Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (39 page)

A
s the mayhem grew, the Europeans suffered more casualties. “Two of our men were killed near the houses, while we burned twenty or thirty houses,” Pigafetta reported. Even their armor failed to protect the men against all the arrows flying in their direction. “So many of them charged down upon us that they shot the Captain General through the right leg with a poisoned arrow.” It was only now, too late, that Magellan realized the gravity of his situation. He finally gave the order to retreat, even though his men were stranded< far from their longboats. More than forty of the Europeans scattered as best they could, while six or seven diehards, Pigafetta included, stuck by the wounded Captain General as the Mactanese pressed the attack: “The natives shot only at our legs, for the latter were bare; and so many were the spears and stones that they hurled at us, that we could offer no resistance. The mortars in the boats

could not aid us as they were too far away. So we continued to retire for more than a good crossbow flight from the shore, always fighting up to our knees in water. The natives continued to pursue us, and picking up the same spear four or six times, hurled it at us again and again. Recognizing the Captain General, so many turned on him that they knocked his helmet off his head twice, but he always stood firmly like a good knight, together with some others. Thus did we fight for one hour, refusing to retire farther.”

All this time, no one came to the aid of Magellan and his small band fighting for their lives—no Cebuans in their
balanghai
, and no reinforcements from the ships. Pigafetta explains that the “Christian king”—faithful Humabon—“would have aided us, but the Captain General charged him before we landed not to leave his
balanghai
but

to stay to see how we fought,” an order that Humabon was only too glad to obey. At last, some Cebuan converts showed up in their
balanghai
, but by then it was too late. Friendly fire from the ships felled many of them before they came to Magellan’s aid; perhaps the seamen mistook them for adversaries rather than allies. Meanwhile, Magellan was rapidly weakening from the effects of the poisoned arrow in his leg, as the implacable Mactanese closed in and the two sides fought hand to hand.

“An Indian hurled a bamboo spear into the Captain General’s face, but the latter immediately killed him with his lance, which he left in the Indian’s body. Then, trying to lay his hand on his sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because he had been wounded in the arm with a bamboo spear. When the natives saw that, they all hurled themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only larger.” The wounded leader “turned back many times to see whether we were all in the boats,” Pigafetta took care to note, and without that concern, “Not a single one of us would have been saved in the boats, for while he was fighting, the others retired to the boats.” Meanwhile, the scimitars’ repeated blows took their mortal toll. “That caused the Captain General to fall face downward, when immediately they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. Thereupon, beholding him dead, we, wounded, retreated as best we could to the boats, which were already pulling off.”

At that moment, the Cebuan warriors finally came to the Europeans’ aid. They charged into the water, brandishing their swords, and drove off the Mactanese, who displayed little desire to make war on their neighbors. When the water had cleared, the Cebuans dragged the exhausted survivors into their
balanghai
and delivered them to the armada’s longboats, which remained curiously distant from the scene of battle.

This was not the dignified, pious ending that Magellan had envisioned for himself during those pressured months of preparation in Seville. No paupers would say prayers in his memory, no alms would be distributed in his name, no masses would be said for him in the churches of Seville. Not one
maravedí
from his contested estate would go to his wife or young son, or to his illegitimate older son, who had been killed in battle at his side in Mactan harbor. He would not be buried in the tranquil Seville cemetery he had picked out for himself; none of the plans he had carefully set out in his will would come to pass. Instead, pieces of his body, driven by the winds and tide, washed up on the sands of Mactan.

I
n Magellan’s death, Pigafetta, who had fought at his side, saw a shining example of nobility, heroism, and glorious acceptance of fate. In the most emotional, eloquent entry of his entire diary, he memorialized his slain leader, whom he had revered. “I hope that . . . the fame of so noble a captain will not become effaced in our times. Among the other virtues that he possessed, he was more constant than anyone else in the greatest adversity. He endured hunger better than all the others, and more accurately than any man in the world did he understand sea charts and navigation. And that his was the truth was seen openly, for no other had had so much natural talent nor the boldness to learn how to circumnavigate the world, as he had almost done. . . .”
Almost
. . . perhaps the saddest and most telling word in Pigafetta’s eulogy.

“That battle was fought on Saturday, April 27, 1521,” he concluded. “The Captain General died on a Saturday because it was the day most holy to him. Eight of our men were killed with him, and four Indians who had become Christians and who had come afterward to aid us were killed by the mortars of the boats. Of the enemy, only fifteen were killed, while many of us were wounded.” The dead included Cristóvão Rebêlo, Magellan’s illegitimate son and constant companion on the voyage; Francisco Gómez, a seaman; Antonio Gallego, a cabin boy; Juan de Torres, a man-at-arms; Rodrigo Nieto, who had been Cartagena’s servant but had switched his loyalty to Magellan; and Anton de Escovar, who lingered for two days after the battle.

Pigafetta’s eulogy makes clear that he was genuinely devastated. He had left Europe as a young man of literary inclination, eager to explore the world as Magellan’s guest, and now his Captain General was dead, and the identity of his successor uncertain. What Pigafetta had experienced of the world beyond Europe could only alarm him. Instead of monsters, magnetic islands, boiling seas, and mermaids, he had encountered fierce storms, cruelty and suffering, and widely scattered humans living in conditions unimaginable to him, people who were as likely to kill him as assist him. Most frustrating of all, the armada had come all this way, halfway around the world, sacrificed dozens of men, including Magellan, and had yet to reach the Spice Islands.

