“About two hours later we saw two balanghai coming. They are large boats . . . full of men, and their king was in the larger of them, being seated under an awning of mats. When the king came near the flagship, the slave spoke to him. The king understood him, for in those districts, the kings know more languages than the other people. He ordered some of his men to enter the ships, but he always remained in his balanghai, at some little distance from the ship, until his own men returned; and as soon as they returned he departed.” Magellan tried to conduct himself as a gracious visitor, but he was outdone by the generosity of the king, who proffered a “large bar of gold and a basketful of ginger.” Magellan politely but firmly refused to accept this tribute, but he remained on such friendly terms with the natives that he moved his ships’ anchorage closer to the king’s hut for the night, as a symbol of their newfound allegiance.
This encounter with indigenous people was shaping up as the armada’s most peaceful and successful since their delirious layover in Rio de Janeiro. A king willing to give gold and ginger might have other resources, and perhaps even women, but experience had shown Magellan that opening gestures could be deceptive, if not outright dangerous.
The next day, Good Friday of 1521, Magellan put his relationship with the islanders to the test. He sent Enrique ashore on the island of Limasawa. Even today, as part of southern Leyte in the Philippines, Limasawa is a remote, inaccessible island remarkable for its broad, clean, inviting beaches, occasionally interrupted by unusual rock formations and caves. Although Magellan was the first European explorer to reach Limasawa, he was not the first outsider to find safe harbor here. Without realizing it, he had arrived at an important trading post. Chinese traders had been calling at the island for five centuries, their junks bearing sophisticated manufactured items such as porcelain, silk, and lead sinkers; the islanders traded for these items with products from their beaches and forests: cotton, wax, pearls, betel nuts, tortoiseshells, coconuts, sweet potatoes, and coconut leaf mats. The Limasawans enjoyed a reputation for hospitality and, more important, honesty. In 1225, Chau Ju Kuo, a Chinese merchant, described the orderly process of trading; the Limasawans, he said, efficiently carried away the Chinese goods they had been given and always returned with the arranged payment. So the appearance of the armada, while unusual, was not wholly unanticipated by the islanders, who were prepared to engage in trade with their guests.
Once he was ashore, Enrique asked the Limasawan ruler, Rajah Kolambu, to send more food to the fleet, for which payment would be rendered. As instructed, he added “that they would be well satisfied with us, for he [Magellan] had come to the island as friends and not as enemies.” The king responded favorably to the request and came himself, along with “six or eight men,” all of whom boarded the flagship. “He embraced the Captain General to whom he gave three porcelain jars covered with leaves and full of raw rice and two very large orades”—the dorado, a fish. In return, Magellan “gave the king a garment of red and yellow cloth made in the Turkish fashion, and a fine red cap. . . . Then the Captain General had a collation spread for them, and told the king through a slave that he desired to be casicasi with him. The king replied that he also wished to enter the same relations with the Captain General.”
This was a strong statement. To be casicasi meant that Magellan wished to become blood brothers with the island king, a ceremony requiring the mingling of their blood. “Both cut their chests,” said de Mafra, “and the blood was poured in a vessel and mixed together with wine, and each of them drank one half of it.”
Magellan’s attitude toward indigenous people had undergone a revolution. Where he had been content to convert, kidnap, and, when it suited his whim, even kill the giants of Patagonia, he felt a genuine kinship with this Filipino ruler. He took the king into his confidence and was soon trying to explain how the Armada de Molucca had navigated its way across the globe. “He led the king to the deck of the ship that is located above at the stern and had his sea-chart and compass brought. He told the king how he had found the strait in order to voyage thither, and how many moons he had been without seeing land, whereat the king was astonished.”
The understanding nearly unraveled when Magellan decided to ask one of his gunners to demonstrate an arquebus, and the spectacle, all smoke and fire and noise, made the “the natives . . . greatly frightened.” Recent experience should have warned Magellan that a show of force was courting disaster, but he could not resist the urge to impress the king with the power of European weapons.
Magellan gave an even more astonishing demonstration as he brought out one of his men, who was dressed in armor from his knees to his neck; then three other Europeans, “armed with swords and daggers . . . struck him on all parts of the body.” As the blows fell and glanced off the armor, the clank of metal on metal echoing across the water, “the king was rendered speechless.” The king seemed to think that these visitors possessed superhuman powers. No man could have withstood the shower of blows, yet the armored soldier had done just that.
Gratified by the king’s reaction to the swordplay, Magellan instructed Enrique, his slave and translator, to tell the king that “one of those armed men was worth one hundred of his own men” and boasted that his armada brought with it two hundred warriors equipped with armor and weapons—swords, halberds, and daggers. The message was plain: A wise leader would do well to keep Magellan as an ally rather than antagonize him. Recovering from the shock of what he had seen, the king hastily agreed that a single warrior in armor was worth one hundred natives.
Magellan’s Armada de Molucca carried enough weaponry to equip a small army. The sheer number of weapons reflected the growing reliance on arms in Spain and Portugal. Both nations depended on gunpowder, which had appeared in Europe at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Gunpowder was slow to reach the Iberian peninsula, but once it caught on, the Spanish and the Portuguese embarked on an arms race with a sense of deadly urgency. Local gunpowder works sprang up all over Spain; and eventually a government-sponsored gunpowder plant appeared in Burgos. The demand for gunpowder grew along with the demand for guns and cannon, and the number of foundries across Spain and Portugal increased as both countries armed themselves to compete for global dominance. It was only a matter of time before weapons found a place aboard the ships of both nations, at first to defend their harbors, and later to protect crews on voyages of exploration.
The most powerful weapons aboard Magellan’s ships were the three lombardas. This was a cannon made of wrought iron. Designed for use at sea, it was equipped with rings to lift it on and off ships. Aboard the deck of a ship, the lombarda rested in a wooden cradle to which it was securely lashed. It could fire almost anything—stones, iron, and lead projectiles, but the most lethal shot consisted of an iron cube covered with a leaden sheath. To fire a lombarda, the gunner held a flaming taper to a touch hole leading to a small chamber holding priming powder; this in turn set off the main charge, expelling the shot with a great concussive roar as the lombarda shuddered in its massive cradle. The lombarda was not accurate, but its heavy projectile could inflict considerable damage on a hull. The fleet also carried seven breech-loading guns called falcones. They were smaller than the lombardas, and light enough for sailors to carry them into the longboats. The fleet also carried three pasamuros, another type of gun; nearly sixty versos, a crude rifle that could fire stone shots; fifty shotguns; three tons of gunpowder; and at least that weight in cannonballs.