Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  As they roamed east and west across the world, however, Portuguese pilots came to the realization that the misalignment increased and decreased regularly and affected not one or two but all compasses. Navigators developed a specialized language to refer to this curious behavior. They said that the needles would nordestear (northeast), meaning that they would point to the east from true north in some parts of the world or that they would noroestear (northwest) in others. Today, the difference between magnetic and true north is called magnetic declination, and Portuguese charts of the early 1500s reveal an astounding awareness of it. The famous Cantino Planisphere, a colorful chart smuggled out of Portugal and taken to Italy in 1502, shows the African coast in striking detail; no contemporary map even comes close to depicting the cone of Africa so accurately. Interestingly, the southernmost tip is identified as the “Cabo das Agulhas,” or “Cape of the Needles,” so named because at that precise place the compass and the North Star became perfectly aligned and the magnetic declination was zero. Portuguese mariners evidently recognized the “Cape of the Needles” as a place of great nautical significance.37

  Magnetic declination was immensely exciting because it could help establish the all too elusive east-west distance or longitude. The Faleiros were among the chief proponents of this method; Rui became convinced that a correlation existed between magnetic declination and east-west distance. He was not mistaken. Anyone with a basic compass in the continental United States today can approximate longitude. In San Francisco, for instance, the needle points to about thirteen degrees east of true north. Farther east, in Denver, that difference dwindles to about eight degrees. Along the Mississippi River, the magnetic declination approaches zero. By the time one gets to Chicago, magnetic north is nearly four degrees west of true north. In New York City, that difference has increased to twelve degrees. In other words, magnetic declination increases or decreases depending on one’s east-west location within the continental United States.38

  During the Age of Exploration, this magnetic declination method would have been a very practical way to approximate longitude, requiring no additional instrumentation, tables, or calculations. But this system had two drawbacks. First, because of the turmoil in our planet’s core, magnetic declinations change. Recent reports about the north magnetic pole wandering away from Canada and toward Siberia have made us aware of this instability. Any method based on Earth’s fickle magnetic field would therefore have required some updating. This was a minor inconvenience, however, compared to the second one: the system simply did not work in many, if not most, places on Earth. A magnetic declination map of the world—that is, a map displaying lines with the same magnetic declination—reveals their wavy and capricious arrangement. Magnetic declination would have indeed served to approximate east-west distance in the North Atlantic, but it would have been utterly confusing along some of the equatorial regions—where the compass needle would not have budged over vast distances—or in areas of the Pacific and Indian Oceans where the lines run in perplexing directions.39

  Faleiro did not possess a magnetic map of the world and therefore could not have anticipated that his system, although viable in the North Atlantic, would be fatally misleading in a passage around South America and across the Pacific Ocean such as the one he and Magellan were proposing. Yet none of this mattered at the time. During the early negotiations, Faleiro was convinced of the soundness of his method, while the Spanish monarchy was bent on reaching “the east by way of the west” to catch up with Portugal. Spain thus backed up Faleiro and Magellan, placing a second and colossal bet.40

  Against all odds, Magellan’s voyage succeeded. The Portuguese captain employed by the Spanish crown not only found the strait at the southern tip of South America that still bears his name but also crossed the Pacific Ocean in one swoop for the first time in recorded history. The suffering was extreme. Of the five ships that had started out from Spain in 1519, only one damaged hull with tattered sails returned in 1522 with eighteen survivors, after having crossed the Pacific, negotiated the Indian Ocean, and ascended through the Atlantic back to Europe. Magellan himself perished in the attempt. Yet his voyage demonstrated that, although vastly larger than anyone imagined, the Pacific was crossable and could well become a new gateway to the extraordinary riches of Asia.41

  The race was suddenly back on. In the wake of Magellan, Spain dispatched at least one overland and seven maritime expeditions in the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s to open this new route. All ended in disaster. Some ships ran aground in the treacherous waterways of the Strait of Magellan, others sank in storms or were defeated by the vast distances of the Pacific, and yet others became stranded on the opposite side of the world and succumbed to attacks by Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asians, or the Portuguese.42

  Expedition planners learned three crucial lessons from these failures. First, sending fleets all the way from Spain via the Strait of Magellan and across the Pacific was not practical. Instead, the best strategy consisted of establishing a port on the western coast of the Americas to serve as a launching point for the transpacific voyages. Second, although long, it was feasible to sail from the Americas to Asia aided by two belts of favorable currents and winds that existed above and below the equator.

