Pedro Fernandez de Queirós, a Portuguese-born navigator who had been a pilot on Mendana’s ill-fated 1595 expedition, had proposed an expedition to the Pacific in search of Terra Australis.
Queirós commands a party of three Spanish ships, San Pedro y San Pablo (one hundred and fifty tons tons), San Pedro (one hundred and twenty tons) and the tender (patache) Los Tres Reyes, which had left Callao in Spanish Peru on December 21, 1605, with Luís Vaz de Torres in command of the San Pedro.
Anchoring in a bay of the New Hebrides group on May 3, 1606, and assuming the islands to be outliers of the Great Southern Continent he seeks for his king, he names the yet-unseen continent “La Austrialia (sic) del Espiritu Santo,” a reference to the House of Austria, to which the king of Spain belongs, and a pun on “tierra austral,” ( “the south land”).
Queirós’ ships after six weeks put to sea again to explore the coastline.
Queirós in the San Pedro y San Pablo on the night of June 11, 1606, becomes separated from the other ships in bad weather and is unable (or so he will later say) to return to safe anchorage at Espiritu Santo.
He then sails to Acapulco in Mexico, where he will arrive in November 1606.
In the account by Prado, which is highly critical of Queirós, mutiny and poor leadership are given as the reason for Queirós’ disappearance.
Torres will remain silent on the subject other than to write his “condition was different to that of Captain Queirós.”
