Sarmiento’s unfulfilled plans included building this fort facing the Strait of Magellan.
A decade after sailing with Alvaro de Mendaha in search of Terra Australis, Pedro Sarmiento conceived another plan to advance Spanish interests in the Pacific. He proposed that a colony be founded on the Strait of Magellan, giving Spain control of the vital passage. King Philip II agreed to back the venture—a decision he would regret.
Sarmiento sailed from Spain in September 1581 with a fleet of 23 vessels and 2,000 colonists. Uhthin a few days, five of the ships foundered in a storm. Plagues claimed scores of victims as the fleet crossed the Atlantic, and when the ships put in at Rio de Janeiro to refit, disease and desertions took an even greater toll. Then a gale foiled Sarmiento’s attempt to reach the strait in 1582. When he set out again late in 1583. the company had been reduced to five ships and 500 colonists.
The settlers—many of them, in their leader’s words, “frightened and prostrate of spirit”—landed on the barren Patagonian shore in February 1584. Calling the spot Nombre de Jesus, Sarmiento started the colonists planting crops and building earthen huts.
Meanwhile, one of the ships was sent west along the coast with supplies for a second settlement. Several days later, Sarmiento set out overland with 100 soldiers to meet the supply vessel. The march took three w'eeks; his men, with provisions for only eight days, nearly starved. No sooner did they reach the appointed site and begin constructing the colony—called Rey Don Felipe, after their King—than the harsh Patagonian winter sw'ept in. A tw’o-w’eek blizzard made it impossible even to forage for roots and shellfish.
Following his plan, Sarmiento left most of his party at Rey Don Felipeand sailed with 30 men back to Nombre de Jesus to see how the colonists there w’ere faring. As soon as he arrived off the settlement, a gale blew' his vessel out to sea—without, he recollected.
His “even being able to take leave of friends and comrades.” He sailed to Brazil and obtained new’ supplies, but was tw'ice shipw'recked trying to return to Patagonia. Finally, deciding that he must ask the King for reinforcements, he headed for Spain in 1586.
Near the Azores his ship w'as captured by English privateers, w'ho took him to the court of Queen Elizabeth. He discoursed w'ith Her Majesty in Latin—“in which tongue,” Sarmiento noted, “the Queen is very elegant.” Charmed—and possibly intending a peaceful gesture tow'ard Spain—she released him. But his troubles w'ere not over. While crossing France, he was clapped into prison by a nobleman W'ho hoped that the eminent explorer w’ould command a great ransom.
Four years later, Sarmiento managed to buy his freedom. By now’ his health w’as broken, yet he persisted in seeking help for his settlements from the King. His appeals went unansw'er-ed; in 1592 he accepted an appointment W'ith a Spanish fleet bound for the East Indies, and nothing is knowm of him thereafter.
He could not have helped the colonists: Most of them had perished even before he made his w’ay back to Spain. In 1587 the English privateer Thomas Cavendish had come upon the pitiful remnant of the first settlement as he passed through the strait. After three bitter winters, only 15 men and three w'omen had survived starvation, Indian attacks and disease.
Cavendish took aboard one survivor. When the others, fearful of the English, hesitated to join him, Cavendish left them to their miserable end.
A few' days later he landed at Rey Don Felipe. Finding only corpses scattered in hovels, he rechristened Sarmiento’s abortive stronghold w'ith a grimly suitable name: Port Famine.
The Spanish Empire had more urgent business at the moment than exploration. By now the other nations of Europe had scented the profits to be had in the New World and were poaching on the Spanish dominions. The French and the Dutch were founding trading posts on the fringes of the Caribbean. The English had learned that they could get rich faster through privateering, a legalized form of piracy by which the Crown discreetly supplied ships and armament to a series of daredevil adventurers—Richard Hawkins, Thomas Cavendish, Francis Drake—for a percentage of their haul. Drake’s capture of one Spanish galleon in 1579 brought the stupendous harvest of 13 chests of silver coin, 26 tons of silver bullion, 80 pounds of gold and uncounted jewels. Such depredations kept Spain preoccupied during the last quarter of the 16th Century.
