Ceremony pervaded every aspect of life in Brunei, and after the audience with Rajah Siripada, the Europeans were ceremoniously returned atop elephants to the “governor’s house” accompanied by seven bearers carrying the presents bestowed on them by the ruler. When they dismounted, each man received his present, which the bearers carefully placed on the left shoulder, and in return, “We gave each of those men a couple of knives for his trouble.”
That evening, nine servants came to the house, each man carrying a large tray, and “each tray contained ten or twelve porcelain dishes full of veal, capons, chickens, peacocks, and other animals, and fish.” Pigafetta claims they dined on thirty-two different kinds of meat, in addition to the fish. “At each mouthful of food we drank a small cupful of their distilled wine from a porcelain cup the size of an egg. We ate rice and other sweet food with gold spoons like ours.”
Even now, nearly a century after the era of the Treasure Fleet, Chinese wares were everywhere. Pigafetta mentions porcelain (“a kind of very white earthenware”); silk; and, amazingly enough, “iron spectacles.” Eyeglasses are thought to have been invented in Venice, but it appears likely that the Chinese also developed techniques for grinding glass, and this technology had found its way to Brunei. Even the kingdom’s currency revealed a pronounced Chinese influence. “The money coined by the Moors in those parts is of metal, pierced at the center for stringing. And it bears only, on one side, four marks, which are letters of the great king of China.” All the men were curious to inspect two giant pearls “as large as eggs” owned by the king. “They are so round they cannot lie still on a table,” Pigafetta marveled. After considerable negotiation, and even more tributes, the officers of the armada made their wishes known, and the king reluctantly displayed the two giant pearls.
After their second night ashore, the delegation rode by elephant back to the ocean, and boarded their crude and confined ships. The familiar creaks filled their ears, and the familiar reek of stagnant water filled their nostrils. Not everyone returned, however. According to Ginés de Mafra, only four men made it back to the fleet while three—the two Greek sailors and Carvalho’s son—remained ashore. (De Mafra forgot to mention that Elcano and Espinosa were also among the missing.) The Europeans suspected that they were all being held against their will and anxiously awaited their safe return.
Shortly after dawn on July 29, more than one hundred proas, organized into three groups, appeared out of nowhere, bearing down on the armada.
For the first time since the massacre three months earlier, the crew feared for their lives. They broke out their halberds, crossbows, and arquebuses, knowing that they were badly outnumbered, because each proa carried a full complement of warriors. To complicate matters, two great junks—de Mafra claims three—had anchored just behind the armada during the night. No one aboard Trinidad or Victoria noticed the junks at the time, but it now appeared that the proas intended to drive the armada toward the junks, whose crew would overwhelm the Europeans and take them as prisoners, or worse.
“Upon catching sight of them, imagining that there was some trickery afoot, we hoisted our sails as quickly as possible, abandoning an anchor in our haste,” Pigafetta wrote. As the armada began to gain speed in the water, some crew members jumped aboard the junks and captured four warriors. The men-at-arms fired their weapons at their adversaries, “killing many persons,” according to Pigafetta. Several of the menacing proas, frightened by the armada’s vehement response, veered away. De Mafra, a more cynical commentator than Pigafetta, was bewildered by the battle. How would such behavior lead to the recovery of the three lost crew members? Nevertheless, the battle raged on, as the armada turned its guns on one of the huge junks. They ordered the junk to drop sail, and when her captain refused, the Europeans opened fire at the rudder; still her crew refused to comply. The Europeans swarmed aboard the junk, where they discovered that her captain was not the murderous pirate they had imagined. “Their captain said that he served the king of Luzon and that while with a fleet to an island he had been cut off from the rest of the ships by a storm, and that being near the island he had resolved to call on it to repair his vessel, since the local king was a relative of Luzon’s king.” After that, Carvalho and the captain fell into secret conversation, to the dismay of the armada’s officers, who had risked their lives to disable and board the junk. In hushed tones, the wily captain offered Carvalho jewels, two cutlasses, and a dagger “with golden hilts and guards inlaid with many diamonds,” all for his personal use. The gifts had their intended effect: “Having received these presents,” according to de Mafra, “our captain released the junk and its people, something which everyone later regretted because they saw that under their poor-looking cotton garments, most of those men were wearing silk clothes with gold embroidery.”
Pigafetta recognized the transaction as a simple case of bribery, and his opinion of Carvalho, never high to begin with, fell several notches. Had they held the captain hostage, Pigafetta believed, Rajah Siripada would have paid a tremendous ransom for him, far more than the bribe that Carvalho had accepted. As Pigafetta interpreted local politics, the captain was needed to battle the heathens who threatened the rajah’s Muslim empire.
The matter did not end there. The extent of the Europeans’ confusion became apparent when Rajah Siripada revealed that the proas had no intention of attacking the armada. They were actually on their way to attack the Arabs’ enemies when the armada got in the way and thwarted their battle plan. “As a proof of that statement, the Moros showed some heads of men who had been killed, which they declared to be the heads of heathens.” Once they realized their mistake, the armada’s officers awkwardly struggled to make amends with the rajah. At the same time, they requested that the detained men, including Carvalho’s illegitimate son, be returned. But Rajah Siripada refused. He had lately pampered the Europeans, treating them to elephant rides and mattresses, to feasts and gifts of precious jewels; he had even granted them a personal audience, and they had repaid his generosity by meddling in his internal affairs and letting the troublesome captain go. As a result, the rajah insisted on holding his hostages, at least for the present.
Carvalho responded with an insult of his own. He decided to keep sixteen of the prisoners they had captured at sea, as well as another prize, three extraordinarily beautiful women. He declared that he would present them to King Charles, a plan that the other officers enthusiastically seconded. Magellan had always forbidden the presence of women and slaves (his own slave excepted) aboard the ships because he believed that their presence would become divisive, and Carvalho’s captives proved Magellan’s belief correct. Soon everyone on board Trinidad was aware that Carvalho had turned the women prisoners into his personal harem, and he was busy taking liberties with all three. This behavior so incensed the other officers that they muttered threats to kill Carvalho, who bartered for his life, and his harem, with liberal gifts of gold and jewels from the loot he had received from the captain of the captured junk. In the end, Carvalho was spared, and he even kept his harem, but he lost all authority in the eyes of his men. As the officers realized, if they took bribes and maintained harems, they would become pirates themselves.