As for discovery, anything might still be found in its watery leagues. Gold, pearls, spices, hundreds of black slaves—wealth that might make old King Solomon seem a beggar by comparison. And Doña Isabel Barreto’s secret purpose in joining this expedition was to win treasure that would make her and her family rich beyond the dreams of anyone, even those who had seen the inexhaustible treasures of Mexico and Peru.
The islands of King Solomon! That was the glittering name that had been passed from mouth to mouth ever since Doña Isabel’s husband had returned, twenty-six years before, from his discovery of those islands in the South Pacific. Doña Isabel knew that Mendaña had not actually brought back any gold, but the miners he had taken with him insisted that plenty of it was there. Furthermore, the islands were stuffed with valuable woods and creamy tropical fruits and pearl shells, and the black natives could easily be captured and put to labor for Christian rulers, even though it was known that they were cannibals like those of neighboring New Guinea. For all these reasons, Doña Isabel yearned to go with her husband to rediscover the Solomon Islands, to colonize them and to reap that waiting wealth.
Many times since her marriage she had listened to her tedious husband repeat the story of that troubled voyage. In those far-off days, Don Alvaro’s uncle, the new viceroy of Peru, had appointed him, though he was only twenty-six, to be the commander of the expedition. It was in the autumn of 1567 that the two ships had sailed and for eighty long days had pushed westward, without sighting any land.
At last, on February 7, 1568, they had discovered the volcanic islands that later were to be called the Solomons. The first of them, nearly a hundred miles long, they christened Santa Isabel. To explore the shallow waters of the group, the men built a five-ton brigantine and in it discovered other islands, including Guadalcanal and Malaita, all of which were claimed by Mendaña in the name of the king of Spain.
What about the gold? Mendaña had on board experienced miners, who had seen plenty of gold back in Peru, and when the ships joined the brigantine, he sent them ashore to prospect in various streams. The miners declared that the country showed signs of gold, but they could not be sure, because the river currents were turbulent and when they tried to wash out the gravel in pans, the stream almost carried away the pans. The prospectors assured Mendaña that there was plenty of gold in the Solomons, but what they could not have foreseen was that more than three hundred years would elapse before that gold was found.
The first exciting days of prospecting were cut short, however, by the attempts of the natives to massacre the invading white man. Mendaña discovered to his horror that the Solomon Islanders really did feed on baked human flesh. One story Doña Isabel had been told a hundred times: “There was one Indian who actually came to feel the legs of a soldier who stood there, by way of testing whether he were tender for eating, as he would be his share in the distribution which they had made.”
To punish the cannibals, Mendaña had ordered their villages to be set on fire, and a canoe load of them had been killed. But when this first expedition stopped at the next big island, San Cristóbal, where the ships were drawn up ashore to be caulked and scraped, the natives were still hostile. Therefore, since the vessels were leaky and the rigging was badly worn, Mendaña decided to return home to Peru for the time being and to colonize these islands on some later trip.
Thereupon the ships headed north for hundreds of miles in search of a wind to blow them to California. They found a hurricane. The two vessels did not sink, but they became separated, and each alone pushed through the North Pacific for two months, with their crews suffering from frightful hunger and thirst.
A few drops of mingled water and powdered cockroaches, a few crumbs of rotten hardtack, one or two black beans—on this daily ration the men existed. They were tortured by scurvy. Their gums swelled until the putrid flesh hid their teeth. They could not move for weakness of their bones. They fell blind. The blood left their veins and rotted just under the skin. “We threw a man overboard every day,” Mendaña used to recall sadly, “and their chief consolation was to call me to watch them die.”
The ships were hopelessly lost, but luckily each stumbled upon the coast of California, and at last made its way back to Peru. Mendaña’s superb patience and dedication had enabled many of his men to survive and to return after two years in the unmapped Pacific, at a time when most people in Peru had long given them up for dead.
