The days before casting off were frantic. Indigenous workers and Black slaves must have been under tremendous pressure to load the bacon, hardtack, chickpeas, wine, and other victuals. The perishables had to be carried into the ships at the last minute to avoid spoilage, although in reality the tropical fauna had already started ravaging them. Even busier than the port workers were the expeditionaries themselves. They needed to acquire many items like weapons, goods for trade in Asia, additional food for the voyage; or, conversely, they had to dispose of their property. After all, they were about to embark on the journey of a lifetime and might not be back in the Americas for years, or perhaps forever. Preparations also needed to be made for the worst possible outcome. Each of the four ships had a person “of good conscience and reputation” appointed as a “holder of goods” (tenedor de bienes). All voyagers were required to register with this person, providing their names, showing proof of the salaries assigned on signing up, and naming their beneficiaries in case of death. Inevitably these transactions and arrangements took more time than expected. Religion played a primary role in sixteenth-century voyages of exploration, and Commander Legazpi did not take such matters lightly. Prior to embarking, all expeditionaries had to confess, take communion, and hear a Mass of the Holy Spirit.24
Three days before leaving Navidad, Commander Legazpi wrote a brief letter to the Spanish king underscoring the “enormity and importance of this venture” and currying royal favor: “I have taken over this enterprise and spent a great deal of my patrimony to supply and equip myself and thus deserve your consideration.” Just hours before leaving and already aboard the flagship San Pedro, Urdaneta also put pen to paper to commend “Andrés de Mirandaola,” his nephew, “who is also going in this armada as a royal administrator, and I implore Your Majesty to grant him this appointment in perpetuity.” The friar-mariner also used the opportunity to write on behalf of the five surviving Augustinians, “for we are the first to participate in this great enterprise, and we have worked hard and this should count for something in your judgment and favor.”25
4
A Disappearance
On Monday, November 20, 1564, all voyagers boarded their respective ships, ready to depart. At 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, in the darkest hour, the flagship finally fired a salvo. A crier said something along these lines: “Ease the rope of the foresail, in the name of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one single true God—that they may be with us and give us a good and safe voyage, and carry us and return us safely to our homes!” Crew members proceeded to untie the mooring ropes or lift the anchors while others raised the sails. Slowly, the San Pedro turned toward the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. Moments later, the other vessels went through the same motions. The fleet must have cleared the bay by sunrise and continued to catch glimpses of the Mexican coast for several hours.1
Life aboard the ships followed new rhythms and obvious improvements over Navidad. The mosquitos and other insects vanished almost instantly (though not the fleas and lice), and the ocean breeze provided effective relief from the heat. The expeditionaries also gained immediate access to foods that had been denied to them before. Each soldier received a daily ration of one pound of hardtack and either a pound of meat or half a pound of dried fish along with fava beans or chickpeas. Doled out in three square meals a day, this was more than enough. Every Sunday afternoon, some cheese was added to the ration for variety. The liquids on offer were also generous: three pints of water per day along with wine, enough not only to keep hydrated but also to soak and soften the hardtack. Commander Legazpi had said nothing to the four ship captains about the distribution of spirits, but we know that the crew members would never have consented to crossing the Pacific without this indispensable tonic for the body and mind. Indeed, alcohol was an important tool, deployed especially during storms to steel the mariners’ resolve and “warm their stomachs.”2
These rations were tangible improvements. Yet the negatives far outweighed the positives, beginning with the cramped conditions. To understand the sailors’ circumstances in a way that makes sense to us, we must imagine a good-sized urban apartment occupied by about one hundred strangers. A single toilet—but no shower or sink—would have to do for everyone, along with a very rudimentary kitchen and no furniture other than sea chests (wooden boxes) scattered all over the deck and below and serving as chairs and tables as needed. Two or three times a day, pages brought out platters of food into which everyone stuck their fingers liberally to get the best pieces of meat or servings of chickpeas. At night, everyone but the most privileged had to find a reasonably level surface to sleep on—always too close to others—and try to get some rest in spite of the noises, odors, and constant movement. Spending merely a week in these conditions would have been taxing, yet the expeditionaries had to endure this for months.3
Aboard the ships, there was strict regimentation. Everybody “without skipping anyone if not for illness” was assigned daily to a four-hour shift. This could occur at any time of the day or night, with the worst shifts having evocative names like “drowsiness,” or modorra (from midnight to four), “dawn,” or alva (from four to eight), and so on. The time was measured carefully with multiple hourglasses, or ampolletas, that had to be turned without fail every thirty minutes, and the assigned tasks ranged from moving barrels and serving as lookouts to pumping out the awful-smelling water that always collected at the bottom of the ship. Those on shift could also be ordered to perform navigational duties like hoisting and trimming sails, not only because the crew was spread too thin but also “to get everybody trained and accustomed to such work in case of necessity.” The remaining twenty hours of the day were far more leisurely. With so much time to kill, the expeditionaries were tempted to play cards or engage in other games of chance, betting their daily rations, clothes, and weapons. Of course, all of this was strictly prohibited, as was invoking the name of God in vain or using profanity, a constant occurrence among seamen. Any of these infractions could lead to punishments ranging from public shaming and withholding of one’s daily ration to imprisonment and torture for repeat offenders.4
