Magellan in Spain

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 52-55:

Columbus’s exploits loom so large in our understanding of the past that other great discoveries recede into the background. In truth, any reasonable observer at the turn of the sixteenth century would have conceded that, even after Columbus’s famous voyages, Portugal’s lead in the global race had widened until becoming almost unassailable. Portuguese navigators reached the tip of Africa in 1488 and found the route to India a decade later. King Manuel I of Portugal took pleasure in writing lengthy letters to the Spanish monarchs, his in-laws and rivals, informing them, “Our Lord has miraculously wished India to be found” and telling them about the spices, precious stones, elephants, exotic peoples, and the immensely profitable trade carried on there. “We are still awaiting news from the twenty-five ships that we sent the previous year [1502],” Manuel gloated to Ferdinand and Isabella in one of his letters, “and after they come back in September there will be time to send some more.”

In the meantime, Spain could point to only a few Caribbean islands and inklings of an unknown continent, but no precious spices, porcelain, or silk. The new lands did offer some gold, but they never replaced the original quest of finding a western approach to the incalculable riches of the Far East. Spaniards explored the continent blocking their way, looking for a passage that would connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. They came up empty-handed until Fernão de Magalhães—a Portuguese defector like the Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín a generation later—put Spain back in the race. Ferdinand Magellan had come of age during Portugal’s torrid expansion into Asia in the 1500s. Yet he had a falling-out with the Portuguese crown and went knocking on neighboring doors. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Magellan’s move to Spain.

Magellan caught up with the roving Spanish court at the town of Valladolid. For someone accustomed to the sound of waves and the proximity of sailboats, it must have been strange to have to journey to the middle of Iberia to propose a maritime venture in a town surrounded by agricultural fields and interminable plains. He did not arrive alone but was accompanied by two brothers, Rui and Francisco Faleiro, both cosmographers whose reputations exceeded Magellan’s. The trio complemented one another well. Magellan came across as a man of action who had fought in India, Malaysia, and North Africa, while the Faleiros were armchair academics. As they waited for an audience with the Spanish king in February and March of 1518, the Portuguese visitors grew unsettled by what they heard. The new monarch, Charles I, was an awkward eighteen-year-old who had come from Belgium just a few months before and had great difficulty communicating in Spanish let alone Portuguese. Worse, the trio had to tread carefully in a court riven by a power struggle between Charles’s advisers recently arrived from Belgium and the old Spanish officials from the previous monarch.

Interestingly, during the early negotiations Rui Faleiro rather than Magellan emerged as the leading voice. The older of the two Faleiro brothers, Rui was deferentially referred to as a bachiller (or bacharel in Portuguese), the highest university degree one could get at the time. Before leaving Portugal he may have been considered for a new chair in astronomy established at the oldest university in the kingdom (what is now the University of Coimbra) by the Portuguese king himself. It was the highest position in the field. One of the reasons that perhaps impelled Rui Faleiro to join Magellan in Spain was being passed over for this prestigious appointment; academic rivalries and pettiness were already alive and well in the sixteenth century! In spite of this setback, and notwithstanding a rumor that “he was possessed by a familial demon and in fact knew nothing about astrology,” Rui Faleiro remained a top European cosmographer. Sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described Rui Faleiro as “a great man in matters of cosmography, astrology, and other sciences and humanities.” There is little doubt that he was extremely accomplished if mercurial and mentally unstable. Rui’s younger brother Francisco Faleiro was just as talented and would go on to find long-term employment in Spain as a leading nautical expert. Together the two Faleiros and Magellan were very credible petitioners.

On the day of the audience, Magellan and Rui Faleiro arrived not with charts as would have been expected but with “a globe that was very well painted and showed the entire world, and on it Magellan traced the route that he would follow.” The two petitioners explained that they intended to cross from one ocean to the other “through a certain strait that they already knew about.” Even though the globe was detailed, the portion of South America where the strait was supposed to be had been left intentionally blank. Magellan and Faleiro had evidently taken some precautions in case anyone present at the audience should wish to steal their project.

