Lope Martín’s proposed start for the return was ideal—not only for his plan to ride the monsoon winds but also for another crucial reason. The western North Pacific is the most active tropical cyclone region in the world. Typhoons develop in the warm waters to the south of the Philippines and curve northward toward the coasts of China and Japan, often passing through the Philippines. Over the years, Spanish navigators left ample testimony of this tempestuous part of the Pacific Ocean. A Spanish galleon in 1601 had to overcome eighteen storms in a single passage, and a few years later a ship named the San Andrés had to endure no fewer than eleven. During the 250 years of Spanish transpacific trade, forty galleons were lost to typhoons and storms. The Italian circumnavigator Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri—a Phileas Fogg of the seventeenth century who recounted his journey in his Giro del Mondo—pronounced the voyage from the Philippines to the Americas “the most dreadful and longest of any in the world,” singling out “the terrible tempests, one on the back of another.” Although typhoons can develop at any time of the year, they are more common in the warmer months of June through November, and thus an early start in April or May is much better.9
Lope Martín’s timing was unerring, and Don Alonso supported his pilot. “I would rather die at sea in the service of His Majesty than among these peoples [Filipinos],” the captain recalled saying to the crew, “and my determination was to complete the voyage or die in the attempt.” After watching Lope Martín perform for the better part of five months, Don Alonso had grown so confident that he was willing to put his life in the pilot’s hands. When word about re-crossing the Pacific spread through the San Lucas, however, several crew members revolted. The San Lucas was a dispatch boat meant to explore coves and inlets in shallow waters, not a vessel intended for the vuelta. The plan all along had been to attempt the return aboard one of the two largest ships in the fleet, the San Pedro or the San Pablo, weighing four or five hundred tons and built at an outrageous cost for this very purpose. Urdaneta had been quite explicit about this. “The main obstacle preventing the return voyage,” he had written to the viceroy during the planning stage, “is that it has been attempted with small and miserly vessels.” Among such “small and miserly vessels” were Magellan’s Trinidad, at 120 tons, and the San Juan de Letrán, at sixty tons. At a mere forty tons, the San Lucas was even smaller.10
Another circumstance made the San Lucas unsuited for an attempt at the vuelta. When the captain and the pilot reached their fateful decision, the vessel had not been stocked for the return voyage. Unable to make landfall at the northern edge of the Philippines, the San Lucas had drifted away with only the provisions that it carried at the time. An inventory revealed that there were eight pipas, or barrels, aboard the San Lucas “and all of them were missing between four and five arrobas of water each.” (In sixteenth-century usage, a pipa consisted of 27.5 arrobas, and each arroba was equivalent to 4.36 gallons, for a total of 761.19 gallons.) In other words, each of the twenty crew members would have to make do with 38.24 gallons of water to cross the entire Pacific. On a voyage lasting seventy days—the time that it took the San Lucas to go from Mexico to the Philippines—this would be a daily ration of 8.7 cups. Before our era of hyper-hydration, the American Food and Nutrition Board would have approved. Eight cups of water was the recommended ration in 1945, a bit of wisdom that endured for decades without much scientific backing. In this case, however, two circumstances made such water intake inadequate. First, the men aboard the San Lucas would necessarily spend time in tropical and semitropical regions, where sweating causes greater loss of fluids than normal, especially among active individuals forced to climb ratlines, trim sails, and operate bilge pumps. In very hot temperatures, an active person can lose up to eight cups of fluid in an hour through sweat and urination—the entire daily ration. Second and most important, there was no way to count on a return voyage of a mere seventy days. Any leaks in the casks, a very real possibility, as we shall see, would spell disaster. Modern sailors, especially around-the-world racers, carry as little water as possible to reduce the weight and improve the performance of their vessels. But carrying such limited quantities is possible only because of water makers (desalination equipment) and rain-collecting systems not available to sixteenth-century mariners. Attempting the return voyage with eight partially filled casks of water was suicidal.11
