{
  "id": "sarmiento-viage-al-estrecho-1768",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1768)",
  "summary": "The royal press at Madrid printed Sarmiento's 1579-80 journal of the Strait of Magellan in 1768, and bound in front of it a dossier of testimonies from other writers, Spanish and foreign. The journal shows what a survey looked like from inside: soundings, a stone cairn, a cross visible down the whole channel. The testimonies show what came of it: a garrison of four hundred set to close the Strait, and corpses left clothed in the houses.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "patagonia",
    "chile",
    "navigation",
    "exploration",
    "books",
    "printing",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "eighteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ovalle-historica-relacion-de-chile"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-voyages-to-the-northwest-coast"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "garcia-de-palacio-instruccion-nautica-1587"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juan-sebastian-elcano"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relacion-del-ultimo-viage-al-estrecho-1788"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What did Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa do in the Strait of Magellan in 1579 and 1580?",
    "Why did Spain try to settle the Strait of Magellan in 1584?",
    "What happened to the Spanish colony of Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, or Port Famine?",
    "How did a sixteenth-century Spanish captain record a coastal survey?",
    "What is in the 1768 Madrid printing of Sarmiento de Gamboa?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The volume opened here is the Madrid printing of 1768. Its title page reads \"VIAGE AL ESTRECHO DE MAGALLANES Por el Capitan Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa En los anos de 1579. y 1580. Y NOTICIA DE LA EXPEDICION Que despues hizo para poblarle. EN MADRID En la Imprenta Real de la Gazeta. Ano de 1768.\" The two halves of that title are the two halves of the story: a survey, and an attempt to hold what had been surveyed.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-diario"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The occasion was not discovery but pursuit. The volume's section of testimonies prints an extract from Alonso de Ovalle's Historica Relacion del Reyno de Chile, book VI chapter I, stating that in 1579 the viceroy of Peru Don Francisco de Toledo sent Captain Pedro Sarmiento with two ships, which left Callao on 11 October, in pursuit of the pirate Francisco Draque - Francis Drake - and that passing the Strait of Magellan he reached Spain.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "What Sarmiento did on the way is described in a second extract, from Cristobal Suarez de Figueroa's Hechos de Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, book V page 210: having gone out through the Strait and hesitated not a little over unknown parts, \"sin soltar de la mano la sonda, astrolabios y cartas, en fondos, puertos, senos y montes, describiendolo todo en perfectas demarcaciones\", he was to make for Spain, as ordered, to give entire and curious notice of the site and disposition of the Strait and its narrows. Suarez de Figueroa is writing a panegyric of a rival commander's house a generation later, which is why this claim carries the method and not the praise.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The journal itself shows the same work at ground level, and shows what the survey was legally for. At the Rio de San Juan the entry records that Mass was said ashore, the forge was set up ashore and the ironwork made for knees and keys, and that \"aqui en este Rio de San-Juan, Pedro Sarmiento tomo la Posesion, y hizo un gran Mojon de piedra, y en el arbolo una Cruz alta que se parecia desde toda la Canal de el Estrecho, y se puso una Carta\" - whose text the book then prints in full, headed \"POSESION DEL RIO DE SAN-JUAN Y del ESTRECHO DE LA MADRE-DE-DIOS\" and opening \"En el Nombre de la Sanctisima Trenidad\".",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-diario"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Sarmiento renamed the passage. The possession document printed in the journal calls it the Estrecho de la Madre de Dios, not the Strait of Magellan; the name did not survive in use, and the volume's own title page reverts to Magallanes.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-diario"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The purpose of the whole enterprise is stated in the volume's own front matter, without any need to infer it. A third extract, from the dedication to the King of Francisco de Seixas y Lovera's Descripcion Geografica y Derrotero de la Region Austral Magallanica, asks that His Majesty order the Magellanic Strait \"se vuelva a poblar con Espanoles para defender aquellas Costas y las del Peru con una Esquadra de vaxeles de guerra, como asi se empezo a hacer el ano de mil quinientos ochenta y uno por Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa\". The survey was preparation for closing a sea lane.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The settlement followed, on a scale the same extracts record. Ovalle states that the King sent Sarmiento back with an armada which, according to the authors cited in the last chapter of his book V, was of twenty-three ships and two thousand men under Don Diego Flores de Valdes, with orders to fortify and secure Chile and Peru; that a city was ordered founded at the mouth of the Strait, of which Sarmiento was to remain governor; and that the city of San Felipe was founded on the northern side.