Chapter III: Spanish and Portuguese Explorers lead the Way to the Pacific Ocean (2)

[39] They may have been the Standard-bearer Paradise Bird
(_Semioptera_), from the Island of Jilolo, which is fawn colour,
with blue and emerald gorget, and large waving plume feathers rising
up from the quills of the wings.

At last the ships were ready to go, in December, 1521. JUAN DEL CANO (or de Elcano, as it is sometimes written), an officer hitherto scarcely mentioned, had been elected captain of the _Victoria_, and the command of the _Trinidad_ had been given to Espinosa, replacing Carvalho, the pilot, who had behaved very badly in regard to the captured natives as well as towards the members of the expedition. [It was Carvalho who refused to stay and ransom poor Juan Serrano.] The _Victoria_ set sail on her way towards Timor and the Indian Ocean, when her cruise was suddenly stopped by the news that her consort the _Trinidad_ had suddenly developed a dangerous leak. They found the water rushing in as through a pipe, and pumping was useless. The kindly King of Tidore sent down divers, who remained more than half an hour under water, endeavouring to find the leak. Some of these even remained an hour under water (this no doubt was a great exaggeration), and, by wearing their long hair loose, attempted to find the leak by letting it be drawn by the suction of the water towards the place. But it was decided at last that the _Victoria_ should start for Spain and the _Trinidad_ remain behind for repairs.[40] The _Victoria_ therefore left with a crew of forty-seven Europeans and thirteen Malays, chiefly from Borneo.

[40] Fifty-three Spaniards remained behind in Tidore with the
_Trinidad_, but of these only five returned to Europe. These
five included the captain, Gomez Espinosa, already mentioned,
and a German gunner, Hans Warge. Many of the Spaniards died in
Tidore from various diseases or were killed in quarrels with the
natives. The _Trinidad_ attempted to sail for Spain back across the
Pacific Ocean, but pursued a northern route which took her to the
forty-second degree of north latitude, whence she was driven back
by storms to some island near New Guinea. Here she was found by the
Portuguese, who stripped and abandoned her, conveying the survivors
of her crew as prisoners to the Moluccas, where they were treated
with considerable harshness.

The _Victoria_ on her way to Timor passed the Shulla Islands (Xulla), and heard from their Malay pilots that the inhabitants were naked cannibals. In other islands there were pigmies (negritos); others, again, were more civilized, producing rice, pigs, goats, fowls, sugar cane, and a delicious food made of bananas, almonds, and honey, wrapped in leaves and smoke-dried, then cut into long pieces. Buru Island was noted (though they did not land there) as inhabited by Muhammadan Malays on the coast and cannibal savages in the interior; also the Banda Islands, producing mace and nutmeg. After leaving the vicinity of Buru the _Victoria_ encountered a fierce storm, which drove them to seek refuge in a harbour of a lofty island[41] which was inhabited by savage, bestial people, eating human flesh and going naked, except that their warriors wore armour made of buffalo hide and goatskins. They dressed their hair (like the New Zealanders) high up on the head, held in position by long reed pins, which they passed from one side to the other. Their beards were wrapped in leaves and thrust into small bamboo tubes. They were the ugliest people Pigafetta had seen, and were armed with bows and arrows of bamboo. Nevertheless they behaved in a friendly way to these Spaniards and sold them quantities of provisions, beeswax, and pepper.

[41] Called, by Pigafetta, Malina, probably the Island of Ombay.

On 26 January, 1522, the _Victoria_ reached the Island of Timor, where it laid in a great supply of buffaloes, pigs, and goats. The people, though going almost naked, wore many gold and brass armlets and ear-rings, and bamboo combs in their hair adorned with gold rings.