The food situation was hardly better. The inventory conducted by Lope Martín and a “gentleman” named Pedro de Rivero showed that the San Lucas carried “some fava beans and garbanzos along with twenty quintales of mazamorra.” Seamen were all too familiar with the unappetizing, often revolting, mazamorra: hardtack crumbs combined with leftovers such as dry fish or meat left at the bottom of the barrels. This pulpy mess had been rotting away for nearly five months by then, collecting mold and cobwebs, and being nibbled by rats. Twenty quintales divided among twenty people works out to less than one pound (0.93) of mazamorra per person, plus an unknown amount of fava and garbanzo beans. Given our lack of knowledge about the legumes, it is not possible to calculate an exact daily ration. The calories must have been extremely limited, however, because after the inventory, Don Alonso ordered additional precautions for dispensing food rations, since, as he put it, “our very lives depended on them.”12
The small size of the San Lucas, the only partially filled casks of water, the exiguous provisions, and the danger of a passage that had never succeeded before gave pause to several crew members, who threatened another mutiny. With ample reason, they argued that “discovering the vuelta was impossible because of the lack of provisions and also considering everything they had heard from previous armadas, and thus going to the Malucos [Spice Islands] would be so much better.” Indeed, a Portuguese fort lay about eight hundred miles away, three weeks of leisurely sailing. Persuading the discontented men to agree to the far riskier plan of voyaging twelve thousand miles to the coast of America must have been difficult in the extreme. The mutinous atmosphere persisted. Yet in a fit of resignation, the voyagers of the San Lucas somehow “left everything in the hands of the Lord and his Holy Mother” and began the vuelta on Easter Sunday, April 22, 1565.13
The first few days were dishearteningly slow, a feeling that any sailor will immediately recognize. In light wind, the sails go unfilled and the vessel barely moves or spins out of control. The San Lucas needed to climb from around twelve degrees of northern latitude to more than thirty-five or forty, comparable to ascending from the coast of Nicaragua to Oregon. In late April, however, the southwest monsoon had not yet become fully established, and the conditions were variable. Unable to make progress, the San Lucas voyagers spent the time discussing their first objective, a place that they referred to as “Pago Mayor” and described as “a large island at thirty degrees of latitude, surrounded by four or five islands to the south and mainland China to the north.” They were referring in all likelihood to Japan. The most southwesterly of the four main Japanese islands, Kyushu, reaches all the way to thirty degrees and is indeed surrounded by smaller islands to the south (including Okinawa) and China to the north. Marco Polo had referred to Japan as “Zipangu,” Hispanicized as “Cipango” or “Cipago,” and therefore “Pago” may have been a shortening of the name with the added “Mayor” to underscore its great size.14
The idea of stopping in Japan to resupply the San Lucas may have been immensely comforting to the voyagers. But it rested on misleading geographic information. Lope Martín possessed a chart of the North Pacific that has since been lost. To approximate the expeditionaries’ geographic understanding of the region, I use Giacomo Gastaldi’s map—first published in 1554 as part of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s great collection of voyages, Delle navigationi et viaggi, and re-released as a standalone map in 1564, the very year of the fleet’s departure. At first glance, Gastaldi’s map is confusing because its orientation is opposite to ours: north is down. Nevertheless, it has the great merit of incorporating the discoveries of Magellan, Loaísa, Saavedra, and Villa
lobos, supplemented by additional insights from Portuguese explorers who had reached China in the 1510s and Japan in the 1540s.15
Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1554 map of East Asia.
