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4. A Disappearance
1. Log of pilot Esteban Rodríguez, 1565, in CDIU 2, document 33, entries for November 20 and 21. I also consulted the other version in “Derroteros y relaciones de los pilotos del viaje a Filipinas,” AGI, Patronato, 23, R. 16. Exactly what the criers may have said is unknown. This is the version provided by veteran mariner Juan de Escalante de Mendoza while departing for the Indies, transcribed in Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 69.
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2. For the rations, see the instructions issued by Commander Legazpi to his captains, boatswains, and pilots, Navidad, November 21, transcribed in Muro, “La expedición Legazpi-Urdaneta a las Filipinas,” 214. In this example I use the rations for the soldiers, as crew members received slightly different amounts. The equivalences from sixteenth-century Spanish libras to pounds and from cuartillos to pints are rough approximations but serviceable. See Mariano Esteban Piñeiro, “Las medidas en la época de Felipe II: La uniformación de las medidas,” http://museovirtual.csic.es/salas/medida/medidas_y_matematicas/articulos/Capitulo3.pdf. For additional context I have relied on Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, esp. chap. 4. For concrete evidence of wine in Legazpi’s fleet, see payment to Rodrigo de Alcázar for two pipas or casks of wine in Rubio Mañé, “La expedición de Miguel López de Legazpi a Filipinas,” document 41. On how spirits were used as a tool during bad weather, see Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Giro del Mondo (Naples: Giuseppe Roselli, 1708), bk. 3, chap. 6.
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3. The comparison of life on a ship to sharing an urban apartment appears in Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 130–31. See also María del Carmen Mena García, Sevilla y las flotas de Indias: La gran armada de Castilla del Oro (1513–1514) (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1998), 409–17.
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4. The quotes are from the instructions given by Commander Legazpi to the captains, boatswains, and pilots, Navidad, November 22, 1564, AGI, Patronato, 52, R. 4; and “Información de Juan de la Isla,” transcribed in Muro, “La expedición Legazpi-Urdaneta a las Filipinas,” 212–15. See also the instructions given by the Audiencia of Mexico to Commander Legazpi, Mexico City, September 1, 1564, in CDIU 2, document 21. For life aboard ships, see Francisco Contente Domingues and Inácio Guerreiro, A vida a bordo na carreira da Índia (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1988), 198–99; and José María López Piñero, El arte de navegar en la España del Renacimiento (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1986), 119–20. On the division of the day, see Fontoura da Costa, A ciência náutica dos Portugueses na Época dos Descobrimentos (Lisbon: Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do Quinto Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1958), 60–61. Although these divisions correspond to Portuguese voyages, they were likely the same in Spanish. Columbus, for instance, also mentions the alva.
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5. The quotes are from the instructions given by the Audiencia of Mexico to Commander Legazpi, Mexico City, September 1, 1564, in CDIU 2, document 21. The pilots’ logbooks record the mid-ocean meeting on Saturday, November 25, 1564.
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6. The quote is from Friar Andrés de Urdaneta to King Philip II, Mexico City, May 28, 1560, in CDIU 2, document 13. The second quote is from Commander Miguel López de Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada de los acontecimientos y suceso del viaje . . .,” Philippines, May 27, 1565, in CDIU 2, document 27, hereafter Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.”
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7. The quote is from the log of pilot Esteban Rodríguez, 1565, in CDIU 2, document 33, entry for Sunday, November 26, 1564. See also Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.”
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8. Pilot Rodríguez’s log, 1565, in CDIU 2, document 33, entry for December 1–2, 1564. For Legazpi’s orders to Lope Martín to move ahead, see Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.”
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9. Don Alonso de Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada . . . ,” Mexico, 1565, transcribed in CDIU 3, document 37, hereafter Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada”; Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada”; and the pilot Rodríguez’s log, 1565, in CDIU 2, document 33, entry for December 1–2, 1564. See chapter 10 for a full discussion of whether the separation was accidental or deliberate. For a brief summary of the case against Martín and Arellano, see Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje redondo de Alonso de Arellano,” 474–76.
