The three Spanish expeditions into the Pacific between 1567 and 1606 traveled west through uncharted waters as far as the Solomons and the New Hebrides— traversing about a third of the earth's circumference. In 1596 Quirds returned by ivay o/ the Philippines. In 1606 he went home by way of Mexico. ivhiJe Torres i ent on separately to the Philippines.
Lands. The currents were so strong that two men were needed at the helm, yet the water was so shallow that they could sometimes feel the ship scraping the bottom. Finally, in the third week of October, almost four months after leaving Espiritu Santo, they reached the western end of New Guinea, almost 1,500 miles from their first landfall.
Torres had sailed through the hitherto undiscovered and extremely difficult strait between New Guinea and the then-unknown land of Australia. Whether or not he actually sighted Australia, whose location and size make it the closest approximation in real geography to the fabled Terra Australis Incognita, is not recorded. Seven months later, after a passage through the Moluccas, he reached Manila. There he submitted a report on his voyage, but the Spaniards hid it away; they did not wish to publicize to the English and Dutch the existence of new paths. Not for another 150 years would it be known that Torres had been through the strait; in 1762 the British seized Manila from the Spaniards and, finding Torres’ report, affixed his name to the strait.
And long before then, the age of Spanish exploration in the Pacific had ended. That endeavor, beginning with Magellan's circumnavigation early in the 16th Century, had been capped by the work of two navigators who led Spanish ships to the farthest known reaches of the great ocean. Neither Quiros nor Torres had found Terra Australis Incognita. But they had broadened European knowledge in reporting the existence of hundreds of islands, with strange inhabitants and exotic ways of life.
Meanwhile, another people had taken up the quest; the Spaniards' former subjects in the newly independent Netherlands.
World History
