King Solomon's servants had brought much gold from Ophir, bringing it to ‘Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea’: somewhere east of Suez, then—Scripture said it—lay a land of incalculable wealth. Ptolemy's Golden Khersonese was an obvious candidate; so were the mysterious islands of Veach and Locach and Maletur, ‘the misbegotten progeny of Polo’; some Portuguese thought that Ophir would be found in East Africa, in the hinterland- 120 -

- 121 -of Sofala, where later romance would place ‘King Solomon's Mines’; Magellan opted for the Lequeos, Columbus thought he had found it in Española: ‘as geographical knowledge extended eastwards and westwards without Ophir being recognised, its supposed position moved with that knowledge, always a little ahead of the latest discovery.’^[27] And in Peru a new element was added, particularly in the active mind of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa: tales of Tupac Yupanqui's Inca fleet with 20,000 men, which had found black people—and gold—in islands to the west; while across the Pacific in the Moluccas, Galvão had heard that in Chile Valdivia had news of an island king, beyond whom ‘were the Amazones, whose queene was called Guanomilla, that is to say, the golden heauen’, so that there must be great riches there, ‘and also at an Island called Solomon’.^[28] The resulting voyages—by Mendaña in 1567–9, Mendaña and Quiros in 1595–6, Quiros and Torres in 1605–6—are among the most remarkable in the whole history of maritime discovery, alike in their geographical results (long misunderstood as these were) and as a story of high ideals, bitter disillusions and sufferings, baseness and grandeur.

By the mid-1560s the Spice Islands were officially barred, the Philippines were becoming an annexure of New Spain; and quite apart from the restraints of policy, the developing knowledge of the wind-systems and the precedent of Grijalva's disaster were hardly encouraging for any Peruvian enterprise in these directions. The southwest was open, and already in the 1550s voyages thither were being mooted; and in 1565 there was a definite project for finding ‘some islands, called Solomon, which lie over opposite Chile’—the first quasi-official use of the name.^[29] This came to nothing—the scratch company recruited was suspected of planning to turn pirate, and hastily disbanded—but in 1567 the interim Governor Garcia de Castro appointed his young and inexperienced nephew Alvaro de Mendaña y Neyra to command two ships to find rich islands ‘between New Guinea and this coast’. In Mendaña's mind the prime motive of settlement was the conversion of the heathen; this probably had only the most intermittent appeal for the rank-and-file or for Sarmiento, who later claimed to have initiated the project (he was at any rate active in its organisation) and to have declined the offered command, on condition of retaining overall control. This is unlikely; his position was captain of the flagship, not Chief Pilot, but in his own view he was at least on a par with that officer; as in so many Spanish voyages, the command was far from harmonious. Objectives were also unclear, as was doubtless inevitable, but seem to have been first of all Sarmiento's Western Isles, anywhere between 14 and 23°S and not far from Peru, and then Terra Australis itself, the great land-mass thought to run from New Guinea to Magellanica.

The hastily prepared Los Reyes and Todos Santos, with about 100 men, left Callao on 19 November 1567, the day of Santa Ysabel, who became patroness of the voyage. The Los Reyes was capitana, and carried Mendaña, Sarmiento,- 122 -

- 123 -and the Chief Pilot Hernan Gallego, who had been with Ulloa and Ladrillero in Magellanic waters. They sailed westsouthwest to about 15°45′S, then west by north and finally west. This change of course was strongly criticised by Sarmiento, who held that they were instructed to press on, and was also angry at Mendaña's refusal to investigate a cloudbank which Sarmiento thought might have been land. This insistence, and Gallego's promise on the last day of the year—already six weeks out—that they would find land by the end of January make it difficult to credit Mendaña's statement that they were provisioned ‘for at least a month’. As Wallis says, that would mean not much over a month; but though the water was bad, it was not exhausted, and there seems no hint as yet of a real food crisis.^[30] It is possible that in changing course Gallego had his own plan, to discover New Guinea from the east, basing himself on Bernardo de la Torre's Cabo de la Cruz (or Cruzes) on that coast, which was thought to be only 600 leagues from Peru.^[31]

On 15 or 16 January 1568 they came to an ‘Ysla de Jesus’, most likely Nui or some near-by island in the Ellices. Here again Sarmiento made trouble, criticising the failure to land and take possession (Gallego being unwilling to risk the ships, or to delay), and later hinting to the soldiers that they had left behind a kingdom.^[32] Continuing generally westwards, on 1 February, Candlemas Day, they reached some shoals they named ‘Bajos de la Candelaria’, either Ontong Java or Roncador Reef.^[33] Then at dawn on Saturday the 7th they saw a large high land, no little atoll: Santa Ysabel, the largest truly Pacific Island yet seen by Europeans. It was fifteen leagues away, and they did not come close-to until late on Sunday: people came out in canoes, shy until a sailor swam to them, eager for caps and bells, thievish once they had nerved themselves to come aboard, but very friendly and soon imitating the sign of the cross and the Lord's Prayer. The ships could not find a harbour that night, but on Monday made port, being guided by a bright star, resplendent in full day-light—surely the Star of the East. Here in the Bahia de la Estrella (still so named), they landed and took possession, the Franciscans singing Vexilla Regis prodeunt—‘the banners of the King press on’.^[34]

