Conquering the Pacific Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraphs

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Preface

  A Global Race

  Dream Team

  Navidad

  A Disappearance

  Mar Abierto

  The Tiny Islands

  Color Photographs

  “The Island of the Thieves”

  The Far Side of the World

  Vuelta

  Fall from Glory

  Survival and Revenge

  At the Spanish Court

  Epilogue

  Note About Dates and Measurements

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Analytical Index

  Read More from Andrés Reséndez

  About the Author

  Connect on Social Media

  Copyright © 2021 by Andrés Reséndez

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Title page map courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.

  All other maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Reséndez, Andrés, author.

  Title: Conquering the Pacific : an unknown mariner and the final great voyage of the Age of Discovery / Andrés Reséndez.

  Other titles: Unknown mariner and the final great voyage of the Age of Discovery

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021004112 (print) | LCCN 2021004113 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328515971 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358676348 | ISBN 9780358638339 | ISBN 9781328517364 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Legazpi, Miguel López de, 1510?–1572—Friends and associates. | Martín, Lope. | Pilots and pilotage—Biography. | Philippines—Discovery and exploration—Spanish. | Pacific Ocean—Discovery and exploration—Spanish. | Explorers—Spain—Biography. | Barra de Navidad (Mexico)—History, Naval. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Spain & Portugal | HISTORY / Expeditions & Discoveries

  Classification: LCC DS 674.9.L4 R47 2021 (print) | LCC DS 674.9.L4 (ebook) | DDC 959.9/01092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004112

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004113

  Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

  Jacket images: © Stanislav Pobytov / Getty Images (ship); courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin (Bay of Acapulco painting); courtesy of Germanisches Nationalmuseum (mariner); courtesy of The Met Fifth Avenue (The Christ Child with an Orb), © BLR Antique Maps (Wall Map of America by Pierre Du Val)

  v1.0821

  Most people realize the sea covers two thirds of the planet, but few take the time to understand even a gallon of it. Watch what happens when you try to explain something as basic as the tides, that the suction of the moon and the sun creates a bulge across the ocean that turns into a slow and sneaky yet massive wave that covers our salty beaches twice a day. People look at you as if you’re making it up as you go.

  —Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide, 2006

  The voyage from the Philippines to America may be said to be the most dreadful and longest of any in the world. The ocean to be crossed is vast, almost half of the terraqueous globe, with the wind always in front, terrible tempests, one on the back of another, and mortal diseases in a voyage lasting seven or eight months, sometimes in higher and lower altitudes, in cold, temperate, and hot weather. It is enough to destroy a man of steel.

  —Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Giro del Mondo (Voyage Around the World), 1699

  Lord my God, You are very great . . . You make the clouds your chariot, and you walk upon the wings of the winds.

  —Psalm 104:1–3

  List of Illustrations

  page

  16 The Pacific Coast in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century. Credit: Archivo General de Indias

  23 Lisbon. Credit: From Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Vol. V by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg (Cologne, 1598)

  49 Juan Pablo de Carrión, circa 1582. Credit: From Espadas del Fin del Mundo by Ángel Miranda, illustrated by Juan Aguilera. Used by permission of the illustrator.

  103 A Long Island. Credit: Archivo General de Indias

  104 An Atoll. Credit: Archivo General de Indias

  107 People of the Sea. From Admiral François-Edmond Pâris, Essai sur la construction navale des peuples extra-européens ou Collection des navires et pirogues construits par les habitants de l’Asie, de la Malaisie, du Grand Océan et de l’Amérique dessinés et mesurés pendant les voyages autour du monde de “l’Astrolabe,” “la Favorite” et “l’Artémise.” Credit: “Flying paraoas of the Caroline Islands” from Essai sur la construction navale des peuples extra-européens . . . by François-Edmond Pâris (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1841)

  112 Guam and a Native Canoe. Credit: Archivo General de Indias

  123 Eager Traders. Credit: From the 1603 Frankfurt edition of Description du Penible Voyage Faict entour de l’Univers ou Globe Terrestre by Olivier van Noort. Courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps.

