Navarrete knew — and he wrote it at 21¾° North. Ryukyu is not found there!

🔥 THE SMOKING QUILL | June 6, 2025

🧭 “Navarrete’s Logbook”: The 1825 Smoking Quill That Burned the Ryukyu Theory to Ashes

Why Spain Never Believed Lequios Was Ryukyu — and Had the Latitude to Prove It

Even as late as 1825, the official Spanish government position never changed:
Lequios was not Ryukyu. It was in the Philippines.

That position, grounded in detailed naval records and reinforced by the data of Spain’s most prestigious maritime historian, Don Martín Fernández de Navarrete, offers one of the most direct refutations of the Jesuit-influenced cartographic shift that wrongly equated Lequios with Okinawa.

In this official historical account titled Noticia Histórica de las Expediciones Hechas por los Españoles en Busca del Paso del Noroeste, Navarrete draws directly from voyage logs, particularly those of Francisco Gali, a Pacific navigator whose detailed accounts were used to assess the viability of transoceanic routes.

And in two smoking pages, he quietly and decisively shatters the Ryukyu theory.

📍 Lequios Begins at 21° North Latitude

Let’s go straight to the text:

“…comienzan las islas de los Lequios, que están en 21 ¾° grados de latitud, y desde allí caminó doscientas y sesenta leguas en la derrota del E. y NE., hasta que pasó de dichas islas y se dirigió á las de Japón…”
(Navarrete, 1825, p. XLVII)

🔎 What does that mean?

• Lequios begins (its Northern boundary meaning it is South of there) at 21¾° N — which corresponds precisely to the Batanes Islands maritime territory, as a border to southern Taiwan's. But... not Ryukyu, which lies between 24° and 27° N.

• The expedition then sails 260 leagues (≈ 832 nautical miles) east-northeast, passing through an arc of unnamed islands (likely the Ryukyu chain) before reaching Japan at 32° N. Ryukyu = "those islands" not even named in this log.

🧭 Translation:

The “Lequios Islands” came before Ryukyu on the voyage to Japan — not as Ryukyu itself.

That’s geographic death for the Ryukyu theory.

🧱 The Silence on Ryukyu Speaks Volumes

If Ryukyu were the famed “Lequios,” Navarrete would have named it.

Instead:

• He names Lequios as the Northern Philippines border nowhere near Ryukyu.

• He names Japan.

• He names Firando (Hirado), a known port in Kyushu.

But Ryukyu is absent — not even a footnote. Just listed as passing through "those islands".
Why?

Because to the Spanish Government, Ryukyu was irrelevant. It lacked gold, silver, iron, and strategic value. The Spanish, driven by resource acquisition, had no reason to fixate on a tributary island chain tied politically to China and culturally to Japan.

Their focus was elsewhere — and they said so.

⚔️ Spain vs. the Jesuits: A Quiet Geographic War

While the Jesuits pushed hard into Japan and Ryukyu, viewing these regions as spiritual conquests and footholds for missionary expansion, the Spanish Crown and its navigators focused on resources. They wanted:

• Gold and silver

• Trade routes

• Control of Pacific passages

And they knew exactly where to look:
the Philippines — especially the northern frontier between Luzon and Taiwan.

The Jesuits, by contrast, recast Lequios to mean Ryukyu, often ignoring or altering prior designations in their maps and missionary accounts. As later records show, this cartographic manipulation was part of a broader campaign to reshape the political value of the regions they hoped to evangelize attempting to equate resources they did not even have.

Navarrete, however, was not a Jesuit.
He was a state historian — and his data was clean.

🕊️ Sidebar: No Jesuits in the Room

When Don Martín Fernández de Navarrete published his Noticia Histórica in 1825, the Jesuits were still officially banned from Spain and its colonies. The Society of Jesus had been suppressed in 1773, and though the order was restored in 1814 by the papacy, Spain had not yet permitted their return to official educational, cartographic, or administrative roles. As such still in 1825, Navarrete’s geographic record is free of Jesuit influence. His placement of Lequios at 21° North, the omission of Ryukyu by name, and his reliance on imperial navigation logs, not missionary narratives, reflects the unfiltered stance of the Spanish Crown and Navy. This is what the Spanish knew — when the Jesuits weren’t there to tell them otherwise.

📘 What This Changes

Navarrete’s testimony from 1825 confirms three things:

1. The official Spanish position placed Lequios beginning at 21 3/4° N, which rules out Ryukyu and fits the Batanes/Babuyan arc precisely in maritime territory of its Northern border.

2. Ryukyu was not worth naming in navigational logs — evidence that Spain never considered it significant. It was not the Lequios of actual resources which tests it fails on an epic scale. Ryukyu is a beautiful land and it never made such a claim, this is European Colonial propaganda. However, it simply has little of the resources on the list and does not match The Lequios geographically except in massaged accounts. 

3. The tension between Spanish imperial priorities and Jesuit missionary objectives shows up in the historical record as a geographic battle, one that only later generations misread as settled fact. This was Spain overturning Jesuit propaganda.

🧠 Final Thought

For 500 years, historians have accepted a fiction — that Lequios was just another name for Ryukyu. But Spain never said that, not in the Official Record, outside of Jesuit influence. Its pilots never said that from the beginning and later accounts prior to the Jesuit suppression era are clearly heavily influenced. And Navarrete, drawing from the original logs, proved it with cold, cartographic precision, in the era of Jesuit suppression clear of propaganda.

The Lequios of the Spanish archives was Philippine — not Japanese.
And now, that smoking quill is writing the truth back into the map.

Yah Bless.

The God Culture Team

📘 Clarification:

Although the northernmost Philippine island (Mavulis in Batanes) sits at 21° 10′ N, Navarrete places the start of the Lequios at 21¾° N — just 35 nautical miles north of the final Philippine landmass. In maritime terms, this still falls well within the navigational boundary of the Philippine archipelago, especially by 19th-century standards, where national influence often extended over 30 nautical miles beyond land. To a navigator like Navarrete, 21¾° N was still “Philippine sea” — and the Lequios, by that reckoning, began in Philippine waters, not Japan.

📚 Source:

• Fernández de Navarrete, M. Noticia Histórica de las Expediciones Hechas por los Españoles en Busca del Paso del Noroeste de la América. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1825. Pgs. XLV–XLVII.