Chapter 18
Zubu
Cebu, the Philippines
At Cebu, Rajah Humabon makes peace with Magellan, and on 14 April 1521 he is baptised with about eight hundred of his people. The queen is given a wooden figure of the Christ Child: the Santo Niño, still kept in Cebu.
Sunday, 7 April 1521
At noon on Sunday, the 7th of April, the ships enter the harbour of Zubu, which we call Cebu. They pass village after village of houses raised on posts. As they approach the town, Magellan orders the banners flown and the sails lowered and arranged as if for battle, and fires every gun in the fleet. The people of Cebu are terrified.
He sends ashore a young man Pigafetta calls his foster-son (Cristóvão Rebelo, by most accounts), with Enrique to interpret. They find a huge crowd with the king, all frightened by the guns. The interpreter explains that this is simply their custom when entering a port, a salute of peace and friendship.
The king, Rajah Humabon, is not easily impressed. He asks what they want. All ships that enter his port, he says, pay tribute, and a junk from Siam paid it only four days ago. He points to a merchant from that junk who is still in town trading gold and slaves. Enrique replies that his master serves the greatest king in the world and pays tribute to no one. If the king wants peace he will have peace, and if he wants war, war.
The merchant from Siam, a Muslim, leans over to the king. “Look well, sire,” he says. “These men are the same who have conquered Calicut, Malaca, and all India Major.” Treat them well, and they will treat you well. Treat them badly, and they will do to you what they did to Calicut and Malacca.
The king says he will think about it and answer tomorrow.
8–9 April 1521
The next morning the fleet’s notary goes ashore. The king asks whether Magellan expects him to pay tribute to the emperor. The notary says no; the captain only wants to trade with him. Then, says the king, if the captain wants to be his friend, let him send a drop of blood from his right arm, and the king will do the same.
The next day the king’s nephew and heir comes out to the ships to make peace, with the king of Mazaua, the merchant from Siam, the governor, the chief constable and eight chiefs. Magellan receives them in a red velvet chair. He shows the merchant a man in full armour. When the merchant looks frightened, Magellan tells him not to be, because “our arms were soft toward our friends and harsh toward our enemies.”
Then Magellan talks to them about God. He tells them God made the sky, the earth and the sea; that all people are descended from Adam and Eve; that we should honour our fathers and mothers; that we have immortal souls. They listen closely and say they have never heard such words. They ask him to leave one or two men behind to teach them. When they say they will speak to their king about becoming Christians, “we all wept with great joy,” Pigafetta writes. Magellan tells them not to do it out of fear or to please the Europeans, but of their own free will. They cry out that it is their own free will.
Magellan takes one hand of the prince and one of the king of Mazaua between his own, weeping, and promises them perpetual peace with the king of Spain.
9 April 1521
That afternoon Pigafetta and another man carry Magellan’s gifts to the king: a robe of yellow and violet silk in the Turkish style, a fine red cap, and strings of glass beads, all on a silver dish, with two gilded drinking cups.
They find King Humabon in his palace, sitting on a palm mat on the ground. He wears only a cotton cloth around his waist and an embroidered scarf on his head, with a very valuable necklace and two large gold earrings set with gems. He is short and fat, and tattooed with fire in many designs. From another mat he is eating turtle eggs from two porcelain dishes. In front of him stand four jars of palm wine covered with sweet-smelling herbs, each with four thin reeds in it, and he drinks through them.
They dress him in the robe and put the cap on his head. Pigafetta kisses the beads and lays them on his head, and the king does the same. Then the king has them eat turtle eggs and drink through the reeds.
Afterwards the prince takes them to his house, where four girls are playing music. One plays a drum resting on the ground. One strikes two hanging gongs with a padded stick, another a single large gong, and the last clashes two small gongs together in her hands. “They played so harmoniously,” Pigafetta writes, “that one would believe they possessed good musical sense.” The gongs, he learns, are called aghon, and they come from China.
10–12 April 1521
On Wednesday morning one of the crew is found dead. Pigafetta and Enrique go to ask the king where they may bury him. The king’s reply is gracious and a little unnerving: “If I and my vassals all belong to your sovereign, how much more ought the land.” The dead man is buried in the town square with as much ceremony as they can manage, and a cross is set over the grave. In the evening they bury another.
The Europeans set up a warehouse ashore and fill it with goods, and four men stay there to trade. The people of Cebu, Pigafetta notes approvingly, “live in accordance with justice, and have weights and measures.” They have wooden balances with marked beams. They love peace, ease and quiet. Their houses stand high on posts, reached by ladders, with the pigs, goats and chickens kept underneath.
The trading is brisk. For ten pieces of gold, each worth about a ducat and a half, the people take fourteen pounds of iron. Magellan deliberately holds the gold trade back. He knows that some of his sailors would give everything they owned for a little gold, and ruin the trade forever.
The sea here, Pigafetta is told, holds a snail so dangerous that it kills whales. The whale swallows it alive, and inside the whale it comes out of its shell and eats the whale’s heart. People find it still alive beside the dead whale’s heart. It is called laghan, and it is good to eat.
Sunday, 14 April 1521
On Saturday a platform is built in the consecrated square, hung with cloths and palm branches. Magellan warns the king not to be alarmed by the guns in the morning. On Sunday, the 14th of April, forty men go ashore, led by two in full armour carrying the royal banner, and all the ships’ guns fire.
