Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  Legazpi’s fleet arrived in the Philippines two weeks after the San Lucas, on February 13, 1565. The three galleons first touched land on the original Isla Filipina, present-day Samar, just to the north of Mindanao. Legazpi and his men were delighted to have reached their intended destination. Yet Samar was disappointing. They found no suitable ports or even people willing to talk to them, as the islanders took off in their canoes at the mere sight of the Spaniards. The mystery deepened as the visitors rounded Samar and explored the neighboring islands. In stark contrast to their experience in Guam with the highly engaged Chamorros, the people of the Philippines tried to avoid any contact. The expeditionaries were thus forced to sail blind until they finally stumbled on an unlikely source of information. On March 19, 1565, Legazpi’s ships were close to the island of Bohol when they spotted a well-armed junk that was “much larger than the ones used by the Indians of these lands.” As the Europeans approached to investigate, a cannonade and a shower of arrows and lances greeted them. The naval engagement left heavy casualties on both sides, but the Iberians eventually seized the large junk along with six or seven of its crew members, including the pilot. The large vessel belonged to the sultan of Brunei, who had sent it to trade in the Philippines. The entire crew consisted of Muslims, or “Moros,” as Spaniards referred to the Muslims of northern Africa.14

  The captured pilot spoke Malay, the lingua franca of the region, and communicated readily with Father Urdaneta, who still remembered the language from the eight years he had been marooned in Southeast Asia in the 1520s and 1530s. The Muslim pilot seemed unusually knowledgeable, “not just about the Philippines,” the expedition commander observed, “but about the Spice Islands, Borneo, Malacca, Java, India, and China, as he had sailed and traded in all of these places.” Tuasan, as this great navigator was called, did not take long in making himself indispensable. He described each of the Philippine islands in detail and listed the products of each of them, such as gold, wax, or slaves. After seeing the European goods aboard the galleons, Tuasan also commented that “such merchandise was not suitable for these islands and would take ten years to sell, but it would require less than a week in Brunei [where he had been employed], Siam [Thailand], or Malacca.” The astute pilot was evidently pursuing his own agenda. Commander Legazpi drily responded that he had no authority to range into such places.15

  Next, the Muslim pilot explained the reticence of the Filipino Natives toward the Spanish. “Two years earlier, eight paraos from the Spice Islands appeared with many pieces of artillery,” Tuasan recounted, “and they came to Bohol and were received in peace until the Spanish suddenly started robbing, killing, capturing many people, and causing great damage in the islands.” Legazpi immediately protested that the perpetrators had been Portuguese based in the Spice Islands rather than Spanish. The pilot replied that “he knew well that they belonged to two separate kingdoms but that the Indians of these islands did not know the difference, especially because the Portuguese themselves had said that they were Castilians.” This is how Commander Legazpi finally understood “why the Spanish were so hated in the islands and the inhabitants hid and refused to trade, and the kingdom of Castile enjoyed so little credit and esteem in these parts.”16

  As the fleet commander pondered more seriously where in the Philippines to establish a Spanish base, Legazpi relied on Tuasan’s experience and knowledge. The Muslim pilot recommended Cebu (or Zubu) and offered to lead the visitors there—still angling for a job, which he finally got. Within the Visayan Islands (Panay, Negros, Cebu, Bohol, Leyte, and Samar) in the central part of the Philippines, Cebu was quite likely the best choice. Cebu had a long history of interaction with the Spanish going all the way back to Magellan. It was well populated, with a port boasting some three hundred well-built houses as well as many other settlements. According to Tuasan, the Cebuanos possessed “rice by the load.” But there was a major inconvenience: Chinese merchants generally bypassed the Visayas because their ships were too large to maneuver there. Instead, they went to the more northerly islands of Mindoro and Luzon. Six years later, the Spanish had to move to Luzon (the large island where Manila is located) to participate in this lucrative trade. Yet, having just arrived in the Philippines and running low on food in the spring of 1565, Commander Legazpi, after a brief conference with his highest-ranking officials, decided to settle down in Cebu. They would first try to barter with the Cebuanos, but if they refused, the voyagers would seize what they needed by force. They even produced a legal justification for such an eventuality. During Magellan’s visit in the spring of 1521, almost exactly forty-four years earlier, the people of Cebu had converted to Christianity and formally pledged loyalty to the Spanish monarchy, but they had subsequently “abandoned the Christian faith that they had accepted of their own volition and reverted to their malevolent rituals and ancient ceremonies.” The people of Cebu had become renegades and apostates, and therefore the Spanish were within their rights to use force.17

