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HISTORY This Week
How a Forgotten Explorer’s Secret Mission Unlocked the Pacific
00:35:05
When an Afro-Portuguese mariner opened the Pacific Ocean to the entire world.
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Hello History this week listeners. It's Sally here. As we are heading to the end of the year, I just wanted to thank you all for sticking with us these last five years. We really do love bringing these stories to you every week and we cannot wait to keep it going in 2026. If you like what you have been hearing, you can always support our work by subscribing to History this Week. Plus exclusively on Apple Podcasts. You can also get email notifications and bonus content by signing up@historythisweekpodcast.com and of course you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook. Thank you so much for listening. We could not make this show without you.
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History this Week, December 1, 1564 hi, I'm Sally Helm. Four Spanish vessels in the middle of the Pacific. They left a secret port in Mexico about two weeks ago. Their goal, to sail across this vast ocean and back. It's never been done before. If these ships succeed, they'll open up a new trade and travel route that will change the relationships among many countries on earth. And they'll give Spain an edge in a long running high stakes competition with its chief colonial rival, Portugal. For a few days now, the smallest of the four ships has been at the front of the pack, the San Lucas. It's been given the job of scoping out dangers that may lie ahead, perhaps because of the skill of its pilot, a man named Lope Martin. Martin is an unusual presence on these Spanish ships. He's one of the people in charge, but he doesn't come from the upper classes. In fact, his ancestors were enslaved. He's one of just a few black mariners to rise through the ranks during the age of exploration. On this first day of December, Martin's ship, the San Lucas, is quite far ahead of the others, which would be fine, except that night a storm comes in from the northeast. The little San Lucas is getting swamped by big waves. It can't slow down too much or it might get dragged under the water. It's dark, hard to get in touch with the other boats to let them know what's going on. The captain orders that a lantern be placed in in the stern of the boat to let the other boats know what they're doing. They leave it out all night, but they don't hear from any of the other ships. And in the morning when they look behind them, nothing but open water. The San Lucas has been separated from the fleet. They're on their own. The following year, against all odds, the tiny San Lucas makes it back to Mexico, winning glory from the Spanish king himself. And that's when the mariners aboard those other ships come forward with an accusation about that fateful stormy night in the middle of the Pacific. The San Lucas is accused of absconding from the fleet under the cloak of night. The implication is that the talented black pilot and his ship only got back first through treachery.
- [04:42]
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Today.
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Betrayals, mutinies, bloody murder and a high stakes trip across the Pacific. How did the San Lucas, the smallest ship in the fleet, complete a near impossible journey that would connect the world? And how did the trailblazing mariner Lope Martin get erased from the story? Professor Andres Resendez has been thinking about this pilot, Lope Martin on and off for 20 years. He first caught a glimpse of Martin in the archives when he was working on another unrelated book. There wasn't much material, but what little.
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I found was so intriguing to me that it had been a black pilot who had been the first to open the Pacific.
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Most famous explorers were white men from the upper classes with connections and resources to tap.
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I mean, just think about Columbus, Magellan, on and on. So to have a person of color breaking into those ranks was quite unusual.
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Resendez now teaches history at UC Davis and he's just written a whole book uncovering the story of Lope Martin and this specific journey. It's called Conquering the An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery. After years reading pilot logbooks and other contemporary accounts. Resendez probably knows Martin's life better than anyone alive today.
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He was a very capable and very determined individual. As you will gather from his personal.
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Story, Martin was born on the southern coast of Portugal. His ancestors had arrived there as slaves.
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He was, in the parlance of the day, a mulatto, that is, a man of African descent.
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Martin himself was a free Afro Portuguese man. And from a young age, he started.
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Out in the very harsh life of the seas.
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This region of Portugal was a maritime hub. After Columbus's voyage in 1492, both Portugal and Spain had made it their business to crisscross the globe, doing the often brutal work of colonialism, trading and pillaging, claiming lands and subjects. So there were many ships setting out from Lope Martin's hometown, bound for Africa, for the Americas.
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These were grueling voyages that require a lot of fresh recruits normally taken off the streets. And so Martin must have been one of those.
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But he doesn't remain a lowly sailor for long. He sets his sights on something higher. He wants to become a licensed pilot.
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Which was a huge jump from ordinary mariner to pilot, because by that era, the art of navigation, as it was called, required all these training in mathematics and cartography that only the most determined ordinary mariners would go through in order to pass these rigorous examinations.
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Martin wants to do his training in Seville Sea, Spain, where lots of expeditions were setting out for the New World. No matter that he's Portuguese, he was.
