"Tierra...! Tierra...!" Perched in a precarious crow's nest seat high above the deck of the Victoria, ship lookout Lope Navarro called out to his shipmates. There, on the horizon, loomed a dark shape: finally - thankfully - it was land at last!

The date was March 6th 1521, more than a year and a half after the Victoria and its two sister-ships Conception and Trinidad had begun their epoch-making attempt to sail Around the world. after a grueling three month crossing of the Pacific, the lookout's sighting of land - most likely the islands of Guam and Rota - was greted with unabated joy among the surviving members of the expedition. Of the 270 men who had begun the voyage in Seville, only 186 now remained. During their harrowing journey, conditions onboard had reached such a desperate state, wrote expedition diarist Antonio Pigafetta, that the emaciated crew had been forced to consume "putrified water", rotten biscuit powder "full of wormes and stinking like pisse by reason of the salt water", and "pieces of leather which were folded about certain great ropes of the shippes...".

For these survivors, including their uncompromising captain Ferdinand Magellan, the Polynesian islands must at first have seemed like paradise - the tribesmen were generous with gifts and the alluring women were the first the crew had seen since leaving South America.
Soon, though, misunderstandings arose, and the visitors were forced to make a hasty retreat. Ten days later, the ships approached Samar on the eastern edge of the Philippines, an area, like Polynesia, completely new to European maps.

Once again, as in Polynesia, there was no way for the crew to effectively communicate with the local tribesmen, and attempts at sign language broke down and led to hostility. On March 25th, however, something extraordinary occured: arriving at a new island, which in his diary Pigafetta calls Mazaua (possibly present-day Limasawa, or Butuan on Midanao), the three ships were greeted by a small boat of eight warriors. As in previous encounters, Magellan's translators, a slave by the name of Enrique, stepped forward and attempted to communicate by calling out in a Malay dialect. This time the men appeared to understand what he said. Within a couple of hours, two long boats approached with the king and his escorts. "And when they came near the captain's ship:, Pigafetta recalled, "the said slave [Enrique] spoke to that king, who understood him well."

The exchange was significant not just in terms of furthering the success of the expedition. For Magellan, it was proof - for the first time - that he had been right all along, and that the Earth was indeed round. For the slave Enrique, it meant that, finally, he was on his way home...

The full article is available in the latest issue of Heritage Asia (Volume 4, No. 3) April - June 2007.

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