The discovery of America by Columbus in 1492 is one of the most important episodes in human history. That giant leap opened the way for other explorers such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, among others, to carry out their conquests on the new continent. Few people have not heard of these characters today, since thousands of books have been written and dozens of movies and series have been filmed about them. The focus that has been placed on them has been so great that other important figures from that period in which the known world was continually expanding have gone unnoticed.
We are talking about other great Spanish explorers who carried out similar exploits outside of America and who have practically fallen into oblivion. Discoveries that have not been so researched in the academic field in recent centuries or that other countries have even tried to attribute to them. Today on ABC we are going to give you three surprising examples that you have probably never heard of.
The first of them is Juan Bermúdez, who was born in the second half of the 15th century in the Huelva town of Palos de la Frontera, into a family with a strong seafaring tradition. This led him to take to the sea at a very young age and he was fortunate to be selected by Columbus as a crew member on the voyage to America in 1492. That was his first trip, although he crossed the Atlantic ten more times as a pilot or master, establishing a record never surpassed by another European in the 16th and 17th centuries.
On that first voyage in 1492, Bermúdez was embarked in La Pinta. He was also chosen to be part of the crew on the second trip to America, becoming rich to the point of being able to captain his own caravel, La Garza, with which he dedicated himself to transporting people, animals, merchandise and tools to the countries that followed. settlements that were being established on the new continent. However, the expedition through which he wrote his own golden page in the history of the conquests did not begin until July 1505 in Seville, the headquarters of the Carrera de Indias.
The outward journey to Hispaniola, in the Caribbean, occurred without a hitch and he unloaded his goods without any problem, but when he began the return everything became complicated. A storm surprised La Garza and diverted him from his course in a northerly direction instead of towards the Azores, as usual. The journey became uncontrolled and took him parallel along the coasts of the Florida peninsula pushed by the current that originated in the Gulf of Mexico. When he had been sailing for a few days, Bermúdez reached a small archipelago that he named the Garza Islands, in recognition of his caravel, which was located north of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
Later, they were renamed the Juan Bermúdez Islands and, finally, Las Bermudas, as they are known today. There are more than 150 and Bermúdez claimed them as part of the Spanish Empire. However, the expedition did not disembark due to the risk of running aground and was deserving of that right. Later, they were colonized by the English. In the chronicle of the Indies published by Pedro Mártir de Anglería in 1511, ‘Legatio Babylonica’, an island called Bermuda in the Atlantic was already represented, although its true discoverer was not mentioned.
The Sources of the Nile
Half a century later we find another example of how the exploits of some Spanish explorers have been forgotten. We are talking about Pedro Páez Jaramillo, a simple Jesuit missionary from Olmeda de las Fuentes (Madrid) who almost no one knows today despite having discovered the famous sources of the Blue Nile. “A place that, for 2,000 years, was the greatest geographic secret since the discovery of America,” noted Alan Moorehead in ‘The Blue Nile‘ (Hamish Hamilton, 1962).
As José Antonio Crespo-Francés explains in an article published in the magazine ‘Atenea’ in 2009: «Despite the fact that many expedition members returned as heroes and their works were studied and disseminated, this explorer and his formidable work fell into oblivion. “He even wrote three volumes about Ethiopia that were not published until 1945, despite their value.”
The objective of his expeditions through Africa at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century was to spread Catholic doctrine. At that time, the Blue Nile and White Nile were known to flow together to form the longest river in the world. However, there was one question that the Ethiopians and Egyptians could not answer: where was it born? For a long time, explorers and armies knew how to reach the junction between the two, but not further because of its waterfalls and geographical features. They did not even succeed with the map that Ptolemy had drawn, with precision, of 6,700 kilometers of it.
Many geographical societies tried to reach its origin, but all failed. Nobody found out until two centuries later, but Páez Jaramillo managed to do it. He left Spain in 1588 for Goa and continued to Ethiopia. There he was captured by the Arabs and sold as a slave to the Turks. He spent seven years in prison and, after being rescued, decided to continue his evangelizing work in Ethiopia. This time he managed to settle, learn the language and customs and win the hearts of the people. “His fine diplomatic sense and spontaneous sympathy, as well as an impeccable training as an architect and polyglot, led him to be a friend and advisor to the emperors Za Dengel and Melec Segued III, whom he converted to Catholicism,” says Crespo-Francés.
