Relacion del ultimo viage al Estrecho de Magallanes (Madrid, 1788)
The frigate Santa Maria de la Cabeza surveyed the Strait of Magellan in 1785-86 with marine chronometers borrowed from the Cadiz observatory, and the book published from its officers' diaries did two unusual things: it stated the expedition's motives itself, naval, scientific and fiscal in that order, and it went back to the manuscript journals of the sixteenth century to establish that the Patagonian giants were never in them.
Why this wins its question: The Patagonian giants are usually told as a European folly quietly dropped in the eighteenth century, with Byron, Wallis and Bougainville as the correcting voices and the Spanish as the people who started it. The 1788 Madrid relation is the volume that settles it, and it is almost never quoted in English. This object gives its actual argument: a measurement by the frigate's officers agreeing to within lines with Carteret, Wallis and Bougainville, and then a return to the manuscript diaries - Albo, Urdaneta, Mori, Camargo, Ladrillero - to show that the sixteenth-century Spanish witnesses do not say what they are quoted as saying. It also prints the machinery around that result: Berthoud chronometers 15 and 16 from the Cadiz observatory, the two observers borrowed from Tofino's atlas of the Spanish coasts, 277 places in the muster, eight months of victuals and bales of warm clothing; the expedition's motives in its own words, navy first and the State last; its own admission that Sarmiento's charts were lost through Spanish negligence; and the machete engraved POR EL REY CARLOS III already worn by the man being measured.
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 commission is stated in the first paragraph of the relation. The King's resolution was communicated to the Captain General of the Navy to arm a frigate that should carry out the reconnaissance and draw the plan of the Strait of Magellan; the frigate Santa Maria de la Cabeza was chosen, of known good qualities, and it seemed preferable that she should not be copper-sheathed. Her command and the whole success of the commission were entrusted to the Capitan de Navio D. Antonio de Cordoba, with liberty to choose his officers, guard and crew, a second of his own confidence, and two officers versed in astronomical observations.
The two observers were borrowed from the survey of Spain's own coasts. Cordoba named the Capitan de Fragata D. Fernando de Miera as his second and, taking the opportunity of Brigadier D. Vicente Tofino being at Cadiz with the officers assigned there to the higher studies of navigation, who for two years had been engaged in forming the Hydrographic Atlas of the Coasts of Spain, asked for two of them.
The instruments are itemised. The two officers charged with the observations brought aboard the longitude clocks numbers 15 and 16 of Ferdinand Berthoud, belonging to the observatory of Cadiz, and in addition the small Arnold number 71 which was the property of D. Alexandro Belmonte; with observations made from land and signals from on board they began to determine the rates and to draw up tables for them. A complete collection of instruments was also embarked, of those made in London by order of the Court by Jacinto Magallanes and owed to the most celebrated artists of England, on whose use he had published memoirs in a quarto volume printed at Paris in 1775.
The ship's company is printed as a table. The Estado de salida names Cordoba as commander, Miera as second, Miguel de Zapiain as lieutenant, and among the tenientes de fragata Tello Mantilla, Dionisio Alcala Galiano and Alexandro Belmonte; it lists two chaplains, two pilots, two surgeons and three pilotines; and it totals 21 senior officers, 2 midshipmen, 30 infantry, 10 artillery, 20 petty officers, 54 sea gunners, 66 seamen, 46 ship's boys, 6 pages, 3 provisioning men and 19 servants - 277 places in all. Alcala Galiano would later command in the Northwest Coast surveys.
The crew's health was treated as part of the plan rather than as an afterthought. Eight months of victuals and five of water and firewood were embarked; and because the happy outcome of maritime expeditions depends in great part on the health of the crews, the commander made it one of his chief cares, embarking besides several bales of warm clothing to be distributed as need arose among troops and seamen, and such preservative medicines as experience had shown to be of unequivocal use.
The relation reports its own casualties in the same plain register. The frigate anchored in Cadiz Bay in June 1786 after eight months and two days of navigation without losing a single man on the return; only the commander and two of the crew came in seriously ill, with sixteen others lightly touched by scurvy, all of whom recovered soon; and on the outward voyage one sailor had been lost and another in the Strait, of illnesses the book says were contracted ashore.
