‘Very Beautiful Land’: Malay Knowledge, Spanish Voyages, and Indigenous Presence in Iberian Mapping of New Guinea

In 1545, Ortiz de Retes ‘took possession’ for Spain of a ‘very beautiful land’ southeast of Maluku and named it New Guinea. This article charts the interplay of local knowledge, Iberian experience, and European cosmography in the fragmentary knowing, naming, and mapping of New Guinea’s coasts in the two centuries after 1511. From Malay stories about the islands, coast, or land of the <i>papuas</i> (Papuans) told to Portuguese and Spaniards in Maluku, empirical traces of New Guinea slowly accumulated during at least seven known voyages before 1606. Materialized in manuscript in travellers’ reports or charts and maps copied from lost Portuguese and Spanish master maps, knowledge of New Guinea was published in travel narratives, chronicles, and wider European cartography. My focus is Iberian encounters with places and their naming and mapping. But I also identify hints in maps and other texts of Indigenous agency in encounters and of ancient regional linkages.