Between Antonio de Abreu's return from Amboyna to the newly acquired Portuguese base at Malacca, in December 1512, and Del Cano's to Seville in September 1522, the Portuguese had acquired a knowledge of the Indonesian seas more extensive and far firmer than Polo's, even if for the most part coastal.^[1] The world in which Lusitanians and Castilians were here involved was far different from that of the Americas: a congeries of petty but civil kingdoms, in the shadow of huge and mysterious empires, and linked by an active and diversified thalassic commerce, which was run by men with little to learn in the arts of trade. Violence by sea and land was not lacking, but the entrada was to be replaced by the embassy; despite forays in Cambodia and pipe-dreams of over-running China, there was to be only one conquista, that of the Philippines.

Dominating the entire region, commercially, was Malacca, a good harbour in either monsoon, and in the hands of its Muslim rulers controlling both sides of the strait through which the traffic between the Indian and the Chinese seas was funnelled.^[2] Born of piracy, like many another Indies Sultanate, Malacca's rise was fostered by its use as a forward base for Cheng Ho's voyages to and across the Indian Ocean^[3]—the name first appears in a Chinese record of 1403. By the early sixteenth century its harbour saw the arrival of about a hundred big ships a year, and of course a multitude of small craft. Its direct contacts extended from Gujarat to Japan, or at any rate to the ‘Gores’ of the Lequeos or Ryukyu Islands.^[4] The Gujaratis were intermediaries for the Venetian trade via the Red Sea—arms, cloth, quicksilver, glassware—while from the farther East the main- 88 -

- 89 -commodities were of course spices, sandalwood, ‘birds from Banda for plumes for the Rumes’—Camoes' ‘aureas aves’, the Birds of Paradise—from the islands; from China, silks, porcelain, and the more mundane salt and saltpetre. The great return trade to China was pepper, up to ten large junk-loads a year.^[5]

The seizure of this great emporium by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1511 dislocated but was far from demolishing the commerce of the local trading powers, such as Atjeh (Achin) and Patani in Siam, both between themselves and with the farther East, and even to some extent with the Red Sea and Venice. Although, as Tomé Pires said, ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’, the grasp was not always effective—there was a marked revival of European spice imports through Alexandria about 1560, and full control had to wait on the bureaucratically much more efficient Dutch monopoly, when the grip of Malacca was replaced by that of Batavia.^[6] Nevertheless, though the new base would have to be supplemented by points farther east, its possession gave the Portuguese a position of strength, and of opportunity, and they lost no time in exploiting it. Albuquerque took Malacca in August; in November he sent de Abreu on his voyage along the north coasts of Java and the islands eastwards as far as Ceram.

By 1517 Tomé Pires could claim that the navigation from Malacca to the Moluccas, by-passing Java, was safe and easy, though the Portuguese authorities took good care that an opposite view was widely circulated.^[7] Pires himself was sent in that year as ambassador to China, with which the first contacts had been made in 1513–15; he was imprisoned and died there, and for some thirty years from 1521 Portuguese trade with China was illicit and hazardous. The Moluccas were first reached by an official Portuguese fleet (as distinct from Francisco Serrão's free-lancing venture) in 1515; they were more tractable in themselves—five small islands; more obviously rewarding as the Spiceries par excellence; and, in view of Magellan's thrust in the service of Castile, a much more urgent objective. On 24 June 1522, between the Trinidad’s departure for Darien and her dejected return, Antonio de Brito set the foundation stone of the fort of São João at Ternate, on the best harbour of the group.

The Spice Islands proper—those of the clove—were Ternate, Tidore, Motir, Makian, and Bachan (Figure 11, “PHILIPPINES AND MOLUCCAS. ”), all volcanic with deep but thirsty lava soils; sago was an important article of diet, but their people depended for much of their food on the nearby large island of Gilolo (now Halmahera, then often Batachina), so that Magellan's stated reason for not making directly for them may have been genuine. Although all the Moluccan rulers were Muslims, there was precious little Islamic brotherhood: political life revolved around the rivalries of the Rajahs of Ternate and Tidore, with interventions from Gilolo; and since the rulers depended ‘entirely on the revenues derived from trade, imports, and middleman profits',^[8] the arrival of Portuguese and Spaniards presented fine openings for quadripartite manipulations in both war and trade. The first round, the seizure of the tiny factory on Tidore and of the Trinidad’s crew, went to the Portuguese.