Producing the Pacific: Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration, 1567-1606

Producing the Pacific Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration (1567-1606)

Portada Hispánica 18 Consejo de dirección Patrick Collard (Universidad de Gante) Hub. Hermans (Universidad de Groninga) Francisco Lasarte (Universidad de Utrecht) Maarten Steenmeijer (Universidad de Nimega) Rina Walthaus (Universidad de Groninga)

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

Producing the Pacific Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration (1567-1606)

Mercedes Maroto Camino

Cover illustration: Anon, Fool’s Cap Map (c.1590). ©National Maritime Museum (London). Cover design: Peggy Vogel The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1994-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Page Acknowledgements List of Illustrations and Credit Lines 1.

Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 – 1606

7 11

15

2.

Exploring the South Pacific 29 2.1 Failure and Futility in the Voyages of Mendaña and Quirós 31 2.2 The (Mis)representation of Isabel Barreto: Woman, Governor and Admiral of the Isles of Solomon 44

3.

Mapping the Pacific 3.1 Plotting the Southern Continent 3.2 Staging the Southern Continent

4.

Performing the South Pacific

101

5.

Conclusion: Inventing, Performing and Practising: The Production of the Early Modern Pacific

121

Works Cited Index

69 72 82

127 135

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Acknowledgements The support I have received throughout the research and writing of this book makes it quite a collective endeavour. It is certainly a pleasure to be able to name some of those people and institutions without whom this book could never have been completed. First of all, my own institution, The University of Auckland, has given me the necessary support in terms of resources and time, including a sabbatical semester, three Research Grants and a Research Excellence Award, all of which have been important for the completion of the project. The climate of collegiality in the Faculty of Arts and the School of European Languages and Literatures has also been essential. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues Christine Arkinstall, Jan Crosthwaite, Kathryn Lehman, Walescka Pino-Ojeda and Wendy-Llyn Zaza as well as graduate students such as Gwyn Fox and Lara Anderson who make my work a very rewarding experience indeed. My dear colleague and mentor, Michael Neill, deserves a very special mention for his unwavering support throughout the years. I wish to thank Anne Salmond for giving me the opportunity to extend the project started with the present book in the years to come. I am deeply indebted to many institutions for providing the financial support that has enabled me to complete the necessary archival research for the book. In chronological terms, this project first received support from the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library in Chicago. During the cold winter months I spent there in 1999-2000, Jim Akerman, Robert Karrow, Pat Morris and Arthur Holzheimer were, as always, extremely generous with their time and knowledge. Next, the American Geographical Society gave me a fourweek fellowship to work in its wonderful collection at the Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I wish to acknowledge especially Chris Baruth and Jovanka Ristic for their kindness. In the United Kingdom, the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich) awarded me a three-month Caird Fellowship during my

8

sabbatical leave in 2001. In this wonderful setting, I was able to consult their bottomless archives in an atmosphere of scholarly and community vibrancy. Besides everyone who worked with me there, I wish to thank especially Nigel Rigby. While in London, I also had the opportunity to work at the British Library and the Royal Geographical Society. The knowledge and hospitality of Peter Barber and Francis Herbert are indeed deeply appreciated. During 2002 and 2003, the Royal Society of New Zealand gave me a generous two-year Marsden Grant which relieved me from some of my teaching and provided funds for travelling. I could then dedicate some additional time to the book, undertake some further research in Spain and, more importantly, count on the efficient Research Assistantship of Gwyn Fox, who now knows more about sources on Spanish navigation than me. In fact, Gwyn has done the most thorough editing work one could have wished for and has completed the Index with the utmost efficiency, for which I am sure many readers will be thankful, as it is a remarkable piece of work in its scope and accuracy. Igor Dreki from the Department of Geography of my university worked the wonderful maps that illustrate the journeys dealt with in this paper, and I am very grateful to him for them. An earlier version of chapter 3.2 Staging the Southern Continent appeared in the journal of the Australian Map Circle The Globe 54 (2003): 13-22. I also have to acknowledge the invaluable help and encouragement of colleagues who generously read and appraise one’s work. Among them, I owe the greatest debt to Tom Conley, Jonathan Lamb, John Brotherton and Jonathan Tittler. And I am very grateful to Bill Richardson from Adelaide for introducing me to a lot of useful information about his own work and sources to consult in Australia, to Rina Walthaus, editor of the series for her careful and constructive editing, and to Marieke Schilling, for her patience and invaluable help with book’s layout. Above all, Malcolm Read and Christine Arkinstall deserve a very special mention for having painstakingly read the whole manuscript and offered many invaluable suggestions. Needless to say, remaining errors and inconsistencies are certainly the author’s. I also want to mention that this book would not have been produced without the groundwork provided by the astonishing investigations of the late Celsus Kelly, O. F. M. His Franciscan colleagues and the librarians of the St Paschal Library in Melbourne are keeping that tradition alive and I have also benefited from their

9

hospitality. Likewise, the investigations of Amancio Landín and of Francisco Mellen have also been instrumental in the development of the argument. In addition, Paco has kindly answered many queries and has provided more than a few interesting insights. Finally, many people, including friends and family, have also been helpful in other ways. Special thanks are due to my parents and siblings, especially to my sister, Carmen, and to Chris, Paula, Pilar, Malcolm, Matthew, Gwyn, Lara, Antonio, Jayne, Elena, Geoff, Fiona, Rosita, Ali and, last but not least, Dave. This book is for them.

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List of Illustrations and Credit Lines Itineraries 1. 2.

3.

Itinerary of the voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña to the Solomons (1567-68). By Igor Dreki. Itinerary of the voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña, Isabel Barreto and Pedro Fernández de Quirós to Santa Cruz (1595). By Igor Dreki. Itinerary of the voyage of Pedro Fernández de Quirós and Luis Váez de Torres to Vanuatu and Torres Strait (1605-6). By Igor Dreki.

Illustrations 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Abraham Ortelius, “Typus Orbis Terrarum” (1570). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. ©National Maritime Museum. Ambrosius Macrobius. [No title]. Brescia (1483). After the fifth-century Roman philosopher Macrobius. From: “In Somnium Scipionis expositio ….” BL I. B. 31072. By Permission of the British Library. Beatus of Liébana [No title] (11th century). From: “Commentary on the Apocalypse ….” (C11). Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid). Robert Thorne, “Orbis Universalis Descriptio” (1527). From: Richard Hakluyt’s “Diverse voyages touching the discovery of America …” (1582). BL C.21.b.35. By Permission of the British Library. Hessel Gerritsz. [No title]. From: “Beschryvinghe Vander Samoyeden Landt ….” BL 1045. e (15) (1). By Permission of the British Library. Claudius Ptolemy. [No title], Ulm (1482). From: “Opus Donni Nicolai Germani …”. BL IC. 9304. By Permission of the British Library.

12

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

Francesco Rosselli. [No title]. c.1508. ©National Maritime Museum. Diego Ribeiro, “Carta universal [...]” (1529). ©Biblioteca Apostólica Vaticana (Vatican). Battista Agnese. [No title] (c.1536) (1544). Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid). Oronce Finé, “Nova Et Integra Universi Orbis Descriptio” (1531 [1532]). BL 798.cc.2. By Permission of the British Library. Giacomo Gastaldi, “Universale (1546). BL Maps K. Top. IV.6. By Permission of the British Library. Giovani Camocio, “Cosmographia Universalis [...]” (1567). ©National Maritime Museum. Sebastian Münster, “Typus Universalis” (1546). BL 566.i.14. By Permission of the British Library. Pierre Desceliers, [No title] (1550). BL Add. 24065. By Permission of the British Library. Nicholas Desliens, [No title] (1567). ©National Maritime Museum. Rumold Mercator, “Orbis Terrae Compendiosa …” (1587). Based on Gerard Mercator (1569). ©National Maritime Museum. López de Velasco, “Demarcacion y Diuision de las Indias” (1575). John Carter Brown Library. Abraham Ortelius, “Typus Orbis Terrarum” (1589). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1589). ©National Maritime Museum. Abraham Ortelius, “Maris Pacifici” (1589). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1589). ©National Maritime Museum. Diego de Prado, Phelipe y Santiago. Archivo de Simancas (Valladolid), the Bay of St Philip and St James in Vanuatu’s Espiritu Santo. Anon, Demonstracion delas Yslas de Salomon que descubrio de Adelantado Alvaro de Avendaño (second half of the seventeenth century). Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid). Pedro Fernández de Quirós, [No title] (1595). Newberry Library (Chicago). Jodocus Hondius, “Typus Orbis Terrarum” (1589). ©National Maritime Museum (London).

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

Hugh Broughton, “A Map of the Earth With names (the most) from Scriptures” (c.1590). BL C.70.b.3. From: “A Concent of Scripture…”. By Permission of the British Library. Anon, Fool’s Cap Map (c.1590). ©National Maritime Museum (London). Jodocus Hondius, “Christian Knight Map” (c.1597). Maps 188.k.1.(5). By Permission of The British Library. Frontispiece. Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). ©National Maritime Museum (London). Abraham Ortelius, “Parergon” (1598). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1598). ©National Maritime Museum. Abraham Ortelius, “Geographia Sacra” (1598). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1598). ©National Maritime Museum. Abraham Ortelius, “Geographia Sacra” (1598) (Detail). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1598). ©National Maritime Museum. Abraham Ortelius, “Maris Pacifici” (1589) (Detail). From: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1598). ©National Maritime Museum.

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1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 - 1606 “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” (George Orwell) “(Social) space is a (social) product¨ (Henri Lefebvre 1991: 26)

The exploration of the Pacific in the early modern period was informed by various beliefs and assumptions. Prominent among these is the search for the Isles of Gold and Silver, which are referred to as Chryse and Argyre in classical sources and by the Spanish and Portuguese as Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata. More important, especially for the South Pacific, is the debate as to whether a fourth continent, Terra Australis Incognita, existed and was inhabited. As will be seen throughout this work, these and other biblical, classical, cartographic and folkloric beliefs converged with the literature of exploration to produce the notion of “the South Seas” or, as we know it today, “the Pacific.”1 It is this interaction or, to borrow a literary term, this intertextuality, that enabled the invention, construction, performance and production of the Pacific in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The early modern Spanish, English and Dutch forays into the Pacific followed and created an imaginary design that presented this ocean as an area of geographical, economic, missionary or colonial importance. Imagining the Pacific is, in fact, the first part of a complex process that entails not just image and invention but also performance and production. In other words, conceptualising the Pacific is a step of a process that is dependent on facts or fictions as well as on presentation, representation, performance, practice and production. The final outcome is the production of the South Pacific

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1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 - 1606

as a geo-political space that is rendered readable by means of the mental activities of imagining and inventing as well as the performative and productive activities that make it “real” for viewers and audiences. In order to trace the process of signification in which a space becomes culturally meaningful I analyse here narratives, maps and rituals, which are central to the idea of producing the Pacific. This process, which originates in the representation of exploration in written narratives, is also embedded in maps and rituals that effectively stage and perform a spatial environment. As will be seen below, the study of maps, narratives and rituals as a single object of study affords an insight into the peculiar ethnography of exploration that informed the production of the South Pacific. The movement studied in this book thus goes from the mental activity of imagining to the ultimate production of the South Pacific. In other words, I trace the transition from invention to performance to product. The final outcome is the “Pacific,” as we understand it, that is to say, a space that has been rendered readable and therefore accessible by means of a productive process. As Henri Lefebvre observes: “an already produced space can be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of signification” (1991: 17). To trace the process of signification that culminates in the production of the Pacific as a space that is culturally and geographically relevant means interpreting these various “representations” as cultural texts. In other words, my study fits in with the analysis of culture as “thick description,” as proposed by Clifford Geertz (1973). The earlier voyage of Ferdinand Magellan (1519-21) and the important journeys of James Cook in the last third of the eighteenth century provide the points of departure and closure for the development of the Pacific. The importance of those voyages for the history of world exploration has been amply documented. This is not the case with the three voyages of Spanish exploration of the Pacific from the west coast of South America that took place between 1567 and 1606, that are the central point of this book. For these voyages, as will be seen below, the Americas are important because, from the Spanish point of view, they were meant to extend their discovery of the new world. Moreover, the expeditions departed from Callao in Peru and were staffed by many people already living in this colony.

1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 – 1606

17

Consequently, the colonial development of the Americas provides the departure point, literal as well as discursive, for a “Spanish lake” that gradually grew to acquire the contemporary dimensions of what today is known as the South Pacific basin.2 The last ocean to be thoroughly explored and mapped, the South Sea was imagined during the fifteenth century from resilient myths that were finally laid to rest by Captain Cook. Before Cook’s voyages, the South Pacific remained one of the least known parts of the world. The Solomons, discovered in 1567 by Álvaro de Mendaña, found their way into maps but remained elusive to later explorers until well into the eighteenth century. From New Zealand to Tasmania in the west and to Easter Island in the east there were blank spaces that still suggested the possibility of a large Southern Continent, normally referred to as Terra Australis Incognita or Magellanica. For two and a half centuries after Magellan’s circumnavigation mapmakers laid down Terra Australis on their maps with little new evidence for its existence or lack of it, even after Pedro Fernández de Quirós’ second journey in 1606 and Abel Tasman’s voyage in 1642-43.3 This view is clearly presented in the most famous map of the time, Abraham Ortelius’ Typus Orbis Terrarum, which appeared in the first world published in 1570, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Fig. 1). The discovery of the Southern Continent or Terra Australis Incognita was behind the sixteenth-century journeys to the South Pacific. Enthusiasts such as Quirós and Mendaña buttressed a belief whose last remarkable upholder was Alexander Dalrymple in the eighteenth century.4 The elusive geography of this area of the world informs two and a half centuries of exploration, ranging from the first round-the-world circumnavigation led by Magellan to the first voyage of Cook in 1768-71. In fact, Cook arrived in the Bay of St Philip and St James (“Big Bay”) in Vanuatu’s Santo (named Espiritu Santo by Quirós) in 1774. The island’s previous European visitor had been its discoverer, Quirós, who nearly 170 years before, in 1606, believed this island to be the northern tip of the Southern Continent and named it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. Previous to Cook’s voyages, the prevalent view of the Pacific was largely the result of various myths that were peppered with second-hand accounts of the Spanish and Dutch journeys during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Classical and medieval geographers had, in turn, informed these voyagers’ belief that, if the

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1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 - 1606

earth were to remain in equilibrium, the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere must be balanced.5 The concept of a vast southern continent was inherited from the cosmography of the Classical era and the Christian Middle Ages. As imagined, this continent embraced today’s Antartica, New Zealand and Australia as well as the islands in the South Pacific, and was thought to extend from the South Pole into the Tropics, and to be bounded by the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Of paramount importance in the construction of the South Pacific was the account of Marco Polo’s voyages, written c.1298. Polo’s legacy was enduring indeed, and it was circulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by means of maps in which the names Beach, Locach and Maletur appeared, as will be seen below.6 Polo’s narrative, which was widely used by mapmakers as well as explorers during the early modern period, deals briefly with this area of the world that, he said, could be found [u]pon leaving the island of Java, and steering a course between south and south-west, seven hundred miles, you fall in with two islands, the larger of which is named Sondur, and the other Kondur. Both being uninhabited, it is unnecessary to say more respecting them. Having run the distance of fifty miles from these islands, in a south-easterly direction, you reach an extensive and rich province, that forms a part of the main land, and is named Lochac [sic]. Its inhabitants are idolaters. They have a language peculiar to themselves, and are governed by their own king, who pays no tribute to any other, the situation of the country being such as to protect it from any hostile attack [...] In this country sappan, or brezil wood, is produced in large quantities. Gold is abundant to a degree scarcely credible; elephants are found there; and objects of the chase, either with dogs or birds, are in plenty [...] Besides these circumstances there is nothing further that requires mention, unless it be that the country is wild and mountainous, and is little frequented by strangers. (1983: 335-36)

Sixteenth-century explorers, including Magellan, were mesmerised by the idea of Polo’s Southern Continent and the belief that somewhere in the mythical east there were wealthy islands of gold and silver that they were destined to encounter. From classical times, geographers had alluded repeatedly to the existence of these islands, Chryse and Argyre.7 However consistent their belief in the existence

1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 – 1606

19

of these islands, they were rather vague concerning their location. For example, Pliny indicated their proximity to the river Indus (Sind), whereas Pomponius Mela located Argyre by the Ganges and Chryse by Tamu.8 In the Christian Middle Ages, there was some debate among scholars about these islands as well as the possible existence of the fourth continent and whether it could be inhabited. Since it was said in the Bible that the Gospel had reached all peoples on earth, St Augustine was adamant that this continent could not be inhabited.9 Similarly, the influential work of the fifth-century Roman philosopher, Ambrosius Macrobius, presented the fourth area of the world as uninhabitable on account of the heat of the Torrid Zone, which separated it from the known universe or oikumene (Fig. 2). Macrobius was very influential throughout the Middle Ages and his book, In Somnium Scipionis, included versions of this diagrammatical representation of the world in which the world was divided into climatic zones. Unlike other classical and Christian scholars, Beatus of Liebana’s conception of the world followed St Isidore of Seville in considering that this Antipodean stretch of land could be inhabited, as seen in the maps based on his worldview published throughout the Middle Ages (Fig. 3).10 Though he was an eighth-century scholar, Beatus’ view was of lasting importance, and medieval editions of his book, Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John (776-86), reproduced a mappamundi with this worldview. Beatus’ maps also locate the isles of Chryse and Argyre in the east; that is, at the top of the map, just opposite the Terrestrial Paradise.11 Similarly, the seventh-century Christian scholar, Saint Isidore, also located them in the east.12 In his study on early mapping of the Pacific, Lawrence Wroth sums up the geographical notions developed by these medieval thinkers as follows: Thus the idea of the Terra Australis came to the Middle Ages with double authority—the belief in the theory expressed by St. Isidore of Seville, embodied graphically in the maps that accompanied certain manuscripts of the Beatus Apocalypse, and the acceptance of it by Cicero, transmitted by the commentary and map of Macrobius. (2001: 168)

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1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 - 1606

The most famous of medieval apocryphal travellers, John of Mandeville, suggested that the islands of silver and gold could be found next to Taproban. In fact, two distinct wealthy and mythical islands are identified in the Bible as Ophir and Tarshish. It is written there that the servants of King Solomon brought the gold with which the Temple was built from the islands of Ophir and Tarshish.13 The relevant passage reads as follows: And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezionber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon. For the King had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram, once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory and apes, and peacocks.14

In relation to the Ophirian conjecture, Columbus set a clear precedent for the explorers-to-come. The search for the gold of “Tarsis,” which he believed to be in the Far East, next to Cathay, could serve, Columbus thought, for the reconstruction of a second temple like that of Solomon and help deliver Jerusalem (Gil 25).15 These elusive islands were also one of the objectives of the Magellanic circumnavigation. As Oskar Spate points out: “[T]he design [of this journey] [...] was not for a circumnavigation but for a Southwest Passage to the Moluccas; and another possible objective in Magellan’s mind was the gold of Tarshish and Ophir, identified with the Lequeos—the Ryukyu islands—already known to the Portuguese” (1979: 37). A few years later, Sebastian Cabot’s journey of 1526 was likewise directed to encounter the islands of Ophir and Tarshish, the search for which is amalgamated with that of Cathay, Cipango and the Spice Islands.16 The goal of Cabot’s journey is suggested in Robert Thorne’s map of 1527, which is reproduced in Richard Hakluyt’s The principal navigations, voyages, traffics and discoveries of the English nation made by sea or over land, first published in 1582 (Fig.4). Thorne’s map shows in the southern hemisphere, close to Moabar and Gelolo, the islands of Tarshish and Ophir, which leads Juan Gil to conclude that Cabot was searching not so much for spices as for the gold, silver and precious stones from these islands:17

1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 – 1606

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[E]n 1527 envió Thorne al embajador inglés Lee un mapamundi que indica a las claras la meta a la que se dirigía Caboto: en efecto, en el hemisferio austral al lado de Moabar y Gelolo, aparecen dibujadas Insule Tharsis et Offir ditissime [...] la expedición de Caboto no iba por especiería, sino por oro, plata y piedras preciosas, los productos que daba la tierra de las islas de Salomón. (31) In 1527 Thorne sent to the English ambassador, Lee, a mappamundi that clearly indicates Cabot’s goal: in the southern hemisphere, alongside Moabar and Gelolo appear drawings marked Insule Tharsis et Offir ditissime [...] Cabot’s expedition was not looking for spices but for gold, silver and precious stones, products of the earth of the Isles of Solomon.

Not surprisingly, many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people confused these biblical sites, Ophir and Tarshish, with the classical Chryse and Argyre and their search informs the three journeys of exploration studied here. These three voyages, which took place between 1567 and 1606, are the only journeys that up to this time were directed exclusively to exploring the southern regions of the Pacific. The first, which was led by Alvaro de Mendaña de Neira in 1567, left the harbour of Callao in Lima with the fleet that would discover the Solomons (Itinerary 1). Mendaña also commanded the second journey to the Pacific in 1595-1596, with Pedro Fernández de Quirós as pilot (Itinerary 2). During this journey the Solomons were not found again but the Santa Cruz archipelago was discovered before Mendaña died. The expedition then returned to the Philippines with Quirós as pilot under the command of Mendaña’s wife, Isabel Barreto, who was the first-ever woman Admiral. Quirós was to lead the third expedition, which also left from Callao in December 1605, with Luis Vaez de Torres as admiral (Itinerary 3). After five months of navigation they arrived in Vanuatu’s Espiritu Santo, which they named and took possession of on the 14th of May 1606.18 The fleet then separated and Torres travelled along the route today known by his name, the Torres Strait, thus inferring the insularity of New Guinea.19 His feat, however, like much documentation concerning these three journeys, remained largely unknown until the relevant letter left in the Manila archive was bought, translated and published by Alexander Dalrymple.

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1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 - 1606

Between the dates of these three journeys, other people traversed the Pacific, including the English privateers, Sir Francis Drake (1577) and John Cavendish (1587). The main objective of both voyages, however, does not seem to have been exploration of the Pacific per se, but the attack and plunder of the Spanish towns of the western South American coast and the Manila Galleon.20 Jonathan Lamb remarks on this point that: If there was a point of origin to the history of the British in the Pacific it would not be found in Drake’s circumnavigation (1577) or in Narborough’s reconnaissance of the western coast of South America (1669). These were peeps into the storehouse of the Spanish Empire that had no hope of establishing a foothold anywhere near it. (2000: 4)

Nevertheless, by crossing the Pacific, Drake contributed to the cartographic representations of the area and to the invention of the Pacific. Therefore, his contribution will be assessed below in the sections devoted to the maps of the Pacific produced and consumed at this time. The three Iberian-sponsored explorations taking place between 1567 and 1606 and their aims, their achievements or lack of them, are scrutinised in the first chapter of this book, “Exploring the South Pacific.” Here the journeys are looked at in their socioeconomic context. Also, the way journeys have been classed as journeys of discovery, exploration, religious conversion, commerce, acquisition of knowledge, settlement and/or conquest is questioned. This functional study leads to the negotiation of previous classifications in the first section of the chapter, “Failure and Futility in the Voyages of Mendaña and Quirós.” The second section studies the contribution to the exploration of the Pacific by Mendaña’s wife, Isabel Barreto, the first female to command a fleet. “The (Mis)representation of Isabel Barreto” looks into the reasons for her historical silencing and the inferences that can be drawn about historical narrative and its role in the production of the Pacific. The inextricable relationship between exploration and representation looked at in the first chapter is complemented with an analysis of maps as ways to acquire knowledge and power in the second chapter, “Mapping the Pacific.” The first section of this

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chapter, “Plotting the Southern Continent,” exposes various maps produced and used at this time and presents them as cultural artifacts where art, fiction and reality merge to create an idea of the world that is as geographical as it is social, moral or religious. This reading is furthered in the next section, “Staging the Southern Continent,” which interprets the topos of the world as a stage in relation to world maps and the Pacific. In these maps, I show, the universe becomes an imperial theatre where various notions of hegemony and political dominance are interwoven with the pervading baroque idea of vanitas. The way meaning is externalised in these maps is likewise communicated in the important rituals enacted, especially those related to the possession in the name of the Spanish Crown. The histrionic ceremonies of possession performed by the discoverers are seen to contribute to the creation of a geographical and symbolic space. These rituals are studied in their multiplicity and complexity in the chapter on “Performing the South Pacific.” Here I consider how these rituals “perform” a physical space thus invented and subsequently produced for the occupiers and their intended audiences away in Europe.21 I offer some concluding remarks about the process of producing the Pacific in my last chapter, “Inventing, Performing and Practising: The Production of the Early Modern Pacific.” This conclusion departs from the assumption that the concepts of image and imagining are imbricated in the creation and reproduction of hegemonic relationships. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it: “visual and verbal representations are inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture” (1994: 3). My study of narratives alongside maps and rituals does not seek to privilege one or the other, but presents both as equally valuable sources of cultural information that are always political constructs. Consequently, their reading is not unique, uniform or uncontestable.22 I have looked at cultural products as, to borrow John Berger’s idiom, ways of seeing and interpreting the world, which give us a multifaceted view of the relationship between culture and society. This involves stressing the various conditioning factors that have inhered in the production of the Pacific. In Michel de Certeau’s words, to interpret means to take into account that culture only exists “in the plural.”23 Tensions between homogenization and differentiation are

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1. Introduction: Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567 - 1606

central to a study of maps and narratives that foregrounds their production, usage and transformation. This discussion will bring to the fore relations of production and consumption in order to show how the world is not a sort of objective given but it is constantly being (re)produced by historical relations of power.24 Like other spaces we inhabit, the Pacific, I submit, is not something that is or has always been there, but a space that is conceptualized, created, invented and produced by means of what Certeau calls “the practice of everyday life.” Space, as Certeau puts it, requires practices to be made into a living environment: “A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space is a practiced place” (1988b: 117). The early modern practice of the Pacific I trace thus not only illustrates Henri Lefebvre’s claim that “(Social) space is a (social) product” but also demonstrates that space is as much a social product as a social producer.

Notes 1

José de Acosta sums up the classical and biblical arguments related to the existence and habitability of the Antipodes (1987: 74-93) as well as the location of Ophir and Tarshis (1987: 93-104) in Historia natural y moral de las Indias. 2

This area, which included Australasia and the Moluccan archipelago, was interestingly described by Lancelot du Voisin as the “third world” (le troisieme monde). On du Voisin, see Tom Conley(1996: 8 and 278-85).

3

“In 1643 Tasman’s expedition from Batavia passed south of the known west coast of Australia, discovering the southern coast of Tasmania and the western coast of New Zealand […[ All the trans-Pacific voyages kept, or were driven by wind and current, to tropical latitudes for the ocean crossing, and consequently all after Mendaña passed through islands now identified as the Tuamotu Archipelago. None found the larger islands of Tahiti, Fiji or Samoa, but all treated their western Pacific landfall […[ as part of a mainland” (Cook 20). On Tasman’s voyages of 1642-43 and 1644, see Günter Schilder 1976: 139-205. 4

“Whatever may have been the expressed motives of the next century and a half, or more, of exploration of the Pacific—the Dutch in the Indies and on the coast of Australia, the English and Dutch buccaneers on all the coasts, the French with their

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25

____________________________________________________ great Compagnie des Indes Orientales—there seems never to have been far from the minds of the leaders and projectors the discovery of the great continent of the south” (Wroth 2001: 176). 5

Mercator wrote about this balance on his world chart of 1569: “under the Antarctic Pole [by] a continent so great that, with the southern parts of Asia, and the new India or America, it should be a weight equal to the other lands.” On this map, see Shirley 1983: 137-42.

6

According to Shirley, “Dubious ancient authorities were given implicit authenticity and embodied in the map [Mercator’s] to be copied again by many lesser geographers [...] For nearly a hundred years nearly all world maps copied Mercator’s vast but imaginary southern continent. The large promontary [sic] jutting northwards towards the East Indies and corresponding approximately to the position of Australia is described under the names Beach, Regio Lucach and Maletur. These are all taken from accounts of Marco Polo’s travels and misapplied geographically, but such was Mercator’s own authority that these names were only slowly displaced and sometimes not until long after the actual discoveries of the 1630s and 1640s in that area […] The influence of Mercator’s world map was widespread. Shortly afterwards, in 1570, it was redrawn on a much-reduced oval projection by Abraham Ortelius for his new atlas the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and in this form widely circulated for over forty years. Virtually every world map for several decades was based on either Mercator’s original or its reduction by Ortelius” (1983: 139). The name Beach appears prominently in, among other maps, Ortelius Typus (1570), which is reproduced above (Fig. 1). 7

Peter Whitfield rightly emphasises “the difficulty of reconstructing the Greek sciences”: “Many important writers are known only through second- or even thirdhand reports, so that we do not have a coherent presentation of their ideas. We have outlines, or suggestions, or guiding principles, and the precise meaning of crucial words and phrases may be elusive. In the case of geography, the overwhelming fact is that no world map in any form has survived from the entire classical period […] we have only descriptive texts which must be used to reconstruct fundamental geographical concepts” (4). Miriam Estensen sums up these concepts in the second chapter of her book, which she entitles “A View of the World” (2000: 5-18). 8

The relevant passage reads as follows: “ad Tamum insula est chryse, ad gangem argyre. Altera aurei soli: ita ueteres tradidere: altera argentei" (Book 3, i-iv). Chryse and Argyre are both Greek names meaning respectively "Gold" and "Silver." The translation of Mela's description is as follows: "Chryse is at the island of Tamu, Argyre is by the Ganges, the one with golden earth, and the other (so the tradition says) with silver." I am indebted to Paul McKechnie for help with this and other Latin translations in this book.

