Part I · Before the Voyage
Chapter 1
The Boy Who Came Home
Spain, the Spice Islands and Lisbon
Andrés de Urdaneta was a young Basque who sailed with García Jofre de Loaísa’s fleet to the Spice Islands in 1525, lived there for eight years and came home by way of Portugal. Thirty years later, as a friar, he would show Spain how to sail back across the Pacific.
24 July 1525
Three years after Magellan’s *Victoria* limped home with eighteen men, Spain sends a second fleet to the Spice Islands. Seven ships under García Jofre de Loaísa sail from A Coruña, on the north coast of Spain, on 24 July 1525. Their chief pilot is Juan Sebastián Elcano, the captain who brought the *Victoria* home.
Among the young men aboard is a Basque named Andrés de Urdaneta, still in his teens. He will write the best account of the voyage, and he will be one of the very few who come back.
It goes badly from the start. Storms scatter the fleet. It takes ten months to get through the Strait of Magellan, and only a few ships come out the other side. In the open Pacific, Loaísa dies in July 1526, and Elcano dies a few days after him.
1527–1535
The survivors reach the Moluccas, the Spice Islands, at the end of 1526, and find the Portuguese already there. For eight years Urdaneta lives among the islands of Tidore and Ternate. He fights the Portuguese, learns Malay, trades, and travels from island to island. He learns to handle a ship and to find his latitude from the sun.
In 1528 a ship arrives from the other direction: the *Florida*, sent from Mexico by Hernán Cortés under Álvaro de Saavedra. Only a few dozen of Loaísa’s men are still alive to meet it.
Then the *Florida* tries to sail home to Mexico, and fails. Saavedra tries again, and dies at sea. Magellan’s own *Trinidad* had tried in 1522 and been driven back by storms. Ships can cross the Pacific from east to west. Nobody yet knows how to get back.
June 1536
In the end the Spaniards make terms with the Portuguese, and Urdaneta goes home the long way: on a Portuguese ship around the south of Africa. He lands at Lisbon on 6 June 1536, where the Portuguese take his papers from him. In Valladolid, in February 1537, he writes his account of everything he has seen.
Then he crosses to New Spain, as the Spanish called Mexico, and serves the viceroy there, in war and in peace. In 1552 he gives it all up and becomes a friar of the Order of Saint Augustine in Mexico City.
He is done with the sea, he thinks. The king will think otherwise.