Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, born in Pontevedra in Galicia, had at then age of eighteen entered the royal military in the European wars, fighting in the armies of Emperor Charles V between 1550 and 1555, after which service he had begun his exploring career, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.

His first destination was Mexico, where he lived for two years.

Little is known of this period in his life, other than that he had encountered difficulties with the Inquisition.

He then sailed to Peru, where he is to live for more than twenty years.

In Lima, he is accused by the Inquisition of possessing two magic rings and some magic ink and of following the precepts of Moses.

Sarmiento de Gamboa is thirty-five in 1567, when he sails from Callao with Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, nephew of Lope García de Castro, viceroy of Peru, on an expedition to the South Pacific in search of the legendary Terra Australis.

The expedition’s two ships are Los Reyes and Todos Santos; Sarmiento de Gamboa is the "Master of the Route."

The members of Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira’s expedition are the first Europeans to sight Tuvalu (known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Ellice Islands) when they encounter the island of Nui ,but are unable to land.

The Spanish explorers led by Álvaro de Mendaña, after crossing the Pacific, discover a group of nearly one thousand islands east of Papua New Guinea.

Finding alluvial gold on Guadalcanal, the largest of these, Mendaña believes he has found the source of King Solomon's gold for the Temple in Jerusalem, and consequently names the islands "The Islands of Solomon".

Mendaña de Neyra’s expedition discovers "a low barren island, judged to be eight leagues in circumference," to which he gives the name of "San Francisco," on October 20, 1568. (The island will eventually be named for Captain Samuel Wake, master of the British trading schooner Prince William Henry, who visits in 1796.)

The enmity between Mendaña de Neira and Sarmiento de Gamboa had erupted even before the ships returned to Callao in September 1569.

Mendaña, in order to take credit for the discoveries for himself, had thrown the journals and maps made by Sarmiento overboard and abandoned him in Mexico.

Sarmiento brings indictments against Mendaña, while Mendaña has Sarmiento arrested.

Both men jostle for favor and influence and their accounts of the voyage differ significantly.

A trial is held in Lima, with the result that Sarmiento is credited with the discoveries.

Sarmiento writes to Philip II of Spain asking the king to prohibit Mendaña from returning to the Solomon Islands.

Spanish navigator and explorer Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira leads the voyage that in 1595 discovers the first islands of Polynesia known to Europeans.

He names them the Marqusas after his patron, García Hurtado de Mendoza, 5th Marquis of Cañete, who is Viceroy of Peru at this time.

Mendaña visits first Fatu Hiva and then Tahuata before continuing on to the Solomon Islands.