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5. Mar Abierto
1. As the crow flies, the distance between the port of Navidad and Mejit Island is 5,629 miles, and easily more than six thousand miles if we allow for the unavoidable deviations from the great circle distance (i.e., the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere). Although Captain Cook is generally regarded as the first European to have made landfall in the Hawaiian Islands, the possibility of earlier European visits is not entirely out of the question. For instance, see Roberto Barreiro-Meiro Fernández and Amancio Landín Carrasco, “El descubrimiento de las Hawaii,” in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 405–34. I remain unconvinced.
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2. I have to reiterate here that, although oceanographically speaking, a gyre refers solely or primarily to the ocean currents, in this book I use the term more broadly to include both the wind driving the ocean current as well as the current itself. I justify this broad usage because, from a sailing perspective, both currents and winds determine what is possible and what is impossible. For the Coriolis effect, I hasten to add that the ocean currents in a gyre parallel the prevailing zonal winds not directly because of wind drag but because of geostrophic flow—a dynamic balance between Coriolis force and pressure gradient. For the wind-driven ocean currents, the Ekman spiral, and the geostrophic flow, I rely on Paul R. Pinet, Invitation to Oceanography (Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2016), 188–205. On the impact of ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation) on the Pacific gyres, see William H. Quinn, Victor T. Neal, and Santiago E. Antunez de Mayolo, “El Niño Occurrences over the Past Four and a Half Centuries,” Journal of Geophysical Research 92, no. C13 (December 1987): 14,449–61. As the authors explain, to determine whether an ENSO event had occurred in the distant past with reasonable accuracy, they looked at various clues and evidentiary strands, the first of which consisted of a significant deviation of normal travel/sailing times along the coast of northern South America related to changes in wind and current patterns.
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3. The best discussion of this maneuver (also known as the volta pelo largo, volta da Guiné, or volta da Mina) is still Gago Coutinho, A náutica dos descobrimentos, I1:197–271. Felipe Fernández-Armesto helpfully warns that, although running with the wind makes sense, there are many examples in the history of maritime exploration in which the voyagers headed into the wind because returning was as important as going. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Portuguese Expansion in Global Context,” in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 496–97. Unlike the other gyres, the Indian Ocean gyre reverses direction during the year. It normally moves counterclockwise, but in the winter months it changes course as a result of a complicated mechanism involving heat changes on the Asian mainland. Even before the Christian era, navigators of the Indian Ocean began using these seasonal winds for trade. The monsoon winds were decisive for a successful return from Asia to the Americas, as we shall see. For a general discussion, see Greg Bankoff, “Aeolian Empires: The Influence of Winds and Currents on European Maritime Expansion in the Days of Sail,” Environment and History 23 (2017): 163–96.
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4. Admiral Coutinho discusses this case at length in A náutica dos descobrimentos, 1:268–71. See also Maria Armanda de Mira Ribeiro F. Ramos Taveira, “Os roteiros portugueses do Atlântico de finais do século XV à primeira década do século XVII” (MA thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1994), 190–200.
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5. On the Sargasso Sea, see Gago Coutinho, A náutica dos descobrimentos, 1:271. The quote about the “seagull with red legs and other small birds” comes from Vicente Rodrigues, cited in Ramos Taveira, “Os roteiros portugueses do Atlântico de finais do século XV à primeira década do século XVII,” 190–91. A debate exists about when the Azores were sighted for the first time, with possibilities going back to the Middle Ages. Whether the Portuguese discovered or merely rediscovered this archipelago, what matters for our purposes is the timing of their definitive exploration and settlement. Various “signs” or señas like Sargassum, birds, and later kelp and marine mammals in the Pacific are expertly discussed in Salvador Bernabéu Albert, “La ‘audiencia de las señas’: Los significados de una ceremonia jocose en la nao de China,” in Albert, La nao de China, 1565–1815, 91–117.
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6. Portuguese navigators used variants of this basic route to India until the nineteenth century. See the discussion in Domingues and Guerreiro, A vida a bordo na carreira da Índia, 192–95; Diffie and Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 175–91; Rossfelder, In Pursuit of Longitude, 55–56; Gago Coutinho, A náutica dos descobrimentos, 1:271–314; and Ramos Taveira, “Os roteiros portugueses do Atlântico de finais do século XV à primeira década do século XVII,” 190–200.
