A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [139]
Magellan’s strategy was not without precedent. Samuel Eliot Morison points out that “almost every group of European intruders into Africa and America felt that to cement an alliance with the nearest tribe of natives they must deploy fire power against next-door enemies.” Champlain in Canada, Cortés in Mexico, the English in the Carolinas, the Portuguese in India and Africa —all had conquered by dividing. “But,” Morison adds, “for Magellan to do it here, when he had the local situation well in hand, was utter folly.”
He might have pulled it off, had he picked the right men, and enough of them, and then handled them properly. Estimates of the force which would oppose him range from 1,500 to 2,000 natives, but they were an undisciplined mob, a prey to panic, armed with only the most primitive weapons. The whole lot could have been easily routed by 150 properly equipped Spaniards trained in the use of crossbows and harquebuses and led by Gómez de Espinosa, the armada’s alguacil, and his disciplined marines. Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, similarly outnumbered, vanquished the Mexicans and Peruvians. But Magellan spurned conventional approaches. He limited his landing party to 60 seamen because, he said, he intended to show the Filipinos a victory won by Christian soldiers against the greatest odds imaginable. And he wanted to lead only volunteers, 20 from each vessel. This meant that the party would include none of the tough marines, who, deeply offended, stayed on their ships. In the end, according to Don Antonio, Magellan wound up with a motley contingent of unseasoned, unblooded cooks, stewards, and cabin boys—crew temperamentally unsuited for the job ahead, unfamiliar with their weapons, and, as it turned out, inadequately protected by armor, which should have been one of their chief advantages in the fight; corselets and helmets were issued to them, but not —and this was to prove decisive—greaves or leg armor. Lastly, their capitán-general was to be their only officer. That, too, was his doing. Because the members of the council had disapproved of his plan, he had excluded them.
Since the humiliation of Lapulapu would serve as well as his defeat, Magellan decided to give him a final chance. Late Friday evening, as the inexperienced volunteers prepared to pile into three bateaux and row ashore at midnight—undrilled, unrehearsed, unaccompanied even by petty officers—their admiral sent an ultimatum ashore, choosing as couriers his slave Enrique and the Siamese Muslim trader, now known to his fellow Catholics as Cristóbal. The rebel chieftain would be spared, he was told, if he acknowledged the local suzerainty of Cebu’s “Christian king,” accepted the Spanish sovereign as his overlord, and paid tribute to Magellan as commander of the armada. If, on the other hand, he persisted in his defiance, he would learn that Spanish lances could wound. Lapulapu scorned the terms. In a fractious reply he jeered that his troops were also armed with lances, fashioned from the finest bamboo, and with fire-hardened stakes. The Spaniards were amused by that, and laughed even harder at the naive postscript. He would be grateful, the petty rajah added, if the Spaniards would delay their attack until morning, when his opposing force would be greater. Here Magellan actually obliged him. Overestimating his foe’s intelligence, he decided that the request was an attempt to trick him into a night attack. He therefore postponed his operation. It hardly mattered. The landing party—sixty men—arrived in the dark anyway. After a brief pull at the oars the three craft ran aground three hours before daybreak.
THEY WERE NOT, however, ashore. When the Saturday sun rose on an ebb tide, they found themselves stranded on the reef, still far from the beach. Realizing