On 11 February, 1522, the _Victoria_ sailed away from Timor into the great Indian Ocean. She was only a little vessel of 85 tons, and she had to buffet her way amidst various storms and high waves across the southern Indian Ocean, as far as the forty-second degree of south latitude before she could beat up north and round the Cape of Good Hope. The sufferings on board were terrible, the ship leaked badly and the pumps were always going, the provision of buffalo meat had putrefied, as they had had no salt to preserve it. There was little other food than rice. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope it took them a further two months before they could land anywhere to obtain fresh provisions, and twenty-one men died of scurvy and starvation during this terrible period. At last, constrained by their despairing condition, they stopped off the Island of Sant Iago, in the Cape Verde archipelago, which for some time had been a settlement of the Portuguese. Here they sent a boat ashore for food, with a concocted story to deceive the Portuguese into believing that the _Victoria_ was a ship coming from Spanish America and driven out of her course by storms. But on its second voyage to the shore the boat, containing thirteen men, was detained, because, having no money, they offered cloves in payment of the things they purchased. Seeing from a distance that the men had been arrested, the captain of the _Victoria_ felt obliged to abandon them to their fate and hastily sailed away.

At last, on 8 September, 1522, the _Victoria_, having sailed into Spain up the Guadalquivir River, dropped anchor at the quay of Seville and discharged all her artillery in crazy joy at this return to the Motherland. On the following day all the survivors of this wonderful expedition--eighteen in number--went in shirts and barefooted, each man holding a candle, to visit the shrines of Santa Maria de la Victoria and of St. Mary of Antiquity in two different churches. As to the thirteen men left behind, they were not so ill treated after all by the Portuguese, but were ultimately dispatched to Seville, so that it may be said of the five ships which started with Magellan in 1519 to reach the Moluccas by way of the Pacific Ocean only one returned to Spain--the _Victoria_, the _Trinidad_ having been lost near the Spice Islands; while of the original 265 men (more or less) who left Spain in 1519 only 36 returned to Spain after circumnavigating the globe--18 in the _Victoria_, 13 in Portuguese ships from the Cape Verde Islands, and 5 survivors from the _Trinidad_ sent back by the Portuguese from Malaysia.

In spite of all these disasters, however, the cargo of cloves and spices brought back by the _Victoria_ sufficed, not only to pay the whole cost of the equipment of the original expedition of five ships, but left a profit of about £200 in value over and above.

This fact, as well as the information (no doubt much exaggerated) about the Philippines and Borneo and the gold to be met with in these islands, made a deep impression on the Court of Spain, and not many years elapsed before further attempts were made to reach Malaysia across the Pacific from Spanish America, the Spaniards being precluded by their agreement with Portugal from adopting the more convenient route round the Cape of Good Hope.

As already related, the Spaniards and Portuguese were out of their reckoning in regard to longitude when they supposed that any part of the Philippines or the Moluccas lay to the east of 130° of E. longitude, and consequently within the domain of Spain. They believed that the Moluccas did come within the Spanish sphere, while the Philippines were, by the same reckoning, Portuguese. After a good deal of wrangling the matter was settled in 1529. A considerable sum of money was paid by Portugal to Spain, the Spanish claim to the Spice Islands was withdrawn, and nothing was said about the Philippines. This archipelago, a few years afterwards, was tacitly recognized as within the Spanish sphere, which also included the lands afterwards to be styled New Guinea.