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7. The quote is from Vasco da Gama; see the lecture by António Baião, “Borrão original da primeira folha das instruções de Vasco da Gama para a viagem de Cabral,” n.p., n.d., in Max Justo Guedes, O descobrimento do Brasil (Lisbon: Vega, 1966), document b, 115. In turn, Vasco da Gama learned about the difficulties of a coastal route and the possibilities of a second volta from Bartolomeu Dias, who first reached the tip of Africa. My discussion is based on Gago Coutinho, A náutica dos descobrimentos, 1:271–314; and Ramos Taveira, “Os roteiros portugueses do Atlântico de finais do século XV à primeira década do século XVII,” 190–200.
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8. The quote by Bernardo Fernandes appears in Avelino Teixeira da Mota, “Atlantic Winds and Ocean Currents in Portuguese Documents,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 73, no. 1 (1972): 63. Teixeira da Mota offers other examples of the term ventos gerais being used from 1535 onward.
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9. Gago Coutinho, A náutica dos descobrimentos, 2:334. The historiography on Magellan is vast, but some of the most useful works include Amândio Barros, O homem que navegou o mundo: Em busca das origens de Magalhães (Braga: Publicações de Bruno Daniel Barbosa Antunes, 2015); and Avelino Teixeira da Mota, ed., A viagem de Fernão de Magalhães e a questão das Molucas (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar, 1975). Valuable biographical information can still be found in Visconde de Lagôa, Fernão de Magalhãis (Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1938); Joyner, Magellan; and José Manuel Garcia, A viagem de Fernão de Magalhães e os Portugueses (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 2007).
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10. Prior to 1520, the Pacific Ocean was known as the South Sea, and it would continue to be known as such for a long time. See O.H.K. Spate, “ ‘South Sea to ‘Pacific Ocean’: A Note on Nomenclature,” Journal of Pacific History 12, no. 4 (1977): 205–11. The Pacific Ocean is often quite challenging to navigate in the area close to the Strait of Magellan. An example of more typical sailing conditions can be found in Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1970), chap. 8. It is likely that an ENSO phenomenon occurred during 1519–20 and may well have contributed to the peacefulness of the Pacific when Magellan first entered it. See Scott M. Fitzpatrick and Richard Callaghan, “Magellan’s Crossing of the Pacific: Using Computer Simulations to Examine Oceanographic Effects on One of the World’s Greatest Voyages,”Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 2 (September 2008): 145–65.
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11. Magellan’s route matches perfectly well with present-day routes. For instance, evaluating the best routes from southern Chile toward the South Pacific islands, the author of World Cruising Routes specifically states that “the route will be decided by the position of the South Pacific High [the area of high pressure around which the gyre turns], normally centered on 30°S,” precisely where Magellan’s fleet turned west. Cornell, World Cruising Routes, 383. On the decision to cross the equator, one of Magellan’s pilots later commented that the reason was that they believed they would not find enough food in the Spice Islands. See Fitzpatrick and Callaghan, “Magellan’s Crossing of the Pacific,” 145–65.
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12. The quote is from the report written by Urdaneta and probably intended for Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco (although Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza is the one whose name appears on the document), n.p., April 1573 (a date that is much too late for either Mendoza or Velasco), AGI, Patronato, 46, R. 10. Pedro de Alvarado’s 1533 expedition is the only one that departed from the coast of Guatemala. It sailed some four hundred leagues and eventually drifted toward the coast of Peru. For the other expeditions, see the discussion that follows in the text.
