‘With Quiros died the heroic age of Spain.’^[74] When he reached New Spain, the Viceroy Montesclaros was cordial at first, but relations were soon soured by a disagreement over the disposition of the capitana, the complaints of members of the crew, and Quiros's liberal interpretation of his original cédula requiring royal officers to assist him; this took the form of a demand for 2000 pesos to take him to Spain. The Viceroy warned the Court that they might expect very wordy complaints from Quiros, who in turn resolved not to be satisfied in future with anything but the most precise commitments to him. He reached Spain in October 1607, in utter penury, by his own account (according to Markham) unable to buy even paper, and reduced to pawning the royal standard he had unfurled at the New Jerusalem. And he needed much paper for the bombardment of memorials which he now let loose. They had worked before, but he was now more discredited than he realised. One of Iturbe's letters, a more reasoned attack than Prado's (which seems to have been merely docketed), had preceded Quiros to Spain, and other unfavourable reports came in.

The bureaucracy's treatment of Quiros was, however, much more reasonable and considerate than is generally allowed. Procrastination and expedient evasion were of course inevitable; but on the main count nothing could be done: Quiros's demands were fantastic—1000 men and half a million ducats. The Council of the Indies thought that there were better uses for a treasury surplus, should there ever be one. Between his persistence and the increasing evidence of his unfitness as a leader, though his knowledge and talents were appreciated, the Council wearily noted that ‘he is not a reliable man, although he has got it into his head that he is a second Columbus, and that is his affliction’—and indeed Quiros himself was not backward in making the same comparison, not to mention an implied bracketing of himself with Caesar, Hannibal, Alexander and Pyrrhus.^[75] In 1609 his affairs came before the council at least twenty times; one must sympathise with the senior clerks who had to read those endless memorials, and soothe down this intolerably monomaniac old bore.

But he retained some influential supporters, and it was felt that he must be handled gently lest he—of all people!—should defect to the heretics. Something- 142 -should be done: perhaps a post as cosmographer, perhaps send him to Peru to pacify him? At one point he was given 3000 ducats for his debts and a monthly retainer of 100 ducats—on condition that he ceased for a time to press his demands. As Kelly says, he ‘memorialized’ himself out of favourable consideration. The famous, or infamous, story that he was betrayed by being sent to Peru with two despatches—an open one entirely favourable, a secret one countermanding it—is not strictly true, for whenever Quiros received a favourable response, he demanded something much more specific, and once more no action was taken.^[76] There were also theological objections to the component of conquest which, despite his experiences at Santa Cruz and Espíritu Santo and his protests at the cruelty of the Conquista, Quiros still included in his plans.

At last a decision of a sort was reached: Quiros was to go out to Peru with the new Viceroy, who was to do his best to send him on his way to the Southland. … It was not much, and probably it was indeed meant as a fobbing-off: one can almost hear the great sigh of relief as the Council minuted ‘and with this it can be taken that we have settled with this man’. But it was obviously the best that he would get and, perhaps with confidence, perhaps with misgivings, he acquiesced. He sailed with the Viceroy in April 1615, but he was never again to see Peru, let alone the Southland: he died on the voyage, probably at Panama.

His dream did not quite die with him: the Franciscans and the Chilean lawyer Juan Luis Arias continued to plan and petition for a great missionary effort in the Austral Regions. The last Franciscan appeals to the Crown were made in 1630–3, but it was then far too late: the springs of the national energy were running down. Abroad the Empire was increasingly hard put to defend itself, at home economic decline was well advanced.^[77]

The last voyage of Quiros was virtually the end of new Spanish enterprise in the Pacific for a century and a half, until the Bourbon revival brought the great northwards thrust in California and the Tahitian voyages, both in the 1770s. Even in the sixteenth century, security in the South Sea had been rudely shaken by Drake and Cavendish; in the seventeenth, the Dutch made the running in Pacific activity. But their efforts were rather of geostrategic than of strictly geographical significance. The Mar de Sur was still a Spanish lake, its axis between the poles of Manila and Acapulco, and the English and Dutch forays are best considered as threats to the Spanish system; with the notable exception of the voyage of Schouten and Le Maire, and of Tasman in 1642–3, their geographical results were secondary, the result of accident rather than design.

Those memorials of whose diffusion the Council of the Indies was so nervous did indeed play some part in this new phase of Pacific navigation: Celsus Kelly relates

The work had fallen into other hands; but it had been initiated by the religious enthusiasm of Alvaro de Mendaña and Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, which brought them only an ambiguous Quixotic fame, some few moments of ecstasy, then disillusion and heartbreak.