A World Lit Only by Fire (49 page)

The seamen were expressing their jubilation in the immemorial manner of men who have cheated death. They were mostly young,
and after two weeks of rest and a restorative diet they felt virile. None had known female companionship since leaving Brazil
at the end of 1519, five seasons earlier. Even if the girls on Cebu had been sheathed in Mother Hubbards, the crews’ discipline
would have yielded to lust. As it was, by custom only married women wore clothing. The youths were surrounded by naked, nubile
maidens who stirred uncontrollable desire in sailors who had been raised in a society which regarded nudity as prurient. The
proximity of the sexes provided maximum temptation, the dense jungle offered maximum opportunity, and the predictable result
was a saturnalia. The men ran wild. Afterward they said that the Filipino maidens preferred white lovers, finding them exotic
and more vigorous than native boys. Of course, that was what they would say. Yet there has never been any suggestion that
their advances were resisted. Apparently the apposition of the two cultures created a powerful sexual tension. The crewmen,
being Christians, were afflicted with a sense of sin which increased their carnal appetites, while the guiltless, innocent
girls enjoyed wanton tumbles beneath the banyans and, afterward, the gift of a mirror, a bracelet, a bangle, or a knife.

All this should have been anticipated. It had been, in the sense that Magellan’s standing orders forbade it. But orders do
not enforce themselves, particularly under such circumstances. A martinet was needed, and Magellan was exhibiting a strange
passivity, wholly out of character and entirely inadequate to the crisis. He did attempt one corrective measure; on his orders
the fleet chaplain, Pedro de Valderrama, denounced sexual intercourse with pagan women as a mortal sin. Unfortunately the
only consequence of that was an irreverent farce; before mounting the girls, seamen baptized them, thus desecrating a holy
rite and reducing the padre’s threat to a joke. The Filipino men, of course, did not find it laughable. Their pride was deeply
wounded. As the debauchery continued, fathers and brothers decided that their hospitality was being exploited, and for husbands
the humiliation was even greater. The writhing women in the bush were not only sisters and daughters; many were also wives.
Some of the seamen were running amok in harems, where gifts of mirrors and bracelets were also appreciated. The situation
was volatile, deteriorating, and building dangerously.

Although venery was the most flagrant of the crews’ offenses, it was not the only one. Other standing orders of the armada
were being flouted, and by officers as well as men. Indeed, the worst offender was the capitán-general’s brother-in-law. Since
the fall Magellan’s most trusted captains had been Duarte Barbosa, captain of
Victoria
, and the Castilian Juan Serrano,
Concepción
’s commander. Private trade with the natives was forbidden to all members of the armada, yet some officers,
Victoria
’s skipper among them, were surreptitiously bartering iron, new to the islands and obviously useful, for gold and pearls,
which, to Philippine peasants who hadn’t the remotest idea of their value on the other side of the world, were commonplace
and useless. Barbosa was also guilty of drunkenness, absence without leave, and a record of prurience which was remarkable
even in the midst of what had become, in effect, a festival of lechery. During this critical period Magellan’s mind was on
other things, but after marines brought his brother-in-law staggering back to his ship after a three-day binge, the capitán-general
had to act. Barbosa was arrested, shackled, demoted, and deprived of his command.

Had the admiral hewed to that line, restoring order by brandishing the whip, he might have survived the voyage to enjoy the
fruits of his great success. But in those heady days, carried away by his sense of exultation, he too had abandoned himself
to excesses. As his men wallowed in indulgence, he was exploring another extreme. Since his arrival in the Philippines he
had been gripped by a religious fever. It was not an immaculate piety; like the European missionaries who followed him to
far lands over the next four centuries, he confused evangelical zeal with colonial imperialism. Even as he converted Filipinos
to Christianity, he also expected them to accept Spanish sovereignty. He saw no divided loyalties in this, no dual objectives;
to him it was one crusade, with crucifix and flag advancing together.

E
ASTER’S ARRIVAL
on March 31, their first Sunday at Limasawa, had provided an opportunity which, the devout Magellan believed, was God-sent.
He had seized it by entertaining his hosts on Limasawa with a theological version of bangles and beads—a flamboyant Mass.
Padre Valderrama was asked to celebrate the services with flair, and the flota’s officers were ordered to provide him with
every possible assistance. Their commander wanted a show, and he got it. An altar having been brought ashore, a glittering
cross was attached to it. The priest, wearing his vestments, performed Eastertide rituals, after which the capitán-general
and his men approached in twos, kissed the crucifix, and received the host while gunners aboard the ships fired volleys and
all hands cheered.

The armada’s guests that morning had been Rajah Colambu, whose Mindanao jurisdiction included Suluan, and his brother Siaui.
Already Magellan was singling out influential chieftains for attention—men who, once they had accepted Christ, could rule
in the king’s name until royal administrators arrived from Spain. The Easter spectacle had served its purpose admirably. After
Valderrama’s Mass the two guests of honor had knelt before the altar, imitated the movements of the supplicants who had preceded
them, and then, according to one account, ordered native carpenters to build a cross so large that when it had been “set on
the summit of the highest mountain in the neighborhood, all might see and adore it.” Before their departure, Magellan had
told the brothers that if they should find themselves at war with other, pagan, natives, his men and ships would be at their
disposal. If that force did not prove adequate, he would return from Spain with one which was.

