Regardless of who deserves more credit, there is no doubt about their monumental accomplishment. A natural barrier that for millions of years had prevented the movement of almost all organisms on Earth finally came down with the vuelta. Regular transpacific contact has ushered in far-reaching biological, demographic, economic, political, and cultural changes. Just as Columbus’s voyages triggered a transatlantic transfer of plants, animals, germs, goods, and ideas beginning in 1492, Lope Martín and the more immediately storied Urdaneta launched the same process for the lands around the Pacific.
Among other things, the newfound transpacific connection led to a population boom in Asia, driven by the introduction of New World crops, especially sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts. Today, China is the second-largest producer of corn in the world, after only the United States; China and India are the top two producers of peanuts; and New Guineans obtain more calories per person from sweet potatoes than anyone else in the world. Corn, for example, was domesticated in the Americas at least nine thousand years ago but spread across the Pacific only in the sixteenth century. In China, this New World crop made inroads along the Yangtze and Han River valleys, where rice had been cultivated for millennia. Rice requires flooded fields of arable land, so cornfields sprang up at higher elevations and in drier conditions, where rice cultivation was marginal or impossible, thus extending China’s agricultural frontier and transforming what had once been forested hills into cornfields. Roughly speaking, corn produced the same number of calories per hectare as rice, but with far less irrigation and labor. This led to a significant population boom. Although the precise timing and magnitude of this demographic expansion varied from one Asian nation to another, all of them benefited from the incorporation of New World crops. A full accounting of this vast energy transfer from the Americas to Asia has yet to be made, but the preliminary information shows that it was enormous.7
Regular transpacific contact also created the first global trading system recognizable to us even today. Economic activities in the Americas came to depend not just on colonial-metropolitan relationships across the Atlantic but on supply and demand around the world—especially in Asia. Excellent examples are the great silver mines of Peru and Mexico, which constituted a mainstay of the economy of the Americas in colonial times and structured life for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who directly or indirectly, forcibly or not, became a part of the silver economy. Traditionally, this is told as a story of European empires extracting valuable resources from their American colonies. Left unsaid is that the most important end-market customer by far was not Europe but China, where a major tax reform known as “the single lash of the whip” replaced paper money with silver in the sixteenth century. With this tax reform, China instantly became a worldwide magnet for the white metal, absorbing the silver production of neighboring Japan and then turning to the New World mines, which produced upwards of eighty percent of the world’s silver between 1500 and 1800. Without China’s massive and persistent demand for silver, the mines on the American continent would never have attained the scale they did, nor would their profits have spilled over into other colonial enterprises and affected so many lives throughout the hemisphere. The sixteenth century gave rise to the first truly global economy, in which Asia’s relative demographic and economic weight was significant and at times paramount. This feature of our world economy has become familiar to us, as China has continued to demand global resources such as soybeans, copper, and steel, affecting markets all around the world.8
By the end of the eighteenth century, British and especially American merchants began building on these earlier transpacific linkages to launch their own ventures. As the Spanish empire in the Americas crumbled in the early nineteenth century, American ships came to replace the old Spanish galleons. The story of the United States’ expansion through the Pacific is well known, as the nation took control of Hawai‘i, Guam, and the Philippines, opened direct trade with Japan and China, and forged a vast network of transpacific interests. As we live in a world increasingly centered on the Pacific, it is imperative that we understand how we got here. The voyages of Urdaneta and of Lope Martín, the Black pilot who now takes his place in world history, were at the dawn of this transformation.
Note About Dates and Measurements
Today, travelers flying from San Francisco to Tokyo or New York to Beijing notice how their phones and computers add one day after crossing the International Date Line—an imaginary line running through the middle of the Pacific from the Arctic to the Antarctic which marks the change from one calendar day to another. Magellan’s crew members were probably the first to notice. When the remnants of that first circumnavigation venture reached the Cape Verde Islands in the middle of the Atlantic and compared the calendar aboard the ship with one kept by the islanders, the survivors realized that they were off by one day. The pioneering voyagers in this book crossed that same imaginary line but, like Magellan’s crew, failed to adjust their calendars. From the middle of the Pacific onward, their logbooks and diaries are therefore one day off with respect to ours. I have retained their uncorrected dates because they make more sense as lived experience.