Throughout that period, Mendaha’s obsession with the Pacific never flagged. Nor was he alone in his enthusiasm. In the waterfront taverns of Callao, mariners spun yarns about his voyage and carried them all over the world, expanding the stories in the telling. By the 1590s Mendaha’s long-neglected islands seemed to be endowed with extraordinary riches: It was said that his ships had brought back 40,000 pesos of gold, that the jungle rivers flowed with more, and that the islands abounded in clove, nutmeg, ginger, pearls—and a cure for gout. As the tales traveled back across the Atlantic, the islands came to resemble the legendary Land of Ophir to which King Solomon’s ships were said to have sailed in Biblical times. By association, European cartographers began to call the archipelago visited by Mendaha the Solomon Islands. Their location was vague, but to adventurers everywhere their very uncertainty had a compelling appeal. And the stories of their wealth finally helped reawaken the Spanish Crown’s interest in exploration. At long last, in 1595, Mendaha won approval for another expedition.
He was now 54 years old. The long delay and the frustrations of dealing with the Spanish bureaucracy had not helped his character. He was bereft of whatever human compassion he had once shown toward his subordinates and the islanders, and he was more indecisive than ever.
He enlisted as his second-in-command and chief pilot a Portuguese navigator named Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, a slim but muscular man with gray eyes and bronzed skin. Of humble origins, Quiros had gone to sea as a boy. When Portugal was united with Spain in 1580, he had automatically become a Spanish subject—and had found work piloting Spanish vessels in the New World. Now 30 years old, experienced, articulate and prudent, Quiros was competent and resourceful, but he had serious flaws that in the end would turn his life to tragedy. He was a mild-mannered man with little insight into human character. He was also a naive dreamer and expected others to share his own religious fervor, which was excessive even in that time of evangelical exuberance.
Mendaha was given four vessels for the expedition: a square-rigged flagship named the Son /erdnimo, another square-rigger called the Santo Isabel, and two large launches called the San Felipe and the Santa Catalina. Into these four ships was packed a motley assemblage of 378 prospective settlers—including a few women and children—whose mundane concerns and inexperience at sea made them hardly congenial to such an idealist as Quiros. The most troublesome of the lot was Men-
Dana’s willful wife, an imperious and selfish aristocrat namecLDona Isabel. With her came her sizable and arrogant family: three brothers with aspirations to grandeur but little talent for command, all of whom traveled with their own livestock and private stores of water, Peruvian wine and oil. Another trouble maker was the camp master, a brave but disagreeable old soldier named Pedro Merino Manrique. “He knew how to think much.” said Quirds. “but he could not be silent.”
Of the rest of the company, 280 were listed as “capable of bearing arms.” but this did not mean they were soldiers; many were vagrants rounded up from the streets of Lima and Callao. Three priests were aboard to see to the spiritual interests of the company and to proselytize the islanders. Crowded into pens on the decks were a number of pigs intended as meat for the general company, and a pack of guard dogs.
On June 16, 1595, the vessels departed from the Peruvian coast and headed southwest for lat. 8° S., on which the Solomons were correctly calculated to lie. On reaching that latitude, Mendaha intended to sail due west about 6,000 miles—the supposed distance to the Solomons that Gallego had calculated almost three decades earlier.
Expecting a novel adventure, the company was in high spirits during the early part of the trip. Five weeks of pleasant sailing brought them in sight of land. Mendaha, fully confident that events were going according to plan, announced that the peaks stretching across the horizon were those of the Solomon Islands and ordered the Te Deum to be sung. But on going ashore he realized his mistake at once; the inhabitants had much lighter skin and bore no resemblance to those encountered on his previous voyage. Mendaha decided the ships would stay only long enough to water and reprovision. He named the discovery the Marquesas Islands, in honor of the Marques de Mendoza, the current Viceroy of Lima.
The Marquesans, who proved to be friendly, had at least one behavior trait in common with the people of the Solomons; coming aboard the ships, they helped themselves to whatever they liked. But Mendaha’s present company was not amused. This time, instead of chasing the interlopers off with harmless shouts of “Afuera,” the Spaniards fired their harquebuses, wounding several Marquesans and killing seven or eight. That was only a start; in two and a half weeks’ time the soldiers killed another 200 people with equal heedlessness, drawing from Quirds the lamentation that such evil deeds “are not things to do, nor to praise, nor to allow.” Mendaha seems to have offered no reproach at all.