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Not going to let anything get in the way of his goal.
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He passes himself off as a Spaniard. Lots of people knew he'd done this. It wasn't an uncommon move. And Martin passes those rigorous examinations to become a licensed pilot, one of the best.
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Lope Martin was so extraordinary that he was purposefully recruited for these secret, no expenses spared kind of an expedition that the Spanish crown was organizing.
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This opportunity comes up sometime after he finishes his training. No expenses spared. Top secret. Why is it secret?
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Because Spain does not want Portugal to know about this.
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These countries are the two maritime superpowers of the age, and they'd made an agreement just after Columbus expedition. They'd had the Pope essentially draw a line down the center of the Atlantic Ocean. Spain can claim lands on the left, that includes most of the Americas, and Portugal can claim lands on the right. Western Africa, South Africa, Southeast Asia, a chunk of Brazil.
- [09:15]
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For the two superpowers, this was the ultimate win win agreement. And of course, everybody else would have objected, but everybody else was not a part of the treaty, so they were.
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Not included yes, there are some issues with this. Spain and Portugal each get half the world plan. Most importantly, that the rest of the world does not necessarily want to be claimed. And for another thing, the world is in fact round, which means that Portugal and Spain are basically circling it in opposite directions, claiming and conquering as they go. But now Spain has a problem. If they want to open a trade route to Asia, they have to start on the west coast of the Americas and go across the Pacific and then ideally come back that same way. They'd managed to do the trip there. There had been about seven expeditions.
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All of them ended in disaster. Everybody ended up being able to get to Asia, but they were stranded in Asia. There was no return.
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The currents on the way back are just incredibly hard to navigate. Those poor mariners had to go the long way around. But in the 1560s, Spain gives it another shot. On November 21, 1564, at around 2 in the morning, four ships leave the tiny Mexican port town of Navidad, heading out across the Pacific for that top secret trip. Their destination is the Philippines and they'll be traveling as a pack. That way, if one ship gets into trouble, the others can help.
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The largest of the ships, the San Pedro, was over 500 tons.
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This is huge, by the way.
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The largest of Columbus ships was not even 100.
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The San Pedro is guided by a famous mariner named Andres de Urdaneta, and commanded by his friend, the fancy nobleman, Miguel Lopez de Legaspi. And at the other end of the spectrum is a little 40 ton ship, the San Lucas. If the San Pedro was a shark.
- [11:21]
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The San Lucas was Minot, carrying only 20 men in very cramped conditions.
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The commander of the San Lucas is a nobleman named Don Alonso de Arellano. He has no maritime experience. Luckily, navigating the ship is the extraordinary pilot, Lope Martin. He has his work cut out for him. The smaller the ship, the harder it is to navigate, the less it can withstand storms or choppy waves. Plus, the San Lucas can carry only eight barrels of water. The San Pedro, in contrast, has 80. That's part of the reason all four ships are supposed to stay together. The San Lucas will have a tough go of it on its own.
- [12:06]
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To communicate, they have agreed on signals, flags during the day and lanterns during the night.
- [12:13]
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But on the night of December 1, very soon after they all set out, the flags and the lanterns become useless. Lope Martin and Captain Don Alonso are sailing far ahead of the other ships. When a storm hits, one of the other boats signals at them to slow down. But according to Martin he can't.
- [12:36]
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The San Lucas was very low on the waist, as he put it. So if you were going at a certain angle against the waves, you would get swamped by some of these waves in this storm. So what he claims is that he couldn't do it.
- [12:52]
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He says the ship would have been swamped by the waves, and so he.
- [12:56]
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Had to save the ship first. And these becoming separated from the rest of the ships.
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Now, the fleet did have a plan for this situation. If they lose sight of each other, they're supposed to head straight to the next islands on their planned route and wait for the rest of the fleet.
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If that didn't work, they would mark a tree or build a cross. And underneath that tree or that cross, they would bury a bottle with messages telling the ships that were farther back what their plans were. And so they would know what to do when they found the message.
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The San Lucas tries to follow this.
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Plan, but it was extremely difficult to stop. In some of these Micronesian islands, they are coming from the bottom of the ocean as volcanoes, basically the tip of a volcano that had become inactive millions of years ago.
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The terrain of these volcanic islands is unpredictable. In some spots, you drop an anchor and never hit bottom. The sea was that deep. In others, there are these tricky shallow reefs just below the surface, like deadly.
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Traps for the ships.
