Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  Once the San Lucas arrived in the Philippines, the activities of the men reveal not an absconding crew with a devious plan but a group of survivors facing a hostile environment and attempting to save themselves. They waited, as we have seen, at an exposed cove on the Davao Gulf in eastern Mindanao for one month—hardly the best way to avoid detection—where they built several crosses and buried a jar containing letters “so the armada would know what had happened to us and where we were going next.” They then rounded Mindanao, navigating right through the middle of the archipelago, within sight of countless islands. They had also visited Cebu, where the chances of finding the rest of the fleet were greatest and where indeed they came close to doing so. The general impression one gets is of an accidental separation followed by clear attempts to rejoin the fleet.11

  Don Alonso and Lope Martín chose to return to Navidad, overcoming immense hurdles and suffering greatly along the way. If they had been pursuing a nefarious plan of illicit enrichment, why had they not acted on it? From the Philippines, the most natural continuation would have been to the Spice Islands, and indeed many crew members wanted to go there. Such a course would have been especially beneficial to Lope Martín, who could have expected a favorable reception or at least an accommodation with his Portuguese compatriots there. Actions speak louder than words. Ultimately, the San Lucas expeditionaries carried out their orders, found the vuelta, and performed a service of incalculable value to the Spanish crown.

  One final piece of evidence has a bearing on the pilot’s guilt or innocence and exposes the ruthless wheeling and dealing prevalent in the early years of Pacific exploration, a time when a single cargo of spices or silk could bring immense wealth to a plucky crew. While the investigation of Don Alonso and Lope Martín was running its course in Mexico City in the fall of 1565, on the other side of the world, in the Philippines, General Legazpi uncovered a dangerous conspiracy while settled on the island of Cebu. Several crew members had planned to steal a cache of weapons and trade goods and make off with them on one of the moored ships. The plotters intended to barter for spices in Southeast Asia and then sail to France, getting there either “by way of the Strait of Magellan . . . or by way of Malacca, where the Portuguese would receive them well.” More than forty men were reportedly implicated in this ambitious scheme, mostly foreigners but some Spaniards as well.12

  Legazpi received timely intelligence about the plot and had the leaders apprehended, questioned, and executed. The investigation revealed that their plan had been conceived even before the expedition’s departure from Navidad a year earlier, “and it was understood that the men involved would flee on the San Lucas, pursuing a different course from the flagship and becoming separated.” It would take two years for this information to reach Mexico, so the Audiencia in Mexico City considering the cases of Don Alonso and Lope Martín in November of 1565 did not have these facts at their disposal. Nonetheless, we can make some educated guesses. Although Lope Martín was never mentioned by name, and the evidence is circumstantial at best and extracted under duress, it is likely that the pilot was involved at least to some extent, given that the plotters were primarily non-Spaniards and that their initial plan had been to flee aboard the San Lucas. As we have seen, Lope Martín was extraordinarily well adapted to the cutthroat world of the early voyages of exploration, and thus at the very least he must have been aware of this intrigue, may have been present in the initial conversations at Navidad, and may well have been one of the ringleaders. But regardless of the extent of his initial involvement, for some reason he reconsidered, attempted to rejoin the rest of the fleet, and ultimately stayed true to his mission and sailed back to Mexico.13

  The Audiencia threw out all the charges, clearing Don Alonso and Lope Martín. But the cabal of elderly men ruling Mexico—prone to secret orders, tortuous dealings, and blatant manipulation—could not refrain from playing one final trick. They allowed Don Alonso to proceed to Spain to request an audience with the king but retained Lope Martín’s services. The Audiencia members would soon be dispatching another expedition to the Philippines with supplies for Legazpi, and what better pilot than the extraordinary Lope Martín? Left unsaid was an ulterior motive. Sending the Black man back to Cebu meant that he would have to appear before Commander Legazpi, who would finally get the satisfaction of bringing to justice at least one crew member from the wayward San Lucas. At a distance of nearly five centuries, it is impossible to tease out all the reasons for this unequal treatment of Don Alonso and Lope Martín, but the vast social differences between a nobleman captain and a mulatto pilot surely mattered.14

