The first voyage round the world, by Magellan : $b translated from the accounts of Pigafetta, and other contemporary writersPigafetta, Antonio
History
The first voyage round the world, by Magellan : $b translated from the accounts of Pigafetta, and other contemporary writers
Pigafetta, Antonio
Magalhães, Fernão de, -1521; Voyages around the world -- Early works to 1800
It may please your illustrious lordship to have some description of
the islands where the cloves grow. They are five—Tarenate, Tador,
Mutir, Machian, and Bachian. Tarenate is the principal island. Its
king, whilst he lived, had almost entire dominion over the other
four. Tadore, the island in which we were, has its own king. Mutir
and Machian have no king, but are governed by the people; and when
the kings of Tarenate and Tidore are at war, they furnish them with
combatants. The last is Bachian, and it has a king. All this province
in which the cloves grow is called Maluco.
When we arrived here, eight months had not elapsed since a certain
Portuguese, Francisco Serrano, had died in Tarenate. He was
captain-general of the King of Tarenate when he was making war on
the King of Tadore; and he acted so strenuously that this king was
compelled to give his daughter in marriage to the King of Tarenate,
who also received as hostages almost all the sons of the chief men of
Tadore. Peace was then made, and from that daughter was born the nephew
Calanopagi, of whom I have spoken. But the King of Tadore never forgave
Serrano in his heart; and he having come several years later to Tadore
to traffic in cloves, the king had him poisoned with some betel leaves,
so that he survived hardly four days. The King of Tarenate wished to
have him buried according to their own usage, but three Christian
servants that Serrano had with him did not consent to it. In dying he
left a little son and a little girl that he had of a lady he had taken
in Java major, and two hundred bahars of cloves.
Francisco Serrano was a great friend and a relation of our unfortunate
captain-general, and he it was who induced him to undertake that
voyage, for when Magellan was at Malacca, he had several times
learned by letters from Serrano that he was here. Therefore, when D.
Manuel, King of Portugal, refused to increase his pension by a single
testoon[366] per month, an increase which he thought he had well
deserved, he came to Spain and made the proposal to his Sacred Majesty
to come here by way of the west, and he obtained all that he asked for.
Ten days after the death of Serrano, the King of Tarenate, named
Raja Abuleis,[367] drove out from his kingdom his son-in-law the
King of Bachian, whose wife, the daughter of the King of Tarenate,
came to Tarenate under the pretext of concluding peace, and gave
him (her father) such a poison that he only survived two days,
and dying left nine sons, whose names were told to me as follows:
Chechili[368]-Momuli, Jadore Vunghi, Chechilideroix, Cilimanzur,
Cilipagi, Chialinchechilin, Cataravajecu, Serich, and Calanopagi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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