Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  The morning unveiled a gruesome scene. To dispose of the corpses, the mutineers had to bring them up on deck. One of the soldiers who had participated in the killing held his bloody dagger like a trophy. He had plunged it completely into the captain’s dead body and intended to keep it unwiped, “to claim the reward that he deserved.” Sergeant Mosquera took full responsibility. The top military officer of the San Jerónimo was indeed “courageous and too much of a man,” as soldier Martínez had described him. But even he had been shaken by the night’s events. Both sailors and soldiers were still struggling to comprehend what had happened when a corporal acclaimed Sergeant Mosquera and urged everyone to name him captain. The military commander demurred, however. “There are men of greater courage aboard this vessel,” he countered. Yet the soldiers pressed their commanding officer “twice and three times” until Sergeant Mosquera accepted. He asked them only “not to address him as captain but continue to call him as before.” The gravity of the crime he had committed a few hours earlier must have weighed heavily on Mosquera. He had suddenly become the most visible leader of a bloody mutiny. Yet he might be able to justify his actions against the Pericóns (still universally despised) if he completed the mission. The new captain thus made clear his intention to take the San Jerónimo to the Spanish camp in the Philippines, as was the original plan. These “sweet words” reassured many men aboard the San Jerónimo—but not Lope Martín.12

  Sergeant Mosquera was popular with his men and therefore much harder to eliminate than Pericón. His supporters consisted of a majority of the soldiers, almost all the royal officials, some sailors, including the maestre, or boatswain, and the chaplain. The new captain was also a prudent man. On pain of death, he ordered all the sailors to give up the weapons they had squirreled away in sea chests and dark corners of the ship during the run-up to the mutiny. Mosquera also knew what Lope Martín was capable of and kept a close eye on him. For the next two and a half weeks, a series of realignments, conspiracies, and counter-conspiracies unfolded in hushed voices aboard the San Jerónimo. To survive, the pilot had to use all his powers of persuasion. He retained the support of many sailors, the ship’s secretary Juan de Zaldívar, who had leaked the pilot’s death sentence in the first place, and a few discontented soldiers like Felipe del Campo. At this time, Lope Martín also added Sergeant Solórzano to his camp, the highest-ranking military officer aboard except for Mosquera. This would prove decisive.13

  Two-thirds of the way to the Philippines, by the middle of June time was running short for the pilot. Sergeant Mosquera must have suspected that Lope Martín was up to something because he considered hanging the pilot preemptively. This would have left even more blood on his hands. But what gave the new captain pause was the difficulty of maneuvering the galleon and bringing it safely into port in Cebu without the pilot. Mosquera had asked the maestre, a man named Rodrigo del Angle, if he felt sufficiently confident in his sailing abilities to take over the San Jerónimo. Boatswains possessed some nautical training and oversaw all the sailors, so in theory they could act as substitute pilots. Angle had replied to Mosquera that he felt perfectly qualified, a “presumption” that Lope Martín would never forgive. In spite of Angle’s assurances, Sergeant Mosquera chose to do nothing, a costly mistake. “It must have been divinely ordained,” declared the soldier-chronicler aboard the San Jerónimo, waxing philosophical, “that someone as able and discreet as Mosquera would in the end become blind.”14

  At midnight on Friday, June 21, Mosquera was at the alcázar talking with the two soldiers involved in the killing of the Pericóns. As the new captain had been worrying about the royal investigation that would ensue on arrival, it was only natural to agree on a single version of events with his accomplices. Unbeknownst to Mosquera, however, these two soldiers had joined the pilot’s faction. Their mission was to keep the substitute captain occupied in the forecastle. In the meantime, Sergeant Solórzano, the second-highest-ranking officer aboard the San Jerónimo, went below decks, where many soldiers were sleeping, and, “adducing sophistic reasons,” ordered them to turn over their weapons immediately. Keeping only “the odd knife,” the soldiers had no choice but to obey their commanding officer. The ploy nearly came undone when Mosquera heard a noise from below. He started to go down to investigate, but the two soldiers called him back to the forecastle and then blocked his way. Not wanting to appear excessively mistrustful or fearful, the captain returned, although he must have suspected something.15