  Lope Martín knew well what awaited him in the Philippines. As he would later explain, “The very hour that the general [Legazpi] saw me there, he would hang me on the spot.” Yet the Audiencia would not take no for an answer. To persuade Lope Martín, the rulers of Mexico gave him eleven thousand ducats to purchase a large ship and hire a crew to his liking. It was an enormous sum of money. Even after accepting the commission, it is likely that Lope Martín did not intend to follow through. He traveled from Mexico City to the Pacific coast with a small entourage, ostensibly to examine vessels and sign up crew members. The pilot actually selected a vessel at the port of Huatulco, but it was much too small. In reality, Lope Martín and his group of friends were living in the moment and in a mood to celebrate. “The road seemed too long to them,” the Spanish ambassador in Portugal commented, “and they squandered the money and for this were thrown in jail.” Embezzling royal funds was a time-honored tradition in the early transpacific fleets. Just a year earlier, the man who had raised Legazpi’s fleet—the larger-than-life adventurer and bigamist Juan Pablo de Carrión—had become the target of a similar accusation. The Audiencia members must have known that it was risky to entrust eleven thousand ducats to a group of seamen who had just experienced months of extreme privation and near-death adventures across the Pacific. It is impossible to know whether this had been a deliberate ploy. Yet now that Lope Martín was in jail for defrauding the royal treasury, they could exert a great deal more pressure on him.15

  The rest of the story unfolded with the precision of a Shakespearean play. The Audiencia procured an old ship for the follow-up expedition to the Philippines, appointed a captain—a man named Pero Sánchez Pericón from Málaga in southern Spain, described as a “miserable, melancholic enemy of friendship, and who delighted in solitude”—and released Lope Martín from jail on the condition that he serve as lead pilot. The Audiencia members also made a final decision about Lope Martín’s fate, “writing to General Legazpi to hang the pilot as soon as he got there [the Philippines] as a reward for his services, and putting the letter in a sealed envelope that would be carried by the ship’s secretary.” There was only one problem with this plan. Secretary Juan de Zaldívar leaked the sealed document’s contents, and Lope Martín’s talent as a pilot was surpassed only by his skill at plotting and conspiring. He would now do everything within his power to stay alive and exact revenge.16

  11

  Survival and Revenge

  The voyage that began in Acapulco in May 1566 was unconventional. A ship named the San Jerónimo would dash across the Pacific steered by a pilot who had no reason to reach his destination. As one of the travelers put it, “If Homer and Virgil had come, they would have needed to summon all of their abilities to convey the hunger, destruction, deaths, cries, sighs, imprisonments, travails, delays, afflictions, and all the calamities and shipwrecks that we experienced.” Trouble began even before casting off, when “a swirl of wind and rain” demolished several houses in Acapulco and tossed the San Jerónimo about while lying at anchor, causing the stern to hit land and threatening to sink the vessel. In all likelihood, 1565–66 was an El Niño year that brought earlier and more intense tropical storms than usual to Acapulco, where the hurricane season normally begins in May.1

  Lope Martín first tried to bring Captain Pero Sánchez Pericón to his side. “You are making a mistake if you think that I will
take you to Cebu,” he said to the captain, “because the very hour that the general [Legazpi] saw me there, he would hang me on the spot.” As alternatives, the pilot laid out a world of possibilities. “I could take you to Japan, where you could get more than 200,000 ducats to add shine to your lineage,” the Afro-Portuguese proposed, “or to the Cape of Cinnamon in Mindanao . . . and I could then take you through the Strait of Magellan to Spain.” Although these were far-fetched schemes, the captain of a well-supplied galleon with a pilot of Lope Martín’s caliber could not dismiss them entirely. Pericón gave few hints about his true intentions. His twenty-five-year-old son, however, Diego Sánchez Pericón de Mesa, was talkative, opinionated, and reckless. Serving as a junior officer aboard the San Jerónimo, Diego was “a lot younger in discretion than in years,” a mercurial presence who thought himself on top of the world thanks to his father’s appointment as sea captain. The overall effect of the Pericóns on Lope Martín was to embolden him.2

