On Monday, March 18, they saw a boat bearing nine men approach from the direction of Suluan. Calculating the risks and rewards inherent in their second encounter with the peoples of the Pacific, Magellan made certain that arms were at the ready; at the same time, he assembled a different sort of arsenaclass="underline" shiny trinkets, in case the encounter turned out to be peaceful.
This time, Magellan handled the situation confidently. “The Captain General ordered that no one should move or say anything without his leave,” Pigafetta wrote. “When those people had come to us in that island, forthwith the most ornately dressed of them went toward the Captain-General, showing that he was very happy at our coming. And five of the most ornately dressed remained with us, while the others who stayed at the boat went to fetch some who were fishing, and then they all went together. Then the captain, seeing that these people were reasonable, ordered that they be given food and drink, and he presented them with red caps, mirrors, combs, bells . . . and other things. And when those people saw the captain’s fair dealing, they gave him fish and a jar of palm wine, which they call in their language vraca, figs more than a foot long [bananas] and other smaller ones of better flavor, and two coconuts. . . . And they made signs with their hands that in four days they would bring us rice, coconuts, and sundry other food.”
Perhaps they had found Paradise, after all, or at least a respite from an expedition well into its second year. Each day Magellan fed coconut milk supplied by the generous Filipinos to the sailors still suffering from scurvy. Pigafetta meanwhile became intrigued with the Filipinos’ method for fermenting palm wine. “They make an aperture into the heart of the tree at its top . . . from which is distilled along the tree a liquor . . . which is sweet with a touch of greenness. Then they take canes as thick as a man’s leg, by which they draw off this liquor, fastening them to a tree from the evening until next morning, and from the morning to the evening, so that the said liquor comes little by little.”
Perhaps under the influence of too much Filipino palm wine, Pigafetta marveled at the coconut and all its uses. “This palm bears a fruit, named cocho, which is as large as the head or thereabouts, and its first husk is green and two fingers thick, in which are found certain fibers of which those people make the ropes by which they bind their boats. Under this husk is another, very hard and thicker than that of a nut. . . . And under the said husk there is a white marrow of a finger’s thickness, which they eat with meat and fish, as we do bread, and it has the flavor of an almond. . . . From the center of this marrow there flows a water which is clear and sweet and very refreshing, like an apple.” The Filipinos taught their visitors how to produce milk from the coconut, “as we proved by experience.” They pried the meat of the coconut from the shell, combined it with the coconut’s liquor, and filtered the mixture through cloth. The result, said the chronicler, “became like goat’s milk.” Pigafetta was so moved by the coconut’s versatility that he declared, with some exaggeration, that two palm trees could sustain a family of ten for a hundred years.
Their idyll lasted a week, each day bringing with it new discoveries and a growing intimacy with their genial Filipino hosts. “These people entered into very great familiarity and friendship with us, and made us understand several things in their language, and the name of some islands which we saw before us,” Pigafetta commented. “We took great pleasure with them, because they were merry and conversable.”
But Magellan nearly destroyed the idyll when he invited the Filipinos aboard Trinidad. He incautiously showed his guests “all his merchandise, namely cloves, cinnamon, pepper, walnut, nutmeg, ginger, mace, gold, and all that was in the ship.” Clearly he felt he was no longer among thieves. His trust was amply rewarded when the Filipinos appeared to recognize these exotic and precious spices and tried to explain where they grew locally, the first indication that the armada was approaching the Spice Islands. Magellan’s reaction can be easily imagined. Perhaps he would reach the Moluccas after all.
He then did his guests a signal honor, or so he thought, by ordering his gunners to discharge their “artillery”—the awkward arquebuses. The roar shattered the silence and reverberated against the distant hills of Homonhom, terrifying the Filipinos who, afraid for their lives, “tried to leap from the ship into the sea.” This might have been a gaffe, an excess of enthusiasm. Or was Magellan trying to impress these defenseless islanders, and himself, with the power of his weapons? At the very least, the display was a cruel practical joke on a tranquil tribe that had only helped and protected him and his men. Magellan quickly reassured the frightened Filipinos and coaxed them into remaining on board; at the same time, he could not fail to notice that his weapons conferred absolute power over the islanders, should he ever feel the need to exert it.
After a week in Homonhom, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor on Monday, March 25, while light rain dappled the water’s surface. As the three black ships were about to head out of the harbor on a west southwest course, deeper into the Philippine archipelago, toward the Moluccas, Pigafetta committed a rare lapse of judgment.
“I went to the side of the ship to fish, and putting my feet upon a yard leading down into the store room, they slipped, for it was rainy, and I fell into the sea, so that no one saw me. When I was all but under, my left hand happened to catch hold of the clew-garnet of the mainsail, which was dangling in the water. I held on tightly, and began to cry out so lustily that I was rescued by a small boat. I was aided, not, I believe, indeed through my merits, but through the mercy of that font of charity”—by which he meant the Virgin Mary. Had Pigafetta not been rescued, he would have drowned on the spot, or been rescued by the Filipinos, and would have spent the rest of his life with them, unable to tell his incredible tale.
The following night, the crew spied an island distinguished by a dull red glow, the unmistakable sign of campfires, and they knew they were not alone. In the morning, Magellan decided to risk approaching, and in a now familiar ritual, they were greeted by another small boat, this one bearing eight warriors with unknown intentions.
Magellan’s slave, Enrique, addressed them in a Malay dialect, and to Magellan’s astonishment, the men appeared to understand him and replied in the same tongue. No one, not even Magellan, knew how Enrique managed to converse with the islanders, but the slave’s background provides some valuable clues. Magellan had acquired Enrique ten years earlier in Malacca, where he was baptized, and he had followed his master ever since across Africa and Europe. If Enrique had originally come from these islands, been captured as a boy by slave raiders from Sumatra, and sold to Magellan at a slave mart in Malacca, the chain of circumstances would account for his understanding the local language. But beyond that, it meant that Magellan’s servant was, in fact, the first person to circle the world and return home.
As the islanders “came alongside the ship, unwilling to enter but taking a position at some little distance,” the Captain General attempted to entice them with a “red cap and other things tied to a bit of wood.” Still, they remained at a distance. Finally, Magellan’s peace offerings were set out on a plank pushed in the canoe’s direction. The men in the boat enthusiastically seized the gifts and paddled back to shore, where, Magellan presumed, they displayed their trophies to their ruler.