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Spain,
1921). In this series of essays Ortega
gives very little comfort to any party or alle-
giance within Spanish society. He blames the
divided and ineffectual “particularism” that
has kept Spain weak throughout its history
on the Visigoth's lack of dynamic leadership,
in contrast to that of their Germanic cousins,
the Franks. Without a feudal “spine” like
that which ultimately produced French
unity, Spain remained divided, taking more
than 700 years to expel its Muslim invaders
and never truly becoming a unified nation-
state. Anticipating his assertion in
La rebelión
de las masas,
Ortega concludes that because it
never developed an effective ruling elite,
Spain has remained a land of poor peasants
and rich peasants.
It is not surprising that those Spaniards
who search for a more “patriotic” side to
their greatest 20th-century philosopher
have hailed the
Meditaciones del Quijote
(
Med-
itations on Quixote,
1914) as his best work.
For Ortega y Gasset in this essay, Quixote is
an iconic figure, shaping and imposing his
own reality upon the mere objectivity of
the other characters, particularly the pro-
saic Sancho Panza. The self-directed subjec-
tivity of M
IGUEL
DE
C
ERVANTES
's hero, as
Ortega would assert in a later edition of this
essay, makes the Man of La Mancha a true
existential hero. For some critics this recog-
nition of Spain's contribution to the intel-
lectual history of the Western world is the
philosopher's most valuable perception.
navigators of the Renaissance between Spain
and Portugal in such a way as to grant most
of Asia to the king of Portugal. Spaniards
continued, however, to seek footholds in the
islands along the western shores of Asia.
Throughout the 16th century they sent
numerous expeditions from N
EW
S
PAIN
(M
EXICO
) to claim not only the P
HILIPPINE
I
SLANDS
but also a number of other archipel-
agoes in that region. They were stoutly
resisted by the Portuguese in the M
OLUCCAS
,
but in other parts of the area lying east of
those islands and south of the Philippines
they made discoveries and explored many
islands both by sea and land. Most of their
discoveries, including the Admiralty Islands
and parts of the Bismark Archipelago, were
of minor significance and not effectively
claimed. The most important Spanish discov-
ery in the region was what is usually consid-
ered the world's largest island. In 1545 the
Basque Ortiz de Retes, who had already
explored the southern Philippines and fought
the Portuguese in the Moluccas, attempted
to find a route back across the Pacific to New
Spain. He set foot upon the land that he
named
Nueva Guinea
(New Guinea). He chose
this name because the Melanesian inhabit-
ants were black skinned, resembling, to his
eye, the people of Guinea on the west coast
of Africa. Ortiz de Retes evidently made an
extensive investigation of the northern part
of the island. It may have been seen by oth-
ers before him, and it was certainly visited by
others afterward. He was, however, the effec-
tive discoverer and name giver to the island
presently known as Papua-New Guinea. His
exploring activities, like those of several other
Spanish expeditions that followed his, were
not productive of permanent settlements. By
the beginning of the 17th century dominance
in the region had passed to the Dutch.
Ortiz de Retes, Iñigo
(fl. ca. 1545)
Spanish explorer
The T
REATY
OF
T
ORDESILLAS
, concluded dur-
ing the reign of F
ERDINAND
V and I
SABELLA
I
and subsequently modified, divided the
world that was being explored by Iberian
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