The Jesuit Cartographic Chaos: Cutting Borders, Crafting Myths. 

History Rewritten at the Jesuits' Altar of Maps.

🪶 THE SMOKING QUILL | June 13, 2025

Jesuit Geography: When Xavier ‘Discovered’ What the Crown Already Charted

🔥 The Rewriting of Lequios from Luzon to Ryukyu Exposed!

With Lequios already recorded in 1502–1544 maps and Official Spanish Government Documents, Xavier’s 1548 ‘discovery’ becomes a revisionist landmark. Ignoring such data was never academic nor scholarly.

🗺 Maps That Disprove Xavier’s “Discovery”

1. Maps [All below] like:

• 1502 – Cantino Planisphere charts eastern islands with trade markers

• 1512–1529 – Spanish and Portuguese maps repeatedly label Lequios near Luzon

• 1539 – Santa Cruz Spanish Government map confirms Philippine location

• 1544 – Cabot’s map cements geographic continuity

• 1548 – Xavier “discovers” what’s already been known for decades

✝️ Missionaries or Myth-Makers?

1. St. Francis Xavier Did Not “Discover” Them: Xavier was a missionary, not an explorer. His travels to Japan (1549) and nearby areas were part of a broader Jesuit agenda. By 1548, the Portuguese already had extensive trade knowledge of the East Asian islands. The narrative that “Lequios were discovered to enable Xavier’s entry” is a religious retcon, reframing established trade routes into spiritual “discoveries.” 

2. Geographic Manipulation: The passage cites Lequios as being “34 degrees north” and “200 leagues from China,” which contradicts Ryukyu (26°–28°) both in coordinates which are far off, and in distance which is almost double wrong. The original Lequios latitude was Luzon/Babuyan (which match closer to 17-21°, mapped as such). The author appears to merge or shift geographic terms to align with evolving Jesuit-era revisions, pushing Lequios farther north to align it with Japan and Ryukyu. Let Jesuits do whatever, but let us not treat that as credible.

🧭 What This Means for the Research:

• Lequios was not discovered by missionaries in 1548. It had been traded with, mapped, and identified long before, referring originally to Luzon and the northern Philippine islands (Batanes, Babuyan).

• The spiritual narrative hijacked the geographic identity of the region, replacing ethnographic accuracy with hagiographic storytelling — in this case, to boost the legacy of Xavier and his order. That was never history we should teach.

• This is a classic case of post-facto revisionism: a real geographic term (Lequios) is folded into the missionary hero tale, distorting both geography and history.

❌ Pinto and the Problem of 29°N

Many researchers have clung to the coordinate “29 degrees north” found in Jesuit Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação to geographically place Lequios near the Ryukyu Islands. This work is even identified by Rebecca Catz and other Jesuit apologists as suspect. But this fixation ignores overwhelming contradictions and broader historical context we have well proven:

🚫 1. 29°N Is a Lone Outlier

• Not a single map in the extensive Portuguese or Spanish corpus from 1502 (Cantino Planisphere) through 1544 places Lequios at 29°N or anywhere near it. Not a single one!

• Even Royal Spanish maps (1512, 1519, 1526, 1529, 1537, 1544) consistently position Lequios in the vicinity of Luzon, long before Pinto was ever published in its manipulated form from the first public text. 

🌱 2. Resources That Don't Grow in Ryukyu

• Resources: Pinto describes ebony, beeswax, sugarcane, botatas, and coconuts — crops that do not grow naturally in Ryukyu but thrive in the Philippines.

• 200 Leagues from China: It is incredible that an island the size of Luzon and distance from China as Luzon is conflated as tiny Ryukyu absent almost every criteria in the account. This is a massive failure for Ryukyu no where near that distance and certainly not the size of Luzon which was required for consideration.

• Culture & People: The names and cultural descriptions better align with Malay-Tagalog traditions, not Okinawan or Japanese. Even place names fit the Ivatan and Tagalog language, not Ryukyuan.

🧠 3. Pinto Was a Jesuit and Xavier’s Close Ally

• Pinto’s writings cannot be separated from the Jesuit agenda — a movement that, in later decades, began to reframe geography around missionary milestones. If Pinto actually wrote 29°N, which has never been produced in an original, then, he manipulated his own writing conflicting with all other factors that fail for Ryukyu.

• As such, manipulating one coordinate (29°N) to fit Ryukyu helped redirect religious interest there while maintaining plausible deniability. The problem is it causes the rest of the narrative to fail highlighting the fraud.

🧭 Conclusion: Luzon, Not Ryukyu

In this Smoking Quill post, readers will find a chronological progression of authoritative Iberian maps and texts — from 1502 onward — that consistently position Lequios in the Philippines.

By contrast, Pinto’s lone geographic number — 29°N — fails the test of consistency, environmental accuracy, historical context, and motive. The evidence points not to Ryukyu, but to northern Luzon, the Babuyan and Batanes Islands — and beyond. 

This is Jesuit cartographic manipulation, not geographical discovery.
The evidence is overwhelming: Lequios was never Ryukyu. It was Luzon — and those who moved it did so with purpose. Their map was not for navigation, but narrative.

🔥 Want more Smoking Quill revelations?
Stay tuned for our Jesuit Trail of Tears visual series — where we expose every false cartographic shift using primary maps, government records, and forgotten testimonies.

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#LuzonNotRyukyu #ColonialRewriting #HistoricalMaps #PortugueseEmpire #SpanishEmpire 
#PintoProblem #BiblicalGeography #BabuyanIslands #JesuitTrailOfTears