Borneo thus became part of the Portuguese "sphere of influence" (as it would now be called), though this large island had first been visited by Magellan in Spanish ships. The Portuguese attempted to enter into relations with the then powerful Muhammadan sultanate of North Borneo (Brunei), but (according to the Portuguese chronicler, Barros) their efforts came to nothing through a very curious mischance. Realizing that the Sultan of Brunei was a very powerful prince, a Muhammadan, and therefore much in touch, through Arab and Persian traders, with the civilized world, it was resolved to send him, by the embassy dispatched from Ternate to Brunei in 1528, a selection of really superior and costly presents. Amongst these was a large piece of tapestry illustrating in a most lifelike manner the marriage of Catherine of Aragon (afterwards the unhappy wife of Henry VIII) to Arthur, Prince of Wales--the first link, possibly, in the long history of the relations between the British and North Borneo. But the figures thus portrayed by the needles and wool of industrious Spanish women seemed to the superstitious Malay sultan a work of subtle magic. He believed them to be real persons sent to sleep by the spell of a magician, and that some night they would be released from their enchantment, come to life, and slay him as he slept. So the Portuguese envoy was dismissed, the presents declined, and no political relations entered into between North Borneo and the Portuguese. This was one reason, probably, why the Dutch, not having been preceded by the Portuguese, got no foothold in North Borneo, and therefore left this side of the island open to British administrative enterprise in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Spanish research in the Pacific was resumed five years after the return of Sebastian de Elcano in the _Victoria_ in the autumn of 1522. In 1528 two Spanish ships, intending to sail from Mexico to the Philippines, were blown out of their course in a storm and accidentally discovered the Hawaii Islands. They were wrecked there, and such of the crews as were saved from drowning--amongst them were several Spanish women--could not get away from Hawaii, and settled down there for the rest of their lives, marrying the people of the country, and no doubt leaving a strain of Castilian blood in the ruling classes of these cannibal islands.

Hawaii was, however, again visited by Spanish ships in the middle of the sixteenth century; and when, long afterwards, the archipelago was rediscovered by Captain Cook, the people were found to be practising several Spanish customs. The real fact is that Spain knew a good deal about the Oceanic islands in the sixteenth century, but out of jealous dread that her monopoly of the Pacific Ocean might be invaded by other European nations she kept this geographical knowledge, set forth in her charts and logbooks, hidden in her State archives, only to be revealed in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when there was no longer anything to conceal from the adventurous French and English.

In 1542 the Philippines were again visited by Spanish ships under the command of LOPEZ DE VILLALOBOS, who penetrated to the large northern island of Luzon. On his return to Mexico he named this archipelago after Philip, the heir to the Spanish throne. In 1564 an expedition under LOPEZ DE LEGASPI was dispatched from the west coast of Mexico to the Philippines for their conquest and their conversion to Christianity. Four ships conveyed 400 Spanish soldiers and a few friars or missionaries. Between 1565 and his death in 1572 Legaspi had actually achieved the wonderful feat of founding the city of Manila in the large island of Luzon, and making the Spanish power predominant over all this large archipelago. A number of the natives became converted to Christianity, and only the Sulu Islands and Palawan remained Muhammadan.

In 1579 a new portent appeared in the Far East. In the month of November there arrived at the Island of Ternate, from nowhere, as it seemed, an English ship, the _Golden Hinde_, commanded by FRANCIS DRAKE. This most remarkable English adventurer--then only thirty-four years old--had been purser to a ship trading to the north of Spain when he was only eighteen, and by the age of twenty-two had not only made a voyage to Guinea, but was commanding a ship as captain in an attack on the Spaniards off the coast of Mexico. In 1577 he had navigated the Straits of Magellan in the _Golden Hinde_ (originally the _Pelican_, which he renamed thus as a remembrance of the heraldic device of Sir Christopher Hatton and a mark of joy at having safely reached the Pacific Ocean), had sailed up the west coast of South America, attacking and plundering Spanish ships and towns "till his men were satiated with plunder"; and, failing to find another Magellan's Straits in North-west America to take him back to the Atlantic, had boldly sailed from the coast of New Albion (the modern State of Washington) aslant the Pacific Ocean and steered a straight course for the Moluccas.

The Portuguese, of course, were then predominant in the Spice Islands and elsewhere in Malaysia, and with them Drake had no quarrel. He therefore sailed on to Java (after nearly coming to grief by striking a rock off the coast of Celebes), and from Java made his way round the Cape of Good Hope to the Guinea coast, and thence to the Azores and England. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth on board the _Golden Hinde_ at Deptford, after the queen had partaken of a banquet on board the famous ship which had sailed round the world in two years and ten months.

