The Tornoviaje
Andrés de Urdaneta, apart from being a seafarer, astronomer and humanist, played a key role in an important scientific and technical discovery, the “Tornoviaje,” the complex return route from the Philippines to America through the Pacific, thus avoiding going round the globe through Asia and Africa.
By doing so, he achieved a historic deed, where many other seafarers in the past had failed, as it required battling the currents and the Trade winds.
The trading route opened the Basque seafarer remained in force for 250 years, until the invention of motor navigation. Due to the later economic importance of this connection, Urdaneta’s discovery was compared to those by Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.