9

Whitfield observes that “In the case of the world map, the authoritative text was considered to be the description in Genesis chapters nine and ten of the division of the world among the three sons of Noah. This was related to the three known continents, and gave rise to the tripartite image of the world which became a cornerstone of

26

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____________________________________________________ medieval geography. Where the basis of the world map in the classical period had been theoretical geometry, it was now the religious imagination” (1994: 12). 10

To quote Whitfield’s explanation: “These rectangular maps were done throughout the Middle Ages and follow a tradition that is traced back to Beatus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John of 776-86.” On the fourth continent, beyond the Red Sea, Whitfield comments that: “This conflicts strikingly with the orthodox religious picture of a tripartite world, but speculation concerning a fourth continent beyond the southern sea, beyond the torrid zone and perhaps inhabited by Antipodeans has a long pedigree in classical literature, and is found explicitly in late Roman geographical writers such as Pliny, Solinus and Mela. The idea was echoed by Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) whose encyclopaedic works were of seminal influence throughout early Christendom” (1994: 16). For a detailed commentary and description of this map, see Harvey 1991: 23. David Faussett remarks that: “It is thought that Anaximander of Miletus made a map and envisaged a spherical earth in the sixth century B.C., and in the mid-fifth century Parmenides expressed similar ideas, incorporating an equatorial axis and symmetrical climatic bands or ‘zones.’ […] [I]n general, the unknown world was defined on the basis of symmetry with the known. The same logic implied that the southern continent might be inhabited, but this idea was rejected-it was thought to be peopled (if at all) by monsters. (1993: 10). 11 The fifth-century Church Father, Saint Jerome, placed Chryse and Argyre on the Indian Ocean. This can be seen in, for example, a twelfth-century manuscript map of Asia illustrating his writings held by the British Library (ADD ms 10049, f. 64). According to Harvey, "This map of Asia may have accompanied works of Jerome as early as the fourth or fifth century, but this twelfth-century copy is the only surviving example. East is at the top; at the bottom of the map are the Black Sea (left), Greece and the Aegean (centre) and the eastern Mediterranean (right)" (1991: 73). 12

This map is held by the Bayerische-Staatsbibliothek in Munich (Clm 10058, f. 154v). A reproduction can be seen in Harvey 1991: 22. 13 Gil mentions several occurrences of the mythical Tarshish, including a legend in Abraham Cresques’ Catalan Atlas (1375), an inscription in Fra Mauro’s map and references in Mandeville and Ptolemy (“A legend in the Catalan Atlas of 1375 referring to the region of Tarsia […] Likewise, Fra Mauro signals in the oriental centre of Asia the “kingdom Tharse from which the Magi came [...] John Mandeville speaks of Tarshish as a region subject to the Three Kings [...] The alphabetical index to Ptolemy, s.u. Tharsos, indicates that from that direction came the star to guide the Kings” “Una leyenda del mapa catalán de 1375 [que] se refiere a la región de Tarsia [...] Asimismo fra Mauro señala en el centro oriental de Asia un "regno Tharse, del qual vene hi magi". Juan de Mandevilla habla de Tarsis como de una región sometida a los Reyes Magos. El índice alfabético a Ptolemeo, s.u. Tharsos, señala que de allí había salido la estrella para guiar a los Reyes” [c1989: 53]). 14

See Chapter IX of the Third Book of Kingss (Vulgate Version) or Chapter X, verse 22, of the First Book of Kings (King James Version). See also Chapter VIII of the

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27

____________________________________________________ Second Book of Paralipomemon (Septuagint version) or Chapter IX, verse 21, of the Second Book of Chronicles (King James Version). 15

According to Gil, “If we believe Columbus, the gold of Tarshish was going to serve for the reconstruction of the second Temple […] the Solomonic treasures were going to facilitate the conquest of Jerusalem” (“De creer a Colon, el oro de Tarsis iba a servir para la reconstrucción del segundo Templo [...] los tesoros salomónicos habían de propiciar la conquista de Jerusalén …” [c1989: 20]). 16

Cabot’s army of the 3rd of April 1526 was destined, according to Gil, for the islands of Tarshish and Ophir as well as Cipango and Oriental Cathay (c.1989: 30). Oskar Spate quotes that Cabot was sent to “discover Ophir and Tarsis and Eastern Cathay, as well as new spice regions believed to exist in the equatorial or southern Pacific and undoubtedly within the Spanish hemisphere” (1979: 15).

17

This view is shared by Colin Jack-Hinton, for whom this map suggests the wealth of the islands of Ophir and Tarshish to be as important, if not more, than the discovery of the Spice Islands: “The view implied by [Robert] Thorne in his map of 1527 was that a major consideration at Badajoz was the discovery and possession of Ophir and Tarshish, the lands from which King Solomon derived his wealth, and which Thorne concluded lay to the SE of the East Indies” (1969: 3). 18

New Jerusalem appears in maps as late as 1756 in Charles de Brosses’ Histoire des Navigations Australes (Paris). 19 Skelton notes that: “Prado and Torres were the first navigators to ascertain that it was an island. Although evidence of their passage through Torres Strait found its way on to printed maps [...] the reports and charts which they forwarded to the King of Spain remained secreted in the Spanish archives, and their discovery was not published” (1958: 199). 20

In Drake’s case, as William Lessa sums up, there was some ambiguity regarding his destination and the goals of the journey: “Drake’s motives […] have long remained unclear. According to most speculation, he must have had one or more of the following objectives in mind: exploitation of the Terra Australis Incognita, discovery of the Strait of Anian, trade with the Moluccas, and the plundering and harassing of the Spaniards […] A final possibility as to what Drake had in mind when he persuaded some of the most highly placed persons in England, including probably the queen herself, to subscribe funds to his venture was neither discovery, nor the annexation of new lands, nor trade, but outright piracy” (1975: 20, 23). On Drake’s voyage, see especially Andrews (1967) 81-84, Wallis (1984), Hampden (1972), and Kelsey (c1998). 21

The first book to use the word invención to describe the Columbian voyages is Hernán Pérez de Oliva’s Historia de la invención de las Indias (c. 1528). Oliva’s is the first chronicle of the discovery and conquest of the Americas written in Spanish. Columbus used the term consistently to describe his journeys to the Americas. The term was used by Edmund O’Gorman for whom “‘[d]iscovery’ implies that the nature of the thing found was previously known to the finder […] Thus an astronomer who is

28

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____________________________________________________ already aware that some heavenly bodies are classed as planets may be said to have ‘discovered’ a planet when he detects for the first time one of those bodies. But the astronomer who first has the conception of such bodies as ‘planets’ may properly be said to have ‘invented’ that class of heavenly bodies, since it was he who formulated for the first time the concept itself” (1961: 9). In his 1611 dictionary, Sebastián de Covarrubias describes inventar as: “To extricate something anew that has never been seen before and is not an imitation. Sometimes it means to lie, and we call inventors those who forge lies. An inventor is the author of something new, an invention the invented or newly found thing” (“Sacar alguna cosa de Nuevo que no se aya visto antes ni tenga imitación de otra. Algunas vezes significa mentir, y llamamos invencioneros a los forjadores de mentiras. Inventor, el autor de la cosa nueva, invención la cosa inventada, o nuevamente hallada”). Thus the meanings of ‘newly found’, ‘invented’, and ‘lie’ neatly converge in the definition. These ideas have been studied in detail by Rabasa (1993). 22

Instead, as other cultural production, they are, in Simon During’s words, “conceived of as a process of ‘hybridization,’ ‘re-production,’ and ‘negotiation’” (1999: 6). 23

I use “Culture in the plural” in Michel de Certeau’s definition of the concept. For Certeau whereas “[c]ulture in the singular always imposes the law of a power […] [c]ulture in the plural endlessly call for a need to struggle (1997: 139). In other words, “[a] resistance needs to be directed against the expansion of a force that unifies by colonizing, and that denies at once its own limits and those of others. At stake is a necessary relation of every cultural production with death that limits it and with the battle that defends it” (1997: 139). 24

Karl Marx described this as the fantastic objectification of commodities. On this topic, see Clifford (1993: 61) and passim.

2. Exploring the South Pacific “TERRA AUSTRALIS RE/center inuenta sed nondu plene cognita.”1 (World Map, Oronce Finé) “Navigation” was a subject in every school, even the most landlocked, as the measurability of the heavens made the earth measurable as well. But “navigation” was really the metaphor of the age as the world was encompassed. (Dening 1980: 108)

Although history has mostly been written by and for the winners, failure has a certain appeal, a sort of romantic aura that makes it attractive. Success, or what is perceived or interpreted as such, has been the main objective of the official history that, by and large, dominated the European view of the world until the last third of the twentieth century.2 Since then, however, there has been much rewriting of history from the point of view of the lower classes, women and the colonised in the last decades. Following that discourse, this chapter proposes that failure is an essential parameter for understanding cultural history and, thus, the world in which we live. This chapter looks into some shared cultural assumptions that underline expeditions of exploration to the South Pacific keeping in mind that historians are always determined by the beliefs and assumptions of their time and place. Other than our own contemporary biases, when considering early modern expeditions to the South Pacific, we need to be aware that the circulation (or lack of it) of the documents relating to those voyages took place well after they were produced.3 Before the last third of the eighteenth century, only some letters, accounts and maps, both printed and in manuscript form, were used by Dutch, French and English explorers and scholars. Among the written material used by these expeditions, the memorial of Quirós

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normally known as the ‘Memorial’, which was translated and printed in many European languages in the seventeenth century, is probably the most influential early modern publication that was widely available in various European countries. Other than this brief most of the material to which we have access today was unearthed, printed and translated during the second half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, the acquisition, edition, translation and publication of many of these documents took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards there was a renewed interest in the Pacific, especially from French and English explorers, that stimulated the re-discovery and diffusion of early material relating to transoceanic journeys. These editions and their commentaries reveal what the prevalent views about good or bad exploration, scientific knowledge and colonisation were at this time. From our point of view, however, both the early documents and their post-enlightenment interpretation tend to celebrate discovery, exploration, masculinism and colonisation to a degree that we may find uncomfortable. Also, the post-enlightenment emphasis on reason makes writers stress and censor what they see to be religious bigotry or native superstition. Indeed, post-enlightenment’s ranking of humanity had a peculiar effect on Catholic Europe, for it associated Catholicism with indigenous cultures and dismissed them both as superstitious and alien to reason. As Jonathan Lamb remarks, “in early Britain […] no opportunity was lost to draw attention to affinities between heathen and Catholic superstitions” (2000: xix).4 These ideas are traced in the first section of this chapter, “Failure and Futility in the Voyages of Mendaña and Quirós” where the trajectories of South Pacific explorers Pedro Fernández de Quirós and Álvaro de Mendaña are looked at in the context of an idea of history that is evolutionary and hierarchical.5 Their journeys embody a persistent sense of failure and deception, to the extent that Lawrence Wroth rightly labels their search for new lands a human drama (comédie humaine): “The search for the continent which did not exist, at least in the form in which it had been envisaged, presents throughout its course a moving scene in the comédie humaine” (2001: 176). Wroth’s use of the word drama (comédie) is doubly significant for these explorers’ search for the Southern Continent, which, as will

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be seen below, forms a chapter of human endeavour that is cruel and moving, as well as histrionic.6 The two sections of this chapter illustrate Michel de Certeau’s argument that “[h]istoriography (that is, ‘history’ and ‘writing’) bears within its own name the paradox—almost an oxymoron—of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse. Its task is one of connecting them, and, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, of working as if the two were being joined” (1988a: xxvii). Indeed, Certeau’s “historical paradox” concerning the gap between the past and what is written about it is amply demonstrated by the treatment of the deeds of Mendaña’s wife, Isabel Barreto, to which the second section of this chapter, “The (Mis)representation of Isabel Barreto,” is devoted. The historical portrayal of Isabel, I show, exposes the gendered biases that inform historiography up to and including our own days.7 By way of contrast, I analyse what can safely be inferred about Isabel Barreto’s personality from the available material and this leads me to question some of the assumptions made about her. As will be demonstrated, her description in contemporary sources and by later history exposes some of the beliefs, prejudices and assumptions of traditional history. In Isabel’s case, in fact, the same stereotypes get recycled and reused throughout the centuries, making one or two passages from Quirós’ account the elements from which her historical portrait has been produced. Isabel’s image appears thus shrouded by the masculinism that permeates the interpretations of her attitude and words up to and including our own days. Like the assessment of the journeys of Mendaña and Quirós, the treatment of Isabel by history illustrates Edward H. Carr’s argument that an historical fact is not what happened, but that small part of what has happened that has been used by historians to talk about (1986: 1-24).8

2.1 Failure and Futility in the Voyages of Mendaña and Quirós Failure and futility are the main ingredients of the three journeys to the Southern Continent that take place in the last third of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. As a

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matter of fact, the distance between high aspirations and cruel reality in the Pacific extends well beyond that period. This bathos became the hallmark of the creation of the Pacific until well into the nineteenth century. As Lamb sums up, “Delight always goes hand in hand with dismay in the Pacific” (2000: 7).9 Mendaña and Quirós can be said to have inaugurated in the Pacific what Daniel Boorstin has called “the ardours of negative discovery” (1983: 278). Negative discovery, as it were, unites efforts to discover and explore the Pacific, which arose from the belief in the Southern Continent or Terra Australis Incognita. According to Lamb, in fact, “negative discovery” pervades not only the journeys themselves, but also, and more importantly, it encompasses historical and literary representations of the Pacific.10 Among them, Lamb lists the following examples: “Gulliver praises the land of the Houyhnhmns for the things it does not contain; William Dampier describes the coast of New Holland as a series of absent amenities; More delivers an account of Utopia by means of the figure of litotes […] Such negative methods of representation are an index of the profound uncertainty of navigators, travelers, and settlers in the Pacific” (2000: xv). This ‘negative’ attitude lay behind the sixteenth-century journeys to the Pacific by Quirós, Barreto and Mendaña, and lasted well into the eighteenth century, buttressed by enthusiasts, the last of whom was probably Alexander Dalrymple.11 Before the expeditions of Mendaña, Barreto and Quirós, other journeys to the Pacific took place in the fifty years after Magellan’s circumnavigation (1521-1567), although they did not have much of an impact in the production of this area of the world. Though at times couched in semi-imperialist tones, the most thorough study of the Spanish exploration to date is Amancio Landín, Descubrimientos en los Mares del Sur. The Portuguese were developing their commercial links in the Malay Archipelago and arrived at New Guinea’s coast in 1526, though they did not carry their search further south. According to Lawrence Wroth, “New Guinea, or Papua, seems to have been briefly sighted in passing as early as 1511 by the Portuguese mariner Antonio de Abreu […] [in] 1526” (2001: 181). Also, sponsored by the Spanish crown, García Jofre de Loaísa led an expedition from La Coruña in Spain to the Philippines in 1525-26 following the Magellanic route and was

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shipwrecked and lost at sea. Two years later, Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón went from Nueva España (Mexico) to the Moluccas and then on to New Guinea (1527-29). Lastly, Hernando de Grijalva went from Peru to the Moluccas in 1547.12 These journeys, however, were not directed to exploring the Pacific. In fact, the first westward voyage of intentional South Pacific exploration was that of Álvaro de Mendaña in 1567. The motivation to find the austral landmass, Terra Australis Incognita, was clearly behind Mendaña’s journey when he set out from Peru to seek “certain islands and a continent” in the South Seas.13 In his search for these “certain islands” Mendaña was probably influenced by Quechua beliefs, which were even more important for his relative and main competitor in seeking command of the expedition, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa.14 Quechua tradition, as interpreted by Sarmiento de Gamboa in the 1550s, ratified the existence of wealthy islands off the West coast of Peru, in the South Seas. These islands were known as Hahuachumbi and Ninachumbi, and Amancio Landín follows Marcos Jiménez de la Espada in identifying them with the Galapagos Islands (1945: 24n.). Landín affirms that: In his Historia de los Ingas del Perú, Sarmiento demonstrates a perfect knowledge of the indigenous tradition in relation to the mentioned Hahuachumbi and Ninachumbi, and this knowledge stimulates his idea of colonizing them.”15 (1945: 25)

Sarmiento de Gamboa, however, did not succeed in his quest, for Mendaña had the fortune or misfortune to count on the support of his uncle, the viceroy García de Castro, who favoured him with the commission to discover the Southern Continent. One of the reasons for the decision to support the exploration, according to a letter cited by Landín, was to provide employment for the many idle people that lived in Peru awaiting their opportunity to sail away and enrich themselves.16 Mendaña sailed from the Peruvian port of Callao on 19 November 1567 with a fleet of around 170-180 men in two ships, the Capitana and the Almiranta, which were named Los Reyes and Todos los Santos respectively. Mendaña was the governor (adelantado) of the fleet, Pedro the field-master, Sarmiento de Gamboa captain of the

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Capitana,17 and Hernán Gallego the piloto mayor (main pilot). Four Franciscan friars accompanied the expedition that traversed the uncharted South-West Pacific in eighty days, making a landfall at Santa Ysabel in the Solomon group of islands on 9 February 1568. Mendaña found no Southern Continent, though he discovered and named Santa Ysabel, San Cristobal and Guadalcanal in the Solomons. The islands Mendaña discovered were only named Solomons thereafter because of their association with the Solomonic Ophir searched for by many explorers and mentioned in the first chapter of this book. The Solomons thereafter eluded travellers for a further two hundred years, being only rediscovered after they had already become another Pacific mirage.18 The words of the nineteenth-century editors of the documents related to the discovery of the Solomons for the Hakluyt Society, Lord Amherst of Hackney and Basil Thomson, rightly present this “discovery” as one of the most puzzling chapters of European exploration.19 They affirm that: “There is surely nothing in the history of maritime discovery so strange as the story of how the Isles of Solomon were discovered, lost, and found again” (1901: i). Mendaña’s expedition spent six months among the Melanesian islands and returned to Callao on 11 September 1569 after an absence of almost two years (Kelly 1971: 16). Upon his return, Mendaña dedicated the next twenty-six years to canvassing support for a further expedition, and on 17th of June 1595 he returned to the South Pacific with Pedro Fernández de Quirós as pilot. With Mendaña travelled his wife and brothers and some 354 people, of whom 107 were women, children and servants (Gil c1989: 106).20 In this rather aimless voyage, Mendaña sought the Solomons, without success, in order to colonise and settle them. Instead, however, he arrived in and named the Marquesas de Mendoza in honour of the Marquis of Cañete, Viceroy of Peru. They then sailed to the Santa Cruz archipelago where Mendaña died of malaria, as did many others in the journey. Following Mendaña’s last will and testament, his wife, Isabel Barreto was named Governor and, after much hardship, hunger and loss of life, she led the remainder of the fleet to the Philippines. She commanded the only ship left of the fleet, the galleon San Jerónimo, which departed the Solomons with one hundred and twenty people on board. Of those, forty died in Santa Cruz and fifty of scurvy, hunger and thirst on the way back. Only thirty-five to forty arrived in Manila,

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and of these a further ten died in local hospitals, as will be seen in more detail in the next section of this chapter. The other ship from the fleet, the Almiranta, was lost and it is believed to have landed in the Solomons, in today’s Pamua.21 Archaeological evidence has proved that it is quite likely that the men and women from that ship founded a settlement of some months’ duration, before disappearing, probably killed by the natives.22 As Jim Allen and Roger Green observe, “the archaeological evidence demonstrates that in 1595 A.D. the Spanish in fact did return to the Solomon Islands they had discovered 27 years before, and established what became the second European settlement of short duration in the Oceanic area of the Pacific” (1972: 91).23 After this failed expedition, Quirós assumed Mendaña’s role and dedicated himself with passion throughout the following decade to canvassing support for a further expedition. He finally led the third voyage to the South Pacific from Callao in 1605.24 This expedition consisted of two ships, the San Pedro y San Pablo and the San Pedrico, and a launch, Los Tres Reyes. Quirós was in charge of the San Pedro y San Pablo, with his declared enemy, Diego de Prado y Tovar as second in command. Luis Vaez de Torres commanded the San Pedrico and Pedro Bernal de Cermeño Los Tres Reyes. Neither the Solomons nor the Santa Cruz archipelago was found in this journey, though Quirós landed in Vanuatu’s Santo. Believing it to be part of the Southern continent, he named it Austrialia del Espíritu Santo to honour the monarchy of the Austrian Hapsburgs as well as the austral find. From Santo the fleet became divided and, for reasons unknown to us, Quirós returned, leaving Luis Vaez de Torres to lead his ship through the strait that today bears his name. This deed was, however, largely unknown until Dalrymple found Torres’ letter in Manila, published it, and proposed that his name be given to the strait and islands that today bear it.25 Brett Hilder, who has studied in detail Torres’ voyage, laments the secrecy of his achievements, especially when compared with the recognition given to Quirós as a result of his self-promotion. In Hilder’s own words: That such great discoveries were made only to be filed away so successfully in the archives that the world has been largely ignorant

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of them to this day is a very poor reward for Torres and his men, who received neither thanks nor repayment from the Spanish Crown. Quiros, on the other hand, thanks to his genius for exaggeration and propaganda, achieved great renown and lasting fame for his meagre discoveries, which were still inspiring exploration at the time of Cook. (1980: 10)

The reasons for Quirós’ decision to abandon the search for the Solomons are unclear, though illness and conflict in the ships were probably determining factors. However, had the ships held course they would almost certainly have sighted either New Zealand or Australia or both. J. C. Beaglehole comments that historians have been puzzled and unanimous in their condemnation of Quirós’ unfortunate decision: “So,” writes Beaglehole, “on the pinnacle of glory, Quirós turned his back; and there began that melancholy retreat the truth of which is so hard to disentangle” (1966: 96). This decision marked the end of Quirós’ search. On his return to Madrid in 1607, he tried all means to have a new expedition entrusted to him for discovery and colonisation in the Pacific. In 1615 he received permission to return to Peru, but he died on the way there in June of the same year. It is worth noting that, between the journeys of Mendaña and Quirós, the circumnavigations of Francis Drake in 1577,26 of Thomas Cavendish in 1586-88 and of Olivier van Noort in 1598-1601 also took place. These journeys were, however, largely focused on the South American Pacific coast and the plunder to be obtained from the Spanish galleons carrying bullion from the colonies to the mainland.27 Also, neither of these navigators stopped anywhere in the South Pacific. Thus, although as feats of navigation the journeys were certainly remarkable, as far as knowledge of the Pacific went, they added little, other than awareness of the lack of accurate geographical information as to the dimensions of the ocean.28 As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, from the point of view of post-enlightenment history, the three Spanish-sponsored expeditions to the South Pacific are assessed as failures. Basil Thomson sums up the outcomes of these voyages as follows: “In fact, for all the good that geographical science had derived from these three Spanish expeditions, they might as well have never been undertaken. All the discoveries have had to be re-discovered, and the published narratives of them have only served as material for speculation and

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controversy” (Amherst and Thomson 1901: Ixxii). Along these lines, these explorations are seen to have been largely infused by the last remnants of the crusading spirit often accompanying the Iberian expansions. Such a view of the past, which informed a good amount of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history, still survives in some works, which separate the various attempts to discover, settle or trade in the Pacific islands from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, according to the attitudes attributed to the nations (or the rulers) that sponsored them. This reading of Pacific voyages first situates the Spanish and Portuguese explorations of the Pacific fringes in search for the Southern Continent and its riches, and in order to Christianise the native peoples or use them as slaves or cheap labour.29 Next, in chronological and evolutionary terms, it locates the Dutch, who arrived via the east and whose main objective is seen to be to secure trade in the islands of today’s Indonesia so as to pursue what is taken to be a type of “prosaic” commerce.30 These attempts, always according to this view of history, culminate during the eighteenth century. At this time, there were a number of European expeditions, mostly English and French, which were seeking not just commerce but also the ethnological, botanical, astrological and geographical knowledge that would afford a coherent image of the Pacific and facilitate their incorporation into the various empires.31 Prejudices notwithstanding, a widespread perception of this sequence is that summed up by Oliver Allen as follows: Sarmiento and his fellow Spaniards began the quest with a lusty zeal that entwined finding gold with serving God and the Spanish Empire. The Dutch took up the search in the 17th Century in a more prosaic spirit, seeking trade. In the 18th Century came the French, looking for markets not yet claimed by the Dutch but finding romance and fare for ruminations on the nature of human society. The English, succeeding the French, brought to the enterprise scientific research and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. (c.1980: 16)32

Recent scholarship is, however, less enthusiastic about the supposed disinterest infusing post-enlightenment journeys. Lamb’s association of “scientific curiosity” with “mercantile imperialism and territorial expansion” offers a cogent summary of contemporary skepticism. For Lamb,

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Voyages were disguised as projects of scientific curiosity, but in fact paved the way for mercantile imperialism and territorial expansion. This effort was enabled or accompanied by colonialism in the domains of culture and knowledge, thought to emerge from a consistent European ideology now often characterized as Enlightenment rationalism. (2000: xvi)

From the perspective of post-enlightenment positivism, a person like Quirós is, among other things, a “dreamer,” and a “zealot.” In the words of Sir Clements Markham “he was but a dreamer […] the last of the long and glorious roll of great Spanish navigators […] a very religious man, deeply imbued with the superstitions of his time and nation” (1967: xviii-xix).33 Although he is probably a more complex character than Amherst believes, Quirós’ Christian devotion is certainly well documented. The profound Christianity or quasimysticism of Quirós can be seen not only in his attitude towards the conquest but also throughout his attempts to canvass support for the journeys. In order to convince the Spanish king to sponsor his expedition, Quirós went so far as to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Ian Cameron’s description of this journey and Quirós’ attitude illuminates the events as well as Quirós’ personality: On August 28th, 1601, a pale slightly-built man in pilgrim’s dress knelt at the feet of Pope Clement VIII. He was a humble man […] but he pleaded his cause with eloquence […] The Pope was first sceptical then impressed; there were two more audiences; the most learned pilots and mathematicians in Rome checked the petitioner’s credentials, and at last Clement VIII was won over. He not only wrote letters recommending the voyage to Philip of Spain, but also, as tangible evidence of his support, handed over a number of specially blessed rosaries and a piece of wood from the True Cross; for never before had he given audience to a man so eager and apparently so well qualified to spread the Gospel to the farthest corners of the earth. (1966: 160)

In fact, between 1607 and 1610 Quirós wrote more than fifty memorials addressed to King Philip III asking for his support in the form of money as well as people so as to colonise the southern continent he was thought to have found.34 As Colin Jack-Hinton sums up: After eleven days in Madrid Quirós was received by the Count of Lemos, President of the Consejo de Indias, to whom he presented his relación, by the Duke of Lerma, then first Minister of the King

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and a member of the Consejo de Estado, and by the King. He now began to write a succession of memoriales in an attempt to prosecute the further discovery, colonisation and conversion of the austral lands which he believed he had discovered. (1969: 158)

Quirós’ views, aggrandised by the self-promotion of his memorials, were of paramount importance for most Pacific explorers till James Cook. The diffusion of Quirós’ Eighth Memorial had an effect on future explorers and cartographic representations of the Pacific that make it the most important document from Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the Magellanic exploration.35 The Eighth Memorial was first printed at the end of 1608 or beginning of 1608[1609?] and was edited thereafter in Seville by Luis Estupián, in Pamplona in 1610 by Carlos de Labayen, en 1610 and in Valencia in 1611. According to Oscar Pinochet, the Pamplona edition had the erratum of “Pedro Fernández de Quir,” which would find its way in many maps up the eighteenth century, in which the Southern Continent appears as “Quir Regio,” “Terre de Quir,” or “Pays de Quir” (1989: 156-57). In relation to the maps, it became a feature of French representations of the area, as Tooley observes, until the middle of the eighteenth century: “A distinctive feature of the later French school was the insertion, greatly enlarged, of the discovery of Quirós. This was marked ‘Terra de Quirós’ or ‘Terre Australe du Saint Esprit’” (1949: 122).36 Quirós’ Eighth Memorial soon found its way into print in various European languages,37 and seems to have been behind the zest to discover the Southern Continent of explorers from Jacob Le Maire to Alexander Dalrymple. According to Allen: Le Maire […] had with him a Dutch translation of a memorial that Pedro Fernández de Quirós had written to the Spanish court five years earlier to win royal backing for further exploration, and he now read aloud some of Quirós’ passages describing Terra Australis Incognita” (c.1980: 44).

Quirós’ name became legendary after his death, and his zest to discover the Southern continent inspired navigators in subsequent explorations up to the eighteenth century. This is certainly illustrated by the scene on board the Eendracht on 25 October 1615, when Jacob Le Maire was sailing across the Atlantic. With his crew falling to scurvy and desperate, Le Maire read to them Quirós’ Eighth

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Memorial: “I read to them in the cabin […] the memorial of Quirós in order to encourage them.” Le Maire goes on to add that this reading had the intended effect of cheering them up (Allen c.1980: 44). Hessel Gerritsz translated Le Maire’s account and also produced a map where the name Quirós appears in good size on the Southern Continent (Fig. 5).38 This map, made in Amsterdam in 1612, influenced Dutch and French representations of the Pacific during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Shirley observes, “This double hemispherical world map first appeared in a collection of voyages published by Hessel Gerritsz [...] who was […] official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company […] Gerritsz’ map has been carefully drafted to incorporate the latest discoveries. There are notes on it relating to de Quirós ’ explorations in the Pacific” (1983: 301). The influence of Gerritsz’ map and or Quirós’ Eighth Memorial stretches forward into the twentieth century via the association made in late nineteenth-century Australia between the name of their country and that given to Vanuatu by Quirós, namely, Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. As William Richardson observes, these claims were based on Dalrymple’s “enthusiastic” publication of the claims of a Spanish and Portuguese discovery of Australia (1995a: 85107). This hypothesis, amplified by McIntyre’s book on the supposed Portuguese discovery of Australia and supported by the Catholic Cardinal P. F. Moran in the late nineteenth century, made it into the school curricula and, “for years, Catholic schools taught that Quirós discovered Australia” (Richardson, 1995a: 86).39 In fact, although Clements Markham demonstrated the implausibility of the claim, Henry Stevens notes that “the popular myth that Quirós personally was the actual discoverer of Australia was revived by the Australian press as late as 1928” (1930: 10-11). As mentioned, the Dutch were not the only explorers influenced directly by Quirós. In the eighteenth century, both French and English scholars and sailors were fully acquainted with the supposed achievements of Quirós. One such explorer was Lozier Bouvet According to Allen, On New Year’s Day, 1739, sailing […] far to the South of the Cape of Good Hope, Bouvet spied a high and rugged headland […] he

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was sure he had sailed along the austral continent. A devotee of the writings of Spanish explorer Pedro Fernández de Quirós, Bouvet also believed he had been close to Quirós’ island of Espíritu Santo. As it turned out, he had stumbled across the most remote speck of land in the world. The nearest neighbor of Bouvet Island, as the tiny, ice-encrusted isle he had discovered came to be named, is Antarctica, 1,100 miles to the south. (c.1980: 78)

Also, the celebrated French explorer, Louis de Bougainville, searched for the Southern Continent following Quirós’ reports.40 However, Bougainville did not find the Southern Continent but sighted the Solomons without recognising them, also contributing to the “negative discovery” of the Pacific that starts from Magellan. The first person to recognise some of Quirós’ discoveries was Cook when, in 1769, he identified Quirós’ La Conversion de San Pablo (today’s Hao). Also, in 1774 Cook rightly assumed Vanuatu’s Big Bay to have been the Bay of Felipe and Santiago in Quirós’ Austrialia del Espiritu Santo (Cf. Kelly 1966: 60). Among the most remarkable vindicators of Quirós’ deeds, the name of Dalrymple stands out prominently. Dalrymple was fully conversant in Spanish and read Quirós’ memorials.41 In fact, as already mentioned, it was to Dalrymple that Torres owes the naming of the strait that today bears his name.42 Dalrymple wished to continue Quirós’ search for the Southern Continent and wanted to be the leader of the expedition that eventually was to be successfully commanded by Cook.43 “For his sources on the Quirós expedition Dalrymple had to rely on the inadequate accounts of Torquemada, Arias, the Eighth Memorial and the Memorial Xa (Ya) he dicho (“I have already said”), which had been published by Samuel Purchas. He had not then the letter-report of Torres. Later, Juan Bautista Muñoz sent Dalrymple a transcription of the Simancas original that he translated into English and made available to Burney, who published it in 1806” (Kelly 1966: 61).44 As late as 1769 Dalrymple still believed that the southern land was bigger than the whole of Asia and stretched northwest from Tierra del Fuego. He calculated that there were around fifty million people living there, thus offering opportunity for trade. However, one year earlier Cook had been given command of the Endeavour and sailed in the voyage that would finally dissipate the myth of the Southern

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Continent. Cook arrived in Tahiti in April 1769 and in October the same year in New Zealand, in spite of the fact that there was, as yet, no way of fixing longitude.45 After surveying both islands of New Zealand, Cook proceeded to discover and chart the east coast of Australia, called New Holland at the time. In fact, he contributed to mapping the Pacific in a way not seen since Magellan, some 250 years before. In his second voyage in 1772, as admiral of the Resolution and Adventure, Cook finally crossed the Indian Ocean to reach New Zealand, thus proving that no Southern Continent existed in habitable latitudes. Cook, therefore, dispelled the myths that underline the journeys of Quirós, Barreto and Mendaña. The era of Pacific exploration and “negative discovery” started by Magellan closes with Cook, highlighting the failure and cost in human, economic and historic terms of many of the expeditions. It is worth noting as a concluding note that, as Kelly and others observe, both Quirós and Mendaña were infused by a missionary zeal that made them attempt to establish a Christian relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered, unlike some of the men travelling with them.46 In Kelly’s words: “Mendaña and Quirós were not only descubridores but misioneros. It was not the Franciscan friars in the expedition but Mendaña himself who conversed through the language of signs about God with the native chief of Ysabel” (1965: xxi). Interestingly, the names of these two discoverers have remained in ways that seem unintentionally suitable. Although indigenous peoples in the Pacific may not have much reason to celebrate the various arrivals of Europeans on their shores, Quirós’ name was given to a cape in Vanuatu’s Santo that hardly ever makes it in world maps. As for Mendaña, an important hotel in the capital of the Solomons, Honiara, is named after him. More interestingly, the Spanish fishing entrepreneur, Manuel Calvo, created in the 1990s the Mendaña Fishing Society where some two hundred locals are employed packing fish for European consumption. These geographical celebrations are suitably local and located, stressing the (f)utility of the lives and deeds of Mendaña and Quirós. This, however, need not imply that they can be dismissed, as they are when contrasted unfavourably with the post-enlightenment view of exploration and discovery.

