Readers will likely have come across news at some point about the Spanish Antarctic Base Gabriel de Castilla. As one might easily guess, it’s one of the two bases Spain operates on the frozen continent, specifically on Deception Island (the other, the Spanish Antarctic Base Juan Carlos I, is located on Livingston Island). It was established at the end of 1989 and is run by around thirty people under the command of the Spanish Army General Staff. What may not be as widely known is the origin of its name, which takes us back centuries, as this Gabriel de Castilla was the first one to sight Antarctica, back in 1603, although the Black Legend credits a Dutchman with the achievement.

The base in question is dedicated to scientific research, including biology, geology, topography, climatology, and more. This activity takes place only during the austral summer, as living conditions worsen in winter and force the personnel to return to Spain until the following season—partly due to the impossibility of working outdoors and partly due to the logistical challenges the resupply ships would face. These ships, the Hespérides and the Sarmiento de Gamboa, belong respectively to the Spanish Navy and the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council).

And that brings us to the heart of the matter. If today’s navy, with all its technological advances, struggles to overcome the relentless ferocity of polar nature, the rough seas, subzero temperatures, and, in short, the extreme weather conditions of those latitudes, just imagine how terrifying it must have been to face all of that in the early 17th century on a wooden sailing ship. Yet that is exactly what Gabriel de Castilla did—one of those bold Spanish navigators who set out to explore the edges of the known world in precarious conditions but with iron determination. Truly people cut from a different cloth, for very different times.

Gabriel de Castilla first person sight antarctica
The Spanish base Gabriel de Castilla on Deception Island. Credit: Piet Barber / Wikimedia Commons

He wasn’t the only one. According to traditional accounts, the Dutchman Dirck Gerrits Pomp was also sailing in the area around the same time. He had trained in the maritime arts in Lisbon and traveled to Goa in 1658 as a trader, navigating through China and becoming the first of his countrymen to visit Japan. Pomp joined the expedition led by Admiral Jakob Mahu in 1598 to the East Indies in search of spices, setting sail from Rotterdam aboard five ships with about five hundred men, among them the famous William Adams, the first Englishman to reach the Land of the Rising Sun.

Things went badly from the start and didn’t improve throughout the voyage. A lack of wind delayed their progress, and scurvy killed a quarter of the crews, including Mahu, which forced a reorganization of the chain of command and left Pomp as captain of the Blijde Boodschap. After crossing the Atlantic under dreadful conditions, the Strait of Magellan delivered its usual harsh verdict, first forcing them to overwinter on land for several months and then scattering the fleet. It was then that the Blijde Boodschap managed to enter the Pacific, but strong winds pushed it toward the pole.

At a latitude of 64° S they sighted land; it is believed to have been the South Shetland Islands, which means, as we said, that Pomp may also have sighted the Antarctic region. He couldn’t go any further because his ship had lost its masts and had to put in at Valparaíso, where the Spaniards imprisoned him. A prisoner exchange in 1604 allowed him to return home, where he resumed his profession as a merchant—but only for a couple of years, as he later joined a spiegelretourschip (a ship of the Dutch East India Company), and was never heard from again. There is no way of knowing whether Pomp ever learned that, in the meantime, someone else had also reached that southernmost part of the globe.

Gabriel de Castilla first person sight antarctica
The Viceroyalty of Peru. Credit: Daniel Py / Wikimedia Commons

In this case, it was a Spaniard from Palencia, where he was born around 1577, son of Alonso de Castilla y Cárdenas and Leonor de la Mata. The young Gabriel de Castilla chose a military career, serving as an artillery captain in the Viceroyalty of New Spain before transferring to the Viceroyalty of Peru. In 1589, aboard the San Francisco, he explored the southern cone by sea, and in 1596 he was appointed general in charge of El Callao, bringing reinforcements to Governor Martí García Óñez de Loyola in the fight against the unyielding Araucanians in Lumaco and Purén.