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So the San Lucas can't stop at the nearest island. And meanwhile, the commander aboard the flagship San Pedro, Captain Legaspi, he changes course himself. He decides the rest of the fleet should make a pit stop in Guam and claim it as a Spanish colony. The San Lucas has no way of.
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Knowing where they've gone, thus making the separation completely permanent.
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- [16:05]
A
Martine's ship continues on with the initial plan and eventually arrives safely in the Philippines. There they mark trees with crosses and bury notes for the fleet. And then they wait. At first they're trading with the Filipino islanders and relations are fairly good. But remember, the San Lucas is small. They don't have a lot of provisions, and eventually they run out of goods to offer.
- [16:31]
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They went from being celebrated guests engaged in a profitable trade to guests who had outlived their welcome to probably hostiles by the end. So by the end of the month, the people of the San Lucas were fearing an imminent, imminent attack.
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The San Lucas gets moving and spends a few weeks working its way through the Philippine Islands. And then it confronts a choice. The mariners can stay put and risk attack. They can go searching for the rest of the fleet, but risk using up their remaining provisions in the process. They can surrender to the nearby Portuguese and hope they'll be treated kindly, or they can risk the perilous return home. The captain, Don Alonso, leaves the decision with the pilot, Lope Martin.
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And so we know that the pilot thought about it, look at his charts, and he said that, well, if we try the return, we may have a shot.
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Martin thinks it's still early in the year. Maybe if we sail way up north, we can catch the winds and currents at just the right time.
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Somehow this extraordinary mulatto pilot was able to solve the last riddle of the puzzle and had figured out how to achieve the return. Because if you do that too late in the year, then you're not going to be able to do it.
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This is the key to making a successful Pacific passage, but it's also a dangerous plan. No one has ever done it before, and this ship in particular, the San.
- [18:11]
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Lucas, was Never meant to be the ship to accomplish their return. It was intended to stay in the Philippines as a support ship there.
- [18:19]
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The San Pedro may have had enough food and water and supplies to last the whole trip back, but not the San Lucas. Still, they decide to risk it. They don't have great options. And so they set off back across the Pacific. Pretty soon their sails become weak, but they don't have the supplies to mend them.
- [18:42]
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Eventually they will start using their own clothes and their own blankets in order to patch up the sails.
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But they're traveling way up north, so it's freezing cold.
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They are experiencing extremely cold weather and they have very little clothes.
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So they're like using their blankets to patch the sack sails, but then they don't have any blankets to keep warm.
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Warm, exactly.
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The passage is windy, stormy.
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There's a storm for a month, which is a problem when you have to find your location by measuring the altitude of the sun. Well, if there's no sun for a month, you can't find your location for a month. So that was another problem.
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Perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous part of this whole whole journey is an on ship battle. Humans versus rats. The creatures on both sides are thirsty. They've used up several of their water casks already.
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And then one day, in desperation, the rats started gnawing on the casks of water. And in two dramatic hours, they spilled the water contents of two of the five remaining casks.
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Oh my gosh.
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So in order to defend what little water they had left, the people aboard the San Lucas had to post around the clock guards to fend off the attacks of the rats.
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According to the ship's records, they killed 20 to 30 rats each night. The trip and the battle against the rats, it all takes a serious toll on this tiny crew.
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They are weakened, they have scurvy, they have been unable to eat properly, they have been unable to sleep properly, and some of them are barely able to stand.
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Then one day in July, they finally sight land. Lope Martin turns in the direction of Navidad and picks up speed.
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Martin was a little bit of a daredevil and you can imagine how motivated he must have been after sighting land that he's going to return to navy that as fast as possible.
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Too fast, in fact. When a storm develops, the ship can't slow down in time. It ends up nearly wrecked by a powerful gust of wind.
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The mainsail is in tatters. Everything turns into pandemonium. And of course, they were knocked off course in the course of these frantic hours. But they were finally able to regain some control over the vessel and basically limp into Navidad, where the men were received as heroes.
- [21:21]
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Lope Martin and Captain Don Alonso have finally completed a round trip Pacific journey. They've opened up the opportunity of a lucrative new trade route and brought glory to the Spanish crown. And then another miracle. Two months later, the flagship San Pedro arrives back in Navidad too. Captain Legaspi has stayed behind in the Philippines to run a new Spanish colony there. But one of his representatives has a message. He formally accuses Lope Martin and Don Alonso of treason, abandoning the fleet on that fateful December night. Why did the rest of the fleet think that they had abandoned them? Like, why would that have been a good move?
