On January 8, 1522, Victoria entered the Banda Sea, extending west of the Moluccas, and the torpid weather suddenly changed. “We were struck by a fierce storm,” Pigafetta reported, “which caused us to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guidance. Running before the storm, we landed at a lofty island, but before reaching it we were greatly worn out by the violent gusts of wind that came from the mountains of that island, and the great currents of water.” The squall nearly shattered the ship, but Elcano avoided the rocks and reefs, and when the seas moderated, Victoria limped to an anchorage close to shore. The next day, divers inspecting the hull discovered extensive damage, and the men gingerly hauled the vessel onto a beach to commence repairs and caulking.
The inhabitants of this island, known as Malua, shocked even these hardened sailors. They were, said Pigafetta, “savage and bestial, and eat human flesh,” and their appearance combined the frightening and the outlandish. They went naked, or nearly so, “wearing only that bark as do the others, except when they go to fight, they wear certain pieces of buffalo hide behind, and at the sides, which are ornamented with small shells, boars’ tusks, and tails of goat skins fastened before and behind.” They lavished most of their attention on their hair, “done up high and held by bamboo pins which they pass from one side to the other.” Completing this curious picture, “They wear their beards wrapped in leaves and thrust into small bamboo tubes—a ridiculous sight.” All in all, Pigafetta judged them to be “the ugliest people in the Indies.”
Despite the inhabitants’ bizarre appearance, the sailors, by this time old hands in such transactions, bestowed trinkets on them, and both sides quickly made peace. As the sailors set to work repairing the ship, the aristocratic Pigafetta, spared the indignity of physical labor, roamed the island, studying its flora and fauna, noting an abundance of fowl and goats and coconuts and pepper: “The fields in those regions are full of this pepper, planted to resemble arbors.” He was speaking of black pepper, which had been introduced to the island some time before the Europeans’ arrival, and which the inhabitants carefully cultivated.
Two weeks later, with repairs to the hull completed, Elcano gave the order to resume their voyage home, and the crew set sail on Saturday, January 25. Victoria, having sailed five leagues or so, called at the island of Timor, towering nearly ten thousand feet above the shimmering surface of the Pacific. Everyone aboard her looked forward to a luxurious, satisfying time ashore, because food, spices, almonds, rice, bananas, ginger, and fragrant wood were all said to grow there in abundance.
Pigafetta’s linguistic skills gave him a prominent part to play in the dealings with the locals to obtain provisions. “I went ashore alone to speak to the chief of a city called Amaban to ask him to furnish us with food. He told me that he would give me buffaloes, swine, and goats, but we could not come to terms because he asked many things for one buffalo.” Assessing his surroundings, Pigafetta realized the chief lived in luxury, attended by numerous naked serving women, all of them adorned with gold earrings “with silk tassels pendant from them, as well as amulets of gold and brass.” And the men displayed even more gold jewelry than the women.
While Pigafetta was negotiating, two young crew members deserted; Martín de Ayamonte, an apprentice seaman, and Bartolomé de Saldaña, a cabin boy, swam ashore under cover of darkness and never returned to their ship. They were exceptions to the generally cautious behavior of Victoria’s crew in Timor. For example, they refrained from enjoying the charms of the local women, believing they were infected with syphilis—“the disease of St. Job.” They had seen evidence of what they assumed to be syphilis all over the Moluccas, according to Pigafetta, but the greatest concentration occurred here, on this island. The origins of syphilis in this part of the world are a mystery. Portuguese traders or sailors might have carried it with them (syphilis was also known as “the Portuguese disease”), but it is worth noting that the disease was reported in China centuries earlier than in Europe, and that junks regularly plied these waters. It is also possible that the sailors’ diagnosis was mistaken, and they had come across islanders affected with leprosy.
To guarantee cooperation with the islanders, Elcano ordered a party of sailors ashore in search of a bargaining chip: “Since we had but few things, and hunger was constraining us, we restrained in the ship a chief and his son from another village.” With their hostages in hand, the armada’s officers proceeded to negotiate for the food they so desperately needed. The strategy worked exactly as planned, and the recalcitrant islanders delivered a ransom of six buffalo, a dozen goats, and as many pigs to the grateful yet rapacious sailors in exchange for the hostages’ freedom.
Once the slaughtered beasts had been loaded, Victoria prepared to set sail once more, this time heading for the island of Java, the largest and, to Europeans, the best-known destination in the Indies. Among the crew members, Java possessed a mysterious allure, if only because the Javanese reputedly practiced exotic customs such as palang. Pigafetta relished telling the tales he heard of Java, beginning with its funeral rites. “When one of the chief men of Java dies, his body is burned,” he wrote. “His principal wife adorns herself with garlands of flowers and has herself carried on a chair through the entire village by three or four men. Smiling and consoling her relatives who are weeping, she says, ‘Do not weep, for I am going to sup with my dear husband this evening and to sleep with him this night.’ Then she is carried to the fire, where her husband is being burned. Turning toward her relatives, and again consoling them, she throws herself into the fire, where her husband is being burned. If she did not do that, she would not be considered an honorable woman or a true wife to her dead husband.” For all its melodrama, this was a fairly accurate account of a funeral ceremony as practiced on the island of Bali, located little more than a mile east of Java, and in India.
And then there was the role palang played in Javanese courtship rites. Magellan’s relative Duarte Barbosa, in his account of the region, had described Javanese palang in excruciating detail. “They are very voluptuous,” he wrote of the inhabitants, “and have certain round hawk’s bells sewn and fastened in the head of their penis between the flesh and the skin in order to make them larger. Some have three, some five, and others seven. Some are made of gold and silver and others of brass, and they tinkle as the men walk. The custom is considered quite the proper thing. The women delight greatly in the bells, and do not like men who go without them. The most honored men are those who have the most and largest ones.”
Pigafetta observed that the custom still formed a vital part of Javanese life. “When the young men of Java are in love with any gentlewoman, they fasten certain little bells between their penis and foreskin. They take a position until their sweetheart hears the sound. The sweetheart descends immediately, and they take their pleasure; always with those little bells, for their women take great pleasure in hearing those bells ring from the inside of their vagina. Those bells are all covered, and the more they are covered, the louder they sound.”
Normally a careful observer, Pigafetta could not resist telling tales when the mood came over him. In the same breath as his description of palang, he conjured Amazons, among the most persistent of all the illusions of Neverland, and perhaps the hardest for the lonely sailors who roamed the world to give up. Pigafetta lent at least partial credence to an account he heard about Amazons on a neighboring island kill their male offspring and raise only females. And any man found exploring the island would be attacked instantly. Needless to say, the survivors of so many shipwrecks, mutinies, ambushes, and other disasters elected not to risk the wrath of the Amazons they believed to be in their midst.