His voyage was a splendid answer to the Spaniards, who believed themselves perfectly safe from interference in the waters of the "great Southern Ocean", and who forbade the rest of the world to trade with America and Australasia. Within eighteen years it was to be followed up by Dutch and British attacks, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, on the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly of intercourse with the East Indies and Malaysia. It is, however, only fair to mention that in the matter of commercial morality the British, French, and Dutch were no more enlightened than the Spaniards. Each sought in turn to make their oversea dependencies regions closed to the trade of other nations than themselves, and even to restrict the commerce of their Asiatic, African, and American colonies to privileged persons or companies.

* * * * *

The Spaniards who sailed to the Moluccas in the two remaining ships of Magellan's squadron had practically got into touch with Papuasia, with the lands of New Guinea and its surrounding islands; and had realized that in this direction there lay a new Negroland, a "New Guinea", in fact. Exactly when the New Guinea coast was reached from the west--whether by ALVARO DE SAAVEDRA the Spaniard in 1528, or in 1511 and 1526 by the Portuguese who had taken possession of the Moluccas--is not known; nor by whom this very appropriate name was first given. Probably it was named "Nueva Guinéa" in 1546 by a Spanish captain--ORTIZ DE RETEZ--who mapped a portion of its northern coast. The impression that this vast island--the biggest in the world--was first called "New Guinea" by Torres when he reached its southern shores in 1607 is incorrect; he, seemingly, was only recognizing a land already named thus for its great superficial resemblance to West Africa. But the Spaniards had heard rumours from the Malay sea captains of a vast land eastward of the Moluccas where there was gold in abundance, besides beautiful birds and curly-haired black people. They jumped to the fantastic conclusion that here lay, not only the Earthly Paradise, but also the Ophir from which Solomon had derived his gold. Mingled with these beliefs was the ever-growing conviction that in this direction must lie a great Southern Continent; and to search for this an expedition was dispatched in 1567 from Callao, the principal port of Peru, under the command of ALVARO DE MENDAÑA DE NEYRA, with the express purpose of discovering the great Antarctic continent and the "Islas de Salomon". Mendaña voyaged for eighty days across the Pacific, more or less through the equatorial belt, and thus discovered and named the Solomon Islands[42] to the east of New Guinea, believing that they might prove to be the Ophir from which Solomon had derived gold. His expedition surveyed the southern portion of the group, giving to three of the large islands the Spanish names, which they still bear, of San Cristoval, Guadalcanal, and Ysabel.

[42] The Solomon Islands are now divided politically between Germany
and Britain, Germany having annexed the large island of Bougainville
and the smaller Buka on the north, and Great Britain the remainder.
The islands are very mountainous and volcanic, and on the largest,
Bougainville, one mountain rises to an altitude of over 10,000
feet. In the British Island of Guadalcanal there is an altitude of
8000 feet. The climate is very wet and unhealthy, and vegetation is
luxurious, including magnificent forests of sandalwood, ebony, and
"lignum vitæ" (a kind of Myrtle--_Metrosideron_). The inhabitants
belong mainly to the Melanesian or Negroid stock, and are no doubt
closely related to the Papuans of New Guinea. In some of the
northern islands, such as Buka, the people often present a striking
resemblance in their features, skin colour, and close-growing,
woolly hair, to African Negroes. Some tribes in the islands,
however, are akin to the Polynesians, and have long, straight
hair. They were until quite recently the most ferocious cannibals
of any part of the globe. In more remote periods this archipelago
was connected with New Guinea, and thence derived the ancestors
of its present wild animals, which include numerous Bats of very
interesting types, some very large Rats the size of big rabbits, a
Cuscus or marsupial Phalanger, and a large Frog about 8 inches long,
besides some remarkable Parrots.

