Conquering the Pacific
Page 28
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15. All quotes are from Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.”
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16. All quotes are from Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.” Tuasan’s explanation was entirely correct, as Legazpi and other fleet officials were able to corroborate. See Commander Miguel López de Legazpi, “Información sobre el daño que los Portugueses del Maluco hicieron en las Filipinas,” island of Bohol, March 25, 1565, in CDIU 3, document 43; and Guido de Lavezaris, Andrés Cauchela, and Andrés de Mirandaola to the Audiencia of Mexico, Cebu, May 28, 1565, in CDIU 3, document 31.
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17. The first quote is from Commander Miguel López de Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada . . .,” Philippines, May 27, 1565, CDIU II, document 27. The second quote is from “Auto para poblar a Cebú,” Bohol, April 21, 1565, AGI, transcription made for the Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam. On the choice of Cebu, see also the introductory essay by Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera in Los primeros de Filipinas: Crónicas de la conquista del archipiélago de San Lázaro, ed. Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 1995), 43. Cebu, however, was not ideal for international trade. For instance, Chinese sailing guides published in 1617 clearly avoided inland Visayan waters. See Scott, Barangay, 75; and Chen Ching-Ho, The Chinese Community in the Sixteenth-Century Philippines (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1968), chaps. 1 and 2.
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18. “Requerimientos y apercibimientos que se hicieron a los indios y nunca quisieron venir de paz,” Cebu, April 28, 1565, AGI, transcription for the Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam.
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19. “Requerimientos y apercibimientos que se hicieron a los indios y nunca quisieron venir de paz,” Cebu, April 28, 1565, AGI, transcription for the Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam.
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20. The first quote is from Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.” For the quote from Juan de Camuz, see “Testimony about the Christ Child found in the Philippines,” Cebu, May 16, 1565, in CDIU 3, document 42.
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21. The quote is from Legazpi, “Relación circunstanciada.” See also “Testimony about the Christ Child found in the Philippines.”
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9. Vuelta
1. On the return attempt of the Trinidad, see Landín Carrasco and Romero de Pazos, “Gómez de Espinosa y su intento de regreso por el Pacífico,” 163–86.
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2. On the first attempt of the Villalobos expedition, see Barreiro-Meiro Fernández, “Bernardo de la Torre y su intento de tornaviaje.” For Villalobos’s second return attempt, see Génova Sotil, “Ortiz de Retes, por aguas australes.”
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3. It is possible that castaways from Japan may have drifted to the coast of North America before 1565, but no clear evidence of any such event has reached us, at least not to my knowledge. For some context, see Frederik L. Schodt, Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2003), 57–60.
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4. We know that Legazpi’s fleet was in Bohol on April 21, 1565, and arrived in Cebu six days later, on April 27 (see the previous chapter), where it remained. Don Alonso’s account is less precise as to the timing and ports visited, but we know that the San Lucas left from a cove in southeastern Mindanao on March 4, 1565, passed through “Magellan’s Island,” or Cebu, and reached what the expeditionaries called the “Islas del Cabo” somewhere on the San Bernardino Strait on April 21–22, 1565. The distance between Cebu and the San Bernardino Strait is 165 miles as the crow flies. On a sailing ship, this would have taken at least three days, and therefore we can be certain that the San Lucas could not have been in Cebu any later than April 18, 1565, ahead of the rest of the fleet by at least nine days. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” For the mistaken assertion, see San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, 1565–1615, 236–37.
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5. All the quotes are from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.”
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6. For an introduction to wind circulation, see Pinet, Invitation to Oceanography, chap. 6; and for cruising routes out of the Philippines, see Cornell, World Cruising Routes, 265–313.
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7. On Urdaneta’s obvious knowledge of the monsoon and the general circulation of currents and winds in the Pacific, see Miguel Bosch, “Las dificultades náuticas del tornaviaje,” 495–98.
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8. Of the previous return attempts across the Pacific, the one aboard the Trinidad during the Magellan expedition began on April 6, 1522. The first return attempt of the Saavedra expedition did not start until June 12, 1528, its progress by way of the coast of New Guinea was extremely slow, and thus by early September it had only reached the Caroline Islands. The following year the Saavedra expedition tried again, starting more than a month earlier, on May 3, 1529, but progress was even slower this time (also by way of New Guinea), reaching the Carolines only in late September or early October. The first return attempt of the Villalobos expedition did not depart until August 4, 1543, and made good progress, but because of the late start and lack of water had to turn back on October 18, 1543. The second return attempt of the Villalobos expedition started on the island of Tidore on May 16, 1545, once again by way of the coast of New Guinea, resulting in a very slow and meandering trajectory. For all of the return attempt reconstructions, I rely on Landín Carrasco, Descubrimientos españoles en el Mar del Sur, passim. Other navigators also agreed that the best time to return began in late April. Juan de la Isla, for instance, wrote in 1565 that “from the end of April to the end of October was a time of vendavales [storms] that were nonetheless useful for the return voyage.” Possibly Juan de la Isla, “Relación de las Islas del Poniente y del camino que a ella se hizo desde la Nueva España.”
