Chapter 30
Timor
Timor
At Timor, Pigafetta sees the white sandalwood that grows there “and nowhere else,” and that merchants came from Java and Malacca to buy.
Sunday, 26 January 1522
The next day they reach a large island five leagues to the south-southwest. It is Timor. Pigafetta goes ashore alone again, to ask the chief of a town called Amaban for food. The chief offers buffaloes, pigs and goats, but wants so much for a single buffalo that they cannot agree. The ship has little left to trade, and the men are hungry.
So they do what they have done before. They hold a chief from another village, Balibo, aboard with his son. Afraid of being killed, he quickly produces six buffaloes, five goats and two pigs, and one more buffalo to make up the ten pigs and ten goats they had demanded. Then they send him and his son ashore “very well pleased,” with linen, Indian silk and cotton cloth, hatchets, knives, scissors and mirrors.
The chief of Amaban is served only by women. The women wear small gold earrings with silk tassels and gold and brass armlets up to the elbow. The men wear gold discs round their necks and bamboo combs with gold rings in their hair. Some wear the necks of dried gourds in their ears instead of gold.
February 1522
White sandalwood grows on Timor, Pigafetta says, “and nowhere else.” Merchants from Java and Malacca come here for it and for wax, and he finds a junk from Luzon in port, loading sandalwood. When the people go to cut it, he is told, the devil appears to them in many forms and offers them whatever they need, and afterwards they are sick for days. The wood must be cut at a certain phase of the moon, or it will not be good.
The island has four kings, all brothers, on the far side. Gold is found in a mountain there, and people buy things with little bits of it.
Pigafetta also notes a disease. “The disease of St. Job was to be found in all of the islands which we encountered in that archipelago, but more in that place than in others.” The people call it foi franchi, the “Portuguese disease.” It is syphilis, spreading along the trade routes a few years ahead of the ships that carried it.
Not everyone gets back aboard. At the very end of his book, Pigafetta mentions in passing that some men “deserted at the island of Timor.” After two and a half years, they chose an island at the end of the world over one more ocean in that ship.
February 1522
At Timor, as the ship prepares to go, Pigafetta fills pages with what the pilots and prisoners tell him about the lands beyond: Java, Siam, Cambodia, China. It is half geography and half dream.
In Java, he is told, when a great man dies and his body is burned, his chief wife dresses herself in garlands of flowers. She is carried through the town comforting her weeping family. “Do not weep,” she tells them, “for I am going to sup with my dear husband this evening, and to sleep with him this night.” Then she throws herself into the fire.
On an island below Java there live only women, who become pregnant from the wind. In a vast tree in the Gulf of China live birds called garuda, so large they carry off buffaloes and elephants. A shipwrecked boy once climbed that tree and hid under one of their wings. In China the king is never seen by anyone. He rides about his palace on a marvellous mechanical peacock, then sits inside a great jewelled serpent and looks out at his people through a glass in its breast.
Pigafetta records it all, without comment. He has seen penguins and giants, walking leaves and birds of God. Who is he to say where the marvels stop?