An illustration from Antonio Pigafetta’s journal showing Cebu, Mactan, and Bohol; with a label indicating that the “Capitaine general” died on Mactan (c. 1525) Source: Wikimedia.
This year marks the quincentenary of the publication of First Voyage Around the World, 1519-1522: An Account of Ferdinand Magellan’s Expedition. First published in 1525, this travelogue was written by Antonio Pigafetta (1492-1531), the navigator from Vicenza who was part of Magellan’s round-the-world expedition. Pigafetta completed the entire voyage from start to finish and lived to write about it.
Such enterprises were often framed in the language of heroism, men who had made enormous sacrifices to undertake hazardous, unpredictable, transoceanic journeys; leaving their countries and families behind while they spent years at sea. Many didn’t survive. Their mission was to open up new trade routes for the benefit of European expansion and the European economy. They brought back spices to Europe for the benefit of the European palate. Even Pigafetta’s commitment to writing a diary on board, no matter how cold or hot or hungry he was, can be seen as a heroic act of resistance. It is thanks, in part, to his unfiltered account that makes no mystery of the plundering, rapes, killings, and conversions in the lands Magellan’s fleet docked at that we understand why parts of Southeast Asia, like the Philippines, are mostly Catholic. Furthermore, Pigafetta’s narrative is useful in current alternative or decolonialist approaches to historical retelling because it provides ample evidence to show that Magellan doesn’t always live up to the heroic image usually ascribed to him. Consider, as a case in point, the circumstances leading to his death in 1521 on the Philippine island of Macatan whose chief was Lapu-Lapu.
Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato, in her new book Emilio Salgari: The Tiger Is Still Alive!, draws from Pigafetta’s account in her reconstruction of the killing of Magellan. She writes:
Magellan thinks—with the arrogant hubris of a colonizer—that “a single well-armed and coated Spaniard can easily win over one hundred savages,” but Lapu-Lapu has a good ally in his knowledge of the island, which is surrounded by coral reefs that prevent the larger boats with arquebuses from approaching. The “indios” await the heavily clad invaders on the beach in howling “hordes,” brandishing their shields and kampilangs (which Pigafetta calls a “terciado, like a scimitar but bigger”). Magellan orders that some houses be burned to scare the natives, but he obtains only fierce resistance, and finally a poisoned arrow hits “the Captain” in the thigh, an unprotected spot of his body, and then he is slashed in the arm and falls into the water where “the mirror, the light, the comfort, and our true guide was killed.”
Lapu-Lapu immediately became a local hero, the first native chief to successfully revolt against a conquistador; he became known as the “savage” who killed the great, civilised Magellan. It was thanks to Lapu-Lapu that the Philippines resisted colonization for another fifty years or so. But what was it that triggered Lapu-Lapu to fight Magellan? Was it just the pressures of conversion in exchange for peace and privileges, or the threat of having one’s villages pillaged? According to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), who had also based his biography of Magellan on Pigafetta’s account, Lapu-Lapu’s determination to defend the sovereignty of his island and his people was motivated by the rapes inflicted by the Spaniards on native women. “Magellan had been unable to prevent his men, sex-hungry after so long a voyage, from raping the wives of his hosts”, writes Zweig.
But who has been lauded for so long as a hero in the history books? Magellan or Lapu-Lapu? While neither of the two are the focus of Galli Mastrodonato’s book, she certainly does make us think about the whole question of hero-making, hero-worshipping and what she calls “the literature of resistance” through the works of nineteenth-century Italian novelist, Emilio Salgari (1862-1911).
