Conquering the Pacific
Page 16
With shriveling sails, little water, and a raging war with the rats, the pressure on the pilot became almost unbearable. Where exactly in that immense ocean could they be? How far was it still to “the Californias”? During much of the crossing, Lope Martín had kept the San Lucas at around forty degrees of northern latitude, ten to fifteen degrees below the necklace of volcanic islands hanging between Russia and Alaska, the Aleutian Islands. Present-day sailing manuals recommend crossing the North Pacific farther south, at around thirty-five degrees of latitude, to avoid the unsettled weather closer to the Aleutians. The pilot’s more northerly trajectory explains the cold and stormy month that the voyagers experienced. On the positive side, however, a more northerly crossing meant less distance between one continent and the other. In mid- to late June, the wind began to shift. It had been blowing toward the Americas, but now the strong breeze started bending southward, an indication “that it was being forced in that direction by the land,” as the pilot astutely noted.26
Lope Martín was a practical navigator with extensive experience and enormous natural talent. But we know he was also well versed in the cutting-edge technologies of his time. Every day he calculated latitude by measuring the noontime angle of the Sun with respect to the horizon and using a declination table. The other ships in the fleet had the luxury of multiple pilots and instruments. Aboard the San Lucas, Lope Martín had to do everything by himself and could not compare his results with anyone else’s. Far more impressive, he was capable of calculating longitude, or east-west distance, by measuring the difference between magnetic and true north, a specialized knowledge that put him among the very best pilots in the world. We know this from an offhand comment by Don Alonso: “The pilot reckoned that we were about one hundred leagues from the coast of New Spain and said that there was a certain variation of the compass needle, and thus he adjusted by one-quarter to the northeast.” Such a passing statement by a nobleman with no nautical training can be interpreted in more than one way. If we understand that the “certain variation of the compass needle” was in fact “one-quarter to the northeast”—that is, 11.25 degrees to the east of true north—then at the time of the measurement the San Lucas would have been at a spot on the Pacific slightly more than one thousand miles due west of Point Reyes, California.27
A few more days of agonizing sailing in a southeasterly direction brought the voyagers ever closer to the continent until the evening of July 16, when the North American coastline became faintly visible in the far distance. “The next day before daybreak,” Don Alonso recalled, “the pilot rose and told me to come out and behold the land of New Spain, and after looking at it for some time, we thanked Our Lord Jesus Christ for having given us such a blessing.” It was the first return from Asia to America ever achieved. Lope Martín estimated their latitude at twenty-seven degrees and three-quarters, around the middle of Baja California in front of a large island now called Isla de Cedros.28
From that point onward, the San Lucas voyagers must have expected a comparatively safer coastal passage to Navidad. In fact, the most dangerous moment occurred not in the middle of the ocean but right before reaching the continent. On the night of July 28 they were running fast, with the mainsail and foresail all out and a strong breeze pushing from behind. We can infer from all the near accidents that befell the San Lucas since departing from Mexico that Lope Martín was something of a daredevil who pushed his vessel to the limit. With just a few hundred miles left, the pilot must have been highly motivated to go fast. As the wind continued to strengthen, however, the pilot finally gave the order to shorten the mainsail. Unfortunately, it was too late. A few sailors climbed up the mast and started gathering the sail, but as Don Alonso recalled, “we were suddenly hit by a blast of wind, sea, and rain, and the blow was so hard that the sail tore away from the hands of the sailors, knocking open two or three heads and flinging two men onto the deck.” Out of control, the San Lucas turnedabeam to the wind and the large waves, heeling violently with the mast almost touching the water and the men hanging on to anything to stay inside the vessel. Everything above and below decks became pandemonium, “and we could not tell if it was land or sea.”29
Although a great deal of water had flooded into the San Lucas during that first knockdown, the vessel began righting itself as if by miracle. Yet a second large wave washed across the deck at that moment. “This one took the compass and everything else, and the fire that we were keeping, and also the helmsman himself,” the captain said, “and thus we remained without heat, with the ship sideways to the waves, and half sunk and buried underneath the sea.” As the mainsail emerged in tatters, the only way to regain control of the San Lucas was with the foresail. The pilot immediately turned his full attention to it, shouting orders, “but the crew members were dazed and no one came, and it was so dark that they could not find any ropes.” They had to expend great energy to contain the sail and bail out the water, “yet everyone was extremely weak from hunger and thirst, and even if there had been food, they could not eat because their gums had grown so large that they covered the teeth,” an unmistakable characteristic of scurvy at a very advanced stage. It must have taken a long time before the exhausted men finally got the foresail properly positioned. In the meantime, the San Lucas was swept off course.30
The expeditionaries had to find a way to save themselves aboard a sinking vessel, navigating with no compass or helmsman, with a few blankets and clothes for a sail, and a crew so enfeebled that they could barely stand. At least they still had their extraordinary pilot, who seemed to know instinctively what to do at every turn. “We begged Our Lady of Guadalupe to keep us safe, and all of us promised to take the makeshift foresail to her shrine in Mexico City,” recalled Don Alonso. Mercifully, the elements held during the last few days of navigation. Light morning breezes pushed the pioneers gently forward while the evening rains came accompanied by moderate wind. They would never have survived another storm. Naked, thirsty, hungry, and with alarming symptoms of scurvy, the pioneers of the San Lucas pulled into the perfect horseshoe bay of Navidad on August 9, 1565. It had taken them three months and twenty days to connect the two sides of the great ocean.31
First page of a letter published in Barcelona in 1566 recounting the “venturous discovery” of a new navigation to Asia “along with other marvelous things of great advantage to Christendom that are worth knowing and reading about.”
