Conquering the Pacific by Andrés Reséndez

Author:Andrés Reséndez [Reséndez, Andrés]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328517364
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

11

Survival and Revenge

The voyage that began in Acapulco in May 1566 was unconventional. A ship named the San Jerónimo would dash across the Pacific steered by a pilot who had no reason to reach his destination. As one of the travelers put it, “If Homer and Virgil had come, they would have needed to summon all of their abilities to convey the hunger, destruction, deaths, cries, sighs, imprisonments, travails, delays, afflictions, and all the calamities and shipwrecks that we experienced.” Trouble began even before casting off, when “a swirl of wind and rain” demolished several houses in Acapulco and tossed the San Jerónimo about while lying at anchor, causing the stern to hit land and threatening to sink the vessel. In all likelihood, 1565–66 was an El Niño year that brought earlier and more intense tropical storms than usual to Acapulco, where the hurricane season normally begins in May.1

Lope Martín first tried to bring Captain Pero Sánchez Pericón to his side. “You are making a mistake if you think that I will take you to Cebu,” he said to the captain, “because the very hour that the general [Legazpi] saw me there, he would hang me on the spot.” As alternatives, the pilot laid out a world of possibilities. “I could take you to Japan, where you could get more than 200,000 ducats to add shine to your lineage,” the Afro-Portuguese proposed, “or to the Cape of Cinnamon in Mindanao . . . and I could then take you through the Strait of Magellan to Spain.” Although these were far-fetched schemes, the captain of a well-supplied galleon with a pilot of Lope Martín’s caliber could not dismiss them entirely. Pericón gave few hints about his true intentions. His twenty-five-year-old son, however, Diego Sánchez Pericón de Mesa, was talkative, opinionated, and reckless. Serving as a junior officer aboard the San Jerónimo, Diego was “a lot younger in discretion than in years,” a mercurial presence who thought himself on top of the world thanks to his father’s appointment as sea captain. The overall effect of the Pericóns on Lope Martín was to embolden him.2

Somehow the pilot came to conceive of this voyage less as a death sentence and more as a dangerous opportunity. In the weeks before departure, he even hurried the captain to finish the preparations, as the sailing conditions were becoming more challenging by the day. Lope Martín was right. Modern sailing guides suggest starting from the coast of Mexico either before June or after October to avoid the summer tropical storms. During April, while Captain Pericón rushed to get all the supplies loaded, the pilot put together a crew, “choosing those who were best suited for his purposes, particularly the ones who came from the municipality where they said he had been married and others from Portugal inasmuch as they say he comes from there.” This is the only shred of evidence that Lope Martín had a wife in Ayamonte on the Spanish-Portuguese border.3

By the end of the month, about 130 men, more or less evenly split between sailors and soldiers, boarded the San Jerónimo.

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