Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  Yet the San Jerónimo could not go far. Missing the two principal sails and facing light winds and a contrary tidal current (atolls are notoriously tidal), the ship lost momentum well before reaching the channel, was driven back by the strong current, and came to rest somewhat farther away from the encampment than before. Intense negotiations unfolded over the next four days. The terms of a possible agreement were quite straightforward. The people aboard the San Jerónimo needed the two sails and some nautical equipment while the people on land—accepting that they could not recapture the San Jerónimo—wanted food. During the negotiations, scores of soldiers as well as many sailors were able to reach the galleon. Finally, on July 21 at dawn, the San Jerónimo slipped out of the lagoon. Left behind were twenty-seven men, among them the pilot and his closest friends and associates. They were seasoned navigators in possession of firearms, with plenty of food and water, and on an atoll visited from time to time by Micronesians. Tantalizing evidence suggests that they survived.28

  12

  At the Spanish Court

  While Lope Martín and his men struggled to stay alive, Friar Andrés de Urdaneta spent the last few months of his life wrestling with the imperial bureaucracy. The friar-mariner had arrived in Acapulco on October 8, 1565, and promptly made his way to the viceregal capital, Mexico City, where he was greeted as “something of a miracle.” Carrying ginger, cinnamon, gold dust, jewels, and “some objects of witchcraft and other good things,” Urdaneta and his companions represented the start of a new era. Mexico was poised to become the meeting point between East and West, “the heart of the world,” as one flattering chronicle put it.1

  Yet there was little time for celebration. The transpacific pioneers were bearing important letters from the Philippines as well as petitions for reinforcements and provisions. A ship was prepared immediately for a voyage to Spain so Urdaneta could report directly to Philip II. There was reason for the haste. As we have seen, Don Alonso de Arellano, the nobleman captain of the San Lucas, had left for Europe a few days earlier, perhaps to claim a reward for having discovered the vuelta and “usurp the glory of others,” as some feared. Urdaneta would have to neutralize this unexpected rival at court. Therefore, around the middle of December 1565, still recovering from the ravages of the voyage across the great ocean, Urdaneta and a few fellow travelers boarded a ship in Veracruz. This Atlantic passage through a well-established route to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in southern Spain at least gave the friar-mariner some time to organize his thoughts.2

  Yet this reprieve ended abruptly on arrival. In Seville, Urdaneta must have been thoroughly debriefed about the technical details of the vuelta. During his stay in Spain, the friar-mariner met such luminaries as Francisco Faleiro, a leading authority on longitude; the maestro Pedro de Medina, author of the celebrated Arte de navegar (1545); and Alonso de Santa Cruz, the empire’s most influential cosmographer of his time. Santa Cruz had tutored Philip II in geography and devoted decades of his life to elaborating an atlas of all the coasts and islands known in the world, a massive work deemed so sensitive that Philip had forbidden its publication.3

  It should have been a time of scholarly exchange and renewal. Instead, Urdaneta became embroiled in a major controversy. As one of his main goals in Spain had been to advocate on behalf of his former comrades who remained at great peril in the Philippines, the friar-mariner appeared before the Council of the Indies to do so. His petition, however, only succeeded in reviving the decades-old debate over whether the Philippines lay on the Spanish or the Portuguese side of the world. Before the councilors could act on Urdaneta’s request for reinforcements, they needed an unequivocal answer to this question. So did the Spanish king. Spending his time in the summer palace at the Bosque de Segovia some forty-seven miles north of Madrid, the never-sleeping Philip II yearned for clarity. “Tell them to gather all the papers and nautical charts [about the Philippines],” a frustrated monarch ordered his councilors. “I believe that I have some of them; the other day I looked in Madrid and, if I have them, they must be there. You, Eraso [secretary Antonio de Eraso], may have some.” The search was in vain, however. The mighty empire now spanning the entire world possessed no good maps of the Philippines.4

