Although Carrión’s arguments were more convincing, Urdaneta insisted on going to New Guinea. The friar made much of the fact that the Philippines were “on the side of the world that belonged to Portugal,” not Spain. He was so adamantly opposed to going to the Philippines—except to top off provisions or rescue stranded Spaniards—that he threatened to quit the expedition if the archipelago was selected as the target. Urdaneta’s uncompromising stance was once again rooted in his personal story. At the time of his first visit to the Spice Islands in 1526, Urdaneta had nearly perished at the hands of the Portuguese. He had found that the Lusitanians were already deeply entrenched in the region, having forged alliances with various local lords and built a fort on the tiny island of Ternate, one of the very few sources of cloves in the world. (According to a contemporary report, there were only five islands with clove trees at the time.) The Portuguese reaped extraordinary benefits from their yearly shipments of cloves, nutmeg, and mace and were not willing to give up their monopoly easily. When a Spanish fleet carrying Urdaneta had pulled into the neighboring island of Tidore (also featuring stands of clove trees), the Portuguese had initially exhibited some restraint. But as the Spanish began building a fort of their own, hostilities broke out. Not yet twenty years of age and already in command of thirty men, Urdaneta experienced the conflict between the two nations in the flesh. In March 1527, he was traveling on a ship along with his men when a barrel of gunpowder exploded, causing Urdaneta severe burns to his face. To relieve his pain, he jumped into the ocean. The Portuguese and their local allies, observing both the explosion and Urdaneta’s dive into the water, immediately went in hot pursuit, shooting at him. “I remained alive only because I am a good swimmer,” Urdaneta recalled, “and I was so burnt that I was confined to a house for twenty days.” The young navigator, who bore the scars for the rest of his life, had no desire to relive similar hostilities in the Philippines in his old age.25
From a legal perspective, Urdaneta was correct. The Philippines were on the Portuguese side of the world. As a practical matter, however, New Guinea would have been an inferior choice, as it was in the Southern Hemisphere and therefore ships departing from Mexico would have been forced to sail through the Intertropical Convergence Zone along the equator. In this region, the winds of the Southern and Northern Hemispheres come together and the prevailing weather is fickle and treacherous, ranging from violent thunderstorms and unpredictable squalls to calms that can last for weeks. The additional risk of getting there seemed hardly worth it, as New Guinea itself possessed few attractions other than its relative proximity to the Spice Islands. Carrión had been there in 1544 and commented that all he saw were “a few naked blacks, and even though we communicated and bartered with them, only obtained miserly foodstuffs and very little rice.”26
Remarkably, the viceroy of Mexico not only backed Urdaneta but also went on to build the entire venture around the friar. When it came time to appoint an expedition commander, Don Luis passed over Carrión—who had arguably done the most to push the project forward and whose plan made the most sense from a nautical perspective—and instead made a puzzling choice. Miguel López de Legazpi had served for decades as a scribe and accounting official at the Casa de Moneda, or Minting House, in landlocked Mexico City, a post that scarcely prepared him for a major transpacific voyage. “We could not have chosen a more convenient person and more to the liking of Friar Andrés de Urdaneta, who is the person who will in fact direct and guide the voyage,” Don Luis confided in Philip, “because both come from the same land and are friends and will get along.” Captain Carrión was less charitable. “Miguel López de Legazpi is from Urdaneta’s home region and both are intimate friends,” the captain commented; “he has no experience in exploration and doesn’t know the first thing about navigation and will defer to the friar in everything.” Today, Legazpi streets and monuments exist in Navidad, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Mexico City, Madrid, Manila, and elsewhere; and the historic voyage that is the subject of this book is generally known as “the Legazpi expedition.” But in truth, Legazpi started out as an incidental commander whose chief attribute was his ability to get along with the Augustinian friar.27
If Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco had lived longer, Urdaneta would have gotten his way, and today we would live in an alternate universe in which Spanish was spoken in New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand. But as fate would have it, Don Luis became very ill in 1564 and died on July 31, four months before the fleet’s scheduled departure. His funeral was the most elaborate ever conducted in Mexico, “and this magnificence was enhanced by the soldiers and General [Legazpi] who were about to leave,” recalled one witness, “and they all carried their weapons and black flags and other signs of mourning, and it was something to behold.” Don Luis would have approved. Yet his unexpected death left no time to consult the king on the life-or-death matter of destination for an expedition that had been in the making for nearly seven years and was finally ready to cast off.28