  Legazpi and his men arrived in Cebu on April 27, 1565, and issued the requerimiento, a specious text employed by sixteenth-century Spaniards in conquests all over the Americas, urging Native Americans to accept Christianity and Spanish domination or face the consequences of a violent conquest. The principal leader in Cebu agreed to reach a peace accord with the strangers but shrewdly sent word that it would take him some time to arrive at the place where the Spanish were waiting for an answer. In the meantime, the villagers started to evacuate. “They hurriedly gathered their belongings and placed them in their boats,” according to one testimony, “and those who had goats and chickens came out of their houses to collect them, even killing them if they could not carry them in any other way.” Legazpi’s men also noticed the arrival of “ten or twelve paraos with armed people that hid behind a finger of land behind the Spanish flagship.” The expeditionaries persisted in reading the requerimiento “one and two and three times,” even as it became clear that the Cebuanos were preparing for war.18

  Early the following morning, Legazpi’s artillerymen were ordered to train their cannons on the sizable settlement right across from their ship, the first time they would use their heavy weapons since arriving in the Philippines. In a matter of seconds, the attackers inflected tremendous damage. More than one hundred houses were burned down—about a third of the village—“and if the wind had blown the other way, everything would have been consumed.” The coconut trees surrounding the village, “the thing that they value the most,” were also destroyed. Soon after that initial blow, Spanish soldiers went ashore to quell any remaining resistance.19

  The cannonade had started at eight in the morning on Saturday, April 28, 1565. The soldiers gained complete control of the village in short order and had all day to search the place, house by house. They found little of use, “mostly pots, some millet, and very little rice.” One man, however, made an astounding discovery. “He went into a very small and poor house and, inside a wooden box, he found a statue of a Christ Child,” reads the soldier Juan de Camuz’s third-person deposition under oath, “and his right hand with two extended fingers, as if about to make a blessing, and with the other hand he held the world.” The Christ Child as salvator mundi, or savior of the world, was a popular theme in European iconography of that era. Even Leonardo da Vinci painted Christ as salvator mundi around 1500, a work that recently fetched the highest price ever paid for a painting at public auction. The statue found by Camuz had been carved in the Low Countries in the 1510s and given by Magellan to the Cebuanos as a present in the spring of 1521. For reasons that will always remain unclear, the dwellers of that humble house in Cebu decided to preserve it for nearly four and a half decades.20

  An example of the Christ Child as salvator mundi by the engraver Martin Schongauer. Christ has his right hand raised in blessing with two fingers extended, and with the other hand holds an orb to signify that he is the savior and master of the world, as is typical of salvator mundi iconography.

  Sixteenth-century Euro
peans could scarcely interpret such a discovery on the other side of the world as anything other than an omen. When the wooden statue was brought into Legazpi’s presence, he “fell to his knees and took it with great veneration, kissing its little feet and looking at the sky.” Whatever doubts he and his officers may have harbored about staying in Cebu, they melted at that instant. The fleet commander ordered a solemn procession with the statue, so everyone could see it. The procession would end at a plot of land set aside for a church where the salvator mundi Christ Child would remain on display, and his appearance would be marked every year. Thus the Spanish founded their Villa de San Miguel on the island of Cebu on an extraordinary day of war, fire, and a miraculous find.21