The tiger in the title of her book refers to the fictional character Sandokan, a freedom fighter from Borneo also known as The Tiger of Malaysia, Salgari’s most famous anticolonial hero who fought James Brooke (1803-1868), the English Rajah of Sarawak. According to Galli Mastrodonato, Sandokan has pronounced one of the most famous indictments against colonialism ever to appear in a work of fiction during the age of imperialism. Sandokan, in one of Salgari’s most famous novels, The Tigers of Mompracem (1900), says to his Portuguese friend and ally, Yanez:
“It’s true [that they hate me], but whose fault is it? Is it not true that the men of the white race have shown no pity to me? Is it not true that they have dethroned me with the pretence that I was becoming too powerful? Is it not true that they have murdered my mother, my brothers, and my sisters to destroy my lineage? What evil had I done to them? The white race had nothing to complain of, and still they wanted to crush me. Now I hate them, whether Spanish or Dutch, whether English or Portuguese like your countrymen. I loathe them and I shall avenge myself awfully. I have sworn it over the dead bodies of my family, and I shall keep my oath!”
The contemporary reader cannot help but draw parallels to the plundered and occupied lands of today, where civilians are massacred for political or commercial gain. The reader might also be surprised to see Sandokan’s clement side, and discover that the way he sought revenge was not so terrible after all. There are all kinds of ways to seek revenge, but not everyone chooses the worst kind that involes massacring and maiming children.
Salgari had authored more than fifty novels set in Southeast Asia, the Far East, India, the Americas, Africa, the poles, Australia, Oceania, and the Russian Empire. His novels cover events such as the British occupation of Borneo, the independence of the Philippines, Mahdist Sudan, the Japanese-Russian conflict, the Boxer rebellion in China and more, including a futuristic leap into an imagined United States of the year 2003.
The plots in Salagri’s novels often revolve around transgressive love stories, friendships and allegiances between Europeans and non-Europeans. His female and indigenous characters have agency. These unconventional plots are what sets Salgari apart from the literary giants of his time like Joseph Conrad, R.L. Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Marianna, the love of Sandokan’s life, is the half-English half-Italian niece of a British colonial officer. She has switched sides to join Sandokan not only in marriage but also in his struggle to regain his homeland usurped by the British.
In our current age when people are still resisting the arrogant hubris of colonizers who raze entire villages to the ground, but fence-sitters are undecided about whom we should stand with—whether our sympathies should lie with the colonizers or those who resist occupation—books like Galli Mastrodonato’s show that heroism and resistance are not just themes for literature. They are deeply cultural and political values that expose the prejudices, biases and contradictions in our societies that ultimately determine our social and political allegiances. The kind of people like Donald Trump and those at Fox News who were coddling Kyle Rittenhouse, the then teenage killer of two Black Lives Matter demonstrators, are most likely not the same people who see Luigi Mangione, killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as a social media hero or modern antihero. If support for killers is “rooted in an American tradition of exalting the outlaw” as Jessica Winters argues here, then how do Americans choose which outlaws to exalt and which to condemn? Why is it “exhausting”, as Taylor Swift croons, to be “always rooting for the antihero”?
Ultimately, what do we expect from the literatures of resistance? What do we expect their protagonists to do? How do they resist their oppressors? How do women and men in love who want to marry the “wrong” person from their families or society’s perspective, get what they want? What strategies do they employ to get what they desire without jeopardising their well-being?
It is ironic that Salgari was writing during the heyday of European imperialism when much of European literature justified colonialist expansion; yet so many of Salgari’s novels are about characters resisting imperialism. He was read and loved not only by people on the left such as Antonio Gramsci, Che Guevara and Sergio Leone. Some of his novels were bestsellers and he was knighted by the Italian crown for his contribution to Italian letters. So how is it possible that someone like him, writing against the status quo, could be so popular? Today, is there any chance of the literature of resistance becoming mainstream?
Of course, one could also argue that Salgari’s novels don’t radically undermine imperialist power structures. Sandokan spares the life of his arch enemy, Rajah Brooke, who returns to England to die happily ever after. But in return, Sandokan does get his homeland back.
Yes, it is easy to write entertaining stories in which the underdog wins when there is no real threat to imperialism; the latter still runs its course. But if today, we are still talking about Pigafetta and Salgari, it doesn’t just mean that their reputations and relevance have resisted over the centuries.
It means that there is still the need, more than ever, for the resistance to win.
