Педро Фернандес де Кейрос: Португальский мореплаватель на службе Испании

Portuguese navigator (1563–1614)

Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (lang es) (1563–1614) was a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain. He is best known for his involvement with Spanish voyages of discovery in the Pacific Ocean, in particular the 1595–1596 voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña y Neira, and for leading a 1605–1606 expedition that crossed the Pacific in search of Terra Australis.

Queirós (or Quirós as he signed) was born in Évora, Portugal in 1563. In January 1606 the expedition came upon Henderson Island and Ducie Island, and then Rakahanga (Northern Cook Islands), and the Buen Viaje Islands (Butaritari and Makin) in the present day island nation of Kiribati. It is also probable that his expedition sighted Tahiti and other islands in the Tuamotu archipelago. Queirós narrowly missed the Marquesas, as well as New Zealand, thanks to a change in his planned itinerary. In his printed memorials, notably the Eighth (which was published in Italy, Holland, France, Germany and England), this was altered to Austrialia del Espíritu Santo (The Australian Land of the Holy Spirit), a pun on "Austria", in honor of King Philip III, who was of the House of Hapsburg or 'Austria' in Spanish. The island is still called Espiritu Santo. Here he stated his intention to establish a colony, to be called Nova Jerusalem. He seems to have identified Australia/Austrialia del Espíritu Santo with the huge northward extension of the Austral continent joining it to New Guinea, as depicted in maps like those of Gerard de Jode and Petrus Plancius. For, as he said in his Tenth Memorial (page 5): “New Guinea is the top end of the Austral Land of which I treat". Two weeks later, his second in command, Luis Váez de Torres, after searching in vain for Queirós and assuming Queirós (or rather the crew of his ship) had decided to go their own way, left Espiritu Santo. Torres successfully reached Manila, the center of the Spanish East Indies in May 1607, after charting the southern coastline of New Guinea on the way and in doing so sailing through the strait that now bears his name, between Australia and New Guinea. Torres was unaware of his proximity to Australia's northern coast, just over the horizon from his route.

In the 19th century some Australian Catholics claimed that Queirós had in fact discovered Australia, in advance of the Protestants Willem Janszoon, Abel Tasman and James Cook. The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney from 1884 to 1911, Patrick Francis Moran, asserted this to be a fact, and it was taught in Catholic schools for many years. He claimed that the real site of Queirós' New Jerusalem was near Gladstone in Queensland, supported by elements of Queirós' description of the land he had discovered, such as his assertion that "its length is as much as all Europe and Asia Minor as far as the Caspian and Persia, with all the islands of the Mediterranean and the ocean which encompasses, including the two islands of England and Ireland. That hidden part is the fourth corner of the world".

Building on this tradition, the Australian poet James McAuley (1917–76) wrote an epic called Captain Quiros (1964), in which he depicted Queirós as a martyr for the cause of Catholic Christian civilisation (although he did not repeat the claim that Queirós had discovered Australia). The heavily political overtones of the poem caused it to be coldly received at a time when much politics in Australia was still coloured by Catholic Protestant sectarianism. The Australian writer John Toohey published a novel, Quiros, in 2002. The British writer Robert Graves describes the 1595 expedition in his historical novel, The Islands of Unwisdom, written in 1949. In its introduction he describes his sources.

The Spanish Navy gunboat Quirós, commissioned in 1896, was named for Queirós, using the Spanish spelling of his surname. After she was sold to the United States, she retained the name as Quiros in United States Navy service from 1900 to 1923.