pigafetta finds the strangest thing of all.
“Trees are also found there which produce leaves which are alive when they fall, and walk.” They look like mulberry leaves, but shorter. On each side, near the short, pointed stem, they have two feet. They have no blood, but if you touch them, they run away.
He keeps one of them in a box for nine days. When he opens the box, the leaf walks round and round inside it.
“I believe,” he concludes, “those leaves live on nothing but air.”
It is an absurd sentence, and a lovely one. He is wrong about the air, of course. But he has done exactly what a naturalist should do: seen something impossible, collected it, kept it, watched it, and written down what it did. Nobody in Europe will believe him.
September 1521
At the careening beach, according to the other records of the voyage, the men settle accounts with Carvalho. He has let the Luzon prince go for gold, kept the captured women for himself, and led them in circles for months. They remove him from command and make him a pilot again.
In his place they choose Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms who stabbed Luis de Mendoza on the Victoria at San Julián, as captain-general and commander of the Trinidad. The Victoria is given to a Basque sailor named Juan Sebastián Elcano.
Eighteen months earlier Elcano had been a condemned mutineer, working in chains through the Patagonian winter. Now he commands a ship.
Neither Espinosa nor Elcano knows exactly where the Moluccas are. But they know which way to go: southeast, towards the great island of Mindanao, where there are people who will know, and pilots who can be persuaded, one way or another, to show them.