  The conversation continued until well into the morning of June 22, when Lope Martín and others joined Mosquera in the alcázar. They were having a lively exchange over breakfast “with much bacon and wine.” Without warning, some sailors entered the room and unceremoniously tied Mosquera’s hands behind his back and snapped a pair of shackles on his feet. The merriment and laughter continued a little longer. “What kind of child’s play is this?” the captain inquired while pretending to be amused. They marched him down to the deck and made him sit on a box close to the yardarm. The prisoner was still smiling and putting on a brave face. At last, Lope Martín pronounced his sentence. “Confess yourself, you are about to die,” the pilot said, “because you have killed the captain.” Mosquera had worried all along about his participation in the killing of the Pericóns, and now he was getting swift justice in the manner of the sea. The pilot also accused the sergeant of attempting to murder him, a charge that Mosquera vehemently denied. The priest rushed to the scene and pleaded with the pilot, telling him to think carefully about what he was poised to do, but Lope Martín turned his back on the cleric and gave a signal. Instantly, some mariners hoisted Mosquera, “without giving him time to confess or say Jesus,” as the soldier Martínez later recalled, “and threw him into the sea with the shackles and still half alive.” Not content with having executed him, they also made it known that he was “a sodomite who had practiced this abominable sin in Italy where he had lived and had tried the same in New Spain.”16

  The sailors were now in full command of the vessel, and Lope Martín had turned into something of a Lope de Aguirre of the Pacific, a renegade explorer beyond the pale of imperial control. He may have considered going to Japan, the Spice Islands, or perhaps to the “Cape of Cinnamon” in Mindanao. Any of these destinations offered products that would have made the pilot and his supporters rich. For the soldiers, those were dark days when “no one trusted one another” and “a melancholy silence reigned over the deck.”17

  On June 29, 1566, after surviving two mutinies and two months of sailing, and one week after Mosquera’s execution, the men of the San Jerónimo began to sight land. Some of the sailors had passed by the Marshall Islands before and knew what to expect. The soldiers, however, more eager than ever to get off the San Jerónimo, were disappointed by the tiny low-lying islands fringed by coral, with no good anchorages, and sometimes populated by “the Bearded Ones,” or “los Barbudos.” “Instead of our much-desired motherland,” Martínez ruminated, “we could call this our stepmother land.”18

  For a week the San Jerónimo skirted atolls and reefs. As they appeared to reach the end of the Marshalls, those in command of the ship let out all the sails and pushed hard. Yet one night, “in an instant, we found ourselves completely surrounded by islands and capes,” Martínez recalled, “and they were so close to us that they caused great alarm among the mariners, let alone the soldiers, and the helmsman asked whether he should steer toward the land.” As the favorable winds and currents propelled the San Jerónimo furiously forward, it was preferable to run aground close to an island rather than smashing into a reef far from land. Lope Martín barked some orders to the contrary. The sailor Lara became so agitated that he pushed the helmsman aside and took the wheel himself. After a few violent turns and scrapes against coral and rock, “God decided to take us through a channel that was not even a stone’s throw wide.” This narrow passage mercifully opened into a perfectly calm and limpid lagoon—as is typical in many ring-shaped atolls—protected from the
open sea by massive reefs all around. Here the pilot and his faction hatched one last scheme to rid the vessel of unwanted cargo.19

  The San Jerónimo had come to rest in the interior lagoon of Ujelang Atoll, the westernmost of the Marshall Islands. While the Ujelang lagoon is quite large, about twenty-five square miles, the land area is less than 0.7 miles, consisting mostly of exposed promontories of sand and coral on its rim. Only on the south side was there a more substantial strip of land. “It was flat and fertile,” as Martínez described it, “and there were four huts but no people because they live on other islands.” The travelers counted about 150 palm trees. Instead of subsisting on moldy hardtack, they would have immediate access there to coconut meat and milk. With some luck, they could find some birds’ eggs and catch fish. They also discovered a small pond of fresh water, a godsend as they were running dangerously low.20

