Conquering the Pacific
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33. The quote is from Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 3:175, emphasis added. The Spanish verb that las Casas used was mostrar, which means either to show or to demonstrate. I believe that the second meaning is more appropriate, given the subsequent actions by Magellan and Faleiro. Rui Faleiro’s initial standing is evident in his appointment as co-captain along with Magellan in the contract drawn up after the audience. Faleiro may even have had an edge over Magellan if we are to judge by the fact that Faleiro’s name appears first in the contracts. For the placement of Faleiro’s name in the documentation, see the contract between the king of Spain, Rui Faleiro, and Ferdinand Magellan and appointment of Rui Faleiro and Ferdinand Magellan as captains, both in Valladolid, March 22, 1518, in Navarrete, Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos, 4:116–21 and 121–22, respectively. The need to extend the line to the other side is already evident in the years between 1495 and 1503. See “Información sobre el derecho que tenían los reyes católicos a las indias e islas del Mar Océano y acerca de las diferencias que tenían con el Rey don Manuel de Portugal por la propiedad de dichas islas,” n.p., n.d. (but between 1495 and 1503), in Colección general de documentos relativos a las Islas Filipinas existentes en el Archivo de Indias de Sevilla, vol. 5, document 210.
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34. Laguarda Trías, “Las longitudes geográficas de la membranza de Magallanes y del primer viaje de circunnavegación,” 148–74; and Joaquim Alves Gaspar, “A cartografia náutica no tempo de Magalhães,” unpublished paper presented at the Simpósio Viagem de Circum-Navegação e Ciência: Diálogos à Volta do Mundo, Ponte da Barca, April 27, 2019. I want to express my gratitude to Joaquim Alves Gaspar for shedding light on the sources of Magellan’s conviction about the location of the Spice Islands.
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35. Most famously, on September 20, 331 BCE, Alexander the Great and his soldiers were marching through Arbela (Erbil) in northern Iraq when a lunar eclipse occurred “at the fifth hour.” Several men had vivid recollections because eleven days later they defeated Darius III of Persia and came to regard the eclipse as a portent of their impending victory. Thousands of miles to the west, in Carthage, Tunisia, the same lunar event was recorded “at the second hour.” Ptolemy estimated that the three-hour difference between Arbela and Carthage represented forty-five degrees of the globe. This method remained in use for a very long time. More than fifteen hundred years later, on September 17, 1494, Columbus witnessed a lunar eclipse while exploring what is now the Dominican Republic and still resorted to the same logic to figure out how far west he had traveled since leaving Spain. Although Ptolemy’s deduction was entirely correct, the real difference between Arbela and Carthage is only thirty-four degrees. The problem was that the eclipse had occurred two centuries earlier, and thus Ptolemy had to rely on terribly inaccurate reports about the timing of this celestial event. Over the centuries since Ptolemy, astronomers and navigators learned that timing a lunar eclipse accurately is not a trivial problem, as such events always start with a very subtle, almost imperceptible darkening of the Moon when it moves into the penumbra. The chances of accurate measurements increase when the Moon passes through the more sharply defined umbra but in a trajectory that often veers off to one side or the other of the dark circle except in the rare event of a total eclipse. Other than lunar eclipses, many celestial events such as conjunctions, planetary transits, and solar eclipses could have been used to determine longitude. Nevertheless, conjunctions and transits frequently require a telescope to observe and are extremely difficult to measure with the necessary accuracy. Total solar eclipses are very rare and therefore impractical. For the case of Ptolemy, see the introduction to Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, trans. and ed. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29–30. For Columbus, see Laguarda Trías, “Las longitudes geográficas de la membranza de Magallanes y del primer viaje de circunnavegación,” 139–41; and Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 653–55. In 1514, Nuremberg mathematician and astronomer Johannes Werner found yet another solution to the problem of longitude. His method consisted of measuring the passage of the Moon (much closer to us) against a seemingly “fixed” star (much farther away) to establish an absolute clock of sorts, compare it to the local time, and thus derive the east-west difference between two points on Earth. See António Costa Canas, “Longitude,” in Dicionário da expansão Portuguesa, ed. Francisco Contente Domingues, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 2016), 1:653–55.
