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By Root 461 0

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