  137 A Miraculous Find. Martin Schongauer, Christ the Child as Salvator Mundi, 1469–1482. Credit: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  149 Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1554 Map of East Asia. From Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi, a 1563 redrawing of the map which first appeared in 1554. Credit: From Delle Navigationi et Viaggi by Giovanni Battista Ramusio, illustrated by Giacomo Gastaldi, 1550–59

  160 Letter About a Glorious Discovery. Credit: From Copia de una carta venida de Sevilla a Miguel Salvador de Valencia . . . edited by Bernardo Mendel (Madrid: Imprenta de la sucesora de M. Minuesa de los Ríos, 1905)

  175 Sling to Transport Horses. Christoph Weiditz, circa 1530. Credit: From Trachtenbuch by Christoph Weiditz, c. 1530

  176 The Forecastle. Drawing by Rafael Monleón in Cesáreo Fernández Duro, La nao Santa María (Madrid: Comisión Arqueológica Ejecutiva, 1892). Credit: Drawing by Rafael Monleón, 1892

  193 Petrus Plancius’s 1594 Orbis Terrarum. From Petrus Plancius, Orbis Terrarum Typus de Integro Multis in Locis Emendatus (Amsterdam, 1594). Courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps.

  Color Insert

  Philip II. Credit: Patrimonio Nacional, 10014146

  Viceroy of Mexico Don Luis de Velasco. Salón de Virreyes del Castillo de Chapultepec. Photograph by Leonardo Hernández. Credit: Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

  Andrés de Urdaneta. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo. Used by permission of Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial

  Black Slaves in the Fleets. Christoph Weiditz, circa 1530. Credit: Illustration by Christoph Weiditz, c. 1530. Courtesy of Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Digitale Bibliothek. Image 189

  Dispatch Boats. Fresco by Niccolò Granello at the Sala de las Batallas painted in 1583. Credit: Patrimonio Nacional, 10014921

  The Four Winds. Atlas Miller. Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France

  Royal Couple from the Philippines, circa 1590. Credit: Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

  Acapulco. Acapulco in 1628 based on a drawing by Dutch engineer Adrian Boot. Credit: Courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin

  List of Maps

  All commissioned m
aps rendered by Mapping Specialists, Ltd., Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

