MORE than 500 years ago, Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet arrived on the island of Homonhon, located in present-day Guiuan, Eastern Samar, two years after departing Seville. Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator, documented their arrival with this account: “At dawn on Saturday, 16 March 1521, we came upon a high land at a distance of three hundred leagues from the Islands of Thieves, an island named Samar.” After two days, they made their first contact with Filipinos, nine men arriving in a boat bringing fish, a jar of palm wine, and coconuts.
In the first voyage around the world, Pigafetta documents this first meeting, which reflects their fascination with many things, including our coconut, a fascination that in turn fascinates us, as we have grown accustomed to the fruit and its many uses: “[T]his coconut is as large as a man’s head or thereabouts. Its outside husk is green and thicker than two fingers, and certain filaments are found in that husk, whence is made cord for binding together their boats. Under that husk there is a hard shell, much thicker than the shell of the walnut, which they burn and from which they derive a powder that is useful to them. Under that shell there is a white marrowy substance one finger in thickness, which they eat fresh with meat and fish as we do bread; and it has a taste resembling the almond, and it could be dried and made into bread. There is a clear, sweet water in the middle of that marrowy substance that is very refreshing, and when that water stands for a while after having been collected, it congeals and becomes like an apple. When the natives wish to make oil, they take that coconut, and allow the marrowy substance and the water to putrefy; then they boil it and it becomes oil like butter. When they wish to make vinegar, they allow only the water to putrefy, and then place it in the sun, and a vinegar results like white wine.” If Pigafetta had mentioned the natives using the halved coconut’s fibrous outer husk that we call bunot to polish and shine wooden and cement floors, his description would have been complete.
In another part, Pigafetta describes the people they met wearing “a piece of cloth woven from a tree about their private parts... the women are clad in tree cloth from their waist down, and their hair is black and reached to the ground; they have holes pierced in their ears that are filled with gold.” And those of us who remember seeing grandparents chewing betel nut would be both amused and charmed by Pigafetta’s depiction: “They cut that fruit into four parts, then wrap it in the leaves of a tree of theirs (which they call betre and which resemble the leaves of the mulberry), and mix it with a little lime, and when they have chewed it thoroughly, they spit it out; it makes the mouth exceedingly red.”
Gabriel García Márquez, in his Nobel lecture, marveled at Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of the first circumnavigation, calling it “a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy.” For García Márquez, the coconut tree that yields food, drink, oil, and shelter, or the rituals of kinship and exchange, exemplify how reality itself can be so astonishing that it reads like fiction: “In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.”
In various interviews, García Marquez has frequently addressed the blurred lines between reality and fantasy, arguing that in Latin America, “reality” is often so surreal, exaggerated, and intense that it resembles the wildest imagination.
García Márquez claimed his stories were not invented fantasies, but rather interpretations of a “factual” Latin American history that is, by its nature, magical, tragic, and fantastic. Reality itself can appear fantastic. The coconut tree’s versatility, the strangeness of unfamiliar customs, the drama of first contact — all read like fantasy, yet they are “strictly accurate.” Pigafetta’s wonder mirrors the reader’s wonder.
If Pigafetta’s book were to be made required reading, we might begin to look at our people, our flora and fauna, our customs, with fresh eyes, and with as much wonder.