Francisco Serrão Reaches the Spice Islands
Francisco Serrão reached the Moluccas in 1512, the first European to arrive at the only place in the world that produced cloves, and never went home. Albuquerque had sent three ships east from Malacca in late 1511 under António de Abreu, with Malay pilots, to find the islands the Portuguese had been trying to locate for a decade. Serrão commanded one. He wrecked it on a reef near the Banda islands, seized a local vessel with the survivors, and was blown to Ternate. Ternate and Tidore were tiny volcanic islands a few miles apart whose sultans had fought over the clove trade for generations. The Sultan of Ternate took Serrão on as a military adviser and gunner, and he stayed for nine years — married locally, had children, built a fortified house, and became in effect a Ternatean official. He wrote to Ferdinand Magellan, an old friend and possibly a cousin, describing the islands, their wealth and their position, and, by Magellan's later account, urging him to come. Magellan used those letters to argue to the Spanish crown that the Moluccas lay in Spain's half of the world under the Treaty of Tordesillas and could be reached by sailing west. Longitude could not be measured, so the claim was unfalsifiable. Serrão died at Ternate in 1521, probably poisoned, a few weeks before Magellan was killed at Mactan. Spain sold its claim to Portugal in 1529. Magellan's surviving ship, the Victoria, reached the Moluccas after his death and came home round the world with a cargo of cloves that paid for the whole expedition. The Dutch took the islands later in the century and destroyed the Banda population to hold the nutmeg monopoly.
- Year: 1512 CE
- Category: Exploration
