Chapter 5
The Sealed Orders
The Pacific, west of New Spain
Urdaneta had planned a voyage to New Guinea, but the Audiencia of Mexico secretly changed the plan. On 25 November 1564, a few days out from Navidad, Legazpi opened sealed orders sending the fleet straight to the Philippines by Villalobos’s route. The friars felt deceived, but went on.
25 November 1564
For five days the fleet sails southwest. On 25 November, out of sight of land, Legazpi breaks the seals on his orders, and reads them to his officers.
They are not going to New Guinea. They are to sail west to the Philippines, by the route Villalobos took twenty years before.
The friars are dismayed. They had been “deceived,” they say; had they known this ashore, they would never have come, for the reasons Urdaneta gave in Mexico. Then they agree to go on, for the service of God, and of the king, and for the good of the fleet. The ships turn west.
29 November 1564
Every night the *San Lucas*, the fastest ship, sails ahead of the flagship. On the morning of 30 November it is gone.
There has been no storm. Legazpi does not blame its captain, Alonso de Arellano, “a gallant man.” He suspects the pilot, Lope Martín. The *San Lucas* knows the route and where to wait, so for weeks Legazpi expects to find it ahead of them in the islands. He never does.
December 1564
The fleet runs west along the ninth and tenth degrees of latitude, north of the equator. The pilots can measure latitude from the sun. Longitude, how far west they have come, they can only guess, by reckoning each day’s speed and course.
The guesses do not agree. Each pilot argues for his own, and quietly changes it before he reports to Legazpi. Urdaneta’s figures are nearest the truth, but even he stretches them to keep closer to the others. So the daily runs are overestimated, and by late December the pilots believe they have already passed islands that still lie ahead.
On 28 December the fleet turns to the tenth degree of latitude, to look for the islands Villalobos named.