In one of his endless journeys in 1618, Páez Jaramillo unintentionally arrived at the long-awaited Sources of the Blue Nile, but he did not shout his discovery to the four winds. He only left the following phrase written as testimony in one of his books: “I confess that I was happy to see what King Cyrus, the great Alexander and Julius Caesar so desired.” He did not give it any more importance and dedicated himself to building a church in Górgora and a two-story palace on the shores of Lake Tana, in western Ethiopia, as well as writing the history of those lands, which was not published until 1945 and in Portuguese.
Several 19th century explorers took credit for its discovery, without knowing that Páez Jaramillo had already achieved it two centuries earlier. In the last three decades, some authors have been interested in his life. In 2001, Javier Reverte wrote a biography titled ‘God, the devil and adventure’ (DeBolsillo). The missionary died in 1622 at the age of 58 and was buried near the source of the Blue Nile, in the main chapel of the old church of Górgora, which is abandoned today. It is in such poor condition that it could disappear into the undergrowth.
Persepolis
On July 17, 1618, García de Silva y Figueroa finally found himself before Abbas the Great of Iran. Sent by Philip III as ambassador, it took this Spanish soldier and explorer – born in Zafra, Badajoz – four years to reach his appointment with the Shah to try to establish a military alliance against the Turks. During the trip he overcame all kinds of dangers and adventures to explain the plans of the King of Spain to the Persian leader, but, once there, he refused to receive him and ordered him to return without a response. None of that should have mattered to our protagonist, because he had just made one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history: Persepolis, the ancient and disappeared capital of the Persian Empire.
As a result, the ambassador – who appears above according to the illustration by Miguel Zorita – became the first European to offer a description of cuneiform writing, the oldest in the world. He also left for posterity one of the most beautiful travel books of recent centuries: ‘Comments by Don García de Silva y Figueroa of the Embassy to King Abbas of Persia’ (Ediciones Orbigo, 2015). A work that, despite its importance and the stir it caused in the intellectual environment of Europe at the beginning of the 17th century, was not translated into Spanish until the 20th century and condemned the ambassador to oblivion.
There have been some historians who have tried to tell about his life in past times, but “what is known is remarkably little,” noted Joaquín María Córdoba in his article ‘A Spanish gentleman in Isfahan’ (CSIC, 2005). His journey had begun in Lisbon, in 1614. He remained held for two years in Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, and then crossed the Indian Ocean to reach the coast of Arabia on April 8, 1617. Then they coasted Oman and crossed the Strait of Hormuz until reaching Persia, where he discovered that the Shah was actually in the Caspian area. In November the ambassador went to Shiraz and there decided to wait until spring to meet him.
When he set out to sea again in April 1618 heading for Isfahan, in Iran, he left the route to see some ruins that he had been told about. In his book he calls them “Chilminara.” He had the intuition, from what he had read in ancient sources and from what he had been told in Europe, that, “without being able to doubt it, this site must be ancient Persepolis.” When he discovered the ruins, he was so perplexed that he did not doubt it for a minute. The letter he sent to his friend the Marquis of Bedmar, ambassador in Venice, was so rich in details and explanations that the news circulated quickly among the enlightened in the main cities of Europe.
Figueroa came to the conclusion that the cuneiform symbols that adorned those temples were not simple ornaments, but a form of writing. António de Gouveia (1602) and Giambattista and Gerolamo Vecchietti (1606) had already recognized them as a type of writing in other sculptures found, but the Spanish ambassador will be the first Westerner to describe them, along with all the architectural details of that lost city. Above all, the great temple that had numerous windows, doors and demolished columns in the main courtyard. This area caught his attention, as it had inscriptions on the architraves and friezes.
At the end of this description, Figueroa reasons his hypothesis that Chilminara was Persepolis, for which he resorts to both classical sources and the reports that Brother Antonio de Gouvea had provided him in Spain. This is how he concluded that this was the capital “buried for so many centuries.” “The last entry is of a melancholic and poetic beauty, when it says that at dusk, as the ambassador went to Margascan, his entourage flew over a large number of storks that, in turn, returned to the nests installed on the legendary columns,” notes Córdoba. in your article.
It is a shame that it took so long for our ambassador’s achievements to be recognized. It was attempted by a Parisian editor named Wicquefort, who published a French translation of an incomplete manuscript 43 years after his death. The work, however, fell into oblivion not long after, amid the avalanche of new publications that were increasingly more complete and full of magnificent engravings. The first Spanish edition of Figueroa’s trip did not arrive in our country until 1903.
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