Part II · Across the Pacific
Chapter 6
The Bearded Men’s Island
The Marshall Islands
On 9 January 1565, after fifty days at sea, Legazpi’s fleet reached a small inhabited island, probably Mejit in today’s Marshall Islands. The Spaniards called it Barbudos, after its bearded men, took possession of it, and sailed on past more atolls towards the Marianas.
9 January 1565
On 8 January a lookout on the *San Pablo* cries land. He is wrong. But the next day there it is: a low, small island, about four leagues around. The anchors cannot find bottom, so boats go ashore, with Urdaneta, Goiti, Juan de la Isla and Legazpi’s grandson Felipe de Salcedo among them.
Most of the people have fled. An old man stays, with his wife, and a young woman with her child. They show the strangers their houses and their food, and give them some. “The Indian was well built and the women good looking,” one Spaniard wrote. They had chickens, fish, coconuts and yams, and wore “garments made of palm-leaf mats, which are very thin and skilfully made.”
The chief pilot, Esteban Rodríguez, counted about a hundred people, “well built and with long beards,” so the island was named Barbudos, the bearded ones. The women kept little gardens. From certain roots, he wrote, they made “excellent bread, for I have tried it.”
Salcedo takes possession of the island for the king. When the boats leave, the islanders show “signs of regret.”
10–17 January 1565
For a week the fleet threads its way among islands. On the 10th it passes a larger island and many small ones ringed with reefs, which the Spaniards call Los Placeres, the Shoals. The same day comes an island so full of seabirds they call it the Isle of Birds. On the 12th they pass islands they call Las Hermanas, the Sisters. All seem empty.
On the 14th they pass islands that Urdaneta says are the Jardines, the Gardens, that Villalobos named twenty years before. The pilots laugh at him. By their reckoning the fleet is far beyond them.
On the 17th the officers meet to decide the course. They want to reach the Philippines well north of Mindanao, where Villalobos’s men starved. Urdaneta says that if they sail along the thirteenth degree of latitude, they will meet the Ladrones. They agree.