Immediately the story spread that Mendaña had brought back a treasure of forty thousand pesos’ worth of gold. That was, of course, untrue. But everyone was sure that the isles of Solomon must be filled with gold. Mendaña set about trying to form another expedition to settle there.
It took him a quarter of a century to complete the arrangements. Times were becoming harder. Spain was no longer the sole proprietor of the world’s oceans. English sea dogs were fighting and looting even in the sheltered seas of the oldest Spanish colonies. The defeat and scattering of the Great Armada had intervened in 1588 and had made the king of Spain much more cautious about risking the loss of his ships, especially in further explorations of the distant South Seas. But at last Mendaña won his long game of petitioning at court, and was given the right to sail to the Solomon Islands, and as governor set up a colony there for God and for Spain. If he achieved his purpose, he would be given wide grants of land and the noble title of marquis.
Governor Mendaña was not a youth this time. He was a man of fifty-four, weighed down with responsibilities. He had acquired a wife and a heartbreaking host of in-laws. To finance the expedition, he volunteered all the money he had in the world. His wife’s family, the Barretos, had helped a little and the group had raised the great sum of forty thousand pesos and had spent it on ships and supplies for the new expedition. The settlers who were invited along had to outfit themselves and bring their household goods, expecting, when the Solomons were reached, to be given large estates and many slaves to cultivate them.
The Barreto family, led by Doña Isabel, were the dominating power in the preparations, and their two strongest traits, pride and clannishness, were to shape the destiny of the venture from the start. The pride of a Spaniard is proverbial, but the Barretos overdid it. Although the Barreto line was not actually of much social prominence back in their home province of Galicia, they felt that any slight upon their pretensions should be resented to the death. In this spirit, the Barreto clan stuck together. Doña Isabel was the wife of the Governor, of course, and therefore in position to see that her family got high value for every peso they had invested in the enterprise. Her brother Lorenzo was appointed captain of the flagship, the San Jerónimo, and two other brothers were shipping in the same vessel. To add to the complications, Isabel’s unmarried sister, Mariana, was also a member of this family party. And anybody who threatened the pride, the family unity or the possessions of the Barretos was instantly an enemy.
Among the warring factions that arose, the capable Chief Pilot, Quirós, tried to remain neutral, but from the start he had his hands full keeping peace among the leaders of the expedition. Quirós suffered under one grave handicap; he had been born not in Spain but in Portugal, before that country had come under the rule of His Majesty Philip II of Spain, and gossips muttered that Quirós had grown up in the water-front alleys of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he had served in many ships as clerk and supercargo, and there was no doubt that he was one of the most skilled navigators of his time. Now only thirty, he left behind in Peru his wife, the daughter of a Madrid lawyer, and two children.
Our main source of information regarding this ghastly expedition is the Chief Pilot’s narrative, from which it is clear that his patience was sorely tried by the conflicting demands of the ill-assorted mass of humanity that was packed into the four ships setting out on a difficult mission of discovery and settlement in the far Pacific.* He was clearly the most sensible person in the party, and everyone was dependent upon his sailorly advice. But Doña Isabel in particular did not appreciate that advice,
and was bored by his efforts as a peacemaker.
By far the most troublesome member of the expedition—the one who made the voyage hell instead of mere purgatory—was the Campmaster, who was in charge of the force of soldiers that had been provided by Governor Mendaña’s friend the Marquis of Cañete, Viceroy of Peru at this time. This Campmaster was a crusty, white-haired veteran of about sixty, named Pedro Merino Manrique. Even before the ships departed, this terrible martinet began to interfere with the sailors in their work. He scolded the boatswain, and when the man objected, the Campmaster started to punish him. Doña Isabel, looking on, remarked to the Pilot: “The Campmaster is certainly severe. If that’s the way he tries to handle things, he may possibly come to a good end, but I’m far from thinking so.”
The Campmaster marched up to them and said to the Pilot: “Do you know who I am? Understand that I am the Campmaster, and if we sailed together, and I ordered the ship to be run on some rock, what would you do?”