  Somehow the pilot came to conceive of this voyage less as a death sentence and more as a dangerous opportunity. In the weeks before departure, he even hurried the captain to finish the preparations, as the sailing conditions were becoming more challenging by the day. Lope Martín was right. Modern sailing guides suggest starting from the coast of Mexico either before June or after October to avoid the summer tropical storms. During April, while Captain Pericón rushed to get all the supplies loaded, the pilot put together a crew, “choosing those who were best suited for his purposes, particularly the ones who came from the municipality where they said he had been married and others from Portugal inasmuch as they say he comes from there.” This is the only shred of evidence that Lope Martín had a wife in Ayamonte on the Spanish-Portuguese border.3

  By the end of the month, about 130 men, more or less evenly split between sailors and soldiers, boarded the San Jerónimo. As the pilot had handpicked the sailors, he enjoyed broad support from them. Some were mulattos like Lope Martín, or hailed from the Spanish-Portuguese border region, or had traveled together before and knew one another well. Juan Yáñiz, for instance, was a fellow Portuguese mariner, a San Lucas veteran, and “Lope Martín’s intimate friend.” All of this made for a cohesive crew.4

  In contrast, the soldiers had come together through greed. Earlier in the year, word had spread in Mexico City that the vuelta had been discovered and a follow-up expedition to the Philippines would be departing soon. Wishing to gain access to the riches of the Orient, many men had volunteered, so many indeed that only those with connections, or who had signed on “through favors,” had secured spots. In the previous transpacific voyage, each soldier had been paid 175 pesos. This time, owing to the excessive enthusiasm, and at Captain Pericón’s suggestion, each soldier was offered merely one hundred pesos. Essentially, these so-called soldiers—even though they were closer to entrepreneurs or agents of wealthy and influential patrons—would be forgoing much of their compensation for the opportunity of going to Asia to seek their fortune.5

  Two sergeants, Juan Ortiz de Mosquera and Pero Núñez de Solórzano, were in command of the military men. Their undisguised contempt for the Pericóns injected great uncertainty into the venture. Mosquera was “an old soldier, able, courageous, and too much of a man,” who loathed Diego Sánchez Pericón because of the captain’s son’s complete lack of discipline and military training. Solórzano, the more junior of the two commanding officers, had been in an actual “brawl” with him. Unclear lines of authority may have been at the root of this conflict. Both Mosquera and Solórzano outranked the younger Pericón and gave him orders even though he was the ship captain’s son. Yet the two sergeants repeatedly complained about their junior officer’s unruliness. Also contributing to the antagonism may have been Captain Pericón’s avaricious ways. The older Pericón had suggested the drastic salary reduction for the soldiers and had extorted an additional fifty pesos to transport each soldier, boasting that he “would have made them serve for free.” Whatever the actual reason for the conflict between the Pericóns and the top military commanders, it gave Lope Martín ample room to maneuver by inserting himself between them.6

  On the morning of May 1, the San Jerónimo cleared the capacious bay of Acapulco and entered “the true sea that makes all others appear like rivers and puddles,” as soldier Juan Martínez, the Homer and Virgil of this voyage, referred to the Pacific. Over the next ten days, the ship descended toward the equatorial region to a latitude of nine degrees, where “the excessive heat, fatigue, and lack of winds held us back,” Martínez recalled, “and caused the bodies to be altered to the point of illness.” The atmosphere became uneasy and electric when two soldiers fell sick and died. A story began circulating about three naos that had departed from Mexico earlier in the year bound for Peru. Without any wind in the middle of the ocean, they had been trapped for weeks and the men had perished, “and nothing had remained, not hair nor bones.” The San Jerónimo voyagers prayed fervently and collected alms to avoid a similar fate. A “deformed comet” appeared like an unmistakable omen of “the great difficulties that we would experience and the evil thoughts some among us were having.” By then, many soldiers wanted to return to the Americas to load more fresh water before attempting the Pacific crossing, while others would have remained on dry land if given a chance. Lope Martín was in his element now.7

