Before leaving the unlucky proa in their wake, the armada spared the life of one of its occupants, the brother of Mindanao’s ruler, who insisted that he knew the way to the Moluccas. Making good on his promise, he guided the armada on a different course; they had been traveling northeast, but he took them to the southeast, toward the Moluccas. Along the way, they passed a cape inhabited by cannibals, and the crew studied these fabled creatures with rapt attention. The cannibals were every bit as frightening as their reputation: “shaggy men who are exceedingly great fighters and archers. They use swords one palmo in length and eat only raw human hearts with the juice of oranges and lemons.” The crew members naturally kept their distance, and listened closely to their captured guide’s account of the tribe as if they were tourists on safari. In all likelihood, they had encountered members of the Manobos tribe, who did on occasion practice a ritual cannibalism in which they devoured the heart or the liver of their enemies. But no European hearts were consumed that day.
The armada had just reached the southernmost part of Mindanao when the ships were swept by the strongest storm they had encountered since the life-threatening gales off the eastern coast of South America, but once again, they received brilliant supernatural reassurance that they would safely reach their goal. “On Saturday night, October 26, while coasting by Birahan Batolach, we encountered a most furious storm. Thereupon, praying to God, we lowered all the sails. Immediately our three saints appeared to us and dissipated all the darkness. St. Elmo remained for more than two hours on the maintop, like a torch; St. Nicholas on the mizzentop; and St. Clara on the foretop. We promised a slave to St. Elmo, St. Nicholas, and St. Clara, and gave alms to each one.” The storm passed, and the shaken crew members once again gave thanks for their lives, raised the sails, and the fleet recommenced its southeasterly voyage. They were only two hundred miles from the Spice Islands, yet they spent weeks zigzagging blindly throughout the Sulawesi and Maluku seas without knowing how to reach their destination.
At the island Pigafetta called Cavit, the crew members struck again, capturing two more pilots and ordering them to take the fleet to the Moluccas on pain of death. “Laying our course south southwest,” Pigafetta tells us, “we passed among eight inhabited and uninhabited islands, which were situated in the manner of a street. Their names are Cheaua, Cauiao, Cabaio, Camanuca, Cabalizao, Cheai, Lipan, and Nuza”—all members of the Karkaralong group, located at the southern tip of Mindanao.
Even now, as they approached their goals, they were bedeviled by misfortune. On November 2, Pedro Sánchez, a gunner aboard Trinidad, attempted to fire an arquebus; the weapon exploded, killing him, and two days after that, another Trinidad gunner, Juan Bautista, died in a gunpowder explosion.
Unable to sail close enough to the wind to pass a cape, the fleet had to double back and forth past the point until the wind changed. As they did, three of their captives, two men and a boy, jumped ship and swam for their lives toward a nearby island. “But the boy drowned,” Pigafetta relates, “for he was unable to hold tightly to his father’s shoulder.”
On the ships sailed, gliding past the islands of Sanguir, Kima, Karakitang, Para, Sarangalong, Siao, Tagulanda, Zoar, Meau, Paginsara, Suar, Atean: a string of emeralds set in gleaming sapphire. And then, on November 6, 1521, they saw four more islands shimmering on the horizon. “The pilot who still remained with us told us that those four islands were the Moluccas,” Pigafetta recorded. After losing three ships and more than a hundred men—half the crew—they were finally on the doorstep of the Spice Islands . . .
. . . Ternate . . .
. . . Tidore . . .
. . . Motir . . .
. . . Makian . . .
They stretched from north to south, four small islands, each no more than six miles across. To the south lay a fifth Spice Island, Bacan, which was considerably larger.
The Moluccas actually comprise about one thousand islands of varying sizes, but for Europeans of the sixteenth century, the Moluccas referred to just those five islands. The best-known among them were Ternate and Tidore, volcanic islands whose steep cones towered about a mile above the sea, imparting an impressive solidity to the tiny landmasses. Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, writing in 1609, described Ternate’s volcano as a “dreadful burning of mountain flames.” He guessed that winds “kindle that natural fire, or the matter that has fed it for so many ages. The top of the mountain, which exhales it, is cold, and not covered with ashes, but with a sort of light cloddy earth, little different from the pumice stone burnt in our fiery mountains.” Volcanic ash enriched the soil on islands where the spices grew, and the moist climate also promoted lush growth; this combination made them unique sources for spices. The occasional volcanic eruptions terrified those who beheld them, and gave Ternate and the other islands a magical reputation. It would not have been more marvelous to see a dragon or the lost city of Atlantis rising from the depths of the sea than to witness an eruption in the Moluccas.
“Look there, how the seas of the Orient are scattered with islands beyond number,” wrote the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões in The Lusíads about the spell cast by the Spice Islands:
See Tidore, then Ternate with its burning
Summit, leaping with volcanic flames.
Observe the orchards of hot cloves
Portuguese will buy with their blood . . .
All these exotic sights and more were now within the grasp of the Armada de Molucca. “So we thanked God, and for joy we discharged all our artillery,” Pigafetta wrote. “And no wonder we were so joyful, for we had spent twenty-seven months less two days in our search for the Moluccas.”
Chapter XIII Et in Arcadia Ego
The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
On November 8, 1521, the Armada de Molucca entered the harbor of Tidore, firing a joyful salute. They dropped anchor in twenty fathoms and fired another round of artillery, the report of the guns echoing off the island’s tranquil hills. In the humid climate, the strong scents of clove and cinnamon wafted across the water, reviving the weary crew members with the promise of riches.
The following day, an emissary from Tidore floated out to the ships in a luxurious proa, his head protected from the sun by a silk awning; his son, bearing a ceremonial scepter, was at his side. They were accompanied by a pair of ritual hand washers bearing sweet water in jars made of gold, and two other bearers carrying a gold casket filled with an offering of betel nuts. The emissary introduced himself as al-Mansur, a Muslim name, but the officers came to know him by the Spanish version, Almanzor. He appeared to be in his forties and rather rotund.