  The third and most painful lesson, however, was that, once in Asia, there was no return to the Americas. Magellan’s men had been the first to experience this predicament. After reaching the Spice Islands, one of the ships, the Trinidad, attempted the first return across the Pacific Ocean in 1522. Wisely, the pilot first sailed to a northern latitude of forty-two degrees (around Japan’s northernmost island and opposite the coast of Oregon) to get out of the contrary currents and winds and catch the other side of the North Pacific Gyre. Only then did the Trinidad point its bow toward the coast of North America, thus starting an agonizing passage that would claim the lives of thirty—out of fifty—crew members through exposure and lack of provisions before the last survivors finally gave up and turned back to Asia. Magellan’s famous voyage is often referred to as a circumnavigation, the first spin around the world, as if he had set out to prove that the world was round. In reality, Magellan’s armada ended up circumnavigating the globe only because it could not sail back the same way it had come. Another Spanish fleet reached the Spice Islands in 1527 and attempted the vuelta unsuccessfully not once but twice in 1528 and 1529. A third Spanish fleet made it across the Pacific and tried the return voyage once again in 1543 and 1545. Every time the ocean refused to yield a passage home. A Spanish missionary in Asia (and future saint) named Francisco Xavier drew a clear lesson from all of these failures: “It is necessary to tell the Emperor not to send any more fleets via New Spain [Mexico] to discover these islands because so many of them have been lost. The storms are so great and in such a manner that the vessels have no way to save themselves.”43

  2

  Dream Team

  The empire paused for fifteen years before dispatching another expedition, this time the secret endeavor originating in Navidad, across the great ocean. When the order finally came down in 1557, it was given not by Charles—the Belgium-born Spanish monarch who had approved Magellan’s voyage and the disastrous expeditions that followed—but by his son Felipe. Like his Hapsburg relatives across Europe, Philip was born and bred to rule. But unlike most of them, he was extremely dedicated and well adapted to the life of the court—with a fondness for hunting, jousting, and spending time with jesters. When Philip was sixteen, Charles went abroad for fourteen years to attend to various European entanglements, leaving his son as regent. By necessity, Philip grew up as Spain’s day-to-day ruler.1

  By the time Charles finally abdicated, the prince was ready to assume his duties. Philip II became the hardest working of monarchs, “never losing an hour, for he is all day among his papers.” As he himself admitted, “I am so starved of sleep because I need to spend most nights reading the papers that other business prevents me from seeing during the day.” This punishing routine was self-infli
cted, as he insisted on making decisions on everything, from the placement of toilets at the Escorial palace to the details of a plot to “kill or capture” Queen Elizabeth of England. In recognition of his administrative dedication, and because the Spanish Empire attained its greatest size and power during his long reign, Philip II is known to posterity as the “prudent king.” Yet he was far from prudent. As his most insightful biographer makes clear, we can better understand Philip as a man overwhelmed by his enormous realms, obsessive to a fault regarding every decision, and dangerously convinced that he was doing God’s work. As a result of these qualities, he issued several ruinous orders. (Dispatching an “invincible armada” against the British Isles is his best-known blunder.) Yet he was equally capable of getting behind risky projects, persisting beyond reason, and occasionally succeeding.2