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9. The quote is from Gemelli Careri, Giro del Mondo, bk. 3, chap. 1. The information about the storms endured by Spanish navigators in the seventeenth century comes from Schurz, The Manila Galleon, 253–55. On the galleons lost, see James Francis Warren, “Weather, History, and Empire: The Typhoon Factor and the Manila Galleon Trade, 1565–1815,” in Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past, ed. Geoff Wade and Li Tana (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012), 183. For present-day sailing recommendations and typhoons, see Cornell, World Cruising Routes, 308–9. The year 2015 alone witnessed a staggering twenty-seven tropical storms—eighteen typhoons, and nine super-typhoons—and a total of fifty-four meteorological events for an average of about one per week. Although in North America we tend to hear more about the hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the western North Pacific is more active still.
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10. The first quote comes from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” The second quote appears in the “Parecer dado a Antonio de Mendoza: Viaje al Maluco,” n.p., April 1573, AGI, Patronato, 46, R. 10. In spite of its present classification and dating, this parecer was written by Urdaneta for Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco sometime before November 1564. See also Miguel Bosch, “Las dificultades náuticas del tornaviaje,” 489–90. The sources indicate that Magellan’s Trinidad weighed between 110 and 120 tons. Interestingly, Villalobos’s orders were to attempt the return not with the sixty-ton San Juan de Letrán but with the bigger and sturdier galleon San Jorge, which weighed 120 tons. The crew was of the same opinion, evidently believing that a larger ship would have a better chance of succeeding. The commander’s determination, however, was to try the return with the lighter San Juan de Letrán, probably motivated by vested interests. See Barreiro-Meiro Fernández, “Bernardo de la Torre y su intento de tornaviaje,” 362.
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11. The quote comes from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” Instead of seventy days, the return voyage lasted 109 days: 1.56 times longer. This would bring down the daily water
ration to a disquieting 5.6 cups. For an excellent discussion of pipas, arrobas, and measurements of volume in sixteenth-century ships, see Dueñas Fontán,“Medidas de los navíos de la jornada de Inglaterra,”11–12. On life aboard the ships, see Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, 144. My calculation of the total amount of water aboard the San Lucas assumes that four of the pipas were missing four arrobas of water each and the other four lacked five arrobas. It also assumes that a cup of water contains eight ounces, or sixteen cups per gallon. For some present-day ideas about hydration, see Jessica Brown, “How Much Water Should You Drink a Day?,” BBC, April 5, 2019.
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12. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” My calculation of the amount of food assumes that a quintal is equivalent to one hundred Castilian pounds, about forty-six kilograms, or 101.4 modern pounds, and further assumes a return voyage lasting 109 days.
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13. The quote is from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.”
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14. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” The identification of “Pago Mayor” as Japan was discussed in Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje redondo de Alonso de Arellano,” 486–87. For an excellent study of early European contact with Japan and the evolving cartography, see the preface by Rui Loureiro in La découverte du Japon par les Européens (1543–1551), ed. Xavier de Castro (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 2013), 7–91. See also Ainhoa Reyes Manzano, “La cruz y la catana: Relaciones entre España y Japón (siglos XVI–XVII)” (PhD diss., Universidad de la Rioja, 2014).
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15. For mentions of the chart of the North Pacific aboard the San Lucas, see Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” For a close analysis of Gastaldi’s map, see Thomas Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia: The Epic Story of Seafarers, Adventurers, and Cartographers Who First Mapped the Regions Between China and India (Singapore: Periplus Editions, 1999), chap. 11. Although Gastaldi’s map is among the most relevant, it is possible to consider other maps, like Sebastian Cabot’s map of 1544. I thank Ricardo Padrón for his cartographic advice and appreciate his admonition that humanistic maps such as Gastaldi’s cannot substitute for the charts used by working pilots. For the broader context, see Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, chaps. 2–3; and Loureiro, La découverte du Japon, preface, 55–96.
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16. Another map, also elaborated in the 1550s but in China and no less remarkable, would have offered an excellent corrective, making clear Japan’s proximity to the Asian landmass. Yet the Spanish didn’t know about this remarkable map until 1574, when a group of Chinese merchants took a copy of it to Manila. The map in question is at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville: “Mapa de China,” MP-Filipinas, 5. A report from Philippines governor Guido de Lavezaris explained the map’s provenance. Guido de Lavezaris, Manila, July 30, 1574, AGI, Filipinas, 6, R. 2, N. 21. For the trajectories of later Spanish ships with respect to Japan, see Schurz, The Manila Galleon, 230.