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36. My discussion is based on Luís de Albuquerque, “Instruments for Measuring Altitude and the Art of Navigation,” in Cortesão, History of Portuguese Cartography, 2:412–19; Alves Gaspar, “From the Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean to the Latitude Chart of the Atlantic,”18; and João de Lisboa, Livro de marinharia: Tratado da Agulha de Marear (Lisbon: Imprensa de Libânio da Silva, 1903), 20–21. The “north” indicated by the North Star was in fact about three and a half degrees away from exact north.
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37. For the Cantino Planisphere, see Alves Gaspar, “From the Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean to the Latitude Chart of the Atlantic,” 18. Luís Teixeira drew the first known isogonic chart around 1585. See K. M. Mathew, History of the Portuguese Navigation in India (1497–1600) (Delhi: Mital Publications, 1988), 59; and Joaquim Alves Gaspar and Henrique Leitão, “Luís Teixeira, c. 1585: The Earliest Known Chart with Isogonic Lines,” Imago Mundi 70, no. 2 (May 2018): 221–28.
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38. Magnetic declinations for San Francisco and the other cities come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag-web/#declination, and the values correspond to September 18, 2016.
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39. In the 1520s, no one knew that magnetic declinations change over time. I thank Alison D. Sandman for her sound advice. On our erratic magnetic pole, see Alexandra Witze, “Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Acting Up and Geologists Don’t Know Why,” Nature, January 9, 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1. Magnetic declination was an unreliable and confusing system for establishing longitude. Nonetheless, it was still useful as an aid to navigation and indeed remained in use until the eighteenth century, when the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, Edmond Halley, was still compiling magnetic charts. See Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 281–84.
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40. Teixeira da Mota, “A contribuição dos irmãos Rui e Francisco Faleiro no campo da náutica em Espanha”; and especially Teixeira da Mota, O regimento da altura de leste-oeste de Rui Faleiro, passim. Rui Faleiro’s text submitted to the Spanish crown was thought for a long time to have been lost. In 1793, however, Martín Fernández de Navarrete published a document from the Spanish archives in Seville that turned out to be Rui Faleiro’s method. Moreover, as Joaquim Bensaúde was able to show, a document attributed to Antonio Pigafetta (the most famous chronicler of Magellan’s circumnavigation voyage) at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan also proved to be another version of Faleiro’s method, or regimento as it is called in Portuguese. Of these two versions, the one from Seville is the more complete. It discusses three methods of determining longitude: the first two—one by the latitude of the Moon and the other one by the conjunction and opposition of the Moon and the stars—are discussed only briefly. The third method, based on magnetic declination, is the only one described in detail and thus the one expected to be used during the expedition. In the end, Rui Faleiro did not go on the expedition. The man who replaced him as chief pilot, Andrés de San Martín, was very competent and was able to make longitude observations in the Spice Islands. San Martín concluded that Faleiro’s system based on magnetic declinations did not work. He also believed that the Spice Islands were on the Portuguese side of the world after all. See Laguarda Trías, “Las longitudes geográficas de la membranza de Maga
llanes y del primer viaje de circunnavegación”; and Alves Gaspar, “A cartografia náutica no tempo de Magalhães”; and personal communication.
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41. Magellan and his contemporaries generally believed that the Pacific was much smaller than it actually is. For an excellent discussion of the changing images of the Pacific, see Ricardo Padrón, “A Sea of Denial: The Early Modern Spanish Invention of the Pacific Rim,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 1–27.