Toward the middle of the map, one can see the “Mare de la China,” or China Sea. At the top, various Philippine islands are represented: Min-danao is called “Vendanao,” Cebu appears twice as “Cyˉabu” and “Zubut,” Samar is identified as “Filipina,” etc. At the left-hand margin, between thirteen and seventeen degrees, the north-to-south chain of the Mariana Islands, then known as “las Islas de los Ladrones” or “Li Ladroni,” are easy to spot. Finally, below the Marianas, between twenty-four and twenty-seven degrees, looms “Cympagu,” or Japan. Anyone armed with a map like this and contemplating a passage from the Philippines to America would have been inclined to call at “Cympagu.” In reality, Japan is farther north and much closer to the Asian mainland, thus requiring nearly a straight northward climb from the Philippines. In later centuries, Spanish ships returning to the Americas sailed far out from Japan, as their intention was not just to go north but also to begin making headway east toward the New World.16
In their quest for “Pago Mayor,” the San Lucas voyagers climbed for weeks, eventually overshooting their intended target until thirty-one degrees of northern latitude. Japan was nowhere in sight. Yet they did find a bizarre but majestic column emerging straight out of the ocean. “It was very narrow, no more than a small house,” the captain recalled, “but it was so tall that I don’t believe there is a higher tower anywhere in the world.” The men aboard the San Lucas could practically touch its sheer sides, but there was no place to land. Rising 325 feet above the waterline, this solitary pillar, called Sˉofu Gan or “Widow’s Crag” by the Japanese and “Lot’s Wife” by British sailors, was the only speck of land the voyagers would behold between the Philippines and the American continent. Sˉofu Gan is actually an underwater volcano with a single andesite pillar sticking out, like a candle on top of a birthday cake. It allows us to place the expeditionaries four hundred miles due south from Tokyo. The San Lucas’s trajectory from the Philippines to Sˉofu Gan makes clear that, however much the pioneers wished to make landfall in Japan or on the Asian mainland, they were drifting eastward into the enormity of the North Pacific, one of the most forbidding regions on Earth.17
Not everything, however, was against the San Lucas expeditionaries. By paralleling the coast of Japan, they were riding the most powerful current in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese call it Kuroshio, or “Black Current,” owing to its characteristic cobalt-blue color. An integral part of the North Pacific Gyre, the Kuroshio Current is an enormous ribbon of warm water that starts in the Philippine Sea, brushes against the coast of Taiwan, and moves rapidly up the eastern side of Japan, snaking and pushing against the cold waters coming from the Bering Sea. After veering off from Japan, the current continues eastward for about a thousand miles as a free jet stream known as the Kuroshio Extension, eventually feeding into the larger North Pacific Gyre. This explains why historically some Japanese ships disabled in storms have washed up in North America. This may have occurred prior to 1492, although no hard evidence has surfaced. More convincingly, scholars have estimated that between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, more than a thousand Japanese vessels were swept out to sea. Among them, a handful are known to have made landfall in the Americas. A rice cargo ship called the Tokujômaru, for instance, ran into a storm that broke its rudder, causing it to drift for sixteen months until running aground in 1813 near Santa Barbara, California, with only the captain and two crew members still alive. Nearly twenty years later, a similar incident occurred when a merchant ship bound for Tokyo, the Hojunmaru, was knocked off course by a typhoon, only to reappear after fifteen months, rudderless and dismasted, in Cape Flattery, the most northwesterly point in the continental United States.18
The San Lucas voyagers reported an unexpected abundance of life in that part of the ocean, an observation that confirms their whereabouts. The collision of the warm Kuroshio Current with subarctic water produces eddies of plankton that are visible even in satellite images. In turn, the plankton attract a variety of animals. The Spanish expeditionaries saw “pig fish as large as cows” and marveled at the “dogs of the sea with their paws and tails and ears . . . and one of them came aboard and barked at us” (almost certainly sea lions, with external ear flaps and very vocal, in contrast to true seals). Quite fittingly, the men of the San Lucas also crossed paths with the greatest migratory species of all. “Black shearwaters followed us, shrieking all day and night,” Don Alonso recalled, “and their cries were very unsettling because no sailor had ever heard them like that.” Sooty shearwaters pursue a breathtaking figure-eight migration spanning the entire Pacific. As they range from New Zealand to Alaska and from Chile to Japan, these noisy birds dive for food in some of the most productive regions of the Pacific, including the plankton-rich eddies off the coast of Japan, where some must have spotted the San Lucas slowly making its way in a northeasterly direction.19