Their knowledge of a passage between the oceans—the alpha and omega of many New World explorations—would have been more than enough for the royal sponsorship. But Magellan and Faleiro went further. As one witness at the audience recounted, “They offered to demonstrate that the Moluccas [Spice Islands] from where the Portuguese take spices to their country are on the side of the world that belongs to Spain, as agreed by the Catholic Monarchs and King Juan of Portugal.” The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had established a line of demarcation running from pole to pole through the Atlantic but did not contemplate extending the line to the other side of the world. As Portugal and Spain, however, had continued to sail in opposite directions, such an antimeridian had become necessary. Measuring longitude or east-west distance was still extraordinarily difficult in the early sixteenth century, so no one knew quite where to draw this line in the distant Pacific. All the same, in the early 1510s the Portuguese had planted trading forts in Malaysia and the Spice Islands while Spain had stood by helplessly. Yet in the winter of 1518, Magellan and Faleiro had become persuaded that the Spice Islands were actually on the Spanish side, a conclusion all the more startling in Spain because it was coming from these top Portuguese navigators and cosmographers.

Columbus in Portugal

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 38-41:

What made this contest [between Portugal and Spain] all the more startling was the stark differences between the two competitors. To put it bluntly, it was a race between a dolphin and an elephant. With a population of barely one million by 1500, Portugal was just too small to take over the world. Lisbon was a very modest capital and base of exploration of around forty thousand people. As it expanded through western Africa, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and China—even if only to establish trading forts or feitorias—the Lusitanian nation became overstretched. Everyone at home was scrambling to keep things running or consumed by one of these ventures halfway around the world. Still, what Portugal lacked in population it more than made up for in experience, cutting-edge nautical technology, and clarity of purpose.

In contrast, the kingdoms that coalesced into Spain contained some five to seven million inhabitants, easily dwarfing Portugal in human and material resources. Yet this aggregation of kingdoms was difficult to manage. Some of them possessed significant maritime experience: elephants do swim. Yet the core of this composite monarchy, the Crown of Castile, was more terrestrial than Portugal. This land orientation is evident in the cities where the Spanish court tended to reside: Valladolid, Toledo, and finally Madrid, right in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula, as far as possible from any coast or sea.

There is no better way to get a sense of these two contenders and understand the nature of the race than by following in Columbus’s footsteps. He lived in Portugal for a decade before moving to Spain and setting the contest in motion by proposing to his new hosts “to reach the east by way of the west.” Columbus’s initial arrival in the Iberian kingdoms had been entirely unplanned. Pirates had attacked the ship on which he was traveling and a great fire had broken out, forcing everyone to jump into the water, “and Columbus, who was a strong swimmer,” a near-contemporary chronicler informs us, “swam for two leagues [seven miles] to the closest land, holding onto an oar to get some rest along the way.” The twenty-five-year-old Columbus washed up on Portugal’s southwestern tip in 1476. It was probably the farthest he had ever been from his native Genoa. Up to that time, Columbus had been trading wools and textiles on behalf of his family, mostly within the Mediterranean.

Once in Portugal, the future “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” remade his life. After drying off his clothes and resting his weary limbs, he made his way to Lisbon where he found a community of Italian financiers, merchants, and nautical experts deeply involved in Portugal’s ventures of exploration. This group included Columbus’s own brother, Bartholomew Columbus, who had moved out of the family household years earlier and relocated to Portugal. The two brothers formed a partnership and made a living by drawing nautical charts and selling books. A contemporary who met Columbus in those years described him as “a dealer in print books of great intelligence although little book learning, and very skilled in the art of cosmography.”

Lisbon, surrounded by massive walls except along the waterfront, was a town on the move at the time of Columbus’s arrival. Sitting on the highest hill was the Castle of São Jorge, a structure that looked ancient even in the fifteenth century. It had a commanding view of the Tagus River and the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1470s through 1490s, when Columbus lived in Lisbon, the castle remained the nerve center of Portugal’s exploration activities. A huge map of the world mounted on gold-plated wood in a cavernous room signaled Portugal’s grand design. Officials bustled around the premises, keeping accounts, levying taxes, and organizing sales of exotic goods coming from Africa as well as from Asia and America later on. Some of these items were on display, including two lions kept in a pen to impress visitors.