The Pilot replied: “I don’t recognize any other leader than the Governor. If you want to be lord of all that is about to be discovered, rather than be under the orders of a person who shows such little judgment I would give up this voyage!”
Later, both the Chief Pilot and the Campmaster separately threatened to resign, but Governor Mendaña smoothed them down and promised that he would take steps to settle their grievances.
After a lofty speech by the Viceroy of Peru, the four ships left the port of Callao on April 9, 1595. But more provisions were needed, and more people had to be collected along the coast, people who wished to take their goods and settle in the islands of Solomon. At one port, where Captain Lope de Vega had enlisted a group of married people, this captain himself was married to Doña Isabel’s sister Mariana. Now a member of the family, he was given command of the consort ship, the Santa Isabel, but for some reason his wife still lived on the flagship, the San Jerónimo. The remainder of the fleet consisted of two smaller vessels—the galiot San Felipe under Felipe Corzo, and the frigate Santa Catalina under Alonso de Leyva.
At the same port the Campmaster got into another quarrel with Mendaña, who had put ashore several couples that he thought were not respectable enough to make good colonists; the Campmaster took their part and said they were as respectable as some others on the ships. The old soldier then managed to get into a rage against the Vicar, one of the two priests in charge of the religious side of the expedition. Next he disputed with Captain Lorenzo Barreto because he thought there wasn’t enough room in the ship for the soldiers to stow their luggage in. The Campmaster’s favorite method of addressing a subordinate was first to crack him heavily over the head with his cane and then to speak, and all except the soldiers, who idolized him, were soon heartily tired of the old bully.
At last the four vessels, with many flags flying and trumpets playing, left Paita on the northern coast of Peru and sailed toward the southwest. Aboard were 378 persons, of whom 280 were listed as capable of bearing arms. Soldiers and sailors, men, women and children—all enjoyed a feast in anticipation of great success and wealth to be found in the South Seas.
The people got acquainted with their shipmates, and at first scarcely a day went by without a wedding ceremony. Doña Isabel must have felt grievously the lack of a hundred comforts that she had been used to during nine years as the wife of Mendaña; but she demanded as her proper due a continuous obeisance from the people of the ship, who were constantly reminded that her family had put much money into the expedition.
No land was sighted for three whole months. Then on Friday, July 21, 1595, the cry “Land ho!” rang out, and Mendaña was so delighted that he asked the Vicar and his assistant priest, the Chaplain, to chant the Te Deum, while all the people knelt on the deck.
In the gathering dusk the expedition had a chance to see their first Pacific island, a glorious remnant of two ancient volcanoes whose entire western rims had fallen into the sea, leaving inspired peaks, deep valleys and wonderfully wooded bays. Here was an island whose physical beauty far exceeded anything the expedition had hoped for, and a thrill of discovery ran through the four crowded ships, for accidentally they had come upon an island which through the long history of the Pacific would be treasured as one of the most hauntingly beautiful retreats in the ocean. It was the island of Fatu Hiva, a lonely, savage, terrible and doomed place, yet one which has lured all travelers who have seen it. As night fell on this moment of discovery, Mendaña and his crew tried, from their little craft, to pierce the mystery that has forever shrouded Fatu Hiva.
In the bright sunlight of the next day, the boats sailed in close, and Mendaña christened the island Magdalena. It was found to be inhabited, and although nobody in the ships was aware of the fact, they were seeing for the first time the members of a race previously unknown to the world. These were the Polynesians, who still inhabit the Pacific within a great triangle whose apexes are Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand.
Doña Isabel watched at the rail as seventy outrigger canoes came out, bringing about four hundred natives, paddling or else swimming and hanging to the canoes. Surprisingly, they were almost white in skin color, and their graceful naked bodies were tattooed with fish designs and other patterns. Among them was a boy of about ten, who paddled one of the canoes. He had long locks, and his face seemed like that of an angel. “Never in my life,” the Pilot was heard to remark, “have I felt such pain as I do now, to think that such a fair creature might be left to go to perdition!” There were souls to be saved in these lovely isles.