Magellan and the king sit in chairs of red and violet velvet. The king says he wishes to become a Christian, but that some of his chiefs refuse to obey him, saying they are as good men as he. Magellan summons the chiefs and tells them that unless they obey their king, he will have them killed and give their property to the king. They say they will obey.
Magellan promises to come back with such forces that he will make Humabon the greatest king in these lands. He tells them they must burn their idols and put up a cross in their place, and adore it every morning on their knees. He is dressed all in white, he says, to show his sincere love for them.
Then he leads the king by the hand up onto the platform. The king is baptised Don Carlos, after the emperor. The prince becomes Don Fernando, after the emperor’s brother. The king of Mazaua becomes Juan, and the merchant from Siam becomes Cristóbal. Five hundred men are baptised before Mass.
It is the first Christian baptism in the Philippines. By the end of the day there will be hundreds more.
Sunday afternoon, 14 April 1521
After dinner the priest goes ashore again to baptise the queen, who comes with forty women. She is seated on a cushion while the priest makes ready, and is shown an image of Our Lady, a cross, and a very beautiful wooden figure of the child Jesus. At the sight of it, Pigafetta says, she is “overcome with contrition,” and asks for baptism in tears.
She is named Juana, after the emperor’s mother. Her daughter, the prince’s wife, becomes Catalina, and the queen of Mazaua becomes Isabel. Counting men, women and children, eight hundred people are baptised that day.
The queen is young and beautiful, Pigafetta writes, dressed in a white and black cloth. Her lips and nails are very red. On her head she wears a great hat of palm leaves shaped like a parasol, with a crown of the same leaves “like the tiara of the pope.” She never goes anywhere without one. She asks to keep the little figure of the child Jesus in place of her idols. Some days later, at Mass, Magellan gives it to her, “in memory of the son of God,” and she thanks him warmly.
In the afternoon the king and queen come down to the shore. Magellan has fire-rockets and great guns set off for them, and they are delighted. The king and the captain-general call each other brother.
The week after
Within a week, Pigafetta says, everyone on the island has been baptised, and some people from other islands as well. One village on the neighbouring island of Mactan refuses to obey the king or the Europeans. Magellan’s men burn it and set up a cross in the ashes. Its name is Bulaia.
Magellan is no longer only a trader and explorer. He is making himself the power behind the throne of Cebu. Before Mass one day, he has the king come in his silk robe, with his brothers and chief men, and makes them all swear obedience to their king. Then he has the king swear to be always obedient and faithful to the king of Spain. He draws his sword before the image of Our Lady, and tells the king that anyone who swears such an oath should rather die than break it.
He gives Humabon a red velvet chair, to be carried in front of him wherever he goes by one of his nearest relatives, and shows him how it should be carried. The king says he is making Magellan a present in return: two large gold earrings, two armlets to wear above the elbows, and two rings for the ankles, with precious gems.
It is flattering, heady, and dangerous. Magellan has sailed across two oceans and is now being treated as a lord.
April 1521
One day Magellan asks why the people have not burned their idols as they promised, and why they still sacrifice so much meat to them. They explain that the offerings are for a sick man who has not spoken in four days: the prince’s brother, the bravest and wisest man on the island.
Magellan tells them to burn their idols and believe in Christ. If the sick man is baptised, he says, he will recover quickly, and if he does not, they may cut off Magellan’s head on the spot. The king agrees.
They go in procession to the sick man’s house, with all the pomp they can manage. He can neither speak nor move. They baptise him, his two wives and ten girls. Then Magellan asks him how he feels, and he speaks at once and says that by the grace of God he feels very well. “That was a most manifest miracle,” Pigafetta writes. Magellan sends him almond milk, rosewater, oil of roses, sweet preserves, and a mattress with sheets and a yellow coverlet. Within five days the man is walking.
The healed man has an idol, hidden in his house by some old women, burned in front of the king and all the people. Shrines along the shore are torn down, and the crowd shouts “Castiglia! Castiglia!” The idols, Pigafetta notes, are hollow wooden figures with open arms, legs folded under them, and faces with four great tusks like a wild boar’s.
April 1521
Pigafetta has time now to watch and ask about the life of the town, and he writes down everything.
He describes how two very old women consecrate a pig, blowing bamboo trumpets and dancing before the sun, offering it wine, and at last driving a lance through its heart in one quick stroke. Then they mark the foreheads of the men with its blood. Only pigs killed this way may be eaten. He describes a chief’s funeral: the women in white seated under cotton canopies, one slowly cutting the dead man’s hair while his chief wife lies upon him, mouth to mouth and hand to hand, weeping as the hair is cut and singing when it is done, while porcelain jars of myrrh and storax fill the house with smoke.
He records a custom of the men so startling that he says he “very often asked many, both old and young, to see” it, “because I could not credit it.” He records that meals, drunk through reeds from the great jars, last five or six hours. And he records a mystery: every night around midnight, a jet-black bird the size of a crow comes to the houses and screeches, and all the dogs howl, sometimes for four or five hours. The people will never tell him why.
He also makes his longest word list yet. Many of the words, like tubig for water, lima for five, balay for house and baboy for pig, are still spoken in Cebu today.