Nine days after he arrived, the incoming galleon from Acapulco advised that Quiros had arrived in Mexico aboard his flagship. Torres duly prepared a report of his activities for his commanding officer on 15 June and settled back to await the opportunity to return to Europe.
A further letter, dated 12 July 1607, reporting his voyage directly to Philip arrived in Madrid on 22 June 1608. In it, Torres complained of ill-treatment since his arrival in Manila.
Almost a year later, his signature appears on a certificate verifying the accuracy of the information presented in another account of the voyage by Diego de Prado y Tovar.
And from there, quite simply, Torres vanishes. There is no surviving account of his fate in Manila, no record of his departure from the Philippines and no suggestion that he arrived anywhere else.
Diego de Prado, of whom we will see a great deal when we look at the voyage more closely, arrived in Goa around December 1613, then returned to Spain via Hormuz, Aleppo and Venice.
After that, Prado became a monk and produced a revised version of the account Torres had verified as a true and accurate record of their voyage. 3
And there, more or less, Spanish interest in the South Pacific ends.
While these three Spanish expeditions delivered nothing of substance, the voyages raise an interesting hypothetical point.
If one resulted in a Spanish colony in the South Pacific, the Spanish in Peru would have angled for a share in the Manila galleon trade.
Of course, there is no guarantee that Madrid would agree to any such proposal.
One might even suggest the lack of Spanish activity in the South Pacific over the next century meant to ensure that the notion was never seriously raised.
However, it seems inevitable that a new galleon route would attract a new wave of unwanted predatory interest.
Indeed, when we turn out attention to the next player to arrive on the scene, it seems that would-be predators were closer than one might think.
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3 The original copies of both Prado's original account and Torres' certificate have disappeared. Prado's new relación "was a holograph copy of the original written in Manila, with additions relating to more recent events, and the accompanying certificate signed by Torres and four others, copied in Prado's hand. The original relación and certificate have never been found. What was found in a collection of documents sold at auction in London and published in 1930 was the later, rewritten copy. That Prado could have altered certain events in the account to please himself is, of course, obvious." (Miriam Estensen, Terra Australis Incognita: The Spanish Quest for the Mysterious Great South Land, p. 218)