During that same Arauco War, he built the fort of San Salvador de Coya and continued to provide fresh troops in various locations, although he couldn’t prevent the destruction of Arriba nor the disaster of Curalava (in which the governor himself was killed in 1599). His accumulated experience, enhanced by the transport of Royal Treasury funds, earned him a promotion to field master and the granting by the viceroy of two encomiendas in Peru—Sica Sica and Huarochirí—which led to a legal review of the viceroy’s actions (which ended in acquittal). With such veteran status and deep knowledge of the coastline, he was the perfect man for the mission that would make him a historical figure.

In 1600, after news spread of the raids by Dutch privateers Oliver van Noort and the aforementioned Jakob Mahu, Gabriel de Castilla was entrusted with the galleons San Jerónimo and Nuestra Señora del Carmen, along with the patache Buen Jesús (also called Los Picos), with the mission of intercepting them. The Spaniard was caught off guard while anchored at Valparaíso and lost his ships, which couldn’t be defended as the crews were ashore. The defeat had no consequences for him, as he also fell seriously ill. Worse perhaps was learning that the Inquisition opened a case against him, though no documentation remains to explain why.

Gabriel may have interrogated Pomp, since in 1603 he set sail from Valparaíso, the city where the Dutchman was still held captive, by order of the viceroy Luis de Velasco y Castillo, Marquis of Salinas, who, although forty-three years older, was a relative of his (born in Carrión de los Condes, in the present-day province of Palencia, in 1534). His objective was to once again intercept the privateers of the United Provinces (the precursor republic of the Netherlands), putting an end to the raids they continued to carry out along the coast of what is now Chile (the Eighty Years’ War or War of Flanders was ongoing).

Gabriel de Castilla first person sight antarctica
Spanish governorship of Terra Australis between 1539 and 1555, later incorporated into the governorship of Chile. Credit: Janitoalevic / Wikimedia Commons

To that end, Gabriel de Castilla had the Jesús María, a six-hundred-ton galleon with thirty cannons, plus two support ships, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, four hundred tons, and Nuestra Señora de la Visitación, which was the new name of the HMS Dainty, an eighteen-cannon galleon captured by Beltrán de Castro in the Bay of Atacames (present-day Ecuador) from the English privateer Richard Hawkins in 1594, during his failed expedition against Spanish South America; hence the ship was also nicknamed the Englishwoman. It was during that mission that the Spanish fleet, battered by severe storms, drifted south and reached 64º latitude, the same as Pomps, beyond the 55º S reached by Francisco de Hoces with the caravel San Lesmes in 1525.

Or so it is estimated, since no records of it remain and it must be deduced from the account left by another Dutch sailor, Laurenz Claesz, who had been part of the same voyage as his compatriot but, not being an officer, was allowed to enlist in the Spanish flotilla. A few years later, Claesz declared “[he had] sailed under Admiral Don Gabriel de Castilla with three ships along the coasts of Chile to Valparaíso, and from there to the Strait, in the year 1603; and was in March at 64 degrees and there they had much snow. In the following month of April, they returned again to the coasts of Chile.”

In 1622, a Latin version of Antonio de Herrera’s History of the West Indies was published in Amsterdam, titled Novus Orbis sive descriptio Indiae Occidentalis. The editor, Casparus Barlaeus, added an appendix in which he claimed that at that latitude there was land “very high and mountainous, covered in snow, like the country of Norway, all white, which seemed to extend to the Solomon Islands.” From this, it is inferred that such land would have been sighted, whether by Pomp, by Gabriel, or by both, despite there being no evidence to support this nor would later testimonies mention it, raising the question of where that description and the reference to 64º came from (Claesz’s testimony would be made later, around 1627).