Spanish seamen measured distance in leguas, or nautical leagues. To make the experience of sixteenth-century explorers accessible to modern readers, I have chosen to convert this arcane unit into statute miles like those commonly appearing on road signs throughout the United States (and as opposed to modern nautical miles, representing minutes of arc around the sphere of the Earth). This is easier said than done, however. Leguas could be equivalent to either three or four Roman miles, or some other length, depending on the context. Columbus once helpfully noted that pilots generally used the four-mile Roman league to measure distances at sea. I thus assume that one legua is equivalent to 3.67 miles. This may not hold in every case, but it gives us a rough sense of scale. Converting sixteenth-century Spanish leguas into modern miles is convenient. Yet the question remains: How accurate were their sixteenth-century measurements? At that time, no one knew Earth’s actual size. Lope Martín and Andrés de Urdaneta assumed that each degree of Earth’s circumference measured 17.5 leguas. This would make Earth’s circumference 23,121 miles, somewhat smaller but relatively close to the real value of 24,901 miles.
Acknowledgments
The intellectual debts that I have incurred while writing this book are considerable and too many to list here. The endnotes give a good idea, but I still need to single out a few individuals. Joaquim Alves Gaspar at the Universidade de Lisboa fielded some of my initial questions about charts, latitudes, and longitudes and graciously read chapters and offered detailed comments and suggestions. Ryan Crewe provided many bibliographic leads and sound advice. Alison D. Sandman saved me from embarrassing errors. Ricardo Padrón shared some of his vast cartographic knowledge with me. Omaira Brunal-Perry at the Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam, was immensely helpful. A. Katie Stirling-Harris, my Iberianist colleague at the University of California, Davis, kindly inquired on my behalf and conveyed a wealth of bibliographic leads from Pedro Pinto and Bill M. Donovan. A number of friends and colleagues read portions (or the entirety) of the manuscript, including Ari Kelman, Eva Mehl, Jaana Remes, and Chuck Walker. I am very grateful to Susan Rabiner, my literary agent, and Deanne Urmy, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for their excellent advice and unflagging support. Over the years, I have presented chapters and various materials from this book in conferences, symposia, invited talks, archival visits, casual hallway encounters, coffees, and just querying colleagues in person or by e-mail. In particular, I thank the participants of the UC Davis History Writing Seminar in the winter of 2018 and the members of the Latin American History Workshop in the winter of 2019. My wife, Jaana Remes, our children, Samuel and Vera, my mother, María Teresa Fuentes, my brother Mauricio and his fiancée, Vania, my primos and tíos in Mexico, my family in Finland, and several friends—including the Colmecas, the Broken Tiller Crew, t
he Spice Cadets, the UWCers, and others—have sustained me over the years. I cannot thank them enough.
Notes
Preface
1. The total area of Earth’s landmasses is 148,434,000 sq. km, while that of the Pacific Ocean is 161,760,000 sq. km. The volume of water contained in all oceans is 1,335,000,000 km3, while the volume of water in the Pacific Ocean is 660,000,000 km3, or 49.4 percent. All of these figures and the boundaries of the different oceans used to calculate surfaces and volumes come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html. The swimming comparison assumes a speed of two miles per hour. For the unfortunate angler, see Jonathan Franklin, 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea (New York: Atria Books, 2015), passim. For the experiment with the buoys, see Alan Dotson et al., A Simulation of the Movements of Fields of Drifting Buoys in the North Pacific Ocean (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics, 1977), 12.
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2. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1798), 1.1.73–79.
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3. The quote is from George Howard Darwin, “On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid, and on the Remote History of the Earth,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 170 (1879): 535–36. For an excellent discussion of the development of Darwin’s ideas, see Stephen G. Brush, “Early History of Selenology,” in Origin of the Moon, ed. William K. Hartmann, Roger J. Phillips, and G. Jeffrey Taylor (Kona, HI: Lunar and Planetary Institute, 1986), 2–15.