  The pilot ordered almost everyone ashore, saying that the San Jerónimo needed repairs. The vessel would have to lie on its side at low tide so the caulkers could scrub the exposed parts of the hull and fix damaged areas. Naturally, the soldiers became suspicious. The allure of getting off the ship, eating some coconuts, and sleeping on the soft sand must have been considerable. Yet the fear of being marooned must have been overwhelming. In the end, there was no choice. Soldiers and sailors alike had to bring down their sea chests and spread out around the palm trees, setting up camp close to relatives and friends. There were three distinct groups: the mutineers, the loyalists, and the vast majority whose allegiance was unknown or uncertain. The mutineers had all the weapons, so they could have sailed away at any moment. This is exactly what Lope Martín’s closest military collaborator, Felipe del Campo, proposed. The pilot, however, had a different idea. He needed time to probe the loyalties of all the men at Ujelang. To reach a destination other than the Philippines, Lope Martín would require many sailors and soldiers. Therefore he spent days trying to win over the undecided, promising them all manner of riches. With surprising speed, Lope Martín had made the transition from dead man walking to ringleader of a major transpacific venture. Meanwhile the loyalists were reduced to waiting. “We were troubled men, domesticated and disarmed,” Martínez recalled, “and there were secrets passed among these evil men that we didn’t know about.” A rumor had it that they were going to spend the winter—still nearly six months away!—at Ujelang. Others overheard the pilot saying that “only later, at the Island of the Thieves [Guam], would the selection of the men take place.”21

  According to Martínez, Lope Martín likened his situation to that of Hernán Cortés, giving us some insight into his frame of mind. Forty-seven years earlier, the great conqueror of Mexico had similarly faced a grave moment of decision upon landing on the coast of Veracruz, at the head of a renegade expedition, and on hearing about the fabulous riches of the Aztec Empire. As the pilot himself explained one night at Ujelang, Cortés had delivered a speech to his soldiers, asking them whether they preferred to return to Cuba or proceed inland toward the city of Tenochtitlán. Cortés promised to surrender the ships and some provisions to those who wished to go back while he would continue with the others. According to the pilot’s version, the conquistador asked his men to form two camps so there would be “a record” of their choice. Cortés thanked those who had thrown their lot in with him, reiterating his promise to make them rich, and then ordered his ships destroyed, forcing all the others to go inland as well but under a cloud of suspicion. Many lessons can be drawn from this story. Martínez, our soldier-chronicler, to his own mind was merely chiding the mulatto for the hubris of likening himself to the great Cortés. Most of the men probably dwelled on the obvious inference that it was much better to volunteer rather than be forced into the pilot’s venture. Some may have found some solace in the thought that even a suicidal plan like Cortés’s had ended up well for many of the men involved. Lope Martín himself evidently appreciated Cortés’s ingenious method of distinguishing between friend and foe.22

  Over a period of a few days, the pilot was able to lure some additional men into his camp. To show their acceptance—like an initiation ritual into piracy—they were required to swear before a crucifix and take a consecrated wafer from the chaplain, promising absolute loyalty to the group “beyond king and nationality.” Of course, some men could never be brought into the fold. One of them was boatswain Rodrigo del Angle, who had committed the capital offense of offering to replace Lope Martín as pilot of the San Jerónimo during the second mutiny. At Ujelang, Angle felt as though “he was already dragging a rope around his neck.” The boatswain sent intermediaries to try to make peace with the pilot but without success. Another man on the outside was Santiago de Garnica, who had served as alguacil del agua, or constable in charge of distributing the water aboard the San Jerónimo. Garnica was widely believed to have kept the late Captain Pericón abreast of the plotters’ movements and was therefore beyond redemption. A more surprising late dissenter was Bartolomé de Lara. The feisty sailor had killed the Pericóns with his own hands, thus doing Lope Martín’s bidding to the point of serving as his enforcer and executioner. At Ujelang, however, Lara had a falling-out with the pilot and reportedly stayed at the ship, “sulking and weeping like a child after a scolding from his mother.” These three men formed a nucleus of resistance that would grow to include a handful of soldiers, a Flemish gunner, the chaplain, and a few others. At great peril, they broached the possibility of seizing the San Jerónimo. 23

