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By Root 418 0

full view of a floating, mesmerized, horrified, but largely immobile audience: the rajah-king of Cebu, Prince Lumai, the Cacique Zula, the other baptized chieftains in the balangays, and the timorous men in the bateaux. The newly converted Filipinos awaited divine intervention by the Madonna, the saints, Our Lady of Victory, or Jesus Christ himself. It never came. Ferdinand Magellan, Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago and emissary of His Christian Majesty of Spain, had no miracles left. Toward the end a small band of his new Christians, Cebu warriors unable to endure the awful spectacle, landed on Mactan to rescue their godfather, but the moment they were ashore a Spanish gunner out in the armada, where no one had stirred till now, fired a medieval culverin at the beach. Castilian luck being what it was that Saturday, the wild shot scored a direct hit on the rescuers, killing four instantly and dispersing the others.

But it took a lot to kill the capitán-general. A poisoned arrow struck his unarmored right foot; reaching down, he ripped it out and fought on. He and his embattled band were knee deep in surf now, showered by stones, sod, and spears—Pigafetta writes that the natives would retrieve the spears and hurl the same one five or six times. Twice Magellan’s helmet was knocked off; twice his men recovered and replaced it. Then he was speared in the face. Half blinded by his own blood, he slew his attacker with his lance, but the weight of the falling spearman wrenched the lance from his grip. Empty-handed, he started to draw his sword and found he couldn’t; an earlier wound had severed the muscles in his sword arm. Seeing him helpless, Lapulapu’s warriors closed in. All but four of Magellan’s men were dead. The survivors tried to cover him with their bucklers, but a native wielding a long terzado—a scimitar—slashed beneath the shields, laying Magellan’s game leg open. As he fell face downward in the water, Pigafetta, bleeding himself from an arrow, saw a dozen warriors “rush upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light and comfort, and our true guide.” Somehow Don Antonio, Enrique, and the two others fought free. “Beholding him dead,” Don Antonio writes, “we, being wounded, retreated as best we could to the boats, which were already pulling off.”

Nothing of Magellan’s person survived. That afternoon the grieving rajah-king, hoping to recover his remains, offered Mactan’s victorious chief a handsome ransom of copper and iron for them. Lapulapu was elated; he had not possessed so much wealth in his lifetime. However, he was unable to produce the body. He could not find it. He searched; accompanied by a delegation from

The death of Magellan

Cebu, he and his warriors carefully examined the shallow surf where Magellan had thrashed his last. The corpses of the other victims lay where they had fallen among the battlefield debris—arrows, discarded spears, fragments of armor—but that was all. None of the capitán-general’s parts turned up; no shred of flesh or tissue, no shard of bone. The only explanation, as inescapable as it is gruesome, is that Mactan’s defenders, in their murderous fever, literally tore him apart, and the sea, which had brought him so far, bore his blood away. Since his wife and child died in Seville before any member of the expedition could return to Spain, it seemed that every evidence of Ferdinand Magellan’s existence had vanished from the earth.

IT WAS ILLUSION. His life had ended, but his voyage had not. To be sure, its next few days were shaky. The magic nimbus which had clothed the Spaniards in glory was gone, as dead as their commander. The disgraceful behavior of the men who had fled to the boats, abandoning their leader, left an unpleasant aftertaste among Filipinos, but there was another reason for their disenchantment. After the chaplain’s memorial service for him, the armada’s prurient seamen, insensitive to their loss, continued to wear out their welcome by impregnating Filipino females. Long afterward one member of