None of the Europeans knew what had become of this legendary figure. The most recent information—and it was only gossip—was that he and a small band of Portuguese adventurers arrived at Ternate, where they allied themselves with the island’s ruler, Rajah Abuleis. In the eyes of the authorities, Serrão and his band of Portuguese adventurers had become little more than mercenaries; like Magellan, they were willing to switch loyalties to Spain in exchange for a better deal. Now, Serrão’s fate assumed great importance to the armada, which was starved for leadership. It was possible that he was still in the Spice Islands, and, if so, the armada’s officers hoped to reunite with him. He might even take command of the fleet in Magellan’s stead, if he were still alive.
The reunion was not to be. Almanzor revealed that Serrão had died eight months before, about the time of Magellan’s death, but the king concealed the whole story behind Serrão’s end. The facts were these: After his arrival in the Spice Islands in 1512, Serrão had chosen sides in a power struggle between the rulers of Tidore and Ternate, and he served as admiral of the Ternate navy, such as it was. The two island kingdoms battled for years, with Ternate, under Serrão’s leadership, winning every time. To make peace, Serrão forced Tidore to give up the sons of its rulers as hostages and forced Almanzor to marry off his daughter to his enemy, the king of Ternate, whose child she bore.
Almanzor neither forgot nor forgave the terrible humiliations Serrão had inflicted on him. “Peace having been made between the two kings,” Pigafetta relates, “when Francisco Serrão came one day to Tidore to trade cloves, the king of Tidore had him poisoned with . . . betel leaves. He lived only four days. His king wished to have him buried according to his law”—meaning Muslim rites—“but three Christians who were his servants would not consent to it. He left a son and a daughter, both young, born by a woman whom he had taken to wife in Java the Great, and two hundred barrels of cloves. He was a great friend and a relative of our good and loyal dead Captain General.” The vendetta did not end there. Ten days later, the king of Ternate, “having driven out his son-in-law, the king of Bacan, was poisoned by his daughter, the wife of the said king, under pretext of wishing to conclude peace between them.” He lingered two days before he died.
The fleet’s officers realized that Serrão’s death contained disturbing echoes of Magellan’s. Each had taken sides in a protracted struggle between two island kingdoms, and each had acted harshly in his dealings with the enemy. Eventually, the warring tribes formed common cause, and the formerly heroic outsider paid for his bold deeds with his life. These cautionary tales reminded the officers to resist the temptation to fight anyone else’s battles. Despite their sorry history, the unhappy inhabitants of these two islands hoped that the distant but powerful king of Spain, about whom they had heard, could bring lasting peace where their own efforts had failed.
On Monday, November 11, the rulers of Ternate began their diplomatic offensive.
One of the king’s many sons came out to the fleet in a proa, accompanied by Serrão’s widow, a Javanese, and their two children. The sight of the approaching craft caused Espinosa to panic, for he had cast his lot with Ternate’s enemy, Tidore. What was he to do? Almanzor, who remained near at hand, calmly advised Espinosa to act as he saw fit.
Espinosa and the other officers aboard Trinidad stiffly welcomed the visitors, bestowed gifts on them, and watched closely for signs of trouble. Meanwhile, Pigafetta, drawing on his linguistic skills, fell into conversation with a servant named Manuel, who said he served a Portuguese governor named Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, who had come to the Spice Islands with Serrão and lived there still. Manuel claimed that while considerable enmity still existed between the kings of Tidor and Ternate, the rulers of Ternate were also in favor of Spain, and he assured the officers that they were as welcome on Ternate as they were on Tidore.
Taking the servant at his word, Pigafetta went ashore to see the Spice Islands for himself. Always intrigued by the local sexual customs and the women, he felt greatly disappointed by the females of Tidore, calling them “ugly,” a word he rarely uses elsewhere in his chronicle. Both men and women went about naked, or wore only a scanty loincloth “made from the bark of trees,” he noted. Tidore was not to be the scene of Filipino-style orgies, because the men “are so jealous of their wives that they do not wish us to go ashore with our drawers exposed for they assert that their women imagine that we are always in readiness.” Pigafetta meant that the European-style breeches made the sailors appear to be erect.
Despite the apparent sexual exclusivity of the inhabitants, Pigafetta heard that the local rulers had fathered dozens of children. He wondered if there was any truth to the story, and found that the profligacy of the island rulers exceeded even his imagination: “The kings have as many women as they wish, but only one principal wife, whom all the others obey. The king of Tidore had a large house outside the city, where two hundred of his chief women lived with a like number of women to serve them. When the king eats, he sits alone or with his chief wife in a high place like a gallery where he can see all the other women who sit about the gallery; and he orders whoever best pleases him to sleep with him that night. After the king has finished eating, if he orders those women to eat together, they do so, but if not, each one goes to eat in her chamber. No one is allowed to see those women without permission of the king, and if anyone is found near the king’s house by day or by night, he is put to death. Every family is obliged to give the king one or two of its daughters. That king had twenty-six children, eight sons, and the rest daughters.” And on a neighboring island, Gilolo, the situation was even more extreme. Two kings shared the island; one had 600 children, the other 525.
Those were Muslim kings, Pigafetta noted. “The heathens do not have so many women; nor do they live under so many superstitions, but adore all that day the first thing they see in the morning when they go out of their houses. The king of those heathens, Rajah Papua, is exceedingly rich in gold, and lives in the interior of the island.”
Once again, Pigafetta set about compiling a dictionary of words and phrases, with heavy emphasis on parts of the body and procreation. He worked swiftly, and his dictionary of the Malay dialect spoken in the Spice Islands blossomed into his most elaborate effort at lexicography.
Trading for spices got under way with astonishing speed. The king of Tidore gave orders to prepare a trading house—probably recovered from the days of the Portuguese occupation—to accommodate the new arrivals, and by Tuesday, November 12, four days after they had dropped anchor in Tidore harbor, the Armada de Molucca was in business. “We carried almost all our goods thither, and left three of our men to guard them. We immediately began to trade in the following manner. For ten brazas of red cloth of very good quality, they gave us one bahar of cloves, which is equivalent to four quintals and six libras.” A quintal of cloves equaled one hundred pounds, and it was the most important unit for measuring the value of a spice shipment.
The men of the fleet valued their take according to the quintalada they received. A quintalada was a percentage of the storage space set aside for the crew members and officers. Following the instructions King Charles gave to Magellan on May 8, 1519, each significant member of the armada received a specific number of quintaladas. Once they paid one twenty-fourth of the amount to the king, they could keep the rest for themselves. Magellan, as the Captain General, was naturally awarded the largest amount: sixty quintals plus another twenty quintaladas. The other officers received almost as much, and on down through the roster of boatswains, gunners, caulkers, coopers, the barber, and the master-at-arms. Even the priests received allotments.