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Paradoxically, then, uselessness and futility have, I suggest, some historical utility. From the point of view of the Melanesian and Polynesian populations of the islands they visited, the most useful outcome of Mendaña’s and Quirós’ explorations was the fact that neither could they return nor could they produce maps or narratives that enabled others to complete the voyage for more than one hundred and seventy years. This absence was especially good news for the Melanesians, who have suffered most cruelly from the evolutionary ranking of human beings. This view is clearly outlined in this quotation from Thomson’s introduction to the manuscripts of the “futile” expeditions studied in this chapter: For the student of ethnology these manuscripts are full of suggestion, for they reveal to us an isolated island race, which is even now very little affected by intercourse with strangers, as they were nearly three hundred and fifty years ago. By all the laws of evolution, they should have been either progressing or deteriorating in the interval. They have done neither. As they are now, so were they then, head-hunting, eating the bodies of the slain, using the same arms, building the same vessels, wearing the same ornaments. It was not that, like the lower races of mankind, they had not made a start upon the road of progress. (Amherst & Thomson 1901: lxxvi)

As these words demonstrate, historiography has relied on interpretation, and those that interpret locate those to be interpreted at a distance that is spatial and chronological. As Fernand Braudel puts it, this is nothing but a “fallacy”: [N]arrative history always claims to relate “things just as they happened.” … In fact, though, in its own way, narrative history consists of an interpretation, an authentic philosophy of history. To the narrative historians, the life of men is dominated by dramatic accidents, by the actions of those exceptional beings who occasionally emerge, and who often are the masters of their own fate and even more of ours. And when they speak of “general history,” what they are really speaking of is the intercrossing of such exceptional destinies, for obviously each hero must be matched against another. A delusive fallacy, as we all know. (1980: 11)

The distance between the past and its representation thus reifies a relationship of power and objectification, where the subject is constructed as individual, white and masculine and the object is feminised. These parameters, which are apparent in the ranking of

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natives and explorers alike, is likewise demonstrated in the analysis of the (mis)representation of Isabel Barreto that follows.

2.2 The (Mis)representation of Isabel Barreto: Woman, Governor and Admiral of the Isles of Solomon Although Isabel Barreto is probably the first woman ever to command an expedition with the title of Admiral and Governor (Adelantada), which she inherited from her husband, Álvaro de Mendaña, we know very little about her. Pedro Fernández de Quirós, the pilot of the failed expedition to the Solomons in 1595, of which she became the leader, portrays her as a merciless, proud and snobbish woman, and complains repeatedly about the inconvenience of having a woman in command. By and large, Isabel Barreto has come down to us as Quirós saw her, with nobody, including modern historians, so much as questioning the writer’s motives or the faithfulness of the portrait.47 This section will scrutinise her actions and what we know about her in order to test the received opinion and the prejudices inherent in her representation. By and large, historians have made up their minds about Isabel from the relation of the voyage written by Quirós and/or by his secretary, Luis Belmonte, which is normally referred to as Quirós’ account or Historia. It is necessary to point out, though, that to take Quirós’ words as truthful, as happens in relation to Isabel, is nothing short of striking. The presentation of Quirós in his own writings and memorials is mostly aimed at self-promotion and is also highly baroque and rhetorical. Quirós is often seen as more humane than some of his contemporaries, but his humanitarian bent is often qualified by references to his uselessness as a leader, his bizarre mysticism and his erratic behaviour, especially in the second journey to the Pacific in 1605-6. Also, it needs to be remembered that Quirós’ views of events and his statements were often questioned by his colleagues, such as Luis Vaez de Torres or Diego de Prado, and were also taken with a grain of salt by the authorities of the time. For example, in his determination to discover and convert to Christianity “the fourth part of the world” he was classed repeatedly as an aspiring Columbus well past his time.48

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In spite of these considerations, Quirós’ words about Isabel Barreto are not only taken as true, but are often exaggerated by critics that see her as a ruthless tyrant unable to command the fleet effectively. The monstrous Isabel Barreto that is construed with this flimsy evidence can be contrasted with some of the acts recorded in passing by Quirós himself and in other documents to which we have access. These documents include her last Will and Testament and her declarations before the Manila court regarding the voyage, both of which have been translated and edited by Celsus Kelly (1973: 135-40 and 59-62 respectively).49 The perspective on Isabel as an authoritarian captain is not exclusive to her contemporaries. Writing in the 1990s, historians Catherine Delamarre and Bertrand Sallard assume Quirós’ affirmations to be true representations of her character without question. Ironically, the subtitle of this book on “women in the time of the conquistadors” (Las mujeres en tiempos de los conquistadores) indicates that it is narrated from the perspective of the women themselves. The subtitle reads “Everyday life at the time of the conquest of America narrated from the women’s point of view” (“La vida cotidiana en tiempos de la conquista de América, narrada desde el punto de vista de las mujeres”).50 With little sympathy towards Isabel’s predicament, these writers assume that she commanded the fleet with an iron hand (“Dirigió la expedición con mano de hierro” [1994: 318]). Delamarre and Bertrand likewise accept unquestioningly the view of Isabel as a proud woman concerned with showing off and maintaining her rank. They use unsubstantiated sources to assert that “it is said” that Isabel used money destined for the expedition for her own clothing, as, for example, in the following quotation: “It is said that, before departing, Doña Isabel Barreto deviated towards her luxurious wardrobe part of the money destined for the provision of passengers. This great dame, preoccupied with the maintenance of her rank in any circumstance, had prepared clothes for two years” (“Se dice que, antes de la partida, doña Isabel Barreto había desviado hacia su lujoso guardarropa parte del dinero destinado al aprovisionamiento de los pasajeros. Esta gran dama, preocupada por mantener su rango en cualquier circunstancia, había previsto vestidos para dos años” [1994: 317]).

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This biased view of Isabel can be contrasted with what can be glimpsed from some neglected segments in Quirós’ narrative and from contemporary letters. According to this information, Isabel Barreto appears as a more complex human being than her historical interpretation would have us believe. This does not mean that the (in)famous events described by Quirós regarding her authoritarian bent and, especially, her often-quoted reluctance to share her food and water when everybody on board was close to starvation need to be false statements (though they may be so). Nevertheless, even assuming the facts to be true, we ought to take into account the circumstances on the ship as well as what the behaviour of others in Isabel’s place might have been. As will be seen below, the repetition and exaggeration of the events and words attributed to her are complemented by an arbitrary invention of other aspects of her life that lead to absurd inferences. Together, these portrayals reveal the biases and particular interests served by the misrepresentation of Isabel’s motives and attitudes and result in the silencing and dismissal of her important historical role.51 The analysis of Isabel’s presence and attitude further qualifies the received wisdom that, by and large, conquest and discovery have always been the province of men. A closer look at historical sources reveals the presence of women not only as sponsors or settlers but also as travellers in the first journeys across the oceans. In fact, according to the study of historians Sallard and Delamarre one out of twenty Spanish women were directly involved in the first decades of exploration and settlement of the Americas in one way or another.52 Isabel Barreto, in other words, may have been an exceptional character in having been a female admiral of a fleet but was part of a cohort of women who played an active role in voyages of exploration. Prejudice about Isabel is not the prerogative of historians. In his novel, The Isles of Unwisdom, Robert Graves presents Isabel as an upper-crust, attractive and stern Victorian lady.53 While her husband, Mendaña, directed the preparations for sailing, Graves tells us that servants ware taking oil to “her private larder,” while Isabel “stood on the half-deck watching the scene below her with impassive face, but her blue eyes danced like stars under her crown of wheat-coloured hair” (1950: 7). Isabel’s captivating skills are described early on in the book when she tries to entice the handsome pilot, Quirós. In words reminiscent of romantic paperbacks, Isabel is said to have “smiled

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pleasantly at the Chief Pilot, who was a fine-looking man, above the usual height, slim but muscular, with clear grey eyes and a short, curly beard” (1950: 10). Thereafter, Isabel continues working hard at seducing Quirós. However, we find out at the book’s end that the selfserving Isabel has premeditated this approach as a way to have a posthumous bastard in order to secure her own inheritance. To date, the only biography of Isabel was written by Manuel Bosch Barrett and was published in 1943. As Isabel Barreto’s selfappointed biographer, Bosch Barrett does not present a sympathetic view of Isabel at all. Instead, he represents the masculinist view of the events in her life as interpreted by Quirós and other writers thereafter. His book provides some interesting information about what is known of her life, which is also corroborated by the investigations of Celsus Kelly. According to these two writers, Isabel was probably born into a Galician family from Pontevedra who had migrated to Peru when she was a little girl. Her father, Don Francisco Barreto, was governor in the Portuguese Indies at the time the poet Luis de Camoens was exiled to Macao following a decree signed by Francisco Barreto himself. According to Bosch Barrett, Isabel’s father was obsessed with exploring the region of Monomotapa on the Abyssinian coast where, it was believed, the famed Queen of Sheba collected the gold for King Solomon. Francisco Barreto, however, died in an expedition to this area in 1574. In one of history’s ironies, Isabel would be known as the Queen of Sheba upon her arrival in the Philippines in 1596, returning from the frustrated attempt to rediscover the Isles of Solomon.54 Álvaro de Mendaña, Isabel’s first husband, was previously thought to have been a Galician, perhaps from Pontevedra, the same town as Isabel, but is now believed to have been born in a village close to Galicia but in northern Castile, in the province of León.55 He was born in 1542 and was, therefore, approximately twice Isabel’s age when they met. Mendaña went to Peru when he was 20, after his uncle, Lope García de Castro, was named President of the Audiencia (High Court) in Lima. There, in Peru, a distant relation of Mendaña, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, influenced Mendaña’s decision to solicit support for an expedition to the fabled Southern Continent. This southern landmass, Mendaña thought, could be found west of Peru,

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where King Solomon’s ships took the gold with which his famous temple was built in Jerusalem. As noted in the previous section of this chapter, when Mendaña’s uncle, García de Castro, became viceroy of Peru, Mendaña obtained permission and support to arm a fleet of two ships destined to find the Solomonic land of Ophir in 1567. The fleet first arrived in Santa Ysabel and then went on to Guadalcanal in what is now the archipelago of the Solomons. Mendaña always thought that he would find Ophir, the land of the Queen of Sheba. Hostility, however, broke out with some of the indigenous population and this, together with the malaria that was decimating the fleet, made them abandon their voyage, not before leaving a cross in the burial grounds of those who died there.56 Like Quirós after him, Mendaña was not deterred by the failure of an enterprise that cost not just money but twenty-two months and thirty-two lives. From his arrival back in Peru in 1568, Mendaña dedicated much time and energy to canvassing support for a further expedition to the Solomons. However, the new viceroy, Don Francisco de Toledo, was not sympathetic towards Mendaña’s aspirations and Mendaña appealed directly to the King, Philip II. After four years of missives, Mendaña went to the court in person and was received by the King in El Escorial. The King gave Mendaña the capitulaciones (sailing contract) that allowed him, among other things, to “conquer and pacify the isles of the Mar del Sur” and “found three cities” in the said islands (Bosch Barrett 1943: 24). After this, Mendaña returned to Panama in 1577 but once there, he again encountered opposition from viceroy Toledo. Following upon seemingly endless discussions, the expedition was finally approved when Don García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete replaced Toledo as new viceroy. Hurtado de Mendoza and his wife, doña Teresa de Castro, stimulated the social life of the town and were often surrounded by many noble locals, among them Isabel de Barreto. Since Isabel was a good friend of Teresa’s and Álvaro de Mendaña was close to the viceroy, they met and, soon after, in May of 1586, they married. In spite of the difference in age and the fact that Isabel’s dowry made a decisive contribution towards financing Mendaña’s second expedition to the South Pacific, their marriage is seen by Bosch Barrett to be the

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result of Mendaña’s fascination with the authoritarian bent of Isabel. Bosch Barrett goes so far as to assume that Mendaña was emasculated by Isabel’s phallic power and felt “submission” and “energy” from the “penetrating” looks of Isabel: “Before the penetrating and authoritarian look of Isabel Mendaña experienced a sort of submission that gave him the energy he had always lacked” (“Mendaña experimentaba ante la mirada penetrante y autoritaria de doña Isabel una especie de sumisión que le daba las energías que siempre le habían faltado” [1943: 81]). Isabel, however, gives a different, and eloquent, perspective upon her wedding to Mendaña in her Last Will and Testament, which was dictated in Castrovirreyna, Peru in 1612.57 In this document Isabel clearly emphasizes that her parents married her off to Mendaña, who bought the ship named Santa Isabel and other things for the journey with the dowry: My parents married me off to Alvaro de Mendaña, Governor of the Islands of Solomon, for which they gave me the dowry that appears in the deeds that were written for this reason […] with which dowry the said Governor bought a ship called Santa Isabel, and some provisions for war and other necessary things for the journey to the said islands of Solomon. (mis padres me casaron con Alvaro de Mendaña, Adelantado de las Islas de Salomón, con el qual me dieron de dote lo que pareçera por las escrituras que en esta razon se hiçieron [...] con la qual dicha dote compro el dicho Adelantado un navio llamado Santa Isabel, y algunos pertrechos de guerra y otras cosas necesarias para la jornada de las dichas islas de Salomón. [Kelly 1973: 135])

Isabel’s words highlight her contribution to financing the voyage and her parents’ role in her first marriage, indicating that they married her to Mendaña. These words clearly contrast with her description of her second marriage, where she indicates she is an agent in the contract by using the words “I married.”58 Although Mendaña had married a wealthy woman who was half his age, according to Bosch Barrett, the reason for the marriage is to be found in the ambitious and dominant personality of Isabel. Bosch Barrett affirms that Isabel’s “authority and ambition” (“la ambición y dominio de doña Isabel” [1943: 32]) made her dream of taking part, alongside her three brothers, in Mendaña’s expedition.

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Since Mendaña is often portrayed as a weak, incapable, although humane, leader, Isabel’s personality compensated his feminine traits with her masculine strength of character. Needless to say, this interpretation is coloured by the censoring of women’s drive as “ambition” and the assumption that a “strong” woman can only remain so if she is married to a “weak” man. Thus, Mendaña’s inability to dominate his wife is associated with his weakness as a leader of hardened men. This view of a strong Isabel and a weak Mendaña is carried over in Graves’ novel in which “Ysabel” wholly controls Mendaña.59 Graves describes Ysabel not only as determined and stubborn but also as evil and primitive; she “was a Galician through and through … [belonging to] that bold, tenacious, clannish, close-fisted, secretive people, who are three parts Suevian and one part aboriginal devil” (1950: 10-11).60 Isabel took part in the second expedition to the Solomons, which took place in 1595, some twenty-six years after the first one, with a now mature Mendaña in command and the Portuguese, Quirós, as pilot. Isabel’s brother, Lorenzo Barreto, was captain of the expedition and Pedro Marino Manrique campmaster (maese de campo). Manrique was then a mature man of around 60 years and had a difficult character, described as “fiery and unruly” (“brioso y arrebatado” [Bosch-Barrett 1943: 33]). Before the expedition was ready, clashes between Manrique, Quirós and Isabel started signaling the conflicts that were to come thereafter. According to Bosch Barrett, Manrique was arguing with the contramaestre of the Capitana when Quirós intervened and told Manrique not to mistreat “sea people” (“gente de mar” [1943: 33]). Isabel, who must have heard the dispute, came out of her chamber in support of Quirós, asking Manrique to check his anger because her husband, the Adelantado, would not like his people to be mistreated.61 Manrique answered with a phrase that Quirós thought best “not to be transcribed” (“no es para transcrita”). The words were accompanied by a gesture that the writer does not consider appropriate: “Supporting the expression with a gesture that is not to be described either” (“[A]poyándola con un gesto que tampoco es para descrito.” [1943: 34]). Quirós intervened and the discussion started to turn ugly, with the sailors divided, three taking sides with Manrique and three with Quirós. This dispute was defused by the timely intervention of Mendaña, but no sooner had this scuffle been settled than a second argument between Quirós and Manrique followed. This time,

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however, Isabel is not said to have taken any part whatsoever in the events. The concluding words of Quirós indicate that “the devil is loose among them,”62 which, as written, can refer either to Manrique or to Isabel. Notwithstanding the ambiguity, Bosch Barrett does not hesitate to infer that they allude to Isabel. Moreover, they demonstrate Quirós’ awareness that the rules forbidding women from taking part in shipping expeditions were right, even in cases when their husbands were in command: These words obviously contained the censorship of the dominion exercised by Doña Isabel over her husband, and he nearly lamented, even before leaving Peru, having taking part in that expedition, because the difficulties presented by women on board had been apparent from the first moment. And with good reason Quirós thought how wise the ordinances that prevent women, including the wives of officers, from boarding ships were, because, especially in that case, this seemed to become the cause and origin of frequent incidents. (Estas palabras encerraban, con toda evidencia, una censura al predominio ejercido por doña Isabel sobre su marido; y casi lamentaba, aún antes de salir del Perú, haber tomado parte en aquella expedición, pues los inconvenientes que ofrecen las mujeres a bordo se habían presentado desde el primer momento, y con razón pensaba Quirós en cuán sabias son las ordenanzas que prohíben el embarco incluso a las esposas de los jefes, que especialmente en aquel caso parecía convertirse en causa y origen de frecuentes incidentes. [1943: 37])

After Mendaña intervened in other squabbles related to the provisioning of the four ships, the fleet finally sailed on 16th June 1595. On the Capitana, named San Jerónimo, Mendaña and Isabel travelled with her brothers, the pilot, Quirós, the maese de campo, Manrique, two priests and Mariana de Castro. Mariana was the wife of the admiral Lope de Vega, who travelled in the Almiranta, named Santa Isabel, where there were also two captains and a priest, as well as soldiers and sailors. A third ship, a galeota, was called San Felipe and was led by Felipe Corzo. Lastly, Alonso de Leiva commanded the frigate, Santa Catalina. The fleet travelled westwards in search of the Solomons, but they first reached Fatu Hiva or Nouka Hiva in the Marquesas, named after Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete. They called the island Magdalena and sang Te Deum Laudamus upon arrival. While in Isla Magdalena some bold natives arrived and went on board naked,

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jumping and shouting happily. However, when they started taking knives and trying them out, a shot was fired and they left the ship. After a cross was planted and mass said, some scuffles with the “Indians” followed and three Marquesans were killed. As no Spaniard wanted to remain on the island to work the land they left, reaching another island, which they called San Bernardo. During this part of the voyage, Isabel spent most of the time in her chamber with Doña Mariana. However out of sight, according to Quirós, she was already misusing the water, which was scarce (Bosch Barrett 1943: 49). Bosch Barrett observes that she also opposed her husband’s wish to transfer water to the Almiranta in case there should not be enough for them, even though they had “four hundred containers” (“cuatrocientas botijas” 50]). As will be seen below, Isabel’s reluctance to share water and food is overly emphasized by Quirós and has been taken as representative of Isabel’s personality.63 Examples of this type of misrepresentation of Isabel abound, and are especially noticeable in the account of the conflicts created by the campmaster, Manrique. In spite of the fact that the maese is described by Bosch Barrett as having a difficult character, and being always ready to pick a fight (“pendenciero”), when Isabel confronts him, she is the one to be blamed for it. This happens in the recollection of events surrounding a failed mutiny led by Manrique. After the attempt had failed, Manrique said to Mendaña that he was not involved, and Mendaña believed him but not so Isabel, who Bosch Barrett believes to be more perverse than Mendaña: “but not Doña Isabel, who was more twisted than her husband” (“mas no así a doña Isabel, que era mas taimada que su esposo ” [1943: 71]). Isabel, instead, urged Mendaña to hang the maese and went towards him with a machete: “Urging her husband to hang the maese, of whose falsehood she was convinced, on the spot and, seeing the negation of the governor, she got up and taking a machete that was there went towards the maese ready to kill him” (“[I]nstando para que se ahorcase en el acto al maese, de cuya falsedad estaba convencida; y ante la negativa del adelantado levantóse y, asiendo un machete que allí había, fue a arrojarse sobre el maese de campo” [71]). Mendaña’s intervention saved Manrique who, the writer informs us, would thereafter continue with the scheming that would lead to the treacherous killing of Mendaña’s native friend, the innocent native chief Malope: “Don Álvaro intervened quieting her and the maese,

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who managed to evade that danger, returned to the land so as to continue his scheming and plotting” (“Se interpuso don Álvaro apaciguándola, y el maese, que supo esquivarse de aquel peligro, regresó a tierra para proseguir sus intrigas y maquinaciones” [71]). Thus Isabel’s efforts to save her husband and his friend, Malope, and to punish the maese are not only not commended but are condemned without much ado. This biased presentation of Isabel’s attitudes not only disregards how she attempted to thwart the plans to murder Malope but also how she tried to prevent the theft of the islanders’ property. When Isabel knew this was being discussed, she told Mendaña, who, in turn, warned the maese that whoever did something to Malope would answer with their lives (Bosch Barrett 1943: 74). Following upon the discovery of the mutinous plot of Manrique, a group led by Mendaña, who was by then quite feverish with malaria, killed the maese, Manrique, at dawn. Another death followed and a decree forgiving everybody publicly ended the disputes for a short while. Sadly, Malope’s life soon came to an end when, for no obvious reason, a soldier shot him and was consequently put in the stocks. Isabel, in this instance, pleaded with Mendaña to spare the soldier’s life, arguing that too much blood had already been shed. In this, she showed compassion, traditionally assumed to be a feminine trait or virtue, and was warmly supported by Quirós. Both made Mendaña relent and pardon the soldier’s life, showing the “Indians” the heads of those already dead, as though they had been punished for the unjust death of Mendaña’s friend, Malope.64 A victim of malaria, Mendaña dictated his will on 17th October and named Isabel his sole heir and Governor of the fleet. He died the following day, leaving her as leader of the expedition as well as universal heir to his property. Her brother, Lorenzo, was named captain, a title he only enjoyed a few days, for he also died of malaria on 2nd November. Isabel then proposed to leave for San Cristobal in search of the lost ship, the Almiranta, and thereafter for Manila. She took this decision in consultation with the sailors, to whom she “pleaded, persuaded and ordered” to give their opinion on the matter: On that day, the governess proposed to the pilots to get out of that island to look for San Cristobal to see if the ship Almiranta could be found there. She did this in order to do whatever was best for the

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service of God and His Majesty. And, if they did not find the ship, her resolution was to go the city of Manila in the Philippines to bring priests and people to return to populate and finish the discovery. And to this end she pleaded, persuaded and ordered each one of those present to give her their opinion in the manner they thought more convenient. (Este día propuso la gobernadora á los pilotos que quería salir de aquella isla, á buscar la de San Cristóbal, por ver si en ella hallaba la nao almiranta, para hacer lo que fuese para más servicio de Dios y de Su Majestad: y que si no la hallasen, su determinación era ir á la ciudad de Manila en Filipinas, á traer sacerdotes y gente para volver á la población, y acabar aquel descubrimento; y que para esto rogaba, persuadía y mandaba á cada uno de los que allí estaban, le diesen su parecer en la forma que entendiese ser más conveniente. (Zaragoza 2000: 231)

Considering the circumstances, including the rampant malaria and the worsening relationship with the natives, they all agreed to leave the island. As they left, Isabel announced publicly that she intended to preserve her sovereignty over the discoveries and to return to colonise the islands. Having failed to find the lost ship Almiranta they headed towards the Philippines, some 900 miles away. On the way there, another ship, the galeota, disappeared. Provisions were scarce, and Quirós blamed Isabel for hoarding some things for her own use, including water, wine and oil. In the passages that have shaped Isabel’s personality for future generations, her selfishness is shown by her reluctance to share her supplies with the rest of the people on board. First, she is said to have hoarded wine, oil and vinegar and, only following upon Quirós insistence, she “[f]inally gave two oil containers” (“Al fin dió dos botijas de aceite” [Zaragoza 2000: 240-41]). Next, she is accused of using up the water for her own purposes when people on the boat were dying of thirst. Quirós went to ask her for a barrel: Because the pilot had so much care about the water that was so scarce, and because secretly there were great wasters of water, he was always present when giving the ration. The governess was very generous spending it, and she washed her clothes with it, and, to this effect, she sent to ask for a pot. To which the pilot said that she should look at the situation, because it did not seem to him to be just to spend the existing water so wastefully, as it was very scarce. (Como llevaba el piloto mayor la agua tan en cuidado por ser poca, y haber por vias secretas grandes gastadores de ella, se hallaba

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presente al dar la racion. Era muy larga la gobernadora en gastarla, y en lavar con ella la ropa, y para este efecto le envió á pedir una botija, a que el piloto mayor dijo mirase el tiempo, y no parecia justo gastar largo el agua que habia, pues era poca. [Zaragoza 2000: 242])

As told by Quirós, this often-repeated episode has become the main ingredient for the historical caricature of Isabel. According to Quirós, Isabel asked him whether she could not do whatever she liked with her goods, her hacienda, and he answered grandly that the soldiers would think that she was washing her clothes with their own lives, indicating “that […] the obligation to restrict her usage was hers […] so that the soldiers could not say that she was washing her clothes with their own lives” (“que […] suya [era] la obligación de acortarse para que los soldados no dijesen que lavaba su ropa con su vida de ellos” [Zaragoza 2000: 242]). Not surprisingly, the same episode appears in Graves’ Isles of Unwisdom, repeating the quasi-poetical words attributed to Quirós in his account: “So she washes her soiled shifts in our life’s blood” (1950: 372). Unlike the previous episode with the maese, this time Isabel is criticised mostly for not complying with the feminine model of self-sacrificing, as women should be. Quirós’ prejudices are apparent in the words used to condemn the fact that Isabel is a woman in charge of men. The resentment people felt at having a woman in command is apparent when we hear that Isabel gave the keys of the larder to one of her own servants and “[t]here were some who said to the pilot that he [Quirós] should not let himself be governed by a woman, and that they should vote to choose a man. But the pilot answered that they should let her enjoy her title by right for the little time she had left” (“No faltó quien dijo al piloto mayor, que no se dejasen gobernar de una mujer, y que á más votos se eligiese un hombre; mas el piloto mayor respondió, que la dejasen gozar el breve espacio que le quedaba de su justo título” (Zaragoza 2000: 243). In advice that follows, the writer attributes to a wise man (“un hombre de bien ver”) the notion that, with some notable exceptions, women’s intellect is wholly unsuitable for command: “because, as far as the brain is concerned, there are very few women such as Dido, Zenobia and Semiramis” (“pues mujeres para cabezas hay muy pocas Didos, Cenobias y Semíramis” (Zaragoza 2000: 244). Quirós’ resentment at having to obey Isabel is apparent when he affirms that “this lady [...] must understand that I was born with the obligation of serving her and putting up with her” (“esta señora […]

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debe de entender que yo nací con obligación de servirla y aguantarla” [Quirós 1986a: 104]). In fact, Quirós praises his own endurance and patience in supporting Isabel’s command, which he does for loyalty to Mendaña and to obey the orders he had been given by the King in this respect: “I do not want to say anything more than that I undertook in this journey nothing harder than to serve a woman as governess and her brothers, and all this and more I do so as not to offend the name and the service of the King, which at the time was in the hands of Doña Isabel Barreto” (“No quiero decir que hice en esta jornada otra cosa buena más de solo sufrir una gobernadora mujer y a sus hermanos, y todo esto y más puede el deseo de no ofender el nombre del servicio del Rey: que de presente estaba en manos de doña Isabel Barreto” (Quirós 1986: 161; Cf. Bosch Barrett 1943: 105). Following these comments, we find out that more people on the ship died from malaria en route to the Philippines, where they arrived after some mutinous attempts against Isabel were put to rest. During the last days of the journey, Isabel seems to have contemplated her own death: “The governess in her retreat seemed to be preparing for death. She had a Book of Hours in her hands, her eyes looking up to heaven and she was praying, and was as afflicted and tearful as everybody else” (“La gobernadora en su retrete pareció que se estaba concertando con la muerte. Unas horas en las manos, puestos los ojos en el cielo, echando jaculatorias, y tan afligida y llorosa como todos” (Zaragoza 2000: 253-54). Fifty people died during the remainder of the journey and the decimated fleet finally arrived in Manila on 11th February 1596. Upon arrival, people in Manila, believing the survivors had come from the Solomons, came out into the streets and called Isabel the Queen of Sheba: “Afterwards the sailors and people from the city came to see the ship as a worthy thing, as much for their needs as because it was coming from Peru and had on it, as it was said, the Queen of Sheba from the Solomon Islands.” (“Luego la gente de mar y otras personas de la ciudad vinieron a ver la nao por cosa de ver, así por sus necesidades como por venir del Perú y traer, como se decía, la Reyna Sabá de las islas Salomón” [Bosch Barrett 1943: 169]).65 The survivors were received by the authorities in Manila and by local nobles who considered an honour having them as guests. There were few Spanish women in Manila and all the widows on

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board, including Isabel, soon found replacements for their lost husbands (Quirós 1986: 170). Isabel married Fernando de Castro, who is said by Bosch Barrett to have become mesmerised by her haughtiness as well as her fortune: “The privileges and fortune that Doña Isabel had inherited and her haughty and adventurous personality necessarily had to excite the ambition and admiration of […] Don Fernando” (“Los privilegios y fortuna que doña Isabel había heredado y su carácter altivo y aventurero tenían forzosamente que excitar la codicia y admiración de […] don Fernando” (1943: 113). Contemporary historian and editor, Roberto Ferrando, also believes Isabel “managed” to “catch” Fernando thanks to the spell of her legendary character: “The entry of Doña Isabel Barreto was spectacular [...] The journey and its popularity would conclude a short time afterwards, but before, taking advantage of the spell cast by her legend, Doña Isabel managed to seduce Don Fernando de Castro, nephew of the governor of Manila, and to marry him” (“La entrada de doña Isabel Barreto fue espectacular [...] El viaje y su popularidad concluirían poco tiempo después, pero antes aprovechando el hechizo de su leyenda, doña Isabel lograba que cayese enamorado y rápidamente la desposase don Fernando de Castro, sobrino del governador de Manila” [Quirós 1986: 32]). Interestingly, Ferrando observes that from then on Isabel’s agency disappears, as her husband takes over her legal representation: “From that point onwards, the role of Barreto will be relegated to a secondary level because the representation of her rights is taken over by her second husband.” (A partir de entonces el protagonismo de la Barreto pasará a un segundo plano, por la representación que de sus derechos hace su segundo marido” [Quirós 1986: 32]). Isabel and Fernando married in November 1596 and Fernando “rightly” acquired Isabel’s goods, as Quirós explains: “Once the festivities ended, our governess married a young gentleman called Don Fernando de Castro, cousin of the governor Mariñas, who, as it was his right, took his wife’s things as his own” (“Acabadas estas fiestas, se casó nuestra gobernadora con un caballero mozo llamado don Fernando de Castro, primo del gobernador Mariñas, el cual, como era justo, tomó las cosas de su mujer por propias suyas” [Zaragoza 2000: 287). In a similar vein, Graves concludes his book with a passage worthy of The Taming of the Shrew:

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Let me write lastly of Dona Ysabel. It is marvelous to relate that, once she was married to General Don Fernando, her character wholly altered: she became generous, trustworthy, truly pious and beloved by all her friends and servants. This transformation must be ascribed to God’s infinite mercy, and to the affectionate love of a lusty, fortunate husband, who fathered on her the children she had so long desired, opposed manly firmness to childish caprice, and weaned her away from the society of Don Luis, her only surviving brother. Don Diego had long since died in a tavern brawl, at the hands of an angry Indian girl. (1950: 415)

In Bosch Barrett’s biography, the dismissal of Isabel’s rights by her husband’s representation of them is matched by her oblivion in a book supposedly dedicated to her. After her marriage, the remaining third of “her” biography is devoted to Quirós and his pilgrimage to persuade King Philip III in Spain and the Pope in Rome in order to embark on his second, and last journey in 1605. The book continues narrating his life till his death, when Quirós was ready to embark for a third time in 1614. We know, however, that Isabel and Fernando returned to Mexico and requested to continue Mendaña’s enterprise from Acapulco. Fernando went back to the Philippines in 1598, by which time Isabel already had a child. In 1602 they requested licence to return to Spain for eight years and to resume the travels to the Solomon Isles. When they heard, in 1603, that Quirós had been given permission and finances for the journey, they protested their own rights and indicated that Mendaña’s debts of 130,000 pesos had not been settled (Kelly 1973: 200). Finally, in 1608, they complained again against Quirós’ requests for further sponsorship to no avail. It seems that Fernando and Isabel returned to Spain in 1609, though this has not been proven. We know, however, what Isabel’s legacy was from her last Will and Testament, dated 1612, in which she shows her unquestionable commitment to her family as well as her religiosity.66 First, Isabel requested that her body be taken to the famous convent of Santa Clara in Lima, where her sister, Petronila was a nun. Isabel also dictated that the five hundred pesos resulting from the rent of ten thousand pesos bequeathed to the monastery be used to fund a chaplaincy (capellanía) where her nephew could serve. The will also records that Isabel left some money to her two sisters and to her niece,

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who were nuns at the convent of La Concepción also in Lima (Kelly 1973: 137). The last act, however, that attests to Isabel’s personality is her legal declaration about Quirós behaviour before the relevant authorities. In spite of the fact that, from Quirós’ narrative, it would appear that she disapproved of him, she commended his attitude and loyalty. In the words of the proceedings: “the governess not only acquits him [Quirós] of any suspicion but commends him as a loyal servant of the Crown and a trusted friend of the dead adelantado” (Kelly 1973: xix). In spite of their failings, it seems that Quirós and Mendaña managed to have some loyal friends in life and in history. As far as Isabel goes, I believe this chapter is the first.

