Over the next several days, trading continued at a feverish pace. “For fifteen brazas of cloth of not very good quality, one quintal and one hundred libras; for fifteen hatchets, one bahar; for thirty-five glass drinking cups, one bahar (the king getting them all); for seventeen catis of silver, one bahar; for twenty-six brazas of linen, one bahar; for twenty-five brazas of finer linen, one bahar; for one hundred and fifty knives, one bahar; for fifty pairs of scissors, one bahar; for forty pairs of caps, one bahar; for ten pieces of Gujarat cloth, one bahar; for three of those gongs of theirs, two bahars; for one quintal of bronze, one bahar.” The men of the armada traded the gongs, the knives, and other items pirated from the Chinese junks they had raided en route for the cloves. In return for these trinkets, they received a haul that a sailor might expect to see once or twice in a lifetime.
A detachment of well-armed crew members guarded the post, but as they knew from tragic experience, staying ashore overnight posed special hazards, even in a peaceful setting. Almanzor earned a measure of trust by warning them not to venture beyond the post at night, or they might encounter a renegade cult of men who appeared to be headless, and who carried with them a poison ointment. Anyone coming into contact with the ointment “falls sick very soon and dies within three or four days.” The king explained that he had tried to discipline these menacing presences, and even had many of them hanged, but they still posed a danger. Forewarned (if scared out of their wits), the guard successfully avoided them.
As trading proceeded, Almanzor did all he could to put the armada at ease, even when the officers revealed that they were holding sixteen captives, taken from islands they had visited. Perhaps their existence could no longer be concealed, or the space they occupied could be more profitably devoted to cloves or cinnamon. To the officers’ surprise, the confession delighted the king, and he asked to take possession of the captives “so that he might send them back to their land with five of his own men that they might make the king of Spain and his fame known.” There was also the ticklish matter of Carvalho’s harem of three captive women, whom the officers delivered to Almanzor for his personal use.
In return for his generous assistance, Almanzor asked only that the Europeans “kill all the swine that we had in the ships,” in accordance with Muslim dietary laws, “for which he would give us an equal number of goats and fowls.” Their food supply assured, the Europeans happily complied with the request. “We killed them in order to show him a pleasure and hung them up under the deck. When those people happen to see any swine they cover their faces in order that they might not look upon them or catch their odor.”
If any member of the Armada de Molucca paused in the midst of his chores to reflect on these days in the Spice Islands, he could only marvel at how fortune, after punishing the fleet for months, had now chosen to favor it.
On the afternoon of November 13, Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, Francisco Serrão’s companion, hailed the fleet from a proa. He excitedly explained that the king of Ternate had given permission for the visit and instructed him to answer all questions truthfully, adding, in royal jest, “even if he did come from Ternate.” There followed one of the more remarkable reunions in the Age of Discovery. In a time when travelers separated from their native cultures were often never heard from again, here was the Portuguese explorer standing before the armada’s officers after a ten-year silence, in good humor and eager to impart vital intelligence concerning Armada de Molucca.
From Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa’s detailed recollections, the officers learned that the implacable Portuguese authorities had been pursuing the armada around the globe: “He told us that he had already been sixteen years in India, and ten in the Moluccas, and that it was many years since the Moluccas had been secretly discovered, and that one year less fifteen days ago a great ship from Malacca had come there and left with a cargo of cloves.” And this ship was still looking for the armada.
Her captain was Tristão de Meneses, a Portuguese. And he [Pedro Alfonso] asked him what news there was in Christendom; and he had replied that a fleet of five ships had sailed from Seville to discover the Moluccas in the name of the King of Spain, with Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese, as captain. And that the King of Portugal, in anger that a Portuguese should oppose him, had sent some ships to the Cape of Good Hope, and as many to Cape St. Mary, where cannibals lived, to guard and forbid the passage, and that he had not found them.
According to Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, the Portuguese pursuit of the Armada de Molucca did not stop there, and he ended his tale with a bombshelclass="underline"
A few days earlier a caravel with two junks had been there to learn news of us. But the junks went to Bacan to load cloves with seven Portuguese. And because they did not respect the king’s wives and subjects, although the king had often told them not to behave thus, and since they refused to abstain and withdraw, they were put to death. And when the men of the caravel learned this, they immediately returned to Malacca, leaving the junks with four hundred bahars of cloves and as much merchandise as would purchase another hundred bahars. Moreover, he told us that every year many junks come from Malacca to Bandan to take and load mace and nutmeg, and from Bandan to Molucca to get cloves. And that these people go with their junks from Molucca to Bandan in three days, and from Bandan to Malacca in fifteen. And that the King of Portugal had already secretly enjoyed Molucca for ten years, that the King of Spain should not know.
This last piece of information explained why King Manuel had refused Magellan four times; a water route such as Magellan proposed, no matter how daring, threatened to disturb Portugal’s lucrative but clandestine trade in spices. Spain, with no such secret relationship, would naturally benefit from Magellan’s plan. How strange and wrongheaded to imagine, as did the mutineers and those whom they influenced in Spain, that Magellan attempted to subvert the fleet to aid Portugal. After fleeing Portugal, Magellan had been as loyal to Spain as he claimed to be.
The officers of the armada plied Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa with alcohol, so the revelations came thick and fast. Not until three o’clock in the morning did the exhausted wanderer reach the end of his tale. Amazed and persuaded by his stories, the officers begged him to join their number by “promising him good wages and salaries.” A man without a country, he agreed. After eluding the agents of the Portuguese crown for so long, he would live to regret this decision.
On Friday the fifteenth of November,” wrote Pigafetta, “the king told us that he was going to Bacan to fetch the said cloves that those Portuguese had left there, and he requested of us two presents to give to the two governors of Motir in the name of the king of Spain. And passing through our ships, he wished to see how we fired out hackbuts, crossbows, and culverins, which are larger than an arquebus, and the king fired three shots of a crossbow, for that pleased him more than the other weapons.”
Still more gunplay ensued when Iussu, the king of Gilolo—“very old, and feared through all those islands for the great power that he had”—also paid a courtesy call on the armada on Saturday, prompting another exchange of gifts. “Since we were friends of the king of Tidore,” he advised, “we were also his, because he loved him like his own son, and if any of us ever went into his country he would do him very great honor.”