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13. The quote is from Hernán Cortés to Emperor Charles V, Coyoacán, May 15, 1522, in Documentos cortesianos, ed. José Luis Martínez, 4 vols. (Mexico City: UNAM-FCE, 1990), 1:231. Detailed information about the outfitting of this expedition as well as one of the main narratives can be found in “Relación de cuentas de los gastos que hizo Cortés en ese viaje en 1529” and “Relación de Vicencio de Nápoles que fue con Saavedra el descubrimiento del Maluco,” both in AGN, Hospital de Jesús 53, vol. 438, file 1. According to Nápoles, the daily distances covered by La Florida—between twenty-five and forty leagues, and up to seventy—are extraordinary to the point of being difficult to believe. The main point, however, is that the ship benefited immensely from favorable winds and currents. For brief treatments of the Saavedra expedition, see Basil Thomson, “Lost Explorers of the Pacific,” Geographical Journal 44, no. 1 (July 1914): 12–29; Harry Kelsey, The First Circumnavigators: Unsung Heroes of the Age of Discovery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Wagner, “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century”; and above all Juan Génova Sotil and Fernando Guillén Salvetti, “Viaje de Saavedra desde Nueva España,” in Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, 1:238.
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14. Varela, El viaje de don Ruy López de Villalobos, passim; and Barreiro-Meiro Fernández and Landín Carrasco, “La expedición de Ruy López de Villalobos.”
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15. My calculations assume that the Micronesian islands are scattered over 2,900,000 square miles of ocean (versus 3,120,000 for the lower forty-eight states) while occupying a mere 271 square miles (versus 1,034 for Rhode Island). Many scholars object to the use of Micronesia as a geohistorical category. For a brief discussion, see Paul Rainbird, The Archaeology of Micronesia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 3. For the identification of Islas de los Reyes with Faraulep, I follow Génova Sotil and Guillén Salvetti, “Viaje de Saavedra desde Nueva España,” 1:238–45. For the identification of Matalotes, see Barreiro-Meiro Fernández and Landín Carrasco, “La expedición de Ruy López de Villalobos,” 334–37. The term matalote comes from the French matelot, or sailor. It is doubtful that earlier Spaniards had visited the island. More likely the locals had traveled to other islands where they had come in contact with Spaniards (or with other islanders who had) and thus learned the Spanish words.
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16. For a discussion of the pilots’ latitude estimates at Navidad, see Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje de Legazpi a Filipinas,” 446–47. The logbook entry is by Esteban Rodríguez, the piloto mayor, “Relación y derrotero,” December 6, 1565, in CDIU 2, document 33.
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17. The quote and information are from the orders given by Commander Legazpi to the captains and pilots about the route that they should follow, Pacific Ocean, November 25, 1564, in CDIU 2, document 26.
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18. The quotes are from L
egazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.” On the origins of parallel sailing harking back to the Azores, see Alves Gaspar, “From the Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean to the Latitude Chart of the Atlantic,” 13–14.
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6. The Tiny Islands
1. Frank L. Peterson, “Hydrogeology of the Marshall Islands,” in Geology and Hydrogeology of Carbonate Islands, ed. H. L. Vacher and T. M. Quinn (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997), 613.
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2. The quotes are from the entry for January 9, 1565, in Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.” Mejit Island is actually at ten degrees and seventeen minutes of northern latitude. On the identification of the island encountered by Legazpi on January 9, 1565, as Mejit, I follow Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje de Legazpi a Filipinas,” 451–52.
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3. The quotes are from the entry for January 9, 1565, in Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.”
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4. The quotes are from the logbook entry for January 10, 1565, Rodríguez, “Derroteros y relaciones de los pilotos del viaje a Filipinas”; and the entry for January 12, 1565, in Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.” Esteban Rodríguez actually gave the name corrales to some of the islands. See his entry for January 12.
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5. The quotes are from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” For the identification of this place as Likiep Atoll, see Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje redondo de Alonso de Arellano,” 477.
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6. Quotes from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” The identification of this island as Kwajalein Atoll is from Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje redondo de Alonso de Arellano,” 478.
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7. The first quote is from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” The second quote is from Friar Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description of the West Indies (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1942), 272. Vázquez de Espinosa traveled to the Philippines in the 1620s. His botanical observations are invaluable. For an overview of Micronesians, see Glenn Petersen, Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), passim. On the strategy for surviving storms, see Rainbird, The Archaeology of Micronesia, 52. For an example of the transformative role of new crops, see Glenn Petersen, “Micronesia’s Breadfruit Revolution and the Evolution of a Culture Area,” Archaeology in Oceania 41, no. 2 (July 2006): 82–92.
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