The bright omen was deceptive, though for a time all went well. By early April they had built a bergantin, and in the next month it visited the north coast of Guadalcanal and circumnavigated Ysabel. By the time it returned to Estrella Bay, relations with the ‘Indians’ had deteriorated, and the whole expedition shifted to Guadalcanal, settling on 12 May at Puerto de la Cruz, the site of the present agreeable little capital, Honiara. A week later the bergantin went out again, following the north coast of Guadalcanal, then across to Malaita and down to San Cristobal, returning to Puerto de la Cruz on 6 June. The ships then moved to an anchorage on San Cristobal, where they careened while the bergantin explored the south coast of the island. The work done in six months by Gallego and his co-pilot Ortega was notable (Figure 6, “EL MAR DEL SUR: FIRST PHASE. ”): very much of the- 124 -coasts of Santa Ysabel, Malaita (Ysla de Ramos), Guadalcanal, San Cristobal, and Florida had been examined, as well as many smaller islands, and Choiseul (their San Marcos) and New Georgia (Arrecifes) had been sighted. Although Gallego greatly over-estimated the sizes of his islands, many of his sites can still be identified with precision, and many of the Spanish names for the islands actually visited remain on the maps. This side of the work was done well. But the bright star had dimmed; the hopes of settlement and of converting the heathen had foundered utterly.

The first friendly reception, when after their visitors had come ashore the Indians had danced to Spanish fifes and guitars and their own Pan-pipes, when their leader Bileban-Arra and Mendaña had exchanged names—they were both tauriquis or chiefs—had gone sour. The islanders, faced with the intrusion of scores of non-producers demanding food, had gone into sullen retreat; the Spaniards naturally enough did not understand that their consumer demand meant the disruption of a nicely, even precariously, balanced economy. Mendaña, a genuinely honest and high-minded man, asked the friars what could be done; they—understanding something, but not enough—replied that parties should go out foraging for essentials: if nothing was offered, food and food alone could be taken, but the villages should not be stripped, and proper and adequate gifts should be left in exchange. It is clear that sincere efforts were made to live up to this semi-self-denying ordinance; but in time they inevitably broke down. Sarmiento, almost a throw-back to the earlier and tougher conquistadores, was not the best man to be put in charge of foraging. He was sent inland, and scaled the central range of Ysabel, a feat not repeated until this century. On the whole he held himself in hand for the time being, but it could not last: the gulf of misunderstanding was too great.

The Indians resorted to guerrilla harassment, interspersed with gestures, which in their own culture would show friendly intent. On at least one occasion these took the form of presenting human flesh for Spanish delectation, which was counter-productive. The dreary syndrome was repeated when the Spaniards moved to Guadalcanal; and we may be sure that news of the strange invaders had travelled ahead. The prizes of war were pigs, desperately needed by the Spaniards, central treasures in the local culture. Here, with a real food crisis, Sarmiento devastated a village (to Mendaña's anger) and took hostages by treachery. Nine Spaniards were killed in retaliation, and it became clear that cannibalism would not be kept within the family: the purser Catoira convinced himself that one Indian felt the legs of a soldier, his destined share of the feast, to see if they were tender. …^[35] So a possibly friendly native group was counter-massacred, the quartered bodies being left where the Spaniards had been slain, and Sarmiento burned all accessible villages. The process began anew on San Cristobal.

It was time to go. A council was held on 7 August: Mendaña, assuming that the islands were outliers of a great landmass, wished to press south for another ten or twelve degrees; Gallego argued that, while they had enough provisions- 125 -for a return voyage, little more food could be gathered by scouting round the islands—and the ships were in very poor shape. In view of the distance from Peru, much greater than had been anticipated, the food shortage, and native hostility, it was generally agreed that settlement was impossible; Mendaña, Sarmiento, and a couple of gold-hungry soldiers dissented, but Gallego won the day. Any course but a return would probably have meant disaster. Mendaña accepted the decision, but so reluctantly that he persistently tried to make the pilots head southeast, into the Trades, alleging that the winds would change with the Equinox and that they would thus make Chile, though it is clear that he was still hankering for a Southland. The pilots replied, unanswerably, ‘the landsman reasons and the seaman navigates’, and after a month formally protested against further vacillations: the only way of salvation was by New Spain. Only then did Mendaña give way completely.^[36]