  9

  Vuelta

  Until April 1565, the Legazpi expedition had accomplished nothing that had not been done before. Magellan, Loaísa, Saavedra, and Villalobos had all journeyed across the Pacific and explored portions of Southeast Asia. The next step, however, was quite literally uncharted. Between 1521 and 1545, Spanish navigators had mounted five valiant attempts at returning to the Americas by re-crossing the Pacific Ocean but had failed every time. A plot of these attempted vueltas, five irregular loops in the western Pacific, tells us nothing about the courage of the crews involved, the overwhelming elements they faced, the anguish at having to give up after months of suffering, and the dashed hopes of two generations of navigators attempting to open a new commercial route to the Orient. Nonetheless, they show a clear grasp of the Pacific gyres. Magellan’s pilots already knew that they had to steer far to the north of the Philippines—in their case as high as forty-two degrees, around northern Japan and the Oregon coast—to get out of the contrary currents and winds in order to reach the northern side of the North Pacific Gyre and find more favorable conditions for a return. About fifty men aboard Magellan’s flagship Trinidad persisted for six months in a dramatic passage that ultimately claimed the lives of all but eighteen, as we have seen. Dwindling food stores and progressively colder temperatures forced the survivors, wearing only thin shirts and pants, to turn back.1

  Later expeditionaries kept trying to find an elusive patch of ocean where the winds and currents flowed toward the Americas. About twenty men on a small craft of the Villalobos expedition came closest to succeeding in 1543. Departing in August from Mindanao, they went farther east than any previous European expedition. Yet a very late start in the sailing season and an inadequate supply of water forced this intrepid crew to turn back after having reached the halfway point between the Philippines and Hawai‘i, or about a quarter of the way to Mexico. Iberian pilots were getting closer to solving the puzzle of the vuelta, but they were still missing one final piece.2

  On Easter Sunday, April 22, 1565, the San Lucas began the most improvised vuelta ever attempted on the Pacific. This epic voyage would include mutiny, marvelous sightings, unforeseeable dangers, and a near shipwreck. It would be the first west-to-east crossing of the Pacific in recorded history, and it jump-started a continuous transpacific flow of germs, plants, animals, peoples, ideas, and products that endures to this day. This voyage, so consequential and still so little known, would be accomplished thanks almost entirely to the skills of the Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín.3

  The men aboard the San Lucas reached the grave decision to attempt the return to the New World after having failed to establish contact with the rest of the fleet. For two months they had rounded Mindanao and navigated through the central Philippines. They had also stopped at “Magellan’s Island,” as they called Cebu, the one place in the entire archipelago where they were most likely to run into the other Europeans. But as fate would have it, they narrowly missed the rest of the fleet there. The San Lucas reconnoitered Cebu sometime around the middle of April and reached the northern edge of the Philippines on April 21. Meanwhile, the other three vessels under Legazpi did not arrive in Cebu until April 27. Had the San Lucas lingered in the middle of the archipelago for an extra week or two, the story would have been vastly different. In actuality, although the four vessels converged, they were never close enough for a reunion. When Friar Gaspar de San Agustín affirmed in the seventeenth century that the crew of the San Lucas “caught glimpses” of the other vessels but “refused” to rejoin them, he was patently mistaken. Instead, believing they were on their own, the San Lucas voyagers began to contemplate excruciating choices: continue to search for the other vessels, all the while consuming their dwindling food supplies; go to the Spice Islands and surrender to the Portuguese; or attempt the vuelta by themselves.4

  Nature intervened in the end. On April 21, the men of the San Lucas reached an opening between the islands of Samar and Luzon, now called the San Bernardino Strait. After passing through the strait, they could see no more islands ahead. They had come to the end of the archipelago. The currents are notoriously strong along the San Bernardino Strait, and there was hardly any wind that day, so the San Lucas started drifting into the open ocean. Returning to the labyrinth of shoals, narrow passages, and hostile villages from which they had emerged would have required everyone to paddle. “I thus told the pilot to consider carefully our best course in the service of God, His Majesty, and to save everyone aboard,” Don Alonso recalled, “and the pilot looked at his chart for some time and thought about all the drawbacks of returning.” Lope Martín’s exact words have reached us to reveal his awareness of the last major piece of the maddening puzzle of the vuelta. He thought “it was best to return to New Spain [Mexico] because the summer season was about to start and, if we could gain enough altitude toward the north, we would find very favorable conditions, and that would be better than being captured by the islanders or the Portuguese.”5

