First Man Round the World

By Andrew C. Milton

Awang befriends Magellan when the latter spies in Malacca while pretending to trade in 1509. After the foreigners’ hasty departure he befriends the Portuguese prisoners and learns their language. When Albuquerque arrives, Awang interprets between the farangi and locals. He observes in detail the two battles. His father pays Magellan to train him as a navigator. He arrives in Lisbon and is culturally shocked. Awang helps Magellan gain the Spanish king’s patronage. They combine their knowledge to find a shortcut back to Southeast Asia by the western route, something Columbus claimed to do but failed. They encounter numerous challenges on the journey — storms, mutinies, shipwreck. Many times they fail to find the straits out of South America, but finally succeed. They sail 104 days across the Pacific, running out of food, until landing in today's Philippines. Magellan is killed in a battle. Can Enrique aka Awang finish his circumnavigation the world and return home?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew C. Milton
• Release date: Nov 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005381097

Book preview

FIRST MAN ROUND THE WORLD

The Adventures of Magellan and Enrique Awang

by

Andrew C. Milton

Synopsis

Young Awang befriends the Portuguese imprisoned by the Sultan of Malacca in 1509, learns their language, and becomes an interpreter between the belligerents. As Henrique he travels with Magellan to Portugal. As Enrique he travels to Spain and helps the explorer win backers for a short cut to the Spice Islands. Reaching South America, he is the key in quelling a mutiny. They make the first recorded Pacific Ocean crossing. After 104 days, they reach what is today’s Philippines, where Magellan is unfortunately killed. Without Magellan, would Enrique aka Awang be the first man to sail round the world?

The Author

Andrew C Milton is a graduate of Oxford University and speaks 4 languages. After a career in corporate and business strategy across the Asia Pacific, he now lives on a tropical island in the Andaman Sea. He is a lifelong fan of Magellan and Enrique Awang and has travelled to most of the locations visited by the pair.

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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark. The information in this book is distributed on an as is basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. This book is written in International English. Foreign words are italicised. Some foreign words have a different nuance in the historical era of the novel. Words perceived to be pejorative now may not be at that time.

Table of Contents

Prologue

How I found the manuscript

Book I of Awang

Young Awang's life in Malacca and

How he came to meet the Portuguese

Henrique

His journey to Lisboa

Their life there

Their challenges

Enrique

Their migration to Spain

Success with King Carlos

Journey to South America

Mutinies and Survival

Finding the Straits

Starvation

Cebu and a Miracle

Magellan's Death

Book II of Awang

Awang regains his freedom

Can he survive without Magellan??

Will he be the first to circumnavigate?

PROLOGUE

Magellan was the first man to sail round the world. The young speaker pronounced the name Mer-je-lan, the second syllable as in jelly.

Wasn’t Magellan killed in the Philippines? The speaker pronounced the name Mac-ge-lan, the second syllable as in galley.

Magellan had an indentured servant, Enrique from Malacca. After Magellan died in Mactan, I believe he returned to Malacca and became the first man to circumnavigate the world, I added.

We were on an island in the Celebes Sea. I had wanted to get as far as possible away from the rest of the world yet here was a Yank and a Brit arguing over a bit of history. And in this remote place, they served a full English breakfast even including black pudding because the cook used to work in a British Army camp. The sun was round and just above the horizon when I heard the sound of big outboard motors. That must be the dive boats coming to fetch us, and put the thought away.

Suddenly, there were shots in the air. I pushed the chair away and scrambled flat under the table. I saw the dirty pairs of shoes and pants walking towards me. The armed men pulled me out, and roughly pushed me along to the beach. A scarf was tied over my eyes. We were soon on their boat. From the sunlight shining on me, I guessed we were travelling east towards the centre of the sea, the no-man’s land between three Southeast Asian countries.

After what seemed like two hours, the engine was cut, and the momentum pushed us to the shore. I could hear the rope being thrown and caught by a man on land and the boat dragged. The kidnappers shoved us off the boat. It was difficult to walk blindfolded and I stumbled a few times. Soon we were inside a hut. The guards locked the door behind them as they walked out. This was our prison.

Gingerly I took off the blindfold. The young New Yorker and the Brit were in front of me. What luck! The first words we said were, Who are they? What do they want from us? I knew the objective of most kidnappers is to collect a ransom.