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17. The quote is from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” Sˉofu Gan’s exact latitude is 29°47'39"N, so Lope Martín’s estimates were off by more than one degree in this case. Only in 2017 did a team of scientists conduct a detailed survey of this very remote ecosystem. Much information from the 2017 survey was featured in the NHK documentary Tokyo’s Lost Islands: Sofugan, which aired on February 23, 2019. Some authors speculate that the rock formation visited by the San Lucas may have been Sumisu-tˉo, also known as Smith Island or Smith Rock. Its latitude of 31°26'13"N corresponds more closely to what Lope Martín recorded, although Arellano’s description “very narrow, no more than a small house” does not fit Sumisu-tˉo so well. See the discussion in Landín Carrasco and Sánchez Masiá, “El viaje redondo de Alonso de Arellano,” 487. In any case, these two rock formations are relatively close to each other and presented the same conditions to the men of the San Lucas, so the precise identity is not particularly relevant.
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18. On the Kuroshio Current, see Ken Sawada and Nobuhiko Handa, “Variability of the Path of the Kuroshio Ocean Current over the Past 25,000 Years,” Nature 392 (1998): 592–95. The Japanese refer to these castaways or drifters as hyoryusha. Some of them were carried by the currents and winds to the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Aleutian Islands, or even Hawai‘i, in addition to the few who reached North America. See Schodt, Native American in the Land of the Shogun, 57–60. Japanese sources may turn up more than a handful of drifters reaching the coast of North America.
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19. All quotes are from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” Sooty shearwaters cover more than 34,000 miles, the longest animal migration ever recorded, as electronic trackers have revealed. See Scott A. Shaffer et al., “Migratory Shearwaters Integrate Oceanic Resources Across the Pacific Ocean in an Endless Summer,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 34 (August 2006): 12799–802.
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20. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.”
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21. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” Low-pressure systems developing in the Sea of Japan or off the Kamchatka Peninsula and then barreling east across the Aleutian Islands are common in the summer, bringing unsettled and very cold weather to the region. The skeptical scholar is O.H.K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 105.
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22. The quote is from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” On the attempt to reach Asia by land in 1539–1542, see Flint and Flint, A Most Splendid Company, 71–74. Twenty-five years after the San Lucas voyage, a Jesuit polymath named Joseph de Acosta similarly advanced “a great conjecture that the New World is not completely separated from the other world [Eurasia], but that one part of the earth and the other must join and continue, or at least they come very close.” See Joseph de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 63. Acosta’s book was first published in 1590. He also provided a succinct explanation of the circular winds and currents in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 106–8.
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23. The quote is from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.”
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24. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.”
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25. The quotes are from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” The calculation of 294 gallons still assumes that a pipa contains 27.5 arrobas and each arroba is equivalent to 4.36 gallons.
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26. Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” Later Spanish pilots returning to America from the Philippines learned to look for kelp as a sign of the proximity of North America. They described this characteristic seaweed as “like the onions from Europe with stems that are three or four fathoms in length, and are green or red in color.” José González Cabrera Bueno, Navegación especulativa y práctica (Manila: Convento de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles, 1734), 294. At greater length, the Italian traveler Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri explained how pilots involved in the return voyage, after reaching a latitude of forty degrees, “afterward fall until they meet the signs—being weeds that the Sea of California carries for hundreds of leagues—and thus continue with favorable winds.” Gemelli Careri, Giro del Mondo, bk. 3, chap. 3.
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27. The quote is from Arellano, “Relación mui circunstanciada.” Working out the exact location of the San Lucas in the weeks immediately before landfall is impossible. As noted earlier, there are at least two different ways to interpret the captain’s offhand statement. One is that the “certain variation of the compass needle”—never quantified in the narrative—caused the pilot to adjust the course of the San Lucas by “one-quarter” of “northeasting.” In practice, this would have made no sense, as the pilot would have had to correct to the southeast, given the declination. Still,
this interpretation cannot be entirely ruled out. Second, if Lope Martín had actually estimated the magnetic variation to be “one-quarter” of “northeasting,” or 11.25 degrees east of true north, then it is possible to do this calculation. First, we need to assume a certain latitude, and unfortunately, one paragraph earlier, Don Alonso merely notes that in the final stretch of the voyage, the San Lucas ranged between thirty-eight and twenty-seven degrees of northern latitude without giving any specific dates. For the purposes of this calculation, I assume a latitude of thirty-eight degrees. Then, if we rely on the most accepted geomagnetic model at our disposal going back to the sixteenth century, this would result in 142 degrees of western longitude, or 1,033 miles due west of Point Reyes. The distance of the San Lucas from the coast of North America would have been greater, assuming that the latitude was less than thirty-eight degrees. Later Spanish navigators approaching North America used magnetic declination to estimate longitude as a matter of course. In the eighteenth century, the piloto mayor of the Carrera de Filipinas (the route to the Philippines) wrote, “You will be careful to ascertain the variation of the needle which will be between nine and ten degrees, and from there you will steer due east until sixty-four degrees of longitude, and at that meridian, you will find that the variation will have increased to fourteen degrees, which is the greatest that the modern navigators have found, and from there it begins to diminish.” González Cabrera Bueno, Navegación especulativa y práctica, 294.