  It is impossible to pinpoint when Philip first became interested in the quest to open the Pacific route. We know that in 1543, the year he began acting as regent of Spain, a fleet reached Asia for the third time after Magellan. Vague rumors about the fate of these men circulated at the court, but after a five-year absence, a few hardy survivors finally returned. The Spanish expeditionaries had departed from the coast of Mexico and crossed the Pacific in a surprisingly uneventful passage. Yet as soon as the voyagers tried to establish a foothold in the Philippines, they were forced to battle elusive islanders armed with poisonous daggers and lances. As their main objective was to discover the return trip, they mended their ships and made two valiant attempts to get back to America in 1543 and 1545. Both failed. The Spaniards were stranded halfway around the world. Worse still, as they moved from island to island in search of friendlier hosts, they depleted their provisions. “We had to eat many creatures and plants of which we had no knowledge,” recalled one of the friars accompanying the expedition, “especially the large lizards that are brown and shiny [monitor lizards], and not many of those who ate them remain alive today.” Even the levelheaded expedition leader, a tall and aristocratic man named Ruy López de Villalobos, changed his opinion about the wisdom of establishing a beachhead in the Philippines. “Do not waste any more resources or time except to come to our rescue,” he wrote to his superiors in 1545, “as there is nothing of value in these lands.” In the end, Villalobos and his men surrendered to the Portuguese stationed in the Spice Islands just south of the Philippines. The Lusitanians regarded this band of ragtag survivalists as trespassers but agreed to throw them in the hold of their ships and transport them via the long way home, first to India and then to the Iberian Peninsula.3

  At the time of the survivors’ arrival in Spain in 1548, Philip could do little, as he was still in the process of consolidating his power. Five years into his regency, the prince was able to act with surprising independence within Spain. Yet his father the emperor retained control over sensitive international affairs—and the Villalobos expedition had turned decidedly controversial. Since learning of the arrival of a Spanish fleet in the Philippines, the Portuguese had accused their neighbors of encroaching on their side of the world. Philip’s father had thus refrained from sending additional ships or even mounting a rescue mission to avoid further antagonizing the Portuguese monarch, who also happened to be his brother-in-law.4

  Nonetheless, the Villalobos expedition produced at least one tangible result. The Philippines, a dazzling archipelago of more than seven thousand islands, had gone by different names in Iberia and remained only hazily known. Magellan had called it “el archipiélago de San Lázaro” because his ships had arrived there on Saint Lazarus Day (and probably, like Saint Lazarus himself, Magellan on landfall felt as if he had risen from the dead). Much of the contemporary documentation refers vaguely to “las Islas del Poniente,” or the Islands of the West (or better yet the Islands of the Sunset), because from Spain it was necessary to sail toward the setting sun to reach them. The survivors of the Villalobos expedition added striking new details. They called the enormous island in the southern sector of the archipelago (Mindanao) Caesarea Karoli in honor of Emperor Charles V. As a nod to the Spanish prince, they also gave the name “la Isla Filipina” to the sizable island in the eastern sector (Samar). As Philip cemented his power during the 1550s, this name gained traction in letters, reports, and maps, and eventually was extended to the entire archipelago.5

  The emperor abdicated at last in 1556. Most expected the retiring ruler to maintain a presence around the court for continuity. Instead, he went into seclusion at the Monastery of Yuste in western Spain, where he was able to escape his earthly duties. Suddenly, Philip found himself alone and free to make decisions about the entire empire guided only by his judgment and conscience. In his prime at twenty-nine, the new monarch went into a frenzy of activity over the next few months. Philip devoted most of his waking hours to micromanaging a war with France. But he also set aside time for other matters, including dispatching a peremptory order to his personal representative in Mexico, Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco, “to explore the Islands of the West, and colonize them, and put them in good order.” This implied finding the return voyage through the Pacific Ocean.6

  Philip’s instructions were striking for several reasons but particularly because they gave Viceroy Velasco “all the power and authority to make those discoveries.” In the past, the Spanish monarchy had generally partnered with entrepreneurial individuals in ventures of discovery. Magellan, for instance, had approached the crown with the idea of finding an alternative route to the Far East and had secured some financing for such a venture. Later on, wealthy conquistadors in the Americas like Hernán Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado took the lead, getting loans, building shipyards, and raising armadas before seeking the royal blessing for their transpacific ventures. In this case, the crown itself would seize the initiative, relying on its vast human and material resources to procure everything needed. All this activity would be coordinated by Velasco, “a trustworthy man who enjoys our full confidence,” according to Philip. From his perch in Mexico City, Don Luis would plan the venture from the ground up, build a fleet, hire the best crew available, and bring the project to fruition—a difficult task for a man with no nautical experience who may never have seen the Pacific Ocean. Yet the viceroy relished the challenge.7

