The Musk of Abel? “The musk of Los Lequios…”

– Giro del mondo, Vol. 5, Gemelli Careri (1699)

🔥 THE SMOKING QUILL | June 5, 2025

By Timothy Jay Schwab

🧭 The Musk of Los Lequios – Rethinking Geography, Trade, and Aromatic Memory in Early Modern Asia 

🧭 Introduction: The Problem of “Lequios”

For centuries, the mysterious “Los Lequios” has hovered in the margins of early modern travel narratives, often equated with the Ryukyu Islands — a convenient but rarely questioned identification inherited from Portuguese and Spanish texts typically ignoring the very geography present, or later manipulated by the Jesuits. But close reading of Gemelli Careri’s Giro del mondo — particularly Volume 5 — presents three separate references to Los Lequios that, when examined together, challenge this default mapping.

Rather than pointing 1,000 kilometers north to Okinawa, Careri’s “Lequios” seems to trace a much more intimate geography: one anchored in northern Luzon, the Babuyan and Batanes islands, and southern Taiwan — a space dense with indigenous cultures, local trade, and aromatic treasures.

📜 The Author: Gemelli Careri and the Art of Synthesis

Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725) was not a missionary, sailor, or soldier — but a Neapolitan lawyer and traveler, and one of the first Europeans to circumnavigate the globe for pleasure and curiosity. His Giro del mondo (1699) was a hybrid work: part travelogue, part encyclopedic digest of the world as known through Spanish, Portuguese, and Jesuit records.

Unlike missionary chronicles that aimed to convert or glorify, Gemelli’s writings often preserved fragments of oral knowledge, trade lore, and regional terminology — and in this, his testimony about Los Lequios is both revealing and subversive.

[You can read this historic writing for yourself at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5320208663&seq=5&q1=lequios]

🧩 The Three References to Los Lequios

1. Geographical Adjacency (Islands “one after the other”)

“…there are the whiskers and small Island of the Babuyanes, up to the Hermosa Island and the Lequios…”

Here, Lequios is placed directly beyond the Babuyanes, forming a chain that stops short of Formosa (Hermosa). No mention is made of Batanes or Taiwan, but their conspicuous absence only strengthens the case: if Ryukyu were meant, why not mention the massive island of Formosa that lies directly in the way?

This version of Lequios lives in the immediate northern fringe of Luzon, not in Okinawa.

2. Definitive Cultural Geography: “Bordering the Babuyanes”

“…the other [islands] by Silvestri, who border on los Lequios…”

Here, Lequios is again presented as adjacent, not distant. The “Silvestri” (wild forest-dwelling peoples) are described as living in the northern Babuyan archipelago, placing Lequios just beyond that inhabited threshold — likely in the culturally distinct Batanes Islands. If Lequios border the Babuyan Islands, that ain't Ryukyu. Test it.

3. Trade and Aroma: “The Musk of Los Lequios”

“…the musk of Los Lequios…”

In the context of global luxury goods (diamonds from Golconda, cinnamon from Ceylon, porcelain from China), this line stands out. True musk — supposedly a secretion from the Himalayan musk deer — was rare and did not originate in Batanes in that sense. So what could “musk” from “Los Lequios” possibly be?

🌿 Enter Lagikuway: The "Father of Musk"

The answer may lie in Batanes ethnobotany. The Ivatan people cultivate a plant known as Lagikuway (Lagikway, Both Tag.) , a musky aromatic crushed for ritual and medicinal use, and revered in Arabic as the “father of musk” or "source of musk" (Dr. Stuart).

• Native to Batanes (Barakue: "my boy", could this be named for Abel literally from the Land of Creation?)

• Strong, musky scent especially from the seeds

• Used in spiritual and healing practices

• Culturally and commercially significant

• Though in trade, the Himalayan Musk became famous, the source of ancient musk appears to be this plant instead

If Careri’s sources (likely drawing on Spanish-Dominican knowledge of Luzon and its northern peripheries) referred to this plant or its trade, then “the musk of Los Lequios” may not refer to a far-off deer secretion — but to a local botanical treasure, traded southward, and misidentified by European chroniclers unfamiliar with its source.