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42. The expeditions in question are Gil González Dávila in 1521, Juan García Jofre de Loaísa in 1525, Sebastian Cabot in 1526, Álvaro de Saavedra in 1527, Pedro de Alvarado in 1533, Hernando de Grijalva in 1537, and Ruy López de Villalobos in 1542. This last expedition can be best understood as a three-pronged attempt at reaching Asia: an overland expedition led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a coastal expedition under Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, and the transpacific voyage of Villalobos. See Flint and Flint, A Most Splendid Company, 87–89. The expeditions of González Dávila and Cabot did not even make it into the Pacific. For sketches of the other voyages, see Amancio Landín Carrasco, ed., Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 3 vols. (Madrid: Editorial Naval, 1992), passim. Some of the same ground is covered in Henry R. Wagner, “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century. Chapter V: The Occupation of the Philippines and the Discovery of the Return Route,” California Historical Society Quarterly 7, no. 2 (June 1928): 132–93; Harry Kelsey, “Finding the Way Home: Spanish Exploration of the Round Trip Route Across the Pacific Ocean,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (April 1986): 145–68; and Andrew Christian Peterson, “Making the First Global Trade Route: The Southeast Asian Foundations of the Acapulco-Manila Galleon Trade, 1519–1650” (Ph.D diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mˉanoa, 2014), chaps. 2 and 3.
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43. The quote is from a letter from Francisco Xavier to Simón Rodríguez, Goa, April 8, 1552, transcribed in Isacio Rodríguez Rodríguez, O.S.A., “Andrés de Urdaneta, agustino, 500 años del descubridor del tornaviaje,” in Andrés de Urdaneta: Un hombre moderno, ed. Susana Truchuelo García (Ordizia, Spain: Ayuntamiento de Ordizia, 2009), 207. Some of the most useful works on Magellan’s voyage include Alfredo Cominges Bárcena et al., “La primera circunnavegación,” and Amancio Landín Carrasco and Mario Romero de Pazos, “Gómez de Espinosa y su intento de regreso por el Pacífico,” both in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 1:89–160 and 163–86, respectively. For a popular treatment, see Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World. For the return attempts in 1528 and 1529, see Juan Génova Sotil and Fernando Guillén Salvertti, “Viaje de Saavedra, desde Nueva España,” in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 1:223–68. For the vuelta of 1543, see Roberto Barreiro-Meiro Fernández, “Bernardo de la Torre y su intento de tornaviaje,” in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 2:361–75; and for that of 1545, see Juan Génova Sotil, “Ortiz de Retes, por aguas australes,” in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 2:379–402.
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2. Dream Team
1. For Philip’s life, see the works cited in the next note. Even though the 1557 order to launch an expedition to Asia came from Philip II, the impetus to cross the Pacific had never ceased in Mexico itself. In particular, Don Antonio de Mendoza, the viceroy of Mexico between 1535 and 1550, embarked on a three-pronged strategy to reach Asia by land, by coastal sailing, and via a transpacific voyage led by Villalobos. See Flint and Flint, A Most Splendid Company, 87–89. Although Viceroy Mendoza ultimately failed in opening regular trade with Asia, he discussed the possibility of finding the return voyage across the Pacific with his successor, Don Luis de Velasco, when the two met in 1550. (For the purposes of this book, I have chosen to use the modern spelling of “Luis,” omitting the accent mark.) There is no question that this long-standing Mexican enthusiasm for the Orient—involving conquistadors, the church, and viceregal authorities—influenced Philip’s 1557 decision. For this lingering interest in reaching Asia originating in Mexico, see Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 274–75; Serge Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), passim; and Flint and Flint, A Most Splendid Company, passim. I thank Ryan Crewe for his excellent interpretive and bibliographic leads.
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2. The first quote is from the bishop of Limoges in Hugh Thomas, World Without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire (New York: Random House, 2014), 298. Philip’s admission is from 1557 and appears in Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), xvii. Parker offers the most insightful portrait. See also Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 12–20.
