Francisco de Hoces (?, 1526?) was a Spanish sailor who in 1525 joined the Loaísa Expedition to the Spice Islands as commander of the vessel San Lesmes. On January 1526, the San Lesmes was blown by a gale southwards from the eastern mouth of Strait of Magellan till 56ºS latitude, where the crew thought they saw a land’s end. This is commonly understood as that they saw open waters westward away of a point of land that could be the southeasternmost tip of either Tierra del Fuego (Cape San Diego) or Isla de los Estados (Cape San Juan). In any of both cases they supposedly had seen an open water connection between Atlantic and Pacific oceans south of Tierra del Fuego, and therefore they preceded Francis Drake in infering the existence of such a connection. This is the reason why some Spanish, Argentinean and Chilean historians maintain that the so-called Drake Passage should be named Mar de Hoces (Hoces Sea).
   After Loaisa expedition eventually reached the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan, the whole fleet was dispersed by another gale and San Lesmes was seen for the last time on late May 1526 . San Lesmes final fate has been the subject of a lot of speculation based in some 16th Century European traces later found in different places around South Pacific, which suggest she could have reached Easter Island, any of the Polynesian archipelagos or even New Zealand. In any of these cases we'd be talking about the first European landing in the Polynesian Triangle, and it would bring forward in History such an event by several decades. Australian writer Robert Langdon has been the most prominent supporter of these theories in his books "The lost caravel" and "The lost caravel re-explored".

Bibliography

• Landín Carrasco, Amancio. España en el mar. Padrón de descubridores. Madrid: Editorial Naval ISBN 84-7341-078-5
• Oyarzun, Javier. Expediciones españolas al Estrecho de Magallanes y Tierra de Fuego. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica ISBN 84-7232-130-4.
• Langdon, Robert. The lost caravel re-explored. Canberra: Brolga Press ISBN 0 9588309 1 6

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