Jump to content

Page:First Voyage Round the World.djvu/195

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
FIGHTING WITH JUNKS.
115

and left behind an anchor in the sea. Our suspicions increased when we observed that behind us were certain junks which had come the day before. Our first operation was to free ourselves from the junks, against which we fired, capturing four and killing many people: three or four other junks went aground in escaping. In one of those which we captured was a son of the king of the isle of Luzon, who was captain-general of the King of Burné, and who was coming with the junks from the conquest of a great city named Laoe, situated on a headland of this island opposite Java Major. He had made this expedition and sacked that city because its inhabitants wished rather to obey the King of Java than the Moorish King of Burné. The Moorish king having heard of the ill-treatment by us of his junks, hastened to send to say, by means of one of our men who was on shore to traffic, that those vessels had not come to do any harm to us, but were going to make war against the Gentiles, in proof of which they showed us some of the heads of those they had slain.

Hearing this, we sent to tell the king that if it was so, that he should allow two of our men who were still on shore, with a son of our pilot, Juan Carvalho, to come to the ships: this son of Carvalho's had been born during his first residence in the country of Brazil: but the king would not consent. Juan Carvalho was thus specially punished, for without communicating the matter to us, in order to obtain a large sum of gold, as we learned later, he had given his liberty to the captain of the junks. If he had detained him, the King Siripada would have given anything to get him back, that captain being exceedingly dreaded by the Gentiles who are most hostile to the Moorish king.

And, with respect to that, it is well to know and understand that in that same port where we were, beyond the city of the Moors of which I have spoken, there is another inhabited by Gentiles, larger than this one, and also built in the