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3. The first quote comes from Friar Gerónimo de Santiesteban to Viceroy of Mexico Antonio de Mendoza, Cochin, India, January 22, 1547, transcribed in the Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista, y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, vol. 13 (Madrid: Imprenta de José María Pérez, 1870), 151–64. The second quote is from Ruy López de Villalobos to Viceroy of Mexico Antonio de Mendoza, n.p., 1545, transcribed in the account written by García de Escalante Alvarado, Lisbon, August 1, 1548, in Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, vol. 5 (Madrid: Imprenta de Frias y Compañía, 1866), 183. It was too late for Villalobos. A year after writing this letter, he would succumb after suffering from very high fevers on Ambon Island (one of the Spice Islands). The Villalobos expedition of 1542–1548 is well covered in the literature. See especially Roberto Barreiro-Meiro Fernández and Amancio Landín Carrasco, “La expedición de Ruy López de Villalobos,” in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 2:319–58; Gaspar de San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, 1565–1615 (Manila: San Agustín Museum, 1998), chaps. 6–7. The first news about the expedition reached the Iberian Peninsula only in the summer of 1547, when a Portuguese armada coming from India brought letters from some of the Spanish expeditionaries. The survivors would arrive one year later. Consuelo Varela, El viaje de don Ruy López de Villalobos a las Islas del Poniente, 1542–1548 (Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1983), 15–16.
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4. On the news trickling into Spain by way of Portugal and the sensitivities around the division of the world, see the information given by Viceroy of Mexico Antonio de Mendoza to Juan de Aguilar to pass on to the Spanish king and the Council of the Indies, Mexico City, 1544, Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), Patronato, 24, R. 10.
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5. For the naming of the archipelago of Saint Lazarus, see Antonio Pigafetta, “Primo viaggio intorno al mondo,” in Magellan’s Voyage Around the World, primary source ed., 2 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906), 1:104–5. The exact date of their arrival had been March 16, 1521. Much of the documentation in the Spanish archives during the first half of the sixteenth century uses the term “las Islas del Poniente.” The first mention of “las Islas Filipinas” occurs in the account of García de Escalante Alvarado, Lisbon, August 1, 1548, transcribed in the Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, 5:117–209. For the most succinct and accurate explanation of the origins of the name “las Islas Filipinas” by a sixteenth-century witness, see the writings of geographer Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias (Madrid: Impresor de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1894), 581–82. Gerardo Mercator, the Flemish geographer famous for his novel projection, includes supporting evidence for this usage in his map of the world of 1569. See Barreiro-Meiro Fernández and Landín Carrasco, “La
expedición de Ruy López de Villalobos,” 340–41.
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6. King Philip II to Viceroy of Mexico Luis de Velasco, Valladolid, September 21, 1557, transcribed in Muro, “La expedición Legazpi-Urdaneta a las Filipinas,” 208–9. As explained earlier, Viceroy Luis de Velasco had discussed the need to find the return route from Asia with his predecessor in 1550. See Ma. Justina Sarabia Viejo, Don Luís de Velasco virrey de Nueva España, 1550–1564 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979), 464. For Philip’s accession to the throne, see Parker, Imprudent King, 49–56; and Kamen, Philip of Spain, 63–71.
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7. All the quotes are from King Philip II to Viceroy of Mexico Luis de Velasco, Valladolid, September 21, 1557, transcribed in Muro, “La expedición Legazpi-Urdaneta a las Filipinas,” 208–9. The majority of sixteenth-century expeditions were financed with private funds. See Flint and Flint, A Most Splendid Company, 61–63. To be sure, the Spanish crown directly organized expeditions such as those of Columbus, Pedrarias Dávila, Loaísa, and some others. Still, as Oviedo wrote in his famous chronicle, “their Majesties almost never risk their wealth and money in these new expeditions of discovery.” Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, 4:300.