Hi there, thanks for having me on. My name's Carmen, I'm a historian, and I've spent the last six years researching colonial Spanish records. And there's one case that just, it won't let me go. It's from 1593, and it involves a soldier who appears to have traveled nine thousand miles in the blink of an eye. Now I know how that sounds. Believe me, I was skeptical when I first came across it. But I've traced this thing back through multiple independent sources, some written within sixteen years of the actual event. years is pretty close for a historical source - Daniel' The earliest account I found was from a friar named Brother Francisco, writing in 1698, and he treated it as historical fact. He didn't understand how it happened, attributed it to witchcraft, but he recorded it as something that genuinely occurred. I had a terrible cold the week I found that document, kept having to blow my nose while I was reading microfilm. Weird thing to remember. Anyway. The soldier's name in most accounts is Miguel Vargas, though some versions leave him unnamed. What we know for certain is that he was a palace guard in Manila, in the Philippines, which was a Spanish colony at the time.
So here's the setting. October 1593. The Philippines are under Spanish rule, and the Governor-General is a man named Hernando Velázquez Mendoza. He's an ambitious administrator, and he's planning a military expedition to capture the Maluku Islands in what's now Indonesia. He assembles a fleet of galleys, loads them with soldiers, and sets sail from Manila. Now here's where it gets tragic. To show good faith, he doesn't chain his Chinese rowers to the oars, which was the standard practice. He even allows them to carry weapons. Three days out from Manila, in the middle of the night, those rowers mutiny. They kill the Governor and most of his Spanish guards while they sleep. Only a handful escape. Word of the assassination reaches Manila the next morning. The colony is thrown into chaos. No successor has been named. Various Spanish officials are vying for power. The palace guards are put on high alert. One of those guards is Miguel Vargas. And on October 24th, he's standing his post at the Palacio del Gobernador, exhausted, waiting to see who will take control.
According to the accounts I've studied, Vargas had been on duty for hours. The heat in Manila in October is oppressive, humid, the kind that drains you. He was tired. He leaned against the palace wall and closed his eyes for just a moment. And when he opened them, if that makes sense, he wasn't in Manila anymore. He was standing in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. What's now called the Zócalo. Nine thousand miles away. Now, I want to be clear about what the sources say. He didn't experience any sense of travel. No floating, no tunnel of light, nothing like that. One moment he was in Manila with his eyes closed. The next moment he opened them and he was in Mexico. The sun was in a different position. The air was different. The buildings around him were completely unfamiliar. But he was still a soldier, so his training kicked in. He saw a palace, he assumed he should be guarding it, so he took up his post. That's when other guards noticed him. His uniform was wrong. It was clearly a palace guard uniform, but it wasn't the style worn in New Spain. They challenged him. Asked who he was. And here's where it gets interesting.
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