  Don Luis was a peculiar man who in some respects resembled Philip—noble birth, administrative experience since the age of fourteen, a deep sense of duty to crown and God, and obsessiveness in every decision. But Don Luis differed from the Spanish king in that he was perennially short of money. As viceroy of Mexico, Don Luis earned an enormous salary, and as the king’s personal representative and living image in Mexico, he was expected to maintain a certain level of luxury. Yet in this Don Luis went well beyond the call of duty. He was a gregarious man who surrounded himself with relatives, friends, supporters, and hangers-on. “Every day his table was set for thirty or forty people, and indeed for anyone who wished to dine with him, of the proper class, of course,” one contemporary remembered, “and they were all treated to great meals of ten or twelve courses and this lasted all the time that he was here in Mexico.” Don Luis also loved horses. An accomplished rider, he kept a stable “worthy of a king,” with dozens of beautiful animals trained by an expensive horse master. He was equally passionate about bullfighting. Every Saturday, at the head of a hundred cavalrymen and their servants, Don Luis rode to the nearby woods of Chapultepec, where he had built a bullring, and they spent the day with a half-dozen wild bulls imported from the Chichimec frontier. The viceroy offered food to all the cavalrymen and their servants, “and it was always a banquet so that they were always talking about celebrations and feasts.” The viceroy’s lifestyle far exceeded what he could afford. “My salary is not enough for the expenditures that I am forced to make,” Don Luis complained to the king as early as 1553, as he would continue to do over the years, “and given my outstanding loans, I do not wish to repay everything in the afterlife. I implore Your Majesty to grant me an adequate salary.” The viceroy’s complete disregard for
his financial circumstances is at times baffling. He was married to Doña Ana de Castilla y Mendoza, a descendant of a fourteenth-century Castilian king. Worried about the transatlantic passage and the uncertain accommodations in Mexico City, Don Luis initially traveled to Mexico alone. But with the passing of the years, the viceroy began preparing to bring Doña Ana to his side. He lived in a palace that had belonged to Moctezuma, the last Aztec emperor. Don Luis was not satisfied with the building, however, so he embarked on a major renovation, adding several rooms and making costly modifications. The viceroy racked up an enormous debt that he indeed would take all the way to his grave.8

  Apart from his spendthrift ways, the viceroy was a hands-on administrator. When he received the king’s order at the end of 1557 to send an armada to the “Islands of the West” along with what amounted to a royal blank check for “all the power and authority to make those discoveries,” Don Luis set to work immediately. As he knew practically nothing about matters of the sea, he began by surrounding himself with explorers, shipbuilders, mapmakers, and anyone who could offer advice. Through his vast network, the viceroy quickly identified numerous experts, with whom he held discussions. These consultations became so extensive that the king felt the need to reprimand Don Luis for “communicating this business with so many people,” and thus alerting the Portuguese to Spain’s latest bid to conquer the Pacific. The viceroy replied with an old Spanish saying that shows his determination: “When one is doing work on the house with axes and hammers, the neighbors usually know about it.” In other words, the Portuguese would inevitably find out about the mission, but what really mattered was its success.9

  Don Luis’s primary adviser was a larger-than-life adventurer named Juan Pablo de Carrión, a figure well known in Spain today because of a recent comic, Espadas del fin del mundo, based on one of his many exploits. At the ripe old age of sixty-nine, Captain Carrión led an attack on a band of Japanese pirates and samurai operating in the northern Philippines, a rare showdown between European swords and Japanese katanas. In the comic, Carrión comes across as a swashbuckling adventurer getting too long in the tooth, a sort of Don Quixote or Diego Alatriste in a Pérez-Reverte novel.10