Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  The bay of Acapulco was spacious, with a sandy bottom, and deep enough to accommodate even the largest and heaviest galleons. Practically all transpacific voyages between Mexico and the Philippines during the colonial period began and ended there.

  Courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

  7

  “The Island of the Thieves”

  Sometime during January 1565, Legazpi’s expeditionaries crossed into a new geologic region of the Pacific. They were gliding over the deepest gash in the world, the Mariana Trench, and sailing through a subduction zone where the Pacific Plate meets the Philippine Sea Plate, a region of volcanism and earthquakes. The low-lying islands of the Central Pacific suddenly gave way to higher lands, among them a north-to-south chain called the Marianas. This line of volcanic islands right on the path between Mexico and the Philippines was the first viable way station since leaving the American continent, in particular Guam, the most southerly of the Marianas as well as the largest island in all of Micronesia. Guam possessed lush high hills and many inhabitants, and offered foods unfamiliar to most Europeans, like the “long figs,” as they sometimes referred to bananas. Ever since Magellan had serendipitously run into Guam in 1521, Spaniards had been aware of its existence. That early encounter with the local Chamorros had not gone well, however. They were tall, imposing, and extraordinarily eager to trade. Well before making landfall, dozens of outrigger canoes had come to surround Magellan’s ships. The islanders had overwhelmed the Europeans, calling out from their boats, offering fish or coconuts, while others climbed aboard, forcing themselves on the travelers, urging them to barter, and appropriating any objects that were loose on the deck. When crew members tried to repel them, localized violence had erupted. Yet many Chamorros remained unfazed and continued to peddle goods. Some even cut off a skiff towed by one of the Spanish ships and made away with it. Magellan retaliated the following day. To retrieve the skiff, he went ashore with forty men and looted two villages, burned fifty houses, and killed at least seven. He also gave Guam the dispiriting name of “la Isla de los Ladrones,” or “the Island of the Thieves,” because, as the chronicler in Magellan’s expedition explained, “its inhabitants are poor, ingenious, and very thievish.”1

  Forty-four years after Magellan, the San Lucas passed too far south of Guam, but the rest of the fleet under Legazpi ascended to thirteen degrees and caught sight of the island on the morning of January 22, 1565. The land appeared so large and so high that “all the pilots thought we were in the Philippines,” Legazpi noted, “and the closer we got, the more certain of this they became.” The only holdout was Father Urdaneta, who thought that it was “the Island of the Thieves.” A disagreement among extremely skilled navigators of this magnitude was rare. The distance between Guam and the Philippines is 1,500 miles! All along, the navigators in Legazpi’s fleet had been very consistent in their calculations of latitude. As we have seen, the variation had been at most a third of one degree, or twenty-three miles. Yet their longitude estimates, the dimension that mattered most when it came to crossing the Pacific, were anything but consistent.2

  Finding longitude was challenging because it required an arbitrary, human-given point of reference. North-south distance is measured with respect to the equator, a line wrapping around the middle of our planet equidistant from the poles that everyone can readily understand. Every place in the world is either north or south of the equator (or right on it). In contrast, no comparable line exists for longitude, and therefore no place on Earth is either east or west except with respect to some other handpicked location. Today we start counting from a meridian line running through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, just south of the River Thames in London (although the Greenwich meridian no longer passes through the line marked on the ground, as it has moved in the intervening time). Before Britain’s ascendancy, however, Iberian navigators began measuring variously from Lisbon, Seville, Toledo, the Cape of São Vicente (the southwestern tip of Iberia), or the line dividing the world between Spain and Portugal according to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

