Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
Although most of the chroniclers did not mention Simão de Abreu’s pioneering trip – Diogo do Couto is an honorable exception – the fact is that the Philippine archipelago would henceforth become part of the spice circuit trade. As historian José Manuel Garcia (possibly the greatest scholar of relations between Portugal and the Philippines) points out “the importance of this navigation network to both sustain Spanish pretensions in the region and establish a Portuguese commercial monopoly in the exploration of the spices of Eastern Indonesia pushes Portuguese movement in the region in order to find and identify the Philippines archipelago.”
Other maritime explorations would follow, with Simão de Vera’s voyage in 1528 being duly documented and with a tragic outcome as this navigator would be killed in Mindanau, “by the natives,” as Lopes de Castanheda points out. He died along with all the garrison at his command, and the inhabitants of those islands took possession of the ship and everything it contained.
There is also the possibility that the ill-fated Simão de Vera was lost in such a tangle of islets, as some scribes suggest. The mission of Simão was to send a message to Malacca, at the behest of the then captain-general of the Mollucas, the aforementioned Jorge de Menezes, who in 1526, dragged by a storm, landed on the islands of Waigeo and Biak and on the peninsula now called Bird’s Head, current Indonesian province of Irian Jaya.
Vera’s death depicts well the degree of difficulty of the intended and ongoing tasks, both on the part of the Portuguese and of the Castilians, when the transpacific journeys of Garcia Jofre de Loisa (1526), of Alvaro de Saavedra ( 1528) and, above all, the later saga of Ruy Lopez de Villalobos (1541) were happening at that time. The latter was in charge of revealing “las Islas del Poniente” to which he would give the current name in honor of Philip I of Spain.
The Galician pilot Juan Gaetan was part of the Villalobos expedition, to whom La Perouse attributes the discovery of Hawaii. Gaetan’s voyage is described, in similar terms and with the same sequence of islands, by the French circumnavigator, in 1753.
In 1825, the Portuguese geographer Casado Giraldes states that the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) were discovered by Gaetan in 1542, and does not even mention James Cook, to whom, officially, and as is known, the discovery is attributed. Between the 6th and the 23rd of January 1543, the galleon San Cristóbal – one of the six ships of the Villalobos fleet – piloted by Gines de Mafra (member of the Magellan expedition in 1519-1522) crashed through the rest of the fleet during a heavy storm. Mafra would eventually end up on the island of Mazaua, where Magellan had anchored in 1521, a place now identified as Limasawa, on the southern tip of the island of Leyte. It would be Mafra’s second visit to the Philippines.
Captain Jorge de Menezes would also send another navigator to those seas, as Diogo do Couto notes: “a Gomes de Sequeira going by order of Dom Jorge to seek supplies for the islands of Mindanao. He discovered many islands together, in nine to ten north, which is called the islands of Gomes de Sequeira.”
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