No time had been lost in seeking the return route; Urdaneta indeed had been anxious to settle at Guam and find the way back thence.^[53] Only three weeks after the founding of San Miguel, he sailed (1 June 1565) on the fastest ship, the San Pedro, initially on much the same course as de la Torre's in the San Juan; the latter's ‘Abreojos' is probably the island still called by Urdaneta's name for it, Parece Vela.^[54] By 3 August the San Pedro was in 39–40°N, then dropping to 30° northwest of Hawaii; early in September they were again in 39°30′N, and then sailed east and by south until, on 18 September, they sighted La Deseada, ‘the desired’, probably San Miguel where Cabrillo had died. Although short-handed (sixteen of forty-four men had died) they pressed on past Navidad for the better port of Acapulco, arriving on 8 October: nearly 20,000km in 130 days. But the triumph was dulled: the lost San Lucas had reached Navidad just two months earlier, on 9 August.

There had been no stress of weather to account for Alonso de Arellano and Lope Martin, captain and pilot of the San Lucas, parting company: it seems simple desertion. Arellano had pressed on for the Philippines—this was after all a known route—picking up eight islands in the Marshalls and Carolines, his most notable discovery being Truk. By his own account he was in Philippine waters for nearly three months, wandering around the inland seas from 29 January to 22 April 1565. This overlaps with Legazpi's stay by nearly nine weeks, and if as Arellano claimed he was really looking for the fleet, it seems strange that no news filtered through either way; on the other hand, his account of his wanderings among the islands is detailed and verifiable. On the return he claimed to have reached 43°N, and this part of his account is filled with strange stories, which- 105 -have cast doubt on his general veracity: porpoises as big as cows present no difficulty, but it is unlikely that cooking oil would freeze in mid-summer.

After enquiry by the Audiencia, Arellano was neither punished for desertion nor rewarded for success, and there is little doubt that Lope Martin was the villain of the piece: a most shady character, who played a leading part in a maze of mutiny on the San Geronimo, sent to aid Legazpi in 1566, and who ended his days marooned in the Marshalls.^[55] As Chaunu says, Arellano's exploit is anecdotal, a ‘first’ less significant in itself than as showing that the solution was in the air; but intrinsically the voyage, in a 40-ton pinnace with twenty men, was a great one.^[56]

With these two voyages, the problem of the return was solved (Figure 12, “TO AND FROM THE PHILIPPINES, 1525–65. ”)—on the lines tried forty-four years earlier by Espinosa's Trinidad. Quite apart from Arellano's narrow priority in time, it is a mistake to attach a single name to the achievement; as Wallis, a supporter of Urdaneta's claims, remarks, ‘Every pilot of Legaspi's fleet probably thought that he knew the route’, and Carrion had stated firmly that the Philippines ‘have the best situation for the return voyage, because they are in north latitude’—Saavedra's lesson had at last been taken to heart.^[57] There is no doubt that Urdaneta had the right contacts—Legazpi, the Viceroy, the Augustinian publicists—and, whatever his formal training, he clearly had a good seaman's intuition, as shown by his justified disagreement with the pilots. He stressed the importance of timing in relation to seasonal winds, though one may suspect that others who had been with, or in touch with, the series from Loaysa to Villalobos had begun to grasp the general trends of the wind circulation; perhaps by a subconscious analogy with the Atlantic. Urdaneta left Cebu at the right time—nearly June, with a westerly monsoon—and took the shortest track through the Trades to pick up the Westerlies. On the whole, despite his penchant for New Guinea and his vacillations, Urdaneta does seem to have had a clearer, or at least more clearly formulated, idea of the problem than did the others, and he alone seems to have appreciated fully the immense width of the Ocean: ‘On all accounts, the intellectual discoverer is Urdaneta’.^[58]

In a remarkably short time ‘Urdaneta's route’ became almost sacrosanct for the Manila-Acapulco run, and his chart was still considered standard, by the Spanish, into the eighteenth century. Late in the seventeenth, however, there was an unfortunate modification—a supposedly safer route, between 32 and 37°N, avoiding the colder and stormier higher latitudes. But here the Westerlies are less reliable, so that the passage was often prolonged, and no small part of the privations and disease of the voyage may be attributed to this change. At either end of the route, however, adherence to tradition had deleterious effects. The excessive risk of wreck in the maze of islands between Manila and the Embocadero, or debouchment of San Bernardino Strait into the Ocean, did not suffice to have this hazardous navigation replaced by the simpler and quicker, and on the whole safer, course up the west coast of Luzon, despite serious efforts, especially in the eighteenth century, to have this route adopted. On the- 106 -opposite shores, even after the colonisation of Alta California from 1770 on, its ports were not used to refresh the weary and scurvy-ridden crews before they went on to Acapulco; this could also have stimulated Californian development, but mercantile interests in New Spain would not brook the short delay. Spanish bureaucracy and dockyards being what they were, it was more difficult to adhere to sailing-dates than to courses: sailings from Manila should have been between mid-June and mid-July, and usually were; but in practice they might be at any time between early May and late September. In any case, the voyage east usually took five to six months, that from New Spain only three.^[59]

Establishment of the Galleon route meant enhanced importance and self-esteem for New Spain, now an essential link in a maritime system extending from Seville to China. The back-parts of Mexico no longer led nowhere in particular, though the increased value of the Pacific coast was narrowly concentrated in the single port of Acapulco. A contemporary letter from Seville says that ‘those of Mexico are mighty proud of their discovery, which gives them to believe that they will be the heart of the world’; and it is notable that this letter, printed in 1566, contains the first use of ‘Mexican’ to mean non-Indian inhabitants of New Spain.^[60]