Notes 1

This translates as: “Terra Australis, recently discovered, but not fully known yet”.

2

On this topic, see White (1987).

3

According to Lawrence Wroth, “The narratives of Mendaña, of Gallego, his second in command, and of Catoira, the chronicler of the expedition, with their full accounts of this island group [The Solomons] discovered upon the first expedition were not given wide publicity by the Spanish authorities. They were, in fact, put in the archives, where they remained until their publication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Knowledge of the discovery was circulated by word of mouth, however, and … found its way, probably from one of the official reports, into the López de Velasco manuscript and was recorded upon two of its maps. Ortelius located the group upon his map of America and his world map of 1587, and in 1601 Herrera caused the López de Velasco map to be engraved and printed in his Descripción de las Indias Ocidentales” (2001: 186). 4

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White also argue that: “[S]cience, particularly in the late nineteenth century, was deeply hostile to ritual. It even saw itself, on occasion, as selfconsciously improving upon those areas of social life which, once governed by ‘irrational’ rituals, could now be brought under scientific control” (During 1999: 383).

5 With reference to Quirós’s second voyage, Wroth affirms that: “Quiros and futility seemed to spell the same thing” (2001: 176). 6

Spate notes that: “The resulting voyages—by Mendaña in 1567-9, Mendaña and Quirós in 1595-6, Quirós and Torres in 1605-6—are among the most remarkable in the whole history of maritime discovery, alike in their geographical results [...] and as a story of high ideals, bitter disillusions and sufferings, baseness and grandeur” (1979: 121).

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____________________________________________________ 7

This corroborates Certeau’s notion that history is ‘cannibalistic,’ and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations: forgetting, which is not something passive, a loss, but an action directed against the part; and the mnemic trace, the return of what was forgotten” (1986: 3-4).

8

See especially the chapter entitled “The Historian and His Facts” (1986: 1-24). Here Carr argues that: “[t]he facts, whether found in documents or not, have still to be processed by the historian before he can make any use of them: the use he makes of them is […] the processing process” (1986: 10).

9

Although remote and sparsely populated, as Lamb observes: “For students of literature and anthropology alike, Oceania has loomed large. The South Seas has been the preferred site of utopias ever since Thomas More invented the genre in 1516; and the myth of a terrestrial paradise there was rather confirmed than dispatched by voyagers from de Quirós to Bougainville” (2000: xiv). 10 I follow Lamb in extending the formula to cover these journeys of ‘negative discovery’, though Boorstin uses it to refer to voyages that, like Cook’s, were aimed at demonstrating the non-existence of places, namely, in this case, the Southern Continent. In Boorstin’s own words: “To succeed in negative discovery—to prove that some mythical entity really did not exist—was far more exacting and more exhausting than to succeed in finding a known objective” (1983: 282). See especially 278-89. 11

To quote Wroth, “Whatever may have been the expressed motives of the next century and a half, or more, of exploration of the Pacific—the Dutch in the Indies and on the coast of Australia, the English and Dutch buccaneers on all the coasts, the French with their great Compagnie des Indes—there seems never to have been far from the minds of the leaders and projectors the discovery of the great continent of the south” (2001: 176) 12

Wroth also remarks: “So far as recorded the only passage to those islands by way of the Strait of Magellan in that period had been accomplished by the fleet of Fray Loaysa, sent out in 1525 to possess the Moluccas for Spain […] Other voyages had been planned but for one reason or another had failed to reach the Strait” (2001: 147). 13

On Mendaña’s trajectory and motivation, see the more detailed description offered in the second section of this chapter, “The (Mis)representation of Isabel Barreto.”

14

Amancio Landín has noted that Sarmiento was neither the first nor the only one to apply for “the enterprise of the discovery of the South Sea”: “The letters of the Peruvian Governor to His Majesty witness that fact. One of them, dated 23rd of September 1565 in the city of Los Reyes indicates that: “Likewise, I have treated with a local man named Pedro de Ahedo who wants to go by sea to discover some islands called Solomons that are situated close to Chile, towards the Spice Islands, of which there is also much information” (“Las cartas del Gobernador del Perú a S. M. lo atestiguan así. Dice una de ellas, fechada en la ciudad de Los Reyes en 23 de septiembre de 1565: “Ansimismo he tratado con uno de aquí que se llama Pedro de Ahedo, que quiere ir por mar al descubrimiento de unas islas que llaman de Salomón,

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____________________________________________________ que caen frontero de Chile, hacia la Especiería, de que se tiene asimismo gran noticia” (1945: 27). 15

My translation. The original Spanish reads as follows: “Sarmiento demuestra en su Historia de los Ingas del Perú un perfecto conocimiento de la tradición indígena respecto a las nombradas Hahuachumbi y Ninachumbi, y en él se incuba la idea de su colonización” (1945: 25). 16

See Landín 1945: 27.

17

In his Terrestrial Globe of 1592 Emery Molyneux attributes the discovery of the Solomons to Sarmiento. Also, there is a monument in Callao that cites Mendaña and Sarmiento as the discoverers (Cf. Kelly 1971: 26).

18

Wroth notes that: “Though the Solomons continued to be shown upon the maps of that area, there is no record of a visit to them for nearly two centuries after their discovery, and it was not long before their very existence began to be questioned. In the later eighteenth century, however, when the English and French were making their great Pacific voyages, interest in finding them revived” (2001: 187-88). This renewed interest is attested to in the expeditions of Bellin, Byron, Carteret and Bougainville. 19

Basil Thomson details the changing position of the Solomons as follows: “The Solomon Islands, which were delineated in their approximate position in 1587, now began to find new resting-places in the Chart of the Pacific. In Dudley’s Arcano del Mare (1646) they are identified with the Marquesas. Delisle, early in the eighteenth century, carried them further westward; Danville suppressed them altogether; Dalrymple, as late as 1790 denied their existence as islands separate from New Britain” (Amherst & Thomson 1901: Ixxii).

20

Geoffrey Badger estimates “a total of 378 men, women and children, of whom many expected to become settlers in the new colony” (1996: 34). 21 Matthew Spriggs has continued the work started by Jim Allen and Roger Green in this area, and suggests that: “There appear to be no remaining Melanesian accounts of these contacts, but we are not solely reliant on the somewhat exaggerated Spanish accounts as archaeological evidence also throws important light on the relations between the local people and the foreigners” (1997: 226). 22

Kelly supports this argument: “Rumours persisted that the Almiranta had not sunk. In 1603 there was a report that the ship had reached New Guinea and that some of the crew eventually made their way to the Philippines in another ship. Others believed that survivors still lived on an island somewhere. When Quirós returned to these waters in 1606 he was told a story on Taumako interpreted, at least by Iturbe, as implying that the men of the Almiranta had been killed on Santa Cruz but that the women and children had been spared” (1965: 275). Intriguingly, Quirós declined to investigate the report. On this topic, see also Spriggs 1997: 238. 23 Green concludes that: “Analysis of the pottery from Pamua shows it to be an imported product of sixteenth-century Spanish origin for which the 1568 exploration of this coast by Gallego is an inadequate explanation […] the Almiranta of Mendaña’s

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____________________________________________________ expedition, the one galleon headed towards this destination in 1595 when it became separated from the rest, reached the ‘Islands of Solomon’ discovered twenty seven years before, made a landfall there and founded a settlement of some months’ duration” (1973: 27). Remains of the pottery found in this excavation are held by the Museum in Honiara and the Otago Museum. 24

For an account of the sources that list the objectives of the voyage, see Kelly 1966: 11.

25 For Estensen, the treatment of the letter is “[a]nother example of the preoccupation with secrecy.” The fact that Torres’ letter criticises “the local Spanish administration” is the cause, Estensen believes, why “ [t]he letter was apparently never answered. It was placed in state archives where neither the Portuguese nor Spain’s English and Dutch enemies would ever find it. The price of such secrecy was that Spain never acted upon Torres’s discoveries, which could have led to Spanish claims to Australia. Instead, the existence of the strait remained conjectural until James Cook went through it in 1770. Torres’s letter was not seen again until the Spanish historian Juan Bautista Muñoz uncovered it in 1782. It remains in the royal archives at Simancas in Spain” (2000: 62-63). 26

According to Lessa, “Drake’s motives […] have long remained unclear. According to most speculation, he must have had one or more of the following objectives in mind: exploitation of trade with the Moluccas, and the plundering and harassing of the Spaniards. A derivative enigma is why he returned to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope rather than the Strait of Magellan […] A final possibility […] was neither discovery, nor the annexation of new lands, nor trade, but outright piracy” (1975: 20, 23). Drake’s expedition was an economic success, the dimensions of which can hardly be stressed. In fact, this money can be considered the seed investment in the future development of the English as a nation and an empire: “The colossal profitability of the voyage [Drake’s] amply rewarded his backers and indirectly made it possible for considerable capital to be invested in similar privateering enterprises. Drake provided the wherewithal to rescue the English royal finances from deepening deficit and enabled the Queen and Lord Treasurer Burghley to make wise investments. At a time when the annual cost of the defense of England, calculated in its broadest sense, was some L35,000, Drake was able to offer Elizabeth about enough foreign bullion to cover it for a decade. She paid off her foreign creditors entirely. She sent a large subsidy to the Netherlands, which enabled their new sovereign, her suitor the Duke of Alençon, to do something to defend the rebels from Spain. It was the Queen who in 1581 put up a large share of the capital for founding the Levant Company, as a result of which the East India Company—the foundation stone of the British empire in the East—was eventually formed” (Kraus 1970: 20) 27 The dividing line between piracy and, what was called privateering is, as Lamb remarks, hard to trace in these instances: “Occasionally buccaneers were recruited by the state for attacks on enemy shipping or settlements … Then they were known as privateers, sailing under an authorization known as Letters of Marque and Reprisal. But it was a thin line dividing privateering from piracy” (2000: 4).

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____________________________________________________ 28

As mentioned, the policy of secrecy was a factor in the prevalent scarcity of geographical knowledge. As Helen Wallis notes, Drake’s knowledge was kept largely secret, though, as ever so often, information leaked in various forms and found its way into maps: Drake returned to England with many charts, sketches, and pictures from which a new and greatly improved map of the world could be made. The paradox of the voyage was that his feat of navigation and his discoveries were kept concealed. Only the inner circle of backers and the Queen’s ministers were allowed to share the secrets revealed to the Queen. Even the fact that he had sailed round the world was not disclosed, as we learn from Mendoza’s secret dispatches … Mendoza added that Drake’s men “are not to disclose the route they took, on pain of death” (Thrower 1984: 133). 29

As late as the nineteenth-century’s fin-de-siècle, Melanesians were the subject of stereotypical classification by Europeans like Thomson, who says that: “The labourers … have been found good domestic servants, and far more apt to adopt European habits and European clothing than the Fijians and Samoans around them” (Amherst & Thomson 1901: lxxvii). 30 The Dutch VOC or East India Company was founded in 1602 (Cf. Schilder 1976: 43ff.). 31

This view survives, as seen by, for example, the following words of Peter Whitfield published as late as 1994: “The entry of the northern European nations into the age of exploration […] This was a decisive moment in European history, when intellectual curiosity, technological strength, national rivalries, and overwhelming avarice, all combined in the European mind to transform the world into a theatre, where aspirations of wealth and power might be realized” (1994: 72).

32

Beaglehole also endorses this view: “In the discoverers of the eighteenth century […] was first seen the organized pursuit of geographical knowledge for its own sake […] This third and last great epoch of Pacific discovery, with its emphasis on knowledge, belonged to the English and the French; the first, the sixteenth century, was that of the Spanish, animated by a mingled zeal for religion and for gold; the second, the seventeenth century, that of the Dutch, the supporters of a prosaic and determined expansion of trade” (1966: 3-4).

33

Kelly contests this assumption, as he does also the inference that “’[t]o convert all infidels to Christianity’ was the official excuse for the expedition; conquest and spoliation were the real motives.” See 1966: 20 and 82ff. 34

Gil remarks on Quirós’ aspirations to become ‘a new Columbus’: “His aspirations in 1609 were not what could be called modest: besides the title of governor and captain general he asked for 500,000 ducats neeed to enrol 1000 men, 12 Franciscan friars, 6 clergymen [...] besides 200 men for administrative, military and artistic tasks […] six war captains, six ensigns, twelve men well versed in business and teachers of all trades, even a painter and a mathematician […] one could not ask for less ‘in order to begin a new world’” (“Un nuevo Colon: Sus pretensiones en 1609 no eran lo que se dice modestas: además del título de gobernador y capitán general pedía 500.000 ducados, que se habían de emplear en aviar 1.000 hombres, 12 frailes capuchinos, 6

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____________________________________________________ clérigos [...] amén de 200 hombres de gobierno, de milicia y de letras [...] seis capitanes de guerra, seis alféreces, doce personas bienentendidas de negocios y maestros de todos oficios, hasta un pintor, un escultor y un matemático [...] no se necesitaba menos ‘para dar principio a un nuevo mundo’”) (c.1989: 122). 35

For quite some time, the only reliable source of Quirós voyage available to historians was the summary of Torquemada, except for some two or three memorials by Quirós. Torres’ letter was first published by James Burney in 1806 and the complete narrative of Quirós in Spanish only appeared in the nineteenth-century, when Justo Zaragoza edited it in 1876. 36

See, for example, the map of William Berry, London (1680). Berry copies Hubert Jaillot’s version of the famous Sanson world map published in 1674 (Shirley 1983: 509).

37

According to Markham, “Purchas obtained a copy, which he reprinted in his Pilgrimes. Hessel Gerritsz. printed a Dutch version, in 1612 […] and two French translations appeared in 1617” (1967: xxi). 38

Schilder describes Gerritsz’ map in the following words: “a very rare and very important product of the Dutch printing presses at the beginning of the seventeenth century […] [is] the Beschryvinghe Vander Samoyeden Landt in Tartarien […] 1612 by Hessel Gerritsz which also contains a memorandum addressed to the King of Spain by P. F. de Quirós […] A world map in two hemispheres in which the discoveries of de Quirós are shown forms part of the book […] It was this that was later to induce Le Maire and Schouten to look for the southern continent” (1976: 19). 39 Richardson also notes that the same process has been followed by McIntyre’s book (1977), which has been “for some years a set text in Victorian secondary schools” (1995a: 88). 40

“Despite the storms and sickness, Bougainville continued to sail into the littleknown waters to the west and west-southwest, hoping to find the large land mass reported by Quirós” (Allen c1980: 90). 41

Andrew Cook has studied in detail Dalrymple’s knowledge, affirming that: “Dalrymple […] had some form of early published narrative for each of these voyages. Herrera for Mendaña’s first voyage; de Morga’s publication of a letter from Quirós, supplemented by Thevenot’s fragment of Figueroa for Mendaña’s second voyage; Torquemada and two of Quirós’ memorials for Quirós and Torres’ voyage. For Le Maire and Schouten he used near-contemporary parallel Dutch accounts; he relied on Valentijn for Tasman’s voyage; and he was aware of the differences between the Dutch and French editions of Roggeveen” (Dalrymple 1996: 21).

42 In Allen’s words, “Dalrymple was England’s foremost proponent of Terra Australis Incognita. A student of Pacific voyages, devotee of Quirós and an esteemed member of the Royal Society, he had examined scores of documents and ships’ logs from past Pacific voyages, and from these records had written a book arguing the case for the existence of the great Southern land mass—and had even drawn a map outlining it. It was Dalrymple who had found the long-lost report of Luis Váez de Torres’ passage

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____________________________________________________ through the strait between New Guinea and New Holland in 1606, forgotten for more than 150 years” (c.1980: 112-13). 43

Dalrymple put himself forward for the command of the expedition that was to be led by Cook in 1768-1771, rounding the North and South Islands of New Zealand and sailing along the then-uncharted east coast of Australia. In his second voyage (17721775), Cook was to retrace the way to Quirós’ Espíritu Santo: “Several days were spent examining the great Bay of St. Philip and St. James, the scene of Quirós’ exultation and suffering. Gazing upon the island’s high peaks, Cook could see how Quirós might think it was attached to ‘the Southern Continent which at that time and until very lately was supposed to exist’” (Allen c.1980: 156).

44

Kelly adds that: “it was not until 1876-80 that the accounts of Quirós, Leza and Torres were published in their Spanish texts. Before 1876, therefore, one of the main sources of information on the expedition was Torquemada—and his account misled Dalrymple, Burney and Meinicke in making their identifications” (1966: 61). 45

Cook did not use John Harrison’s chronometer, which was still in its experimental stages. In 1675 the Greenwich Observatory was founded with the objective of calculating longitude. In 1714 the English Government created the Board of Longitude and John Harrison started to develop his chronometer in 1730.

46

Spriggs notes that Melanesian hostility was probably the product of the suspicion of foreigners created as a result of Polynesian forays into their land (127). Spriggs also contests the unfavourable ranking of “primitive” Melanesians versus Polynesian “noble savages” in these terms: “As can be seen from oral traditions in the region, the establishment of Polynesian populations on the Outliers was more often than not accompanied by the massacre or enslavement of the previous inhabitants. Perhaps this explains why these new foreigners, light-skinned like the Polynesians, were greeted everywhere they went with such vigorous response except on the two Outliers with which they had contact” (1997: 228) 47

Cameron also records the received wisdom on Isabel Barreto’s cruelty (1966: 162).

48

See below, chapter 3.

49

Her Last Will and Testament appears with other documents related to it, including death certificate, inventory of possessions, etc. (131-35 and 140-48). 50

The notes on Isabel de Barreto take only four pages (1994: 316-20).

51

Isabel’s treatment thus demonstrates Greg Dening’s dictum that: “History is not the past: it is a consciousness of the past used for present purposes” (1996: 72). The “present purposes” of feminist historiography have, however, bypassed Isabel to date, therefore showing how prejudices about women in power are still rampant.

52 They affirm that the study of two generations shows that one in every twenty women was linked to the conquest (“[A] lo largo de dos generaciones una mujer de cada veinte estará vinculada a la conquista” [1994: 97]).

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____________________________________________________ 53

The Victorian characteristics attributed to Isabel by Graves can be seen later on in the novel, when he remarks that: “Dona Ysabel was too well-bred to rebuke him publicly for making a laughing-stock of himself, and must have known that to do so would only have encouraged him in his stiff-necked humility; but it is my belief that she hated him for the shame he caused her, and that nothing kept her nails from his cheeks, but the title and riches which she hoped to win by being his wife and sole heiress” (1950: 180-81). 54

Of Isabel and her three brothers, Lorenzo, Diego and Luis, no more is known until Isabel marries Álvaro de Mendaña in Peru.

55 Vicente Fernández Vázquez discovered that Mendaña was born in the village of Congosto, in Leon’s El Bierzo (1994: 51-63). 56

As mentioned in the previous chapter, it would be around two hundred years before the islands were “found” again by Europeans. 57

The original is kept in the Library of Congress, in the Harkness collection.

58

Isabel’s actual words read as follows: “Ítem, I declare that for the second time I married in the month of May of 1596 in the Philippine Islands with Don Fernando de Castro” (“Ítem, declaro que segunda vez me casse por el mes de mayo de mill y quinientos y noventa y seys en las Islas Philipinas con don Fernando de Castro” [Kelly 1973: 135]). 59 Mendaña is said in this book to have made vows to keep celibate in the journey: “[T]he general had adopted the habit of a Franciscan lay-brother”. Don Lope, whose wife, Mariana, was Isabel’s sister-in-law, also kept the same vow. Celibacy, some members of the crew believed, was imposed by Isabel in order to ensure her moral pre-eminence: “Others blamed Doña Isabel, swearing that it was she who had made this chastity a condition, for fear that her sister might be got with child before the voyage was over and so outdo her in womanly repute” (Bosch-Barrett 1943: 49, 75). 60

In the book Isabel does not attend Mendaña’s funeral and shows no feeling for Mendaña’s death: “[O]ur She-Governor, or Governoress, […] had not thought fit to display herself at the grave-side” . When Quirós saw her: “he found her dry-eyed and dressed from head to foot in black, which enhanced the beauty of her golden hair and milky skin. ‘A Governoress must not give way to grief,’ she told him with a sad smile, ‘though her heart bleed inwardly’” (Graves 1950: 321, 331). 61

The actual words are: “that the people that were under him be mistreated in such manner” (“que así se maltrate a la gente que está bajo sus órdenes” [1943: 34]). 62 “The devil has been let loose among us, and it is not him who can help us in this enterprise. Everybody should look after their own duties, and I will take care of mine, because it is my firm will to receive orders from the adelantado and that these orders be not interfered with.” (“Anda el diablo suelto entre nosotros, y no es él quien puede ayudarnos en esta empresa; cuide cada cual de sus quehaceres, que yo cuidaré de los míos, porque es mi voluntad firme recibir órdenes del adelantado y que éstas no sufran influencias” [1943: 37]).

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____________________________________________________ 63

Zaragoza explains a similar refusal by Mendaña saying that he thought the “challenge” to be “false” (2000: 151). 64

The episode is described in detail in Zaragoza 2000: 206-11).

65

Bosch-Barrett adds that, had more people survived they would not have made the journey: “It is to be noted that, if the people who had died had not done so, the survivors would not have made it, because they had only twenty pots of water and two sacks of flour left” (Es de advertir que si la gente que se murió no muriera, que los que quedaron vivos no llegaran con veinte botijas de agua, y dos costales de harina” [1943: 169]). 66 Isabel’s religiosity is also attested to by her bequest of two thousand masses as well as her collection of various religious images, which she bequeathed to her sister Petronila (Kelly 1973: 138-39).

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3. Mapping the Pacific If one had to choose the single most telling motif, constantly recurring in countless world maps over the centuries, it is that of power, the controlling powers that shape the world’s features and history. That power may be religious—Christian or pagan. It may be secular—conquest, trade or empire. It may be conceptual—the world map as a navigational instrument or as a thematic document. Or it may be scientific—cosmological or seismic. (Peter Whitfield 1994: 2)

The development of mapping techniques and the increasing production and use of maps in the early modern period went hand in hand with the colonial enterprise. The parallel evolution of maps and world exploration is apparent throughout the early modern period and can be seen in the trajectories of South Pacific voyagers Mendaña and Quirós. The maps used by these men or those made to represent their expeditions were not only devised as navigational tools but were also a means to canvass support for future enterprises and were deployed to illustrate the achievements of their journeys. They were therefore tools of conquest as well as cultural artefacts that demonstrated the intimate relationship between spatial representation and power. Some of the memorials, letters, accounts and journals written in preparation, during or after the voyages of these explorers were accompanied by manuscript maps made by the writers themselves or by their colleagues. Unfortunately, many of these maps were never printed and were kept secret, and most of them are now lost. There are, however, a few maps extant, as well as printed maps based on the knowledge of those that were lost. These, together with the abundant references to them and to their importance give a clear picture of the role they played.1 The production and consumption of these maps are the focus of this chapter.2

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In the following discussion I approach maps as, to borrow John Berger’s formulation, “ways of seeing” the world that afford individual and collective interpretations of space and time. As cultural products, maps represent visually, among other things, geographical, social, political and ethnographical data. This view concurs with the definition of maps provided by Brian Harley for whom maps are “a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations” (1988: 278).3 In this way, like other cultural information, maps are designed to enable the viewer to apprehend something that is rendered familiar by means of visualisation.4 From the producers to the consumers, maps convey the idea that viewing is understanding, and that this process is intimately woven with possession and with hegemonic relationships. Maps, then, provide valuable information not only about geography and chorography but also about the social and cultural beliefs and values embedded in them; they are cultural practices that, like narrative, are part of the processes by means of which meaning is socially constructed.5 Other than for guiding travellers and navigators, maps have been used for economic benefit, military advances, and propaganda as well as for decoration. In fact, most maps are made to serve one or more functions, ranging from the strategic to the ornamental. Sometimes mapmakers or map users see these functions as mutually exclusive, whereas in other instances they overlap intentionally or unintentionally. Nonetheless, even in very different maps, many underlying assumptions are often shared, regardless of the original design or the intention of the producers. These notions, which are the focus of this chapter, inform maps and often give us an indication of some cultural values or belief systems of particular societies. The maps studied in this chapter are, therefore, at the same time artistic, scientific and military constructions; they are sophisticated tools which developed relatively late in Western culture and which develop arbitrary conventions. The reification of particular historical readings represented in maps served to give meaning to emerging geographical areas and to make them intelligible by fixing their geographical boundaries. From their development as useful navigational tools maps have, then, been important means to acquire knowledge and have served to reify the effects of conquest. They have

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been given an aura of authority that is still very much with us, in spite of the fact that maps are subject to various biases of which viewers may be largely unaware, as Mark Monmonier has amply demonstrated. The importance of maps in the processes of colonisation grew consistently from Columbus’ discovery of the Americas onwards. The ways maps were used to legitimise exploration, discovery and conquest is demonstrated, for example, by the fact that the name America resulted from its incorporation on a particular map,6 or from the partition of the world between Spain and Portugal. This partition followed soon upon Columbus’ arrival in the Americas when, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI drew a line on a map in his famous bull Inter caetera. This bull is normally referred to as Bull of Demarcation, and settled the rival claims of Portugal and Spain by allocating to Spain everything west of a line running one hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. To Portugal, Pope Alexander gave everything to be discovered east of that meridian line. The next year, 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas shifted the line of demarcation 370 leagues westward. As a result, in America Brazil fell within the sphere of Portugal’s rule, whereas the unknown distances in the Pacific made the Philippines and the Spice Islands or Moluccas the focus of much dispute between Spain and Portugal during the following decades. The study of the use and development of maps during the early modern period thus offers us an index of the changes resulting from the increasing interest in travelling, discovering and colonising obtaining at that time. The first section of this chapter, “Plotting the Southern Continent” traces the evolution of these maps and the uses to which they were put in the exploration of the Pacific in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.7 These aspects are further explored in the second section of this chapter, “Staging the Southern Continent,” where contemporary maps develop the topos of the world-as-stage in order to negotiate a notion of geography that is as moral as it is descriptive. The world here is, as it were, “performed” upon maps that highlight the intricate relationship between religion and power at this time.

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3.1 Plotting the Southern Continent It is well documented that most early modern explorers were familiar with contemporary maps, and often used them to present their cases before the relevant authorities. In this, they followed the model set by Columbus, who used a map to illustrate his proposal to the Catholic Queen and King of Spain, Isabel and Fernando, to sail west from Europe to the East Indies. This chart was probably made by his friend, Pietro Toscanelli, and made practical use of the recently recovered knowledge of the Alexandrian Greek, Claudius Ptolemy (Edgerton 1987: 46), which suggested that the distance between Western Europe and Asia was short and accessible. Although Toscanelli’s chart has not survived, we can surmise that its features were similar to those in the multiple renaissance versions of Ptolemy’s maps (Fig. 6).8 This map is also of importance for the Pacific, the existence of which, though it occupies the largest portion of the known world, is not contemplated as yet. Sketchy though it may seem to us, Ptolemy’s knowledge was a great advance from existing representations, and had been largely unavailable for medieval Christian geographers. After the fall of Constantinople, in 1476, his work was translated in Venice and versions of his mappamundi started to be produced, especially in renaissance Italy. The years following Columbus’ arrival in the Americas produced many changes in the appearance of the universe (Cf. Nebenzahl: 1990). From the Ptolemaic world of Columbus’ project to Magellan’s journey in 1519 the shape and dimensions of the known world underwent a revolution of unprecedented proportions. This transformation starts to be appreciated in the first map to use the oval projection that would be widely used throughout the sixteenth century, Francesco Rosselli’s world map of 1506 (Fig. 7). In this small map, the Southern Continent appears south of Africa for the first time.9 According to Peter Whitfield, no source has been found for this geographical feature in a map in which “[t]he southern continent, postulated by Ptolemy as a counterweight to the northern land-masses, appears here for the first time as Antarcticus. Rosselli’s map is unusual in depicting this as a concentrated land-mass, and in locating it south of Africa, but no specific source for this idea has been identified” (1994: 50).