The first four days of the journey were uneventful. But on Saturday, November 25, Commander Legazpi requested all captains, pilots, and high-ranking officers to come aboard the flagship, San Pedro, for a mid-ocean meeting. Just conveying this order accurately to the other three vessels—some of which may have been sailing miles away—and then transferring two or three individuals from each of these ships into rowboats and then onto the towering San Pedro must have been difficult and time-consuming. All six pilots, including Lope Martín; all four captains, including Don Alonso de Arellano of the tender San Lucas; all five Augustinian friars, including Urdaneta; all royal officials; military commander Mateo del Sauz; and a few others—around twenty-five men in total—were in attendance at this unexpected gathering hundreds of miles from the continent. The fleet commander must have dreaded the moment when he would have to disclose the existence of a second set of instructions from the Audiencia of Mexico which he had kept secret from everyone else. The notary aboard the fleet broke the royal seals and read aloud until reaching the key paragraph: “You will steer toward the Islands of the West without entering the Moluccas [Spice Islands] because that would be contrary to our arrangement with his Most Serene Highness, the King of Portugal, and instead you will go to the Philippines, which are not on the Portuguese side but within His Majesty’s demarcation.”5
We will never know the full range of emotions that flared up at that mid-ocean meeting, but Urdaneta received the news as a personal affront. The Philippines were on the Portuguese side, as he had made abundantly clear to Philip II four years earlier. “The Philippines and the Spice Islands are on the same meridian,” Urdaneta had written to the monarch without a shred of doubt, “and both are well within the Portuguese demarcation.” This is why the friar had advocated going to New Guinea all along. The new orders ignored this exchange between the fri
ar and the king, reverted to a mistaken geography, and risked a serious military engagement with the Portuguese in Southeast Asia. Friar Urdaneta also must have spared a thought or two for his old nemesis Captain Juan Pablo de Carrión, who had always proposed going to the Philippines and had evidently gotten the last word. Carrión had been forced to stay behind, but his brother, Andrés Cauchela, had joined the expedition as a royal accountant and was present at that meeting. Above all, the unveiling of the new orders strained relations between the two most important men of the expedition: the fleet commander, who had withheld vital information from the other, the man who was supposed to guide it. Legazpi had to admit that the sudden change of plans “affected the friars greatly,” adding that “they would not have come on the voyage had they known [the true destination].” The opinionated Urdaneta did not hide his anger, but he could hardly quit or retaliate in any meaningful way in the middle of the ocean.6
After the pilots and captains returned to their vessels, the fleet immediately changed course to “west-southwest and heading straight to the Philippines.” There was one additional adjustment. Since departing from Navidad, the flagship had sailed at the head of the squadron. After the mid-ocean meeting, Commander Legazpi ordered the tender San Lucas to move to the front, perhaps in recognition of Lope Martín’s extraordinary seamanship or merely as a precaution. Martín and his crew would be scouting ahead for rocks, islands, atolls, and other dangers. The San Lucas would remain in constant communication with the other ships, using flags during the day and lanterns at night. If the wind picked up and it became necessary to lower some of the sails to reduce speed, all four ships agreed on a signal so all would slow down at the same time and remain together.7
After taking the lead, however, the San Lucas began pulling ahead. Lope Martín’s instructions had been to stay within half a league (about two miles) of the flagship, yet he steered as far as two leagues (seven miles) ahead. In fair weather, this would still have been acceptable. Yet on December 1, 1564, several clouds gathered during the day and developed into an evening storm. The flagship lowered the mainsail and made the signal to slow down, but the San Lucas forged ahead into the impenetrable darkness until it disappeared.8
Hours later Lope Martín sounded the alarm and informed Captain Don Alonso de Arellano that the other ships were nowhere to be seen. The pilot explained that the San Lucas was “low on the waist” and therefore could not slow down too much because the cross-sea would dump water over the deck and swamp the vessel. Don Alonso immediately ordered lanterns to be placed at the stern and on top of the mainmast, but the separation continued during the next morning and over the next few days. Indeed, it became permanent. The weather had something to do with it. With the passing of the days, however, Legazpi, Urdaneta, and others aboard the flagship suspected that the mulatto pilot, perhaps in collusion with Don Alonso, had abandoned the fleet deliberately. Whatever the real reason, a mere ten days after leaving Navidad, the expedition became something of a race. The three largest vessels with the lion’s share of the resources remained together, while the smallest craft, commanded by a cipher of a nobleman and steered by a remarkable pilot, struck out on its own.9
5
Mar Abierto
The voyagers’ first hurdle was to cross the longest stretch of open water in the world. After leaving the port of Navidad, they would not see land for six thousand miles, or about three-fifths of the way across the Pacific Ocean. The Hawaiian Islands would have been ideal for a stopover, but Europeans would not know of their existence until 1778, when Captain Cook chanced on Kaua‘i. Instead, Legazpi, Urdaneta, Don Alonso, Lope Martín, and the others followed what they believed to be the best trajectory to the Philippines, a very straight path across the ocean that passed hundreds of miles south of Hawai‘i and hundreds of miles north of Kiribati for a disquieting month-and-a-half passage through a trackless, seemingly never-ending expanse of water. The utter loneliness of that sector of the great ocean is hard to imagine.1
An ordinary person standing on the deck of one of the four ships in the fleet would have seen nothing but water. Yet the pilots possessed a mental map of the Pacific that included currents, winds, areas of calm, islands, and subtle clues floating around or in the skies that were critical to orienting them. This mental map had evolved over the decades, as oceangoing expeditionaries came to understand the general circulation of winds and currents around the world, applied novel technologies to establish their position on the high seas, and culled all relevant geographic and biological information from preceding voyages. It was a collective enterprise spanning six generations of pilots, cosmographers, seamen, mathematicians, astronomers, mapmakers, and instrument makers.
