Two Fictitious Accounts of Ortega’s “Third Voyage” to California

The long, narrow, and barren peninsula across from Sinaloa and Sonora defied, for nearly two centuries, all efforts at conquest and settlement. Ships were fitted out, sailors, soldiers, and would-be colonists were recruited by hopeful generals, admirals, and explorers. From the first try under Cortés in 1535 until the successful expedition of Father Juan María de Salvatierra in 1697, there were numerous attempts to establish towns and missions in Lower California.¹

Spanish sovereigns from Charles I to Charles III were anxious to establish ports of call on the west coast for the Manila Galleon. Reputed wealth in the form of pearl beds along the east coast and the precious mineral deposits throughout the peninsula contributed further motives for conquest. The unconverted natives, so close to the flourishing missions on the mainland, offered a promising field for evangelization.

Even the absurd geographic and cartographic errors of the times helped to lend importance to the sterile region.² Friar Antonio de la Ascensión, who accompanied Sebastián Vizcaíno on his second expedition, made of the Californias—from the southern tip at about twenty-three degrees north latitude to Cabo Mendocino at about forty degrees—a huge island. California was considered not only a veritable continent, but also a region controlling the entrance into the long-sought-for Northwest Passage. The nation which held California controlled the supposedly shorter route to Europe and the Far East. Ascensión’s erroneous map and report were taken over by the British, given world-wide publicity, and accepted by the Spaniards, who should have known better.³ In the 1630s, while Ascensión was still living and a century and a half before his mistakes would be detected and corrected, the rivalry among the enterprising leaders to explore and settle California was at its keenest.⁴

Prominent among the contenders at this time was Francisco de Ortega. In light of his own reports, he is usually credited with making three expeditions to California: from February 27 to July 3, 1632; from September 8, 1633, to April 8, 1634; and from January 11 to May 16, 1636.⁵ As indicated in the title of the article, I consider the two reports (entitled Tercera demarcación) on the third expedition as fictitious, and I deny that he undertook any third voyage of exploration along the coast of the Californias.

I should like to present this brief study as follows: first, summarize Ortega’s claims about the third trip; then, analyze the key elements of his reports; thirdly, attempt to find out what really took place; and finally, conjecture why he forged the two contradictory accounts. For the sake of brevity, I shall presuppose the reports on the first two voyages to be substantially correct, reflecting events which actually took place, although I cannot help pointing out, as the reader will see, several inaccuracies and impossible claims made in them.

A word, then, about Ortega’s claims as set forth in the first and longer version. He there asserts that he set out on the expedition from Santa Catalina, Sinaloa, on January 11, and returned to the port of departure on May 16, 1636. He sailed on the Madre Luisa de la Ascensión, the same frigate which had served him so well on the two previous expeditions.⁶ The ship carried twenty-one persons: Ortega, the Jesuit chaplain Roque de Vega, four sailors and a pilot, three cabin boys, seven soldiers (one of whom, Don Gabriel de Figueroa, doubled as escribano), and four women-servants (mozas de servicio).⁷ Several members of this crew had participated in the two earlier voyages. Ortega again took with him for gathering pearls that marvelous diving bell “which one or two persons can enter, and then go down to any desired depth without any danger of drowning, even though they remain there ten to twelve days.”⁸

Two day’s sailing carried them across the Gulf of California to a bay close to the well-known harbor of La Paz in southern Lower California.⁹ While anchored there, the frigate was tom from its moorings by a violent norther. For two nights and a day the ship was at the mercy of the hurricane. Long before the storm finally abated, it dashed the helpless frigate to pieces against the rocky coast far to the south of La Paz.

Marvelous to say, no one was lost; no one was even injured. Despite the raging tempest, all twenty-one rode safely to the shore on a portion of the wreckage. Even more extraordinary, Father Vega’s mass kit, with vestments, hosts and wine, was gently wafted ashore.¹⁰ The priest offered a Mass of thanksgiving, the first, according to Bancroft, Engelhardt, and others, to be said by a Jesuit in California.¹¹

No natives are referred to as living in this part of the peninsula; but, after all, no outside assistance was needed. In only forty-six days the ship-wrecked explorers built a sailboat,¹² water-tight and large enough to hold all twenty-one, and sufficiently steady for Father Vega to say Mass on board; so seaworthy that it carried them through calm or stormy weather from February 27 to May 16. So fine a ship did they build out of the wreckage and native California trees that they sailed along the eastern shore of California farther north (36° 30′) than any previous explorer. I might add that no subsequent explorer has succeeded in duplicating the voyage, which would take him to approximately the latitude of Monterey, California.¹³

We are not told what tools Ortega and his men used to build the boat, nor are we informed how they made it watertight. We do not know what food supplies they could secure for their fifty-three days on land and about two months at sea.