- [22:11]
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Well, first of all, there are some precedents for that. For example, even in Columbus journey on his return, one of his ships went ahead to claim the glory. But more importantly, you have to consider that Lope Martin, even though he is on paper a Spanish pilot, everybody knew that he was a Portuguese. They also knew that a single load of some of these precious spices would be enough to make everybody aboard the vessel immensely rich.
- [22:44]
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So it's plausible that Lope Martin and Don Alonso had some kind of motive. Plus, there actually had been a plot against Legaspi led by some of the non Spaniards in the crew. It's quite possible that Martin had been involved. But Resendez points out Martin never actually deviated from the official plan. Go to the Philippines and back.
- [23:04]
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He waited for the rest of the fleet, he tried to rejoin everybody, and he ultimately returned to the Americas as the original mission was.
- [23:15]
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He didn't just abscond with some cinnamon to get rich. But even still, Legaspi is basically accusing him and his shipmates of treason. Legaspi claims that the San Lucas lit out from the pack that night when the weather was totally clear, which seems like just a lie. Even Legaspi's own pilot's logs say it had been raining that night. And when a governing body in Mexico rules on the case, the charges are thrown out.
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So here we have the difference between a white nobleman, very well connected, who is simply allowed to do whatever he wants.
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Captain Don Alonso is free to travel back to Spain and be received by the King.
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But Lope Martin, this black pilot accused of treason, just like the nobleman, but he's unable to leave Mexico. And in fact, he's forced into this other mission that it's pretty obvious that Lope Martin would not willingly accept.
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The pilot is told that the Spanish crown needs him to go back to the Philippines to resupply Legaspi and his men.
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And what better pilot than Lope Martin to steer that ship? Ship.
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But Martin has a hunch. This isn't the full story, and pretty soon he gets proof. On board this resupply ship will be a secretary carrying a sealed envelope. But the secretary happens to be one of Martine's allies, and he shows him what the letter says.
- [24:49]
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He would be hanged upon arriving in the Philippines. Never.
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Nevertheless, Martin has to pilot this ship, but if it's up to him, there's no way it'll reach its destination.
- [25:06]
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This trip is meant to be Lope Martin's deep death sentence, but the pilot is not easily daunted.
- [26:44]
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Somehow, in the course of these preparations, Lope Martin starts looking at this as a very dangerous opportunity rather than as his final sail that will lead him to the hangman.
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He recruits as many allies as he can find to crew the ship and he approaches the Ship's captain, he says.
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Frankly, I have no reason to go to my destination because I know I'm going to be hanged. But this is a well supplied ship. You have a very good crew and we can do anything. We can take you to Japan, we can take you to the Spice Islands, and we can make you super rich.
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But the captain says, no dice. This ship is going to the Philippines. So that fails. So what does he try next?
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So as the weeks pass and it is clear that the only way to remain alive was to get rid of.
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The captain, Plan B is mutiny. Once they're on their way, Martine starts to stir up resentment among the crew. And he finds a wedge issue. The captain has this horse, a beloved horse. It's being held on board the ship, using up precious resources.
- [27:59]
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The horse required a lot of water, and so Lope Martinen commented that, well, we should really kill the horse.
- [28:06]
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One night, another sailor slips down to the place where the horse is being held, wielding a dagger. The next morning, the horse is found above a puddle of its own blood. The captain is furious.
- [28:21]
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You can imagine what the tension must have been in the middle of the ocean. Half of the ship was basically siding with Martin. These were mostly the mariners, and half of the ship, mostly soldiers, were for the plan of going to the Philippines and supplying Legazpi.
- [28:37]
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Martin himself is stoking that tension. And finally one night, two of his allies go after the captain.
- [28:47]
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They descend through a hatch that leads straight into the quarters of the captain and basically murder the captain and his son.
- [28:56]
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So the song soldiers on board pick a new captain, a well respected sergeant, one of the people who had killed the previous captain. This sergeant feels guilty about the crime he's committed and nervous that he'll be accused of mutiny. So to defend himself against these charges, he decides to stay on course for the Philippines. Martin has a harder task now. The old captain was unpopular. The new captain is popular.
- [29:26]
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Martin was a very skillful plotter. I mean, his skill as a mariner was matched only by his skill at human connections and building relationships and forging alliances.
- [29:38]
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So Martine organizes another mutiny. In the end, he's able to have this second commander tied up and thrown overboard. And now, against all odds, Martin is getting what he'd hoped for.
- [29:54]
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He's fast turning from a man at the verge of death and turning into the leader of a new expedition that he himself may not have known exactly what it would be, but the possibilities were endless.
