Ricardo Padrón’s new book is an in-depth exploration of the place of the Pacific Ocean in the geographic imagination of imperial Spain. Spanish cartographers and chroniclers struggled with the vastness of its measure and its meaning—geocultural, historical, cosmographic—for it was both a daunting natural barrier for Spain’s westward imperial expansion and a malleable surface upon which to plot connectivity. In fact, Padrón argues that Spanish cartography and historiography strove to contain and even shrink—narratively and visually—the formidable size of the so-called South Sea in order to further Spanish imperial claims to the East Indies and to endow its increasingly complex colonial system with continuity and cohesion.The invention of the Pacific was in part the result of a crucial geopolitical conflict between the Portuguese and the Spanish about on which side of the Tordesillas meridian the Moluccas fell. But this was far from a simple story. By guiding the reader through the itineraries of Spanish colonial writing, Padrón’s powerful argument shows that most chroniclers and cartographers working for the Habsburgs mapped the Far East as the transpacific West. And this had decisive consequences for imperial practice and discourse in the early modern period.The first two chapters of the book offer a theoretical framework and a narrative point of departure for the entire journey. After familiarizing the reader, in the first chapter (“The Map behind the Curtain”), with classic scholarship on cultural geography and on Pacific history (Spate, O’Gorman, or Lestringant, among others), Chapter 2 (“South Sea Dreams”) focuses on Jorge Reinel’s 1519 nautical chart to introduce a series of concepts and claims that would be key for the overall argument, the most important being the idea that the “architecture of continents was not the only framework [. . . ] available for imagining the world” (70). Cartographic literature of the period displayed a kind of “metageographical plurality” that is key to understanding both the invention of the Pacific and early modern worldmaking more generally.From the dreams of the South Sea, the narrative turns to “Pacific Nightmares” in Chapter 3, which includes a detailed reading of Antonio Pigafetta’s, Maximilianus Transylvanus’s, Peter Martyr’s, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s accounts of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world. By examining “the cultural construction of transpacific distance,” the chapter explores the “anxieties and contradictions, political, ideological, and cosmographical that mark Spanish world-making projects” (81). Pigafetta narrated the Pacific as an immense waterworld, painful, and untamable, ultimately sublime. Transylvanus, Martyr, and Oviedo, for their part, set to the task of domesticating it, of containing it in different metageographical figurations that made it amenable for imperial exploration and subjection. These imperial chroniclers—none of which had ever been to the Pacific—came to the rescue of the transpacific enterprise by erasing from their accounts Pigafetta’s nightmarish stories about extreme hunger, disease, and failed landings. Despite their efforts, the chapter closes with an analysis of the ways in which a map by Diogo Ribeiro made in 1529 registered the Spanish failure at commanding, imaginatively and nautically, the South Sea.The next two chapters seem to confirm this failure, which progressively brings about the geographic and ontological separation of America and Asia. Chapter 4, “Shipwrecked Ambitions,” studies the “second wave of South Sea ventures” (108) led by Saavedra, Loaysa, and Villalobos, as told in Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias and Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias. Oviedo’s optimistic account of the South Sea as a space of imperial expansion is undermined, again, by the experience of hunger, whereas in Gómara the transpacific enterprise is also hampered by the sea as a physical obstacle, one that also ends up certifying the insularity of America and the alterity of Asia. Raising doubts about the theory of Amerasian continuity, however, did not entirely foreclose the possibility of a “Spanish lake” (Spate) reaching to the Indies of the West, as shown in maps by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (based on Ribeiro’s) and Diego Gutiérrez/Hieronymous Cock.The conquest and settlement of Manila was a turning point in Spanish cartographic discourse about East and South East Asia. Chapter 5, “Pacific Conquests,” focuses on the work of cosmographer and chronicler Juan López de Velasco. His Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias (1574) is “suspended between a vision of the Indies that seems to participate in and even contribute to the ongoing invention of America and one that breathes new life into established ways of imagining Spain’s potential transpacific empire” (146). López de Velasco’s main strategy to figure the Pacific as a conquerable ocean is a “hydrography of containment” (157) that presents the South Sea as a symmetric double of the North, and thus as a conquered and navigable maritime space.After the Philippine turn, Padrón goes on to focus on Spanish imperial discourse on China and Japan. For both Sinophobes and Sinophiles alike, argues Padrón in chapter six (“The Location of China”), the Pacific had indeed become a domesticated lake, which made it easier for China to fall on Castile’s transpacific west rather than on Portugal’s transasiatic east. In Mendoza’s Historia de la gran China, which culminates a long textual tradition of European Sinography (Francisco de Sande, Bernardino de Escalante, etc.), the Middle Kingdom would indeed be located in the middle of “an idealized Spanish Pacific world that promised not only the salvation of countless Asian souls, but the salvation of Spain itself” (203).“The Kingdom of the Setting Sun,” as the seventh chapter is titled, explores the role Japan played in the geopolitical imagination of the Spanish empire. It provides useful insights into the ways in which Franciscan millenarism informed the order’s spatial discourse, as seen particularly in Ribadeneira’s Historia de las islas del Archipiélago Filipino (1601). This section takes the reader from Marco Polo’s Zipangu to sixteenth-century Japan, which for many also was the missing link between the North American continent and East Asia, not only because it was conceived of as a way station in the transpacific route, but also because it was an irreplaceable piece in the metageographical theory of Amerasian continuity. The turf war between Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans is a useful context to understand their respective discursive cartographies of East and South East Asia.The final chapter focuses on two official chronicles: Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas’s comprehensive Historia general (1601), and Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’s Conquista de las Malucas (1609). While Herrera’s narrative saturates the Pacific with the historical memory of Spanish exploration—even from its title pages—Argensola erases the Portuguese from the Eastern imperial stage, imagining the world “as a global network of maritime routes that converge on the Moluccas” (256), seaways that are strategically closed to the Dutch through a series of “choke points” such as the strait of Magellan.Padrón’s book—a bit like Torres García’s famous upside-down map of South America—helps us denaturalize and historicize the ways we have come to understand the geographic and symbolic makeup of the world, and its implicit hierarchies. In fact, it recovers the historical contingency and the plasticity not only of the world, as one of the key metageographies of both early and late modernity (as Ayesha Ramachandran argued in The Worldmakers too), but also of continents, oceans, and archipelagos. In line with his previous work in the influential The Spacious Word (2004), Padrón shows how the indeterminacy of maps always warns us against their seeming transparency, against that kind of apparently clean and straightforward referentiality that is rather the product of their visual and rhetorical strategies. The theory of climates could have more power to organize and divide up the physical world than the architecture of continents, while a rhetoric of smooth sailing or a visual strategy of cartographic containment could significantly condition imperial expansion and competition in the early-modern age.This is a very important contribution to the fields of early modern Spanish and colonial Latin America literatures, as well as of early modern history in general. Students of cartography and of the history of geographic thought would of course find it very useful. Finally, and crucially, The Indies of the West offers, as one of its epigraphs reads, “a new map for Spanish Pacific Studies” (24).