For the answer thus received from the King they sent him a present by
Gonzalo Mendes Despinosa, captain of the ship Victoria, and the King
accepted the present, and gave to all of them China stuffs; and when
there had passed twenty or twenty-three days that they were there
trading with the people on the island, and had got five men on shore in
the city itself, there came to anchor at the bar, close to them, five
junks, at the hour of vespers, and they remained there that evening and
the night until next day in the morning, when they saw coming from the
city two hundred paraos, some under sail, others rowing. Seeing in this
manner the five junks and the paraos, it seemed to them that there might
be treachery, and they set sail for the junks, and as soon as the crews
of the junks saw them under sail, they also set sail and made off where
the wind best served them; and they overhauled one of the junks with
boats, and took it with twenty-seven men; and the ships went and
anchored abreast off the Island of the Myrobalans, with the junk made
fast to the poop of the flag-ship, and the paraos returned to the shore,
and when night came there came a squall from the west in which the said
junk went to the bottom alongside the flag-ship, without being able to
receive any assistance from it whatever.
Next day, in the morning, they saw a sail, and went to it and took it.
This was a great junk in which the son of the King of Lucam came as
captain, and had with him ninety men; and as soon as they took them they
sent some of them to the King of Borneo; and they sent him word by these
men to send the Christians whom they had got there, who were seven men,
and they would give him all the people they had taken in the junk; on
which account the King sent two men of seven whom he had got there in a
parao, and they again sent him word to send the five men who still
remained, and they would send all the people they had got from the junk.
They waited two days for the answer, and there came no message; and they
took thirty men from the junk, and sent them to the King of Borneo, and
set sail with fourteen men of those they had taken and three women; and
they steered along the coast of the said island to the northeast,
returning backward, and they again passed between the islands and the
great island of Borneo, where the flag-ship grounded on a point of the
island, and so remained more than four hours, and the tide turned and
it got off, by which it was seen clearly that the tide was of
twenty-four hours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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