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“Strictly speaking, oceans do not really exist: they are constructs of the mind, figments of the cartographer’s imagination, landlubbers’ ways of dividing up maritime space according to the lay of the land,” writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto.1Close As this pathbreaking book shows, the so-called Spanish Lake was just such a figment. The term was an invention of twentieth-century historians trying to make sense of a Castilian imperial system that existed between 1567 and 1815. The figure of a lake was wholly inappropriate, for it assumes a body of water defined by land—which the Pacific was not—and leaves a distorted impression of the empire itself. Readers will discover here that the Pacific was neither a lake nor Spanish.
The Spanish were more seafearing than seafaring; and, as James Hamilton-Paterson points out, one way to “tame a threatening landscape [is] by subjecting it to the control of language.”2Close When Vasco Núñez de Balboa spied waters to the west of the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, he not only used a name, El Mar del Sur (South Sea), previously applied to other more familiar bodies of water, but miniaturized it by calling it el golfo rather than an ocean. Ferdinand Magellan provided a similar service by describing its waters as “pacific,” but his voyages also revealed unexpected vastness, which evoked a horror vacui that could be only partially allayed by filling maps with lines indicating key trade routes linked to terrestrial destinations.3Close Always landlubbers, the Spanish viewed the sea as something to cross rather than to discover.
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