Climbing to forty degrees and up to forty-three degrees of northern latitude, the pioneers overshot the warm waters of the Kuroshio Current. They had journeyed farther north into the great ocean than any other Europeans, sailing through frigid waters coming from the Bering Sea. Only Magellan’s Trinidad had plied this part of the Pacific more than forty years earlier, where a storm had dismasted it and forced the last survivors to turn back. Extreme cold—that old nemesis of previous return attempts—became a serious concern for the crew members of the San Lucas, especially because they were missing most of their clothes after the washing party had to abandon them in Mindanao months earlier.20
The San Lucas voyagers now faced “the greatest cold of winter,” as the captain put it, “even though it was the middle of summer in June and July.” For thirty days the sky turned so dark and stormy that they were unable to see the Sun or the stars. On June 11, snow fell on the deck and did not melt until noon. Lamp oil became so frozen that the bottle in which it was kept had to be warmed over a fire, “and it still came out in pieces like lard.” Modern historians have sometimes seized on such unlikely details to discount the veracity of Don Alonso’s account. “Porpoises as big as cows present no difficulty,” wrote one of these skeptics, “but it is unlikely that cooking oil would freeze in mid-summer.” Lamp oil freezes at around fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the process can start even at higher temperatures. Sailing by the Aleutian Islands in June, especially during the Little Ice Age, would force such doubters to amend their opinions.21
Dark and stormy conditions persisting for a month not only threatened death by exposure but also posed a serious navigational challenge. Since the men could not see the Sun or the stars, they were unable to establish their position. Lope Martín’s chart reached up to forty-three degrees of northern latitude. The San Lucas expeditionaries were navigating right along the map’s top margin and even venturing off the chart, “and we could not pinpoint our location because there was no more sea left.” As they were sailing blind, the men of the San Lucas pinned their hopes on their imagination. “We believed [ourselves] to be close to China,” Don Alonso stated, “and understood that the China coast continued and came close to that of Mexico.” In the 1540s, Spanish expeditionaries based in Mexico had attempted to reach Asia by walking far into North America, but to no avail. Two decades later, still no one knew how far America was from Asia. In fact, it would not be until the eighteenth century that the Danish explorer Vitus Bering finally reconnoitered the region. Yet in the 1560s, two centuries earlier, the lives of the San Lucas pioneers depended on how the two continental landmasses fit together.22
It is likely that Lope Martín chose to go all the way to forty-three degrees of northern latitude in the hope of finding land, if not in Japan then in China. But after reaching the top of his chart, experiencing the bitter subarctic cold, and failing to see any coasts, the pilot opted to continue east until striking what he and his crew
members vaguely and wishfully referred to as “the Californias.” The only way forward was by running with the wind, and “thus the pilot picked a path little by little and based on his experience.”23
During this long passage, the plight of the expeditionaries worsened. The sails began to shrivel. They needed to get across the ocean before it became too late in the season, yet every day the wind, sun, and seawater battered their only means of propulsion, tearing it to pieces. The San Lucas carried no extra sails or mending equipment, so the crew had to hand-sew the tears with fishing line and repurpose the bonnets (sail extensions) to keep the mainsail and foresail working. Eventually they would have to part with their blankets and even their clothes to patch the holes. The men of the San Lucas would not be the first to wash up in the New World naked.24
But the most dangerous enemy was not the wind or the sea but the rats. After two months at sea, the large rodent population became thirsty, aggressive, and ready to do anything. “We had to chase after them with sticks,” Don Alonso recalled, “because so many had been breeding aboard.” During the string of storms, the rats must have been able to drink rainwater. After the weather cleared, however, the only available water aboard the San Lucas was sealed in the eight casks, “and in desperation they turned to gnawing on the barrels.” The thirsty creatures perforated two barrels in as many hours, spilling all their contents. Disaster had struck. There were only three casks of water left, “and they were not full but missing four or five arrobas.” In other words, by then the San Lucas was carrying a maximum of 294 gallons of water—less than fifteen gallons per person. Such an amount would be appropriate for an extended camping trip but surely not for crossing the largest ocean in the world. To defend what little water they still had, the expeditionaries kept a four-man guard by the casks below decks day and night, “and this gave us so much work, that it could not have been any worse.” The guardsmen lit fires to keep the rodents at bay, especially at night, a necessary but extremely dangerous precaution that threatened to burn down the entire ship. Yet the rodents kept attacking, “and we killed between twenty and thirty every night.”25
Conquering the Pacific Page 15