JUAN FERNANDEZ was a Spanish pilot who appears to have given some study to the Straits of Magellan. About 1572 he was venturing out some distance into the Pacific Ocean from the coast of South America, and thus discovered the two little islands which have ever since borne his name, and which proved for a time such an important harbourage and resting place for the Dutch and English navigators who flouted the prohibition of Spain to enter the great Southern Ocean. Fernandez conceived the idea that there must be some large extent of land in the southern half of the Pacific Ocean, and he may have sighted Easter Island, or some other Pacific archipelago, and have believed that it was an indication of the coast line of this Terra Australis.

Mendaña de Neyra, who had returned to the coast of Peru in 1570, was very anxious to organize at once another expedition to extend his discoveries. He was not enabled to do so until the year 1595, when he again started from the coast of Peru with a fleet and a number of Spaniards who were to colonize the Solomon Islands. On his way thither he discovered the Marquezas archipelago (which now belongs to France). Sailing along a course which was more or less that of the tenth degree of south latitude, his ship at last reached the little island of Santa Cruz, the northernmost of an archipelago which is now associated with the group of the New Hebrides. Here, for some reason, his expedition came to a stop, and he landed and attempted to establish a portion of his crew as settlers. But the climate, or some other cause of ill health, brought about the death of Mendaña and many of his companions. He had been accompanied on this cruise by his young wife, who played a heroic part in rescuing the remainder of the expedition. After Mendaña's death, one of his pilots, PEDRO FERNANDEZ DE QUIROS (a Portuguese), brought the remains of the Spanish fleet to Manila in the Philippines. Then in one vessel he boldly sailed back across the Pacific to Peru, and thence made his way to Madrid, where he revealed to the Spanish Government the stories gathered from Malays regarding the existence of a great Southern Continent. He obtained permission from the Court to search for this Terra Australis, and for this purpose returned to South America and started on his quest from Callao (Peru) in 1605. The Viceroy of Peru associated with him, practically as admiral in command of the expedition, LUIS VAEZ DE TORRES, as well as a second ship. Directing his voyage across the southern Tropics instead of the northern, de Quiros discovered a small island, which long afterwards was renamed Osnaburg by Cook. A few days afterwards he passed one or more islands of the Tahiti archipelago, which he named "Sagittaria", probably from the month (February, under the zodiacal sign of Sagittarius) in which they were discovered. Sailing on westwards he next reached the group of the New Hebrides. This he believed to be a portion of the coast of the Southern Continent, and he named its largest island[43] Australia del Espiritu Santo, or Australia of the Holy Ghost, this being the first time that the word Australia came into being. He did not pursue his investigations any farther, because his ship's crew mutinied and forced him to sail back again to Mexico.

[43] Sometimes known as Marina. The name as given by de Quiros seems
to have been spelt "Austrialia".

But his admiral, Luis Vaez de Torres, suddenly abandoned by the ship which had de Quiros on board, was less certain about the actual discovery of this continent, so in 1606-7 he pursued a westward course and thus passed through that strait which separates northern Australia from New Guinea, and thence sailed to the Philippines. He was consequently the discoverer of what is now the British province of Papua, and of the important Torres Straits.

For a long time the Spaniards kept these explorations as State secrets, for they were becoming very much alarmed at the progress in oversea exploration of the Dutch and English. The existence, therefore, of Torres Straits, separating the Australian Continent from the huge Island of New Guinea, remained practically unknown to the world of Europe until the voyages of Captain Cook, more than 150 years later. In fact, Cook, when he rediscovered and mapped the strait between North Australia and New Guinea, was not aware that he had been preceded in that direction by Torres. When, however, this fact was made clearly known through the archives of Spain, the name of the bold Spanish seaman was very appropriately (in 1796) given to a strait of water which is one of the most noteworthy passages from the Pacific to the Indian Oceans, and which may some day become of great importance in the world's history.