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Rosselli’s map prefigures the existence of the Pacific, discovered in 1513 by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa from Darien, in today’s Panama. It was then named Mar del Sur, South Sea, a name that endured and alternated with Mare Magellanicum and Pacific Ocean thereafter. The name, Pacific, is attributed to Magellan himself, when he was deceived by the peaceful appearance of the ocean after the tumultuous waters of the Strait that today bears his own name. According to Cameron, the words he used were: “Gentlemen … we are now standing into waters where no ship has ever sailed before. May this sea always be calm and peaceful as it is this morning. In this hope I name it the Mar Pacifico” (1966: 141). Much like the naming of the Solomons,10 however, the account of this event has come down to us as an anecdote that may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, the baptizing zeal displayed by these explorers in this and other occasions is well attested, and it reinforces the relationship of power they exercised and the desire to apprehend and possess the new lands and oceans discovered, as will be seen in my next chapter. It is recorded that Magellan used a detailed map to illustrate his proposal before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.11 During the circumnavigation he used charts made previous to his departure, probably by the Portuguese cartographers, Diego Ribeiro and Nuño García de Toreno, who worked for Spain at the time.12 Hernando de la Torre mentions that Magellan consulted a chart by Nuño García and another by Ribeiro when passing Sierra Leone. Nonetheless, even though Nuño García is mentioned in various reports as having been quite a prolific mapmaker, only one chart of the Far East made by him has survived.13 If the pilots of Magellan’s fleet drew any charts while sailing, we have no record of them and none has survived. However, one of the eighteen survivors of Magellan’s expedition, Antonio Pigafetta, displayed his mapmaking and artistic skills in the production of twenty-three maps in the style of the contemporary Isolari to accompany his account of this eventual journey.14 After the return of the Victoria, Nuño García, Diego Ribeiro and other official cartographers working for the master chart, the padrón general, drew charts to illustrate the voyage and its geographical discoveries. These maps were normally compiled from the diverse charts, accounts, official interviews, logbooks and similar documents, which were delivered to the Casa de la Contratación in Seville.15 Here they produced the padrón, which was meant to be

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secret and devoted to the exclusive use of Spanish authorities for future expeditions or for military purposes. Needless to say, much information from these sources often leaked in one way or another and found its way into maps of the time. As Daniel Boorstin has illustrated, the policy of secrecy was not easy to enforce, especially after the middle of the sixteenth century. This was due, not to “spies or treacherous pilots-major like Sebastian Cabot […but because of] a new technology that created a new kind of merchandise. After the arrival of the printing press geographic knowledge could be conveniently packaged and profitably sold” (1983: 269).16 The creation of this master chart, the padrón, attests to the use of geographical knowledge as a means to power and possession. In fact, as David Turnbull argues, the Casa de la Contratación and its Portuguese contemporary, the Casa da Mina, may be considered the first attempts to create “scientific institutions” in Western Europe: The first attempts by the state to create a space within which to assemble cartographic knowledge were at the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratación, and hence they can be described as the first scientific institutions in Europe […] The Casas and the Padrons thus represent the first example of the kind of knowledge space that we now take for granted as a precondition for the production of scientific and technical knowledge. However, neither Portugal nor Spain succeeded in sustaining state control of geographical knowledge and by the 1560s their template maps had started to fall into desuetude. (1996: 5, 9)

From this time onwards, as Turnbull suggests, knowledge would increasingly rely on representational practices that reified and consecrated a more uniform and universal epistemology.17 This epistemology was, in time, apprehended as being wholly disassociated from cultural or other conditionings, and would be assimilated within a uniform view of the real world. Needless to say, the objectivity and universalism of this paradigm have been questioned throughout the last decades for their overt disregard of the ways knowledge is informed by, among other things, the social, political and economic environment that produces it and to whose production it contributes. The knowledge and information about the Magellanic journey circulated widely in spite of the Casa’s policy of secrecy.18 The most important map reflecting this knowledge and produced by the Casa

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was the manuscript world map of Diego Ribeiro (1529), which served to disseminate that knowledge effectively and was used as a model for many maps thereafter (Fig. 8). One example of Ribeiro’s influence is Battista Agnese’s manuscript world map (1536), which follows closely Ribeiro’s geographical features. Agnese’s map traces and celebrates Magellan’s circumnavigation, which is marked by dotted lines (Fig. 9).19 One of the most important printed maps reflecting the new knowledge of the Pacific Ocean is the cordiform map of Oronce Finé, dated 1532, where Magellan Strait is shown with that name (Fig. 10).20 Finé uses the term Terra Australis for the Southern Continent with the added legend “recently discovered but not yet fully known.”21 This double heart-shaped world map shows the true extent of Magellan’s Pacific exploration and is probably the first recognition of Magellan’s feat in the nomenclature used on a printed map, where the Pacific beyond the Strait are designated “Mare Magellanicum.” Finé’s map also became a model for those that followed, among them that of Gerard Mercator (1538).22 Also based on the manuscript padrón chart of Ribeiro are the world maps of the Venetian school, which became prominent during the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the most prominent mapmakers from this school is Giacomo Gastaldi (1546), who clearly records the newly redrawn characteristics of the southern part of the globe (Fig. 11). Gastaldi’s map was reproduced with variations in some fourteen or fifteen different forms between the year of its publication and 1576. During this time, the Southern Continent that was missing in the 1546 version made its reappearance, as can be seen in the map of another mapmaker from the Venice school, Giovani Camocio (1567) (Fig. 12). Camocio’s map follows Gastaldi and Rosselli and, as Whitfield remarks, “is entirely characteristic of this school. The oval projection, derived from Rosselli’s archetype at the beginning of the century, was not dominant throughout Italy and Germany […] The geographical hallmark of the Venice school is immediately apparent: the gigantic southern continent, reaching here to 20 degrees of the equator” (1994: 64). The Pacific Ocean thus traversed, and the discovery of Magellan’s strait in the southern tip of the American continent, became part of European knowledge and started to appear in maps

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produced in various European countries.23 Indeed, these maps and the narratives about Magellan’s voyage can be said to have invented the Pacific, for it was not until this eventful journey was popularised in maps and written reports that the name and limits he had given to the ocean then known as Mar del Sur or Mare Magellanicum became part of European knowledge. Up to the eighteenth century, the three names, South Sea, Mare Magellanicum and Pacific Ocean, alternated and shared the space we now know as the North and South Pacific. The first map to use the name Pacific supposedly given to the sea by Magellan is Sebastian Münster's (1546) (Fig. 13). Münster's is the first printed map dedicated exclusively to the Western Hemisphere and shows a definitive separation between America and Asia. Münster uses names recorded on the journey, such as the Unfortunate Islands. As in many contemporary Spanish and Portuguese maps, Münster does away with the southern continent, prominent in the remaining cartographic traditions of Europe, as Günter Schilder has rightly noted.24 These maps illustrate that, as Oskar Spate puts it, “Magellan’s voyage [...] ensured the final destruction of the lingering remnants of the Ptolemaic world […] No other single voyage has ever added so much to the dimension of the world” (1979: 57). The swift spread of the knowledge of the “Pacific” stimulated cartographical representations of the mythical Southern Continent, now believed to come down from Tierra del Fuego. Tierra del Fuego thus gained a prominent place as the starting point of the Southern Continent or Magellanica from this time onwards. To quote JackHinton, “Magellan’s voyage though the Estrecho de Magallanes seemed, with its firm discovery of Tierra del Fuego, to provide physical proof of an antarctic and antipodean continent, and the identification of that land as the northern tip of a continental landmass exercised a considerable influence over the cartography of the sixteenth century” (1969: 7). Contemporary French and Portuguese cartographers displayed this feature prominently in their productions. This is especially visible in the world map of the cartographers from the Dieppe School, such as those of Pierre Desceliers (1550) (Fig. 14) and Nicolas Desliens (1567) (Fig. 15). These maps show the hypothetical Land of Java-laGrande,which is the main idiosyncrasy of the Dieppe School, south of

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Asia. The presence of this mysterious, large landmass has fuelled the hypothesis of a possible Portuguese discovery of Australia before Luis Vaez de Torres's sighting of the strait that bears his name in 1606 and the Dutch voyage of Willem Jansz and Jan Lodewycksz van Roossingen in the Duyfken in 1605.25 The notion of a possible Portuguese discovery of northern Australia in the sixteenth century has found some partisan defenders. Following upon Kenneth McIntyre’s book, The Secret Discovery of Australia, there has been an often-heated debate as to the possibility of a Portuguese discovery of today’s Australia.26 The maps themselves, as William Richardson has amply illustrated, are descendants of the belief in the Southern Continent as represented by Marco Polo.27 To date, no conclusive evidence of a discovery has come to light, though sightings of the coast of Australia are quite possible.28 The existence of the Southern Continent was so strongly fixed in the minds of men of the time that they held on to it even after Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten in 1615 proved Tierra del Fuego to be an island. Gerard Mercator was the most important precedent for world maps produced during the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries that represented the southern continent coming from Tierra del Fuego. This is apparent in his famous work of 1569 (Fig. 16)29 and those derived from it, which include the most important maps of the time: those of Abraham Ortelius (1570) (Fig. 1). From Columbus onwards, then, and especially after Magellan’s circumnavigation, the Pacific was conceptualised as a sea bound by the Southern Continent. This view, already widespread by the middle of the sixteenth-century, prevailed throughout the century with few alterations thereafter. The most important of these changes was the inclusion of the elusive Solomons. The first map to show these islands after Mendaña’s discovery is probably the manuscript map of López de Velasco, which appears in a work entitled Demarcacion y Diuision de las Indias, 1575 (Fig. 17). This map shows the routes to the Philippines from Mexico and runs the line of demarcation through the Malay Peninsula. This made the Moluccas and Java fall within the Spanish area, as indicated by the congress of Badajoz in 1524. Ortelius incorporates the Solomons in editions of his work from 1589 onwards, and they appear in the various editions

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thereafter in both the map of the world (Fig. 18) and the new plate devoted to Maris Pacifici “known vulgarly as South Sea” (“quod vulgo Mar del Zud”) (Fig. 19).30 Unlike López de Velasco’s or Ribeiro’s maps, most of the world maps that contributed to the conceptualisation, staging and performance of the Pacific were published and were well known to contemporary navigators. They, therefore, lacked the detail of manuscript charts that were often made on voyages. Unfortunately, we have very few maps produced or used during the three journeys studied here, but there exist some manuscript derroteros derived from the journeys which give us an idea of how these charts were. From Quirós’ second voyage, we have four manuscript charts drawn by Diego de Prado y Tovar, a declared adversary of Quirós and later to become a friar of St Basil. These maps are kept at the archive of the Palace of Simancas in Valladolid, and one of them represents the Bay of St Philip and St James in Vanuatu’s Espiritu Santo. (Fig. 20).31 We also have some manuscript rutters, derroteros, derived from the journeys. One of these derroteros, produced in the second half of the seventeenth century, bears the interesting label “Demonstracion delas Yslas de Salomon que descubrio de Adelantado Alvaro de Avendaño” (Fig. 21).32 The word used to describe the chart, “demonstración,” suggests that the map is deployed as witness and thus a reification of the very existence of the islands.33 This corroborates how the representation of discoveries in maps became a way of claiming proprietary rights from the beginning of world exploration. Demonstration becomes the equivalent of displaying and showing, so that to see becomes proof of existence as well as ratification of naming and possessing. Knowledge, in other words, is never disinterested but is intimately related to the creation of hegemonic relationships, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated. In Foucault’s own words: “it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable” (1980: 100). The important role of maps in the process of discovery is also shown by the numerous references to maps and mapmaking, which are

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of paramount importance in assessing the trajectories of these explorers. For the 1595 voyage, Mendaña instructed his pilot, Quirós, to draw five charts of his journey. In concrete, as Celsus Kelly has noted, we have references to Quirós having been ordered to provide graphic knowledge of the Pacific coast of South America: Queiros’ first comission to draw a South Sea chart was given by Mendaña (c. April-May 1595) shortly before the colonising expedition sailed from Paita in Peru. Mendaña instructed him to draw five marine charts for his pilots. He was to show the Peruvian coastline from Paita to Arica and away to the west across the Pacific at a distance of 1500 leagues two points of the Solomon Islands […] with no other land in between lest one of the ships be tempted to desert to it. (1961: 206)

Quirós also refers to having made a world map in which he used different colours to signify the various stages of discovery and knowledge of the different surfaces. On his return to Spain in 1607 he drew a world map (mapa universal) showing all the islands and lands he had discovered with their names, as well as indicating latitudes and longitudes. According to Quirós, he drew no fewer than 200 maps, in one of which he claims to have “pintado el Mundo, reducido á tres puntos: lo que es dorado, representa todas las tierras sabidas; lo azul, los mares ya navegados; lo negro, la parte incógnita y en ésta lo que se va descubriendo. Señor, no ay más que un Mundo, y después que trato de descubrir lo que dél falta, he pintado más de 200 de muchas formas y de muchos tamaños” (Zaragoza 2000: 809). Quirós also wrote a Treatise of Navigation c.1610, where he emphasized the scant knowledge of the Southern part of the world. In this Treatise he writes that “all the charts are defective and will remain so unless your Majesty sends a person of knowledge and experience with accurate instruments to observe and describe everything as he passes from one place to another” (Qtd. Kelly 1961: 205). Kelly also observes that Quirós’ “cartographic competence was recognized at Rome (1600-02) and at Madrid (1607-14). After having demonstrated his knowledge and skill to the leading pilots and mathematicians at Rome, the Duke of Sesa, on 2 February 1602, wrote to the king: “I believe there must be very few pilots who know as much as he does, for the majority of them are content with practice and experience alone. But he is skilled in making globes and navigation charts” (Kelly 1961: 205).

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There is certainly no shortage of references to Quirós’ expertise as a mapmaker, which has been detailed by Cortesão’s investigation.34 As attested to by Kelly, at various stages in his negotiations for his 1605 expedition (between the years of 1595 and 1603) and again for the subsequent colonising expedition which he proposed (1607-14), Quirós explained details of his project with the aid of maps of the South Seas that he had drawn. These maps (cartas de marear) were examined in Rome by leading pilots and mathematicians c. 1601. Likewise, Quirós is said to have explained his own maps and rutters for his proposed voyage of discovery (mapas y derroteros de mi descubrimiento) to the members of the Council of State and other influential persons at the Spanish court in 1602-03; and he used un mapa in his discussions with the members of the Council of the Indies in 1603. In spite of all these references, we only have a map supposedly made by Quirós (Fig. 22). This map is interesting in that, though dated 1598, it does not show any of the 1595 discoveries. Perhaps, it has been suggested, Quirós wanted the location of the islands discovered to be secret to prevent other European powers from undertaking voyages of expedition and settlement (Cf. Kelly 1966: 1011).35 Both Mendaña and Quirós are also referred to as having used native knowledge as, for example, in St Ysabel in the Solomons in 1567, when the captive chief drew a map in the sand (Beaglehole 1966: 46). This information allowed them to infer that Ysabel was an island and not the Southern Continent they were seeking.36 Likewise, we also have references to Quirós having used the natives’ cartographic knowledge in Taumako. The process, described by Ian Cameron, allows us to infer the depth of geographical knowledge Polynesians had and their ability to communicate location, distance and chorographic information. The description of Tumai’s geographical awareness is worth quoting at length: The Captain [Quirós] then asked Tumai whether he knew of other lands, far or near, inhabited or uninhabited. In reply Tumai pointed to his island, then to the sea, then to various points of the horizon; he then began counting on his fingers up to as many as sixty islands, ending with a very large land which he called “Manicolo”. The

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Captain wrote down the names, having the compass before him for noting the bearing of each island from Taumaco. To explain which were small islands, Tumai drew small circles, and for larger ones larger circles; while for the very large land to the south-west the opened both his hands and his arms as wide as he could. To explain which were the distant islands and which the nearer, he pointed to the sun, then rested his head on his hand, shut his eyes, and with his fingers counted the number of nights one had to sleep on the voyage. In a similar way he explained which people were white, black or mulattos; which friendly and which hostile. He gave us to understand, by biting his arm, that in one island they ate human flesh, and indicated he disapproved of such people. In this way what he said was understood. He repeated his information many times until he was tired, and showed a desire to return to his house; and then the Captain gave him many gifts for barter, and he departed after embraces and other tokens of love. (1966: 167)37

In spite of all these maps and references to them, the Pacific still had to wait over two more centuries to acquire its contemporary dimensions and shape. In between, the Southern Continent appeared and disappeared, as did the Solomons.38 Thus, at least in the case of the Pacific, mapping is by no means the result of continuous growth towards what we now apprehend as a more scientific, detached knowledge of the world. As R. Skelton puts it: The unfolding of the map of the Pacific from the early 16th century to the end of the 18th century is not a record of continuous growth [...] The maps which explorers brought back, no less than their narratives, throw light on the illusions created by their discoveries, on the retreat of knowledge before fantasy, and on the diversion of enterprise to the pursuit of chimeras which nonetheless yielded new and fruitful discoveries. (1958: 185)

The imbrication of fiction and reality in maps alluded to by Skelton was not untangled till James Cook’s voyages in the last third of the eighteenth century. In between, the image of the Pacific that I have traced throughout did not change substantially from the first half of the sixteenth century until two hundred years later. All maps studied in this section can be “read” and analysed taking into account the particularities of a certain era and the material conditions that enabled their production and consumption.39 These relations have to be made apparent to the modern viewer, who may

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not be aware of how maps disclose particular ways of life and their inherent contradictions. The maps studied in this chapter illustrate Monmonier’s proposal that “maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information and also are subject to distortions arising from ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice” (2). Some of the “distortions” Monmonier observes will also be the focus in the next section of this chapter, where the Pacific is staged by means of the theatrum mundi topos.

3.2 Staging the Southern Continent The fourth continent is unknown to us and uninhabitable on account of the blaze of the sun. There sciapodes are alleged to live, one-legged beings of incredible speed, who are called sciapodes by the Greek because in the heat they lie on their backs in the shade of their [own] enormous foot. (Beatus’ Map of Codex St Osma [Qtd. Gunter Schilder 1976: 244]) Theatricality is deep in every cultural action. (Greg Dening 1980: 109)

The classical idea of the world as a stage, Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem, pervades many maps and narratives of exploration during the early modern period. This notion infuses many world maps, which offer a vision of a fragile universe, reminding viewers that human life is short and ephemeral. Much like Hamlet, the mirror these maps hold up to view returns an image of life as being briefly performed upon a stage, as well as of human mortality. Like those studied in the previous section, the maps studied here are polysemous cultural, social and spatial representations that exemplify the transition between the moralized geography prevalent in the Middle Ages and the topographical representations with which we are now familiar. In fact, these early modern maps can be said to have served as a stimulus and to have been stimulated by the increasing drive to explore, chart and conquer the universe beyond the European shores that underscores the transatlantic voyages from the fifteenth century onwards.

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The reasons for the increasing European expansion in the early modern period are multiple and complex. Samuel Edgerton, for example, sees the Christian frustration regarding the failure to reconquer Jerusalem from the Arabs as one possible reason for the desire to travel, explore and chart the unknown universe.40 This, Edgerton suggests, provided the necessary impetus to sail beyond the known shores and the boundary markers of the pillars of Hercules in Gibraltar, which had for centuries been inscribed with the motto “Non plus ultra” (“there is nothing beyond”). This motto was significantly rewritten by Charles V as “Plus ultra” (“there is more beyond”) following upon the nearly three decades of exploration that had taken place since the discovery of the Americas by the time he ascended the Spanish throne in 1517. From this time onwards, then, increasing numbers of explorers (and their sponsors) felt the need to sail in search of new routes, worlds and markets. The early modern cartographic impulse took place at a time when expansion was rendering the world increasingly smaller, and when humans saw themselves to be displacing God as the agents of history.41 From such a perspective, the humanistic ideas that inform the period known as the renaissance equally underline world exploration. To put it otherwise, early exploration provided the backdrop for the development of the humanistic philosophies that became the hallmark of the renaissance. It would appear, therefore, that these developments would render somewhat anachronistic the profound religiosity and determinism we identify with the Middle Ages. However, these ideas are prominent in the voyages of exploration associated with the Iberian Peninsula, including those of Álvaro de Mendaña and Pedro Fernández de Quirós, and can also be seen in many European cartographic products that developed at the time, especially those from the Dutch school. Mapmakers from the Dutch school, including Jodocus Hondius, Peter van den Keere or Willem Jansz Blaeu, highlight the relationship between discovery and vanity in some of their maps. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world maps present a vision of the world that is both moral and geographical, as demonstrated in the way they display ostentatiously the baroque theme of vanitas.42 These topoi crossed the Christian divide between Reformers and Catholics to become one of the prevalent notions underlying

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exploration and mapmaking from the second half of the sixteenth century until well into the seventeenth. The histrionic notion of the world as a stage is of special interest in relation to the early modern maps of the hypothetical Southern Continent. As long as the Pacific remained uncharted, geographical discoveries and fantasies interacted in the invention of this large area of the world. Indeed, fiction and reality merge in the representations of the world as a stage that informs the mapping of the Pacific at the time of the Spanish journeys studied in this book. These maps stress the religious notions underlying renaissance geography and the idea of a histrionic world that is divinely ordained. Among these, the heart-shaped world map of Jodocus Hondius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, published in 1589 (Fig. 23), offers some interesting insights.43 This miniature map is the first map known by Hondius, who fled the religious struggles in the Netherlands to live in London in the 1580s before returning to Amsterdam in 1592 or 1593. Here the image of the whole universe, which is suspended by a cord held by the hand of God and thereby subject to God’s divine power, has clearly been constructed by human action. This is seen by the map’s incorporation of recent discoveries and its open acknowledgement of the recent circumnavigation of the world by Sir Francis Drake (157880).44 The rounding of the southernmost tip of South America and the presence of the island baptized by Drake as Insula Regina Elizabetha attest to the achievements of the journey. Two concepts that seem to us to contradict each other, scientific progress and religious predetermination, are clearly combined in this map. At around the same time, Hondius engraved another world map relevant to the exploration of the Pacific, which appeared in Hugh Broughton’s A Concent of Scripture (c.1590) (Fig. 24). In this “Map of the Earth with names (the most) from Scriptures,” the lands to be discovered are written over with words that conjure up the mythical islands of wealth and riches mentioned above: Ophir and Tarshish: Ophir in South America and Tarshish over the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.45 The quotation from Psalm 72, also inscribed on the map, explains that: “The kinges of Tarshish shall bring presentes.” John Gillies interprets this map identifying the Biblical associations with contemporary colonialism:

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Broughton’s reinscription of the Typus—the most prominent icon of the new geography c. 1590—in the biblical idiom of the “ends of the earth”, is beyond mere idiosyncracy. It is systematic in a way that points beyond the poetic geography of the Bible to a powerful protocolonial discourse in which the peoples of the “ends of the earth” are written as objects of missionary and imperialistic attention. [...] [T]he biblical association between “Tarshish,” “treasure,” “fleets” and “Spain,” may also conceal an allusion to the oceanic empire of Philip II whose yearly treasure fleet, the carrera de las Indias, made the hazardous journey from the Caribbean to Cadiz: which the Romans knew as Gades and the Greeks may have known as Tartessus. (1994: 177)

The ways cartographic representations of the newly colonised world highlight the meaninglessness of exploration and construct world geography as a theatre are neatly summed up in a map produced nearly at the same time as Hondius, which is normally known as the Fool’s Cap Map c. 1590 (Fig. 25).46 This map, which follows that of Abraham Ortelius in its geographical features, is derived from one made by Jean de Gourmont c. 1575, and is designed to emphasize the imbrication of exploration and vanity.47 The characterisation of the world as a fool offers a wide array of possible interpretations, for the fool was a cultural icon embodying multiple meanings. These meanings ranged from the relationship of madness with wisdom, inherited from the classical tradition, to, as Peter Whitfield sums up, the role of scapegoat: The Fool’s origin and central role seems to have been in magic: he was a kind of scapegoat who drew down upon himself the forces of evil, unreason or ill-fortune, and by confronting them, averted the power from his community. He was licenced [sic] to break rules, speak painful truths, and mock at power and pretension, and the grotesque shape he bore was a kind of living punishment […] it is now the whole world which takes on the Fool’s costume, thus forcing the viewer to confront the possibility that the whole created order is irrational, alien and threatening. (1994: 78)

Equally relevant in the context of Pacific exploration is one of the most interesting representations of moralised geography, Hondius’ “Christian Knight” map of c.1597 (Fig. 26). Hondius’ map is important not only for being quasi-contemporary with Quirós’ depiction of his journey to the Pacific as pilot of the second fleet (led by Mendaña in 1595), but also because of the salient place occupied

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by the mythical Southern Continent in it. In this map, in the large space supposedly occupied by the undiscovered southern territories, the various Christian notions that remind humans of the meaninglessness of earthly endeavours and the worthlessness of worldly riches are all placed in Terra Australis Incognita. The World, Sin, Flesh, Devil and Death, Mundus, Peccatum, Caro, Diabolus and Mors, are located around the central figure, the Knight in armour. This Christian Knight who steps on the Flesh, Caro, is inspired by the Holy Ghost hovering over him, much like the explorer Pedro Fernández de Quirós was when naming Vanuatu Austrialia del Espiritu Santo.48 These images surround the knight with the paraphernalia of the theatrum mundi, where humans are placed in a universe that is geographically and spiritually histrionic. The world, its riches and confines are thereby moralised. Contradictorily, then, these maps present an invitation to discover and define the unknown universe that is couched as a warning against forgetting that the ultimate common destiny of all humans is death and one ought to be prepared for it. As Whitfield observes, these maps link the physical world with the forces that lie behind it: What unites [the motifs in the maps] is the intention of the mapmaker to display not merely the world but the forces which shape and control the world […] There is a sense, especially in the larger maps of baroque theatre, in which gods or monarchs survey or manipulate human drama” (1994: 74).

From the point of view of production and consumption, these maps can be treated as narratives. This treatment is especially useful in maps in which the line between cartographic representation and narrative is difficult to draw, as happened paradigmatically in the contemporary atlases. Besides atlases, however, many early modern maps were accompanied by elaborate textual explanations. These were added in adjacent pages, were written as explanations on the map itself, or were included in vignettes that could be read individually or sequentially. The intimate relationship between map and narrative is obvious in the most important collection of maps that made up what is considered the first atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius (1570) (Fig. 27). Indeed, in Ortelius’ Theatrum, as Peter van der Krogt has argued, maps and words “form one whole.” Ortelius’ atlas, van der Krogt affirms, “can essentially be called the first (world)

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atlas” for it “is the first publication with maps which have been exclusively designed to be issued in a book together with other, similar maps […] Through the text, introductory matter and registers, the maps truly form one whole” (1998: 60).49 Ortelius, like Ptolemy and the classical geographers that were his models, saw geography and history as inseparable aspects of knowledge.50 In his famous Theatrum, he included a lengthy description of the land depicted in the maps in the pages between the maps, where geographical, botanical, ethnographical, folkloric and even literary information can be found. To quote Van der Krogt on this aspect of the atlas, On a standard, folded double folio map, two pages are available for explanatory texts, the first and the fourth, the map being displayed on pages two and three. In the early editions […] the text is usually limited to a single page. In later editions the second page is used as well. In a text, usually we first get a geographical specification and description of the country, sometimes augmented with ethnographic, economical, remarks and details on physical geography. Texts tend to consist of a succession of summarised bits and pieces, unrelated abstracts, in which historical subjects dominate. (1998: 68)51

A good mixture of fact, fiction and interpretation, these sections rightly complement the decorative and informative aspects of the maps themselves. This provided the grounds for Ortelius’ rationale of the explanations: Because we thought it would be a thing nothing pleasing to the Reader or Beholder, to see the backsides of the leaues altogether bare and empty; we determined there to make a certaine briefe and short declaration and Historicall discourse of euery Mappe, in the sam[e] manner and order as we said we obserued in the Mappes themselues; not omitting nor concealing any mans name, that we had occasion to use. (1570: np)

The premises outlined here by Ortelius were thereafter followed in the construction of atlases as well as in collections of city views, such as the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, where the charts were always accompanied by explanatory narrative.52

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Ortelius’ Theatrum thus set down the intimate relationship between map and narrative, further suggesting the impossibility of separating geography from history, and religion from the idea of the world as theatre.53 This interdependence is also seen in the development of the Theatrum from its first publication to the numerous editions, translations and additions it underwent in the following decades. The success of the Theatrum led to its increase in size and its eventually being made into a pocket edition, the Epitome, which made the atlas cheaper and more widely available. After the atlas had gone through the multiple editions and translations that made his compiler wealthy and renowned, Ortelius complemented it from 1598 onwards with a section dedicated to “The Geography of Holy Writers,” in the Parergon (Fig. 28). This addition to the Theatrum included maps of ancient civilization drawn up by Ortelius. The relationship between history, religion, geography and the idea of the world as a stage is prominent in this section, which John Gillies calls a “historical geography” (1994: 60). In the Parergon, Gillies suggests, geography is made into a “historical ‘theatre’”: In these maps of bygone empires and events, the idea of geography as a historical “theatre” is made graphically manifest [...] To their purely cartographic function, Ortelius adds a narrative-theatrical function. As well as describing regions, these maps tell histories. Accordingly, the cartography is complemented by a variety of narrative or pictorial devices [...] Textual legends appear before or within or beneath maps, in order to convey the historical dimension of the geographic image. (1994: 72)54

If the early modern theatre represents a microcosmic image of the world, the world is also compared to a theatre, where everything is ephemeral and where humans are nothing but actors.55 This theatrical universe is an “invention,” much as each new discovery is said not just to image forth but also to invent anew a geographical area for Europeans. Geography, myth, theatre and religion are likewise eloquently woven in the Parergon’s initial address to the readers, entitled “The Geography of Holy Writers.” Here Ortelius deals with one of the places that became all-important in the exploration of the Americas and of the Pacific, the Solomonic land of Ophir. This land is visible in the map that opens the Parergon, Geographia Sacra (Fig. 29) and is also highlighted in the inset map in it where he situates Ophir in the

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east, above India and the Malayan peninsula (Fig. 30). From this mythical land, Ophir, Solomon was thought to have taken the gold to build his famous temple in Jerusalem. Ortelius’ own words, as translated by John Norton in the first English edition of 1606, demonstrate this religious-cum-mythical link: We haue vpon the side in a void place set the Mappe of the whole World, whereby the diligent student of Diuinity by conferring might easily see, what and how great a portion of the same, the holy history doth mention and comprehend: and at once, iointly with the same labour to find out the situation and position of two famous places mentioned in the holy Scriptures: namely of the situation of the country Ophyr and the earthly Paradise. Of the which although many men do write many and diuers things, and the opinions of the learned be different, yet we haue also set downe our iudgement, willingly giuing leaue to the learned Reader, his discretion, to take which him pleaseth: and he may read, if he thinke good, that which in our Geographicall Treasurie, we haue written more at large of Ophyr. Of Paradise also there is the like controuersie and question amongst the Diuines. (1606: np)]

The Ophirian legend, as indicated in the Introduction of this book, informs and is informed by the journeys of exploration to the South Pacific at this time, and it articulates the overlapping of geography and chimera. This articulation takes the form of the world-as-stage topos that is, I submit, part and parcel of the epistemology of the early modern period. By the time the Theatrum was published, the relationship between the Ophirian conjecture and the exploration of the Pacific had a long tradition, which started in the classical era and culminated in many sixteenth-century representations. In fact, Ophir was also confused with, among other places, the lands described by Marco Polo as Beach, Locach and Maletur.56 As with the Ophirian legend, the uses of Marco Polo’s geographical knowledge in the exploration of the Pacific emphasise the intimate overlapping between geography and morality that informs early modern cartography. In fact, the writings of Marco Polo were taken to be authoritative by many subsequent generations so that his influence in the representation of the “east” and the “southern continent” lasted for well over three centuries. Polo’s names survived in the most famous maps of the era, including those of Ortelius (Fig. 1).57 Gerard Mercator, who became a model for cartographers

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thereafter, used Marco Polo in his influential world map of 1569, which was reprinted thereafter by his son, Rumold, and then by the Hondius family till the 1630s (Fig. 16) (Shirley 1983: 139-40).58 Contemporary maps and narratives therefore weave to varying degrees the Spice Islands with the islands of gold and silver, and Argyre, the biblical Ophir and Tarshish, Ptolemy’s Golden Khersonese or his southern landmass,59 Cipangu, the Southern Continent and Polo’s Beach, Locach and Maletur. Journeys to the South Seas show these mythical or real places as their stated or implied objectives in an elusive merger of dream and reality.60 By means of this alternation, they belie their intended imperialistic aims and construct a mythical type of history that incorporates beliefs and fantasies. This alternation informs the appearance of Argyre or Isla de Plata in the map of the Pacific, Maris Pacifici, included in Ortelius’s Theatrum from 1589 onwards (Fig. 16 and Fig. 31). From 1570 to 1587, in all editions of Ortelius’ atlas, the Map of Asia only has the large island of Iapan and various smaller islands, including Fermosa (today’s Taiwan) and Lequeio (Lequio in the Philippines. This map remains unchanged in later editions, but the new map of the Pacific, Maris Pacifici, includes an island larger than Japan north of this country and identifies it with the classical Argyre in the legend next to it. These versions alternate freely in various post-1589 editions.61 Reinforced by a view of life as representation, and of the world as a stage where humans follow the designs of divine destiny, these maps, like the narratives that often accompanied them, construct a universe where fiction and reality are representation both for the actors and for the viewers. Whitfield comments: “At their most expressive, these maps created a sense of the world possessed, politically through exploration and conquest, intellectually through geographical imagery” (1994: 74).62 Much like the explorations on whose information they relied, the maps of the early modern Pacific merge not just fact and fiction but, more interestingly, beliefs, chimeras and theatricality. This theatricality, in fact, is part and parcel of the construction of space in maps and, as the following chapter will show, in the rituals and ceremonies performed by the explorer.

