David Melgueiro


David Melgueiro is supposed to have been a Portuguese navigator and explorer. He allegedly sailed across the Northeast Passage in 1660 by travelling from Japan to Portugal through the Arctic Ocean at a time when Portuguese vessels were banned from Japan.

History

According to the story of a diplomat and French spy in Portugal, the Seigneur de La Madelène, he found records that a Captain David Melgueiro, at the command of the Dutch ship Eternal Father, left the island of Tanegashima, Japan on March 14, 1660, sailed north and entered the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. The expedition reached 84° N and, upon sighting Svalbard, headed south, towards Scotland and Ireland. Carrying on board a number of emigrant passengers back to Europe with valuable goods. The ship finally arrived in 1662 at Porto, an important northern seashore Portuguese city, Melgueiro’s birthplace. The reason that his route was chosen was the risk of pirate attacks, common on southern seas for those who dared to return to their native countries by sailing across the waters of Cape of Good Hope or Strait of Magellan.
La Madelène was allegedly murdered when he was preparing to leave Portugal to reveal Melgueiro’s achievement to the French. In 1754 the French geographer Philippe Buache traced in his memoirs the route taken by Melgueiro on a 1649 map drawn by a Portuguese identified only as Teixeira. The map was found in the French Navy archives. How the French Navy acquired this map would be a Portuguese state secret as well.
William Corr dismisses the story by saying that "no Portuguese vessels sailed, or could have sailed, from Japan in 1660; Portuguese commerce with Japan ended drastically in 1639." The Portuguese were expelled and under the Sakoku isolationist policy all trade and contact with the outside world stopped except for very limited trade by the Dutch. Corr, however, does not take into consideration the fact that Melgueiro undertook the expedition under Dutch, not Portuguese, service.
In his account of the expedition of the Vega, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld mentions Melgueiro's alleged voyage briefly but dismisses it as fiction.
A Portuguese scientific project using avant-garde technologies in naval construction took Melgueiro's name: Associação David Melgueiro.