Philippines

The problem of the Pacific was not getting to Asia but getting back, and it was solved by a friar who knew how to sail. Andrés de Urdaneta, Augustinian and sailor, was fifty-seven years old and directed the technical side of Legazpi’s expedition; command of the return voyage fell to Felipe de Salcedo, the governor’s nephew, who was eighteen.⁴

On 1 June 1565 the San Pedro sailed from Cebu with some two hundred men, and on the 9th it entered the Pacific. Taking advantage of the monsoons and the Kuro-Shivo current, the expedition sighted Santa Rosa Island, in California, on 18 September, and reached Acapulco on 8 October. They had covered 7,644 miles by an unknown route: it was the first crossing of the Pacific from west to east.⁴

The trade of the Manila galleon ran on that route between 1566 and 1815. Urdaneta returned to Spain in April 1566 to present his maps and navigation papers to Philip II, and he died on 3 June 1568 in an Augustinian convent in Mexico.⁴