Estêvão Gomes

• 1. Introduction

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  In May of 1521, the Portuguese explorer Estêvão Gomes sailed a ship named the San Antonio into a Spanish port. He was not the officer who had commanded her when she had set out. That ship belonged to Ferdinand Magellan's fleet, and its rightful captain was Alvaro de Mesquita. Gomes had overpowered Mesquita near the Strait of Magellan and taken the ship for himself. Gomes had joined the voyage hoping for command of a ship of his own. Whatever happened near that strait, it ended Gomes' part in the expedition for good. What pushed a trusted pilot to turn on his own commanders? How did a man who mutinied against Magellan later have his own name attached to a stretch of the North American coast? The answers start not aboard a ship, but in a Portuguese port city and a Spanish shipping office.

• 2. A Pilot In Castile

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  Porto, in northern Portugal, was Gomes' birthplace, sometime around 1483, and he came from a family of African ancestry. As a young man, Gomes sailed in the Portuguese India Armadas. By 1518, he had relocated to Castile, taking up a post as a pilot for the Casa de Contratación in Seville, the Spanish office that vetted pilots for the Crown's fleets. That appointment placed him among a small circle of experienced seamen the Spanish Crown could call on for its next major voyage.

• 3. Mutiny At The Strait

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  In 1519, Gomes sailed as pilot major of the entire fleet, a senior post aboard the San Antonio. His real ambition, though, was command of a ship, not just charting its course. That ambition curdled when Magellan passed him over for a captaincy, choosing his own inexperienced nephew, Alvaro de Mesquita, instead. Near the Strait of Magellan, Gomes moved against Mesquita, seized control of the San Antonio, and turned the ship back toward Spain. Once ashore, Gomes argued that the mutiny was justified, pointing to what he called Magellan's abuses and poor management of the fleet. Investigators locked the mutineers away while they weighed the claims. Within six months, every one of them walked free, except Mesquita.

• 4. Charting An Unknown Shore

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  In 1523, the Spanish Crown authorized Gomes to search the North American coast for a passage to Asia faster than the Strait of Magellan. A fifty-ton caravel named La Annunciada was built for the voyage. It left the port of Corunna on the 24th of September 1524, carrying a crew of 29 men. No one aboard left behind a firsthand account of the voyage. What is known comes secondhand, through brief summaries by the historians Oviedo, Peter Martyr, and Alonzo de Santa Cruz. More detail survives in charts later drawn by Diogo Ribeiro. Even the direction of the voyage is disputed. For a long time, historians assumed Gomes explored the coast from north to south. A more recent case argues instead that he began in the Spanish Caribbean and sailed north. If Gomes did travel south to north, he likely stopped first at Santiago de Cuba to restock supplies. From there, he would have followed the coastline from Florida to Labrador, surveying the shores of future New England with particular care. Gomes sailed up the Penobscot River as far as the future site of Bangor, Maine, and named the waterway El Rio de Las Gamas. Other landmarks got his labels too: the Merrimack River became Rio de San Antonio, and Cape Cod became Cabo de las Arenas. Near the Penobscot, though, Gomes was not only naming rivers.

• 5. Captives And A Royal Order

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  Near the Penobscot, Gomes abducted at least 58 native people, loading them onto his ship as evidence of a potentially lucrative slave trade. He reached Spain in August 1525 and sent word ahead to the king of his return. According to Peter Martyr, the message garbled somewhere along the way. The Spanish word for slaves, esclavos, was misheard as the word for cloves, clavos. For a moment, the royal court believed Gomes had found a route to the Orient. Once the mistake came to light, Charles was furious that his ban on enslaving American natives had been ignored. He ordered the captives freed. The expedition's more lasting legacy, though, would be drawn in ink rather than argued in court.

• 6. A Coastline Bears His Name

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  Cartographer Diogo Ribeiro drew on Gomes' voyage to complete his 1525 Castiglione map. It was the first to show North America with a continuous coastline running from Florida to Nova Scotia. On that map, Ribeiro labeled the region of present-day New England as Tierra de Esteban Gómez, the Land of Estêvão Gomes. The label would outlast the voyage that inspired it. Gomes' own career at sea, meanwhile, still had one chapter left to run.

• 7. Final Years

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  After returning from North America, Gomes spent several years supervising shipbuilding at Corunna, a role that lasted until 1528. In 1533, he took on a commission to build a canal connecting the Guadalquivir river, but the project collapsed soon after it began. In 1535, Gomes joined Pedro de Mendoza's expedition to the Río de la Plata, in South America. Natives along the Paraguay River killed him there in 1538, three years after he had set out.