Transpacific Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 25-27:

Dispersals across the Pacific are more daunting still. Some species do exist on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, as we have seen. Marsupials live in the Americas (opossums and shrews) and in Australasia (kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, etc.). Intriguingly, a tiny arboreal marsupial from South America known as the monito del monte is more closely related to Australian marsupials than to its American cousins. Could this be the first terrestrial mammal to cross the Pacific? Recent research shows that marsupials originated in South America and migrated to Australia tens of millions of years ago, when there was a land connection via Antarctica or at least great proximity among these three landmasses. The same holds true for other lineages distributed on both sides of the Pacific, including birds, frogs, and turtles.

...

The only terrestrial vertebrate that seems to have survived a transpacific passage of six thousand miles is an iguana. The vast majority of iguanas are indigenous to the New World. Yet one genus called Brachylophus lives in the South Pacific islands of Fiji and Tonga. How did it get there? A passage from Central or South America would have taken a minimum of six months and more likely a year or more. Like geckos, iguanas are well suited for oceanic dispersals. They are able to obtain water from the plants they eat and possess nasal salt glands and thick skins that protect them from dehydration. Their presence not only on the American continent but also on many surrounding islands demonstrates their ability to travel across stretches of ocean. The Galápagos Islands, for instance, lie about six hundred miles away from the coast of Ecuador and are home to no fewer than three species of land iguanas as well as one marine iguana that lives on land but dives into the ocean to procure food, foraging on seaweed and reaching exposed rocks completely surrounded by water.

Still, it is one thing to drift on logs for a couple of weeks and quite another to endure a six-thousand-mile passage. After several months adrift and no food left, any voyaging iguana would have perished. Nonetheless, some biologists have proposed a possible solution. The stowaways may have spent much of this journey as eggs. Brachylophus has an unusually long incubation period of seven, eight, or even nine months, one of the longest of any iguana. It is possible then that thirty or forty million years ago an unsuspecting group of iguanas, some in the form of eggs, may have dispersed by means of an epic rafting passage in which everything went right. Yet even if Brachylophus was somehow able to cross much of the Pacific, few other terrestrial vertebrates ever did until humans began making inroads in far more recent times.

Transatlantic Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 23-25:

Oceanic dispersals are extremely instructive because they reveal what is biologically possible, showing what oceans could be crossed and in what direction and which ones constituted insurmountable barriers. The Atlantic, for instance, has been breached several times. One hundred million years ago, South America became something of an island unto itself, having broken off from Africa and decoupled from North America (until about three and a half million years ago, when the Isthmus of Panama finally connected the two halves of the hemisphere). South America therefore existed in “splendid isolation” for tens of millions of years, as one scholar has put it. Yet several dispersals from Africa occurred during this time. South America was originally rodent-free, but a type of rodent called caviomorphs—related to guinea pigs, chinchillas, and capybaras but different from mice and rats—irrupted into it between fifty-five and forty-one million years ago. The closest relatives to the South American caviomorph rodents live in Africa, clearly indicating the source population. Primates followed suit. Again, South America possessed no primates at first. Yet a monkey that scientists call Chilecebus carrascoensis somehow got across the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five to twenty million years ago. To succeed, any primate had to be small and extremely resilient. To judge by the extant fossils, Chilecebus carrascoensis weighed less than two pounds and had a skull barely two inches long. This intrepid voyager would give rise to all New World monkeys, including spider monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets.

As far as we know, about a dozen species have made it across the Atlantic Ocean, including rodents, primates, bats, tortoises, a blind snake, and even a weak-flying bird called the hoatzin. Of all these creatures, geckos and skinks were particularly capable of surviving long oceanic passages, as they hid underneath branches and laid eggs resistant to desiccation and even short-term immersion in seawater. Yet, irrespective of individual capabilities, two main factors explain these successful crossings. First, the closest two points across the Atlantic (Kabrousse, Senegal, and Touros, Brazil) now lie about 1,740 miles apart and, thirty or forty million years ago, perhaps half that distance. Nine hundred miles is far but not overwhelmingly so. Second, the rivers of western Africa constitute excellent launching pads to catch western-moving Atlantic currents leading to the Americas. Although crossing the Atlantic has never been easy, the biological record shows that it has occurred from time to time, and what is true for geckos and rodents applies no less to humans. When Christopher Columbus set out to cross the Ocean Sea in 1492, he and his crew were embarking on a voyage that other species had already made successfully.

