About Legazpi’s Log

Legazpi’s Log retells the voyage that began more than three hundred years of Spanish rule in the Philippines: Miguel López de Legazpi’s expedition from Mexico in 1564, the settlement of Cebu, the friar Andrés de Urdaneta’s discovery of the way back across the Pacific, and the founding of Spanish Manila in 1571.

The book follows them in 28 chapters, from the letters, logs and reports they sent home, read with an eye to the people of the islands, whose side the Spanish sources rarely tell. As you turn the pages, the fleet sails across a globe of the 1560s, with the North Pacific clouded until the San Pedro crosses it. Objects from the voyage are collected into your codex as you read.

Sources

The book retells the expedition’s own records: Legazpi’s relation of the voyage and his letters to the king, the instructions of the Audiencia of Mexico, the acts of possession written by the fleet’s notaries, the accounts of the chief pilot Esteban Rodríguez and of the pilot Rodrigo de Espinosa, who kept the San Pedro’s log on the way back, the relations of the voyage to Luzon in 1570 and of its conquest in 1572, and Guido de Lavezaris’s report after Legazpi’s death. Quotations follow the English translations in Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson’s The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, volumes 2 and 3 (1903).

Almost every source was written by a Spaniard, for Spanish readers, and Blair and Robertson’s own summaries carry the prejudices of 1903. The margins try to say what the records leave out: how the people of Guam, Cebu, Bohol and Manila Bay might have seen the strangers, and where the record is one-sided. Where sources disagree, as on who found the Santo Niño or where the blood compact was made, the book says so.

The map

The globe shows the world of the 1560s, with borders adapted from historical-basemaps by A. Ourednik (GPL-3.0) and coastlines from Natural Earth. The fleet’s tracks follow the latitudes and places in the pilots’ logs, but between those points they are drawn by hand, so read them as the route, not a record of every mile. The North Pacific, which no European ship had sailed before the San Pedro, stays clouded until she crosses it.

How it was made

Legazpi’s Log was made with the help of AI. The retelling was written with an AI model working from the published translations of the expedition’s records, and every quotation was checked against them. The 28 pictures in the codex were made with AI image generation, in the style of engravings.

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Legazpi’s Log is the third volume of Voyage Logs: history’s great voyages, retold from the journals of the people who sailed them.