Hemispheric knowledge: Sarmiento de Gamboa and his texts on the strait of Magellan

Abstract

This article examines Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s texts on the Magellan region, the formation of specific geographic knowledge, his methods of operation and rhetoric, as well as his critical understanding of the process of mundialization and the place of the Spanish language at the end of the sixteenth century. Textual analysis focuses on the Relación of the irst voyage to the Strait of Magellan, written by Sarmiento in 1580, and on a sonnet of the same author, published in Madrid in 1591, by the end of his life. It also analyzes the reception and usage of Sarmiento’s Relación in Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’s Historia de las Islas Malucas (1609) and Bernardo Iriarte’s Viaje al Estrecho de Magallanes (1768).