By far the most crucial insight was that gigantic wheels of winds and currents, now called gyres, circle the oceans with regularity. Five main such circular flows exist in the world: two in the Atlantic, two in the Pacific, and one in the Indian Ocean. Gyres change constantly and are affected by atmospheric phenomena like El Niño, which causes the winds to slacken around the equatorial Pacific. Yet the gyres of today are quite comparable to their predecessors five hundred years ago because they arise from the same slow-changing factors: Earth’s rotation on its axis and the overall shape of continents and oceans. The spinning of our planet causes the air to be deflected to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. In turn, the circling winds transfer some of their energy to the ocean as air molecules collide with the surface and set the water in motion. Known as the Coriolis effect, this peculiar air and water circulation is neither intuitive nor easy to explain. But from the vantage point of humans wishing to cross oceans, what matters is that gyres amount to veritable highways, because alongside them both winds and currents flow in the same general direction, like conveyor belts. In an era before motorized vessels, being pushed along by the currents and having the wind at one’s back made all the difference between the possible and the utterly impossible. Among other things, the Atlantic gyres enabled Columbus to go from Spain to the Caribbean and back, and permitted the long-distance interactions that followed—including the forcible transportation of 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic. The Pacific gyres allowed Magellan to cross the Pacific and made possible Spain’s subsequent explorations of Southeast Asia down to the Navidad venture.2
Humans have brushed against portions of the five principal gyres of the world from time immemorial. Yet understanding their overall shape and using them purposefully for long-distance navigation is a development of the last few centuries. Except for the Indian Ocean—a case apart on account of the seasonal winds of the South Asian monsoon—it was not until the early 1400s when navigators began a systematic process of discovery of the gyres, beginning with the two in the Atlantic Ocean. This work began quite by accident while the Portuguese were exploring the western coast of Africa. Sailing from Portugal to the bulge of Africa was trivial thanks to the favorable winds and currents pushing the ships. But returning the same way proved more difficult the farther south the fleets went, until Cape Bojador in southern Morocco emerged as something of a point of no return. To go beyond Cape Bojador, Portuguese navigators had to let themselves go with the dominant winds and currents deep into the Atlantic for hundreds of miles westward until arriving at a region of variable winds, where they could finally try to double back toward Portugal. The volta do mar largo (the loop around the great sea) was a maneuver not suited for the faint of heart.3
The discoverers of this daring trajectory are unknown, not only because the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 destroyed much of the extant historical documentation but also because of Portugal’s deliberate secrecy to prevent competitors from learning about this revolutionary method of ocean navigation. Nonetheless, by 1446 the volta do mar largo had become so commonplace that even ordinary passengers knew about it. That year, eighty Black men aboard thirteen canoes, armed with bows and arrows dipped in poison, ambushed Nuno Tristão’s fleet off the coast of Senegal.
Only five young men in one caravel survived the attack. Their sole hope of returning to Portugal was by means of the volta. A cabin boy, the only survivor with some sailing experience, refused to pilot the caravel because of his “limited knowledge of the art of navigation.” Fortunately, one of the passengers, aptly named Aires Tinoco (aires meaning “winds”), rose to the challenge and volunteered to steer, following the contours of the North Atlantic Gyre, a maneuver that he must have seen performed before. They spent two agonizing months until emerging, almost as if by a miracle, close to the port of Lagos in the Algarve.4
Conquering the Pacific Page 9
