# Mourelle Sails Past Niutao and Nanumea (5 May 1781)

URL: https://allhistories.com/tuvalu/timeline/1781-mourelle-sails-past-niutao-and-nanumea
Location: Niutao and Nanumea, Tuvalu
Themes: main-event

On 5 May 1781, the Spanish naval officer Francisco Mourelle de la Rúa, aboard the frigate La Princesa, sailed past Nanumea and charted it as San Augustin. He also recorded an island as El Gran Cocal, the Great Coconut Plantation, which researchers Keith Chambers and Doug Munro in 1980 identified as Niutao. Mourelle was trying to find a southern route from the Philippines to Mexico. Wikipedia says he visited Tonga and travelled through the Ellice Islands, then mapped islands off New Guinea, before contrary winds forced a return via Guam and a northern crossing to Mexico. Both Tuvaluan sightings carry the same date in the Wikipedia articles. Islanders reportedly brought coconuts out in canoes at Niutao, but the ship sailed on without landing. The Chambers and Munro identification resolved what had been called the Mystery of Gran Cocal. The voyage added the northern atolls to European charts, though more than a generation passed before traders and whalers began to call regularly. At this point in the timeline (1781), no single ruler governed the islands (c. 1000 BCE – 1892); Polynesian settlers and their descendants lived in independent island communities under their own chiefs and councils, and no list of rulers survives.

## Why it matters
It is the earliest documented European contact with Niutao and Nanumea, and an example of how modern scholars matched old Spanish names to today's islands.

Ruler at the Time: [Prehistory, Polynesian settlement and the independent island communities](https://allhistories.com/tuvalu/rulers/prehistory-polynesian-settlement-and-the-independent-island-communities-1)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Francisco Antonio Mourelle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Antonio_Mourelle)
- [Wikipedia — Niutao](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niutao)
- [Wikipedia — Nanumea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanumea)