Abstract
José F. Buscaglia-Salgado has established beyond all doubt the existence of the protagonist of the Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (Mexico City, 1690), by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. This makes Ramírez the first person from the New World known to have circumnavigated the globe. The story of this first American to claim universal stature is an invitation to partake in a sense of freedom and social possibilities born on the open seas, where ambivalence and versatility reigned supreme in a nonlinear, nonplanar way of knowing and being. As a seminal work of oceanic/colonial critique that undermines all sense of certainty, stability, and forms of authority, the Misfortunes is a pirate—and a piratical—narrative that was first to document the deep impression made by life on the open seas and beyond the confines of empire on the American sense of freedom.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra astronómica y filosófica (Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderón, 1690), 33. “Ni se yo como será universalmente una cosa que tal vez, segun afirma, se falsifica; ni tampoco alcanço, como puede servirle de razon para convencer mi sentir lo que a mi me sirvio de prueba para afirmar mi opinion.”
- 2.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. Infortunios que Alonso Ramírez, natural de la ciudad de San Juan de Puerto Rico, padeció, así en poder de ingleses piratas que lo apresaron en las Islas Filipinas, como navegando por si solo, y sin derrota, hasta varar en la Costa de Yucatán: consiguiendo por este medio dar vuelta al Mundo. Mexico City: Herederos de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderón, 1690.
- 3.
See José F. Buscaglia Salgado, introduction to Historias del Seno Mexicano, by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, ed. Reynier Pérez Hernández (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2009). Two years prior, in 2007, Fabio López Lázaro disclosed a momentous finding citing a letter of July 1, 1690, where the Count of Galve, Viceroy of New Spain, tells his brother, the Duke of Infantado, that he had met a man by the name of Alonso Ramírez who claimed to have sailed from the Philippines to Yucatan. See Fabio López Lázaro, “La mentira histórica de un pirata caribeño: El descubrimiento del trasfondo histórico de los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690),” Anuario de estudios americanos 64.2 (July–December 2007): 100–101. The finding by López Lázaro, while no doubt of the outmost significance, could not be seen as incontrovertible proof of the existence of the protagonist of this story. Like I was able to show in the Spanish edition of the Infortunios of 2011, Ramírez had taken a different name while in the Philippines. See Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, ed., intro., José F. Buscaglia (Madird: Polifemo/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2011), 92–96, 144–145. As he refashioned his story to suit his interest at every turn, even with the passing reference in Galve’s letter there would always remain doubt of whether Alonso Ramírez was the actual name of the protagonist. The finding of the marriage certificate dispelled that doubt once and for all.
- 4.
See Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, ed. J.S. Cummins and Alan Soons (London: Tamesis Texts, 1984), 6.
- 5.
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez, ed., trans., José F. Buscaglia Salgado (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2019). (Hereafter Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes). This article is a shortened and revised version of the first part of the essay that accompanies the bilingual edition under the title “The History of the First American of Universal Standing: How Alonso Ramírez, a.k.a Felipe Ferrer, Turned the World on Its Head by Circumnavigating the Globe.”
- 6.
Keep in mind that at all times I use the term American to refer to the inhabitants of the entire continent, just as Sigüenza did in the very first sentence of the story when he pointed to the location where Alonso Ramírez was “stranded in the coasts of Yucatan, here in America.” To avoid confusion, I prefer to name those Americans from the United States of America with the neologism of Usonians. See José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire, Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xviii.
- 7.
See Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez,” in La novela del México colonial. ed. Antonio Castro Leal, vol. 1. (Mexico, D.F.: Aguilar, 1964), 51.
- 8.
The original treatise making a case for keeping the seas open to all nations and vessels dates from 1609. See Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1916).
- 9.
Again, since 2003 I have been using the neologism of Usonian (and Usonian imperial ideology) to refer to the American peoples from, and all things pertaining to, the United States of America. See Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire.
- 10.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 102.
- 11.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 87.
- 12.
Barbara Fuchs and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel find the origins of this tendency to conceive of Mexico City as what they call a “colonial metropolis” already at the start of the seventeenth century with Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana (1604). See Barbara Fuchs and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, “La grandeza mexicana de Balbuena y el imaginario de una ‘metrópolis colonial,” Revista Iberoamericana 75.228 (July–September 2009): 675–695.
- 13.
For a detailed discussion concerning the notion of the European Ideal and of the movement of what I call mulataje see Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire, xiv–xviii.
- 14.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 1. “Nunca con mas repugnancia, que en la ocacion presente tomé la pluma en la mano.”
- 15.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 2. “El perjuyzio en que todos estaban, pensando que solo por ser recien llegado de Alemania a esta Nueva-España el RP havia de ser consumadísimo Mathematico.”
- 16.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 5. “Nuestra criolla nacion.”
- 17.
In the Libra, Sigüenza is clear when he refers to “we the Americans…who from Spanish parents by chance were born in them” (in the countries of America). See Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 83. “Nosotros los Americanos.…los que de padres Españoles casualmente nacimos en ellos.”