The motives are named by the expedition itself, and the order is worth noting. The introduction lists what geography and hydrography would gain from sure knowledge of remote districts of the King's dominions whose notices were so contradictory, each traveller presenting a plan of the Strait in his own way with different names according to the anguish or the hope he was in when he baptised its dangers; then a second and very powerful motive, that the length of voyages south by Cape Horn and how pernicious they usually are to crews had always made another route desirable; and it closes by calling these motives of instruction and credit for the Corps of the Navy, of corrections and improvements for the sciences, and of utility for the State.
The same introduction faults Spain's own administration by name. It says that although Sarmiento and the Nodales, who visited those regions on purpose, left descriptions far more circumstantial than those of foreigners, through "la incuria de aquellos tiempos" - the negligence of those times - their plans have been lost, so that the descriptions remain in great part unintelligible, and none of them as exact as they should be given the scant aids their century supplied.
In December 1785 two Patagonians came aboard, and the account of it is a record of an encounter that had already happened many times before. One gave his name as Francisco Xavier, was of ordinary stature and directed the other, whose bulky body of 6 feet and 11 and a half inches, Burgos measure, the book says would not fail to cause surprise to the inhabitants of this old continent. The metric figure is not in the book: taking the Burgos foot at 0.2786 metres and its pulgada at a twelfth of that, the measurement converts to about 1.94 metres - tall, and not a giant. He wore a sabre or machete whose blade was engraved in capitals POR EL REY CARLOS III, and each carried lassos and bolas, arms well known in the province of Buenos Ayres.
The two men are described as acting on their own judgement, including against their hosts. They behaved with the greatest friendship and good faith, smoked tobacco and sat at table using fork and spoon deftly, but refused wine and brandy altogether, Francisco Xavier spitting out a mouthful he had been induced to try and warning his companion to abstain, giving all present to understand that he knew the bad effects of strong liquors.
The second part of the book closes the question of the Patagonian giants with a measurement. Of those who speak of the existence of giants, it says, it is enough to assure that the Patagonians are in no way such: the prolix measurement made by the officers of the frigate agrees, to within lines, with that of Carteret and Wallis and that of Bougainville, and all of them agree with the exact definition given by the Nodales, that they were "unos hombres membrudos y apersonados" - big-limbed, well-set men.
It then does something rarer than measuring, which is to check the sources. Refusing the charge that the early Spanish navigators invented the fable to make their voyages extraordinary, the book answers that countless authors agree Magellan, Loaisa, the Nodales and even Sarmiento depose unanimously to a gigantic stature, and that "nosotros que hemos tenido presentes sus Diarios originales nada hemos hallado de semejante hecho": Albo's diary, the only one surviving from Magellan's expedition, does not mention the Patagonians at all; Urdaneta, reporting that he dealt with them, calls them big and ugly; the Mori manuscript, though speaking expressly of these Indians, says nothing of their stature, and neither does Camargo; Ladrillero says only that the people of the Strait are well built, proud and of great strength.
The refutation is partly self-interested and the book does not hide it. The passage is written as a defence of the honour of the "primitivos navegantes Espanoles" against foreign authors, and its own footnotes cite the French Histoire des Navigations aux terres australes and Hawkesworth against itself. The measurement is independent of the motive - it agrees with the English and French figures - but the argument from the manuscripts is a Spanish naval institution defending Spanish navigators, and is reported here as such.
What this object rests on, and what it does not. It rests on page scans of the 1788 Madrid volume: pages iij of the introduction, 1, 3, 4, 21, 70, 323, 324 and 325. The relation of the voyage, drawn from the officers' own diaries and published by royal order two years after their return, is tiered primary; the second part, an eighteenth-century extract of all earlier voyages with a dissertation on the inhabitants, soil, climate and productions, is a compilation from other men's books and manuscripts and is tiered secondary, which is why this object is secondary. The charts and the derrotero that accompany the volume were not opened, and the manuscripts the book says it consulted were not seen.