Nicholas B. Miller
Associate Professor of History, Flagler College
After a dire crossing of the Pacific, the Magellan expedition anchored off the coast of Guam on 6 March 1521. Following an initial encounter with Chamorro mariners wherein the latter absconded with a skiff from the Trinidad, Magellan led a punitive raid that left a village burnt and several Chamorro dead. Departing the island with much-needed provisions, the expedition continued their journey.
Image 1: “Reception of the Manila Galleon by the Chamorro in the Ladrones Islands.” In the Sino-Spanish Codex (Boxer Codex), ca. 1590. Boxer Mss. II. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reception_of_the_Manila_Galleon_by_the_Chamorro_in_the_Ladrones_Islands,_ca._1590.jpg
In the first few months of 1521, the Magellan expedition achieved the remarkable feat of surviving the first known human crossing of the Pacific from Patagonia to the fringe of Maritime Southeast Asia. They were in miserable shape. As week after unexpected week passed in a Pacific far larger than imagined, they had previously encountered only deserted atolls, succumbing to scurvy, hunger, and frustration. It was thus with considerable relief that on 6 March 1521, the crew of the three remaining ships spotted the Mariana Islands of Guam and Rota, approaching them in a southwesterly direction and anchoring off the coast of Guam. Rightly presuming it to be lush and populated, Magellan’s original intention was to land and secure provisions.[1]
Magellan’s intentions were, however, not the only ones at play. Soon after the fleet anchored, several dozen såkman, or “flying proas,” raced from Guam to the three naos, where several Chamorro navigators proceeded aboard.[2] In reference to their sails, Magellan initially branded the archipelago the Islas de Velas latinas.[3] His companions, after surviving him to become the voyage’s chroniclers, bestowed conferred the epithet of the Islas de Ladrones, or the Islands of Thieves.[4]
Why did the Chamorromariners race out to the expedition and why did the Magellan crew deem them thieves? In the absence of preserved testimony from the Chamorro, either oral or written, any answer to these questions is either speculative or one-sided. Albo, the pilot from Rhodes, succinctly claimed “They sought us to steal whatever they could from us.”[5] Whether numbed by their weeks in the open Pacific or stunned by the boldness of the Chamorro, the Magellan crew found themselves quickly outmanoeuvred. Along with diverse goods, they made away with “the skiff of the flagship, and they cut the rope with which it was made fast, and took it ashore without their being able to prevent it.”[6]
No form of communication beyond the guesswork of signs was possible between the two groups unless one accepted Gómara’s uncorroborated claim that an unnamed Sumatran woman, taken forcibly along the expedition, was able to interpret the speech of the Chamorro.[7] The expedition was not yet far east enough for her linguistic knowledge to be called into service, nor that of Enrique of Malacca, Magellan’s slave. The Chamorro may even have had an edge in knowledge, possessing preliminary information about the Europeans gleaned from their trading relations with the people of what is now called the Caroline Islands, including Yap and Palau, which traded with Mindanao and the Moluccas.[8] In any case, it appears both sides shared the notion that the best defence was a strong offence.
Image 2: “A Flying Proa, taken at the Ladrone Islands.” In George Anson, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, 5th ed. (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1749), vol. 2, copperplate in between 341 and 342. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=R_8DvpWLvlcC
Magellan wrought revenge, fast. Short a skiff, the fleet sailed out to sea for the night, before returning the next morning to the original spot of anchorage. From there, Magellan sent out 40 to 60 armed men to land, where they torched a village and engaged in battle, killing several men.[9] Amidst their rampage, Pigafetta collected brisk ethnographic observations that constitute the oldest surviving written testimony on the Chamorro.[10] The latter were at a technological disadvantage, though not strictly outgunned. Against spears topped with sharpened fishbones wielded by the Chamorro, the expedition prevailed with steel pikes and crossbows, despite a general lack of military training.[11] Regardless of how we appraise Magellan’s “terror tactics,” they worked.[12] The skiff was recovered, followed by forty to fifty såkman bearing provisions, likely including much fruit.[13]
Despite their losses, the Chamorro bade their visitors farewell with bravado. Pigafetta, in his valedictory reflections on the islanders, claimed that the “thieves thought, according to the signs they made, that there were no other men in the world besides them.”[14] From this first moment of encounter in the western Pacific, it was evident that the expedition could expect advantages of neither surprise nor hospitality. As they sailed in a westerly and only slightly southern direction, they approached a world of trade and politics perhaps unexpectedly familiar, though for Magellan ultimately more perilous.
[1] Antonio Pigafetta, Account of Magellan’s Voyage, in The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, Translated from the Accounts of Pigafetta and Other Contemporary Writers [1874], ed. Henry Edward John Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 68.
[2] Pigafetta, Account, 68. Leone Pancaldo, Navigation and Voyage which Fernando de Magalhāes Made from Seville to Maluco in the Year 1519, in The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, Translated from the Accounts of Pigafetta and Other Contemporary Writers [1874], ed. Henry Edward John Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9.
[3] Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 225.
[4] The archipelago would carry the designation of the Ladrones Islands in the Western world for a century and a half until they were re-named after Mariana of Austria (1634-1696) following her patronage of a Jesuit mission to convert the islanders headed by Diego Luis de San Vitores.
[5] Francisco Albo, “Derrotero del viaje al Maluco,” 1519, quoted in Fernández-Armesto, Straits, 226.
[6] Pancaldo, Navigation and Voyage, 9.
[7] Fernández-Armesto, Straits, 99.
[8] Frank Quimby, “The Hierro Commerce: Culture Contact, Appropriation and Colonial Entanglement in the Marianas, 1521–1668,” The Journal of Pacific History 46, no. 1 (2011): 3–4.
[9] Pancaldo, Navigation and Voyage, 10. Pigafetta, Account, 68–69.
[10] Pigafetta, Account, 69–71.
[11] Pigafetta, Account, 70.
[12] Fernández-Armesto, Straits, 230–231.
[13] Pancaldo, Navigation and Voyage, 10.
[14] [emphasis added]. Pigafetta, Account, 70–71.
