Part 28 (1/2)
[343] Figueroa implies the second day; whilst Quiros speaks of ”two days.”
[344] Dalrymple's Historical Collection of Voyages: vol. I., 58.
Thus terminated the attempt of the Spaniards to found a colony in the Solomon Islands; and the ill fate which it experienced was scarcely calculated to encourage others to undertake a similar enterprise.
Barely half of the four hundred souls who had left Peru under such bright auspices could have reached the Philippines. Among them, however, was Quiros the pilot of Mendana, who, nothing daunted by disaster and ill-success, returned to Peru and endeavoured to re-awaken the spirit of discovery which was losing much of its enthusiasm with the departing glory of the Spanish nation. The Viceroy of Peru referred him to the Court of Spain; and, after experiencing for several years the effects of those intrigues which seem to have been the accustomed fate of the early navigators, Quiros set sail from Callao at the close of 1605, to search the Southern Ocean once again for the Isles of Salomon and the other unknown lands in that region. He had been supplied with two s.h.i.+ps, and was accompanied by Luis Vaez de Torres as second in command. It is unnecessary to enter here into the particulars of the voyage across the Pacific. It will be sufficient for my purpose to state that Quiros finally sought the parallel of 10 south, and sailed westward in the direction of Santa Cruz, which he had discovered with Mendana ten years before. Being rather to the northward of the lat.i.tude of Santa Cruz, he struck a small group of islands, the princ.i.p.al of which was called Taumaco by the natives. These islands have been identified with the Duff Group, which lies about 65 miles north-east of Santa Cruz. Nearly two centuries had pa.s.sed away before these islands were again seen by Europeans, when they were sighted by Captain Wilson of the missionary s.h.i.+p ”Duff,” in 1797. During the ten days spent by the Spaniards at Taumaco, Quiros obtained information of a number of islands and large tracts of land in the neighbourhood, which seemed to confirm him in his belief in a vast unknown extent of land in the Southern Ocean. The list of these islands are included in a memorial[345] subsequently presented by Quiros to Philip II. of Spain, which contains many particulars of the discoveries of the expedition in this region. Some of them I have been able to identify with names on existing charts, but referring my reader to Note XIV. of the Geographical Appendix, I will only allude here to the most interesting reference in this memorial, which is to _a large country named Pouro_, that is without doubt the large island of St.
Christoval in the Solomon Group, which lay rather under 300 miles to the westward. The central portion of St. Christoval is at present called _Bauro_, and by this name the whole island is often known to the natives of the islands around. Thus, without suspecting it, Quiros had described to him an island of the lost Solomon Group, and the very island which had been more completely explored than any other by the expedition of Mendana nearly forty years before. Had he been in possession of Gallego's journal, in which the native name of _Paubro_ is given to St.
Christoval, he would have at once recognised in this _Pouro_ of the Taumaco natives the _Paubro_ of Mendana's expedition. His informant spoke to him of silver arrows which had been brought from _Pouro_, but this circ.u.mstance did not set him on the right track; and thus for the second time this enterprising navigator unwittingly let the chance pa.s.s by of finding the Isles of Salomon.[346]
[345] Dalrymple's Hist. Coll. of Voyages: vol. I, p. 145. This memorial is given in the original in Purchas, (His Pilgrimes, Part VI, Lib. VII, Chap. 10.) _Vide_ also De Brosses ”Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes:” tom. I, p. 341: Paris 1756.
[346] The question of this name of Pouro is further treated in Note XV. of the Geographical Appendix, since an attempt has been made by Mr. Hale, the American philologist, to identify it with the Bouro of the Indian Archipelago.
The opportunity had gone; and, for this reason, the remainder of this voyage of Quiros has no interest in connection with the Solomon Group.