  As we have seen, Spain and Portugal had divvied up the world, first with a meridian line running from pole to pole through the Atlantic—according to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—and then by extending the Tordesillas line to the other side of the world. Yet estimating east-west distance was extraordinarily difficult in the sixteenth century, so no one knew exactly where to draw the antimeridian line. To avoid a costly war in the distant Pacific, the two Iberian rivals had thus reached an agreement in 1529 that held the key to whether Spain could legally occupy the Philippines. As Portugal was already in control of the Spice Islands, the Spanish negotiators consented to surrendering an additional slice of the world in exchange for a cash payment. The Treaty of Zaragoza of 1529 thus adjusted the antimeridian, shrinking the Spanish area of exclusive control and expanding the Portuguese hemisphere to accommodate all Lusitanian possessions in Asia. From then on, the antimeridian would be drawn seventeen degrees to the east of the Spice Islands (a much easier measurement than extending the line all the way from the Atlantic). As compensation, Spain would receive 350,000 ducats. Spanish officials thus began referring to this slice of the world given up to Portugal as el empeño, or the “pawned territories”—the assumption being that Spain could always recover such territories by returning the money. In the meantime, many in Spain wondered whether the Philippines were included in the “pawned territories.”5

  When Friar Urdaneta began petitioning for reinforcements for the Spanish encampment in the Philippines in the fall of 1566, the Spanish crown had to settle the matter. Philip thus summoned all major cosmographers to Madrid to respond to two disarmingly simple questions: First, were the Philippines included in the territories “pawned” to Portugal according to the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza? Second, with regard to the original antimeridian, were the Philippines on the Spanish or the Portuguese side of the world? Alongside Faleiro, Santa Cruz, and other prominent cosmographers, Urdaneta gave his considered opinion on October 8, 1566. His text reveals a man of deep convictions. The friar-mariner dispensed with the first question summarily—almost dismissively. Without a doubt, the Philippines lay on the Portuguese side. “I sailed in that gulf in the year of 1526,” the Augustinian elaborated briefly by way of explanation, “and resided there for eight years in the service of His Majesty the Emperor, may God hold him in his glory, and I also went there last year of 1565 from the port of Navidad.” No other Spaniard alive could claim as much familiarity with that region. He had seen it with his own eyes.6

  The second question, about the Philippines in relation to the original antimeridian, was far more difficult to answer. To tackle it, Urdaneta employed two methods. First, with the help of Portuguese charts that had come into his possession, he worked out the length of each passage from the Tordesillas line, around Africa and India, and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This method was akin to a land surveyor measuring the boundary of a large property by pacing from one tree to a nearby stream to a large rock farther along the way. Once he had retraced the better-known Portuguese route to the other side of the world, Urdaneta used basic trigonometry to disaggregate north-south and east-west distances for each segment, and finally added the latter until reaching the equivalent of 180 degrees to determine the precise location of the antimeridian. In addition to aggregating the errors of the different segments, this procedure had the further disadvantage of requiring knowledge of Earth’s size to establish an equivalence between degrees of longitude and distances, a vexing problem that was far from resolved in Urdaneta’s time.7

  Therefore, the friar-mariner used a second and far more parsimonious approach based on astronomical observations. As we have seen, one of Urdaneta’s fellow Augustinians, Friar Martín de Rada, had carried to the Philippines “an instrument of medium size” to derive east-
west distances with respect to the Spanish city of Toledo. The details of this instrument and the nature of Rada’s calculation are unknown. In theory, it would have been possible to approximate longitude through astronomical means. (Rada could have measured the angle between the Moon and a star in the background to establish an absolute clock of sorts, because it would have been the same time wherever this angle was visible from Earth. Compare it to the local time, and thus calculate east-west distance.) In practice, however, this would have required extremely accurate angular measurements seemingly impossible with the astrolabes, cross-staffs, and other instruments available in the sixteenth century.8