Other oceanic paths have been less common. The reverse Atlantic passage from South America to Africa, for instance, has played a much smaller role in the dispersal of species. Negative evidence cannot settle the matter definitively. South American organisms may well have crossed but been attacked on arrival, or perhaps they survived in Africa but without leaving much of a trace. Still, it is striking that no terrestrial vertebrates are known to have made the eastward passage across the Atlantic.

Returning Shinto Shrines in Hawaii

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 209-211:

In December 1947, Hawaii’s Kotohira Shrine was finally allowed to reopen its doors, along with the other closed Buddhist and Shinto shrines. Rev. Isobe was still deported, so the religious services were nonexistent. As the shrine struggled to find its footing, the Justice Department swept in. In April 1948, citing the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, the government seized Kotohira’s assets. The Act cited was passed into law to confiscate German American property during World War I. Other shrines across Hawaii also had their assets seized, including the Izumo Taishakyo Mission, Hawaii Daijingu Temple and Wahiawa Daijingu.

Upon hearing of the move to liquidate the land, the Kotohira Jinsha solicits the services of the law firm Robertson, Castle & Anthony, which files suit on March 31, 1949, against the United States attorney general, the State of Hawaii and the Federal Alien Land Office. They’re challenging the apparent misuse of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

It’s the first such lawsuit initiated by a Japanese organization, and many eyes across Hawaii and the mainland are eagerly watching to see who wins.

...

Judge Joseph McLaughlin knows the value of a good legal fight. That’s why he refuses both the plaintiff and the defendant requests for a summary judgment in Kotohira Jinsha v. McGrath.

It would have been easier to just rule from the bench and save months of judicial headache. The shrine wants its property back, and the government just wants the whole matter ended. But some scraps are worth having in the open forum.

Several trial dates were set and changed, delayed by both sides’ trips to Japan to gather evidence. The trial began on March 27, paused as attorneys travelled to Japan and resumed on May 3. The trial ended May 17, after a “two-day argument upon the facts and the law,” as the court puts it.

Today, McLaughlin dismantles the government’s case one blow at a time. His ruling finds the government presented no justification for Kotohira Jinsha’s closure. “The evidence does not establish any Japanese governmental control, direct or indirect, of this plaintiff, nor any direct or indirect doctrinal or financial control by any state shrine in Japan,” he states in his decision. “Nor is there any evidence upon which I could possibly find or hold that the national interests of the United States required that this little insignificant shrine in Hawaii, with not more than five hundred members, should be deemed to be an economic, military, or even ideological threat to the United States.”

The judge includes a pocket history of how the imperial government used religion to foster war. “To accomplish the ends desired by the militarists of Japan, Shinto was distorted and state Shrine loyalty became a test of patriotism and the false doctrine of Japanese supremacy and eventual world domination was fostered, which led to its ultimate defeat in World War II.”

He reserves some editorial commentary to the shrine’s form of Shinto, finding an umbrella approach to spirituality confusing. “Plaintiff and its members did not even understand what it was they believed or why,” he writes in the court’s ruling. “I am not even prepared to find on this evidence that this plaintiff, operating in the United States of America, held beliefs which could be agreed to constitute a religion . . . Its members practiced by way of prayers and ceremonies a primitive mythology known as Shinto or Way of the Gods, with special attention to three gods, but whether the plaintiff’s tenets were the same as state Shintoism in Japan, or even Sect Shintoism in Japan, has not been established by either party.”

Aside from these sharp elbows under the robe, the ruling is an unambiguous victory, not just for the shrine but for the democratic system tested by governmental overreach. “We have not yet come to the point nor will we ever while ‘this Court sits’ where the government can take away a person’s property because it does not approve of what that person believes in or teaches by way of religion or philosophy of life,” Judge McLaughlin writes. “The First Amendment forbids.”

The property is returned to the shrine. Getting legal permission for its leader, Rev. Isobe, to return from Japan will take longer. But the legal victory paves the way for more lawsuits and more overturned seizures.