  The pilot’s insight is unassailable. To catch the northern portion of the North Pacific Gyre, it was not enough to go north from the Philippines; one had to do so at the right time of year to benefit from the monsoon, a dramatic seasonal reversal of the winds. Although most people associate the monsoon with the Indian Ocean, it extends into the western Pacific, including the Philippines and the China Seas. This 180-degree shift in wind direction stems from the cooling and warming of the Asian landmass. During the winter months, the air above East Asia cools off, becoming more dense than usual, as cold and dry air is heavier and more tightly packed than warm and moist air. This creates a high-pressure zone, forcing the air—like any other fluid—to equalize by moving from high-pressure to low-pressure zones. If we could add artificial coloring to our atmosphere, we would see this heavier mass of continental air at the edge of Asia initially spilling southward into the Pacific Ocean. Because of Earth’s spinning and the Coriolis effect, a circulation pattern would soon take hold around this high-pressure zone, with the ocean winds moving from the northeast toward the southwest and all across the Philippines, where this season is called Amihan or the northeast monsoon (meaning that the dominant winds are coming from the northeast). Thus, during November through April, cool and dry air blows from the depths of the Pacific all across the Philippines. Attempting to sail toward the depths of the Pacific at this time would have been foolish. By late April, however, Amihan is over and, after a brief period of unsettled winds, the direction is entirely reversed. As the Asian landmass warms up, it creates a low-pressure zone that attracts oceanic air. Blasts of warm and humid air, known in the Philippines as the southwest monsoon or Habagat, thus move from the southwest and continue deep into the Pacific, precisely where the expeditionaries wished to go.6

  How Lope Martín was able to anticipate this dramatic shift in wind direction is unknown. He may have learned about it from local navigators, perhaps during the stay in Mindanao or in one of the chance encounters with Filipino canoes. As we saw, Legazpi gleaned precious information from a Muslim pilot he captured in a naval battle. Although Lope Martín may have similarly tapped into the reservoir of local knowledge, it is just as likely that he knew about the monsoon before arriving in the Philippines. Pilots trained in Europe, Africa, and the Americas would have be
en utterly unfamiliar with the rhythms of the monsoon. But friar-mariner Urdaneta, who, as we know, had lived as a castaway in Southeast Asia for eight years, would have gained a deep understanding of the monsoon seasons. Decades later, when the Augustinian friar became the guiding spirit of the Legazpi expedition in the early 1560s, it would have been only natural for him to discuss the monsoon at length with the expedition pilots, including Lope Martín.7

  Regardless of how he knew to do it, the pilot’s plan to start the vuelta in late April was inspired. All five previous return attempts had in fact launched between April and August, well within the southwest monsoon, as doing anything else would have been nearly impossible. The precise timing, however, made a difference. The first return attempt aboard the Trinidad during the Magellan expedition had begun even earlier, in the first days of April. The precocity of Magellan’s pilots is remarkable, and their early start paid off handsomely. In the first few weeks of the voyage they made excellent progress, sailed sufficiently north to catch the gyre, and would have succeeded had they carried warmer clothes, brought more food and water, and not encountered a freak storm that broke the mast and sails of the Trinidad. At the other end of the spectrum, in 1543 the Villalobos expedition waited to start its vuelta until August, too late in the season. Although the San Juan de Letrán was able to go farther east than any prior return attempt, by the middle of October the ship still had a long way to go when the southwest monsoon was near its end. It turned back eventually. The three other return attempts were doomed from the start because, instead of heading immediately to the northeast to catch the gyre, these vessels meandered along the coast of New Guinea, wasting precious time. The elements drove them back to Asia as they negotiated the immensity of the Pacific far too late in the season.8