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Notes 1

For example, to signify the power of the Spanish ruler, Mendaña showed a map to the Marquesan cacique Bile Banara: “[T]omé vna carta de marear y señálele lo que era mar y lo que era tierra, y señálele por su tierra vna isla muy pequeña y toda la demás le dixe que era de Vuestra Majestad” (Kelly 1965: 13).

2

I study some maps representing the Pacific from Magellan's journey (1519-21) until the seventeenth century in “Representaciones del Pacífico 1599-1606”. (2001b: 15476).

3

Harley and David Woodward offer a coherent summary of the definitions of maps and mapping in “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography.” 4

As Johannes Fabian reminds us, the “conventional prescriptions” given to anthropologists include “the recommendations to use maps, charts and tables [which] signal convictions deeply ingrained in an empirical, scientific tradition […] Such a theory in turn encourages quantification and diagrammatic representation so that the ability to ‘visualise’ a culture or society almost becomes synonymous for understanding it” (1983: 106). On this topic, see also Mary Pratt’s study, Imperial Eyes (Pratt 1992).

5

The definition of culture I am using is that developed by the early theoreticians of Cultural Studies, John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts, who “understand the word ‘culture’ to refer to that level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life and give expressive form to their social and material lifeexperience” (1975: 10). I also assume, as Dick Hebdige observes, that “[I]n effect, the material (i.e., social relations) which is continually being transformed into culture (and hence subculture) can never be completely ‘raw’. It is always mediated: inflected by the historical context in which it is encountered; posited upon a specific ideological field which gives it a particular life and particular meanings” (During 1999: 446).

6

The map was made by Martin Waldseemuller and incorporated in a collection of travellers’ accounts. On this topic, see my “Mapping terra incognita.”

7

In her study of ceremonials of possession, Patricia Seed suggests that “[d]escribing formed part of the process of laying claim to new regions […] Describing demonstrated knowledge of a region, knowledge which could have been obtained only by extensive exploration” (1995: 162). Seed illustrates the territorial value attributed to cartographical description by the Dutch, which she differentiates from the value given by other imperial powers. Seed adds that: “To the Dutch, putting a place upon the map rendered it more than a record of ‘discovery’; it transformed the map into a critical sign of possession” (1995: 163). Seed’s argument is a claim for “differentiating” among European imperial powers: “Differentiation rather than homogenising Europe enables us to examine differences as well as similarities in the means of creating colonial authority over the New World” (1995: 3). However, in

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____________________________________________________ order to achieve this “differentiation” along the lines of today’s nations Seed generalises wildly about things such as the use of maps or, as will be seen in my next chapter, the rituals and ceremonies of possession. 8

Wroth notes: “[Ptolemy’s] maps were built upon the theory that the earth was a sphere, and that was a theory which demanded for the equilibrium of the sphere antipodal land masses in the south and west as counterweights to Europe and Asia of the north and east. This meant the existence of inaccessible lands and peoples unknown to the Scriptures. Such a condition formed an effective denial of the Master’s word that the Gospel would be preached throughout all the world and a negation of the doctrine that all men were the fruit of a single creation, fallen through Adam and in Christ made alive” (2001: 106).

9

This reproduction comes from the printed original exhibited at the Explorers’ Gallery of the National Maritime Museum. As it is very brightly coloured, it was first thought to be a manuscript. Only two further copies of this map are known (Cf. Shirley 1983: 28).

10

Despite the Ophirian aspirations of Mendaña’s expedition and the use of the title Island of Solomon in relation to the object of the search prior to its departure, in none of the narratives does the name Islands of Solomon occur, either in relation to the object of the voyage or to the discoveries made. According to Jack-Hinton, the earliest use of the name Islands of Solomon after Mendaña’s return from the Western Pacific seems to have been in a despatch of the Licenciado Juan de Orosco in 1569 (1969: 7980). 11

Armando Cortesão believes this map, which showed the possibility of sailing round the southern tip of the American continent, to have been made by Pedro Reinel and his son, Jorge Reinel, c. 1519. This map, normally referred to as “Kuntsmann IV,” was kept at the Armeebibliothek in Munich and disappeared during World War II (1960: 38).

12

Cortesão’s research shows that there is no mention of Ribeiro among the detailed documentation related to this journey. Cortesão dates the earliest extant map attributed to Ribeiro in 1525 (1960: 96). 13 14

This map is preserved in the Biblioteca Reale, Turin. See Cortesão 1960: 89.

These cartographic sketches could be derived from originals executed during the voyage. Made in the style of contemporary isolari, Pigafetta’s maps complement his written description of how the ships of Magellan’s fleet sailed around the South American mainland for the first time, crossing the difficult strait that today bears Magellan’s own name. They then set foot on some South Pacific islands, including the Marianas, which they called Los Ladrones (“Robbers”) and, after much hardship, finally reached the Philippines, where Magellan was killed. For clear summaries of the events in Magellan’s journey, see Spate 1979: 34-51 and Beaglehole 1966: 15-38. For a study of the relevance of the maps and narratives of this journey, see my “Maps, Traffic and Representation.” (2001c).

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____________________________________________________ 15

The Casa was founded in 1503 by the Reyes Católicos, Isabel and Ferdinand, with the purpose of accumulating and standardising the knowledge acquired by the new discoveries.

16

Boorstin dedicates a chapter of his book to what he calls “The Reign of Secrecy,” which was practised with more or less success by all empires or aspiring powers, including, at this time, Portugal, Spain and England (Cf. 1983: 267-71).

17

Turnbull further comments: “What was to count as knowledge was as much a political and moral problem as an epistemological one, but it was also a problem that required the implementation of social, literary and technical practices of representation” (1996: 12). 18

Previous to the creation of the Casa, as Boorstin notes, “The Spanish […] kept their official charts in a lockbox secured with two locks and two keys, one held by the pilot-major […] the other by the cosmographer major” (1983: 268).

19

As Lawrence Wroth observes, “a lightly traced silver line […] indicates Magellan’s track around the world, a thin line joining ocean to ocean and continent to continent, demonstrating graphically the new comprehension of the world brought about by that earliest circumnavigation” (2001: 154). 20

The map is known from its presence in the Paris edition of the Novus Orbis of Simon Grynaeus (1532). Finé’s trajectory is traced and interpreted in detail in Conley1996: 88-134. 21

Skelton notes this to be the first use of Terra Australis: "In the Antarctic the southern continent, already figured by Schöner in 1515 and Francisco Monachus in 1529 [...] is extended by Finé to the tropic. Its geography is adapted to the results of Magellan’s voyage [...] and the continent is here first named Terra Australis" (1958: 320). Shirley observes that this is one of the first uses of Magellan's name for the sea known as Mar del Sur and Pacific Ocean: "Much of the right-hand (or southern) cordum is taken up

with the new Terra Australis [...] Beyond the tip of South America is marked the Mare magellanicum, one of the first uses of the navigator's name in such a context" (1983: 73). It had also been used previously on Schöner’s planiglobe. 22

Mercator follows closely not only Finé’s features but also his double cordiform projection, and shows his acquaintance with Magellan's discoveries by naming the Pacific Mare Magellanicum. Mercator's legend also records the absence of further information about the continent as follows: “Terra hic esse certum est sed quantas quibus limitibus finitas incertum” (That land lies here is certain, but its size and extent are unknown). Cf. Nebenzahl 1990: 98. Schilder observes that Mercator's “southern continent has substantially the same shape as Finé's, but it is smaller. On Mercator's globe of 1541 the southern continent is for the first time given the status of a fifth continent [...] On his famous world map of 1560 [...] Mercator called the Terra Australis the fifth and largest, but as yet unexplored continent” (1976: 15).

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____________________________________________________ 23

The earliest appearance of the strait is on the “Ramusio” map of 1534. According to Wroth, “On the so-called “Ramusio” map of 1534, designed to illustrate a compilation of narratives by Peter Martyr and Oviedo published in Venice in the year named, the strait is clearly drawn and alongside it are the words “Stretto De Magallanes, probably the earliest appearance of that designation upon a printed map” (2001: 146). “Ramusio” derived his knowledge from Ribeiro. 24

To borrow Schilder's words: "Sebastian Münster was yet another cartographer who managed without a southern continent. This group formed a minority in most countries of Europe, except Spain and Portugal where as a rule map-makers conscientiously put only on their maps that of which they had reliable information" (1976: 15).

25 Schilder offers an account of this journey in “The Dutch Discovery of the Fifth Continent” (1976: 43-53). 26

This popular belief is summed up also in publications addressed to the general public, such as Badger’s book, where he writes: “The next move took them into the Pacific, and there is evidence, ably summarised by K. G. McIntyre in The Secret Discovery of Australia, that they discovered Australia and sailed along the east coast. The Dauphin Map, commissioned by King Francis I of France and now in the British Museum, appears to show the north and east coasts of Australia. Another map, prepared in 1541 - a quarter-century after Portugal seized Timor - gives a recognisable outline of Australia apart from the south coast. The Portuguese tried to keep their discoveries secret, to discourage interlopers, but someone may have given information to the French cartographers. It seems possible that Cristovão de Mendonça surveyed the east coast of Australia in 1522, long before the Dutch sighted the west coast in 1606” (1996: 29).

27

William Richardson has surveyed the topic thoroughly and illustrated the unsoundness of the Portuguese hypothesis with ample evidence. Likewise, claims of a Spanish discovery have been put to rest by Richardson’s thorough research. See especially “Enigmatic Charts” (1998), “Jave-la-Grande” (1982), “A Critique 1” (1995a), and “A Critique 2” (1995b). 28 Helen Wallis’ study is worth quoting at length, since she is very much alone among scholars in her endorsement of the possibility of a Portuguese discovery of Australia: “As historical evidence of the maritime discoveries of their day, these charts have been a subject of discussion and controversy since the later years of the eighteenth century. They display not only French but Portuguese discoveries for a period from which few Portuguese charts survive [...] Most notable of the features peculiar to Dieppe hydrography is the large land-mass called by Rotz ‘the londe of Java’, and by later hydrographers ‘Java-la-Grande’. Lying south of the East Indies, it appears to represent a western displacement of the Australian continent. Whether ‘Java-laGrande’ records the Portuguese discovery of Australia has been debated for many years. If it does, then it was a very secret discovery, since the land does not appear on Portuguese charts, and Portuguese chronicles give only a hint of certain voyages which might have reached Australian shores” (1981: 38-39).

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____________________________________________________ 29

Skelton notes the influence of Marco Polo on Mercator's map: “On Mercator’s world chart of 1569, the promontory of the Southern Continent to the south of New Guinea (‘Iaua major’) bears names transferred from Marco Polo’s geography of south-east Asia. The legend describing ‘Beach’ is taken from Polo’s account of Locac (Indo-China), “a wild region whither few travellers go.” Mercator’s ‘Lucach’ and ‘Beach’ both derive from Locac by copyists’ corruptions: Locac—Loeach— Boeach—Beach. ‘Maletur’ is Polo’s Malaiur (Malaya); his Java Minor was Sumatra and is here displaced by a further misinterpretation” (1958: 21). 30

According to Jack-Hinton: “The first definite example of cartographical knowledge of the archipelago outside Spain is to be found in two maps by Abraham Ortelius dated 1587, the world-map Typus Orbis Terrarum in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1590, and his Americae sive Novi Orbis Nova Description” (1969: 91).

31

Copies of Prado’s maps were made in 1808 and sold to the British Museum in 1848. They were unidentified until George Barwick recognised them around eighty years after they were made (Stevens 1930: 76-77). 32

Kelly affirms that this derrotero was “probably derived” from Hernando Gallego’s sea-chart (1965: iv)

33

For example the South Sea Wagoner of William Hack (1685) has a “Demonstration of the Gulf of Vallona” (Fol 49), which is supposedly copied from other contemporary Spanish “demonstrations”.

34 Cortesão attests to the fact that: “[t]here is no lack of evidence that in his day Quirós enjoyed a high reputation as a pilot and navigator and that he was also active as a cartographer” (1960: 12). Gil also corroborates this information (c.1989: 113). 35

Spate notes that: “He [Mendaña] had instructed Quirós to prepare a chart showing only the Peruvian coast and two points in 7º and 12ºS, 1500 leagues from Lima: these showed where the Isles of Solomon would be found: all else was omitted lest one of the captains should be tempted to go discovering on his own account” (1979: 128). 36 Using the sand to draw cartographic representations is also corroborated by further Pacific explorers, such as Cook. 37

Cameron continues: “Next day the Captain went to the village, and in order to corroborate what Tumai had said, he assembled the natives on the beach. Holding a paper in his hand, with the compass before him, he began asking them many times respecting the lands to seaward; and all gave the same information. Other persons that same day put the same questions to other natives elsewhere in the island, always with the same result. So it appeared certain to us that the natives were truthful” (1966: 167). 38

For example, the map of Herman Moll (London, 1688) does not have the Solomons. See the reproduction in Shirley 1983: 543. 39 This premise brings to the fore what Karl Marx described as the fantastic objectification of commodities, where the relationships of production are all but

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____________________________________________________ silenced. As Clifford interprets it, “[t]he objective world is given, not produced, and thus historical relations of power in the work of acquisition are occulted.” (1993: 61). 40

Edgerton suggests: “Many learned churchmen … believed that knowledge of geometric systematisation would somehow restore Christian unity and make it possible to regain the Holy Land” (1987: 14). 41

This idea is best embodied in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in our days taken to be a sort of trademark for renaissance humanism.

42

J. A. Welu discusses the use of vanitas on Dutch maps, suggesting that: “the Dutch led the way in mapmaking during the seventeenth century, [and] they also, at the same time, popularised vanitas imagery in cartographic material” (1977: 100). I have examined this topic in relation to women and the land in “That map which deep impression bears.” 43

The whole map is only 90 mm but is very precisely engraved.

44

Hondius also celebrates Drake’s “famous voyage” in a broadside map of 1595, where he marks the route of Drake’s circumnavigation. This map was in all likelihood copied directly or indirectly from one that Drake gave Queen Elizabeth with his diary and which hung at the palace of Whitehall. Unfortunately, it was lost in the Whitehall fire. For a description of this and other maps used by Drake, see Wallis (1984). 45

Gillies observes that: “The phrase ‘the endes of the earth’ (this time from Matthew 12) also appears in the Indian Ocean at the outlet of the Red Sea” (1994: 174).

46 According to Shirley, “Seven or eight copies of another foolscap world map are known, based on but quite different from Jean de Gourmont’s earlier foolscap world map [...] The geographical details follow Ortelius’ latest plate, and thus indicate a date post-1587 […] There is an allusive reference to the foolscap map in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy” (1983: 189). 47

To quote Shirley again, “There is some uncertainty over the origin of this woodcut map of the world which is framed in the face of a jester’s head. The small oval map is derived from Ortelius’ world map of 1570: around it and as part of the jester’s dress are allusive epigrams in French reciting the vanities of this world. Across the fool’s shoulders is the dour motto Nul eureux qu’apres la mort” (1983: 157). 48

Peter Barber identifies “the Christian Knight” with King Henri IV of France and argues cogently for an allegorical reading of the map as a celebration of Henri’s defeat over the dark forces of Catholicism (2001: 59).

49

Van der Krogt reminds us that: “‘Theatre’ designated an encyclopaedic collection of pictures of the world. ‘Theatrum orbis terrarum, theatre of the world, is a metaphor for the surroundings in which life unrolls, just like a play unrolls in the theatre … ‘Theatre’ as a metaphor for the world was used as early as 1561 in the title of a morality work, viz. Le Theatre du Monde … (Paris, 1561) by Pierre Boaistuau [translated into English around 1566]… However, it is unclear whether Ortelius knew

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____________________________________________________ about these works … Another possibility is that he drew from classical sources” (1998: 64). 50

In his initial address to the “courteous Reader” Ortelius explains the Ptolemaic relationship between history and geography, where geography is portrayed as “the eye of history,” as follows: “This so necessary a knowledge of Geography, as many worthy and learned men have testified may very easily be learn’d out of Geographical Chartes or Mappes. And when we have acquainted our selues somewhat with the use of these Tables or Mappes, or haue attained thereby to some reasonable knowledge of Geography, whatsoeuer we shall read, these Chartes being placed, as it were certaine glasses before our eyes, with the longer be kept in memory, and make the deeper impression in us. […] [T]he reading of Histories doeth both seeme to be much more pleasant, and in deed so it is, when the Mappe being layed before our eyes, we may behold things done, or places where they were done, as if they were at this time present and in doing.” On the notion of Geography as the eye of History, see also Conley 1996:170-71. 51

Van der Krogt adds: “[T]he texts (just like the maps) provide an informative picture of the transition period from old to new geography” (1998: 69).

52

On the relationship between word and image in city views, see my Practising Places, especially 45-66 2001a.

53

Whitfield believes this to be a medieval, encyclopaedic concept: “The idiom of that visual language is drawn from the aspirations of the society that created it: it is a secular language, a language consciously rooted in a largely mythical past, and a language of externals. It has no spiritual or religious dimension and the inner world is not represented. This graphic idiom revived the world map’s role as a visual encyclopedia, a concept familiar from the Middle Ages” (1994: 74).

54 Gillies’ work on Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference illustrates the relationship between geography, history and theatre, suggesting that: “Renaissance theatre and ‘cosmography’ are conceptually interrelated. The theatre was cosmographic and, to an extent, geographic, in its conceptual character [...] Cosmography, for its part, was ‘theatrical,’ in the sense that ‘theatre’ is an important enabling metaphor” (1994: 35). 55 To quote Gillies again: “The world was a theatre in the sense of its delusiveness and emptiness [...] For its part, the theatre was a world in the sense of the microcosm’s epitomisation of the macrocosm” (1994:76). 56

The association of these islands with Chryse and Argyre, as well as Polo's "mysterious islands" and Ptolemy's Golden Khersonese, is noted by Spate, who writes: “Ptolemy’s Golden Khersonese was an obvious candidate; so were the mysterious islands of Veach and Locach and Maletur [...] some Portuguese thought that Ophir would be found in East Africa, in the hinterland of Sofala, where later romance would place ‘King Solomon’s Mines’: Magellan opted for the Lequeos, Columbus thought he had found it in Española [...] And in Peru [...] tales of Tupac Yupanqui’s Inca fleet with 20,000 men, which had found black people—and gold—in

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____________________________________________________ islands to the west; while across the Pacific in the Moluccas, Galvão had heard that in Chile Valdivia had news of an island king, beyond whom ‘were the Amazones, whose queene was called Guanomilla, that is to say, the golden heauen’, so that there must be great riches there, ‘and also at an Island called Solomon’” (1979: 119-20). 57

In the map of Asia there is the following explanation: “To these may be added the isles of Iapan, and new Guiniei very lately descried; but this last, whether it be an island, or adioyned to the South maine, it is not yet certainly knowen. The peaceable or the south sea, called by the Spaniards MAR DEL SVR: ..The isles of Salomon, which in this table you see described about Noua Guinea, were not long since discouered by Oliuer Mendanio, after he had conducted his fleet out of the part of Lima in Peru,& had sailed ouer this huge Ocean: as I find recorded in Iosephus Acosta his book & 17.chapter De natura novi orbis.”

58

In this, Mercator was continuing the scholastic tradition of knowledge, which paid homage to the authoritative figures of the past. As Shirley remarks: “In two legends, Mercator refers to the authority of Marco Polo, under his Venetian name M. Paul, for the existence of lands in this region. Also shown are the ‘Kingdom of Maletur’ and the ‘Region of parrots’” (1983: 89). Whitfield also comments on this as follows: “Mercator regarded himself as a cosmographer in the sense that he consciously presented traditional geographical thought and legend, alongside the recent discoveries of his contemporaries. This explains the endless recurrence on sixteenthcentury maps of features such as the southern continent, because Ptolemy or Marco Polo had authorized it” (1994: 38).

59

According to Whitfield, “[t]he most celebrated enigma of the Ptolemaic map is the land linking South-East Asia with Africa. We have no knowledge of Ptolemy’s source for this idea; the land is completely featureless, and it may have been added as a purely theoretical balance to the lands north of the equator” (1994: 8) 60

Faussett is of the opinion that: “This overriding of scientific motives by ideological ones was carried forward by philosophy and theology. In the fourth century B.C. Plato exploited the tension between them by passing his imaginary society, Atlantis, on the notion of an antipodean continent. Aristotle discussed more soberly the questions of a ‘torrid’ or equatorial zone […] A Hellenistic cosmologist, Erasthones of Alexandria (240-196 B.C), affirmed that Africa was separate from the southern continent, but in the first century A.D. another Alexandrian, Claudius Ptolemy, still showed (in the first known atlas) an enclosed Indian Ocean analogous to the Mediterranean” (10-11). On this topic, see also the rest of Faussett’s description of the “Discovery of the Austral World” (1993: 10-27).

61

This was brought to my attention by the British Library’s remarkable exhibition held between July 2001 and April 2002 under the significant title “The Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps.” The maps are not reproduced in the exhibition’s catalogue, which was edited by Peter Barber and April Carlucci . 62

Whitfield rightly questions: “Is it fanciful to suggest that the great illustrated maps of the seventeenth century sought to restore the sense of man’s belonging in an

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____________________________________________________ interpreted world, the maps now taking a secularized form, in which European man was the undisputed master of his world?” (1994: 74).

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4. Performing the South Pacific The voyages led by Álvaro de Mendaña, Isabel Barreto and Pedro Fernández de Quirós have been associated repeatedly with “negative discovery” and with “futility,” as seen in the second chapter of this book. Notwithstanding their supposed futility, this book has shown how these journeys contributed to the production of the space we identify as the Pacific. This productive process involved the publication of the journeys and their interpretation, as well as the creation and use of maps. It also depended on the remarkable ritual processes involved in discovering and taking possession of the land that are the focus of this chapter. As we now know it, the Pacific is the result of the exploration, survey and description, both in verbal and visual form, of the lands (to be) encountered. However, as this chapter shows, the production of this area relied on the panoply of cultural acts performed by the explorers that were understood to legitimise conquest and possession. These rituals and ceremonies, I propose, are performative in every sense on the word. On the one hand, like the maps explored in the previous pages, they are theatrical and histrionic; while on the other they construct a geographical space by means of words and deeds. Ceremonies and rituals take the place of treaties and are understood by the coloniser as reifications of discovery and appropriation where a dialogue is established between European powers and within the people in each of them. As Stephen Greenblatt has suggested: “Ceremonies take the place of cultural contacts; rituals of possession stand in for negotiated contracts” (1991: 58).1 Needless to say, the natives participated in these ceremonies as observers excluded from decision-making processes.2 These contracts are drawn with the home audience in mind, both those present on the journey and the relevant authorities and officials in Spain that would legitimate the discoveries. The ceremonies performed in the Pacific can be classed as collective celebrations in Victor Turner’s understanding of the social connotations of the concept. According to Turner, various

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“properties,” or modes of staging and presentation are used as a way of locating the meaning of the event culturally: Celebrations […] are generally connected with expectable culturally shared events, such as life experiences […] work […] seasons of the year […] religious beliefs […] upward shifts in social status […] and shared community celebrations […] Some of these events are tied in with the individual life-cycle; others are located in the family, the neighborhood, the village, the city, or the nation […] Each kind of ritual, ceremony, or festival comes to be coupled with special types of attire, music, dance, food and drink, “properties,” modes of staging and presentation, physical and cultural environment, and, often, masks, body-painting, headgear, furniture, and shrines. (1982: 12)

The community addressed by these ceremonies is, as mentioned above, one able not just to admire or understand the rituals but also able to legitimise their intention. Like travel accounts, journals or maps, rituals and ceremonies are part of the intellectual apprehension and subsequent possession of newly found territories. For the explorers studied in this book and for their contemporaries, this complex affair involved not only discovery and its discursive and verbal representation in maps and reports, it also depended on a series of rituals that are to us unfamiliar and overly histrionic, but that were clearly understood by the performers and their intended audiences. Rituals and ceremonies took place from the departure of the ships to their arrival and the appropriation of the lands. Though Quirós was certainly the most theatrical of all discoverers, theatrical performance was part and parcel of the rituals followed by other Pacific explorers, including Magellan and Mendaña. The important role played by ceremonies of possession in early modern European expansion has been analysed in some detail by Patricia Seed. In her study of the ceremonies enacted by the five main colonising powers of the time (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English), Seed argues that: Colonial rule over the New World was initiated through largely ceremonial practices—planting crosses, standards, banners, and coats of arms—marching in processions, picking up dirt, measuring the stars, drawing maps, speaking certain words, or remaining silent. While military might effectively secured their power over the New

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World, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans also believed in their right to rule. And they created these rights for themselves by deploying symbolically significant words and gestures made sometimes preceding, sometimes following, sometimes simultaneously with military conquest. (1995: 2)

The ceremonies Seed studies include reading the (in)famous Requerimiento,3 felling trees, planting flags or crosses, building churches, singing psalms and the subsequent incorporation of the land in narratives, maps, charts and chorographic descriptions. These practices, which Seed segregates to differentiate between the five early modern colonial European powers, all converge in the early modern performance of the Pacific, especially as enacted by Quirós. One common ritual enacted repeatedly in our journeys was the performance of ritual mass and religious services before departing, on the ships and in the new lands discovered. Although the celebration of mass was very common its importance should not be disregarded, for not only does it corroborate the religious mentality of the explorers but also stresses the intricate relationship between statecraft, religion and colonisation during this time. For example, before departing, Magellan and the men of his fleet together attended a mass at the church of Santa Maria de la Victoria in Seville. This was also the occasion when the ritual oaths of obedience were sworn and the royal banner received, thus emphasising the association of patronage, authority and religion in voyages of exploration.4 Mass was also routinely celebrated on the ship along the way and upon arrival in various landing places. Quirós and Mendaña celebrated mass regularly on board and onshore as they did, for example, when in the Solomons, some dissatisfied soldiers tried to spur Mendaña to leave the island by creating trouble intentionally and killing some of the natives for no apparent reason. The scuffles did not prevent the celebration of daily mass in the church that was being built as a sign of colonisation and settlement. Beaglehole mentions that: “in the midst of these troubles a church was built, where every day a priest said mass” (1966: 73).5 This ritual performance of mass or religious services to emphasise issues of authority or to reify discovery and colonisation was not exclusive to the Catholic powers of Europe. For example, Drake is said to have held religious services twice a day while on board and to have sung religious hymns frequently.6

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Mass, as proposed, was part and parcel of ceremonies of possession and were often perceived as such not only by the people on board the ships, but also by the natives when they witnessed these performances. During Magellan’s voyage we have reference to a ceremonial mass having been “admired” by the natives of Brazil in what is today Rio de Janeiro. Afterwards, we are told, a ritual that closely associated religion with colonisation, the planting of a cross, took place. Like Magellan, other discoverers often planted crosses near the beach upon landing, as, for example, Quirós did on his second voyage in which, Gaspar González de Leza recalls, he planted a large amount of crosses on each one of the islands on which they landed. In fact, the ritual became so widespread that González de Leza says that just about everybody was planting a cross whenever they landed: “and in this same place [the cemetery] we all gathered and we hoisted a well-made cross very high, although there were many crosses we hoisted in this island, there was nobody among us who went on land who did not try to hoist his cross” (“y en este mismo lugar [el cementerio] nos ajuntamos todos, y arbolamos vna cruz muy alta, y bien echa, aunque fueron muchas las que arbolamos en esta isla, porque no auia ninguno de los nuestros que fuese á tierra que no procurase arbolar su cruz”) (Zaragoza 2000: 624). Crosses were therefore raised routinely upon arrival, as happened during Quirós’ second journey in 1606, and were often used as markers of possession by church and state, both associated in the Spanish ruler. For example, we are told in Quirós’ account that in island of San Marcos in the Solomons the raising of the cross signified the appropriation of the island in the name of the Spanish King: “The next day possession of the land was taken in the name of Your Majesty and a cross was raised on the hill” (“Tomóse el siguiente dia posesion de la tierra por S. M. y se levantó una cruz en un cerrillo”) (Zaragoza 2000: 100). The raising of crosses was so common that the indigenous population soon learnt to perform the ritual and even took part in it, as happened in the Solomons’ Ysabel. Quirós recounts how, one day, when the locals were helping them to build some houses, “the vicar went out towards them and many with him and he made a cross with two sticks and afterwards the Indians did the same thing and they went with it in procession to their village” (“salió el vicario á ellos, y muchos con él; é hizo de dos palos una cruz; y luego los indios

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hicieron lo mismo, y se fueron con ella á su pueblo en procesión”) (Zaragoza 2000: 174). The intricate relationship between religion and colonisation illustrated in the celebration of masses and the raising of crosses is also exemplified in the ritual singing of psalms, especially the Te Deum laudamus. We have many references to this psalm having been sung in, for example, Mendaña’s journey of 1567. Here, we are informed, when they saw the planet Venus, they thought it was a miracle and: “when they saw land sang the Te Deum laudamus … straightaway on landing raised a cross, before which the Franciscans chanted the Vexilla Regis” (Beaglehole 1966: 44-45).7 Similarly, in his next voyage, Mendaña, believing he had re-encountered the Solomons, ordered that the psalm be sung: “[T]he adelantado said to the vicar and to the chaplain that with everybody on their knees they should sing the Te Deum laudamus and to thank God for the favour of the land, which was performed with great devotion” (“Dijo el adelantado al vicario y capellan que con toda la gente de rodillas cantasen el Te deum laudamus, y que diesen gracias á Dios por la merced de la tierra; lo cual se hizo con gran devocion”) (Zaragoza 2000: 127-28).8 Also, in the Breve Relacion de Mendaña the writer recalls that they planted the cross and sang the Vexilla regis before uttering the words that legitimised the possession legally in the eyes of Spanish authorities: “After both ships had arrived, we went on land and we planted a very high cross that fray Francisco de Gálvez … took on his shoulders in the most comfortable place we found and after we had planted it we all prayed and the friars sung that hymn, the Vexilla regis prodeunt, and after I took possession of all that land in the name of Your Majesty” (“Después de auer surgido ámbas naos, saltamos en tierra y pusimos vna cruz alta, que fray Francisco de Gálvez [...] sacó á cuestas, en el lugar más commodo que hallamos, y después de auella plantado hiçimos todos oracion y los rreligiosos cantaron aquel himno, Vexilla regis prodeunt, y luego tomé la possession de toda aquella tierra en nombre de Vuestra Magestad”) (Austrialia II, 6-7). Religion was also an important factor in the redefinition of the landscape that accompanied the explorers’ arrival as seen in the mentioned raising of crosses, building churches and founding of cities. Mendaña, for example, built one church upon arriving in Santa Cruz (Ndeni) in 1595 to celebrate daily mass.9 The frequent building of