  This was also a moment of reckoning for the pilot. As Pericón would never deviate from his orders to go to the Philippines, with each passing day Lope Martín found himself closer to the gallows. The pilot’s predicament was brutally simple. To survive, he would have to find a way to eliminate the ship’s captain. Thus he talked more openly about his circumstances, made promises, forged alliances, and finally began agitating against the prickly Pericón. The captain’s principal object of affection was a horse that he kept in a sling below decks. The beast, however, drank too much water at a time when the precious liquid was becoming scarce, and many crew members noticed. The pilot “did not hold his tongue and said that it was better to kill it,” a pronouncement that Pericón took as an affront. The captain went so far as to post guards by the animal—drawing complaints from the soldiers thus tasked, who felt demoted to horse grooms—yet on the morning of May 25, Pericón’s beloved horse was found dangling over a puddle of blood. A sailor had slipped through the night and sunk a dagger into its heart, “from where the blood flowed as if out of a drainage pipe,” Martínez noted drily, “and everything was done so subtly that the guards could not see anything.”8

  Typical horse transport system in the Spanish fleets according to a drawing from the 1530s.

  In the nautical world, the forecastle, or alcázar in Spanish—a term of Arabic origin meaning “fortress”—referred to a storeroom on a raised deck at the front of the ship. The men of the San Jerónimo stored their weapons in a room like this one. Notice the hatch leading below decks, similar to the one used during the first mutiny.

  Pericón became incensed. The perpetrators’ identity was hardly a mystery. They had openly criticized the captain for days, “losing all sense of shame in word and deed and showing very little respect.” At the top of the list was Lope Martín, but it extended to about two dozen individuals, “particularly from among the sailors.” The mutiny was also starting to spread to the military men. A soldier named Felipe del Campo had joined forces with Lope Martín and served as go-between with the two military leaders, Sergeants Mosquera and Solórzano, whose hatred for the Pericóns remained undiminished. The captain needed to act urgently. As he could not proceed solely on rumor, he drafted a decree and had it read aloud throughout the ship, accusing “certain people who were conspiring against His Majesty and his [Pericón’s] person.” Captain Pericón also offered one thousand pesos in gold for information about the conspirators as well as a separate reward of four hundred ducats for leads about the horse killer. In the cramped quarters of a sixteenth-century sailing vessel, the tension must have been unbearable. If it came to open violence in the middle o
f the ocean, the consequences would be fatal for everyone. Yet no one came forward. The captain and his son became more isolated than ever. Their few remaining allies counseled them to stay alert and to move about the San Jerónimo with guards. But Captain Pericón was “a very devout man, given to praying and keeping to his own opinions.”9

  Meanwhile, the plotters were well coordinated. Some broke into the alcázar, or forecastle (a depot or storeroom on top of a raised deck in the forward part of the ship), and retrieved many weapons kept there under lock and key. Six days after the horse killing, a sailor named Bartolomé de Lara created another provocation. He complained to the younger Pericón about the “wretched food and drink.” As the exchange escalated, the captain’s son pulled out a whip to put Lara in his place, but the mariner drew out a dagger, forcing the young officer “to retreat in a great commotion and go down to his quarters to fetch some soldiers.” It took several men to disarm Lara and lock him up below decks. Only two days later, however, his friends released the feisty sailor. He strolled around the deck as if nothing had happened in yet another display of blatant disregard for the captain’s authority.10

  The end came that very night, in the wee hours of Monday, June 3, 1566, Pentecost. Fresh out of the brig and ready for vengeance, Lara put himself at the head of a very tight group consisting of the military commander Sergeant Mosquera and two soldiers. Late in the evening they made their way quietly to the stern of the San Jerónimo, opened a hatch, and descended through a passageway that ended in front of the captain’s quarters, where the Pericóns were sleeping. Daggers drawn, Lara and Mosquera stepped in front while the two soldiers stayed a few paces behind for support. The two ringleaders burst into the cabin and killed father and son, but not without loud screams and groans. Like the horse, the Pericóns died in total darkness and with a profusion of blood. Lope Martín and several sailors stood close by with shields and swords drawn in case anyone came, while other mutineers were posted where many of the soldiers were sleeping, “and those who stirred and attempted to get up were tamped down with the flat part of the sword and told, long live the king, nothing is happening.”11