Lope Martín ( 1564–1566) was a Portuguese maritime pilot who successfully navigated across the Pacific Ocean east–west and then west–east, becoming the first to complete the return voyage from Asia to the Americas. Martín was from Lagos, Portugal, and became a licensed pilot in Spain. He was contracted for Miguel López de Legazpi's expedition from Mexico to the Philippines and was designated the sole pilot of a patache called the San Lucas. Martín and the San Lucas separated from the rest of the fleet after ten days and sailed through the Marshall Islands and the Caroline Islands before arriving at the Philippines in January 1565. Without the rest of the fleet, Martín then embarked upon the return voyage from Asia to the Americas, which had been attempted but never completed; the San Lucas arrived in Mexico in August 1565.
In spite of Martín's accomplishments, the Real Audiencia of Mexico soon ordered him to return to the Philippines and appear before Legazpi, who was expected to execute him for having allegedly deserted the rest of his fleet. Martín's ship, the San Jerónimo, departed Mexico in May 1566; recognizing the danger that he faced, Martín led two successive mutinies and took command of the ship. He anchored the San Jerónimo at Ujelang Atoll in July 1566, intending to maroon any members of the crew who were not loyal to him; instead, Martín and 26 other men were left behind and never seen again.
Early life Martín was born in Lagos, Portugal. He was a free mulatto of Portuguese and African descent whose African ancestors were brought to Portugal as slaves. He was a skilled sailor and navigator; he was a licensed maritime pilot in Spain, a position that required much navigational and technical expertise. He was also one of the very few pilots of African descent in Spain in that era. Pilots were expected to be Spanish nationals; Martín probably claimed to be from the town of Ayamonte, near the Spanish and Portuguese border, since many of his contemporaries wrongly believed him to be from the town. Martín also stated that he had a wife living in the town.
Legazpi expedition In 1557, King Philip II of Spain ordered Luis de Velasco, the viceroy of New Spain, to send a fleet to the East Indies and establish a colony there. At the port of Navidad (now the town of Barra de Navidad, Mexico), four ships were constructed for the expedition and 380 men, including sailors, soldiers, scribes, and friars, were gathered to crew them. Martín was one of six pilots contracted for the expedition. He was to receive a payment of 700 ducats for the voyage, 300 fewer than the lead pilot Esteban Rodríguez; for reference, a laborer's yearly wage around that time was roughly 30 to 40 ducats.
Martín was designated the sole pilot of one of the four ships, the San Lucas, a three-masted patache (a small ship with shallow sides). The smallest of the four, the San Lucas was 40 tons and around long. It had a crew of ten sailors and ten soldiers and carried just eight barrels containing around 1,000 gallons (3,600 L) of water, even though the vessel would need to travel roughly to its eventual destination, the Philippines. In comparison, the fleet's flagship, the San Pedro, was 550 tons (roughly five times larger than Ferdinand Magellan's ship, Trinidad) and carried 200 barrels of water, 100 soldiers, two pilots, three friars, and all of the expedition's leadership. When the San Lucass original captain, Hernán Sánchez Muñón, refused to travel to Navidad, the fleet commander Miguel López de Legazpi appointed the nobleman Alonso de Arellano in his stead. Arellano did not have any nautical training.
Following years of preparation and multiple delays, the four ships departed Navidad in the early morning of 21 November 1564 with Legazpi as their commander and the experienced sailor Andrés de Urdaneta as his advisor. Four days into the voyage, Legazpi called for a meeting on the San Pedro. During the meeting, which was attended by the fleet's highest-ranking officers and pilots including Lope Martín, Legazpi revealed that although the fleet had previously received instructions to travel to New Guinea, the Real Audiencia of Mexico, Mexico's high court, covertly ordered Legazpi to instead direct the fleet to the Philippines and establish a colony on the islands. The Audiencia had also ordered him to keep these instructions secret until the fleet had already departed and sailed 100 leagues from the port, as Spanish colonization of the Philippines would be an open violation of the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Treaty of Zaragoza. According to the treaties, the Philippines belonged entirely to Portugal.
Martín's navigational equipment during the voyage included a compass, a table showing the Sun's declination, and a now-lost chart of the North Pacific. He was also capable of calculating longitude by finding the difference between magnetic north and true north, called magnetic declination. At this time, such a skill was rare among pilots. For parts of the journey, Martín had sailed without any reference, and some of his estimates and measurements are known to be inaccurate; it is therefore impossible to plot the San Lucas's exact course.