The natives surrounded the ship and shouted, and made gestures inviting the strange visitors to go ashore. They handed up gifts of coconuts and fine bananas, and bamboo canes full of fresh water. Then one of the natives was coaxed to climb aboard the flagship, and the Governor got him to put on a shirt and a hat. As he capered about in this garb, many others laughed and came aboard, staring in wonder.
Some forty of the natives strolled around the deck. Their bodies were well proportioned but so large that the Spaniards seemed dwarfed by comparison. The natives were confused by the fact that the Christians wore clothing, but the soldiers bared their breasts and let down their stockings to show the skin underneath, and finally the Polynesians were convinced that these were human beings like themselves.
They began to dance and sing and grab at things they saw, and the Governor ordered them to leave the ship. But they stayed until he ordered a cannon to be fired; at the sound, in great terror they jumped overboard and swam to their canoes. Yet one persistent man clung to the main chains and would not let go until his hand was struck with a sword. At this the natives got angry, and under the urging of an old man with a long beard, the warriors in the canoes approached the ship with raised spears and began throwing stones. A bullet from the arquebus of one of the soldiers hit the old man’s forehead. He fell dead, and the canoes retreated to the shore.
Mendaña at first thought that he had prematurely arrived at the Solomon Islands, but he soon had to admit that he did not recognize these shores. Soon other beautiful islands were sighted, and the group was christened Las Marquesas in honor of the Marquis of Cañete, Viceroy of Peru, who had aided the expedition. Mendaña’s fame as discoverer of the romantic Marquesas will always be respected in Pacific history. Unfortunately, the impact of the brutal and senseless behavior of these first Spanish adventurers upon the quickwitted Polynesian inhabitants was never forgotten, and made later contacts with Europeans an unhappy ordeal.
The island of Tahuata, which the Governor called Santa Cristina, was discovered on July 21. Here the Campmaster was sent ashore with twenty soldiers to find a watering place. Becoming fearful when many natives paddled out in canoes to greet them, the soldiers began to fire unwarrantedly at the Marquesans. One native jumped into the sea with a child in his arms, and clasped together they were sent to the bottom with one shot. Later the Pilot asked the soldier who had done this needless murder why he had not fired into the air. The man answered that he did not want to
lose his reputation as a good marksman. “What good will it do you to enter Hell with the fame of being a good shot?” asked the Pilot. But that first indiscriminate shooting of helpless natives was but a sample of what was to come.
The following day the Campmaster’s party actually landed on the island, and surrounded one of the villages. Three hundred natives approached, but were warned not to cross a line drawn in the sand. When asked for water, they brought coconuts for the men to drink from, and the women brought other kinds of fruit. The women were very pretty, and with true Polynesian hospitality they came close to the men and flirted with them. But the natives did not welcome the idea of being put to work lugging the water jars that the Spaniards had brought with them to be filled. When they saw that the Campmaster was about to order this task, they ran off with four jars. To punish them, the soldiers fired a volley into a helpless and unoffending crowd, and a number of the villagers were killed.
A better landing place was found up the coast, and Doña Isabel and her husband and most of the people of the fleet went ashore on Santa Cristina, to hear the first mass said. The natives flocked around and quietly imitated everything the Christians did, kneeling and folding their hands at the proper times. Near Doña Isabel sat a very beautiful Marquesan girl, whose long hair was such a startling red that the lady took her scissors and tried to snip off a few locks as a keepsake. The girl did not like this and Doña Isabel had to stop for fear of making the natives angry.
The soldiers who attended the church service immediately noticed that the women of the Marquesas had beautiful legs and hands, fine eyes, fair countenances, small waists and graceful figures. They wore nothing but a single garment that covered them from the breasts downward. The Spaniards pointed out some girls that they thought were prettier than the ladies of Lima, who were famed for their beauty.