- 18.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 147. “no solo a mí, sino a mi Patria y a mi Nacion.”
- 19.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 5, 147. “Trabajoso juicio.”
- 20.
For a contextualized discussion of racialist ideology see José F. Buscaglia Salgado, “Race and the Constitutive Inequality of the Modern/Colonial Condition,” Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 109–124.
- 21.
For the most poignant example of Sigüenza’s temerity in this regard, see Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Alboroto y motín de los indios de México,” in Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, un sabio mexicano del siglo XVII, edited by Irving A. Leonard, trans. Juan José Utrilla (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984).
- 22.
Juan Sebastián Elcano sailed with Ferdinand Magellan and was captain of the Victoria when it returned to Spain thereby completing the first circumnavigation of the globe (1519–1522).
- 23.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 120.
- 24.
In act 2, Ariel wonders at the sight of Caliban: “What have we here? A man or a fish?” only to conclude: “This is no fish, but an islander.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 2.2: 25–37. Stephano enters into the scene thereafter to protest: “This is some monster of the isle, with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language?” Shakespeare, 2.2: 66–68. In act 3, Ferdinand admires Miranda: “But you, O you, so perfect and so peerless, are created of every creature’s best.” Shakespeare, 3.1: 46–49.
- 25.
See here the pioneering work of Álvaro Félix Bolaños, “Sobre ‘relaciones’ e identidades en crisis: el ‘otro’ lado del ex-cautivo Alonso Ramírez,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 42 (1995): 131–160.
- 26.
Words used by Miranda to describe Caliban’s kind. See Shakespeare, 1.2: 358–359.
- 27.
See Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (New York: Random House, 2001), 246.
- 28.
Defoe, 259–260.
- 29.
Defoe, 158–159.
- 30.
See Fabio López Lázaro, The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
- 31.
Here, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s reading of “Ramírez’s testimonial as a parody and criticism of the epic hero, a key icon of European imperial imaginaries” is particularly relevant in broadening the interpretative possibilities in the work. See Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, “Colonial No More?: Limits of the Transatlantic Episteme,” in From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008): 146–184.
- 32.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Libra, 4. “Lo lleve a mi casa, lo regalé en ella, lo introduge con mis amigos.”
- 33.
Francisco de Ayerra Santa María (1630–1708) was born in San Juan de Puerto Rico and, like Ramírez, abandoned his country for Mexico City at an early age. There he attended the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico and was ordained as a priest. He would come to be well known as a poet and become a good friend of Sigüenza who was younger than him by fifteen years. When Ramírez came to Mexico City in 1690, Ayerra was about to turn seventy years of age.
- 34.
This was most evident in Yucatan where the city of San Francisco de Campeche had suffered a devastating attack in September 1685 at the hands of Michel de Grammont, also known as Chevalier de Grammont, and Laurens Cornelis Boudewjin de Graaf, known to the Spaniards as Lorencillo. The rape of Campeche lasted three months. It included the burning of much of the city and the razing to the ground of the nearby town of Lerma. In human costs, it led to the loss of one-third of the population of the city, including countless prisoners whom de Grammont summarily and systematically executed while waiting for the ransom.
- 35.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 127.
- 36.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 199.
- 37.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 92.
- 38.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 90.
- 39.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 129.
- 40.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 135.
- 41.
“llego a saver de quatro pricioneros que estavan con dicho enemigo del uno de ellos llamado Miguel que no supo su apellido solo si que era sevillano de nacion, y los otros tres naturales que eran del Reyno de Chile llamado el uno tambien Miguel, y el otro Andres, y asi mismo el otro llamado Miguel con quienes comunico este declarante muchas vezes en el discurso del tiempo que estubo pricionero.” Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (A.G.I.), Filipinas 12, R. 1, N. 60/4/41–42.
- 42.
“Y asi mismo dize este declarante le dijo el dicho Miguel.” A.G.I., Filipinas 12, R. 1, N. 60/4/23.
- 43.
“habia salido del Reyno de Ynglaterra pero que no supo quando y que havia estado en las Costas del Peru para donde havian traido su derrota cargado de mercaderias y que no les havian querido admitir en ningun puerto de los de dicho reyno.” A.G.I., Filipinas 12, R. 1, N. 60/4/13.
- 44.
“Y assi mismo le dijo el dicho Miguel que por el andariel [sic] havian venido y passado por tierra numero de Yngleses los quales con embarcaciones pequeñas salieron al mar y se encontraron con este dicho navío, y incorporados con el viendo que no eran rezividos en puerto alguno de dicho Reyno del Peru trataron de piratear, y que siempre havia andado solo dicho navio, y que el Capitan de el a los que se quiere acordar este declarante se llamava Capisuan, y que trae sesenta y dos hombres de las naciones que arriba lleva referidas, y catorce piezas de artillería de fierro de a quatro y seis libras de calibre y quatro pedreros, y mucha escopeteria pistolas y alfanges. Y asi mismo le dijo a este declarante el dicho Miguel sevillano y los otros tres prisioneros chilenos que havia estado dicho navio en el Reyno de Mindanao tiempo de seis meses, y que se avia quedado en dicho Reyno el Capitan Principal de el con otros quarenta y nuebe hombres.” A.G.I., Filipinas 12, R. 1, N. 60/4/13–14.
