KUNGL. SV. VET. AKADEMIENS HANDLINGAR. BAND 57. N:0 4. 67 



had written down this narrative; but his copy had been löst when the ship on which he 

 returned from Spain to Mexico had suffered shipwreck. Seventeen or eighteen years 

 låter, in 1584 or 1585, he jotted down from memory the principal points of the narrative 

 and sent them to the Archbishop of Mexico, Pedro de Moya y Contreras, who was at 

 this time acting as Viceroy of New Spain, and who was busy with plans for new disco- 

 veries in that part of the ocean that lay in the route of the galleons. In order to emphasize 

 still more the importance of these discoveries, and to encourage their achievement, Father 

 Aguirre reported as follows: 1 — 



A Portuguese ship on the way from Malacca to Japan had put in at Canton and 

 there taken in cargo, but, when the coast of Japan was already in sight, the ship was 

 thrown out of her course by a westerly storm. For eight days they drove under storm- 

 sails without seeing land; but when the weather cleared up on the ninth day, they sighted 

 two large islands. They put in at a good harbour here near a great town, surrounded by 

 stone walls, and were received very kindly by the inhabitants, who were white, wore 

 clothes of silk and fine cotton stuff, and spöke a language which was different from that 

 of the Chinese and Japanese, but which was so easy to learn that the Portuguese were 

 able to make themselves understood by the natives during the förty days they stayed 

 there. The islands were very fertile and rich in silver and other products; the goods 

 they had on board were sold at a profit, and the ship was laden with silver, after which they 

 started back to Malacca. The position of the islands is given as between 35 and 40 degrees; 

 but the longitude in relation to Japan could not be determined in consequence of the 

 stormy and hazy weather. The islands, which lay east of Japan, were called Islas del 

 Armenio after an Armenian merchant, who had been sent ashore to bargain with the 

 natives and who was highly esteemed by the people on board. 



The story of these islands, which the Spaniards obviously regarded as lying far out 

 in the sea to the east of Japan, seems to have been also known to Captain Francisco 

 Gali, for the island of Armenicao, which he mentions in the course of his voyage of 1584, 

 can scarcely have been any other than Islas del Armenio. 2 



I have tried to show in another place 3 that, as a matter of fact, these islands are the 

 Loo Choo Islands, and that the story of the discovery is probably an altered version of the 

 report, by the Portuguese captain Diogo de Freytas, of the first discovery of Japan by the 

 Europeans; the statement as to the position of the islands could in that case be explained 

 by a failure of memory on the part of Father Aguirre when he jotted down what he 

 recalled of the story that he had löst many years before. This assumption, it is true, 

 does not seem reconcilable with what Francisco Gali had to say about the position of 

 Armenicao, which islands he, too, regarded as lying east of Japan; but even if the 

 origin of the name Islas del Armenio must be regarded as unsettled, yet it is not 



1 Carta de Fray Andres de Aguirre al Ilustrissimo Seiior Arzobispo de Mexico, dando noticias del 

 descubrimiento de las islas nombradas de Armenio, en la costa del Sur, in Col. de docum. ined., XIII, 1870, 

 pp. 545 — 549. 



2 Cf. p. 46 above. 



3 See the present writer's paper, entitled A Contribution to the History of the Discovery of Japan 

 (Transactions of the Japan Soc. of London, Vol. XI, 1914, p. 252). 