That day we were not fed. It was one occasion I was grateful we had a full English instead of a Continental breakfast. We were not given water. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to put on my daypack with my water bottle inside before I hid under the table. I sipped bit by bit. That sustained me until the late afternoon. Then I peed into the water bottle and drank my own urine. That night we all slept on the floor of the bamboo hut.

The next morning, we were given cassava and bananas, and a large bottle of water. The cap was already broken. By noon I was having diarrhoea. It was probably tap water, maybe even river water, definitely not boiled. I remember a thrifty friend who had gone to study medicine in India; he told me that he had purged badly when he first drank the water there, but in time his body got used to it. He obviously survived to tell the tale so I was confident I would not die. My companions fared no better than me. We passed into the potty at the corner of the hut. The whole place stank. Worse still, flies began to buzz around.

The next morning, we were given sweet potato and nangka, and another bottle of water. The purging continued. Then we were shifted to another hut. It was similar to the previous one except there was an attached bathroom with a squat toilet and water closet. That was better than a potty. A guard sat in one corner with his AK pointing to the roof. Each shift lasted 12 hours.

It was clear our kidnappers wanted us to stay alive. None of us had any idea what was going on outside the hut. From my reading of hijackings and kidnappings, my guess was that they were negotiating a ransom with the two English-speaking governments.

After two more days, the diarrhoea stopped. The cheeks of the plumb boy from Ithaca were flattening and that of the thin young man from Kennington were noticeably sinking. My tummy was concave when I lay down. Despite the diet of tubers and fruits, and the purging, we did not die, as we first feared. We adjusted to the new normal.

Strangely the conversation drifted to where we were rudely cut off by the abductors. When there’s a weight on one’s mind, there is a tendency to repeat the same thing.

Magellan was the first man to sail round the world.

Wasn’t Magellan killed in the Philippines?

Magellan had an indentured servant, Enrique from Malacca. After Magellan died in Mactan, I believe he returned to Malacca and became the first man to circumnavigate the world.

To be friendly to the guard I explained the conversation to him in the local language. The man said he knew Magellan was killed in Mactan. There is a re-enactment there every year at the Lapulapu Monument. Magellan, Zheng He and Columbus were some of the historical figures that captured my imagination as a child, but while most students know a fair bit about the last, few know about the other two. I started sharing my knowledge with the two young foreigners and at the same time translating into the local language for the benefit of our guard. He also seemed to know a lot about Magellan’s journey from Sevilla to Brazil and the Straits, and then across the Pacific Ocean. He even knew about his exploits in India and Malacca. And he said, The slave’s name in Malacca was Awang which I knew was true. How amazing! How did he know?

One morning after the breakfast of cassava, the guard gave me a blindfold and ordered me to follow him. I held on to his shoulder. From the temperature and the sunlight, I sensed we were walking under the canopy of a forest, i.e. inland. Then we were going uphill. After about 2 hours, he instructed me to take off the blindfold.

In front of me was a Malay house. He walked up the stairs and on to the anjung. I followed him. Then he opened the two-leaf door. As the door creaked open, I saw a very old man with very white hair and completely wide shirt and sarong (a loose fabric tube wrapped tightly around the hips worn in Southeast Asia) sitting cross-legged in the serambi (veranda). The timber floor was made of planks with a tiny gap left by design between them for ventilation. His voice sounded as if it came from the distant past.

You have finally arrived.

He voiced the sentence as if a load had been taken off his back. For 18 generations we have waited for this moment. Enrique or Awang came to retire. He foretold that after 500 years, a foreigner conversant with Portuguese, Malay and Chinese would come to this island. The stranger would be familiar with Awang and Enrique’s life, and we were to show him the memoirs. He will take the story and share it with the world. You are that someone.

500 years.

You are that someone.

I was stunned.

He gave an instruction to the guard. The young man climbed the tiang ibu (mother pole, central column of the house), loosened a rope, and gently lowered down a box. As the old man opened the box, I saw yet another box inside. Charcoal briquettes occupied the gap between the inner and outer boxes, I guess to absorb moisture. Even more gently, he took out the inner box and passed it to me.

What’s inside? I asked.

You look inside. He said with a smile.

I opened the box. There was a stack of thick paper yellowed with age. How ancient I had no idea. There were perhaps a hundred pages. He nodded to me to read it.

