Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The survivors were eventually sent home on a returning Portuguese
ship.
The puzzle was not solved until 1565 Miguel Loópez de Legazpi,
sent out as first governor of the Philippines, despatched an expedi-
tion back to Mexico with Andreós de Urdaneta as pilot. Urdaneta was
then an Augustinian friar in his fifties but forty years before he had
travelled as Elcano's page on the ill-fated voyage which resulted in
the death of the first circumnavigator. Ever since then he had been
a student of ocean winds and currents. Now he put his knowledge
to good use. Taking advantage of the SW monsoons and the Japan
current, he guided his ship, the
San Pablo,
into the zone of the sum-
mer westerlies. In four months he crossed the ocean from Cebu to
Acapulco and brought the East within reach of Spain's waving com-
mercial tentacles. His successors never succeeded in wresting con-
trol of the spice trade from the Portuguese but they did establish
through the Philippines a mercantile system which was just as prof-
itable. It involved the exchange of Peruvian silver, for which there
was a great demand in China, for silk and porcelain; which comman-
ded high prices in Spain and the colonies.
By the last decades of the sixteenth century Spain was operat-
ing a truly phenomenal transoceanic commerce based on the export
of bullion from the Pacific ports of Peru and Mexico (New Spain).
Tens of millions of pesos left Callao and Acapulco annually; some
bound for Manila; the rest sent home to Seville via the isthmus. Nor
was the Spanish quest for new sources of precious metal abandoned.
The Incas had a legend about gold coming from 'islands in the west'.
Several expeditions were sent out in search of this new Eldorado.
In 1568 Alvaro de Mendafia claimed to have located it. He called his
newly discovered islands the Solomons, after the legendary wealthy
king. Twenty-seven years later he returned to found a colony. It was
a lamentable failure. No mines of gold or silver were discovered and
the local people, not without cause, became hostile. Then the So-
