Producing the Pacific. Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration (1567–1606) by Mercedes Maroto Camino (review)

108 REVIEWS ! ! ! ! ! No es la de Juan Montero una antología con la que únicamente conocer los escritos más notables de diez poetas canónicos, sino una red de textos ubicados en sus contextos, elucidados con rigor y ligados por relaciones de contigüidad literaria en virtud de criterios históricos, genéricos y estilísticos. No es, por tanto, una selección con la que leer poesía, sino un báculo con el que caminar sin perderse por la historia literaria de la poesía hispana entre 1526 y 1700. Su carácter propedéutico convierte a la antología en un instrumento insustituible para el conocimiento de esta parcela de la literatura áurea, haciendo de la brevedad, virtud. Ignacio García Universidad de Córdoba Maroto Camino, Mercedes. Producing the Pacific. Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration (1567-1606). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. PB. 144 pp. ISBN 90-420-1994-8. Mercedes Maroto Camino examines the notion of the South Seas in early modern Spain, attending to three operative factors: narratives, maps, and ritual performance. She emphasizes that expeditions, narratives, mapmaking, and ceremonial observances not only are the production of a shared cultural, socio-historical, and literary heritage, but they also contribute to the representation of the Pacific of the time. The volume is divided into five chapters, with the first and the last as introduction and conclusion. Thirty-four, black-and-white illustrations, ranging from the Beatus of Liébana in the eleventh century, to the itinerary map of the voyage of Pedro Fernández de Quirós and Luis Váez de Torres to Vanuatu and Torres Strait in 1605-06 (made by Igor Dreki of the University of Auckland), are included. “Imag(in)ing the Southern Continent, 1567-1606” introduces the objective of the book, highlighting the notion of the Pacific as a social space created by various “conditioning factors,” which include mythical, biblical, literary, and cultural beliefs as well as economic, political, and religious motives. Maroto Camino discusses the legendary island of Ophir (or Chryse), identified in the Bible, and in writings by Classical and medieval Christian authors such as Pomponius Mela, RESEÑAS 109 ! ! ! ! ! Ambrosius Macrobius, Mandeville, Marco Polo, and others, and assesses their influence on Spanish explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Underscoring the importance of three expeditions made between 1565 and 1606, the author acknowledges the impact that such belief had on the expeditions led by the Galician Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira in search of the elusive Solomon Islands (1565; 1595-1596). She then describes a subsequent, third voyage by Fernández de Quirós and his admiral Váez de Torres in 1605 and the two explorers’ arrival in Vanuatu’s Espíritu Santo in 1606. In the second chapter, titled “Exploring the South Pacific,” Maroto Camino continues her study of the contribution made by Mendaña. She asserts that together with narratives, maps, and rituals, both Mendaña’s voyages, even though unsuccessful, served to illustrate and invigorate traditional beliefs in the legendary Quarta Pars Incognita. The second half of the chapter digresses from the main thesis of the book by focusing on the Mendaña’s widow, Isabel de Barreto, without making a clear thematic association between the widow and the rest of the study. Contesting the image of a perverse, unruly, and cruel woman, originated by Mendaña’s pilot Fernández de Quirós and conventionally accepted by scholars, Maroto Camino devotes a significant number of pages to Barreto. She challenges the conventional negative representation of the widow with Barreto’s own testament and declarations before the Manila court regarding the second voyage. It is in “Mapping the Pacific”, the third chapter of the study, that the author offers more engaging insights. Here, she resumes the focus of the book and defines the critical role of cartographic representations in early modern identifications of the Pacific. She examines three key voyages, made by Columbus, Magellan, and Mendaña, evaluating their debts as well as contributions to early modern European knowledge of the world. Thanks to Magellan’s circumnavigation, the Pacific was finally charted and conceptualized as “a sea bound by the Southern Continent...