10
Fall from Glory
The bold passage of the San Lucas caused a burst of excitement in Mexico. America was poised to become the axis mundi, the bridge between East and West. Don Alonso, Lope Martín, and their shipmates had finally turned the largest ocean on Earth into a vital space of human contact and exchange. After 1565, for two and a half centuries Spanish galleons sailed yearly from the coast of North America to the Philippines, carrying silver to Asia and returning with silk, porcelain, spices, and other wondrous products. They also transported Asian slaves to America. In a few short years, the Philippines became a major hub where merchants from China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia gathered to trade with the Americas, and the round trip across the Pacific became not just possible but, in fact, routine. “It is like the return from the Americas to Spain,” explained the Jesuit savant José de Acosta in 1590, “as those going from the Philippines or China to Mexico sail far to the north until they reach the latitude of Japan, and then they sight the Californias.” By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British and especially American merchants built on these early linkages to launch their own transpacific ventures. As the Spanish empire in the Americas crumbled in the early nineteenth century, American ships replaced the old galleons. Eventually the United States seized Hawai‘i, Guam, and the Philippines, tapped into markets in Japan and China, and established a network of interests that is now once again remaking the world.1
The men of the San Lucas could not have imagined all the consequences of their odyssey. Yet even at that early date, there were some inklings. At the port
of Navidad, the voyagers enjoyed a heroes’ welcome. They paused there for a few days to regain some strength before continuing to the viceregal capital of Mexico City and on to Spain, where they hoped to get an audience with Philip II. Wherever they went, the captain of the San Lucas, its Afro-Portuguese pilot, and the others were recognized and celebrated, “and everyone rejoiced at the news from those lands and the samples of cinnamon that they had brought.”2
Their moment of glory ended swiftly, however. Two months after the arrival of the San Lucas, another ship of the Legazpi expedition washed up in Acapulco. It was the flagship San Pedro. The largest vessel in the fleet had also returned by means of an arc across the Pacific similar to that of the San Lucas but more southerly and lasting four months. The San Pedro had been loaded with enough provisions to last for eight months at sea and had carried two hundred casks of water. Yet the human toll still had been alarming. Sixteen men had died along the way, including the piloto mayor Esteban Rodríguez. Out of nearly two hundred crew members, only eighteen or so “could do any work whatsoever” when they finally pulled into Acapulco on October 8, 1565. Scurvy had wreaked havoc during the passage. Among the survivors were Felipe de Salcedo, Legazpi’s eighteen-year-old grandson, who had served as ship’s captain during the return voyage, and the resilient Andrés de Urdaneta, who at the age of fifty-seven had circumnavigated the globe, sailed from America to Asia twice, and returned once. Legazpi himself had remained behind in command of the Spanish settlement in the Philippines.3
The men of the San Pedro had every reason to feel proud, especially Urdaneta. Since the start of the secretive venture to find the vuelta, the friar-mariner had projected supreme confidence, often quipping that he would return “not on a ship but on an ox cart if necessary.” He had finally made good on this promise, although it had not been easy. As we saw, the Audiencia of Mexico had betrayed the friar, leading him to believe that the fleet was going to New Guinea, only to change the destination to the Philippines in mid-ocean. Yet Urdaneta had regained his composure and served well. He had identified Guam correctly when all the other pilots thought they were much farther along, helped the fleet navigate through the Philippines, communicated in Malay with the captured Muslim pilot, and above all guided the San Pedro back across the great ocean with a sure hand. When he arrived in Acapulco, one of the first things he did was draw a chart “with all the winds, directions, coasts, and peninsulas.” It remained in use for decades, “and not a single thing has been added,” commented an Augustinian chronicler nearly sixty years later. Friar Urdaneta was evidently a man of uncommon vitality, utterly dependable, an extraordinary navigator, and a towering figure in the annals of the early navigation of the Pacific.4
Yet the friar-mariner and his companions had not been the first to return. When they heard of the San Lucas’s earlier arrival, they must have been skeptical. Was it even possible for such a small and poorly provisioned dispatch boat to sail to Asia and return? The claim was all the more suspicious because the San Lucas had become separated from the rest of the fleet a mere ten days after departing from Navidad and not too distant from the American coast. Nonetheless, the San Lucas voyagers had reappeared months later bearing porcelain, silk, cinnamon, and other products from Southeast Asia, proving that they had indeed crossed and re-crossed the Pacific. Thus the greatest mystery always came back to the matter of their separation.