- [30:09]
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Eventually, the ship approaches the Micronesian Islands. Martin tells his shipmates everyone needs to go ashore so he can make repairs to the vessel. But some of them are worried that he plans to abandon them. Martin has many allies on board, but there's also a group of loyalists who want to follow through on the plan and go to the Philippines. Martin, however, is very persuasive. And so the ship anchors off these islands and everyone goes ashore. For a while, the pilot and his allies are trying to convince any undead decided men to stick with them.
- [30:43]
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But then there is a counterplot by the loyalists.
- [30:48]
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The loyalists swim out to the ship and manage to take it over. But then they realize Martine has removed the sails just in case something like.
- [31:00]
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This happened, so that the ship was as good as a sitting duck.
- [31:04]
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It's a stalemate. Martin and his followers on land want food. The loyalists aboard the ship want sails.
- [31:12]
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And so they negotiated, and eventually they left some food for Lope Martin and his 26 followers. And in exchange, they received the sails.
- [31:22]
A
And then the ship pulls away from that Micronesian island, bound for the Philippines at last, but without the condemned pilot, Lopez. As the years go on, Martin doesn't re emerge from that island in the Pacific, and he starts to fade into obscurity. It's Urdaneta who gets the credit for accomplishing the first round trip Pacific journey. Lope Martin is written out of the story. Do you think that has to do with his race and class status?
- [31:56]
E
Yes. I mean, I think it's hard to believe that the color of his skin did not play a role. And it also has to do with the fact that what this expedition accomplished was not a great conquest like Columbus or Cortes or Pizarro. It was an achievement of connectedness. And this is more difficult to quantify.
- [32:18]
A
The impact is more nebulous. But here's one way Resendez sees it. In the years after this trip in 1564, there are annual Spanish expeditions to Asia. Trade booms, and the population of China in the next few centuries goes way up.
- [32:35]
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China is able to grow its population for a number of reasons, but one of the most important was the unfolding of these very nourishing and very productive New World crops. Corn and sweet potatoes particular.
- [32:50]
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Some of that can be traced directly to Lope Martin's journey.
- [32:54]
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So just in terms of the overall demographic balance of the world, it had a huge impact. China's weight in the world became huge at this time, and it is a feature of the global economy that is pretty obvious to us even today.
- [33:11]
A
Now, even if this specific journey was more about trade than conquest, it was still about conquest too. The Spanish colonial project had devastating impacts around the world. The and Lope Martin cuts a complicated figure in that context. If he had been allowed to stay in Mexico or go back to Spain, he may have ended up living the same kind of life as the other conquistadors, even though almost all of them were white men of privilege. Those conquistadors basically live out their lives enjoying the spoils of colonialism. And Martin was on that path until he's betrayed. He's kind of doing that right, like he seems to be into the Merida project, but he ends up totally differently.
- [33:55]
E
Well, I think you are totally right in that, of course he is a product of that society of the 16th century Iberian world and given more time and more success, he may have turned into another Columbus, but in this context he is, it seems to me, another victim of these colonial enterprise. Here you have a man of color who is forced into this harsh life of the sea, who excels at that, who is handpicked for this incredible expedition, and then who is betrayed.
- [34:26]
A
But the betrayal isn't the end of Martin's story. After that ship pulls away from the Micronesian island, leaving him on shore, the trail of his life goes cold. But there's no reason to believe that he and his men died. These are well armed, well supplied, experienced adventurers. And future expeditions see some tantalizing hints that Martin and his men may have just stayed on this specific island and made a life for themselves. That's what Resendez likes to imagine.
- [35:00]
E
What I would find most satisfying is that the man who basically was able to navigate the Pacific back and forth for the first time time in recorded history somehow made his home right in the middle of the Pacific in these tiny islands where he may have found a place for himself and his followers in spite of all these injustices, in spite of all of these terrible maneuverings on the part of royal officials bent on hanging him, even though he appears to have done the right thing all along.
- [35:46]
A
Thanks for listening to history this week. For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today. If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address historythisweekhistory.com or you can leave us a voicemail. 212-351-0410. Special thanks today to Andres Resendez. You can read the full story of this cross Pacific journey in his book Conquering the An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery. This episode was produced by Julia Press. History this week is also produced by Julia Julian Gruder, Ben Dickstein and me, Sally Helm. Our editor and sound designer is Dan Rosado. Our researcher is Emma Fredericks. Our executive producers are McKamey, Lynn, Jesse Katz and Ted Butler. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review History this week, wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you next week.