KUNGL. SV. VET. AKADEMIENS HANDLINGAR. BAND 57. N:0 4. 31 



Another participator in the expedition, Father Cosmo de Torres, ga ve some short, but 

 by no means unimportant, notes on it in a letter to Ignatius de Loyola from Goa, 25 

 January 1549. 1 Finally, too, the account for which we are indebted to Antonio Galväo 

 must be included amongst the original sources, as its author, as sometime Governor of 

 the Moluccas (1536 — 40), evidently derived his information from the Portuguese authori- 

 ties there. Though his work came out in Portuguese as early as 1563, and in an English 

 translation in 1601, it was not until quite close to our own time that it hasbecomegener- 

 ally accessible through the edition produced by the Hakluyt Society, in 1862. 



With the help of all these sources I shall attempt to give a reconstructed picture of 

 Villalobos' voyage, in order thereby to show whether there is any ground for the discovery 

 ascribed to Juan Gaytan. 



All our sources agree in stating that the expedition sailed on 1 November 1542 

 from a harbour in the neighbourhood of La Navidad (19° 10' N. lat.), which Gaytan calls 

 Porto Santo, but two of the other descriptions call Puerto de Juan Gallego. After having 

 sailed westwards 180 leagues in 8 days they saw "a little uninhabited island" (according 

 to Santisteban), which they supposed to be the same as that discovered by Hernando 

 de Grijalva in 1533, and to which Grijalva had given the name of Santo Tomas. But 

 probably this supposition was incorrect: the land they saw was quite certainly the little 

 island, likewise discovered by Grijalva, Los Innocentes, now San Benedicto. After sailing 

 3 days and 12 leagues they discovered another island, to which was given the name of 

 La Anublada because it was covered with cloud: here they took some wood and water, 

 although at great risk of going aground when the anchor cables threatened to be cut by 

 the submarine rocks. This was presumably the true Sayito Tomas or Socorro,- the larg- 

 est in the Revilla-Gigedo Archipelago and the only one where it would seem to be pos- 

 sible to land without great difficulty; the summit, 2000 feet high, causes the formation 

 of clouds which gained the island the name of "the cloud-capped". 3 



Two or three days låter, when they had sailed a further distance of 80 leagues, an- 

 other island hove in sight: it was called Roca Partida, but as it lay to windward they could 

 not approach it: to judge from the distance it must have been the present Clarion or 

 Santa Rosa, not the island which on modern maps is called Roca Partida. 



They were now (13 or 14 November) within the trade-wind belt and probably they 

 were led by the prevailing direction of the wind to lower the latitude pretty soon. For 

 55 days they sailed without sighting land, although they often fancied that they could 

 see signs that land was near. On the night before 3 December the pilot on the flagship 

 was warned by the lookout: he immediately commanded them to luff and cast the lead; 

 "by the grace of God", it is added, it happened that the ship, which usually sailed badly 



1 The original text of this letter, in Portuguese, was published by H. Haas, Geschichte des Christen- 

 tums in Japan, II, Tokyo 1901, pp. 355—360. Cosmo de Torres afterwards did much important work as a 

 missionary in Japan, where he died in 1570. 



2 Grijalva himself describes Santo Tomas in a way which closely agrees with modern descriptions. Cf. 

 James Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic and round Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean, Lond. 1798, 

 pp. 109 et sequ.; A. J. Grayson, Ejcploring Expedition to the Island of Socorro (Proceed. of the Boston Soc. 

 of Nat, Hist., Vol. XIV, 1872, pp. 287-297). 



3 "The summit is continually covered with clouds". Colnett, op. cit., p. 119. 