Shortly after they set sail from the scene of the wreck, they were back in La Paz.¹⁴ They were cordially welcomed by the natives, who had loyally kept in perfect condition everything that had been left there during the second voyage: “the fort, the church, and all else.” Ortega, usually so prolix in details, does not tell us specifically what stores these were.¹⁵ Fortunately, the fierce La Paz Indians were for once most docile and cooperative; otherwise the explorers, who had lost all their weapons in the shipwreck, would not have survived any hostile attack.¹⁶

With the zeal and enthusiasm of a missionary, Ortega praises the apostolic work of Father Vega in behalf of the Indians in and around La Paz. We are not told, however, how Vega could communicate with his new charges. We learn that the Padre was so favorably impressed by their receptive attitude towards Christianity that he determined to stay among them; but Ortega, scrupulously careful about exact compliance with regal orders, had to remind the fledgling missionary that no governmental or ecclesiastical authorization had been secured to start a mission at La Paz.¹⁷

On March 10, after a stay of seven days there, they continued their voyage. The main emphasis in both versions of the report about the third expedition is on the vast number of pearl beds he discovered. Even as they were sailing out of the harbor of La Paz, he found “El Comedero de las Sillas,” the first in an interminable series of pearl beds. The very next morning, as they were about to cast anchor in a harbor of the Isla Cerralbo, they discovered another; and so, day after day, as they shuttled back and forth between the off-shore islands and the peninsula, they brought up more pearls.¹⁸

Ortega does not seem to have consulted his two earlier reports when he drew up the contradictory versions of the third voyage. Thus, in the first expedition, he put La Paz at 24⁰ north latitude; but, in the third, they reached 31⁰ 30′ shortly after leaving the harbor. The incredible voyage northward is at a dizzy speed; the unidentifiable Punta de Buen Viaje was reached at 36° 30′, where they decided to return to Santa Catalina, Sinaloa.¹⁹

A region so far north was so intensely cold at this time of the year that even the local natives refused to dive for pearls. Accordingly, on that epochal day, May 6, 1636, after reaching the northernmost point ever attempted by any explorer, they turned the prow of their rebuilt boat southeastward to arrive at the port of departure in ten uneventful days.

Such in brief is Ortega’s first version of his third expedition. The following are a few of my reasons for holding that this report is essentially fictitious and that the voyage was not carried out as claimed by him. If Ortega had really made the trip with a Jesuit chaplain by the name of Roque de Vega, there would be some record of the priest. The Jesuit documentation for the time is so abundant, detailed, and specific that the presence of the missionary, a pioneer participant in the exploration of California, would not have gone unrecorded. In none of the Mexican Jesuit Province catalogues of the time is there a “Vega,” nor even a “Roque,” much less a “Roque de Vega.” Neither during, before, nor after 1636, was there a Jesuit in Mexico by that name.²⁰

Andrés Pérez de Ribas, S.J., later superior of all the Mexican Jesuits, and missionary of the same area where Vega is supposed to have worked, at the very same time, does not mention him in this most detailed and minute contemporary account of the Jesuit missionaries in northern Mexico.²¹ The other Jesuit missionaries, without a single exception, who participated in the California expeditions, are given extensive consideration by him. Had Vega gone with Ortega in 1636, he would have been the first Jesuit to participate in the exploration of California and would have been recognized as such by the numerous historians of the Order.²²

When Atondo y Antillón’s expedition (1679-1685) seemed to promise success, Garavito and Escañuela, bishops of Guadalajara and Durango respectively, wrote interminable letters and protests, each claiming jurisdictions over California. Every chaplain appointed to earlier expeditions was cited in the controversy; thus the authorizations granted to Diego de la Nava by the ecclesiastical chapter of Guadalajara to participate in Ortega’s 1632 and 1633-1634 ventures are reproduced verbatim in support of Guadalajara’s contention. When the same chapter learned that Juan de Zúñiga, by virtue of the authorization of the archbishop of Mexico City, was accompanying the second Ortega expedition, it ordered and carried out the arrest of the “intruding chaplain.” Inasmuch as Roque de Vega was supposedly working in Sinaloa, he would have had to be authorized by Franco y Luna, bishop of Durango, in order to have the necessary spiritual powers to participate in Ortega’s third expedition; accordingly, Escañuela, Franco y Luna’s successor, would have been able to invoke a strong argument in support of his contention. Neither side, however, knew anything about a Roque de Vega.²³

Had Ortega and his crew really suffered the complete shipwreck he claimed in the first version of the report, it would have been an extraordinary accomplishment for the group to build a boat large enough to hold two or three persons, equip it with oars, and fit it out with a piece of sail rescued from the frigate. With great effort they might have succeeded in recrossing the Gulf and securing a party to rescue the others stranded at the tip of the peninsula. But that they could build a ship, under the conditions alleged by Ortega, large enough to accommodate twenty-one persons, and then go on a long exploratory trip of about two months, is, I believe, against all reason.

