The ceremony ended on a solemn note, with the king and the other chieftains, now Christians, declining Magellan’s offer of dinner aboard Trinidad, but embracing as brothers in the same faith, while the ships discharged their artillery and the jarring blasts reverberated throughout the island kingdom.
After dinner, the women took their turn at conversion, and their ceremony proved to be even more emotional. Father Valderrama, along with Pigafetta and several crew members, returned to the island to baptize the queen, who brought a retinue of forty women. She made a regal impression on the Europeans. “She was young and beautiful,” Pigafetta noted, “and was entirely covered with a white and black cloth. Her mouth and nails were very red, while on her head she wore a large hat of palm leaves in the manner of a parasol, with a crown about it of the same leaves, like the tiara of the pope.”
The women now participated in a very different sort of ceremony. “We conducted her to the platform, and she was made to sit down upon a cushion, and the other women near her, until the priest should be ready. She was shown an image of our Lady, a very beautiful wooden child Jesus, and a cross. Thereupon, she was overcome with contrition, and asked for baptism amid her tears. We named her Johanna, after the Emperor’s mother [Juana the Mad]; her daughter, the wife of the prince, Catherina; the queen of Limasawa, Lisabeta; and the others each [received] a distinctive name. Counting men, women, and children, we baptized eight hundred souls.”
As more conversions occurred spontaneously in the following days, the entire population of Cebu embraced Christianity, and soon the inhabitants of other islands were making their way to Father Valderrama for the same reason. In all, 2,200 souls converted, without a shot being fired in anger.
The scenes of conversion seemed touching and inspiring at first glance, but on closer inspection, they were incongruous and improbable. Theater had won the day. The rapidity with which the Cebuans accepted Christianity was suspect, but neither Magellan nor Pigafetta saw beyond the outward signs of faith to the lack of sincerity, conviction, and understanding that lay beneath. Thousands of islanders had converted to Christianity, but for how long? A tribe that converted so easily could readily accept another religion, or none at all.
By mid-April 1521, Magellan’s trajectory as an explorer reached its zenith. He had quelled vicious mutinies, made good on his promise to discover the strait, navigated uncharted reaches of the Pacific Ocean, and claimed the Philippines, among other lands, for Spain, converting thousands of islanders in the process. But his erratic behavior—sometimes beneficent, sometimes menacing, occasionally both—suggests that his accomplishments had gone to his head and caused him to take an increasingly zealous approach to religious matters. Throughout the voyage, he had displayed a penchant for piety, but he now went further, threatening to kill those who defied his crusade. This time, Magellan intended to carry out his threat.
“Before that week had gone,” Pigafetta wrote, “all the persons of that island, and some of the other islands, were baptized.” But there were holdouts. Magellan sent word to the recalcitrant chieftains that if they did not convert immediately and swear allegiance to King Charles, he would confiscate their property, a European concept that was nearly meaningless to the islanders, and he vowed to punish them with death, a threat they understood but chose to ignore. To demonstrate his seriousness, Magellan sent a band of his men to wreak havoc. “We burned one hamlet which was located on a neighboring island, because it refused to obey the king or us. We set up a cross there, for those people were heathen,” Pigafetta said, without a trace of remorse as the smoldering ashes sent a sickening plume into the sky.
The neighboring island was called Mactan.
As the Mactan hamlet burned, and all its inhabitants fled, Magellan forced the potentates of Cebu to adopt more authoritarian and hierarchical methods of exercising power, in the Spanish mode. First, he gathered various chieftains and coaxed them into swearing obedience to Humabon, who in turn had to swear loyalty to the king of Spain. “Thereupon, the Captain General drew his sword before the image of our Lady, and told that king that if anyone so swore, he should prefer to die rather than break such an oath.” Next, Magellan endowed Humabon with a red velvet chair, “telling him that wherever he went he should always have it carried before him by one of his nearest relatives; and he showed him how it ought to be carried.” Humabon, in return, presented Magellan with a special gift: two large earrings made of gold, two gold armlets, and two gold bands to be worn above the ankles. But the king was mistaken if he thought Magellan regarded those precious tokens as equal in importance to the power symbolized by the velvet chair.
For all his apparent success in bringing the islanders to Christianity, Magellan was troubled by signs that the conversions were incomplete, and might be undone. Despite his orders, for example, they had failed to burn their idols; in fact, they continued to make sacrifices to them, and he demanded to know why. Everywhere Magellan looked, there seemed to be an idol mocking him; they were even arrayed along the shore, and their appearance was disturbing to European sensibilities. “Their arms are open and their feet turned up under them with the legs open,” wrote Pigafetta. “They have a large face with four huge tusks like those of a wild boar, and are painted all over.”
In their defense, the islanders explained that they were propitiating the gods to aid a sick man; he was so sick that he had been unable to speak for four days. He was not just any man, he was the prince’s brother, considered the “bravest and wisest” on the entire island. But Christianity could not help him, for he had not been baptized.
Magellan seized on the illness to demonstrate the healing power of Christian faith. Burn your idols, he commanded, believe in Christ, and only Christ, and, if the sick man is baptized, “he would quickly recover.” Magellan was so adamant that if the sick man failed to recover, he would allow Humabon to “behead him, then and there.” In fact, he would insist. Humabon, compliant as always, “replied that he would do it, for he truly believed in Christ.” Magellan was convinced that his life depended on the outcome of the baptism, and it did. If the sick man failed to recover, the cause of Christianity would lose all credibility, and Magellan, undone by his fanaticism, would very likely lose his head.
He prepared carefully for the ordeal, relying on a show of power and a display of ritual to preserve the sick man’s life. Once again, Pigafetta was in the thick of things: “We made a procession from the square to the house of the sick man with as much pomp as possible. There we found him in such condition that he could neither speak nor move. We baptized him and his two wives, and ten girls. Then the Captain General asked him how he felt. He spoke immediately and said that by the grace of our Lord he felt very well. That was a most manifest miracle. When the Captain General heard him speak, he thanked God fervently. Then he made the sick man drink some almond milk, which he had already prepared for him.” The miraculous healing made a tremendous impression on the trusting islanders, who now revered Magellan as they would a god. He was more powerful than their idols, yet he walked among them.