🧠 Rethinking Los Lequios

What emerges across all three references is a regional, not remote, idea of Los Lequios:

• Geographically: Immediately north of Babuyan, encompassing Batanes ending before southern Taiwan.

• Culturally: Populated by distinct indigenous groups on its borders to the South, considered “Silvestri” but possessing trade goods and spiritual complexity.

• Economically: Exporting aromatics, likely Lagikuway, under the colonial label of “musk.”

This reframes Lequios not as a mispronounced Ryukyu, but as a colonial construction applied to a trade-peripheral zone north of Luzon — a space of in-between-ness, ambiguity, and underestimated value.

🔚 Final Thoughts

We should not assume that the tidy boundaries of later atlases apply cleanly to early colonial terminology — especially when terms like Lequios must be tested against the practical geography they supposedly described. As with Tartary or Zingala, Lequios was a floating term: mutable, regional, and often shaped more by rumor than by map — particularly by those who had strategic or rhetorical reasons to move it.

However, as the Giro del mondo of Gemelli Careri makes clear, the original referent of Lequios is not the distant Ryukyu Islands, but the northern Luzon maritime region, including the Babuyanes and Batanes. The geographic sequencing provided by Careri is specific and consistent: from Luzon northward, through known archipelagos, “up to Hermosa and the Lequios.” There is no geographic leap to Okinawa. Instead, Lequios is framed as part of a nearby frontier region, one with economic and cultural ties to Luzon — not a separate East Asian kingdom.

The discovery of Lagikuway, the aromatic plant native to Batanes and locally revered as the “father of all musks,” provides a plausible and culturally coherent explanation for Careri’s reference to “the musk of Los Lequios.” It affirms that what European observers labeled as exotic was in fact a native botanical product from a region deeply embedded in Philippine ethnogeography.

No amount of rhetorical vagueness or later textual conflation changes the clear direction and local specificity embedded in these early sources. Unless future research uncovers compelling contrary evidence — and we remain open to that possibility — we can now confidently conclude that Lequios, as used in early Spanish and even Portuguese records, referred to the Philippine northern island arc, not the Ryukyus.

This journey has revealed a consistent, well-supported, and previously overlooked reality. Our conclusions are not only coherent — they are overwhelming. Attempts to conflate or displace Lequios beyond this context amount to historiographical distortion, and have now been fully disarmed.

There is nothing more to prove on this question. Lequios belongs to the Philippines.

Note: We are aware there are some AI references used in some recent articles by our team in which the AI's have admitted to their offering a paraphrase instead of an actual quote, which is not our norm. We will be editing and rooting those few out as we have always provided actual sources, mostly primary even, many times even screenshots of the actual source, and we will continue to do so. In our book especially, all will be reconciled and sourced appropriately as always, and these blogs continue to represent that in the larger picture. These blogs are not a replacement for such, but a gathering of research replacing our previous videos on YouTube that simply get buried by YouTube now. We get it right in the end as true researchers go through such a process, sharing our work along the way, and I am proud of our team for stepping up with these blogs. It has been a learning experience I am proud to lead. As we return to this platform with our next topics, especially in The Smoking Quill Series, we have learned how to treat even AI in this process. As we continue to learn and grow in the maturity of the Word embracing history, geography and other realms, we look forward to bringing you the truth, as we always have.

Sources Cited

• Gemelli Careri, Giro del mondo, Vol. 5 (1699)

• StuartXchange.org, “Lagikuway” – https://www.stuartxchange.org/Lagikuway

Editor's Note: In our deeper research, we also found other references to the "musk of Lequios". When French encyclopedists mapped the global flow of wealth in 1757, Lequios stood among the trade titans. Not for its temples. Not for its lords. But for its musk — and its proximity to the true center of empire: the Philippines. [See the affirming Source]