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churches and founding of cities exemplifies the belief in the intimate relationship between civilisation, Christianity and urbanisation of the time. For Quirós and his contemporaries, cities, with the church in the main, central square, were symbols of civilisation as well the economic and political centres where society was defined.10 This notion is clearly exemplified in Quirós’ founding of Nueva Jerusalem in today’s Santo (Vanuatu). The centre of the planned city was the square, where the church would stand out prominently, and the neighbouring river was given the biblical name of Jordan. Ritual naming was, likewise, part and parcel of the process of appropriation of new territories in which religion and statecraft intervened, as the names Santa Cruz and Solomons indicate. Religious motifs often offered a good choice of names, as happened in the Solomons, where Beaglehole relates that: “the new land they called Santa Ysabel, because they had sailed from Peru on the feast of that saint, and she had been their patron throughout the long voyage” (Beaglehole 1966: 44-45).11 Religious festivities were also important in the naming of the island Nombre de Jesús, as stated in the Breve Relacion de Mendaña: “I named it Nombre de Jesús, because we discovered it in the celebration of this festivity. It was discovered the fifteenth of January of the year 1568” (“púsele por nombre el Nombre de Jesús, porque la descubrimos cerca de la celebración desta fiesta. descubrióse á quinçe de henero del año de 1568” [Kelly 1965: 4]).12 For Annie Baert, the use of religion in naming cannot simply be attributed to lack of originality. Baert believes that, because one of the main objectives of the journeys was the evangelisation of the peoples encountered, this process was suitably inaugurated by giving the land a Christian name, thus facilitating its access into the Christian world.13 These “new” places would thus be Christianised and blessed by the name as well as the planting of crosses or the erection of churches.14 The baptizing zeal displayed by these Pacific explorers was, then, part of the rituals of appropriating newly discovered worlds. As in so many other aspects of discovery and exploration, Columbus had set a clear precedent about this when, on first arriving in San Salvador, he named the place after the Saviour while acknowledging that it had an indigenous name, Guanahaní. Upon arrival, Bartolomé de Las Casas mentions that: “On Friday [...] they arrived in an islet of the

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Lucayos that was named in the Indian language Guanahani” (“el día Viernes […] llegaron a una isleta de los Lucayos, que se llamaba en lengua de indios Guanahani” [1991: 29]). In relation to Columbus’ christening zeal, Stephen Greenblatt has noticed that: “naming […] has much to do with the manifestation of power through eponymous titles […] Moreover, the legal act of possession customarily involved naming, since crown lawyers ‘believed that no one could well lay claim to a nameless city and that a province without a name was hardly a province at all’” (1991: 82).15 This obsessive naming happened even when the newcomers might have known the name given by the indigenous people to the land. This is precisely the practice recalled by Juan de Iturbe in his Sumario breve of Quirós’ 1605 expedition in relation to the naming of Santa Cruz, which was called by the natives Ndeni. Iturbe mentions that, while in Taumaco, the natives “also gave information concerning the island of Santa Cruz which they [the Spaniards] sought. They call it Yndeni” (Zaragoza 2000: 284-85; Cf. Beaglehole 1966: 73). Homage to rulers and other authorities were also determining factors when choosing a name for the lands discovered, as demonstrated by the honorific title given to the Marquesas. The whole name given to this archipelago was Marquesas de Mendoza in order to celebrate Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis de Cañete, then Viceroy of Peru and a sponsor of the expedition. Another example is the naming of New Guinea as Magna Margarita. After losing sight of Quirós, Torres and Prado sailed along the coast of New Guinea and Prado writes that he named this large island La Magna Margarita in honour of his Queen: “In this island I took possession of all the country in the name of his Majesty the King our lord in the manner aforesaid; and to the great land I gave the name of the Magna Margarita because it was discovered in the time of Queen Margaret our lady” (qtd. Stevens 1930: 155).16 Kings and their representatives were also routinely acknowledged in the verbal and written declarations of discovery often performed by the relevant notary to signify the possession of the land. For example, in the narrative of Mendaña’s first voyage, Catoira recalls: “Afterwards the Lord General took possession of this island and land in the name of Your Majesty, without the objection of the natives” (“Luego el señor General tomo la posesion de la isla y tierra

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en nombre de Su Majestad, sin que los naturales le enpidiesen”) (Kelly 1965: 98).17 As is well known, the ways power and authority contributed to the “legal” claim to the land was inaugurated in the Americas with the reading of the Requerimiento. This famous document, which was used from Columbus onwards, fell from use after the 1570s, [to avoid repetition of ‘onwards’] when a shorter proclamation was read ceremoniously before a notary to indicate the King’s appropriation of the land. There is no mention whatsoever of having used the Requerimiento in any of the narratives of these voyages, not even in those related to Mendaña’s 1567 journey. Political power was, then, made present not only in the process of naming but also, and perhaps more importantly, it was reified in the ceremonial flag raising that was part of the ceremonies of arrival. These may be seen together in the description of the arrival in the Solomons’ Ysabel, which includes the ritual of hoisting the flag, accompanied by the ever-present Te Deum: “And the sailor reported land, and presently it was visible to us. And we hoisted a flag […] and everybody received the news with great joy and gratitude for the grace that God had vouchsafed to us through the intercession of the Virgin of Good Fortune, the Glorious Mother of God, whom we all worshipped, to whom we all prayed, singing the Te Deum laudamus” (Beaglehole 1966: 43-44). Another frequent ritual of appropriation performed in the new lands was felling trees, a practice that, though serving a practical purpose, also contributed to the appropriation and redesigning of the indigenous landscape. This, in many cases, symbolized the mighty power of the newcomers and rendered the indigenous population alien in their own land.18 In Mendaña’s voyage, Beaglehole recounts, Gallego led a party with this purpose: “Straight-way also a party under Gallego began to fell trees, with which, together with timbers they had brought with them, they might build a brigantine” (1966: 44-45). The rituals described so far also formed part of the ceremonies of possession performed by explorers from other European powers. For example, on the Southern tip of South America, the English navigator, Drake, took act of possession by prostrating himself on the land and setting up a monument. He also named the lands discovered

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in honour of his country and Queen and is quoted to have taken possession in the name of the Queen, by which the writer probably meant that words to that effect were pronounced. Helen Wallis describes the arrival south of Tierra del Fuego and in North America’s “Nueva Albion” and the rituals carried out: By showing Tierra del Fuego to be an archipelago and not part of the southern continent Terra Australis, he [Drake] pushed the continent to the south, revealing open sea beyond and a new passage to the Pacific […] The southernmost island of the group is “Insula Regina Elizabetha.” Here Drake with typical panache made an act of possession on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, prostrating himself at its southernmost point, as Sir Richard Hawkins recounted: “going ashore, [he] carried a Compasse with him, and seeking out the Southermost part of the Iland, cast himselfe downe upon the uttermost poynt groveling, and so reached out his bodie over it. Presently he imbarked, and then recounted unto his people, that he had beene upon the Southermost knowne land in the world, and more further to the Southwards upon it, then any of them, yea, or any man as yet knowne.” Fletcher reported that Drake set up a monument recording the event. (1981: 129)

The most complete representation of all rituals and ceremonies performed at this time is that which took place on Quirós’ second voyage in 1606. Upon landing in the island of Vanuatu, Quirós carried out all the rituals mentioned with a gusto that has become paradigmatic. First, Quirós named the “continent”, Austrialia del Espíritu Santo (Austrialia of the Holy Spirit), a multi-layered label coined to pay homage to the discovery of the Austral continent as well as to the Austrian dynasty of the Habsburg Kings in Spain, and to the Holy Spirit.19 After naming the land, Quirós performed various rituals of taking possession. For a start, he ordered that a wooden church be built and “founded” a city, rightly named New Jerusalem. The doors of New Jerusalem, Quirós thought, should be made of marble, like those of the Temple of Solomon.20 Next, Quirós set up a Knightly Order, which was given the same name as the land. The so-called Knights of the Holy Spirit had to bear an insignia also designed by Quirós: a blue silk cross of two different sizes indicating the “quality” of their bearers.21 A selfdeclared enemy of Quirós, Prado, ironises about this order in the following terms:

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[T]hen he summoned the rest and gave them robes down to the black drummer, that they might put them on their breasts at once, which they did with the obligation that they were to defend the Indians from their enemies and from the others who might wish to injure them, and other absurdities which I omit to avoid tiresomeness; I will only say this as it is serious, namely that he resolved to build on the side of the river a city to which the name of the New Jerusalem was to be given. (qtd. Stevens 1930: 123)22

In spite of Prado’s dismissive attitude towards Quirós’ use of clothing and his elaborate rituals, he indirectly bears witness to the importance of visual imagery in the creation of meaning. In other words, for Quirós and his contemporaries, clothing and rituals were symbols of a complex network of social beliefs, customs and aspirations that could be used as acts of persuasion or as forms of cultural interaction. These meanings may be complementary or contradictory, as the different attitudes of Prado and Quirós demonstrate, but they “[express] some deeper ordering of political and social relations” (Wilentz 1985: 1). The journal of one Franciscan priest from the expedition, Fray Martín de Munilla, also sees that Quirós overstates his case and describes the events on the island and their social connotations with as much irony as Prado and in much more detail: On this day, Saturday, at about nine in the morning, the General sent for the Father Commissary, Fray Martín de Munilla, chaplain and vicar of this royal armada, and spoke to him of how he had resolved and decided upon the creation of an Order, and to invest all those who had come on this discovery with a knightly robe and insignia. To this end […] he had made some crosses of blue silk, in varying sizes, for all those who came in the said fleet, whether white or black or Indians, and even one for the native brought from the island of Nuestra Señora de Loreto. He ordered that all should wear the insignia on their breast making them all Knights of the Holy Ghost, by which name they were to be called. These insignia or crosses differed […] some being larger than others […] They differed, too, in that the larger ones were worn in the middle of the breast, and the others to the sides. (215-16)

Munilla recalls that the Franciscan friars that were part of the expedition did not want to become knights or wear anything that might be considered worldly, according to the principles of their

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charter; they were concerned that “the wearing of knightly insignia over the habit bespoke worldly honour and vanity” (Munilla 217). After some discussion, they resolved to wear a wooden cross instead of the silk insignia. Quirós was not only displeased but became incensed at what he saw as lack of sensitivity and a misunderstanding of the religiosity of his enterprise. He said, according to Fray Munilla, “things that cannot be set down with ink on paper” (217). Following the creation of the Order, offices for the running of New Jerusalem were created and appointments made. Beaglehole explains how: [o]wing to the risk of attack from the natives, and for the advantage of ‘the royal authority, the better establishment of the work, the union of all their wills, and for other hidden reasons’, Quirós created a ‘ministry of war and marine’. Torres was made camp master, Bernal Cermeño, the captain of the launch, ‘Almirante’, and de Leza chief pilot” (1966: 93).

For Fray Munilla the process was certainly remarkable: Afterwards, as the General stood on the bank of a cool stream, he sent for certain men of standing and appointed them officials for the administration of justice and for government, such as alcaldes ordinarios, officials of the Hermandad, Regidores and other similar offices. It was a marvellous thing to see such a diversity of knights, for truly nothing like it has ever been seen since the world began, because here there were sailor-knights, grummet-knights, ship’s page-knights, mulatto-knights and negro-knights and Indian-knights and knights who were knight-knights. (222-23)

After the order had been created, flags were raised, the land kissed and Quirós came out with a cross, followed by the five barefooted Franciscan priests that accompanied the expedition. They knelt on the beach, sang the psalm Lignum and went in procession to the door of the church (Munilla 256-57). There, Quirós planted the cross and, according to Beaglehole, “knelt, saying, ‘to God alone be the honour and the glory’: then, bending down to the ground, he kissed it, and said, ‘O Land, sought for so long, intended to be found by many, and so desired by me!’” (Beaglehole1966: 94). Quirós asked the notary (escribano) to read the documents he had prepared to legitimate the possession of the land, among which no mention of the

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Requerimiento appears. These “chapters” spelled out the identity of the five dignities in whose name Quirós saw himself to be acting: the Holy Trinity, the Catholic Church, St Francis and his order, the Order of the Holy Spirit and, last but not least, His Majesty, the King of Spain. All the crew heard three masses and sang a fourth before the offices for the city, including majors, officials and treasurer, were filled and some slaves were freed (Munilla 257-62). Another interpreter of the events, Juan de Iturbe, is as ironic as Munilla in his representation of the events and, in relation to this latest gesture, the freeing of slaves, he points out that, grandiose though it sounded, it was only an empty action: “[O]n that day, he granted them their liberty, although they did not belong to him, and what is more they afterwards continued in the self-same state of slavery” (Austrialia del Espíritu 286). When the work for the church was completed on 20 May, the following day being the feast of Corpus Christi, a further procession took place at dawn. A soldier carrying the cross was followed by a priest with another, golden cross surrounded by two altar boys, monaguillos, with candles and then three groups marched in order with a flag in their midst. The sailors were clothed in red and green silk and carried bells on their shoes.23 Eight children dressed as Indians with garlands on their heads followed them. The captains walking around the royal banner held candles in their hands. One comisario carried a coffer with the Holy Sacrament and was surrounded by the incense being burned. They now all sang the Pangelingua and the bells tolled. Four masses followed and, after a siesta, there was music and dancing and good conversation (“buena conversación”) (Cf. Munilla 266-69). We can only guess what Pedro, the Taumaco “Indian” that was with them, thought, as he paraded dressed in taffeta. Nevertheless, the writer informs us that he showed his pleasure and admiration at the events (Munilla 268). These rituals are certainly nothing like the “theatre of improvisation” that Seed sees in “Spanish ceremonies,” when compared with the French. For Seed: “In contrast with the elaborate ballets enacting French possession, Spanish ceremonies were often a theatre of improvisation” (67).24 In fact, the rituals just described question the division set up by Seed, according to which she attributes ceremonials to the French, readings of the Requerimiento to the Spanish and the redefinition of the landscape to the English:

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Unlike the English belief that fixing stationary objects such as fences, houses, and gardens transparently conveyed rights of possession, or that the actions of ordinary agriculture could do so, Frenchmen appear to have entertained the notion that a different set of actions—processions, cross-planting, and staging theatrical performances—transparently conveyed possession. The reasons for the ceremonial character of French possession lay deep within the French political tradition and within the uniquely French meaning of the word ceremony. (1995: 48)

Indeed, in Quirós’ description we have references not only to ceremonies and processions having taken place, but also to the building of a church, the founding of a city and even the creation of a garden. As Beaglehole recounts: One day Quirós himself went ashore and sowed a quantity of maize and melon and vegetable seeds, to consolidate Spanish possession of the land […]The feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with great rejoicing—the church was newly adorned, triumphal arches erected, [and] a garden made with branches and herbs (Beaglehole 1966: 9596).

This, like the previous examples mentioned in this chapter, corroborates the fact that Quirós’ attitude was part of a tradition often enacted by his predecessors. The founding of cities and redefinition of the landscape is well attested to throughout the landing places on the American continent. Also, another instance of the relevance of city founding can be seen in the 1595 voyage. While in the Solomon’s Ysabel, Mendaña discussed with his soldiers a suitable site for the foundation of a village. Following the camp-master’s view, the soldiers started to clear the land they considered suitable for the settlement. In the QuirósBelmonte account we are told that: [T]he adelantado went ashore and called a meeting and because the single men were of the opinion of the camp-master, they took their axes, machetes and hoes without control and started to cut trees, that were of flat trunks, high and thick and with different leaves […] The soldiers cut the trees with great pleasure, they brought sticks with which they erected huts and the palms and branches with which they covered them.25

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The references to the different rituals being performed illustrate Greenblatt’s criticism of the claim to speak for “the European practice of representation.” As Greenblatt suggests, it is probable that differences between Protestants and Catholics, or within each of the various Christian creeds as well as the various Catholic orders, might be more important than today’s “national” divisions: There were profound differences among the national cultures and religious faiths of the various European voyagers, differences that decisively shaped both perceptions and representations […] Catholics and Protestants tended to ask different questions, notice different things, fashion different images [...] On crucially important matters—the significance of ritual and festivity, the process of conversion, the nature of gifts, the way Christians should deal with the false beliefs of others, and the authority that secured and legitimised interpretation―there had emerged, by the time of the second generation of European voyagers to the New World, highly visible divisions, divisions that not only marked the distinction between Catholic and Protestant but cut each of the groups into smaller fragments. (1991: 8)

The rituals performed were also aimed at redressing the unfamiliarity of the new environment not only by possession and domination but also by a type of negotiation with the powers at home. These rituals were performed at the border between what was familiar; that is to say, the customs of the metropolis and the unfamiliar of the exotic environment and peoples encountered, which were to be apprehended and appropriated. Most of these rituals took place on the ships or near the shore and their liminality exemplifies the fact that the voyagers came from a civilization that was far away, and they were also distant from the cultures of the places to which they had arrived.26 Similarly, the travellers forming part of these expeditions can be treated as marginal characters, much like castaways. In other words, these rituals ratify how these sailors can neither easily be classed simply as Europeans nor as Spaniards or Portuguese. After months and years of travelling, these people became a new sort of international being that carried with them customs and habits that did not belong either in their old or in their new environment but often incorporated both as well as their own practices on board the ships. They can be considered part of a diaspora, that is to say, migrants who, anticipating what would become an idiosyncratic trait of our

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modern times, both belonged and did not belong to the metropolis they came from and who certainly did not belong in the new land encountered.27 The rituals enacted witness how the zest to discover and invent the new world was as histrionic as the representation of the area in maps and narratives. These ceremonies not only tell us about what did or did not happen but also afford an insight into the system of values that informs the invention of the new world. Like the maps and narratives of Pacific exploration, the rituals performed contributed to conceptualising the Pacific as a geographical area of strategic, economic and symbolic importance. These visual and written representations are not only “colonialist” but also show the beliefs and fantasies that infuse the era. They thus demonstrate the impossibility of extricating the mental and symbolic production of a geographical and socio-political space, in one word, its performance, from what we now understand as its “real” existence. As Michel de Certeau puts it: “A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space is a practiced place” (1988b: 117). In sum, the Pacific, like other spaces we inhabit, is not something that is or has been always already there, but is created and invented, produced by means of what Certeau calls, “the practice of everyday life.” This “new” early modern construct, the Pacific, thus not only corroborates Henri Lefebvre’s claim that “(Social) space is a (social) product.” 28 It also proves that space is as much a social product as a social producer.

Notes 1

Greenblatt refers here to Columbus who, he says, “acts entirely with what Michel de Certeau calls ‘the scriptural operation’ of his own culture, an operation that leads him not simply to pronounce certain words or alternatively to write them down but rather to perform them orally in the presence of the fleet’s named and officially sanctioned recorder. Writing here fixes a set of events” (1991: 58). 2 Patricia Seed comments: “Subjects or citizens of each European power could perceive their enactments of authority overseas as legitimate because they were

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____________________________________________________ grounded in the familiar ideas of power and authority expressed in their own everyday language” (1995: 7). 3

On the Requerimiento’s use as justification of war and conquest, see Todorov 1987: 158-60. The legal scholar, Juan López Palacios Rubios, elaborated the Requerimiento in 1512 to standardise the various practices used at the time. It was widely used between 1512 and 1573 but does not seem to have been read thereafter and was certainly not used in the Pacific voyages studied in this book. 4

This event is recounted by Beaglehole as follows: “When preparations were almost finished a solemn service was held at the church of Santa Maria de la Victoria at Seville, at which Magellan received the royal standard and his captains and men took an oath of obedience to him” (1966: 22).

5

Beaglehole goes on to add: “Religious exercises […] seem to have been of minor effect: natives were shot and stabbed to death simply to provoke a war which would make it impossible to remain” (1966: 73). 6

As Kraus remarks, “At the services on board, held twice daily, psalms were sung and prayers were offered. Often these were led by Drake himself, although the expedition had its own chaplain” (1970: 19).

7

Catoira mentions having sung the Vexilla Regis on a further occasion (Kelly 1965: 97). 8 “On 21 July [1595] an island was sighted, Magdalena, or Fatuhiva and later others. Mendaña, for no very good reason, was immediately convinced that these were the Solomons, and with great joy ordered the Te Deum to be sung” (Beaglehole 1966: 6566). 9

See reference above to Beaglehole (1966: 73).

10 This is so much the case that, in our own days, Elizabeth Grosz observes, “[t]he city has become the defining term in constructing the image of the land and the landscape, as well as the point of reference, the centerpiece of a notion of economic/social/political/cultural exchange and a concept of a ‘natural ecosystem’” (1992: 242-43). 11

The island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons was named after the original village of one of the officers, Pedro de Ortega, who was also instrumental in the naming of Ramos (Malaita) and other islands. As stated in the Breve Relacion de Mendaña: “In the sortie he did much land was discovered, and the first that Pedro de Ortega discovered [...] was a very large island, to which he gave the name Isla de Ramos [...] In the morning he discovered another small island, which he named La Galera [...] and a further two islands close to this one, one of which is called Buena Vista and the other San Dimas and another one Isla de Flores” (“De la salida que hiço se descubrió mucha tierra y la primera que Pedro de Ortega descubrió [...] fue vna isla muy grande, á la cual puso nombre Isla de Ramos. [...] Por la mañana descubrió otra isla pequeña, que llamó La Galera [...] y otras dos islas junto á esta, que la vna se dice Buena Vista y otra San Dimas, y otra Isla de Flores” [Kelly 1965: 12]).

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____________________________________________________ 12

Likewise, the naming of Baxos de la Candelaria also acknowledges the coincidence of the onomastic of the Virgen of Candelaria: “I named it Baxos de la Candelaria because we discovered it on the eve of this festivity” (“Púsele nombre los Baxos de la Candelaria porque los descubrimos víspera desta fiesta” [Kelly 1965: 5]).

13

My translation of Baert’s words reads as follows: “One of the aims of these voyages was the Christianisation of the Oceanians. To put this into practice did not signify in any way indifference or misunderstanding of the indigenous names, which are always mentioned in their accounts, but it had the symbolic value of taking the lands away from the devil’s enterprise and make them enter the Christian world” (“L’un des buts de ces voyages étant l’évangélisation des Océaniens, sa mise en pratique signifiait en aucune façon indifference ou mépris pour leurs noms indigenes, qui sont d’ailleurs relev’es dans les récits, mais avait pour valeur symbolique d’ôter ces terres à l’emprise du diable, et de les faire entrer dans le monde chrétien”) (94). 14

For further examples, see Baert (c1999: 96n.55).

15

Tzvetan Todorov has studied naming in relation to the conquest of America, where it soon became an inherent feature of colonisation. In relation to Columbus, Todorov observes the religious and monarchic motivation of the names given to the Caribbean islands discovered and notes that, although Columbus knows that the islands already have indigenous names, this does not deter him, because to name, for him, amounts to taking possession (“el dar nombre equivale a una toma de posesión”) (1987: 35). 16

The Spanish text is thus: “en esta isla tome posesión de toda la tierra en nonbre de su magestad del rey nuestro señor por la horden atrás dicha. y a la tierra grande le puse nonbre [...] la magna margarita por averse descubierto en tiempo de la reyna doña margarita nuestra señora” (qtd. Stevens 1930: 154). 17

Later on in the narrative Catoira also uses the same words to describe the possession in the name of the king: “Don Hernando took possession in His Majesty’s name” (“Don Hernando tomo la posesion en nombre de Su Magestad”) (Austrialia Franciscana II, 133). 18

I have studied the part played by the redefinition of the landscape in the conquest of Ireland in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in “Methinks I see an evil lurk unspied.”

19

Kelly translates the words transcribed by Fray Munilla as follows: “I take possession of all these parts of the South as far as the Pole in the name of John of God and of all the professed brethren of his Order … Finally, I take possession of this bay named San Felipe y Santiago and of its Port of Vera Cruz, and of the site where the city of Nueva Jerusalen is to be created … and of all the lands which I have sighted and which lie before my gaze and of all these parts of the South as far as the Pole, which henceforwards are to be called the Austral Region of the Holy Ghost” (1966: 220-22). 20

The rivers nearby were named Jordan and Salvador.

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____________________________________________________ 21

Oscar Pinochet mentions that Quirós might have had in mind the Order of the Holy Spirit founded by Henri II of France in 1578 (Quirós 87). On the semiotics of the ceremonies of power of French monarchs, see Giesey, who describes in details Henri II’s entry into Paris in 1549 (Wilentz 1985: 52-53).

22

The Spanish original reads: “después llamo a los demas y les dio abitos asta el negro a tanbor que luego se los pusiesen en el pecho como lo hiçieron con oblicaçion que avian de defender a los indios de sus enemigos y a los demas que les quisiesen hazer agravio y otras impertinencias que las dejo por no cançar, solamente dire esta por ser solemne y es que determinava edificar a la orilla del rio una ciudad a la qual avia de poner por nonbre la nueva Jerusalén” (Stevens 1930: 122). This follows the symbolism of Revelation 21, where “a new heaven and a new earth” are promised for “the holy city, the new Jerusalem.” 23

Seed affirms that the use of ceremonial clothes was an idiosyncratic feature of the French rituals (1995: 49). The use of clothes and related paraphernalia as signs of power in seventeenth century France has been studied by Louis Marin. In relation to the absolutist power of the Sun-King, Louis XIV, Marin affirms: “The clothes, the lace, the ribbons, the wig and its curls are not an addition, supplement, ornament or decoration of the body. It is the body that is multiplied, the organic ‘instrument’ that, passing into the architecture of the signs that cover it, acquires through it an ordered, instituted, and legitimated plurality, a power” (1988: 27-28). 24 Seed classes ceremonials, such as those enacted by Quirós, as “distinctly” and “uniquely French” (1995: 49). However, the examples she uses to illustrate this claim are all from seventeenth-century voyages, whereas those used to illustrate the “Spanish” and “Portuguese” styles belong to the earlier part of the sixteenth century. In fact, the ceremonies and rituals of Quirós precede those itemised by Seed as “French.” This questions the validity of her division along national lines and her disregard of chronological sequencing and other contextual issues that effectively blur the differences. 25 I have translated the following description: “Salió á esto el adelantado á tierra é hizo junta; y porque los solteros fueron del parecer del máese de campo, incontinente se sacaron hachas, machetes y azadones, empezando á cortar árboles que los habia de lisos troncos, altos y coposos y en hojas diferentes ... Con mucho gusto los soldados cortaban árboles, traian palos, con que armaban chozas, y las palmas y ramos con que las cubrian” (Zaragoza 2000: 165). 26 Certeau eloquently analyses the symbolism of the ship in the early modern colonial encounter in his description of Jan van der Straet’s (or Stradanus) famous engraving of Amerigo Vespucci. In this setting, Certeau affirms that: “Amerigo Vespucci the voyager arrives from the sea. A crusader standing erect, his body in armor, he bears the European weapons of meaning. Behind him are the vessels that will bring back to the European West the spoils of a paradise. Before him is the Indian ‘America,’ a nude woman reclining in her hammock, an unnamed presence of difference […] An inaugural scene: after a moment of stupor, on this threshold dotted with colonnades of trees, the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history.

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____________________________________________________ From her he will make a historied body […] She will be ‘Latin’ America” (1988a: xxv). 27

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the paradigmatic figure of the castaway in the Americas. Cabeza de Vaca spent eight years among various Indian tribes in the American Southwest and became a sort of local priest. At the end of this period, he was not recognised as “Spanish” by those who met with him. 28

As Lefebvre puts it: “(Social) space is a (social) product.[...] [I]n addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power [...] The social and political (state) forces which engendered this space now seek, but fail, to master it completely” (1991: 26).

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5. Conclusion: Inventing, Performing and Practising: The Production of the Early Modern Pacific The world we know—the only world we know—is in the final analysis dependent on how we see it. (Kaiser and Wood 2001: 109)

Seeking sponsorship to “discover the South Seas” Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa wrote a petition to King Philip II from Cuzco on 4 March 1572. In this letter, Sarmiento de Gamboa offered his services using the following terms: I offer myself to serve [your Majesty] and discover that South Sea […] I am looking forward to working in this enterprise of discoveries” (“yo me ofrezco de servir [a vuestra Majestad] y descubrir este Mar del Sur [...] estoy esperando en que trabajar en este negocio de descubrimientos (Kelly1971: 25; italics added).

Sarmiento’s plea not only associates the interesting concepts of “to serve,” “to discover,” and “to work” but also highlights the important role that was played by the different ways of practising “the enterprise of discovery” (“negocio de descubrimientos”). Service to the king is linked to labour and to discovery, and these are represented discursively before, during and after they are performed. As seen throughout this book, the colonial enterprise relied necessarily on the establishment of widely accepted criteria of economic and ethical values, and was contingent on verbal, visual and ceremonial representation.1 The establishment of hegemonic ways of apprehending the unknown world is, therefore, contingent on its presentation and its practice. Using this perspective, this study has traced various stages of the production of the Pacific, one of which is the imagining of the area in the minds of early modern explorers and cartographers. Equally important, I have observed, is the invention and performance of that spatial domain in narratives and maps as well

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as its reification in the rituals and ceremonies that accompany discovery and possession. These performances rely on an audience “back home” in order gain legitimacy. The final outcome is a spatial production that comes from the acceptance, diffusion and practice of “the Pacific.” In other words, the spatial production of the Pacific depended on the internalisation and use by Europeans of the social, geographical, ethnographic and political coordinates of the place. In order to be made into a space, this place, the Pacific, has to be, as Certeau puts it, “practiced.”2 This last stage cannot be understood unless common criteria are adopted and this can be seen in the spread and acceptance of narratives, maps and rituals by other European powers, which thus effectively transform a local into a “universal” process. The notion that space is not a given but is, instead, produced has been cogently argued by Henri Lefebvre in his influential The Production of Space. Lefebvre proposes that from the early modern period onwards a common code for understanding space developed in Western Europe that was increasingly accepted as the norm by Western cultures. In other words, for Lefebvre, as for the present writer, there is nothing in history or in society, which does not have to be achieved and produced. As Lefebvre puts it, “the relations of production” need to be included in “the production of space”: If space is produced, if there is a productive process, then we are dealing with history […] The history of space, of its production qua ‘reality’, and of its forms and representations, is not to be confused either with the causal chain of ‘historical’ (i.e. dated) events, or with a sequence, whether teleological or not, of customs and laws, ideals and ideology, and socio-economic structures or institutions (superstructures). But we may be sure that the forces of production (nature, labour and the organization of labour, technology and knowledge) and, naturally, the relations of production play a part— though we have not yet defined it—in the production of space. (1991: 46)

This book has illustrated how the various representations of the sixteenth-century Pacific became inalienable parts of the process of the geographic construction of the area. These representations depended on the labour forces that made travelling or producing maps possible and are, therefore, always dependent on the economic conditions of their particular time and place. From this point of view, explorers and mapmakers can be seen as productive forces that

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contributed to the incorporation of the Pacific into the known world. At the time these explorations took place, as Fernand Braudel’s study has shown, the economic developments in fifteenth-century Europe enabled the social organisation and ideological changes necessary for the exploration and conquest of the new worlds. Braudel observes: “Of all the economies, [Europe’s] was the most imbued with monetary techniques utilizing both hard cash and other media of exchange.” Thus, by the time expansion started to gather momentum, Europe had “established herself at the center of a vast but weak world economy” (1954: 260). As with the rituals studied in the previous chapters, the enterprise of discovery can also be said to be pan-European in its economic and labour dimensions.3 Discovery and exploration, I suggest, are intimately woven in the creation and maintenance of the type of mercantile relationships that developed in the colonial context. Michel Foucault’s explanation of the relationship between mercantilism and representation as systems of exchange is illuminating in this context: Through the mercantilist experience, the domain of wealth was constituted in the same mode as that of representations [...] From one representation to another, there is no autonomous act of signification, but a simple and endless possibility of exchange. Whatever its economic determinations and consequences, mercantilism, when questioned at the level of the episteme, appears as the slow, long effort to bring reflection upon prices and money into alignment with the analysis of representations. (1973: 179-80)

The process of spatial creation, this book has suggested, is historical, and it is also local and located in time and in space. To see space as the result of a productive process enables us to understand that to discover, in the sixteenth-century understanding of the term, is to incorporate a world into a universe of meaning determined by European concepts. This is clearly seen by the production and use of maps and narratives of exploration, which attest to the spread of a cartographic imagination that would become increasingly uniform. Ricardo Padrón has argued thus: The cartographic revolution […] established one type of map as the hegemonic kind. It introduced something that the Middle Ages lacked, a cartographic idiom consciously asserted as a flexible means of mapping the surface of the earth at any scale, from the

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largest to the smallest. It was an idiom that had at its disposal crucial technologies of reproduction and dissemination that were not available before, as well as increasing institutional support from governments, universities, and the like. (2000: 42)4

According to these notions, this book has presented geography, history and society as cultural products that result from complex processes of production, involving, among other things, mental imagining, representation and social performance. This is important to observe because, from the point of view of discovery or trade, the three journeys studied in this book could be seen as a wanton waste of time, money and human resources. However, the journeys of Mendaña and Quirós not only contributed to the invention of the area in terms of myth and legend but they also brought to the attention of the world many islands and atolls of the Pacific, including a good section of the Solomons, the Marquesas, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as seen above, the Pacific appeared as the last oceanic space of a gradually shrinking universe to be discovered, mapped and appropriated, the ultimate “new” world waiting to be incorporated into the early modern colonial enterprise. For economic and historical reasons, alone among the world’s discoveries, the Pacific remained isolated, and its discovery had to be re-enacted nearly two hundred years later. Between the dates of the round-the-world voyage of Magellan and the “last invention” of Quirós, Pacific exploration provided a site for chimeras as well as accomplished dreams. The three journeys studied here can be said to have concluded with Quirós’ second and last journey of 1605-06, when his pilot, Luis Vaez de Torres, sighted the Australian continent for the first time. Quirós’ futile enterprise signals the end of the aspirations of Pacific exploration by Iberian sponsors, sailors and adventurers. As seen throughout this book, however, Quirós may well be seen as the inaugurator of the myth of a Pacific utopian world when he comments that he has “discovered” a terrestrial paradise: I have discovered a Terrestrial Paradise that I wish to populate with angels and saints, and with them, from there, finish the discovery and acquire true knowledge of what is the rest of all that world” ([T]engo descubierto un Paraíso terrenal que deseo poblar de

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Angeles y de santos, y con ellos desde allí acabar de descubrir y saber de cierto lo que es todo aquel resto del mundo [qtd. Pinochet 1989: 432).