  Having common standards is an underappreciated but vital aspect of scientific progress, and early navigators could not agree on where to start when it came to measuring longitude. The French pilot aboard the flagship, Pierres Plín, for example, calculated longitude at Navidad before casting off. “At that port,” Plín noted, explaining his result, “I found myself at 1,250 leagues from the line of reference along the Canary Islands that is ten leagues to the west of the Island of Hierro.” It turned out to be a reasonable estimate. The east-west distance between Hierro and Navidad is about 1,400 leagues. Yet if this result was to have any value, the other pilots also had to start measuring from a prime meridian passing ten leagues west of Hierro. This was not the case. Plín’s good measurement notwithstanding, one of the five Augustinian friars, Martín de Rada, was involved in a parallel effort and thus “carried an instrument of medium size to ascertain the longitude between Toledo in Spain and wherever God wants us to settle down across the Pacific.” It would still have been possible to make longitude measurements from Hierro and Toledo compatible with each other, but this would have required knowing the east-west distance between these two places halfway around the world.3

  Starting in Europe to establish longitude in the Pacific was just too cumbersome. As a practical matter, Legazpi’s pilots tried to solve the east-west riddle in two ways. First, they kept a running tally of the distance traveled since departing from Navidad. Typical logbook entries include statements such as these: “Today we traveled twenty-nine leagues” or “There was very light wind during the day, so we set the distance at fifteen leagues.” Ships did not come equipped with odometers or speedometers in those days, so pilots had to gauge distance and speed by sensing the strength of the wind, observing the trim of the sails, and looking at the passing bubbles every hour of the day and night. The pilots may have been extremely skilled, yet even small hourly and daily inaccuracies added up. After a month at sea, Commander Legazpi asked them how far the fleet had traveled since departing from Navidad. “Some of the pilots showed the ships 200 leagues [734 miles] ahead of where others said they were,” the commander reported, “I don’t know if on account of the tides and currents that we experienced.” When the expeditionaries first sighted Guam after two months of sailing, the discrepancies had grown to 1,500 miles. Eyeballing distance was evidently not a satisfactory method to estimate longitude.4

  For this reason, the foremost pilots in the world resorted to a second method based on the small angle between true north as observed by the North Star and magnetic north as indicated by the compass. As we have seen, Portuguese navigators began noticing how the compass needles almost never pointed straight north but deviated slightly to the east or to the west, a phenomenon that they described as “northeasting” or “northwesting” of the compass and today we call magnetic declination. Explorers traveling vast distances across the globe such as Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and others witnessed how their compasses shifted slightly but in unison, as if pointing toward a specific spot in the world. (At least one sixteenth-century cosmographer called it the “attractive point,” a very early formulation of the North Magnetic Pole.) Some cosmographers posited that this slight displacement of the needles held the key to approximating the elusive longitude, among them the brothers Rui and Francisco Faleiro, as we have seen. Rui Faleiro had offered to determine the exact longitude of the Spice Islands with this revolutionary system during the negotiations with the Spanish king leading to Magellan’s historic circumnavigation voyage. In the end, Rui Faleiro did not accompany Magellan—some sources claim that he went mad—but the crown still compelled him to explain his system in writing and also hired the younger Francisco Faleiro, a brilliant cosmographer in his own right. Francisco went on to explain the method in a published navigational manual and even proposed a “shadow instrument”—today we would call it an azimuth compass—to measure the ga
p between true and magnetic north more precisely.5

