The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East and the Transpacific West by Ricardo Padrón (review)

Ricardo Padrón's The Indies of the Setting Sun reveals to its readers an understanding of the world that has, for the most part, been lost in time. As he shows us, when premodern people looked at maps and globes, they did not immediately see continents and oceans as we do today. They organized the world in quite different ways and saw things like climatic bands that wrapped around the world, basins of water around which people and states huddled, and routes along which people and ships traded and traveled. Blank spaces between landmasses did not necessarily indicate water, but instead, more often indicated parts of the world that were simply unknown. This was the way that sixteenth-century Europeans looked at maps of the world, and as Padrón shows us, such an understanding directly nurtured Spanish imperial hopes and fantasies. While historians have long tended to emphasize Spain's connection to the Americas, Padrón demonstrates—in wonderfully clear prose—how sixteenth-century Spanish maps and cartographic literature regularly sought to link Spain to Asia.

Spanish cartographers and cosmographers did this by focusing on an array of metageographical ideas that tend to be foreign to modern audiences, including ideas about climates, peoples, and water. In the wake of the Columbian voyages, some European chroniclers, cosmographers, and mapmakers identified and depicted the lands to the west of the Atlantic as America—that is, as a New World, and a separate continent—and in doing so appear to emphasize the idea of continents as the principal, organizing tendency of their cartographic visions. It is these depictions, such as that shown in the famous 1507 map by Martin Waldseemüller—the first map to use the term America—that tend to be most familiar to modern audiences. However, such depictions were actually very much in the minority. In fact, well into the sixteenth century, the vast majority of cartographers and chroniclers understood these newly-encountered lands in the western Atlantic as a peninsular outcropping of Asia.

While this was a generally European tendency, the Spanish in particular had a vested interest in resisting the idea that these newly-discovered lands in the western Atlantic were separate from Asia. Connecting the Americas to Cathay and the Orient undergirded Spain's right to the riches of the Spice Islands and transpacific trade. As a result, as much or more than other early modern cosmographers, the Spanish regularly depicted the part of the world that we today call the Pacific as narrow and imminently navigable. Rather than showing America, the Pacific, and Asia as separate parts of the world, Spanish speakers overwhelmingly referred to all of these lands as Las Indias, which as an idea "referred to something broader, in some ways more ambiguous, but always more inclusive than what others called America" (32). That is to say, the makers of Spanish maps and the authors of cartographic literature knew that in order to shore up Spain's transpacific authority, the Spanish Indies had to appear as a continuous, unbroken expanse that stretched from the lands that are today the Caribbean westward to the islands of Southeast Asia. They did so by depicting the Pacific (rather than the Atlantic) at the center of their maps, by emphasizing the narrowness of these waters, and by stressing the climatic and cultural similarities of the populations on both sides.

Padrón's chapters reveal the unbridled resiliency of the work of Spanish cosmographers, even in the face of mounting evidence that America was a separate continent. For instance, even when Magellan's crew returned from their 1521 voyage around the globe and the Vicentine chronicler Pigafetta described their truly harrowing crossing of the enormous and undifferentiated Pacific, Spanish cartography managed to contain this news. The secretary Maximilian von Sevenborgen's account De...