The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West by Ricardo Padrón

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West by Ricardo Padrón Noemí Martín Santo Ricardo Padrón. The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West. U OF CHICAGO P, 2020, 352 PP ARGUING THAT THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION of the Spanish Empire connected East and Southeast Asia with the New World, Ricardo Padrón traces the efforts made to forge this transpacific vision. In the chronicles, letters, accounts, and cartographies of Habsurg Spain, East and Southeast Asia became Las Indias del poniente or The Indies of the Setting Sun and appeared as a space on the Spanish side of the line of demarcation that, since the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, divided the world between the Castilian and the Portuguese hemispheres. Chroniclers and mapmakers contributed to the institutionalization of the idea that the Pacific Ocean (Mar del Sur or South Sea) was a narrow and navigable oceanic basin through the use of different metageographical frameworks, specifically the architecture of continents (the division of the globe into its major constitutive landmasses) or the theory of climates that divided the globe into frigid, torrid, and temperate zones (39). In his introduction, Padrón explains that he classifies his eight chapters in three groups organized around a vision of the Pacific instead of the Atlantic at the center of the Spanish colonial projections. Chapters 1 and 2 examine two major strategies of representing the Pacific: what he calls the "cartography of containment," a depiction of the world's oceans as reasonably well-bounded basins, contained by the major landmasses or "continents"; and the "rhetoric of smooth sailing," a series of devices and techniques used by court authors to indicate that crossing the Pacific was a shorter and easier enterprise than travelers described in their writings. Padrón discusses maps and books to demonstrate the evolution of the globe's geographic imagery from the classics and to provide the background needed to understand the interpretation of the world in the early modern era. An important point to consider is that in the sections of a map that appear empty, the modern reader tends to see water; in comparison, the early modern reader imagined land filling that space or admitted to having no knowledge about the unknown area (54). Padrón dedicates chapters 3 and 4 to explaining the construction of transpacific distances and difficulties in mapping the Pacific. Maps and [End Page 187] writings produced in the Spanish court after news of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition (from 1523 to 1552) lacked cartographic empiricism, not only because of inaccurate methods and measuring techniques, but also because of political purposes and anxieties related to the line of demarcation and the possession of such key territories as the Spicery (Padrón's term for the Moluccas or Spice Islands). On the one hand, Padrón studies the narration by Antonio Pigafetta (ca. 1480–1534), for whom the Pacific is incommensurable and mythical, while, on the other, he examines the language of imperial chroniclers and geographers, who domesticate the ocean using the rhetoric of smooth sailing. In fact, the latter do not mention the hardships of Magellan's expedition or address the length of travel; instead, they describe the evangelization of the islands. In chapters 5 to 8, Padrón examines the East and Southeast Asia as a new frontier for Spanish imperialism in the cartographic literature produced after the establishment of the first Spanish colony in Manila under the governance of Miguel López de Legazpi (1502–72; governship 1571–72) and the discovery of the return route from Southeast Asia (the tornaviaje) by the Augustinian friar and explorer Andrés de Urdaneta (139). Chapter 5 is dedicated to the Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias (1574) by cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco (ca. 1530–98), which was part of an official effort to reconceptualize the Indies in the wake of the establishment of the Manila Galleon route and the transformation of Manila from a local port into a nexus for global commerce. As López de Velasco recounts, the...