Ricardo Padrón’s new book is an in-depth exploration of the place of the Pacific Ocean in the geographic imagination of imperial Spain. Spanish cartographers and chroniclers struggled with the vastness of its measure and its meaning—geocultural, historical, cosmographic—for it was both a daunting natural barrier for Spain’s westward imperial expansion and a malleable surface upon which to plot connectivity. In fact, Padrón argues that Spanish cartography and historiography strove to contain and even shrink—narratively and visually—the formidable size of the so-called South Sea in order to further Spanish imperial claims to the East Indies and to endow its increasingly complex colonial system with continuity and cohesion.
The invention of the Pacific was in part the result of a crucial geopolitical conflict between the Portuguese and the Spanish about on which side of the Tordesillas meridian the Moluccas fell. But this was far from a simple story. By guiding the reader...