Many expedition members, beginning with Commander Legazpi back in the Philippines, had a clear answer to this question. On November 7, 1565, Legazpi’s legal representative in Mexico City formally accused the captain of the San Lucas, Don Alonso de Arellano, of “absconding and becoming absent from the fleet under the cloak of night, without cause, and when the sea was calm and the weather was good.” The document went on to demand that “the said captain, his pilot, and their soldiers appear before their general [Legazpi himself] to answer for their conduct”—all the way back in the Philippines! It was a very serious charge, potentially amounting to treason, thus triggering an investigation against the pioneers of the San Lucas. 5
Yet Don Alonso’s initial impulse was to brush aside the accusation and carry on with his preparations to cross the Atlantic and seek an audience with the Spanish king. As a nobleman with many allies in high places, he was not about to change his plans on account of what he must have viewed as a specious allegation. Anyone wishing to travel to Spain needed to secure written permission before being allowed to board a ship in Veracruz, so Don Alonso paid a visit to the Audiencia and had no difficulty getting their approval. If anyone wanted to stop him, it would have to be at the highest levels of the royal bureaucracy in Madrid.6
Yet Gabriel Díaz, Legazpi’s representative in Mexico City, was nothing if not persistent. Díaz was a treasurer at the Minting House, a high-ranking royal official in his own right, and a longtime Legazpi colleague and friend. On hearing that “Don Alonso and some of his soldiers were getting ready to depart for the kingdoms of Castile,” treasurer Díaz went into legal overdrive. He lodged a second complaint four days after the first one, a third one two days later, and a fourth one three days after that. Díaz also made contact with crew members of the San Lucas, some of whom had arrived in Mexico City with Don Alonso, or perhaps they were in the middle of a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe to pre-sent the tattered sail, as they had promised when they had nearly capsized. What is certain is that treasurer Díaz met at least one of the San Lucas’s men and obtained sufficient information to level an additional accusation against Don Alonso and Lope Martín of “throwing a Spaniard into the ocean while still alive and a second man who was an Indian.”7
Although murdering two crew members in cold blood may seem very serious to our sensibilities, in the sixteenth century ship’s captains had considerable latitude in disciplining their men. Crew members could be thrown overboard for even minor infractions like falling asleep twice during their watch, as happened during the Villalobos expedition. Why these two luckless crew members of the San Lucas were executed and at what stage of the voyage is unknown, but most likely it was when they were at the border of the Philippines arguing over whether to attempt the vuelta. Regardless of the exact circumstances, such a brutal punishment was within the scope of Don Alonso’s authority.8
Thus, “becoming absent” from the fleet “when the sea was calm and the weather was good” remained the only serious accusation. The Audiencia had to consider the case no fewer than four times, prompted by treasurer Díaz’s vigorous legal offensive. Given what we know today, it is almost certain that the charge was unfounded. First, on the night of the separation, December 1, 1564, no pilot of the expedition reported a “calm” sea and “good” weather, as Díaz insisted. Aboard the flagship San Pedro, one of Legazpi’s own pilots recorded “a downpour in the early evening,” while the other pilot wrote in his logbook that he could not measure the latitude that day “because of the many rains,” implying that the bad weather had started in the morning. Indeed, not a single pilot in any of the four vessels was able to establish latitude between December 1 and December 3 and again on December 5, evidently because during those days of rain and storms, they could not see the Sun to measure its altitude with respect to the horizon. This is entirely consistent with the testimony given by Don Alonso, Lope Martín, and other men of the San Lucas before the Audiencia of Mexico on November 22, 1565. “We had rough weather coming from the northeast,” they declared, “and on December 1 at night, the wind became so strong that it pushed us toward the southwest, and we were taking on water and could not turn sideways because the vessel is small and very low.” Without having been there, it is impossible to know for certain if there was anything that the San Lucas—by far the smallest and lowest ship in the fleet—could have done to remain within sight of the others. But the fact is that bad weather in the middle of the ocean, especially in the pitch darkness of a stormy night, sometimes resulted in unintended separations among sixteenth-century squadrons crossing oceans.9
Precisely because this was a real possibility, Commander Legazpi, as we have seen, had issued detailed orders. The stray ship would go immediately to nine degrees of latitude and “proceed due west toward the Philippines” looking for the “Islands of the Kings” and the “Islands of the Corals,” and then go up to ten degrees toward the “Islands of Reefs” and “Matalotes.” On finding any of these islands, the lone vessel would wait ten days for the rest of the fleet to catch up. If still no contact had occurred, the separated voyagers would continue on to the Philippines after leaving a sign in the form of a large cross with a bottle buried at its foot containing a letter. The men of the San Lucas had followed these orders to the extent possible. They had navigated between eight and nine degrees but could not stop in Micronesia for the same reason that the rest of the fleet had not paused there either, as it consisted of minuscule atolls and islets rimmed with jagged edges, and sitting atop pillars of coral with no place to anchor. If anyone had deviated from this contingency plan, it had been not the San Lucas but the rest of the fleet. For a month and a half, the three ships under Legazpi had sailed at around nine or ten degrees of latitude, as agreed. Yet after a mid-ocean gathering of all the captains and pilots, Commander Legazpi had suddenly changed course and ordered the squadron to ascend to thirteen degrees in order to call at Guam, thus making the separation permanent.10