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4. The quote is from Osmond Fisher, “On the Physical Cause of the Ocean Basins,” Nature (January 12, 1882): 243–44. On the continuing popularity of the Darwin-Fisher theory about the origin of the Moon, see Alfred T. DeLury, “Sir George Howard Darwin,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 7 (1913): 114–19. Present-day astronomy textbooks still make it a point to criticize this theory, once so widely accepted. See H. Karttunen et al., eds., Fundamental Astronomy (New York: Springer, 2009), 195.
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5. The quote comes from a letter that Wegener wrote in 1910 to Else Köppen, in David M. Lawrence, Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 34.
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6. The quote is from Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 75.
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7. The quotes appear in Lawrence, Upheaval from the Abyss, 51 and 58–59.
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8. See D. G. van der Meer et al., “Intra-Panthalassa Ocean Subduction Zones Revealed by Fossil Arcs and Mantle Structure,” Nature Geoscience 5, no. 2 (February 26, 2012): 215–19.
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9. True dinosaurs emerged some 230–240 million years ago, a time when the lands of the world were still relatively close together. For a popular treatment, see Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (New York: William Morrow, 2018), 34–35. For the original paper advancing the theory that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, see Luis W. Alvarez et al., “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” Nature 208, no. 4448 (June 6, 1980): 1095–1108. For the likely site of the impact, see Alan R. Hilde-brand et al., “Chicxulub Crater: A Possible Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary Impact Crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico,” Geology 19 (September 1991): 867–71. For the most complete and accessible account of this remarkable discovery written by one of the protagonists, see Walter Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
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10. The quote is from Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, 14. My description is based entirely on his reconstruction of events. More recently, some scientists have posited that massive volcanic eruptions in what is today India—the so-called Deccan Traps—may have contributed significantly to the mega-death. The debate rages as of this writing. See Paul Voosen, “Did Volcanic Eruptions Help Kill Off the Dinosaurs?,” Science, February 21, 2019.
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11. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 72–76 and 86–87; Nicholas R. Longrich, Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar, and Jacques A. Gauthier, “Mass Extinction of Lizards and Snakes at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 109, no. 52 (December 26, 2012): 21396–401; Nicholas R. Longrich, Tim Tokaryk, and Daniel J. Field, “Mass Extinction of Birds at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) Boundary,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 108, no. 37 (September 13, 2011): 15253–57; Kenneth D. Rose, The Beginning of the Age of Mammals (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 4–5.
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12. Even though ferns are primitive in the sense that they do not produce flowers like the more evolved land plants, they are nonetheless able to reproduce even when conditions are adverse. Not only are ferns not dependent on a delicate cycle involving pollen, pistils, insects, birds, and so on (all of which were surely disrupted by the impact), but also they have the additional advantage of being able to propagate via spores that form on the underside of their leaves in great quantity and are protected by a strong case, or via their modified stems, called rhizomes, which grow above or below the soil surface. New ferns will grow even from a small piece of rhizome. Not surprisingly, many fern species endured. Ferns are characterized by a bi-generational life cycle, although the details of this cycle vary by species. For the case of mammals, see the introduction to Kenneth D. Rose, The Beginning of the Age of Mammals (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Only one cactus was found outside the Americas in ancient times: a spindly species known as mistletoe cactus or Rhipsalis baccifera. Originally from tropical America (possibly southern Brazil), R. baccifera spread before the Age of Discovery to sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. Birds that ate the seed and flew over the Atlantic Ocean likely dispersed it. Other than this very exceptional case, cacti have been (and for the most part remain) New World plants. Edward F. Anderson, The Cactus Family (Portland: Timber Press, 2001), 18; J. Hugo Cota-Sánchez and Márcia C. Bomfim-Patrício, “Seed Morphology, Polyploidy and the Evolutionary History of the Epiphytic Cactus Rhipsalis Baccifera (Cactaceae),” Polibotánica 29 (March 2010): 109.
