Magalhães killed at Mactan: 27 April 1521

Three hours before dawn on Saturday 27 April 1521, three ships' boats lay off the island of Mactan, in the central Philippines. In them were sixty men in corselets and helmets. Behind them, in twenty or thirty boats of his own, waited Humabon, the ruler of Cebu across the channel, who had been baptised a Christian thirteen days before.1 source1 source

Their commander was Fernão de Magalhães, a Portuguese nobleman sailing for the king of Castile, known in English as Ferdinand Magellan. He sent a message ashore by a Muslim trader from Siam who had been baptised in Cebu: if the people of Mactan obeyed the king of Spain, accepted Humabon as their lord and paid tribute, he would be their friend. If not, they would see how his lances wounded. The answer came back that they had lances too, of bamboo, and stakes hardened in fire.1 source1 source

When it was light, forty-nine men climbed out of the boats. Rocks kept the boats from coming closer, so they waded more than two crossbow shots through water up to their thighs, while eleven stayed behind on guard. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian gentleman who kept a journal of the voyage, put the islanders waiting on the beach at more than 1,500, drawn up in three groups.1 source1 source

By the end of the morning Magalhães was dead in the shallows, and the people of Mactan would not give up his body.1 source1 source

Magalhães was born around 1480 in the north of Portugal, perhaps in Porto, and spent eight years fighting for Portugal in the East, including Afonso de Albuquerque's capture of Malacca in 1511. After King Manuel I turned down his petitions for advancement, he renounced his allegiance and reached Seville on 20 October 1517. Lisboeta's article on the strait that bears his name tells the story of that break and of the voyage to the bottom of South America.2 sources2 sources

Charles I of Spain backed his plan to reach the Moluccas, the clove islands of what is now eastern Indonesia, by sailing west. Five ships left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519. Three came out of the strait into the Pacific in late November 1520, and on 6 March 1521, after a crossing of more than three months without fresh food, they reached the Marianas.2 sources2 sources

On 16 March they sighted Samar, in the islands later named the Philippines. At an island Pigafetta calls Mazaua, usually identified with Limasawa, the fleet's priest said Mass on Easter Sunday, 31 March, and Magalhães had a cross set up on the highest hill so that later ships would know they had been there.1 source1 source

The ruler of Mazaua guided them on to Cebu, a large and well-supplied island. They entered it at noon on Sunday 7 April with flags flying and every gun firing, which terrified the town. Humabon's first answer was that ships entering his port paid tribute: a junk from Siam had paid four days earlier.2 sources2 sources

A Muslim merchant from Siam who was trading in the town told Humabon to be careful. These, he said, were the men who had conquered Calicut, Malacca and all of India. The Castilians had done no such thing, but their captain had fought at Malacca for Portugal ten years before. The interpreter replied that his master's king was more powerful than the king of Portugal, and that Humabon could have peace or war.2 sources2 sources

Humabon chose peace. He asked for a drop of blood from Magalhães's right arm as a sign of friendship and offered his own. On Sunday 14 April he was baptised Carlos, after the emperor, on a platform hung with palm branches in the town square. Pigafetta counted 800 baptisms that day; Maximilianus Transylvanus, a student at Valladolid who wrote up the survivors' stories in 1522, put the total at more than 2,200.2 sources2 sources

The new faith came with conditions. Magalhães told the chiefs who would not obey Humabon that he would have them killed and give their goods to the king, and promised Humabon he would come back from Spain with forces enough to make him the greatest king in those islands.1 source1 source

That afternoon the queen was baptised Johanna, after the emperor's mother. Shown an image of the Virgin, a wooden figure of the Child Jesus and a cross, she asked to keep the child in place of her idols. In 1565 a soldier of Miguel López de Legazpi's Spanish expedition found a carved Child Jesus in Cebu, and it was taken to be the same figure.1 source1 source

Not every chief came over. Before the week was out the visitors burned a village called Bulaia on Mactan, the smaller island that sheltered their anchorage, “because it refused to obey the king or us”, in Pigafetta's words. Mactan had two chiefs, Zula and the man Pigafetta calls Cilapulapu, known in the Philippines today as Lapulapu.2 sources2 sources