By August 5 the Spaniards had replenished their ships’ stores, and Mendaha ordered the expedition onward, assuring the company that the Solomons were right over the horizon. But days passed, then weeks, and the islands did not appear. In the darkness of a September night, one of the ships, with 180 people aboard, disappeared, never to be seen again. The soldiers and seamen on the three remaining vessels began to “murmur and talk,” Quirds recorded, some saying that the ships must have passed the Solomons without anyone realizing it. And increasingly they wailed that “No one knows where we are!”
In fact, the ships had strayed more than 2° south of their intended latitude and still had not sailed far enough west. Mendaha nonetheless remained optimistic. When the ships made another landfall on Septem-
Ber 7 and people paddled out in canoes, he confidently spoke to them in the tongue he recalled from his visit to the Solomons a quarter of a century before. But they did not understand a word he said.
Still, the island was large and attractive; its rising landscape reminded one of the Spaniards of the Andalusian hills of Spain. Mendaha decided after a few days of reconnoitering that it would do for a settlement and named it Santa Cruz. (The name would later be applied to the whole group of islands to which it belonged.) He thereupon ordered Merino, th§ camp master, and a detachment of soldiers to begin building houses at once. As the camp began to take shape, some of the colonists moved ashore, taking along the livestock and the dogs. The first European community in the South Pacific had been born.
The story of the Santa Cruz settlement is not a pleasant one. The indigenous people proved as baffling as those of the Solomons: after offering a friendly if guarded welcome, they turned surly and began shooting arrows into the ships’ rigging. The Spaniards drove them off
English marauders led by Thomas Cavendish sack Puna isiand off Peru and sJaughter its Indian inhabitants in 1587. Cavendish was ane of many English adventurers wha entered the Pacific to pillage known lands rather than discover new ones. His booty from this two-year voyage came to about ?125,000—nearly half the Crown’s annual revenue.
With harquebuses, killing a number and wounding many more. The same kind of incident would occur again and again in the days to come.
The Spaniards also had trouble among themselves. First Mendaha and the camp master. Merino, disagreed over a site for the settlement; after vacillating, Mendaha yielded to Merino’s choice. Then the soldiers detailed to do the building tired of their novel surroundings and began to grumble about how much they missed “the delights of Lima,” Quirds observed ruefully. Before long the Spaniards had real cause for anguish; an unknown fever descended on the company. The first victim was Mendaha himself, who took to his bed aboard the flagship Son Jeronimo.
Soon Doha Isabel divined that Merino was inciting the soldiers ashore to rise against Mendaha and her brothers, and she importuned her ailing husband to “kill him or have him killed.” Mendaha obligingly struggled from his sickbed and, taking four trusted companions, went ashore “to do justice on the camp master,” recorded Quiros. Merino came forth to meet them, and was stabbed by one of the party. “Oh gentlemen!” Merino cried out, “leave me time to confess”—and with that he fell dead. To avenge their fallen leader. Merino’s men attacked Mendaha’s party with swords and soon another soldier lay dead and several were wounded. Finally a shouted command from Mendaha brought the combat to a standstill, and he quickly ordered a Mass to be said, as if the invocation of the Almighty—the one authority nobody present questioned— would put an end to the matter. It did. The officiating friar delivered a sermon at the end of the Mass, urging the men to be quiet and give their obedience to Mendaha. They listened, and dispersed in peace.
By now the fever had become an epidemic and was claiming lives throughout the company every day. Two days after the brawl, Mendaha was so ill that he ordered an aide to draw up a will—which the commander was almost too weak to sign. He also summoned a friar to administer the last rites. As Mendaha prepared himself for his Maker, perhaps he found some solace in knowing that the colony he had dreamed of founding for a quarter of a century was at last a reality. By afternoon he was dead—and the colony was not to survive him for long.
According to his will, the widowed Doha Isabel became nominal governess of the expedition. The real leader, however, proved to be Quiros. He was not forceful enough to completely control the arrogant Doha Isabel but, in spite of his gentle demeanor, it was evident to all that he was better qualified to command than she was. It was to Quiros that the company began to turn for important decisions.
His first decree was to leave Santa Cruz “in the claws” of the devil. In the last month alone, 47 members of the expedition had died. Of the 280 men in the original company, only 15 were healthy; the rest were either dead or sick with the fever. Clearly the colony had no future. Quiros decided to make one last attempt to find the Solomons and then, if they missed the islands, to head for Manila, where help could be expected.
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