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13. The quote is from Alfred Russel Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876), 1:14. To be sure, strong-flying birds did not need rafts, and neither did some species like tortoises that simply floated across the ocean while keeping their heads above the water and endured without food or water for up to six months. See Minh Le et al., “A Molecular Phylogeny of Tortoises (Testudines: Testudinidae) Based on Mitochondrial and Nuclear Genes,” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 40, no. 2 (2006): 517–31.
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14. The phrase describing the condition of South America comes from George Gaylord Simpson, Splendid Isolation: The Curious History of South American Mammals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), passim. North America became a separate continent about fifty-five million years ago. Nevertheless, because of its proximity to Siberia, the formation of occasional land bridges through Beringia, and the existence of Greenland as a stepping-stone, North America is not a good place to learn about the crossability of the Atlantic Ocean. South America is a much better gauge. For a useful summary of the African origin of caviomorph rodents and primates, see John J. Flynn, André R. Wyss, and Reynaldo Charrier, “South America’s Missing Mammals,” Scientific American 296 (May 2007): 68–75. On caviomorph rodents, see Céline Poux et al., “Arrival and Diversification of Caviomorph Rodents and Platyrrhine Primates in South America,” Systems Biology 55, no. 2 (2006): 228–44; Pierre-Olivier Antoine et al., “Middle Eocene Rodents from Peruvian Amazonia Reveal the Pattern and Timing of Caviomorph Origins and Biogeography,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 1732 (2011): 1319–26. On the oceanic disper
sal of primates, see among the sources just cited Flynn, Wyss, and Charrier, “South America’s Missing Mammals,” 72–73; and Poux et al., “Arrival and Diversification of Caviomorph Rodents and Platyrrhine Primates in South America,” 240–41.
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15. Geckos and skinks crossed the Atlantic not once but multiple times. No fewer than three different gecko lineages are believed to have crossed the Atlantic on rafts. The details of these momentous journeys will never be known. Nevertheless, their African background coupled with their presence in South America ten, twenty, or thirty million years ago leave little doubt about their movements. Skinks also crossed the Atlantic Ocean several times, and their journeys provide some additional information. Biologists have established that one genus of skink known as Mabuya made two separate Atlantic crossings: one to the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, which lies 225 miles off the coast of Brazil, and another one to the continent. Fernando de Noronha is right on the path of the South Equatorial Current, leading from the Gulf of Guinea to South America, precisely the place where one would expect an errant raft launched from Africa to make landfall. T. Gamble et al., “Coming to America: Multiple Origins of New World Geckos,” Journal of Evolutionary Biology 24, no. 2 (2010): 231–44; S. Carranza, E. N. Arnold, J. A. Mateo, and L. F. López-Jurado, “Long-Distance Colonization and Radiation in Gekkonid Lizards, Tarentola (Reptilia: Gekkonidae), Revealed by Mitochondrial DNA Sequences,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 267 (2000): 637–49; S. Carranza and E. N. Arnold, “Investigating the Origin of Transoceanic Distributions: MtDNA Shows Mabuya Lizards (Reptilia, Scincidae) Crossed the Atlantic Twice,” Systematics and Biodiversity 1, no. 2 (August 2003): 275–78. See also Emma C. Teeling et al., “A Molecular Phylogeny for Bats Illuminates Biogeography and the Fossil Record,”Science 307, no. 5709 (January 2005): 583; Le et al., “A Molecular Phylogeny of Tortoises (Testudines: Testudinidae) Based on Mitochondrial and Nuclear Genes”; Nicolas Vidal et al., “Blindsnake Evolutionary Tree Reveals Long History on Gondwana,” Biology Letters 6, no. 4 (March 2010): 558–61; and Gerald Mayr, Herculano Alvarenga, and Cécil Mourer-Chauviré, “Out of Africa: Fossils Shed Light on the Origin of the Hoatzin, an Iconic Neotropic Bird,” Naturwissenschaften 98, no. 11 (October 2011): 961–66.
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