Journal of a Voyage in the Magellanic Sea

December 1745. By order of the Spanish Court, three Jesuits, a captain, two pilots and twenty-five soldiers embark at Buenos Aires on the small ship San Antonio. Their mission: to reconnoitre the unknown coast of Patagonia as far as the Strait of Magellan, and to choose a site there for founding a town in the face of the English threat.

For four months, between storms weathered under bare poles, tides of six fathoms and shores without water or wood, they confront a coast that foreign maps have peopled with eleven-foot giants, fabulous rivers and outsized oysters. A pilot injures his face in the tempest, a Guarani Indian dies on board, the ship nearly loses her masts in a hurricane. At San Julián, the bay of lies, they have to take off their shoes in the mud to see that the great river shown on every map ends in a sandbank.

Father José Cardiel, crucifix at his neck and staff in hand, then sets off for eight days toward the west with thirty-four men, in search of Indians who remain nowhere to be found. Father José Quiroga, a former sailor turned cartographer of the expedition, measures latitudes and tides; Father Matías Strobl, superior of the mission, holds back and consults. Together they return with an uncompromising verdict: the coast of the Patagonians is a desert, the fables are fables, and Spain will found no southern town there.

Written in the third person by Father Pedro Lozano, historian of the province of Paraguay, who stayed at the college while his seafaring brethren sent him their notebooks, this journal is first of all a rutter intended for the Court of Madrid: latitudes, soundings, winds and sandbanks take up as much room in it as the men. Published by Charlevoix and then reprinted in Buenos Aires in 1836, it documents a precise moment in the imperial rivalry for the South Atlantic, four years after the passage of the English commodore George Anson, whose account had sown European maps with imaginary rivers and giants. Few eighteenth-century testimonies refute these fables with such geographical precision, soundings and latitudes to back them up.

A complete modern rewriting for today's reader, making this account accessible without betraying anything of the voyage. Twenty original illustrations and several maps of the voyage show the route, while a set of reference aids (glossary, chronology, index) and selected passages of the original text shed light on the reading.