Andrés de Urdaneta
Andrés de Urdaneta found the way home across the Pacific, which is a harder problem than finding the way out. He sailed at seventeen on the Loaisa expedition to the Moluccas, was wrecked and stranded, and spent eight years in the islands before reaching Lisbon by way of Portuguese custody. He then served in New Spain, and in his forties became an Augustinian friar. The problem he was brought out of the cloister to solve was commercial and it had defeated four expeditions. Ships could reach Asia from Mexico on the north-east trades, but every attempt to return had been driven back; without a return route the Philippines could not be held or traded with. The obstacle was the wind system itself. The north-east trades that carry a ship west across the tropical Pacific blow against anyone trying to come back along the same latitude, so the return was not a matter of better seamanship but of finding a different ocean to sail in. He sailed with Legazpi in 1564 as navigator and cosmographer, and in 1565 took a ship north from Cebu to about thirty-eight degrees, out of the trade winds and into the westerlies of the northern Pacific, then ran east before them to make landfall near Cape Mendocino and coast south to Acapulco. The voyage took four months and killed most of the crew. The route he proved - the tornaviaje - carried the Manila galleon for two hundred and fifty years, exchanging American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain, and it is the first sustained commercial link across the Pacific. It also carried the silver that Chinese fiscal policy came to depend on, which ties the Ming and Qing economies to the mines of Potosí more closely than either side understood.
- Lived: 1508 CE – 1568 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: explorer, religious_leader