To conclude, the idea of the Pacific as a geographical-cumpolitical space was produced from various ideas, voyages, myths and representations (visual and ritualistic) that were dependent on the social and economic environment in which they were conceived and developed. This “enterprise” of its discovery, I have suggested, is intimately linked not only with the notions of trade and colonisation but also with chimera, defeat, futility, and the idea of the world as a stage. This staging invented the Pacific by means of histrionic representation in maps and narratives as well as through the rituals associated with the legitimisation of conquest and possession. Thus, alongside maps, narratives and rituals, the senses of grandeur and futility of these “enterprises” were “productive” in that they ultimately contributed to the creation of the Pacific as we know it today.

Notes 1

Skelton observes that the knowledge gained during that expedition was even more important than the spices the Victoria carried back to Spain. In his own words: "Considered in the light of its influence on the course of history, the most precious cargo brought back in the Victoria was not the load of cloves in her hold but the information carried in the memories or notebooks of the eighteen European survivors" (1958: 6). 2

Certeau uses these words: “In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs” (1988b: 117). 3

Oskar Spate itemises the web of economic connections and the ideology that infused discovery as follows: “[N]either intellectual curiosity nor fervour to spread the Faith would have been likely to secure the necessary backing without the auri sacra fames, the cursed lust for gold which could compel the hearts of men not only to infamy but also to deeds of high courage. In an age when the amassing of a hoard of bullion” was among “the prime objects of statecraft”, any state able to do so was bound to further the discovery and exploitation of new sources of wealth, whether in the precious metals themselves or in commodities which commanded high prices, such as pepper and the other spices. This demanded capital and organisation on a scale not available in Portugal and Castile [...] For major exploitation, outside sources of capital

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____________________________________________________ increasingly became necessary: Genoese, Florentines, the great German houses such as the Fuggers and the Welsers, took their shares” (1979: 23-24). 44

Padrón is here contesting Walter Mignolo’s argument that the maps produced by the Casa de la Contratación, including that of López de Velasco’s reproduced in this book, “do not conceptualize the Indies so much as the coastlines hitherto unknown to western Europe” (1995: 286). By way of contrast, for Padrón, “[t]he early modern revolution in mapping and spatiality should be treated as an emergent trend located in a particular sector of the culture—a class of technical specialists—rather than as a widespread phenomenon involving the culture as a whole” (2002: 35).

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Index A Concent of Scripture. See Hugh Broughton Abreu, Antonio de, 32 Abyssinia, 47 Acapulco, 58 Acosta, José de, 24, 98 Adam, 92 Adventure, 42 Aegean, 26 Africa, 72, 98 Agnese, Battista, 75 Ahedo, Pedro de, 60 alcaldes ordinarios, 111 Alençon, Duke of, 62 Alexander VI, Pope, 71 Allen, Jim, 35 Allen, Oliver E., 37, 40 Almiranta, 35, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61, See Todos los Santos Amazones, 98 America, figure of, 118 Americas, 25, 27, 59, 71, 79, 83, 88, 108, 109, 117 South America, 16, 22, 84, 108 South American Pacific coast, 36 Amherst of Hackney, Lord, 34, 38 Amsterdam, 84 Anatomy of Melancholy. See Burton, Robert Anaximander of Miletus, 26 Antarctic Pole. See South Pole Antarctica, 41 Antipodeans, 26 Arabs, 83 Argyre. See Isles of Gold and Silver Arica. See Peru Aristotle, 98 Armeebibliothek, Munich, 92 Asia, 25, 26, 41, 72, 76, 77, 95, 98 Atlantis, 98 Audiencia (High Court), 47

Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 19 Australasia, 24 Australia, 18, 24, 25, 36, 40, 42, 60, 62, 65, 77, 94, 124 Austrialia del Espíritu Santo. See Vanuatu Badajoz, Congress of, 27, 77 Badger, Geoffrey, 61, 94 Baert, Annie, 106, 117 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 73 Barber, Peter, 96, 98 Barreto, Francisco, 47 Barreto, Isabel, 21, 22, 31, 32, 34, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56, 57, 65, 101 her brothers, 66 Barreto, Lorenzo, 50, 53 Barreto, Petronila de, 58 Barwick, George, 95 Batavia, 24 Baxos de la Candelaria, Island of, 117 Bay of Felipe and Santiago. See Vanuatu, Bay of St Philip and St James Bay of St Philip and St James. See Vanuatu Bayerische-Staatsbibliothek, 26 Beach. See Isles of Gold and Silver Beaglehole, J. C., 36, 63, 80, 92, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 116 Beatus of Liebana, 19, 26 Belmonte, Luis, 44, 113 Berger, John, 23, 70 Bible, 19, 20, 85 First Book of Kings (King James), 26 Genesis, Book of (King James), 25 Matthew, Book of (King James), 96 Psalm 72, 84 Revelation, Book of (King James), 118

136 Second Book of Chronicles, (King James), 27 Second Book of Paralipomemon (Septuagint), 27 Third Book of Kings (Vulgate), 26 Biblioteca Reale, Turin, 92 Big Bay, 41, See Vanuatu, Bay of St Philip and St James Bile Banara, 91 Black Sea, 26 Blaeu, Willem Jansz, 83 Boaistuau, Pierre, 96 Boorstin, Daniel, 32, 60, 74, 93 Bosch Barrett, Manuel, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 67 Bougainville, Louis de, 41, 60, 61, 64 Bouvet Island, 41 Bouvet, Lozier, 40, 41 Braudel, Fernand, 43, 123 Brazil, 71, 104 Breve Relacion de Mendaña, 105, 106, 116 Britain, 30 British Library, 26, 98 British Museum, 94, 95 Brosses, Charles de, 27 Broughton, Hugh, 84, 85 buccaneers, 24 Buena Vista, Island of, 116 Bull of Demarcation. See Inter caetera Burghley, Lord Treasurer of England, 62 Burney, James, 41, 64, 65 Burton, Robert. See Anatomy of Melancholy Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez, 119 Cabot, Sebastian, 20, 27, 74 Cadiz, 85 Callao. See Peru Calvo, Manuel, 42 Cameron, Ian, 38, 65, 73, 80 Camoens, Luis de, 47 Cañete, Marquis of, See Hurtado de Mendoza, García Cape of Good Hope, 40, 62 Cape Verde Islands, 71

Index Capitana, 50, 51, See Los Reyes Caribbean islands, 117 Caribbean Sea, 85 Carlucci, April, 98 Carr, Edward H., 31, 60 carrera de las Indias, 85 Casa da Mina, 74 Casa de la Contratación, 73, 74, 126 Castile, 47 Castro, Fernando de, 57, 66 Castro, Garcia de, 33 Castro, Mariana de, 51, 52, 66 Castro, Teresa de, 48 Castrovirreyna, 49 Cathay, 20, 27 Catholicism, 30 Catholic Church, 112 Catholic Europe, 30 Catholics, 83, 114 Catoira, 59, 107, 116, 117 Cavendish, John, 22 Cavendish, Thomas, 36 Cermeño, Pedro Bernal de, 35, 111 Certeau, Michel de, 23, 24, 28, 31, 60, 115, 118, 122, 125 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 73, 83 Chile, 60, 98 Christ, 92 Christendom, 26 Christian Knight. See Maps Christian Middle Ages, 18, 19 Chryse and Argyre. See Isles of Gold and Silver Cipango, 20, 27, 90 Clarke, John, 91 Classical era, 18 Clement VIII, Pope, 38 Clifford, James, 28, 96 Columbus, Christopher, 20, 27, 44, 63, 71, 72, 77, 97, 106, 107, 108, 115, 117 Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John, 19, 26, See Beatus of Liebana Congosto, 66 Conley, Tom, 24, 93 Consejo de Estado, 39, 80 Consejo de Indias, 38, 80

Index Constantinople, 72 Cook, Andrew, 60, 64, 65 Cook, James, 16, 17, 24, 36, 39, 41, 42, 62, 65, 81, 95 Corpus Christi, Feast of, 112, 113 Cortesão, Armando, 80, 92, 95 Corzo, Felipe, 51 Council of State, Spain, 39, 80 Council of the Indies, Spain, 38, 80 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, 28 Cresques, Abraham, 26 Cuzco, 121 Dalrymple, Alexander, 17, 21, 32, 35, 39, 40, 41, 61, 64, 65 Dampier, William, 32 Darien. See Panama de Morga, Antonio, 64 De natura novi orbis, 98 Delamarre, Catherine, 45, 46 Delisle, Guillaume, 61 Demarcacion y Diuision de las Indias, 77 Dening, Greg, 65 Desceliers, Pierre, 76 Descripcion, 59, See also "Indies" Descubrimientos en los Mares del Sur, 32 Desliens, Nicolas, 76 Dido, 55 Drake, Sir Francis, 22, 27, 36, 62, 63, 84, 96, 103, 108, 109, 116 During, Simon, 28 Duyfken, 77 East Africa, 97 East India Company British, 62 Dutch, 40, 63 French Compagnie des Indes Orientales, 25, 60 Easter Island, 17 Edgerton, Samuel, 83, 96 Eighth Memorial. See Quirós, Pedro Fernández de El Escorial, 48 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 62, 63, 96, 109 Eloth, 20

137 Endeavour, 41 Erasthones of Alexandria, 98 Española, Island of, 97 Espiritu Santo. See Vanuatu Estensen, Miriam, 25, 62 Estupián, Luis, 39 Ezionber, 20 Fabian, Johannes, 91 Far East, 20 Fatu Hiva. See Marquesas Islands, Magdalena Faussett, David, 26, 98 Fermosa (Taiwan), 90 Fernández Vázquez, Vicente, 66 Ferrando, Roberto, 57 Fiji, 24 Fijians, 63 Finé, Oronce, 75, 93 Foucault, Michel, 78, 123 Francis I, King of France, 94 Francis, Saint, 112 Franciscan Order, 34, 66, 105, 111, 112 Fuggers, the, 126 Gades. See Cadiz Galapagos Islands, 33 Galicia, 47 Gallego, Hernán, 34, 59, 61, 95, 108 Gálvez, Fray Francisco de, 105 Ganges, 19, 25 García de Castro, Lope, 47, 48 García de Toreno, Nuño, 73 Gastaldi, Giacomo, 75 Geertz, Clifford, 16 Gelolo, 20, 21 Gerritsz, Hessel, 40, 64 Gibraltar, 83 Giesey, Ralph E., 118 Gil, Juan, 63, 95 Gillies, John, 84, 88, 96, 97 God, 83, 84 Golden Khersonese. See Isles of Gold and Silver González de Leza, Gaspar, 65, 104, 111 Gospel, 92 Gourmont, Jean de, 85

Index

138 Graves, Robert, 46, 50, 55, 57, 66 Greece, 26 Greek, 25 Green, Roger, 35 Greenblatt, Stephen, 101, 107, 114, 115 Greenwich Observatory, 65 Grijalva, Hernando de, 33 Grosz, Elizabeth, 116 Grynaeus, Simon, 93 Guadalcanal. See Solomon Islands Guanahaní. See San Salvador Guanomilla. Queen of Amazones, 98 Gulliver, 32 Habsburgs Austrian Habsburgs, 35 Habsburg kings, 109 Hack, William, 95 Hahuachumbi and Ninachumbi, Islands of, 33 Hakluyt Society, 30, 34 Hakluyt, Richard, 20 Hall, Stuart, 91 Hamlet, 82 Hampden, John, 27 Hao, 41 Harkness collection, 66 Harley, Brian, 70, 91 Harrison, John, 65 Hawkins, Richard, 109 Hebdige, Dick, 91 Henri II, King of France, 118 Henri IV, King of France, 96 Hercules, Pillars of, 83 Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de, 59, 64 Historia de los Ingas del Perú, 33 Hessel Gerritsz. See Maps Hilder, Brett, 35 Hiram, 20 Histoire des Navigations Australes, 27 Historia de los Ingas del Perú. See Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de Holy Ghost, 86 Holy Land, 96 Holy Roman Emperor, 73 Holy Sacrament, 112 Holy Spirit, 109

Holy Trinity, 112 Hondius family, 90 Hondius, Jodocus, 83, 84, 85, 96 Honiara. See Solomon Islands Honiara Museum, 62 Hours, Book of, 56 Houyhnhmns, Land of, 32 Hurtado de Mendoza, García, 34, 48, 51, 60, 63, 107 Iapan, 98 Iberian expansions, 37 Iberian Peninsula, 83 Iberian-sponsored explorations, 22 In Somnium Scipionis. See Macrobius India, 25, 89 Indian Ocean, 26, 42, 96, 98 Indians, 104, 110, 112 Indies, 24, 25, 27, 94 East Indies, 72 Portuguese, 47 indigenous cultures, 30 indigenous peoples, 42 Indonesia, 37 Indus, 19 Insula Regina Elizabetha, 84, 109 Inter caetera, 71 Ireland, 117 Isabel and Ferdinand, King & Queen of Spain, 93 Isabel and Ferdinand, King and Queen of Spain, 72 Isidore of Seville, St, 19, 26 Isla de Flores, 116 Island of Solomon. See Isles of Gold and Silver Isles of Gold and Silver, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 34, 48, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98 Isles of Unwisdom. See Robert Graves Isles of Unwisdom, The, 46, 55 Iturbe, Juan de, 61, 107, 112 Jack-Hinton, Colin, 38, 76, 92, 95 Jansz, Willem, 77 Japan, 90 Java, 18, 77 Java Minor. See Sumatra Java-la-Grande, 76, 94

Index Jefferson, Tony, 91 Jerome, St, 26 Jerusalem, 20, 27, 48, 83, 89 Jiménez de la Espada, Marcos, 33 John of God, 117 John of Mandeville, 20 Jordan, river, 106, 117 Keere, Peter van den, 83 Kelly, Celsus, 42, 45, 47, 61, 62, 63, 65, 79, 80, 95 King Solomon’s Mines, 97 Knights of the Holy Spirit, 109 Kondur, 18 Kraus. Hans P., 116 Krogt, Peter van der, 86, 87, 96, 97 La Concepción, Convent of, 59 La Conversion de San Pablo. See Hao La Coruña, 32 La Galera, Island of, 116 Labayen, Carlos de, 39 Lamb, Jonathan, 22, 30, 32, 37, 60, 62 Landín, Amancio, 32, 33, 60, 61 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 106 Le Maire, Jacob, 39, 40, 64, 77 Lefebvre, Henri, 15, 16, 24, 115, 119, 122 Leiva, Alonso de, 51 Lemos, Count of, 38 León, province of, 47 Lequeos Islands, 20, 90, 97 Lerma, Duke of, 38 Lessa, William, 27 Letters of Marque and Reprisal, 62 Levant Company, 62 Library of Congress, 66 Lima. See Peru Loaísa, García Jofre de, 32 Locach. See Isles of Gold and Silver London, 84 longitude, 42, 65 López de Velasco, Juan, 126 López Palacios Rubios, Juan, 116 Los Ladrones. See Marianas Islands Los Reyes, 33, 34 Louis XIV, King of France, 118 Lucayos, 107

139 Macrobius, Ambrosius, 19 Madrid, 36, 38, 79 Magdalena, Island of See Marquesas Islands, 116 Magellan, Ferdinand, 16, 17, 18, 20, 32, 41, 42, 60, 62, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 92, 93, 97, 102, 103, 104, 116, 124 Magellanic route, 32 Magellan, Strait of, 73, 75, 76, 92, 94 Magellanic exploration, 39 Magi, 26 Magna Margarita, 107 Malaiur. See Malaya Malaya, 32, 77, 89, 95 Maletur. See Isles of Gold and Silver Malope, 52, 53 Mandeville, John of, 26 Manicolo, 80 Manila. See Philippines Manila Galleon, 22 Manrique, Pedro Marino, 50, 51, 52, 53 mapmakers, 17, 18 Maps, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 39, 42, 43, 59, 61, 63 "Ramusio", 94 Agnese (1536), 75 America, 59 Americae sive Novi Orbis Nova Description, 95 Asia, 90 Australia 1541, 94 Beschryvinghe Van der Samoyeden Landt in Tartarien, 64 cartas de marear, 80 Catalan Atlas of 1375, 26 Christian Knight, 85 Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 87 Dauphin Map, 94 derroteros, 78 Desceliers, Pierre, 76 Diego Ribeiro, 73, 75, 78 Dieppe school, 76, 94 Dutch school, 83, 96 Epitome, 88 Finé's cordiform, 75 Fool's Cap Map, 85 Fra Mauro, 26

140 Francesco Rosselli, 72, 75 Francisco Monachus, 93 Giovanni Camocio, 75 Guillaume Delisle, 61 heart shaped world, 84 Hessel Gerritsz, 40 Hubert Jaillot, 64 Isolari, 73 Jean Rotz, 94 Kuntsmann IV, 92 López de Velasco, 59 manuscript maps, 26, 69, 77 mappamundi, 19, 21, 72 Maris Pacifici, 78, 90 Mercator, 77, 93 Nicolas Desliens, 76 Novus Orbis, 93 Ortelius’ atlas, 17, 25, 86, 90 Ortelius’ world, 59, 96 oval projection, 72 padrón general, 73, 74 Parergon, 88 Ptolemaic map, 98 Quirós' world map, 79 Robert Thorne, 20 Sanson world map, 64 Schöner's planiglobe, 93 Sebastian Münster, 94 Terra Australis, 17 Terrestrial Globe, 61 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 17, 25, 86, 88, 89, 90, 95 Typus Orbis Terrarum, 17, 25, 84, 85, 95 Venetian school world, 75 William Berry, 64 William Hack, 95 world, 23, 82 Mar del Sur, 93, See Pacific Ocean Mare Magellanicum, 93, See Pacific Ocean Marianas Islands, 92 Marin, Louis, 118 Mariñas, Governor of Philippines, 57 Markham, Sir Clements, 38, 40, 64 Marquesas Islands, 34, 51, 61, 107, 124, Magdalena, 51, 116, Nouka Hiva, 51,

Index San Bernardo, 52 Marquis of Cañete. See Hurtado de Mendoza, García Marx, Karl, 28, 95 masculinism, 30, 31 Mauro, Fra, 26 McIntyre, Kenneth, 40, 64, 77, 94 McKechnie, Paul, 25 Mediterranean Sea, 26, 98 Meinicke, 65 Mela. See Pomponius Mela Melanesia, 34 Melanesians, 43, 63, 65 Memorial Xa (Ya) he dicho, 41 Mendaña Fishing Society, 42 Mendaña, Álvaro de, 17, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49,50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 77, 79, 80, 83, 85, 91, 92, 95, 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 113, 116, 124 Mendonça, Cristovão de, 94 Mercator, Gerard, 25, 75, 77, 89, 93, 95, 98 Mercator, Rumold, 90 Mexico, 33, 58, 77 Middle Ages, 19, 26, 82, 83, 97, 123 Mignolo, Walter, 126 Mitchell, W. J. T., 23 Moabar, 20, 21 Moll, Herman, 95 Moluccan archipelago, 20, 24, 27, 33, 60, 71, 77, 98 Spice Islands, 20, 27, 60, 90 Molyneux, Emery, 61 Monachus, Francisco, 93 Monmonier, Mark, 71, 82 Monomotapa, 47 monsters, 26 Moran, Cardinal P. F., 40 More, Sir Thomas, 32, 60 Mundus, Peccatum Caro, Diabolus and Mors, 86 Munich, 26, 92 Munilla, Fray Martín de, 110, 111, 112, 117 Muñoz, Juan Bautista, 41, 62 Münster, Sebastian, 76, 94

Index Narborough, 22 National Maritime Museum, 92 Navigation, 29 Ndeni See Santa Cruz Archipelago, 105 Nebenzahl, Kenneth, 72 Netherlands, 84 New Britain, 61 New Guinea, 21, 32, 33, 61, 65, 95, 98, 107, Papua New Guinea, 124 New Holland, 32, See also Australia New Jerusalem, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118 New World, 102, 114 New Zealand, 17, 18, 24, 36, 42, 65 Noah, 25 Nombre de Jesús, Island of, 106 Non plus ultra, 83 Noort, Olivier van, 36 Northern Hemisphere, 18 Norton, John, 89 Nouka Hiva. See Marquesas Islands Nuestra Señora de Loreto, island of, 110 Nueva Albion, 109 Nueva España. See Mexico Nueva Jerusalem, 106 O’Gorman, Edmund, 27 Oceania, 60 oikumene, 19 Oliva, Hernán Pérez de, 27 Ophir. See Isles of Gold and Silver Order of the Holy Spirit, 112, 118 Orosco, Juan de, 92 Ortega, Pedro de, 33, 116 Ortelius, Abraham, 25, 59, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 97 Orwell, George, 15 Otago Museum, 62 Oviedo, 94 Pacific, 22 Pacific Ocean Mar del Sur, 73, 76 Mar Pacifico, 73 Mare Magellanicum, 73, 75, 76 South Sea, 73 Padrón, Ricardo, 123

141 Paita. See Peru Panama, 48, 73 Darien, 73 Papua. See New Guinea Papua New Guinea. See New Guinea Paris, 118 Parmenides, 26 Pedro the Taumako, 112 Peru, 16, 33, 36, 47, 48, 49, 51, 56, 66, 79, 97, 98, 106 Arica, 79 Callao, 21, 33, 34, 35, 61 City of Los Reyes, 60 Lima, 21, 47, 58, 95, 98 Paita, 79 Peter Martyr, 94 Philip II, King of Spain, 48, 85, 112, 121 Philip III, King of Spain, 38, 39, 58, 64 Philippines, 21, 32, 34, 47, 54, 56, 58, 61, 66, 71, 77, 92 Lequio, 90 Manila, 21, 34, 35, 45, 53, 56 Pigafetta, Antonio, 39, 73, 92 Pinochet, Oscar, 39, 118 Plato, 98 Pliny, 19, 26 Plus ultra, 83 Polo, Marco, 18, 25, 77, 89, 90, 95, 97, 98 Polynesians, 43, 65, 80 Pomponius Mela, 19, 26 Pope, the, 58 Prado y Tovar, Diego de, 27, 35, 44, 78, 107, 109, 110 Pratt, Mary, 91 printing press, 74 Protestants, 114 Ptolemy, Claudius, 26, 72, 87, 90, 92, 97, 98 Purchas, Samuel, 41, 64 Quechua, 33 Quir, de. See Pedro Fernández de Quirós Quirós, Pedro Fernández de, 17, 21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,

142 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 78, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 95, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 118, 124 Eighth Memorial, 30, 39, 40, 41 Historia, 44 Treatise of Navigation, 79 Rabasa, José, 28 Ramos, Isla de, 116 Red Sea, 20, 26, 96 Reformers, Christian, 83 Regidores, 111 Regio Lucach. See Isles of Gold and Silver Reinel, Pedro and Jorge, 92 Requerimiento, 103, 108, 112, 116 Resolution, 42 Reyes Católicos. See Isabel and Ferdinand, King & Queen of Spain Ribeiro, Diego, 73, 75, 78, 92, 94 Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata. See Isles of Gold and Silver Richardson, William, 40, 77, 94 Rio de Janeiro, 104 Roberts, Brian, 91 Rome, 79, 80 Roossingen, Jan Lodewycksz van, 77 Rosselli, Francesco, 72, 73, 75 Rotz, Jean, 94 Royal Society, 64 Ryukyu islands. See Lequeos Islands Saavedra Cerón, Álvaro de, 33 Sallard, Bertrand, 45, 46 Salvador, river, 117 Samoa, 24 Samoans, 63 San Bernardo. See Marquesas Islands San Cristobal. See Solomon Islands San Dimas, Island of, 116 San Felipe, 51 San Felipe y Santiago, Bay of, 117 San Jerónimo, 34, 51 San Pedrico, 35 San Pedro y San Pablo, 35 San Salvador, 106

Index Santa Catalina, 51 Santa Clara, Convent of, 58 Santa Cruz Archipelago, 21, 34, 35, 61, 105, 106, 107 Santa Isabel, 49, 51 Santa Maria de la Victoria, Church of, 103 Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro, 33, 37, 47, 60, 61, 121 Schilder, Günter, 24, 76, 93, 94 Schouten, Willem, 64, 77 Seed, Patricia, 91, 92, 102, 103, 112, 115, 118 Semiramis, 55 Seville, 73, 103 Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. See John Gillies Sheba, Queen of, 47, 48, 56 Ships Adventure, 42 Almiranta, 33, 35, 51, 52,53, 54 Capitana, 33, 50, 51 Duyfken, 77 Endeavour, 41 Los Reyes, 33 Los Tres Reyes, 35 Resolution, 42 San Felipe, 51 San Jerónimo, 34, 51 San Pedrico, 35 San Pedro y San Pablo, 35 Santa Catalina, 51 Santa Isabel, 49, 51 Todos los Santos, 33 Victoria, 73, 125 Shirley, Rodney, 40, 90, 96, 98 Sierra Leone, 73 Simancas, Palace of, 41, 62, 78 Sind. See Indus Skelton, R. A., 81, 93, 95, 125 Sofala, 97 Solinus, 26 Solomon, 89 Solomon Islands, 17, 21, 34, 35, 36, 41, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 58, 61, 62, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 95, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 116, 124 Guadalcanal, 34, 48, 116 Honiara, 42

Index Malaita, 116 Pamua, 35 San Cristobal, 34, 53 San Marcos, 104 Santa Ysabel, 34, 42, 48, 80, 104, 106, 108 Solomon, Island called. See Isles of Gold and Silver Solomon, King, 20, 27, 47, 48 Solomon, Temple of, 109 Sondur, 18 South Pole, 18, 117 South Sea. See Pacific Ocean Southern Continent, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 60, 65, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 98, 109 Antipodes, 24 Terra Australis, 15, 17, 19, 27, 29, 32, 33, 39, 75, 86, 93, 109 Southwest Passage, 20 Spanish Crown, 23, 80 Spanish Empire, 22 Spate, Oskar, 20, 27, 59, 76, 92, 95, 97, 125 Spice Islands. See Moluccan archipelago Spriggs, Matthew, 61, 65 Stallybrass, Peter, 59 Stevens, Henry, 40 Stradanus, see Straet, Jan van der, 118 Straet, Jan van der, 118 Strait of Anian, 27 Sumario breve, 107 Sumatra, 95 Tahiti, 24, 42 Taiwan, 90 Taming of the Shrew, 57 Tamu, 19, 25 Taproban, 20 Tarshish. See Isles of Gold and Silver Tartessus. See Cadiz Tasman, Abel, 17, 24, 64 Tasmania, 17, 24 Taumako, 61, 80, 107, 112 Te Deum laudamus, 51, 105, 108 Terra de Quirós. See Vanuatu

143 Terre Australe du Saint Esprit. See Vanuatu Terrestrial Paradise, 19 Theatre du Monde, Le, 96 Thevenot, 64 Thomson, Basil, 34, 36, 43, 61, 63 Thorne, Robert, 20, 21, 27 Tierra del Fuego, 41, 76, 77, 109 Todorov, Tzvetan, 116, 117 Todos los Santos, 33 Toledo, Francisco de, 48 Tooley, 39 Tordesillas, Treaty of, 71 Torquemada, J. de, 41, 64, 65 Torre, Hernando de la, 73 Torres Strait, 21, 27 Torres, Luis Vaez de, 21, 27, 35, 36, 41, 44, 59, 62, 64, 65, 77, 107, 111, 124 Torrid Zone, 19 Toscanelli, Pietro, 72 Treatise of Navigation. See Quirós Tropics, 18 True Cross, 38 Tuamotu Archipelago, 24, 124 Tumai, 80 Tupac Yupanqui, 97 Turin, 92 Turnbull, David, 74, 93 Turner, Victor, 101 Unfortunate Islands, 76 utopias, 60 Utopias More's Utopia, 32 Valentijn, 64 Valladolid, 78 vanitas, 23, 83, 96 Vanuatu, 17, 21, 40, 41, 86, 106, 109, 124 Austral Region of the Holy Ghost, 117 Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, 17, 35, 40, 41, 86, 109 Bay of St Philip and St James, 17, 65 Espiritu Santo, 17, 21, 35, 41, 42, 106

144 Terra de Quirós, 39 Terre Australe du Saint Esprit, 39 Vega, Lope de, 51, 66 Velasco, López de, 59, 77, 78 Venice, 72 Venus, 105 Vera Cruz, Port of, 117 Vespucci, Amerigo, 118 Vexilla Regis, 105 Victoria, 73, 125 Vinci, Leonardo da, 96 Virgin of Candelaria, 117 Vitruvian Man, 96 Voisin, Lancelot du, 24 Wallis, Helen, 27, 63, 94, 109

Index Welsers, the, 126 Welu, J. A., 96 White, Allon, 59 White, Hayden, 59 Whitehall, Palace of, 96 Whitfield, Peter, 25, 63, 69, 72, 75, 85, 86, 90, 97, 98 Woodward, David, 91 World as a stage, 23, 71 World War II, 92 World, partition of, 71 Wroth, Lawrence, 19, 30, 32, 59, 60, 61, 92, 93, 94 Zaragoza, Justo, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 67 Zenobia, 55