Loaísa expedition

Castilian travel to Southeast Asia in the 16th century

The Loaísa expedition was an early 16th century Spanish voyage of discovery to the Pacific Ocean, commanded by es (1490 – 20 July 1526) and ordered by King Charles I of Spain to colonize the Spice Islands in the East Indies. The seven ship fleet sailed from La Coruña, Spain in July 1525 and became the second naval expedition in history to cross the Pacific Ocean, after the Magellan Elcano circumnavigation. The expedition resulted in the discovery of the Sea of Hoces south of Cape Horn, and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. One ship ultimately arrived in the Spice Islands in September 1526.

De Loaísa's expedition was conceived both as a rescue mission and a voyage of discovery. The Victoria, a vessel from Magellan's expedition to the Pacific, had returned to Spain in 1522 with word that her sister ship the Trinidad had last been seen attempting to return home by sailing east from the Spice Islands to South America. De Loaísa was ordered to seek Trinidad, or news of her fate, by voyaging along her expected return route to Spain. Failing this he was to locate and colonise Magellan's Spice Islands, and also to bring back news of Tarshish and Ophir, where, according to the Bible, King Solomon, exploited precious metals and gems (Spanish scholars believed that those biblical islands might be somewhere near China).

The expedition set sail from Corunna on July 24, 1525. It consisted of seven ships, Santa María de la Victoria, Sancti Spiritus, Anunciada, San Gabriel, Santa María del Parral and San Lesmes and a patache, Santiago. De Loaísa was named captain along with Juan Sebastián Elcano, who had reached the Spice Islands in 1521 during the Magellan expedition. The fleet headed southwest to the Canary Islands and then south along the African coastline. In November 1525 de Loaísa moved west across the Atlantic to Brazil, reaching the Patagonian shore in January 1526. After some difficulty Hoces was able to steer his galleon northward once more, rejoining the other three vessels that remained with the expedition. On 26 May 1526, this diminished fleet of four ships (three galleons and the patache), passed through the Strait and entered the Pacific. The San Lesmes disappeared entirely. Twentieth century speculation suggests she ran aground in the Tuamotus, either on the island of Anaa where a 1774 expedition found a cross erected on the beach, or off the Amanu atoll where an old Spanish cannon was later found. New Zealand film maker Winston Cowie assesses the San Lesmes theory in his books Nueva Zelanda, un puzzle histórico: tras la pista de los conquistadores españoles and Conquistador Puzzle Trail, the Spanish version of which was completed with the support of the Embassy of Spain to New Zealand, adding the oral tradition of the Pouto Peninsula to Langdon's work. Cowie concludes that there is a possibility that the San Lesmes was wrecked on the Pouto Peninsula, with more research required to take the theory from possibility to probability. Greg Scowen's fiction conspiracy thriller The Spanish Helmet is based on Langdon's theory.