Almanzor’s theatrical arrival was calculated to announce that he was an important personage: the king of Tidore and an enthusiastic astrologer. As intended, the officers recognized that gaining Almanzor’s goodwill would be vital because he was the gatekeeper to the cloves, which they had come so far to find. But Almanzor’s little kingdom was in constant peril, and he needed these visitors from afar as much as they needed him, or his spices.
From his resplendent proa, Almanzor enthusiastically welcomed the fleet. “After such long tossing upon the seas, and so many dangers, come and enjoy the pleasures of the land, and refresh your bodies, and do not think but that you have arrived at the kingdom of your own sovereign,” he declared, according to Pigafetta. And then Almanzor startled them all by announcing that he had dreamed of their arrival, and they had fulfilled his prophecy.
Almanzor boarded Trinidad under the watchful eyes of the officers, who offered him the velvet-covered chair of honor. Almanzor lowered himself into it, but conveyed the impression that he was accommodating them by consenting to sit, after which he “received us as children” in Pigafetta’s astonished words. For all his graciousness, Almanzor had a stubborn streak; he refused to bow or even to tilt his head even when it was necessary. When he was invited to enter Trinidad’s cabin, he refused to stoop, as her crew members routinely did. Instead, he mounted the upper deck and descended from above, his head rigidly erect.
In conversation, Almanzor revealed that he was familiar with Spain, and even with its great and powerful ruler, King Charles. He insisted that he and the people of Tidore fervently desired to serve the king and his kingdom, an assertion that immediately made the officers suspect that Almanzor had another agenda that involved switching his allegiance from the Portuguese to the Spanish. The officers were correct. A decade earlier, the father of the island’s current ruler had encouraged the Portuguese to set up a trading station, in part because he wished to loosen the Arab stranglehold on the islands’ crops.
The experience left a bitter legacy on both sides. The Portuguese came to detest the Moluccans with the passion of a jilted lover. At the outset, the Portuguese had hoped to break the Chinese and Arab monopoly on spices and grow fat on the proceeds, fatter even than their neighbor and rival, Spain. They would then assert control over the global economy. But the islanders turned out to be devious partners, murderous and slippery; most infuriating of all, they continued to sell spices to anyone with a ship capable of carrying them away. Portugal never got its monopoly and blamed the rulers and inhabitants of the islands.
João de Barros, a Portuguese court historian, expressed the official attitude toward the inhabitants of the Spice Islands: “In everything but war they are slothful; and if there be any industry among them in agriculture or trade, it is confined to the women,” he declared, enumerating their failings. “Altogether, they are a lascivious people, false and ungrateful, but expert in learning anything. Although poor in wealth, such is their pride and presumption that they will abate nothing from necessity; nor will they submit, except to the sword that cuts them. . . . Finally, these islands, according to the account given by our people, are a warren of every evil, and contain nothing good but their clove tree.” Barros came to consider the clove itself as the ultimate source of evil in this region. “Though a creation of God,” he wrote, the spice was “actually an apple of discord and responsible for more afflictions than gold.”
No wonder Almanzor had grown tired of the Portuguese; and no wonder he preferred Spaniards (although he did not realize that many of the crew were Portuguese). But there was more. Local politics also influenced Almanzor’s thinking. At the time, Tidore was embroiled in a conflict with its island neighbor, Ternate, still in the Portuguese grip, and Almanzor thought these representatives of the Spanish crown could make powerful allies in the struggle.
The triumvirate of officers—Elcano, Espinosa, and Méndez—quickly made trading pacts with Almanzor and bestowed so many gifts that he asked them to restrain their overwhelming generosity because “he had nothing worthy to send to our king as a present, unless, now that he recognized him as a sovereign, he should send himself.”
On November 10, Carvalho and a small detachment went ashore, and for the first time the men of the Armada de Molucca set foot on the Spice Islands.
Antonio Galvão, the Portuguese administrator who arrived at the Spice Islands a few years later, evoked the ethereal landscape that greeted the armada’s crew as they looked at their surroundings: “The shape of most of these islands is that of a sugarloaf, with the base going downward into the water, surrounded by reefs at little more than a stone’s throw; at ebb tide one can go there on foot. One can put into the islands through some channels in the reef which outside is very high; and there is no place to anchor except in certain small sandy bays: a dangerous thing! They look gloomy, somber, and depressing. That is always the way they strike the onlooker at first sight; for always, or nearly always, there is a large blanket of fog on their summits. And for the greatest part of the year the sky is cloudy, which makes it rain very often; and if it does not, everything withers but the clove tree, which prospers. And at certain intervals there falls a dismal, misty rain.”
What made the islands seem alive to the first European explorers were the active and highly unpredictable volcanoes rising to the sky. “Some of these islands spit fire and have warm waters like hot springs. And they are so thickly crowded with groves as to look like one big mass of them, and they are therefore hiding places for evil doers,” Galvão warned. As a result of the volcano’s ejecta raining down on the islands, the soil “is black and loose; and in places there is clay and gravel, which is unstable because it lies on the rock where it does not take hold. And however much it may rain, the water stands only a while before it is absorbed.”
Of supreme importance were the spices themselves, especially the cloves. The armada’s men had seen cloves, smelled cloves, and tasted cloves, but only now did they find cloves growing in the wild—not just a few trees scattered here and there, but a dense, impenetrable forest of cloves. “The hills in these five islands are all of cloves,” wrote Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa, after his visit to the Spice Islands in 1512. “[They] grow on trees like laurel, which has its leaf like that of the arbutus, and it grows like the orange flower, which in the beginning is green and then turns white, and when it is ripe it turns coloured, and then they gather it by hand, the people going amongst the trees.”
On their first visit to Tidore, the armada’s leaders reached an agreement with Almanzor recognizing Spain’s sovereignty over the island, even though it violated the Treaty of Tordesillas. Once these formalities were over, the leaders wanted to obtain the spices as quickly as they could, before local strife drove them away. The men had seen too many warm receptions turn violent for them to believe that Almanzor would keep his word for very long.
For the Europeans of the armada, a treaty was, above all, a written document, but for the Tidoreans, only the oral expression carried the force of law. To record commercial transactions, the inhabitants of the Spice Islands occasionally wrote on palm leaves or paper imported from India, using a system borrowed from the Chinese, but when they made treaties, they relied on oral rather than written communication. Both sides managed to overcome their differences to seal the bargain, and with the treaty in force, the king of Tidore advised the armada’s officers that he did not have enough cloves on hand to satisfy their needs, but he offered to accompany them to Bacan, where he assured them that they would find as much as they wanted. But before the officers began filling the ships with spices, they inquired after one of their own: Francisco Serrão, the author of the letters that had inspired Magellan’s voyage to the Spice Islands.