Farewell South Seas! Captured Spanish derroteros or English-made Copies?

In this article, I argue that a late seventeenth-century Spanish derrotero—believed to have been seized by English buccaneers in the Pacific—is instead an English-made copy. My proposed re-attribution of the Huntington Library’s Derrotero general del mar del sur (MssHM 918) challenges its earlier identifications as the ‘Rosario derrotero’ and the ‘Morgan derrotero.’ Drawing from material, visual, and documentary evidence, including the study of watermarks, paper, spelling errors, scribal style, and early auction catalogues, I demonstrate that—despite its dateline of Panama 1669—the atlas was not produced in the Spanish Americas by Spanish American navigators or chart makers. Instead, the Huntington derrotero appears to be one of at least two English copies identified thus far, raising questions about the role that English copies of stolen Spanish sea charts played in England’s imperial ambitions.