When ships approach this island, some of the crew row to shore, where they deposit either money or such things as the natives lack, such as salt and waist cloths. On their return the next morning, they find cloves in equal value. Some believed that this barter was carried on with genii; one thing was, however, certain: no one who ventured into the interior of that island ever left it again.
Other Arab accounts of the islands were still vaguer and more vivid, as with Masudi’s (890–956) Meadows of Gold:
No kingdom has more natural resources, nor more articles for exportation than this. Among these are camphor, aloes, gillyflowers [cloves], sandal-wood, betel-nuts, mace, cardamoms, cubebs and the like … At no great distance is another island from which, constantly, the sound of drums, lutes, fifes and other musical instruments and the noise of dancing and various amusements are heard. Sailors who have passed this place believe that the Dajjal [the Antichrist of the Muslims] occupies this island.
Embroidered as these fictions were, the sixteenth-century reality lagged not far behind. For the spices of these fables grew only on two tiny archipelagos, each of which is barely larger than a speck on the best modern map. Needless to say, no such maps existed in 1500. To locate them among the 16,000 or so islands of the archipelago was to find a needle in a haystack.
The northernmost of those specks is the home of the clove, in what is today the province of Maluku, in the easternmost extremities of Indonesia. Each of the five islands of the Moluccas is little more than a volcanic cone jutting from the water, fringed by a thin strip of habitable land. From the air they resemble a row of emerald witches’ hats set down on the ocean. Ternate, one of the two principal islands, measures little more than six and a half miles across, tapering at the centre to a point over a mile high. In the phrase of the Elizabethan compiler Samuel Purchas, Ternate’s volcano of Gamalama is ‘angrie with Nature’, announcing its regular eruptions by spitting Cyclopean boulders into the atmosphere to an altitude of 10,000 metres, like the uncorking of a colossal champagne bottle. A mile across the water stands Tidore, Ternate’s twin and historic rival, like Ternate a near-perfect volcanic cone, barely ten miles long, its altitude a mere nine metres less: 1,721 metres to Ternate’s 1,730. From the summit it is possible to see the other three Moluccan islands, marching off in a line to the south: Motir, Makian and Bachan beyond. Together they represent a few dozen square miles in millions of miles of islands and ocean. At the start of the sixteenth century and for millennia beforehand they were the source of each and every clove consumed on earth.
The nutmeg was equally reclusive. Provided the winds are right, a week’s sailing southward from Ternate will bring the well-directed traveller to the tiny archipelago of the Bandas or South Moluccas, nine outcrops of rock and jungle comprising a total land area of seventeen square miles (forty-four square kilometres). Here, and here alone, grew the nutmeg tree.
Size and isolation conspired to keep the Moluccas’ obscurity inviolate. The first European with a plausible claim of having seen nutmegs in their natural state (though many have doubted his account) was the early-sixteenth-century Italian traveller Ludovico Varthema (c. 1465–1517). He found the islands savage and menacing, and the people ‘like beasts … so stupid that if they wished to do evil they would not know how to accomplish it’. Spices aside, there was practically nothing to eat. He made a similarly disparaging assessment of the northern Moluccas, where the people were ‘beastly, and more vile and worthless than those of Banda’. The Portuguese historian João de Barros (c.1496–1570) considered the land ‘ill-favoured and ungracious … the air is loaded with vapours … the coast unwholesome … a warren of every evil, and contain[ing] nothing good but the clove tree’. But regardless of their vapours and ‘rascal’ inhabitants, the Moluccas’ cloves, nutmeg and mace were sufficiently tempting to lure traders across the planet.
Portugal’s first expedition in search of the Moluccas left in 1511. In December of that year, shortly after the fall of Malacca, António de Abreu set off in charge of three small vessels. With the assistance of local guides, the Portuguese found their way to the Bandas, where they filled their hulls to overflowing with nutmeg and mace. With no room remaining for cloves, de Abreu resolved to return to Malacca with two of the expedition’s three ships, leaving behind a companion by the name of Francisco Serrão to carry on the search without him.
The northern Moluccas were a more elusive goal for the Portuguese, although in time they would prove a more valuable asset. After various tribulations, including shipwreck in the Banda Sea and getting hopelessly lost among the islands, Serrão eventually made it to Ternate in 1512, on a junk stolen from pirates on whom he turned the tables. Forming an alliance with the sultan of the island, he worked his way into local favour by assisting Ternate in its desultory conflict with neighbouring Tidore – a condition as constant as the annual visitation of the monsoon. The original Lord Jim, he married a local woman (who may have been a daughter of sultan Almanzor of Tidore; if so, an adroit act of marriage diplomacy) and built himself a small fort and trading post – it still stands – from which he sent back a steady stream of cloves to Portugal. He would remain in the Moluccas for the rest of his life.
On the surface, everything was going Lisbon’s way. The immediate and troubling question was whether the Portuguese had any legal claim to their conquests. To many experts the possibility of Spanish ownership under the terms of Tordesillas looked like a probability. At the time the earth’s circumference was still greatly underestimated, no one having the slightest inkling of the vast breadth of the Pacific. All authorities agreed that the Spice Islands lay only a few days’ sailing west of the Mexican coast, a misconception that would not be corrected for several years. According to the document regarded at the time as the single most authoritative description of the world, the Suma de Geografia of Martim Fernandez de Enciso, written in 1519, the eastern meridian as defined at Tordesillas fell at the mouth of the Ganges – which made the Moluccas Spanish.
While the cosmographers speculated, troubling reports and rumours filtered in. The sheer distance they had to travel from India east to the Moluccas had come as an unpleasant surprise to de Abreu and Serrão. Given the great distance they had covered, it seemed not at all unlikely that they had passed out of the Portuguese hemisphere, into Spain’s. The secrecy with which the Portuguese shrouded their voyages served only to encourage further speculation; one reason why so few contemporary maps survive is that they were treated with the secrecy of classified documents. The Spaniards smelled a rat. To many it looked as if the Portuguese were not conquerors, but trespassers.
One of those who shared this suspicion was a Portuguese nobleman from the remote province of Trás-os-Montes, Fernão de Magalhães, or, as he is known in the English-speaking world, Magellan. A veteran of Portugal’s early years in the Indies, he had waded ashore at the conquest of Malacca alongside Serrão, whose life he had saved. When his friend sailed east to the Moluccas Magellan headed west, to India and then back to Portugal. But he never renounced his ambition to revisit the Indies, and the Spice Islands in particular. Over the course of the next few years he and Serrão maintained a regular correspondence via the junks Serrão sent back laden with cloves from Ternate. It was clear from Serrão’s letters that the Moluccas lay a good deal further east than the Portuguese authorities would publicly admit. Largely on the basis of his communications with Serrão, Magellan’s suspicion that the Moluccas lay in the Spanish half of the globe grew to conviction.
Conviction soon ripened into action. Magellan wrote to Serrão that he would come and join him soon, ‘if not by the Portuguese way, then by Castile’s’: that is, he would sail west from Europe to the Spice Islands, avoiding the Portuguese zone entirely. The idea seemed eminently feasible. Provided his assumptions about the circumference of the earth were correct, the voyage would be shorter than the long trip around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Technically, in strictly navigational terms, there was nothing stopping him; politically, on the other hand, the idea was dynamite.
In its essentials, of course, Magellan’s plan was nothing new: the idea of a westward voyage to the Spice Islands was the same as Columbus’s scheme a few decades earlier, the chief difference being that