Five venerable men had been ruling Mexico jointly with Don Luis. All six had been members of the so-called Audiencia of Mexico, a committee with broad executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Predating the doctrine of separation of powers, the Audiencia was like a cabinet, Congress, and Supreme Court rolled into one. After Don Luis’s death, the five remaining officials naturally stepped up to fill the vacuum. Their ability to rule, however, was severely compromised. One of them was already in his eighties and perhaps bordering on senility. Another one was almost completely deaf—an ironic circumstance, as the Audiencia members were called oidores, or “those who hear”—and in fact had asked to be relieved from his post. One final drawback applied to all five. One year before Don Luis’s death (down to the day), a high-ranking official appointed by Philip II had arrived in Mexico to carry out an investigation into Don Luis’s performance as viceroy. Over the summer of 1563, Jerónimo Valderrama had crossed the Atlantic and survived a shipwreck in the Caribbean for the sole purpose of conducting what was then known as a visita, or a royal inspection routinely performed on important officials nearing the end of their term. As visitador, Valderrama wielded enormous power and thus invited anyone with complaints against Don Luis to come forward. In the course of his investigation, the visitador Valderrama had learned about the viceroy’s scandalous granting of power and riches to his allies, friends, and family. Don Luis had married his daughter to the richest silver baron in Mexico (Diego de Ibarra), granted the encomienda of Xilotepec to his brother’s family, given the encomienda of Tecamachalco to his nephew, and the list went on. This wholesale trafficking in influence (notorious even in an era when nepotism and conflicts of interest were tolerated) also extended to the members of the Audiencia, who came under suspicion during the royal inspection.29
In an atmosphere of great uncertainty, the visitador Valderrama turned his attention to the Navidad project. At the outset, the visitador was shocked by the cost. “I pray for the success of this venture to China,” Valderrama wrote to Philip, “yet they have spent three hundred thousand pesos, without counting the expenditures for artillery and other things in Seville, and I will be pleased if they request only one hundred thousand more before the ships depart.” For a deceased viceroy characterized by his spendthrift ways, the fleet at Navidad had been by far his most extravagant undertaking, surely exceeding half a million pesos. The visitador also objected to the selection of Legazpi, the Mexico City accounting official, as commander. “He is a very good man and a fearful Christian,” Valderrama commented, “but he is completely unprepared in matters of war . . . and lacks experience for an undertaking of this magnitude.” The visitador was even more alarmed by the appointment of Mateo del Sauz, a veteran of the wars in Peru, as the highest-ranking military officer of the expedition. In Valderrama’s own words, Sauz was “a great traitor” who could well become “another Lope de Aguirre,” a reference to the deranged soldier who two years earlier had hijacked an expedition up the Amazon River, murdered his ranking officer
s, and defied the king of Spain by declaring the absolute independence of the kingdom of Peru. Valderrama was partly correct. There were Lope de Aguirre–like figures in the transpacific expedition. But the military commander was not one of them.30
The visitador and the Audiencia members made one final decision intended to correct the late viceroy’s excesses. Even though Commander Legazpi had already received instructions to go to New Guinea, the royal officials, with merely a few weeks before the fleet’s departure, quietly solicited additional opinions. They consulted many experts, probably including Captain Carrión, who happened to be in Mexico City at the time. It did not take long for the officials to conclude that the plan in place was sheer madness. Going to New Guinea “would be venturing into a completely unknown path and require an enormous detour to reach the Islands of the West,” the Audiencia explained to Philip, “whereas the other route [to the Philippines] would be very straight, well known, and established.”31
At last, the visitador and the Audiencia had come around to Captain Carrión’s point of view. Yet changing the fleet’s destination at the eleventh hour would have been extremely disruptive. It would have caused the immediate withdrawal of Friar Urdaneta and, along with him, Commander Legazpi, several subsidiary captains, many soldiers, and all the Augustinian friars who were to Christianize the peoples of Southeast Asia. Caught in the dilemma of sending the fleet on a suicidal mission or disrupting it severely, the Audiencia opted for a decidedly unorthodox solution. Publicly, New Guinea remained the fleet’s destination, thus ensuring Friar Urdaneta’s participation. Moreover, Captain Carrión, who still harbored hopes of going along with the fleet, was ordered to stay behind. The visitador Valderrama became convinced that the captain had maliciously delayed the outfitting of the expedition for his own benefit “and had done other wrong things,” a vague condemnation that hinted at mismanagement of royal funds or perhaps at the captain’s bigamy. To the outside world, all of this would appear as a clear endorsement of the late viceroy’s plan and a complete triumph of Urdaneta’s faction.32
Secretly, however, the Audiencia drafted another set of instructions and then summoned Legazpi on September 1, 1564. With all five Audiencia members in attendance, the visitador Valderrama informed a startled fleet commander that he would not be going to New Guinea after all but to the Philippines, and administered a most solemn oath. With his right hand on a Bible, Legazpi pledged to carry out this new mission and, on pain of “disloyalty to the king of Spain,” promised not to reveal the new destination to anyone. The instructions would remain in a sealed envelope until the ships were one hundred leagues (about 350 miles) into the Pacific. It would amount to a dangerous gambit that would play out in the middle of the ocean.33
