Pedro Cubero

Title page of the second edition of Peregrinación del mundo (1682)

Pedro Cubero Sebastián (El Frasno, Spain, 1645 – c.1697) was a Spanish priest, best known for his travel around the world from 1670 to 1679.

Pedro Cubero was born in the village of El Frasno, near to Calatayud, in the Spanish region of Aragón. He studied in Zaragoza and Salamanca, up to his ordination as a priest in Zaragoza, and soon afterwards went to Rome, where he joined the Propaganda Fide congregation.

Around the world

In accordance with his missionary work, he undertook in 1670 a journey to East Asia, that eventually led him to complete an eastwards around the world trip. The journey is specially memorable as for the first time in History a considerable part of the way was done overland, through Western and Eastern Europe, Western and Central Asia and North America. So, he preceded Gemelli Careri who undertook a similar voyage twenty years later.

Actually, he visited Paris, Venice, Istanbul, Warsaw, Vilna, Moscow (where he met Nicolae Milescu, who acted as Cubero's interpreter), Astrakhan, Isfahan, Bandar Abbass, Surat, Goa, Colombo, Mylapore, Malacca, Philippines, Pekin, Moluccas, Acapulco, Veracruz, Havana and eventually Cádiz, among many other places.

Vicissitudes in Far East

While sailing from Colombo to Mylapore Cubero was captured by Malabar pirates and enslaved in the Maldive Islands for a few months. In Malacca, he was put in jail by the Dutch Governor, accused of publicly preaching Catholicism. And in Manila he suffered the big earthquake of 29 November 1677.

Aboard the Manila galleon

Cubero crossed the Pacific Ocean in the 1678 sailing of the Manila galleon, that time a carrack named San Antonio de Padua commanded by Don Felipe Montemayor y Prado. The navigation started in Cavite on 24 June, they caught sight of the American land on 5 December in latitude North of 29 degrees and docked in Acapulco on 8 January 1679. Only 192 people were alive, several of them dying, out of more than 400 that had begun the voyage.

Back in the Spanish court

He finally reached Madrid in January 1680, just in time to attend the celebrations of the arrival of Maria Luisa of Orléans, recently married to King Charles II of Spain.

He wrote the account of his adventures around the world in a very objective, detailed and interesting book, Peregrinación del mundo (World's peregrination), first published in Madrid in 1680. An extended second edition was brought out in 1682 in Naples, by then a Spanish possession.

References

See also

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