Separation and voyage to the Philippines After the meeting, Legazpi ordered the San Lucas to take the San Pedros position at the front of the fleet, where its crew would be responsible for scouting for hazards. They also established a signal system that used flags during the day and lanterns in the dark. As the San Lucas began to stray further from the fleet, at some points separating itself by two leagues, Legazpi ordered Martín to maintain his ship within half a league from the rest of the vessels. On 1 December 1564, a tempest formed, and Arellano ordered the crew to hang lanterns on the mainmast and stern. The flagship signaled to the rest of the ships to slow down, but Martín explained to Arellano that the San Lucas could not reduce its speed during the storm without its deck flooding due to the vessel's shallow sides. Thus, despite the signal and Legazpi's orders to remain within half a league, the San Lucas continued forward and disappeared from the view of the rest of the squadron.
Separated, the San Lucas spent over a month on the open ocean before encountering the Marshall Islands. The islands, which comprise 29 atolls and 5 coral islands, pose a threat because they are surrounded by coral that can breach a vessel's hull. They are low-lying, making them difficult to detect during approach. It is also difficult to anchor at an atoll due to both the risk of breaching and the great depth of the ocean surrounding them. On the night of 5 January 1565, crewmembers of the San Lucas recognized that the ship was headed directly towards one of the Marshall Islands' atolls (possibly Likiep) after they heard crashing waves. Martín quickly ordered the sails lowered as the San Lucass helmsman turned the vessel hard to port. Pushed by a strong breeze, the ship narrowly avoided crashing into the atoll and instead entered a shallow body of water. While standing on the deck and searching for a way to reenter the open sea, Martín was swept off of the ship by a wave. He managed to cling onto a rope with a single hand and reboard the vessel.
Two days after avoiding the atoll, the San Lucas crew spotted a canoe piloted by three inhabitants of the islands. The sailors helped the three natives, two grown men and one boy, board the ship and gave them beads, a knife, toy bells, and a shirt in exchange for fish, coconuts, and water. The natives then led ten of the crewmembers—among them Martín and Arellano—to their families and their homes, which they had built on the shoreline of an island amid the coral reefs (possibly Kwajalein Atoll). Martín called the island "the Island of the Two Neighbors", referring to the two families that lived there.
The following day, 8 January, the sailors of the San Lucas encountered a well-populated island whose inhabitants swam out more than one league to meet the vessel; Arellano named it "the Island of the Swimmers". Before the voyage, Legazpi had developed a contingency plan in the event a ship split from the rest of the fleet: the ship was to wait at the next island for ten days and wait for the others; if it recorded no sight of the others or failed to find land, the crew was to leave a cross and a letter explaining where they would go before proceeding. According to Arellano, the San Lucas failed to stop at any point in the Marshall Islands because they could not find anchorage in the coral reefs.
Having successfully navigated through the Marshall Islands, the San Lucas proceeded to the Caroline Islands, barely avoiding a reef on 15 January and arriving on 17 January at what was most likely Chuuk Lagoon. After the inhabitants of Chuuk invited the San Lucas to sail into an inlet within the atoll, they launched an assault on the vessel with spears and clubs. The sailors attempted to withdraw as Arellano ordered a musket volley to frighten the natives away. Martín considered that in the dark it would be impossible to exit the atoll by the same route they had entered; he instead marked the bearing of a nearby shoal for reference and had the leadsman search for anchorage. As the ship moved slowly along the shoal, the leadsman located a bottom at thirty fathoms, and the San Lucas managed to anchor for the night. They departed Chuuk the following morning, and although about a dozen canoes followed them, a sailor scared them off with a shot from a culverin, a medieval-era light cannon.
The next day, the San Lucas anchored at Pulap Atoll, in desperate need of wood and water. After a sailor sailed to and from the atoll on one of the inhabitant's canoes, returning with jars of water, Martín and Arellano planned to row to the island with eight other men. They departed in their boat, but worried that the reef would tear a hole in the bottom and disconcerted by the sight of islanders hiding behind trees holding spears, Martín and Arellano reversed course and returned to the San Lucas. Instead, three more sailors boarded canoes and went towards the island, where the natives clubbed the first two to death. The third managed to fight off the natives who were bringing him to the island and was rescued by his crewmates. The San Lucas departed with its crew reduced to just eight sailors and ten soldiers.
On 22 January, the San Lucas coasted near an atoll—probably Sorol—when two canoes met them out at sea. Martín threw a red jacket into the water for the natives; as they drew near, a soldier seized a boy from the canoe by the hair and dragged him onto the ship while the rest fired muskets and a culverin at both canoes. The wounded men abandoned their canoes and swam back to the island. The crew of the San Lucas captured the canoes and broke them down for firewood. As for the boy, the crew cut his hair, clothed him, and named him Vicente. They passed by another atoll, likely Ngulu, the following night.