As I indicated above, had the expeditionary party really sailed as far north as Ortega claimed, they would have found themselves at a point east of and directly opposite the famed bay of Monterey in Upper California (36° 30′); in reality, the head of the Gulf of California is located at 31° 52′. On careful study of the two versions of the report on the third voyage, it becomes evident that Ortega never got as far as the Ángel de la Guarda Island, the largest on the east coast of the peninsula. The southern tip of the island touches 29° north latitude. He knew nothing about the narrow channel between the island and the peninsula. The first to record and identify the island was Kino, who described it from the Mexican mainland in 1706; the earliest cartographical record we have of it is the same missionary’s 1710 map.²⁴ It was not until 1721 that the first voyage was made to the island itself; this was undertaken by the Jesuit missionary Juan de Ugarte and his English pilot, William Strafford.²⁵

Ortega’s Isla de las Tortugas is certainly not the tiny island called Tortuga today. Cebreiro Blanco identifies the island with the nearby San Marcos.²⁶ If this is so, then Ortega’s information about it is completely wrong. An island that measures five and a half miles in length and from one and three quarters to two and a half across, is far from having a circumference of seventy-five miles, as claimed by Ortega.²⁷ San Marcos is at about 27° 13′ north latitude; Ortega puts it at 33° 15′, over six degrees off.

He fares even worse in regard to the next island, called by him San Sebastián, and identified by modern scholars as San Lorenzo, the last of the Sal-si-puedes group.²⁸ Ortega locates it at 36°, whereas in reality it is at about 28° 34′. He reckons its circumference at one hundred miles; in reality it is some twelve and a half miles long and from one to two miles across.

Enough for the analysis of Ortega’s fictitious data in the first version of his report. Let us turn for a moment to the third point of our inquiry: what really took place? Here we are in the realm of conjecture. All that we are certain of is that, after the alleged expedition, Ortega went to Mexico City, where he insisted on his right to continue the California explorations and tried to give the new Viceroy, Marqués de Cadereyta, sixty pearls—thirty white ones and the others badly discolored and scratched. The Viceroy very tactfully declined the gift and suggested that Ortega forward them to Philip IV. Ortega chose some of the better ones and sent them to the sovereign.²⁹

Inasmuch as the second version of Ortega’s report helps to solve what really took place, I shall summarize it briefly here.³⁰ As the reader will see, this second version differs radically from the version we have been analyzing. It states that twenty persons participated in the expedition; again, Father Roque de Vega goes along as chaplain.³¹ The voyage was most successful, without the slightest mishap, until they reached 36° 30′ north latitude, where a fierce norther struck the frigate. The mighty impact drove the ship onto a sandbar and cracked it wide open. All the crew, however, was miraculously saved. Then, with tools rescued from the ship and timbers secured from the peninsula, they built a smaller sailboat and returned at once to Santa Catalina.³² In the terrible shipwreck most of the pearls were lost; hence so few were left to offer to Cadereyta.

Obviously, both versions cannot be correct. The main problem at this point of our inquiry is to try to determine whether anything in either is true. As is evident, Ortega’s second version is more plausible than the first. Unlike the situation reported in the first version, Ortega’s crew could use the tools, planks, and sails from the stranded frigate in order to build a seaworthy ship. More important, they did not go on a long exploratory voyage of some two months before deciding to return to Santa Catalina. Cadereyta, nonetheless, was not particularly impressed by the improved version, calling to Ortega’s embarrassed attention the absence of all regal and viceregal authorizations for the third expedition, or even for the second. In fact, Cadereyta, in his reply, cited a decree dated December 3, 1632, which expressly forbade Ortega to make any more expeditions after the first one undertaken earlier in that same year.³³

Now that we have studied the information furnished by the two versions of Ortega’s report, recalled the ascertainable facts about his trip to Mexico City, and seen Cadereyta’s reaction to his alleged third expedition, we are better able to conjecture what really took place. Sometime between April 8, 1634, when Ortega returned from his second California expedition, and mid-1636, when he went to Mexico City, he undertook a pearl-fishing voyage along the eastern coast of the peninsula. The results were meager, as we have seen. Quite likely, although not certainly, he set out on January 11, 1636, if the attestation of the event is authentic.³⁴

Ortega’s frigate disappeared: it was either wrecked somewhere along the coast of the Mexican mainland or sold by its owner. Neither of the two contradictory versions of the wreck is acceptable. No boat built from a derelict could have brought back twenty or twenty-one men from such a great distance and through one of the world’s roughest and most treacherous bodies of water.

