Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899 by Rainer F. Buschmann, and: Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 by Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller (review)

When the beleaguered Spanish crews of the Trinidad, Concepcion, and Victoria stumbled ashore on Guam in 1521, following a grueling three-month voyage across the world’s largest maritime space, they were the first Europeans to make landfall in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Under the leadership of Ferdinand Magellan, the expedition’s participants faced starvation and rampant disease while traversing what Vasco de Balboa earlier termed el mar del sur. Although Magellan’s visit was fleeting, this oceanic crossing inaugurated nearly four centuries of Iberian presence in the Pacific, a presence that William Lytle Schurz famously christened the “Spanish Lake” in 1922.¹²

It is this concept that Rainer Buschmann, Edward Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller in Navigating the Spanish Lake and Buschmann in Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean reexamine through the application of contemporary methodologies of world history. Utilizing approaches including crosscultural exchange and Benedict Anderson’s “print capitalism,”¹³ the authors readdress the common Anglophone narrative of the inevitable decline of decrepit and exploitive Spanish “literal” and “imagined” empires (Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller, p. 3). In doing so, these works examine non-Anglo-French colonial influence in the Pacific over the longue durée. The four centuries of Spanish presence in the region left a unique legacy of “tricultural convergence” (Asian, Iberian, and indigenous), native Catholicism, and global commercial networks, which permanently linked the Americas with Asia (Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller, p. 64). Furthermore, Spanish attempts to defend their Pacific empires against British and French imperial intrigues, veiled in Enlightenment scientific curiosity, resulted in a period of dynamic intellectualism and diplomatic engagement, which pitted Iberian archival “revealed” knowledge against the firsthand “encountered” knowledge of famed Anglo-French explorers like James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville.

For the first 250 years the Spanish Pacific imperium was only sporadically challenged. The Treaty of Zaragoza (1529) demarcated Spanish regional primacy in international law and the Habsburg-Bourbon armada affirmed it. Yet, Spanish control was always tenuous at best. Intimately tethered to the spindle of the galleon routes that connected Manila and Acapulco (1565–1815), the Spanish bypassed much of the Pacific in their quest to exchange American silver for Asian silk, porcelain, and spices. In doing so, the Spanish conceptualized and administered the Pacific not as a “new world,” but as an extension of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Buschmann, p. 7).

This political and intellectual subordination meant that the “Spanish Lake” was heavily influenced by a system of “archipelagic Hispanization” more akin to Mexico City than Madrid (Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller, p. 13). Spanish officials in New Spain maintained responsibility for trade, evangelization, defense, colonial administration, and exploration across the Pacific. In the aftermath of Magellan’s voyage, spurred on by Incan tales of fantastic wealth and Ptolemy’s Terra Australis Incognita, Spanish American officials funded numerous Pacific exploratory ventures. Expeditions led by Álvaro de Mendaña y Neira (1568) and Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (1606) reached the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu respectively. However, limited cartographic return on significant investment, fears of imperial overreach, and the confirmed success of the Manila galleons led the Spanish to end exploration and declare the region “known” by 1608 (Buschmann, p. 214).

Although substantial, Spanish feats of exploration in the Pacific were historically sidelined by Anglo-French narratives, which arose after the 1740s. Aroused by rising nationalism, an Enlightenment thirst for knowledge, and intense public interest in firsthand “adventure” accounts, northern European powers assaulted both the literal and imagined Spanish Pacific. While Buschmann asserts that the...