Chapter 16
The Watering-Place of Good Signs
Homonhon, the Philippines
On 16 March 1521 the fleet sights Samar and anchors at Homonhon, where the men find two springs of clear water and the first signs of gold. They call it the Watering-Place of Good Signs.
Where did Magellan first land in the Philippines?
On Homonhon, a small uninhabited island off Samar. The fleet sighted Samar at dawn on 16 March 1521, and the next day Magellan landed his sick men on Homonhon and put up tents for them on the shore. On 18 March men from neighbouring Suluan came to meet them, the first meeting with people of the islands. The fleet stayed a week, and named the place the Watering-Place of Good Signs for its springs and the first signs of gold. Magellan called the islands the Archipelago of San Lázaro; the name Philippines came later, after a prince of Spain.
16–17 March 1521
At dawn on Saturday, the 16th of March, a high coast appears ahead, three hundred leagues west of the Ladrones. It is an island its people call Samar.
Magellan does not land there. He wants somewhere safe to rest his sick men, so the next day he chooses a small uninhabited island nearby. Its name is Homonhon. He has two tents put up on the shore for the sick, and has a pig killed for them.
It is the first time in almost four months that the men have lain on solid ground. They have reached the edge of a great archipelago, an unknown world of islands in every direction.
Because the islands were first sighted on the day Pigafetta calls the Sabbath of St. Lazarus, Magellan names them the Archipelago of San Lázaro. Later they will be renamed after a prince of Spain who has not yet been born: the Philippines.
18 March 1521
On Monday afternoon a boat approaches with nine men in it. Magellan orders everyone to stay still and say nothing without his permission.
The visitors come ashore, and their chief goes straight to Magellan, showing every sign of joy. They come from a neighbouring island called Suluan. Magellan sees that “they were reasonable men” and has food set before them, and gives them red caps, mirrors, combs, bells, ivory and cotton cloth. In return they give him fish, a jar of palm wine they call uraca, bananas, and two coconuts. It is all they have with them, they explain by signs, but in four days they will bring rice, which they call umay, and more.
To honour them, Magellan takes them aboard the flagship and shows them his cargo: cloves, cinnamon, pepper, ginger, nutmeg and gold. When he fires a few guns for them, they are so frightened they try to jump overboard. But they make signs that the spices on board grow in the place the fleet is heading for.
After nineteen months, the voyage is finally in the right part of the world.
March 1521
Pigafetta is fascinated by the coconut palm, and he writes about it at loving length. Just as Europeans have bread, wine, oil and milk, he says, these people get everything from this one tree.
For wine, they cut into the heart of the palm at the top, where a sweet, slightly sharp sap drips out. They collect it in bamboo tubes as thick as a man’s leg, tied up in the evening for the morning and in the morning for the evening. The nut itself is as big as a head. Its green husk gives fibre for rope. Its hard shell is burned into a useful powder. Inside is white flesh a finger thick, eaten fresh with meat and fish as Europeans eat bread, and tasting like almonds. In the middle is a clear, sweet, refreshing water.
Leave the flesh and water to rot, then boil it, and you get oil like butter. Leave just the water in the sun, and you get vinegar. The sailors even make milk, by scraping the flesh and straining it through a cloth with its own water, “like goat’s milk.”
Two trees, he says, can support a family of ten, if they draw wine from them in alternate weeks. The trees live a hundred years.
22 March 1521
At noon on Friday the men from Suluan come back as promised, in two boats. They bring coconuts, sweet oranges, a jar of palm wine and a rooster, to show that there are chickens in their islands.
Their lord is an old man, tattooed all over, with two gold rings in his ears. His companions wear gold armlets and cloths wrapped around their heads. Near the islands, they say, live people with holes in their ears so large they can put their arms through them.
The fleet stays a week. Every day Magellan goes ashore to visit the sick, and every morning he gives them coconut water from his own hand. Pigafetta notes how much it comforts them. The men begin to recover, quickly, as scurvy victims do once they have fresh food.
On Homonhon they find two springs of perfectly clear water, and the first signs of gold. They name the place the Acquada da li buoni Segnialli: the Watering-Place of Good Signs.
Monday, 25 March 1521
On the afternoon of Holy Monday, the feast of the Annunciation, the ships are about to weigh anchor, and Pigafetta goes to the side of the ship to fish.
It is raining. He steps onto a spar leading down towards the storeroom, his feet slip, and he falls into the sea. Nobody sees him go. When he is almost under, his left hand happens to catch a rope trailing from the mainsail in the water. He hangs on and yells so loudly that the small boat comes and hauls him out.
“I was aided,” he writes, “not, I believe, indeed, through my merits, but through the mercy of that font of charity,” meaning the Virgin Mary, on whose feast day it happened.
It is easy to read past this moment. But the only full eyewitness account of the first voyage around the world very nearly ended here, in the rain, with a slip of the foot, long before most of its story had happened. That same day the ships sail west-southwest, threading between four small islands, looking for a larger harbour.