The memorials of Pedro Fernández de Quirós to Philip III
A campaign of petitions, some of them made public, by which a pilot tried for a decade to get a fleet sent back to the South Sea. The crown treated his written memorial as an asset transmissible to a successor, then paid him an allowance to keep him quiet, and the Council of State advised the king that the danger in refusing was that the man would carry his proposals to other princes.
Why this wins its question: Quirós's memorials are usually mentioned as a curiosity — the man who would not stop petitioning about Terra Australis — and quoted, when at all, for the rapturous description of the austral lands. What is missing everywhere is the administrative record around them, and that is what this object assembles from the volume that prints it: a royal cédula making the memorial itself the thing a successor would inherit, the petitioner's own line about proposing a method of discovering, settling and governing that would avoid the harms known from earlier discoveries, the three thousand ducados never fully collected, and the Council of State telling Philip III in its own words that the risk of refusing was that this man would take his proposals to other princes. It also states which half of the story comes from an editor hostile to him.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The crown treated his written memorial as the transferable part of the enterprise. A royal cédula printed in the volume, addressed to Don Luis de Velasco or the conde de Monterrey as viceroy of Peru, states that captain Pedro Fernández de Quirós goes by royal order "á hacer el descubrimiento de la parte incógnita del Sur", and orders that if he should die, fall ill or be unable to go, the viceroy is to name the most sufficient person to be found, who is to carry out the discovery "con los papeles y memorial que él dejare, para luz é inteligencia de lo que se pretende", giving that person the favour and help needed.
In Lima the same method was used on the viceroy: Quirós recounts in the first person that he continued presenting memorials asking that the dispatch be shortened, and setting out in them everything he judged necessary to arm, victual and fit the ships in men, munitions, provisions and tackle. He names the two men in the junta who backed him — the oidor Juan de Villela and the padre Francisco Coello, a former alcalde of the same audiencia and assessor of the previous viceroy — and records that the enterprise "en todas partes, halló siempre más contrarios que valedores", including don Fernando de Castro, husband of Mendaña's widow, who told him he would oppose the voyage because the settlement belonged to him.
One memorial stated the method rather than the request, and it is the one worth naming: after the weakness of a cédula that lacked much of what he had asked, he went back to the Council of State with several petitions, and "dí tambien otro memorial en que propuse el modo que pensaba tener en descubrir y poblar y gobernar aquellas naciones, huyendo de los daños que por ir por otros caminos se habian conocido en las demás descubiertas." The harm of the earlier discoveries is cited by the petitioner himself as the reason for a different procedure.
The argument he expected to work was strategic, not moral: he represented the damage that delay would do, that the English and Dutch enemies already had notice of the enterprise, and that if the Spanish did not occupy those lands and seas first, others might. His own summary of the result is dry — "lo que resultó de esto fué detenerme más" — together with an order that he be given a monthly sum for his maintenance and three thousand ducados de ayuda de costa to pay his debts, "los cuales nunca se acabaron de cobrar"; the rest was paid out to him by the secretary Antonio de Aróztegui.
Some of the memorials were deliberately made public, which is how the project escaped the crown's control of news. The editor of the 1876 edition records that Quirós circulated the eighth in February 1609, taking in it the discoveries of Vaez de Torres — implicitly as his own, since they had been made by ships of his armada — and repeating the plea that he be sent to take possession in the name of the king of Spain and to found colonies; that he gave another to the public detailing what had happened at the island of Taumaco and extending the news the islanders had supplied him; and that in another, carried along by the arbitrista currents of the day, he heaped up promises and even proposed that the king go and visit the Indies.
The publication of memorial number sixteen, in which he plainly threatened to go to Peru and carry out the enterprise by joining with others, is what forced a decision. In the consulta raised for the purpose the Council of State told Philip III that "el recelo del poco secreto que hay en las cosas, hace temer la indignacion y desesperacion de este hombre, si supiese el contra-despacho ... y que acuda á otros príncipes con sus propuestas" — the counter-dispatch being the order to be sent to the viceroy for when Quirós arrived there. The cédula to the marqués de Montes Claros of 15 December 1609 was produced by that fear.
The machinery worked as a delaying device and both sides knew it. The editor describes the resulting cédula as confused and vague, and says that far from satisfying the captain it drove him to fresh memorials to the Councils of the Indies and of State; the same editor frames the whole affair through the Council's own phrase about ridding itself of "las impertinencias del marino", and reports that complaints against the project reached the court from Mexico and protests from Peru.
What this case is evidence of: a subject of the Spanish monarchy could press a strategic project on the crown for years through a written, numbered and partly printed series of petitions, be answered with cédulas, an allowance and a counter-order, and be feared for the publicity he could give the refusal. It is evidence about administrative procedure and about the limits of Habsburg secrecy, not about the merits of the project; and half of it is reported here through a nineteenth-century editor who is openly unsympathetic to the petitioner, which is why those claims sit at 0.7 to 0.75 and the first-person and documentary ones higher.