North of the Equator they came across an island which Gallego identified as Salazar's San Bartolomé (Taongi) but which was actually Namu in the Marshalls; some rope and a nail fitted to a stick were probably relics of Villalobos or the San Geronimo in 1566. Further on, in 19–20°N, they sailed round the very isolated atoll of Wake Island (not seen again until 1796), and in mid-October the almiranta, now under Sarmiento's command, parted company. The Los Reyes lost its main-mast in a great storm—in forty-five years Gallego had not seen its like—but they patched up a jury-rig, at first with no more sail than a blanket, and came through, although the ship ‘being built only for the coast of Peru, for which work she was good enough … was only fit to drown us all’.^[37] The soldiers, racked with scurvy and reduced (like Mendaña himself) to a daily ration of ‘half a pint of water, and half of that was crushed cockroaches’, clamoured that ‘they no longer had any faith in charts and papers’ and demanded to turn back, which presumably meant a course for the Philippines, where Legazpi was still on Cebu. Faced with this lunacy, Mendaña asserted himself, for once in accord with his pilots: land must surely be near. Murmuring continued until, next day, a log ‘clean and quite free from barnacles’ was picked up; but it was still eight more days until, on 19 December, they sighted Baja California. Near the tip of the peninsula they rested and watered, and the sick were fed on pelicans; a great white cockatoo brought from the Solomons, ‘a very rare bird, the like of which has never been seen’, had been sacrificed to the same end. They could not make Navidad, and it was not till 23 January 1569 that they entered a Christian port, Colima, where three days later Sarmiento rejoined in the Todos Santos.^[38]

The voyage was not yet over, nor were their troubles. Sarmiento was the first problem: he was obviously insubordinate, and Mendaña had him arrested, probably to obviate false charges against himself. The transaction is obscure; Sarmiento was soon released, but either he or Mendaña, or both, thought it imprudent for him to come on to Peru. The battered voyagers were well received at Colima, but it was not much of a port and they could not refit there, while all down the coast, from Acapulco to Realejo, they were met at first with alarmed- 126 -suspicion, only allayed when Gallego was recognised by fellow-pilots: John Hawkins had been on the Atlantic coast two years earlier, and since ‘it had not been certified that we were not Lutherans’ they were taken for ‘strange Scottish people’, up to no good. At Realejo they were at last able to repair the ships, but only by Mendaña and Gallego pledging their personal credit. They did not reach Callao until 11 September 1569; they had been gone over twenty-two months.^[39]

The Southland had not been found, and the position of the islands actually discovered was far from certain. Unable to make adequate allowance for the favourable South Equatorial Current, Gallego had greatly underestimated the distance run from Callao to the Bajos de la Candelaria, making it 1638 leagues against an actual 2284, about 9700 and 13,525 km—a shortfall of over 28 per cent. It is true that he was able to deduce, correctly, that the islands lay not far southeast of New Guinea; but this depended on a grossly reduced figure for the width of the Pacific. With the techniques at Gallego's command, the error is excusable; but it set the Solomons on a wildly errant career.^[40]

Yet the existence of large high islands might well point to a mother-continent not far away, and indeed might not the islands seen to the west—Choiseul and New Georgia—be promontories from the main? If no tierra firme had been discovered, neither had any significant wealth been revealed; there were hints of gold, fallacious, but enough to spark off wild rumours along the waterfronts of the New World. Lopez Vaz, a Portuguese captured off La Plata by the Earl of Cumberland's men in 1587, spoke with great confidence of 40,000 pesos of gold, ‘besides great store of cloves and ginger’, brought back by Mendaña—this although the Spaniards ‘were not seeking or being desirous of gold’! He added the intriguing suggestion that the Solomons had been so named ‘to the ende that the Spaniards supposing them to bee those Isles from whence Salomon fetched gold to adorne the Temple at Jerusalem, might bee the more desirous to goe and inhabite the same’.^[41] The Ophirian Conjecture was far from dead; only Ophir was as elusive as ever.

To Mendaña, the isles, and their souls crying for salvation, became an obsession. He went to Spain with his uncle the Governor in 1569, and presented a too-glowing prospectus of his discovery and the opportunities it offered. Doubtless by the influence of de Castro, now on the Council of the Indies, he obtained in 1574 authority for a substantial expedition to found a colony of which he would become marquis: it seemed as if the old days of the Conquista had come again. But when he arrived in Peru, in 1577, he found the climate changed. His uncle was far away, and the new Viceroy, the great Francisco de Toledo, saw no point in such expensive ventures, even as a way of getting rid of turbulent soldiers of fortune—after all, they came back just the same, and claimed rewards for their services. Sarmiento was high in Toledo's favour, and corsairs more real than the phantasmal gente estrangera escoseses were soon to rock the Spanish Pacific world: while Drake and Cavendish were at large, not a- 127 -ship or man or peso could be spared for adventures however pious.^[42] But with the capture of Richard Hawkins off modern Ecuador in 1594 the immediate threat was eased; and Sarmiento, after his abortive fortification of the Straits of Magellan against a second Drake, and a polite captivity in England and a harsher one by Huguenot Frenchmen, was safely off the scene. A new Viceroy, the Marques de Cañete, was more favourably disposed than the ferociously realist Toledo. But it was a quarter of a century after Mendaña's return to Callao before he could set out once more on his quest.