I
n death, Magellan was not a hero to everyone, not even to those

had admired his daring and skill. His loyalists believed he had courted death by picking an unnecessary quarrel with the Mactanese, who held all the military advantages. In his misguided quest for glory, Magellan had squandered lives and the resources of the armada; his reckless conduct grieved other crew members, but more than that, it angered them. In de Mafra’s judgment, Magellan’s final campaign amounted to “madcap foolhardiness which the unfortunate Magellan attempted . . . when he could have done some much better things instead.” In the name of King Charles, Magellan had pillaged and betrayed his hosts, and paid the ultimate price.

The circumstances leading to Magellan’s spectacular, gory death were not, as has often been suggested, an aberration, the result of an unusual tactical error or inexplicable lapse of judgment. Rather, it was the direct outcome of his increasingly belligerent conduct in the Philippines, where he burned the dwellings of people who could easily have been converted to Christianity by diplomacy rather than force. Through frequent displays of his military might, Magellan convinced the islanders—and himself—that he was omnipotent. It was only a matter of time until he provoked a confrontation with enemies who held a decisive advantage from which faith alone could not protect him. His thirst for glory, under cover of religious zeal, led him fatally astray. In the course of the voyage, Magellan had managed to outwit death many times. He overcame natural hazards ranging from storms to scurvy, and human hazards in the form of mutinies. In the end, the only peril he could not survive was the greatest of all: himself.

Magellan’s death may also have been the result of one final mutiny by his own disenchanted sailors. Although Pigafetta and other eyewitnesses provide a detailed account of the Captain General’s actions during the fight in Mactan harbor, the whereabouts and actions of his backup is open to question—and to suspicion. During his amphibious landing, Magellan and his coterie expected the gunners aboard his ships to cover them with fire that would disperse the island warriors. Pigafetta, a gentleman, not a soldier or a seaman, believed the tide made it impossible for their ships to anchor close enough to the raging battle to be effective, but even after several hours of fighting, they failed to dispatch reinforcements in their longboats; indeed, the most striking element of Pigafetta’s account of the battle of Mactan concerns the inexplicable isolation of Magellan and his small band. The Cebuans eventually intervened, but not Magellan’s own men, a circumstance that makes no sense, unless the crew members refused to come to the Captain General’s aid or their officers ordered them to stay put. From the standpoint of the men in the ships, this mutiny had the advantage of being easy to disguise; the revolt consisted of what they failed to do rather than what they did. In effect, they allowed the Mactanese to do the dirty work for them; they left Magellan to die the death of a thousand cuts in Mactan harbor.

Antonio Pigafetta was among the few men of the armada who saw the Captain General’s death in a different, more glorious light. He was no tyrant and engendered no anger or disloyalty; his end embodied the Portuguese ideal of submission to fate, no matter how tragic, in the service of a noble principle. Magellan seemed even greater because he was doomed; he had become a martyr to a cause greater than himself. Even so, the chronicler’s own record tells a more ambiguous story, one in which light and shadow are virtually inseparable, and in which Magellan is both heroic and foolish, perspicacious yet blind, a man of his time who was trying to escape his time, a visionary whose instincts outran his ideals.

Magellan was generally at his best, and a far more sympathetic character, when he was the underdog. At such moments, his best qualities came to the fore: tenacity, cunning, and courage. When his plan to reach the Spice Islands was turned down by the king of Portugal—not once, but many times—Magellan successfully assembled and promoted a mission to the king of Spain. When mutineers seized three of his ships in Port Saint Julian (and nearly captured a fourth), Magellan immediately, and with little assistance from others, managed to reclaim the vessels, one by one, to end the mutiny. When his officers doubted the existence of the strait, Magellan found it; when they quailed at the prospect of entering the Pacific Ocean, he proceeded to sail into its roiling waters. And it took the massed forces of fifteen hundred men to kill him.

A
fter the furious battle ended, the hacked pieces of the explorer’s corpse drifted aimlessly in the water near the beach at Mactan until the victorious warriors claimed them. That afternoon, Magellan’s distraught loyalists urged Humabon to send a message to Lapu Lapu, requesting the remains of Magellan and the other victims of the battle of Mactan; they even offered to pay as much as the victors wanted in exchange for the nine fallen soldiers. Lapu Lapu’s reply was shockingly arrogant: “They would not give him for all the riches in the world. . . . They intended to keep him as a memorial.” That might have been the case, but nothing of Magellan was ever recovered, not even his armor.

T
oday, in the Philippines, the tragic encounter between Magellan and Lapu Lapu is seen from a radically different perspective. Magellan is not regarded as a courageous explorer; instead, he is portrayed as an invader and a murderer. And Lapu Lapu has been romanticized beyond recognition. By far the most impressive sight in Mactan harbor today is a giant statue of Lapu Lapu, his bamboo spear at the ready, as he gazes protectively over the Pacific. There is no other record of Lapu Lapu or his reign; were it not for his battle with Magellan, his name would be lost to history.

Within the harbor, a white obelisk commemorates the ferocious battle between the Europeans and the Filipinos, and it offers two sharply varying accounts of the events. One face presents the European point of view: “Here on 27th April 1521 the great Portuguese navigator Hernando de Magallanes, in the service of the King of Spain, was slain by native Filipinos.” The other portrays the conflict from the Filipino perspective: “Here on this spot the great chieftain Lapu Lapu repelled an attack by Ferdinand Magellan, killing him and sending his forces away.” This version is naturally more popular in the Philippines, where the name Magellan is often regarded with loathing and even gloating at the circumstances of his death. Every April, Filipinos restage the battle of Mactan on the beach where it occurred, with the part of Lapu Lapu played by a film star, and Magellan by a professional soldier. Thousands turn out to witness the reenactment between the nearly naked Filipino warrior and the armor-clad invader who eventually falls face down into the surf.

Book Three
Back From the Dead