As directions, east and west remain relative. As concepts, East and West resemble statuary: immobile constructs subject to erosion over time and more immediate efforts at either conservation or toppling, depending on who wields the chisel. Ricardo Padrón's engrossing account returns us to the workshop before either East or West had been carved into their current form. The Indies of the Setting Sun captures the strained efforts of Spanish cartographers to wrestle the Pacific expanse into geographic and imperial cohesion. The book accomplishes this by peeling away centuries of learned intuitions about the orientation of the world and the resulting toponyms reinforcing them.
Was the New World “new” or an extension of Asia? How wide was Balboa's South Sea? How far west could and should the Spanish Indies extend? Padrón argues that the architects of Spain's sixteenth-century cartographic imagination labored to establish “Amerasian” continuity of one form or another, lashing what we now call the Americas to what we now call East Asia. Some appealed to theories of the continents, arguing that “America” was an Asian peninsula, downplaying the Pacific's breadth in the process. Others suggested that untamed tropicality defined societies on either side of the ocean, however wide, making both Caribbean and Insular Asian communities in need of the guidance only a temperate—climatologically and characteristically—society like Spain could provide. In time, Castilian initiative stood in as an organizing principle when appeals to climate and continents faded. Padrón's survey extends beyond maps to the wider “cartographic literature” structuring Spain's imagination of the Indies. He argues that these sources supported Spain's transpacific ambitions by evincing a “cartography of containment” and the “rhetoric of smooth sailing” (p. 8).
The work spans eight chapters. The first two baptize the reader into sixteenth-century ways of seeing. The next three, highlights of the work, explore cartographic literature during the overlooked decades bridging Magellan's Pacific crossing in 1520–21 and the founding of the Spanish Philippines in 1565. Debate persisted longer than our teleology of discovery might suggest about the Pacific's width, the contours of the Asian and American coastlines, and the location of the antemeridian marking the Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres. “Asia”—south, southeast, and east; insular and continental—permeates the narrative, but China and Japan receive their own chapters as objectives and obstacles within the greater West Indies. In the former, commentators debate whether a conquest of China should be martial or merely spiritual; the latter establishes Japan's position as a missionary way station into the transpacific West. The final chapter catalogs appeals to Castilian valor that inadvertently reveal the limits of Castilian success. The empire retained its transpacific dimension into the nineteenth century, but never at the scale required to sustain the alternative geography explored here. Ultimately, the Pacific contained Spain rather than the other way around.
Padrón anchors his chapters in three or four key texts and deftly balances broad vision with deep reading. You might occasionally get turned around trying to remember which firsthand account is being sourced by which “cartographer” to what end, but these are exceptions; rarely will the reader need to step back and get their bearings.
There are quibbles to pick, should you require a few. This is a history of construction (usually from afar), not reception, of theory more than practice. Padrón convincingly pitches an alternative geography to today's separation of the Americas from Asia, but the audience for this vision remains illusory. Though Padrón's prose and the narratives he introduces are transporting, the conversation feels sealed off and self-contained. But this is the critique of a grumpy historian; your mileage will vary.
And yes, specialists of “Asia,” particularly China and Japan, will find plenty to respond to. For example, Japan briefly experimented with transpacific commerce in the early seventeenth century. Patrons of the failed endeavor pitched Japan as an eastward waypoint on the route from Manila to Acapulco, a vision complicating Padrón's emphasis on Japan as a “western” way station for the Spanish mission into Asia. Japanese cartographic narratives are beyond Padrón's remit, but this initiative—noted but not explored—was cataloged, debated, and rejected primarily in Spanish-language sources that would burnish a chapter devoted to Japan's evolving place within Spain's geographic imaginary.
Padrón calls his work a “provocation” (p. 12), inviting responses from scholars as disparate and variegated as the world he retraces. Those rooted in or simply curious about debates over the emergence of “America” and “the New World” will find a book well worth reading. For scholars grounded in Asia, Padrón produces a welcome and, I think, necessary primer on an alternate map of encounter. Having been presented with an alternate European vision of the Pacific, the search for alternatives to European visions persists. If that's not a helpful provocation, I don't know what is.