- 45.
For more on the concept of the people of the sea, see Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Carla Rahn Phillips (Baltimore, Md.: The John Hopkins University Press, 1889).
- 46.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 116.
- 47.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 121.
- 48.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 116–117.
- 49.
I have given some tentative consideration to both the question of sodomy and coprophagy in Undoing Empire, 163–165.
- 50.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 133.
- 51.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 102.
- 52.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Misfortunes, 92.
- 53.
By 1682 Giovanni Michele had been granted a privateer license by the governors of Yucatan and Havana with permission to attack English and French pirate ships and seize their cargoes. See César García del Pino, El corso en Cuba. Siglo XVII (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2001), 189–191. In a letter dated March 13, 1683, the governor of Havana, Tomás Fernández de Córdoba, mentions the prices captured by “Captain Juan Corso.” (A.G.I., Santo Domingo, 107, R. 2, N. 41) Five years later, in a letter of November 7, 1687, the military governor of Havana writes of a deceased Juan Corso, “who served well fighting the enemies that infest this sound” (A.G.I., Santo Domingo, 109, R. 2, N. 29). The letter deals with the attack perpetrated by Juan Miguel’s brother, Biagio Michele, or Blas Miguel Corso, against the French in Petit-Goâve, Saint-Domingue, in August of that year. See also Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico (A.G.N.), GD100 Reales Cédulas Originales, Vol. 22, exp. 40, fs. 2.
- 54.
See Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire, xiv–xviii.
- 55.
See also Buscaglia-Salgado, Circumventing Racialism through mulataje. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-395
Selected Bibliography
Bolaños, Álvaro Félix. 1995. Sobre ‘relaciones’ e identidades en crisis: el ‘otro’ lado del ex-cautivo Alonso Ramírez. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 21 (42): 131–160.
Buscaglia-Salgado, José F. 2003. Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2015. Race and the Constitutive Inequality of the Modern/Colonial Condition. In Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, 109–124. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2018. Circumventing Racialism through mulataje. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-395.
Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. 1982. La transgresión de la picaresca en los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez. In Violencia y Subversión en la prosa colonial hispanoamericana, siglos XVI y XVII, 85–109. Madrid: José Porrúa Turranzas.
Cummins, James S. 1984. Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez: ‘A Just History of Fact’? Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (3): 295–303.
Fuchs, Barbara, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. July–September 2009. La grandeza mexicana de Balbuena y el imaginario de una ‘metrópolis colonial. Revista Iberoamericana 75 (228): 675–695.
Grotius, Hugo. 1916. The Freedom of the Seas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Julie Greer. 1981. Picaresque Elements in Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora’s Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez. Hispania 64 (1): 60–67.
López Lázaro, Fabio. July–December 2007. La mentira histórica de un pirata caribeño: el descubrimiento del trasfondo histórico de los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690). Anuario de estudios americanos 64 (2): 87–104.
Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2008. Colonial No More? Limits of the Transatlantic Episteme. In From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse, 142–184. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Pérez-Mallaína, Pablo E. 1889. Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century. Translated by Carla Rahn Phillips. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1690a. Infortunios que Alonso Ramírez, natural de la ciudad de San Juan de Puerto Rico, padeció, así en poder de ingleses piratas que lo apresaron en las Islas Filipinas, como navegando por si solo, y sin derrota, hasta varar en la Costa de Yucatán: consiguiendo por este medio dar vuelta al Mundo. Mexico City: Herederos de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderón.
———. 1690b. Libra astronómica y filosófica. Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderón.
———. 1984a. Alboroto y motín de los indios de México. In Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, un sabio mexicano del siglo XVII. Edited by Irving A. Leonard and Translated by Juan José Utrilla. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
———. 1984b. Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez. Edited by J.S. Cummins and Alan Soons. London: Tamesis Texts.
———. 2009. Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez. In Historias del Seno Mexicano. Introduction by José F. Buscaglia Salgado, Edited by Reynier Pérez Hernández. Havana: Casa de las Americas.
———. 2011a. Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez: Edición crítica de José F. Buscaglia. Madrid: Polifemo/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
———. 2011b. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez. In The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates, ed. Fabio López Lázaro, 99–150. Austin: University of Texas Press.
———. 2019. Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez/The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez. Edited and Translated by José F. Buscaglia-Salgado. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Buscaglia-Salgado, J.F. (2022). Alonso Ramírez’s Circumnavigation of the World (1675–1689) and the Universal Claim to the American Spirit in the Open Seas. In: Moraña, M. (eds) Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08903-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08903-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-08902-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-08903-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)