The accounts give different reasons for what came next. The log of a Genoese pilot in the fleet says Magalhães ordered a village on Mactan to send three goats, three pigs, three loads of rice and three of millet, and was offered two of each. Transylvanus says the king of Mactan was stronger than the other chiefs and would not do homage to Humabon, whom he had long been used to command. Ginés de Mafra, a sailor in the fleet, adds that the two rulers were brothers-in-law.3 sources3 sources

On Friday 26 April Zula sent one of his sons with two goats and a request. He could not deliver all he had promised, he said, because Cilapulapu refused to obey the king of Spain; if Magalhães sent one boatload of men the next night, they could fight him together. Magalhães decided to go with three.1 source1 source

His men begged him not to go. The royal instructions for the voyage told him to avoid putting himself in danger, and Humabon offered warriors of his own. Magalhães told Humabon to stay in his boat and watch. In Mafra's account he turned down the offer of help in so many words.4 sources4 sources

The landing went wrong from the start. Pigafetta says the islanders had dug pits between their houses and had asked the visitors to wait until morning so that more men could gather. The guns in the boats were too far off to help. For half an hour the musketeers and crossbowmen fired from long range; the shots went through the thin wooden shields without stopping anyone, and Magalhães shouted to them to cease firing.1 source1 source

He sent men to burn the houses, hoping to frighten the defenders. Twenty or thirty houses went up, two of his men were killed beside them, and the attack grew fiercer. A poisoned arrow struck Magalhães in the right leg. He ordered a slow retreat, but most of his men ran for the boats, leaving six or eight with him.1 source1 source

The islanders aimed at the visitors' bare legs and twice knocked the helmet from Magalhães's head. For more than an hour the small group fought knee-deep in the water. He killed one man with his lance, but a bamboo spear in the arm stopped him drawing his sword, and a cutlass blow to his left leg brought him down face first. The defenders closed in with iron and bamboo spears.1 source1 source

Pigafetta says eight of his men died with him, and four Christian islanders who had come to help were killed by the guns in the boats. Fifteen of Mactan's defenders were killed. That afternoon Humabon, with the visitors' consent, offered the people of Mactan as much merchandise as they wanted for the bodies.1 source1 source

Pigafetta, wounded in the face by a poisoned arrow, wrote a eulogy into his account of the battle. No man in the world, he wrote, understood sea charts and navigation better, and Magalhães had almost sailed round the world.1 source1 source

Pigafetta's is the fullest account, and he wrote it as an admirer of his commander. Of the twenty-five early accounts of the voyage that survive, eleven were written by men who sailed on it. The rest were written by people who were not there. They agree on the outcome and differ on most of the details.2 sources2 sources

Mafra tells a different battle. In his version Magalhães landed with 34 men, found a large village among palm trees with nobody in sight, and ordered a house burned. About fifty men burst out of it with cutlasses and shields, a second party came at the landing party's backs from a side street, and Magalhães, wounded in the face and legs, bled until he fell. Only then did Humabon's men charge and help carry the wounded to the boats.1 source1 source

Even the date varies. Pigafetta gives Saturday 27 April and says Magalhães chose a Saturday because it was a day especially holy to him. One copy of the Genoese pilot's log gives 28 April and another 27 April; the Lisbon Academy's editors noted that 27 April 1521 was indeed a Saturday. A wooden tablet a parish priest set up on Mactan in 1843 gave 26 April. It stood beside a cross until a stone monument was raised on the site later in the century.3 sources3 sources

Some witnesses left the battle out. The log of the pilot Francisco Albo records only that the fleet stayed many days at Cebu, and that the king and queen, with many people, “became Christians of their free will”.1 source1 source

Almost nothing is known about the man the Philippines honours as the victor of Mactan. Pigafetta names Cilapulapu twice, as one of the island's two chiefs and as the one who refused to obey the king of Spain. No account describes him or says what became of him.2 sources2 sources