I eyeballed the lines left to right. At first it made no sense to me. Slowly I figured out that the main language was Portuguese. There were words in Malay scattered here and there. It took me longer to figure the Chinese words transliterated into Portuguese script. Once I got the hang of it, I read page after page without pausing. I was so engrossed I was unaware the sun was setting until the guard nudged me. I was only half way through. We trudged back in the cool air, and we walked in darkness the last quarter of the way. The next day we repeated the journey and I finished reading the story.

That night I did not return to the prisoners’ hut. I was shown to another house. From that day onwards, better food arrived. One day nasi kuning (yellow rice), another day nasi lemak (coconut rice), even fried fish and vegetables. I started work, translating the text into English, retaining a few Portuguese, Spanish, Malay and Chinese words for authenticity. In these cases, I have added an explanation, contained in brackets.

After some time, I finished the translation and returned to the prisoner’s hut. The American boy and English man were no longer there. I don’t know their fate, whether they left the island with their life, or the kidnappers killed them. Nothing appeared in the international newspapers.

BOOK I OF AWANG

I remember vividly that year in my life as only a youngster would. It was just after the fruit season. Mangis (mangosteen) with their sappy purple skins and sweet white flesh, rambutan with their soft red or yellow hair, duku, and langsat with their pale skins and sour seeds were all in season. Most importantly, there was durian. At the peak of the season, Father had taken us in a boat up the Kesang River, to the foothills of Gunong Ledang, where we had a feast of the thorny and fragrant fruit.

It was the month I noticed my pubic hair and had nocturnal emissions. It was the week my grandmother told me I was no longer a child, that I had learnt enough at home, that it was time to learn from outside the house. I had in my childhood learnt much about my grandfather’s business, and travelled with him in the region, but my grandmother wanted me to be able to stand on my own feet, not sit on my ancestors’ shoulders. Let me be clear that my mother was alive and thriving, just that in any household, there can be only one matriarch. My mother was a tigress to us but a sheep in the presence of my grandmother. That was the way it was in those days, in every household.

My forebears had been in the spice trading business for it seemed forever. Seven generations ago, a young man in Ternate was in the business of selling buah pala (nutmeg) and cengkeh (clove). In those days the flesh and oil of the nutmeg were sold to Chinese traders and the red mace and seed were thrown away. That young man experimented with the mace and seed, and learnt that it had flavour of a different kind. About that time, Arab traders arrived in town, and he persuaded them to buy the mace and nutmeg seeds. They could be dried in the sun and easily transported long distances. The Indians and Arabs used some of the spices but sold even more to the people of Europe who craved these spices to preserve their food. For the young man and Nusantara (Southeast Asian archipelago), a new business was born. That man was my ancestor and generations became rich from it. Spice trading had been our rice bowl. Grandfather often reminded me that Ternate had both nutmeg and clove, but Ambon only had nutmeg. Besides, the Ternate nutmeg is smaller but more fragrant.

When my father or grandfather travelled to meet their suppliers every season, they would take me along, so I knew something about the business world. But in Malacca I was under the supervision of my grandmother and mother. That year they urged me to be more independent. I decided to sell goreng pisang every morning. In Malay grammar the adjective follows the noun, while the verb precedes it. So, the term actually means to fry bananas but it had become the normal usage by my time to mean banana fritters. Although bananas grow all over Nusantara, the Malacca specialty is pisang tanduk (horn bananas) because they resemble the horns of a buffalo. Each one is the size of a man’s arm. Sliced at an angle, each piece was as big as my palm with fingers extended. My amah fried the bananas in batter and laid them in banana leaf layers in a cane basket.

I hawked a different route each day: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday around the market, Tuesday outside the gate of the palace, Thursday in Bukit China, and Saturday in Little India. This way I learnt about the different parts of Malacca, and the different races: Arabs, Indians, and Chinese who came from far away; Malukuans, Javanese, Baruneians, Siamese and Peguans whose homes were nearer, and Malays from both sides of the straits.

I also learnt about different kinds of people. There were rich people and there were poor people. There were honest people and there were people who would trick and cheat an innocent person. This was true whatever their skin pigment. There were people who having agreed to a quantity and price will pay you less. There were people who having agreed to a quantity and price will take a bit more. I shall not name names, but I learnt that people from certain countries tended to exhibit certain of these characteristics.

Through listening to people who wanted others to know they were knowledgeable, listening to people who loved to gossip, and to people who loved to talk, I learnt about the history of Malacca. It was during this time that the Chinese started to call me Ah Wong, and the Malays and Indians, Awang.

Malacca

Some 140 years ago, the Majapahit Empire of Java attacked and defeated