  Legazpi’s excellent pilots—including Lope Martín—may well have been acquainted with Francisco Faleiro’s method and even with the cosmographer himself, who remained active in Seville nautical circles in the 1560s. The two pilots of the San Pablo, for instance, started wrestling with the longitude problem at Navidad. “At that port, we marked the direction of the compass needles, as is customary among mariners, to know the variation and distance from the true pole,” Jaymes Martínez Fortún and Diego Martín explained in their logbook with disarming clarity, “and the needles pointed to the northwest by half a quarter with respect to a straight north-south line.” Today the magnetic declination at Navidad is 6.53 to the east of true north, but if we use the most accepted geomagnetic model for the sixteenth century (January 1, 1590, is the oldest date available), the declination would have been 4.55 degrees to the west, entirely consistent with the pilots’ assertion about “northwesting.” What is more, the pilots’ misleading-sounding measurement of “half a quarter” turns out to be uncannily accurate. Compass roses of that era were divided into thirty-two points of 11.25 degrees each (32 x 11.25 = 360 degrees). “One-quarter” was like saying one click of the compass, and thus “half a quarter” amounted to 5.6 degrees, or a mere 1.07 degrees off from the predicted magnetic declination at Navidad for that era. The two pilots of the San Pablo were almost exactly on the mark, and their continued observations on the way to the Philippines jibe extremely well with our estimates. As we would expect, magnetic declination diminished as the fleet traveled across the Pacific. Three weeks into the voyage, on Wednesday, December 13, 1564, the two navigators reported “no variation whatsoever between the North Star and the compass needle.” According to our geomagnetic model, this line of zero declination would have been located about 1,500 miles west of Navidad (at a longitude of 125 degrees west), a distance that makes perfect sense given the fleet’s overall trajectory and speed. When the expedition began encountering the first islands of Micronesia on January 12, 1565, the two pilots measured the declination again and recorded that the compass needles were now “northeasting by a quarter,” or 11.25 degrees. Their accuracy is again hard to believe. The declination would have been 10.9 degrees to the east of true north at Ailuk Atoll according to our estimates, only one-third of a degree off from what the pilots reported! Not all of their measurements match ours so precisely—after all, sixteenth-century pilots expressed their measurements in imprecise clicks of the compass of 11.25 degrees. Yet all of their readings were consistent and painted the same basic magnetic picture of the Pacific.6

  Magnetic declination confounded navigators and cosmographers from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries because, while it serves to derive east-west distance in some parts of the world, it is downright perplexing in others. In a passage such as the one pursued by Legazpi’s fleet toward Asia, it was quite effective. Since Legazpi’s pilots were measuring declinations across the Pacific for the first time, these values only satisfied their curiosity. Future navigators, however, could use them to gauge their east-west progress. They would expect their compass needles to “northwest” slightly at Navidad. For a couple of weeks after departure, the declination would diminish until reaching zero at a spot in the ocean that was easy to measure and indicated good westward progress. Future travelers would also know that from that point on, the compasses would “northeast” until getting to “one-quarter,” at which point they were likely to run into the first Micronesian islands. The needles would continue to “northeast” and attain the highest declinations at a line between the first Micronesian islands and Guam (at a longitude of 162 degrees east), and then reverse course and begin their march back toward zero, something that would occur near the Borneo coast, west of the Philippines. All of this may seem like voodoo science to us, but to anyone risking his life across the largest ocean in the world, this longitude information was beyond precious. And yet, in some other parts of the North Pacific, this method could be fatally flawed, as is obvious from the wavy and capricious lines of a magnetic map of the region. The return trip across the mighty ocean, the awesome challenge facing the expeditionaries, would yield confusing magnetic declinations and thus a potentially fatal ending.7

  Even today, catching the first glimpses of Guam from an airplane window after so many hours of ocean travel is exhilarating. We can only guess at the elation of Legazpi and his men at the sight of such a large and lush island on that Monday, January 22, 1565. The fleet was met far out at sea by no fewer than fifty canoes, similar to what Magellan’s fleet had experienced, although this time the islanders refrained from attaching themselves to the Spanish vessels or climbing aboard. They stayed in their canoes or paraos “at a stone’s throw distance.” Violent encounters since Magellan’s visit more than four decades earlier had taught both peoples to be circumspect. Nonetheless, the Chamorros “gave great voices to call our attention, and they pointed to different parts of the island where they lived, giving us to understand that they would give us much to eat.” Wishing to make a good first impression, the Spanish commander ordered some knives, scissors, beads, and a mirror to be tied onto a piece of wood and cast adrift so the islanders could get it. The people on the parao that was closest to the Spanish flagship picked up the gift and pointed even more intently at a certain place on land.8