The information which he had obtained of the numerous islands and tracts of land in the vicinity of Taumaco seems to have banished from his mind all thoughts of the missing group. Steering southward, and pa.s.sing without seeing the island of Santa Cruz of which he had been in search, he reached the island of Tucopia, of which he had previously obtained information from the natives of Taumaco. Continuing his course, he finally anch.o.r.ed in a large bay which indented the coast of what he believed was the Great Southern Continent. The name Australia del Espiritu Santo was given by him to this new land, when flushed with the success of his discovery. In the hour of his supposed triumph, fortune again frowned on the efforts of the Spanish navigator. A mutiny broke out on board his s.h.i.+p, and Quiros was compelled by his crew to abandon the enterprise. Without being able to acquaint Torres of what had happened, he left the anchorage unperceived in the middle hours of the night, and after making an ineffectual attempt to find Santa Cruz, he sailed for Mexico. Torres, after ascertaining that the supposed southern continent was an island,[347] continued his voyage westward, and, pa.s.sing through the straits which bear his name, ultimately arrived at Manilla.
[347] This island is one of the New Hebrides, and still retains its Spanish name of Espiritu Santo.
The results of the expeditions in which Quiros had been engaged could hardly have been looked upon with feelings of great satisfaction at the Spanish Court, where the veteran navigator in the true spirit of Columbus now repaired to advocate the colonization of the Australia del Espiritu Santo he had just discovered. The Isles of Salomon had been also discovered, it is true; but two succeeding expeditions had failed to find them. Santa Cruz had similarly eluded the efforts of Quiros; and his last discovery of the supposed southern continent had been proved by his companion, Torres, to be an island. Several years had pa.s.sed away, and Quiros was an old man before his wishes for a new expedition were granted. In furtherance of the exploration of the Isles of Salomon and the Australia del Espiritu Santo, he is said to have presented no less than fifty memorials to the king; in one of which, after painting in the brightest colours the beauty and fertility of his last discovery, he thus addresses his Sovereign: ”Acquire, sire, since you can, acquire heaven, eternal fame, and that new world with all its promises.” Such appeals coming from one who might fitly be called the Columbus of his age could scarcely be rejected by the monarch. In 1614, Quiros, bearing a commission from the king, departed from Spain on his way to Callao, where he intended to fit out another expedition. Death, however, overtook him at Panama on his way to Peru; and with Quiros died all the grand hopes, which he had fostered, of adding the unknown southern continent to the dominion of Spain. Had he lived to carry out his project, Australia might have become a second Peru. The spirit of enterprise on the part of the Spanish nation never again extended itself into this region of the Western Pacific. During the next century and a half the large island-groups, which the Spaniards had discovered in these seas, were not visited by any European navigators;[348] and it is surprising how few benefits have accrued to geography from these three Spanish expeditions to these regions. Their discoveries have had to be rediscovered; and it has been only by a laborious process on the part of the geographer that the navigator has been able to make any use of the imperfect information, which the Spanish navigators have bequeathed to us of their discoveries in these seas.
[348] In 1616, the Dutch navigator, Le Maire, when he discovered and named the Horne Islands in lat. 14 56' S. and Hope Island in 16 S.
thought that he had found the Solomon Islands; but these islands lie more than a thousand miles to the eastward of this group.
Dalrymple's Hist. Coll., vol. II., p. 59.
The death of Quiros deepened more than ever the mystery that was thrown over the Isles of Salomon. Although Herrera[349] had published in 1601 a short description of these islands, which he must have derived from official sources, no account of the first voyage of Mendana was published until nearly half a century after the return of the expedition to Peru, when in 1613 a short narrative appeared in a work written by Dr. Figueroa.[350] However, the exaggerated description, such as Lopez Vaz had given, obtained by virtue of prepossession a stronger hold on the memories of the sea-faring world. The same spirit of jealousy against other nations, which had compelled Gallego to suppress his journals, and had so long withheld any account of Mendana's discoveries, now doomed to destruction the several memorials and doc.u.ments of Quiros; but fortunately the work of destruction was not completed. The consequence of such proceedings was to greatly heighten the exaggerated misconceptions relating to the Isles of Salomon. We learn from Purchas[351] that Richard Hakluyt was informed in London in 1604, by a Lisbon merchant, of an expedition which had left Lima in 1600 and had fallen in ”with divers rich countries and islands not far from the islands of Salomon. One chief place they called Monte de Plata, for the great abundance of silver there is like to be there. For they found two crowns' worth of silver in two handfuls of dust, and the people gave them for iron as much and more in quant.i.ty of silver.”[352] Amongst the misconceptions which prevailed is one which we find in a memorial addressed by Dr. Juan Luis Arias to Philip III. of Spain,[353] where he refers to the discovery of ”New Guadalca.n.a.l” and ”San Christoval” as quite distinct from Mendana's subsequent discovery, as he alleges, of the Isles of Salomon; and he alludes to the opinion of some that New Guadalca.n.a.l was a part of New Guinea. In Peru the actual existence of these islands came to be doubted; and successive viceroys held it a political maxim to treat the question of the existence of the Solomon Islands as a romance.[354]
[349] _Vide_ page 192.