  page

  xvi The Most Extravagant Labyrinth

  5 Panthalassa or Pre-Pacific

  10 Ancient Iguana Crossing

  12 Human Chain Across the Ocean

  15 Guided by the Stars

  21 Atlantic Meridian

  26 The North Atlantic Gyre

  39 Magnetic Map of the World

  45 The Philippines and the Spice Islands

  57 Route Proposals

  86 From Navidad to Micronesia

  88 World Gyres

  90 The Original Loop Around the Ocean

  93 A Second Vuelta

  95 Magellan’s Track Across the Pacific

  96 Arrow Shots Through the North Pacific

  100 Parallel Trajectories

  118 Magnetic Map of the North Pacific

  133 The San Lucas and Legazpi’s Squadron in the Philippines

  138 Failed Attempts

  143 Monsoons

  151 The Kuroshio Current

  152 The First Successful Vuelta

  182 Ujelang Atoll

  191 Antimeridians

  Preface

  Seen from a satellite above the Pacific Ocean, Earth appears as a magnificent ball of indigo. The continental lands recede to the edges, as if about to slip to the far side. What remains in view is an immense span of blue interrupted only by minuscule specks of land. All of us have looked at satellite images of the Pacific. Yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending its vastness: so large that all the continents and islands would fit within it, and so deep that it holds almost exactly half of the water contained in all the world’s oceans. Such comparisons, impressive as they may be, are still on an alien scale, so here is a more human attempt at understanding: if we were to drop an average swimmer in the middle of the Pacific, she would need three months without ever stopping just to reach the closest continental shore. Without swimming and left only to the currents, the trip would take a lot longer. A fisherman swept off the coast of Mexico on a boat with a faulty motor spent nearly fourteen months adrift in 2012–2014 before washing up in the Marshall Islands, three-fifths of the way across the Pacific. Buoys with transmitters deployed by scientists near Hawai‘i bobbed and drifted for a year before some of them began washing up in the Philippines. Of course, the stranded fisherman and the scientific buoys covered only portions of the Pacific. Anyone actually contemplating crossing it from one continental shore to the other—like the explorers in this book—would have to double these times: six months of around-the-clock swimming or close to two years of free-floating coupled with unbelievable luck.1

  We tend to think of the Pacific as just another ocean, like the Indian or the Atlantic. In fact, it is different, as Erasmus Darwin—Charles’s grandfather—noticed in 1791. He believed that the South Sea, as it was often called, was nothing less than the hole left behind after the Moon had split from Earth. Erasmus was a scientist, but rather than attempting to prove this audacious theory, he bequeathed it to posterity in a poem:

  Gnomes! How you gazed!

  When from her wounded side,

  Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide,

  Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car.2

  Nearly a century would pass before another Darwin—George Howard Darwin, Erasmus’s great-grandson and Charles’s son—would take the bait. George studied the Moon’s orbit and developed a set of equations that described the history of the Moon’s rotations around Earth. Running his model as far back as it would go, the younger Darwin estimated that the Moon had once orbited a mere six thousand miles away from our planet. This had occurred fifty-four million years ago “or before,” according to his calculations, a time when the Earth and the Moon may still have been in a molten state and, as he put it, “formed parts of a common mass.” The inescapable conclusion was that the Moon had been flung off from Earth in the distant past.3

  George Darwin’s contemporaries were enthralled. In a letter to the editor of Nature in 1882, geologist Osmond Fisher praised the younger Darwin’s efforts and offered some additional thoughts. The Moon’s separation from Earth must have been so sudden, Fisher reasoned, “that a great but shallow hole must consequently have been formed, whose centre would have been on or near the equator.” Fisher’s addendum gained acceptance, and thus was born the idea of the Pacific as “the scar” left after the Moon separated. The fission theory, as this explanation became known more formally, remained popular at least through the 1930s. The men and women of that generation believed that an ancient planetary event accounted for the immensity of the Pacific.4

  Modern geology has provided an alternative explanation for how the vast Pacific came to be that is just as fantastical in its own way. Scientists have now established that Earth is much older than previously thought, around 4.5 billion years. During this time our planet has undergone dramatic changes in the arrangement of its continents and oceans. The latest configuration is the most relevant. Three hundred million years ago, all lands on Earth were fused together in a supercontinent known as Pangea (“all-earth” in Greek), while the rest of the planet consisted of a vast region of water referred to as Panthalassa (all-ocean) or sometimes Pre-Pacific. A German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener first came to this elegant vision of our planet after merely staring at a map and noticing how the contours of different continents fit so neatly together, as if they were pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. “Does not the east coast of South America fit exactly with the west coast of Africa as if they had formerly been joined?” he wrote excitedly to his fiancée in 1910.5

  Over the course of five years, Wegener built his case. He identified species like marsupials that live in Australasia and South America to show that an ancient land connection was the only reason for this curious distribution. He also enlisted the fossil record to his cause, observing how skeletal remains of Mesosaurus—an enormous lizard that lived some 280 million years ago—had turned up only in southern Africa and eastern South America, indicating once again that these two lands had been joined together in the distant past. Most persuasively perhaps, Wegener showed that the Appalachian Mountains of North America formed a single geological system with the Caledonian Mountains of Scandinavia and the British Isles. According to the theory that he advanced in The Origin of Continents and Oceans, first published in 1915, these were “fragments of the edges of the separating blocks, whose detachment is easily understandable in just such a region of tectonic disturbance.”6

