ABSTRACT
The town of Pontevedra, in Galicia, has been a nursery of distinguished seamen—“The seed-plot of illustrious sailors,” as one of its historians called it. The western coast of Galicia mainly consists of the three deep bays of Arosa, Pontevedra, and Vigo, with the little port of Bayona and the mouth of the Miño further south. These great bays were the nursing homes of seamen from the earliest times. A ship of the Galician fleet, under Pazo Gomez Charino, disputes with Laredo in Asturias the honour of having broken the chain across the Guadalquivir, at the taking of Seville in 1248. Such traditions were an incitement to the sailors of Galicia to emulate the deeds of their ancestors. Pontevedra was one of the centres of these aspirations. The old town is well placed on the river Lerez, only a few miles from the sea. The surrounding country is well cultivated, its hills well wooded, while its more distant mountains attain, in the Faro de Avion, a height of over 3500 feet. Here Pedro de Sarmiento y Gamboa, the famous navigator and historian of the Incas, first saw the light; and here were born the two sailor brothers Bartolome and Gonzalo Nodal. Their early home was in a street called Las Corbaceiras, in the ward called La Moureira, in the town of Pontevedra. They were both baptized in the beautiful old church of Santa Maria la 172Mayor or “de los Pescadores,” an edifice in the late ogival style of the 15th century, and called by Ferreiro “La perla del arte Gallego”—the pearl of Galician art. There were four years between the two brothers, the elder, Bartolomé, having been baptized in 1574 and the younger in 1578. But they both went to sea at the same time, as volunteers, in 1590, aged respectively 12 and 16. Their long and honourable careers in the navy are recorded in the following notices which appeared in the same volume as the narrative of their voyage of discovery.
