Andrés de Urdaneta

From Freepedia

Andrés de Urdaneta (b.1498 - d. June 3, Mexico, 1568) was a Spanish friar, sail-captain and explorer.

Urdaneta was born in the town of Villafranca in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, Spain. He is known for discovering and plotting a path across the Pacific from the Philippines to Acapulco, New Spain (present-day Mexico), which came to be known as "Urdaneta's route." He set sail from San Miguel in the Philippines on June 1, 1565 and arrived in Acapulco on October 8, having traveled 12,000 miles (20,000 km) in 130 days. Upon arriving, he discovered that a member of the crew of his expedition, Alonso de Arellano, who had abandoned them just after leaving the port, had actually beaten them across the ocean, arriving at Barra de Navidad in Jalisco on August of the same year. However, Arellano's notes were far less precise and professional than Urdaneta's, and so the latter's route became the famous and trusted one.

For the remainder of the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish ships, particularly the annual Manila-Acapulco trading Galleon, used Urdaneta's route. For a variety of reasons, they never explored much of the Pacific coast of North America, nor most (if any) of the Pacific Islands, althought Spain kept nominal suzerainty over most of the Pacific Ocean well into the 19th century.

Urdaneta was also a member of the Loaísa Expedition in 1525-1526, under the command of sea captain García Jofre de Loaísa, to colonized the East Indies. However their expedition failed and forced Urdaneta to go back to Spain.

References

• McDougall, Walter (1993). Let the Sea Make a Noise: Four Hundred Years of Cataclysm, Conquest, War and Folly in the North Pacific. New York: Avon Books.