Ortega almost certainly knew about the change of Mexican viceroys which took place on September 16, 1635. The news had nearly four months to reach him in Santa Catalina before he left on the third expedition and exactly eight months by the time he allegedly returned to the same harbor. Ortega most probably learned about the change late in 1635. Inasmuch as he had no authorization from the new viceroy and did not want to start the long process of securing it, with his chances slim against so many contenders and the express prohibition of Viceroy Cerralbo, he went ahead with a pearl-fishing expedition.³⁵

Ortega tells us that he had the report and map of Friar Antonio de la Ascensión.³⁶ As we have noted, both the report and the map consider the Californias as a vast island. That is why Ortega could “sail” his boat up to 36° 30′ north latitude. His Tercera demarcación is the log of a ship sailing up the Gulf of California in accordance with Ascensión’s version of reality.

Inasmuch as this interpretion of California geography was commonly held at the time, this part of Ortega’s lie could not be detected. Yet Cadereyta, finding a dossier heavily weighted against Ortega, saw through the man’s dishonest schemes. He now forbade the explorer, under the threat of the death penalty, to undertake any more expeditions.³⁷

There remains little to be said in answer to the last question: why did Ortega forge the two accounts of the Tercera demarcación? At least one motive is certain, and of this he makes no secret: he wanted to secure royal and viceregal authorization to continue his explorations and preserve his monopoly of California pearl fishing. In order to do so, he had to present his case in the most favorable light. Hence he alone possesses the marvelous diving bell. Hence, too, he alone possesses the knowledge of the location of numerous and abundant pearl beds. These are two incomparable advantages over all rival contenders. Further, he added spiritual advantages to the temporal: he always took along with him at least one chaplain who worked among the Indians and converted many of them.

Why the shipwreck? After all his boasting, he must have a logical explanation for bringing back so few pearls. For some reason, too, the frigate must disappear. The shipwreck which, according to the first version of his report, took place as soon as he had crossed over to the peninsula, was placed, on second and better thought, at the end of the northern voyage. This was a more plausible explanation and served his purpose just as well.

In conclusion, I believe that Ortega’s apocryphal accounts can be best understood in the light of similar forgeries of our western and southwestern history. When it is realized that his Tercera demarcación is not unique, but rather one of many, then we can work out some sort of pattern to help us recognize such frauds.

Obviously, much misinformation was taken over from the Indians in good faith by explorers. For lack of mastery of the native languages, the explorers often failed to understand their native informants. Then too, the Indians used the techniques of the “protective lie” in order to get the unwanted strangers to move on to fabulous riches or to please them, and the “tall story” in order to amaze and startle them; hence the accounts of Amazons, tribes of white people, one-horned sheep, one-legged men, four-legged birds, miraculous apparitions, and so on.

It was usually not the natives, however, who were the main sources of apocryphal information. The explorers themselves contributed most. Friars Marcos de Niza and Antonio de la Ascensión were the true authors of the reports dealing with the events in which they participated; yet every statement in their accounts must be checked against other sources. The vengeful ex-govemor of New Mexico, Diego Dionisio Peñalosa Briceño y Verdugo, in order to turn over vast regions of Spanish North America to Great Britain or France, forged several accounts which he attributed to the well-known Franciscan missionary Nicolás Freitas, who could not even suspect the fraud perpetrated in his name.³⁸ The French Jesuit, Amando Niel, was credited with a commentary on the famous Relaciones del Nuevo México by Zárate Salmerón; the commentary was concocted in the 1790s, more than half a century after the death of the supposed author.³⁹ Luis Velarde, S.J., in his valuable Descripción de la Pimería Alta, unwittingly took over numerous apocryphal elements.⁴⁰

So anxious were European nations to find the Northwest Passage that one of the greatest forgeries of all times was readily accepted. Admiral Bartolomé de Fontes maps and detailed description of the passage and surrounding regions were published in English and French. The Spanish critic and historian, Andrés Marcos Burriel, S.J., published in 1757 the first refutation after the French Academy had most enthusiastically defended Fonte’s productions as genuine.

A study of the above-mentioned apocrypha reveals definite types of forgeries: some authors never existed (e.g. Bartolomé de Fonte); others existed but never wrote the account attributed to them (such were Amando Niel and Nicolás Freitas); others, through ignorance or for ulterior motives, accepted too readily the data passed on to them (Luis de Velarde), or accommodated the information received to their preconceived notions (Marcos de Niza and Antonio de la Ascensión). I would place Francisco de Ortega in the category of those who possess accurate information but act with an ulterior motive. Ortega sent in the false reports in order to help his chances of securing governmental authorization to continue the exploration of California and engage in lucrative pearl fishing.

Author notes