Extent of Martial Law, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 126-129:

Lt. Col. Thomas Green, now the Hawaiian Department’s judge advocate, moves into Iolani Palace the day after Pearl Harbor. The man who wrote the rules governing the military administration is on hand to direct martial law operations.

At 12:30 P.M., Green switches on the radio to hear President Roosevelt address a joint session of Congress....

Green switches the radio off. The reality of his position washes over him like a wave—with the war official, the martial law over Hawaii is good as permanent. Now the Army must run everything. All civilians need to be registered and fingerprinted. Manpower is needed to censor the press, long-distance telephone calls and all civilian mail. The Army must police the ban on liquor sales. The list seems endless.

Emergency medical facilities fall under direct Army control. That includes the Japanese Charity Hospital—the military took control of over half of the hospital’s facilities in the aftermath of the attack. The day before, eight hundred volunteers from the United Japanese Society in Honolulu, freshly trained to respond to medical emergencies, went straight from their graduation ceremony to tend to the wounded.

Of all the challenges Green faces, creating a functioning justice system is the thorniest. It’s not easy to replace the civil system with military courts overnight. Easing his job is the lack of impediments: the writ of habeas corpus remains suspended, search warrants are unneeded and even written charges are optional. Being tried before a military court will be a shadow of the former process—presided over by a sole officer, who’ll be encouraged to sentence offenders the same day of their arrest.

Japanese Hawaiians are subject to special restrictions. For them, meeting in groups of more than ten is forbidden. Being outside during the nightly blackouts is cause for detention. The entire community is ordered to turn in all firearms, flashlights, portable radios and cameras.

At his home on Kalama Beach, Otto Kuehn hears the rap on his front door, blood frozen. The military police hustle him, Friedel, Hans Joachim and Susie into a truck. All are held in cells at the US Immigration Service’s detention center in Honolulu, held for the crime of being German in Hawaii.

Honolulu's Roundup Begins, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-123:

Gero Iwai tries not to feel the other men’s eyes on him as they gather in a conference room on the second floor. Most know him, but some do not. They’re taking second looks at the only Japanese American in the room of Army intelligence agents and G-men.

SAC Shivers is in charge. Army officials order their four commanding generals (and nine corps commanders) to work with the FBI to round up all persons on their detention lists. Shivers, Bicknell and Honolulu police acting captain John Burns sit down with a card file and make the final determinations on who’s to be arrested. Personal friends and acquaintances are spared at the last moment, but the number still hovers at more than four hundred people.

The wheels to sanction these arrests have been spinning for hours. Just after the second wave, Lieutenant General Short stood in Iolani Palace to ask Hawaii territorial governor Joseph Poindexter to declare martial law. The governor called President Roosevelt, who advised him to follow the recommendation, which he did. By the rules drafted beforehand by Lt. Col. Thomas Green, this enables local military authorities to apprehend US citizens without cause.

Hoover telegrams his field offices: “Urgent. Immediately take into custody all Japanese who have been classified in the A, B, and C categories.”

At just before 2:00 P.M., Shivers is handed a letter from Short authorizing execution of the arrests. By then, President Roosevelt has signed Proclamation 2525, classifying all Japanese aliens living in the United States or any of its territories as “alien enemies” subject to apprehension. Some arrests had already begun, but under martial law, the final official authorization had to be given by the Army.

Across Honolulu, FBI men, military intelligence agents and local cops gather the detainees and deliver them to the Honolulu Immigration Station. There are almost five hundred residents in Hawaii, citizen and alien alike, placed under armed guard that day: 345 Japanese aliens, twenty-two Japanese American citizens, seventy-four German nationals, nineteen citizens of German ancestry, eleven Italian nationals and two citizens of Italian descent.

Nearly every consulate support worker is seized, including Richard Kotoshirodo and John Mikami. (Of more than two hundred seized, only these two are actually guilty of abetting espionage.) Also detained are the Japanese language school teachers and religious leaders from Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Members of mainstream Japanese civic societies are hustled into cars and ferried away from their families.

Those detained are brought under armed escort to an immigration building next to the territorial government officers near Honolulu Harbor. The prevailing feelings inside the cramped quarters are disbelief and shame. These are the leading merchants, priests, teachers and social organizers in Honolulu, now rounded up with fewer rights than those afforded criminals.