Chapter 3
The King’s Letter
Valladolid and Mexico City
In 1559 King Felipe II ordered the viceroy of New Spain to send ships west to the islands near the Moluccas, above all to find out whether ships could sail back to Mexico. He asked the friar Andrés de Urdaneta to go, and in 1561 the viceroy chose Miguel López de Legazpi to command.
24 September 1559
Felipe, the prince the islands were named after, is now King Felipe II, ruler of Spain and of a great part of the Americas. On 24 September 1559 he writes from Valladolid to his viceroy in Mexico, Luis de Velasco.
He wants two ships sent west, “for the discovery of the western islands toward the Malucos.” They must stay out of the Moluccas, which a treaty has left to Portugal, and go instead to other islands “such as the Phelipinas.” They should bring back some spice, to see whether the trade will pay. But the real point is the journey home. “The principal reason of this expedition,” the king writes, “is to ascertain the return voyage.”
With the letter comes another, to a friar in Mexico City.
May 1560
The king has heard about Fray Andrés de Urdaneta: how, “when you were a secular, you were in Loaysa’s fleet,” and spent eight years in the Spice Islands, and that he is “a good cosmographer.” He charges him to go.
Urdaneta is no longer young, and not well, but he says yes. The viceroy is delighted. Urdaneta, he tells the king, “is the best and most accurate cosmographer in Nueva España.”
The friar has one worry, and he puts it in writing. By his reckoning the Philippines lie on Portugal’s side of the line that the two kingdoms agreed on in 1529. Sending ships there without “some legitimate or pious reason” would be wrong. He suggests one: to rescue Spaniards left behind by earlier fleets. Meanwhile the viceroy keeps the real plan quiet. In Mexico it is given out that the new ships are for the trade with Peru.
February 1561
The fleet needs a commander, and in February 1561 the viceroy names one: Miguel López de Legazpi, a Basque gentleman “of the family of Lezcano,” fifty years old, who has spent more than twenty-nine years in New Spain and held important offices in Mexico City.
He is no sailor. But he and Urdaneta come from the same part of the Basque country, and the viceroy tells the king that “they are kinsmen and good friends, and have one mind.” A more suitable man, and one more welcome to Urdaneta, “could not have been chosen.”
1561–1563
The ships are built at Navidad, the little port Villalobos sailed from. It is a sickly place, far from Mexico City. Urdaneta tells the king that Acapulco, farther south, would be healthier and better for a shipyard. He asks for pilots, charts and instruments from Spain, hemp-seed for rope, and workmen.
The work goes slowly. Cables and rigging come from Nicaragua and Guatemala. Masts and anchors are late. In May 1563 Legazpi writes to the king that the viceroy has chosen him, “not because this land has few men who would do it better than I,” but because no one would give himself to it “with a more willing spirit.”
He spends much of his own fortune on the voyage. He will never see Mexico again.