6 INDEX TO THE PACIFIC ISLANDS. 



three months and twenty days he sailed with favoring winds north, then north-west, 

 and finally west, suffering bitterly from scurvy and privation until on March 6, 152 1, 

 the green shores of the islands which his sailors called from the misconduct of the 

 natives "Ladrones" were seen, but not until ten days later were the sufferings of the 

 company relieved when they came to the important group since called the Philippines. 

 Then persuaded to aid the petty chief of Zebu in his wars Magalhaes fell miserably on 

 the island Mactan, and his comrades had not even the melancholly privilege of burying 

 his remains. The survivors completed the first circumnavigation of the globe but 

 strangely missed all the islands of the central Pacific and added only the islands of the 

 Marianas to the map of Balboa's ocean. 



Next from the west came the Portuguese Jorge Menezes and discovered New 

 Guinea, which only a few months later was rediscovered by the Spaniard Alvaro de 

 Saavedra sent bv Hernan Cortez from Mexico to the Moluccas. Saavedra on his re- 

 turn saw islands of the Caroline Group, and in 1542 Ruiz Lopez de Villalobos on a 

 voyage from Mexico to colonize the Philippines saw others of the same group but 

 neither could suffieientlv determine the position for identification. 



In 1567 Alvaro Mendana de Nevra discovered the important group which he 

 called fslas de Salomon and in 1594 Philip II. gave him a commission as Adelantado. 

 In April, 1595, Mendana sailed from Callao "para ir a pacifica y poblar las islas occi- 

 dentales ill mar til sur." Although he never again saw the Solomon Islands, he dis- 

 covered and named the Marquesas Group and came at last to the island of Nitendi or 

 Santa Cruz where he attempted to colonize but died and his survivors quarrelled with 

 the natives until his widow sailed with his remains and what was left of the colon}' to 

 Manila, where she married the Governor. Not long after the ship of the expedition 

 which carried the corpse of the Adelantado, and which had been driven from the 

 squadron by a storm, followed her to the island of Luzon where it ran ashore, sails all 

 set and rotten, and all hands dead on board, another tragical ending for a discoverer in 

 the Pacific! One of the ships of this expedition disappeared mysteriously in a slight 

 squall one evening and it was supposed that tired of the infelicities of the ill-fated 

 colony her company had deserted and taken the northern route back to Callao. If they 

 tried this long and perilous way, in a ship insufficiently provisioned, they never reached 

 their goal, and as the Hawaiian Group was not far from their probable track, it may 

 have been from this ship that the survivors were thrown on the shore of Hawaii, as 

 told in the native legends. 



Francis Drake had in the meantime crossed the Pacific in the " Golden Hind" 

 the first English warship to circumnavigate the globe. He left England December 

 13, 1577, entering the Pacific in September of the following year, and early in Novem- 

 ber, 1580, arrived at Plymouth; but his mission was not to discover new lands but 



rather to vex the Spaniard. 



[90J 



