Shikoku

Shikoku enters the narrative as the coast that turns a transpacific homeward voyage into shipwreck and confiscation. The Spanish galleon San Felipe was cast ashore there by a storm; its hull broke on a sandbar, and the cargo that had been brought ashore was subsequently seized by The Taikō. The island is thus not merely a point on a map but the setting for a collision between maritime disaster and political power.

A coast reached through uncertain waters

The account gives Shikoku a maritime rather than an inland geography: it is encountered from the sea, as the destination of a storm-driven landfall. That arrival belongs to a world in which navigation remained perilous. Existing charts could be so vague as to be nearly useless, and sailors had no means of determining longitude. Pilots relied instead on rutters: compact records of observed routes, compass courses, depths, seabeds, winds, currents, storms, anchorages, and dangers. Such books offered practical guidance, but could contain errors, even deliberate ones; a pilot could not be certain of a route until he had sailed it himself. This broader navigational uncertainty frames the voyage that ended on Shikoku without implying that the account specifies a particular route to the island.

The San Felipe wreck

A monk who had sailed aboard the San Felipe recounts that a great storm drove the galleon onto the shores of Shikoku. The ship struck a sandbar, and by the third day its back had broken. Before the hull failed, the crew had managed to land the bullion and most of the cargo. The galleon had carried spices, gold, silver, and specie valued at a million and a half silver pesos, making the wreck both a maritime catastrophe and the loss of an immense shipment.

Confiscation and political consequence

The wreck did not end with the ship's destruction. The monk recalls that word came that the cargo had been confiscated by The Taikō, on the grounds that the Spaniards were pirates. Shikoku consequently becomes the place where the vulnerability of a ship and its cargo at landfall gives way to a struggle over who may claim them. The surviving goods had been brought ashore, but their recovery did not secure the crew's possession of them: the island's significance in this account lies in the passage from storm damage to political seizure.