The gap has been filled with competing stories. At the 500th anniversary in Lapu-Lapu City on 27 April 2021, Senator Christopher “Bong” Go said Lapulapu had been a Tausug warrior from Sulu, in the far south of the country, a claim President Rodrigo Duterte had made in speeches since 2017. Go apologised after historians objected.1 source1 source

The National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP), which the law charges with resolving historical controversies, said on 30 April 2021 that Lapulapu's origins, his ethnicity included, are unknown. Everything known about him, it said, comes from survivors of the expedition such as Pigafetta. The archaeologist Jose Eleazar Bersales, director of the University of San Carlos Museum in Cebu, said the records show that Lapulapu was chief of Mactan.1 source1 source

What the battle means is argued over too. Writing in the journal südostasien in 2021, Luis Zuriel P. Domingo noted that some historians call Mactan the first Philippine revolt against colonial rule, although the word Filipino came into use only in the late nineteenth century. For Catholics, he wrote, Magalhães's arrival laid the foundations of Christianity in the islands; for others it began centuries of colonisation.1 source1 source

The alliance with Cebu lasted four more days. On 1 May Humabon invited the two men the crews had chosen to replace Magalhães, Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão, to a feast. Pigafetta says twenty-four men went ashore. Two turned back, suspecting a trap. Soon afterwards Serrão was brought to the beach bound and wounded, shouting that all the others were dead except the interpreter, and the ships sailed without him.1 source1 source

Pigafetta and Transylvanus both blame Enrique, the interpreter Magalhães had held as a slave since buying him in Malacca, as Transylvanus tells it. After the battle one of the new commanders told Enrique that his master's death had not freed him, and he went to Humabon. Transylvanus and the Genoese pilot put the party that went ashore at twenty-eight, and Brito at thirty-five or thirty-six.2 sources2 sources

With too few men to sail three ships, the survivors burned the Concepción and reached Tidore, in the Moluccas, on 8 November 1521. The Victoria, under the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano, sailed home round Africa and reached Sanlúcar on 6 September 1522 with eighteen men, the first ship to sail round the world.3 sources3 sources

Spain came back. The voyage opened the way for Spanish colonisation of the Philippines, and Legazpi's expedition was in Cebu by 1565. From 1571 Manila was the seat of power in the islands.3 sources3 sources

In Portugal his memory stayed double-edged. Luís de Camões, in Os Lusíadas, the national epic printed in 1572, included him in the passage where a goddess shows Vasco da Gama the future deeds of the Portuguese: a Lusitanian “aggrieved with his king” who would open a way no one had imagined. Then he drew the line plainly.1 source1 source

In the Philippines, 27 April is a public occasion. A 1961 law turned the town of Opon, on Mactan, into the City of Lapu-Lapu. In 1969 Congress made the site of the old Magellan Monument, “the approximate place” of the battle, a national shrine called the Liberty Shrine, and ordered a monument to Lapulapu built beside it.2 sources2 sources

Under a law of 2018, 27 April is Lapu-Lapu Day, a special working holiday across the country and a day off in Lapu-Lapu City, “to commemorate the victory of Lapu-Lapu and his men over the Spaniards”. The same year the government set up a National Quincentennial Committee for the 500th anniversary in 2021, with the NHCP as its vice-chair and secretariat. An order of 2020 set out its view: it was to stress both the humanity of the islanders who helped the starving crew after the Pacific crossing and the courage of the warriors at Mactan.3 sources3 sources

Lapu-Lapu City marks the day with a wreath-laying and a re-enactment of the battle at the shrine, which the city believes is the site of the fighting. At the 505th commemoration, on 27 April 2026, the police estimated the crowd at 2,500, and the mayor, Cynthia King-Chan, told it that Lapulapu had united his people against a common enemy.1 source1 source

Portugal and Spain now present the voyage as shared heritage. In 2023 UNESCO added fifteen manuscripts about the first circumnavigation to its Memory of the World register, on a nomination by the two governments. Some of them are in the Torre do Tombo, Portugal's national archive.2 sources2 sources