  Unfortunately, Wegener came up against a scholarly establishment unreceptive to the idea of wandering continents. At the University of Cambridge, physical geographer Philip Lake chastised Wegener for not seeking truth but advocating a cause that was “blind to every fact and argument that tells against it.” Paleontologist Edward Wilber Berry of Johns Hopkins University was harsher. “My principal objection to the Wegener hypothesis rests on the author’s method,” Berry declared at a meeting in 1926. “It takes the familiar course of an initial idea, a selective search through the literature for corroborative evidence, ignoring most of the facts that are opposed to the idea, and ending in a state of auto-intoxication in which the subjective idea comes to be considered as an objective fact.” Wegener’s continental drift—the precursor to the modern theory of plate tectonics—was not widely adopted until the 1960s, when the evidence from multiple fields was so overwhelming that it could no longer be dismissed.7

  Now we know that Pangea actually existed. Three hundred million years ago, our planet consisted merely of one supercontinent and one super-ocean. As Pangea broke up, however, it created additional oceans and seas. The Atlantic emerged after the Americas split from Europe and Africa. Crucially, even as the lands surrounding the Atlantic Ocean drifted apart, their contours continued to fit like pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. In other words, opposite coasts of the Atlantic have always remained relatively close to one another, with an S of ocean snaking between Europe and Africa on one side and the
Americas on the other.8

  Meanwhile, the ancestral Panthalassa evolved into the Pacific Ocean that we know today. It is smaller than its super-ocean predecessor and continues to shrink every day, as the American continent drifts westward in the direction of Asia. Yet even in this diminished incarnation, the Pacific remains the mother of all oceans, colossal compared to all other bodies of water and possessing the forbidding shape of an oval or a flattened circle with its east-west axis being the longest—precisely the direction that mattered most to the navigators whose story appears in this book, men who wished to go from the Americas to Asia and back. Not surprisingly, the Pacific has acted as the greatest obstacle to the movement not only of latter-day humans but also of all living creatures for tens of millions of years.

  * * *

  As long as the supercontinent lasted, plants and animals were able to move across the land more or less unencumbered. Most famously, dinosaurs were found on every continent, including Antarctica. About sixty-six million years ago, however, when North America had largely decoupled from Eurasia and South America had become completely detached from other landmasses, a meteorite smashed into Earth, bringing the dinosaur era to an end and causing a major redistribution of life on our planet.9

  The most accepted scenario runs something like this: All was stable until a meteor fell on the coast of Yucatán. The object in question was about six miles in diameter, sizable but not big enough to inflict serious physical damage on Earth. For living creatures, however, the impact was devastating. The meteor moved so fast that it pierced the atmosphere in about one second. The first indication that something was amiss must have come as a blinding flash of light followed by a sonic boom far louder than anything humans have ever heard. More alarming must have been the rumbling of the ground as the meteor burrowed itself into the crust of Yucatán to a depth of about twenty-five miles. The worst came an instant later. As the asteroid became vaporized inside the hole, a brutal shockwave erupted as flaming rock and “ejecta,” hurtling in all directions and reaching the atmosphere’s highest layers. The narrow shaft carved by the asteroid on impact widened into a massive crater one hundred miles across, and a fireball resembling a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb but incomparably larger emerged from it. Much of what is now Mexico, the United States, and Canada burst into flames as incandescent debris rained down all over the region, igniting fires and scalding animals roaming in the open or flying around. This great pulse of heat eventually died down. The ejecta, however, lingered in the atmosphere for months, causing an “impact winter.” An environment that previously had been too bright and hot now overshot in the opposite direction. “The land became so dark that you could not have seen your hand in front of your face,” wrote geologist Walter Alvarez, one of the chief proponents of the killer asteroid theory. All green plants withered, producing a shutdown of photosynthesis and a collapse of the food chains based on them. Temperatures all across the world dropped precipitously. The mega-death that occurred sixty-six million years ago ranks as one of the five deadliest mass extinctions in all of life’s history.10