On Cebu he stalked a more powerful figure, his majesty the rajah Datu Humabon, ruler of the great island. The rajah’s entourage
included a Muslim trader who had just arrived from Siam on a junk and who, recognizing the cross of St. James on the sails
of the arriving fleet, whispered that these visitors were the pillagers of India and Malaya. Humabon ignored the warning;
warming to the capitán-general from their first meeting, the rajah immediately consented, through Enrique, to a perpetual
treaty of peace with Spain. Pressed by Magellan, he also agreed to burn his pagan idols and worship Jesus Christ as his lord
and savior. Once more Magellan played the role of stage manager; the rajah’s initiation in his new faith, celebrated on the
second Sunday after Easter, was even more liturgical and ostentatious than the earlier Mass on Lima-sawa. Humabon’s subjects
massed densely outdoors round a market square, in the midst of which an altar, decorated with palm branches, dominated a high
platform. Behind the altar and beneath a sheltering canopy were two thrones wreathed in red and purple satin. Humabon occupied
one throne; the other awaited the arrival of the capitán-general.

Magellan made a spectacular entrance. Wearing an immaculate white robe and preceded by forty men in gleaming armor, he advanced
beneath the fluttering silken banner of Castile and Aragon, unfurled here for the first time since it had been presented to
him, twenty months earlier, in Seville’s church of Santa Maria de la Victoria. As a band played stirring marches, the armada’s
officers paraded behind their leader. The Spaniards bowed their heads, a large cross was raised above the platform, and the
fleet’s cannons boomed across the harbor. That nearly ended the ceremony. The native congregation, hearing gunfire for the
first time, panicked, began to scatter, and returned only when they saw that their ruler—who had been forewarned—remained
composed and enthroned.

The rajah knelt and was baptized; Magellan, as his godfather, renamed him Don Carlos. His majesty’s heir, his brother, and
his nephew, the king of Limasawa, followed him to the font; so, unhappily, did the Muslim trader from Siam, who had been given
no choice. They were christened Hernando, Juan, Miguel, and Cristóbal. All that was pro forma, in Spain if not in the Philippines,
but the rituals which followed would have stunned Christians throughout Europe, Catholic and otherwise. Worshipers of the
Lord Jesus were expected to be monogamous, or at least to pay monogamy lip service. Humabon, however, had drawn the line there.
He wanted to save his soul but refused to abandon his harem. After protracted negotiations Magellan had succeeded where the
emissaries of Henry VIII, in their appeals to Pope Clement, had failed. Padre Valderrama was persuaded to overlook the rajah’s
little quirk. Therefore the women, costumed and gaudy with lipstick and fingernail polish, were presented one by one (there
were forty in all) and blessed with such Spanish names as Juana, Catarina, Juanita, and Isabella. Humabon’s favorite—Doña
Johanna, as she now was, the namesake, unknown to her, of Spain’s demented queen mother—received special recognition. Because
she outranked the others, Magellan presented her with a carved image of the Madonna and child. Then the spectators were invited
to enjoy Christian rebirths themselves.

Only a few hundred came forward then, but by the end of the following week virtually every inhabitant of Cebu—a total of
twenty-two hundred, according to one of the flota’s crew—had chosen Christ. The surge in conversions was a personal triumph
for Magellan. It was also a striking example of how a religious fanatic, which is what he had become, may be invested with
psychic gifts. After the royal christenings at the outdoor Mass, Humabon, taking him aside, had told him that one member of
the island’s ruling family longed to be baptized but had been too ill to attend, and was, in fact, dying. Investigating, the
capitán-general had found the man so sick that, in the words of Don Antonio, he “could neither speak nor move.” Magellan discovered
something else; the women nursing the afflicted man were also praying for him, but praying as heathens—thus seeking to propitiate
the pagan idols their rajah had just repudiated. Shocked and indignant, the admiral-become-preacher denounced the infidel
nurses, sent them away, and decided to try his hand at faith healing. With Humabon as his witness, he vowed to demonstrate
how belief in Christ could cure the doomed. After baptizing the patient, the patient’s wife, and their ten children, he asked
the man how he felt. Miraculously reinvested with the power of speech, the invalid replied haltingly that he felt well. Magellan
put him on a regimen of milk and herbs, and within five days the man who had been given up for lost was up and about.

T
HIS FEAT
made a tremendous impression on both the Filipinos and the officers of the fleet, though the two saw it very differently.
The natives became passionate converts, while the officers worried. Increasingly they had been troubled by their commander’s
state of religious exaltation. They considered themselves devout, but they were aware that God, in his wisdom, did not smile
consistently upon those who sought to work miracles. All were familiar with, or had heard of, at least one religieux who had
suffered a humiliating public disappointment, and they were chilled by the thought of what might have happened if their commander’s
patient had collapsed before his eyes and died. Furthermore, they regarded Magellan’s altruistic, indulgent approach to the
natives as folly, contrasting sharply with the Iberian school of colonial administration developed by earlier explorers. Had
this expedition been led by Cortés, or the pitiless Da Gama, the Filipinos would now be unchristened slaves. Not all of Magellan’s
lieutenants felt that way, and none was prepared to reproach him to his face, but all agreed that after three weeks on Cebu
it was time to resume the voyage.