  Regardless of the difficulties, Urdaneta became convinced that the two methods yielded consistent results. According to the friar-mariner, the antimeridian passed through the island of Borneo, “all of which shows that the Spice Islands are within the demarcation of His Majesty,” Urdaneta reported happily, “as well as a small part of Java, the better part of China, and other islands.” Spain would thus be able to colonize the Philippines legitimately if the crown could repay Portugal and thus regain the “pawned territories.”9

  Urdaneta’s mixed opinion did not please the Spanish monarch. This probably explains why Philip II did not grant an audience to Urdaneta and offered him only a modest stipend for food and lodging during his stay in Spain. The king’s displeasure would have been even greater had he known the real answer: the Philippines had never been in the Spanish hemisphere according to either the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas or the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza. None of this mattered, however. Philip was determined to add his namesake islands to the already unwieldy Spanish Empire. At least this would justify his sending reinforcements for the men stranded in the Philippines.10

  Petrus Plancius’s 1594 Orbis Terrarum with some of the islands visited by the San Lucas.

  Even while mired in this cosmographical disputation, Urdaneta also must have sought intelligence about his rival Don Alonso de Arellano. Very little is known about the activities of the nobleman captain of the San Lucas, who, together with Lope Martín, had beaten the friar-mariner to the vuelta. The Augustinian chronicler Gaspar de San Agustín categorically affirmed that Don Alonso had appeared in court “to request a reward from His Majesty, and a great prize would have been given to him had it not been for Father Andrés de Urdaneta, who arrived just in time to reveal the true version of events.” San Agustín was also certain that, after Urdaneta’s decisive intervention, Don Alonso had lost all credibility and been thrown into jail, “where he had languished for a long time.” No record of any of this exists, however.11

  On the contrary, scattered information suggests that Don Alonso was able to meet with leading cartographers and nautical experts of that era, all of whom would have been extremely interested in the information the nobleman had to offer. Intriguingly, the trail leads away from Spain and in the direction of Holland and England, upstart empires in the process of challenging the Iberians in the Far East. In 1594 a Dutch-Flemish astronomer and clergyman in Amsterdam named Petrus Plancius published a map of the world which includes some islands that only the San Lucas had visited up to that time. Near the lower-left corner of Plancius’s Orbis Terrarum, one can see the “I. de los Nadadores,” or “Island of the Swimmers,” a name bestowed by Don Alonso himself because so many locals had swum out to the San Lucas, nearly overwhelming it. Plancius’s map also features the island of “Miracomo Vaz,” or “Watch How You Go,” thus called by Lope Martín because, as he had said, “it would be convenient for later navigators passing near there to know.” Don Alonso must have approached English mapmakers as well. Richard Hakluyt, the famous writer and booster of English colonization of North America, spent several years collecting nautical information. The 1599 edition of The Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation contains a rare and very valuable map, one of the first to use Mercator’s novel projection. This map shows the so-called “I. de don Alonço,” giving us another clue about the activities of the San Lucas captain.12

  Don Alonso may indeed have fallen out of favor in Spain. To obtain some compensation for having risked his life crossing the Pacific, the nobleman, evidence indicates, sought out Dutch and English mapmakers. Ironically, to lure them, Don Alonso may have used the deposition that he, Lope Martín, and others had given in Mexico City to defend themselves against the charge of having abandoned the rest of the fleet deliberately, a testimony that explicitly mentions the “Isla de los Nadadores,” “Miracomo Vaz,” and others. Spain’s loss was Holland’s and England’s gain. Little else is known about Don Alonso’s fate.13

  As for Urdaneta, he yearned for a simpler life in his Augustinian monastery in Mexico City. After wrestling with the Spanish imperial bureaucracy for nearly a year, he requested permission to return to the Americas. By the summer of 1567, he was back in his old cell. He may have planned to continue on to the Philippines “to achieve the spiritual conquest of their inhabitants,” as some sources indicate. Yet his condition “not only due to his age [fifty-nine years] but also to his continuous and lengthy pilgrimages through the world” made such a project unfeasible. Urdaneta’s superiors reportedly persuaded him to remain at the monastery, where he died a year later, on June 3, 1568.14