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The cost is on the record inside the same Spanish volume, in the words of a hostile foreign witness the editor chose to print. The extract from Olivier van Noort's relation reports that the city of San Felipe, which Thomas Cavendish called the City of Famine as he called its inlet the Port of Famine, stood at 53 degrees 18 minutes; that it had four bastions with a cannon in each, which Cavendish found buried in 1587, dug up and took; that a church had been built and severe justice used, since a half-gallows was found with a man of that nation hanged on it; that it had been garrisoned with four hundred men so that no vessel could pass to the South Sea without their licence; that in three years nothing sown or planted throve and wild beasts came into the fortress itself; and that with all provisions consumed and no relief possible from Spain the greater part perished of hunger, the English finding many corpses still clothed and stretched about the houses.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "Two explanations of the failure sit a few pages apart in the same book and do not agree, which is worth more than either alone. Van Noort's account blames the ground: nothing sown grew in three years. Ovalle blames the map: the city could not be preserved for want of communication with the other settlements of Chile, being so far from all commerce with any other, and the colds of those parts being so insufferable. Neither writer was there, and this object does not choose between them.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The 1768 printing is itself a decision. A journal of 1580 was issued by the royal press of the Gazeta, bound together with a notice of the settlement expedition and with a dossier of testimonies drawn from other authors including a Jesuit historian of Chile, a court panegyrist, a Spanish writer on the austral region and a Dutch commander who had raided the same coasts. A government press printing the enemy's account of a Spanish disaster is an unusual editorial act for its date.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-diario",
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What this object rests on, and what it does not. It rests on page scans of the 1768 volume: the title page, page 230 of the journal, and pages lxxii, lxxiii and lxxvi of the preliminary testimonies. The journal is tiered primary as a printed transmission of Sarmiento's own text, but the volume does not state on the pages opened how faithfully it follows the manuscript, and no manuscript was seen; the testimonies are an eighteenth-century compiler's selection of other men's printed books and are tiered secondary, which is why this object is secondary. Nothing here rests on the volume's charts, on its index, or on modern scholarship.",
      "sources": [
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-diario",
        "sarmiento-viage-estrecho-1768-testimonios"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of the Strait of Magellan reach Sarmiento through Cavendish and through the phrase \"Port Famine\", so the story arrives already finished: Spaniards tried to bottle up the Strait and starved. The 1768 Madrid volume, which is where the Spanish side of it was actually printed, is rarely read in English at all. This object quotes it: the possession act at the Rio de San Juan with its stone cairn and its cross visible down the whole channel, the name Estrecho de la Madre de Dios that did not stick, the sounding line never let go of, the dedication that says plainly the point was a squadron of warships, and - printed by the royal press itself - Olivier van Noort's inventory of the four buried cannon, the half-gallows and the clothed corpses. It also prints the disagreement between two of its own witnesses about why the colony died, instead of resolving it.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-15",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/sarmiento-viage-al-estrecho-1768",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/sarmiento-viage-al-estrecho-1768.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1768)",
    "description": "The royal press at Madrid printed Sarmiento's 1579-80 journal of the Strait of Magellan in 1768, and bound in front of it a dossier of testimonies from other writers, Spanish and foreign. The journal shows what a survey looked like from inside: soundings, a stone cairn, a cross visible down the whole channel. The testimonies show what came of it: a garrison of four hundred set to close the Strait, and corpses left clothed in the houses.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/sarmiento-viage-al-estrecho-1768",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-15",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes en los anos de 1579 y 1580, y noticia de la expedicion que despues hizo para poblarle (Madrid, 1768) - the journal text",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=6LYGAAAAQAAJ"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Testimonios - the dossier of extracts from other authors printed in the preliminary matter of Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1768)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=6LYGAAAAQAAJ"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1768)"
  }
}