3
Navidad
In the span of a few weeks, between September and November 1564, 380 expeditionaries—and as many as a thousand people or more if we count family and friends accompanying them—rode or were carted into the port of Navidad. Their impressions on arrival may have been positive. At the end of the rainy season, the Pacific coastal plain in western Mexico would have been an interminable carpet of green interrupted only by chocolate-colored rivers and streams. The view toward a secluded horseshoe bay surrounded by verdant hills, reaching almost to the water, would have been equally alluring. The town itself, however, was underwhelming. It consisted of a few makeshift huts and a couple of stone houses on a lip of sand between the bay and the entrance to a lagoon. The place was so insignificant that absorbing a sudden influx of hundreds of outsiders must have required a great deal of improvisation. Except for the highest-ranking officials, who may have enjoyed special accommodations in a house or perhaps aboard one of the nearly completed ships, almost everyone had to camp by the beach or around the town.1
Very rapidly, the expeditionaries must have grasped the conditions they would endure until leaving. In theory, the heat should have been bearable. Temperatures in September through November hover around eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit at Navidad—and in the sixteenth century, during the Little Ice Age, perhaps somewhat lower. Yet with the heat stuck day and night in a narrow range and the humidity approaching one hundred percent, the overall effect was oppressive, sapping the energy of the newly arrived and clouding their minds. The marshy environment contributed greatly to their discomfort. It supported an array of insects and arachnids, particularly of the biting kind: dense clouds of mosquitos, of course, but also midges ( jejenes), horseflies (tábanos), bedbugs (chinches), blister beetles (cuereres), scorpions (alacranes), and spiders of all sizes and shapes. Beginning at dusk, this tenacious army of biters attacked and tortured all humans residing at the port and made every night a true ordeal. Before regular fumigation was introduced some decades ago, locals still resorted to procedures like rubbing mud on their bodies or keeping smoky fires in their houses through the night. If the dark hours were difficult, the days were exasperatingly long, and the expeditionaries were confined mostly to the town. Venturing into the mangroves and forests would not have been prudent: a snakebite or an encounter with a predator like a river crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), a jaguar (Panthera onca), or a venomous Mexican beaded lizard (Heloderma horridum) was always a risk. A dip in the lagoon would have been the simplest way to escape the heat and the bugs and get some relief from the exuberant environment, but swimming in the bay was dangerous because of the strong riptide that could carry away even good swimmers.2
From the time they first set foot in Navidad, the visitors had to adapt to an unvarying new diet that consisted primarily of turtles (eggs, meat, and blood) as well as some corn, beans, and occasionally fish. As the nesting season was unfolding during September–November, marine turtles were plentiful both along the bay and inside the lagoon. Such food, however, proved challenging to Europeans, who regarded bread, wine, olive oil, and land animal meat as the essential building blocks of any true meal. Infuriatingly, there was in fact plenty of wine, vinegar, bacon, cheese, fava beans, and garbanzos in Navidad. Yet all these foods had been set aside to provision the ships and were therefore inordinately expensive or unavailable, and the entire province of Michoacán had sent all its wheat to make bizcocho, or hardtack, a type of unleavened bread eaten on sea voyages.3
Navidad was a notorious deathtrap, especially at the end of the rainy season, when the abundance of water was thought to cause “fevers and swelling of the stomach.” The first and most important task of the expeditionaries therefore consisted of not falling ill. As they had come from temperate regions in central Mexico or farther afield in Europe, Africa, and Asia, they had to grapple with a new set of pathogens from the semitropical coastal plain. Sources mention the alarming tendency of newcomers to develop fever, diarrhea, and vomiting. From then on, there were only two prognoses: an extremely slow and unnerving recovery or a gradual worsening of the condition that ended in dehydration and death. Unfortunately, there was no escaping this rite of passage while waiting for the final provisioning of the ships. Many expeditionaries developed the dreaded symptoms, among them Friar Lorenzo Jiménez, one of the six Augustinian friars, who was never able to turn the corner. There was some medical attention. One of the viceroy’s earliest appointments at Navidad had been a barber-surgeon from the Basque Country named Damián de Rivas. Besides cutting hair and trimming beards, Rivas was handy with the scalpel to make incisions or sever veins, letting blood out of his feverish patients to restore their humoral balance according to the dominant medical theory of the time. Better trained (although probably no more effective) was a “physician and surgeon” called Gabriel Sánchez Hernández. He was to be the expedition’s chief doctor but had been dispatched to Navidad several weeks before departure because his services were so badly needed. The last resort was Father Melchor González, a tireless priest who dispensed spiritual comfort to the dying.4
Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen
to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.5
Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.6
Conquering the Pacific Page 7