  The counter-plotters faced long odds. As the soldiers were not permitted aboard the San Jerónimo, they would have to swim to it. The only loyalists able to come and go as they pleased were Lara, another sailor named Morales, the Flemish gunner (Juan Enrique Flamenco), and the boatswain Angle, who, in spite of being considered hostile to the mutineers, had legitimate work to do aboard the San Jerónimo. These few loyalist crew members would have to overpower the guards posted at the vessel, gain access to the weapons locked in the storeroom, and make them available to their supporters. They also had to overcome one final obstacle. Lope Martín had taken ashore all the compasses and charts as well as the two principal sails (the mainsail and the forward sail). The nautical equipment privately owned by boatswain Angle, the man who would pilot the ship should the plan succeed, had also been removed from the ship. To leave Ujelang and have even the slightest chance of reaching the Philippines, the counter-plotters would thus have to find a way to retrieve the sails and at least some of the instruments. They tried their luck on Wednesday, July 16.24

  Lara, Morales, the Flemish gunner Juan Enrique, and Angle armed themselves as best they could, took the small boat, and rowed toward the San Jerónimo. They entered “with their weapons gleaming and blazing, giving forward and backward strokes.” The assailants promptly slashed a mulatto, one of Lope Martín’s closest allies, who was guarding the ship. Although wounded, this man “jumped into the water and went to take this bitter news to his friends.” The San Jerónimo must have been about one hundred yards from the beach, so the assailants had only a moment to look for the firearms. A Galician boy held the keys to the depot where they were kept, “but because he did not find the key fast enough, Rodrigo del Angle gave him a bad cut in the head.” The attackers then hurried to bring the weapons onto the deck and distributed them liberally to friends and allies, including some who had been kept in shackles aboard the ship, such as the secretary Juan de Zaldívar, who, like the sailor Lara, had once supported Lope Martín but had subsequently quarreled with him. The coup was over in minutes. With relatively little resistance, the loyalists had taken command of the ship.25

  On land, confusion prevailed. Lope Martín believed that his supporters aboard the San Jerónimo, perhaps drunk and incapacitated for a few hours, would eventually regain control. He was also certain that without sails and navigational instruments, the San Jerónimo would be as good as a sitting duck. Many men in the camp nevertheless feared that the San Jerónimo’s departure from Ujelang was imminent. Four or five soldiers saw n
o other recourse but to swim out to the ship. They were running a great risk, as they had made a very public choice and had left all of their possessions behind. Their reception at the other end was uncertain. Their gamble paid off, however. They were immediately welcomed and provided with weapons. Even then, doubts persisted as to the true state of affairs aboard the ship. It was only after the ever feisty Lara came to the side of the San Jerónimo and called loudly for Felipe del Campo to come aboard on account of their old friendship that the dramatic shift that had taken place on the vessel became obvious to the men on land. Del Campo replied to Lara that he would “gladly go to the ship to punish him and the other scoundrels that were there.”26

  At last, Lope Martín ordered his followers to swim out to the San Jerónimo and retake it, even though it would be nearly impossible, with well-armed soldiers standing guard on the deck who could easily capture those who reached the ship. Perhaps seizing the rowboat would have been easier, but the Flemish gunner was standing on it, preventing anyone from even getting near. As more and more sailors dashed into the water, the boatswain Angle lost his nerve. He cut the two anchor cables and had the few sails available aboard set up. Very slowly, the San Jerónimo turned and began to move toward the narrow channel through which it had entered the lagoon. From the beach, the men watched in astonishment. As our soldier-chronicler remarked, they were “leaving behind cruelly and miserably their enemies as well as their friends, guilty and not guilty alike.”27