In fact, other sources state that the Spaniard was aboard the Buena Nueva when, in the summer of 1603, he saw the snowy land in question on the horizon after having passed 60º latitude. He named his discovery after the ship, islands of La Buena Nueva, which according to the coordinates would be the aforementioned South Shetland Islands. These are located at 62º S and 58º W, about one hundred and twenty kilometers from the coast of Antarctica, with their highest elevation being Mount Irving, 1,950 meters high.

However, that must not have been the one glimpsed by the Spaniard, as it is located on Clarence Island and the chorography (the description of geographical features) seems to point rather, in the opinion of current experts, to another archipelago, the Melchior, a group of islands and islets located at 64° S and 63° W. Also on the Antarctic coast and very close to the Shetlands, though somewhat farther south. The Shetlands were so named by the English captain William Smith in 1819, who was also the first to set foot on their shores—unless the sailors of the San Telmo had done so a little earlier that same year.

Gabriel de Castilla first person sight antarctica
The ship San Telmo in a plate by Alejo Berlinguero. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

It was a Spanish ship of the line, seventy-four guns, which, dragged by opposing wind and sea, was wrecked on Livingston Island. This was confirmed by Smith himself and, shortly afterward, by his compatriot James Weddell (who surpassed Cook’s record by three degrees, holding it for eight decades), upon finding remains of the vessel, thus confirming the words of the poet Bernardo López García that in the world “there is not a handful of earth without a Spanish grave”. That initial landing opened the way for Argentine seal hunters and, in this way, the archipelago was finally incorporated into world cartography.

It had remained in semi-oblivion, broken only by occasional visits such as that of James Cook in 1773, who nearly two centuries later was the first to surpass the 64° latitude then established—reaching 71°10′—or that of the Argentine Juan Pedro de Aguirre, who filed a request to fish on Deception Island, although there is no record that he actually did so. Moreover, part of the scientific community remains somewhat reluctant to acknowledge Gabriel de Castilla’s discovery, due to insufficient evidence and the improbability that he failed to report it to the authorities, at a time when Terra Australis was being eagerly sought and Spanish sailors were obligated to report any newly discovered land.

Of course, such communication may have been lost, and the cartography from that 17th century does seem to suggest something along those lines, reading a bit between the lines, but the matter remains in question. It is worth adding that the same goes for the account of Dirck Gerrits Pomp, which raises even more doubts, because, although the navigator Jakob Le Maire recorded it in his ship’s log a decade later, he himself never mentioned it in the letters he wrote from his prison in Lima. Because of this, the more skeptical deduce that he likely did not go beyond 56° or 57°. It may have been the editor Barleus who attributed it to him for propaganda purposes, and the engraver Theodore de Bry, famous for being the graphic disseminator of the Black Legend, later took on the task of popularizing it.

Returning to Gabriel de Castilla, he escaped the ice and returned from his mission to tell the tale. In 1605 he started a family with Genoveva de Espinosa y Lugo de Villasante, daughter of the chief constable of Cuzco, with whom he had at least three sons (Diego, Lorenzo, and Jusepe Lázaro) and three daughters (Isabel, Ana, and María). Two years later he became chief constable of Cuzco and the following year corregidor of Tarma and Chinchaycocha. His last post, which he held until 1619, was the corregiduría of Conchucos and Piscobamba, despite which he was burdened with considerable financial hardship, as the expenses of his patrols against the corsairs had come out of his own pocket. He died in Piscobamba, after a long illness that confined him to bed, at an uncertain date between 1620 and 1625.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on June 11, 2025: Gabriel de Castilla, el español que fue el primer europeo en avistar la Antártida

SOURCES

Jorge Berguño, Un enigma de la historia antártica: El descubrimiento de las islas Shetland del Sur

Areños Muñoz Rodríguez, Don Gabriel de Castilla, más allá del descubridor de la Antártida. Estado de la cuestión

Isidoro Vázquez de Acuña, Don Gabriel de Castilla primer avistador de la Antártica

A.G.M, Gabriel de Castilla

Wikipedia, Gabriel de Castilla

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