  The fleet’s final approach to the island was challenging with the swarm of paraos and distracting shouts coming from them. The greatest obstacle, however, was a shallow limestone platform surrounding Guam. This “shore bench,” as geologists sometimes refer to it, fringes the island and extends up to half a mile out, preventing vessels with deep keels from getting near the land. The sea is too shallow inside the platform and too deep outside it, so it is not even possible to anchor. Visible from many beaches around Guam, this limestone platform has been a deterrent throughout history. In 1944, when American troops launched an amphibious assault to retake the island from the Japanese, the operation began with underwater demolition teams reconnoitering gaps in the platform and reefs and blasting boat lanes.9

  Wisely, Legazpi’s fleet bypassed Guam’s treacherous southern tip where the limestone platform is widest and probed the island’s western approach. It was sunset by then, however, so the ships had to pull away to a safe distance for the night. In the meantime, the islanders returned to their villages to light fires all along the western coast of Guam, still trying to lure the voyagers to their respective settlements. The next morning the three Spanish vessels resumed the search and found a promising bay (indicated as “surgidero y agua,” or “landfall site and water,” in the drawing at the beginning of this chapter). Legazpi probably knew about its existence in advance. Nearly forty years earlier (on September 4–10, 1526), Friar Urdaneta had stopped at Guam during the Loaísa expedition and perhaps still recalled where the best ports were. The three ships in the fleet almost certainly entered what is today Umatac Bay and anchored without difficulty.10

  The Chamorro people wanted nothing more than to trade. Coastal villages throughout Guam had participated in a regional exchange with other islands as well as with the Asian mainland, a trade that included iron, an extraordinarily valuable material that did not exist on the island. Iron knives served as excellent weapons and tools, while iron nails were essential to build sturdy boats. “This is their gold,” commented one contemporary Spaniard, “and they use it in all of their tasks and activities.” Understandably, different Chamorro villages competed with one another fiercely to control and monopolize such a vital trade. This explains their venturing far out to sea to meet all passing vessels, their relentless peddling of goods, and their aggressive methods.11

  “The Natives began coming from the entire coast in their paraos,” the commander reported, “and we counted more than four hundred, the flagship alone being surrounded by more than one hundred.” Each parao carried between four and six persons, so the islanders who gathered on Tuesday, January 23, 1565, could well h
ave exceeded two thousand out of a total island population of perhaps thirty thousand. Yet not a single Chamorro dared to go aboard the galleons in spite of the commander’s encouraging signals and occasional gifts. The canoes surrounded Legazpi’s three ships from all sides as scores of Chamorros called out to the Spaniards insistently and held up “coconuts, sugarcanes, green bananas, and rice tamales, although each canoe brought very little: two or three coconuts, one or two sugarcanes, or two or three yams.” When the peddlers learned that the visitors had iron, they did not want to trade for anything else, “and when we showed them our nails, they became so very addicted that they gave up everything for them.” The friar-mariner must have had a facility for languages and an excellent memory. He came out on the deck and “said a few words in the Chamorro language from his previous visit, counting up to ten, and everyone was very excited.” In return, one of the islanders shouted “Gonzalo,” the name of a cabin boy who had deserted in the Marianas during Magellan’s visit and who had lived there for years.12

  That first day of trading, the Spanish got the better part of the bargain. Yet as the paraos continued to arrive in Umatac Bay to barter over subsequent days, some islanders came out ahead. Word spread that the Spanish wanted rice, so Chamorro merchants brought bundles of twenty-five to thirty pounds. “But because the Indians didn’t want to come onto our ships and thus gave the rice to be hoisted with a rope,” Legazpi recorded, “we found many loads full of sand with two fingers of rice at the top to hide their deception.” The Spaniards also traded for coconut oil similarly hoisted in barrels that were later found to contain one or two fingers of oil at the top and the rest water, “and they played similar tricks, because, after we had thrown down the nails, they fled without any shame and went to another ship to do the same.” Indeed, “these peoples are inclined to do harm,” the fleet commander concluded, “and they seem delighted by their bad deeds, and whoever called it the Island of the Thieves had more than enough reason.”13