  Epilogue

  Marooned at Ujelang Atoll, Lope Martín and twenty-six of his men remained on the westernmost of the Marshall Islands for an indefinite amount of time. They were all seasoned navigators, well armed and determined to stay alive. Although no Marshallese resided permanently at Ujelang, nearby islanders visited the atoll from time to time. Indeed, a few days before their marooning, on July 21, 1566, the men of the San Lucas spotted “three paraos with their sails headed for us, and they still came straight at us even though they knew we were there and saw our ship.” The pilot’s plan had been “to catch them and bring them to where we were, so they would fish for us.” They even tried to ambush one of the Marshallese vessels, but it slipped away.1

  The stranded men also found an abandoned parao in a state of near completion in one of the nearby islets of the atoll around the lagoon. It was a substantial vessel, “with space for about thirty men,” more than enough to accommodate Lope Martín and his party. As they were all expert seamen and not afraid to venture into the Pacific, it is perfectly plausible that Lope Martín and his men used it to reach another island or even a mainland.2

  The trail goes almost completely cold after the marooning in late July 1566, except for some indirect but nonetheless suggestive evidence. Two years later, in 1568, another Spanish expedition passed through the Marshall Islands, probably a little to the east of Ujelang Atoll. The fleet commander, Álvaro de Mendaña, as well as his pilot, Hernán Gallego, reported how, on approaching one of the islands, they spotted a vessel leaving in a great hurry. The explorers had dispatched a boat ashore to investigate, but the villagers had deserted the place. Yet the investigating party found “a chisel made of a nail” and a piece of rope. Mendaña and Gallego believed that Lope Martín and his men had been there, “and perhaps thinking that Mendaña had come to punish them, they had fled in that vessel that they had probably built and gone to New Guinea.” Exactly why these later explorers thought that the pilot and his comrades had chosen New Guinea as their refuge is unclear.3

  Another Spanish expedition, this one in 1606, captured a Marshallese man. When the Europeans questioned their prisoner about nearby lands, he intriguingly “pointed to several places on the horizon, counted on his fingers several times, and ended by saying, ‘Martín Cortal.’ ” He may have been alluding to Lope Martín.4

  More than a century later, a missionary in the Carolines named Juan Antonio Cantova became quite puzzled by the skin color and physiognomy of the locals, some of whom appeared to be “pure Indians,” the Jesuit noted, “while there can be no doubt that others are mestizos, born of Spaniards and Indians.” As the peoples of the Carolines and Marshalls had very seldom been in contact with Europeans up to that time, Fa
ther Cantova surmised that they were descendants of Lope Martín and his men.5

  If so, Lope Martín may have avoided execution and found a new life in the tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific. Although he may not have achieved his grand design of taking a shipload of spices to Europe, his Pacific life would have been a fitting end for the man who first learned to navigate the largest ocean in the world.

  With their voyages, Lope Martín and Andrés de Urdaneta wove together all the major landmasses of the world for the first time in history. Plants, animals, products, and ideas began flowing across the Pacific nearly half a millennium ago, a process that reshaped the world. Yet only one of them has received credit for this great maritime feat. “The first and true discoverer of this navigation and return is Father Andrés de Urdaneta,” fellow Augustinian Gaspar de San Agustín proclaimed as early as 1698, “and not Captain Don Alonso de Arellano nor his pilot Lope Martín.” The laudatory writings of the Augustinian order over the centuries have cemented this selective interpretation. Modern scholars continue to hold more or less the same view. The famous French historian Pierre Chaunu, for instance, considered Lope Martín’s voyage “merely anecdotal” while granting to Urdaneta the honor of “having found the immutable line of fifteen thousand kilometers through water that the galleons would follow until 1815.” Others concede that Arellano and Lope Martín may have been the first to return but minimize the significance of their accomplishment. “It is only on the basis of Urdaneta’s passage,” the Spanish scholars Amancio Landín Carrasco and Luis Sánchez Masiá argue, “that we know with precision the route that would enable the Spanish presence in the Philippines.”6