[350] _Vide_ page 192.
[351] ”His Pilgrimes,” vol. IV., p. 1432.
[352] Geographical writers are not agreed as to whether this allusion refers to one of the voyages of Quiros or not. From the date it would appear probable that it refers to Mendana's second voyage, when Quiros was chief pilot.
[353] A translation is given by Mr. Major in his ”Early Voyages to Terra Australis.”
[354] Pinkerton's Voyages, vol. XIV., p. 12.
The jealous att.i.tude, a.s.sumed by Spain towards other nations with reference to these discoveries, succeeded only too well in bewildering the geographers who endeavoured to ascertain the true position of the Solomon Islands; and so varied were the opinions on the subject, that the lat.i.tude a.s.signed to them varied from 7 to 19 south, and the longitude from 2400 miles to 7500 miles west of Peru. Acosta, in 1590, ignorant of the materials several years after placed at the disposal of Figueroa, located these islands about 800 leagues[355] west of Peru, and Herrera gives them the same position,[356] a longitude which Lopez Vaz had previously given them in the account obtained from him in 1586 by Captain Withrington. The discoverers themselves, if we may trust the estimates given in the accounts of Gallego and Figueroa, and in the memorials of Quiros, considered that the Solomon Islands were removed about double this distance from the coast of Peru. Their estimates vary between 1500 and 1700 Spanish leagues, whereas the true distance is about 2100 leagues or from 1500 to 2000 miles west of the position a.s.signed by the discoverers. In his second voyage, Mendana was misled by this small estimate when he at first mistook the Marquesas for his previous discovery, the Isles of Salomon. I am inclined to consider that the Spanish navigators purposely under-estimated the distance of these islands from the coast of Peru, and that in so doing they were actuated by two motives. In the first place, they would be desirous to bring their discoveries within the line of demarcation fixed by the Papal Bull after the discovery of America by Columbus, by which the hemisphere west of a meridian 370 leagues west of the Azores was a.s.signed to Spain, and that to the east of this meridian to Portugal. Thus it was that Spain had had to deliver the Brazils to Portugal; and in possessing herself of the Moluccas she had appropriated by a geographical fraud lands which should have belonged to that nation.[357] Their other motive is probably to be found in that jealousy of spirit which, in order to prevent Drake and the English from finding their discoveries, caused the suppression of Gallego's journal and the burning of many of the memorials of Quiros.
[355] Spanish leagues, 17 to a degree.
[356] Herrera at the same time places them 1500 leagues from Lima!
[357] I am indebted to Mr. Dalrymple (Hist. Collect. of Voyages, vol. I., p. 51) for this explanation of the small estimates of the Spanish navigators.
Similar confusion prevailed amongst the early cartographers as to the position which they should a.s.sign to the Solomon Islands. As M.
Buache[358] points out, the first charts representing the Isles of Salomon, which were published at the end of the 16th century, made a near approximation to their true position by placing them to the east and at no great distance from New Guinea. Subsequent cartographers, however, were less happy in their guesses at the truth. In the ”Arcano del Mare,” published by Dudley, in 1646, the Solomon Islands were transported to the position of the Marquesas, with which they were thought identical. This position was generally received until early in last century, when Delisle adopted a position much nearer to that given in the early maps. M. Danville, however, later on in the century, being unable to reconcile the Spanish discoveries with the more recent discoveries in the South Seas, suppressed altogether the Isles of Salomon in his map of the world; and his example was followed by several other geographers, who were equally anxious to expunge the lost archipelago from their maps and to relegate it to the cla.s.s of fabulous lands.
[358] ”Memoir concerning the existence and situation of Solomon's Islands,” presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1781.