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This post is mainly focused on Spanish voyages across the Pacific and the cimentations of the Viceroyalty of Oceania.


On April 9th 1595 they set sail from the port of El Callao, including Pedro Fernández de Queirós (which will be an important person later on). On July 21st they reached the Marquesas Islands. Relations were cordial, but deteriorated rather quickly and Queirós estimated that by the time the expedition left, 200 Marquesans had died. When they sighted land again on September 8th 1595 they landed in the island of Santa Cruz [1], concretely on Graciosa Bay. However the settlement deteriorated rather quickly with a military commander being executed and the natives growing more hostile. On October 30th, a rather desperate Neira set sail personally to Ateroa while leaving the colony in the hands of his wife (and also an admiral) Isabel Barreto. When he reached Medina de Ateroa on November 13th, Juan Fernández agreed to assist him and lent him some supplies to support his colony. When Neira returned on November 19th, fifty-two members of the expedition had died due to a mix of malaria and lack of food. When the natives grew tired of the Spanish and tried to attack, they were crushed and the Spanish retaliated by massacring half of the island's population while turning the rest into slaves. During the next months the colony stagnated and another thirty people died. Around January, Neira left to Manila in order to get more supplies from the Philippines. He reached Manila in March 3rd 1596 and came back with supplies in April. When he arrived, there were only 68 survivors and his own wife was sick. With the supplies and native "assistance" they managed to grow some crops and repair their ships.


Juan Fernández died on July 1596 and his successor Manuel Ortiz sent two ships to check what happened to Neira's colony. The ships got lost but eventually found the island in March 1597 after three months. In the way, the ships discovered a rather large, long island which they dubbed Cana, as the natives called it [2]. With help of the expedition from Ateroa, Neira managed to stablish a permanent outpost in the island, serving as a nexus between Ateroa and the Philippines.


On December 21st 1605 an expedition commanded by Pedro Fernández de Queirós (which returned to Lima in 1599) left from the port of El Callao commanding an expedition to finally settle the issue over the existance of Terra Australis Incognita. The expedition arrived to the colony in Santa Cruz on May 1606. The expedition decided to split then. Queirós decided to wait in the island and move south, while his second-in-command, Luis Váez de Torres insisted on sailign due west as these seas had never been explored while the southern ones were more or less cartographed during the Neira expedition. Torres insisted that the existance of Ateroa was a proof of an ever bigger territory west of it as the islands seemed to grow larger the more you sail to the west. After an argument, Torres embarked his ship, the San Pedro and tried to sail west while actually going southwest. That inconscius move to the south likely saved his ship from crashing somwhere in the Great Barrier Reef.


On August 1606 he landed on an island which he called "Isla de San Buenaventura" [3] and after sailing a bit to the North he discovered that the island was part of a much greater one. Convinced he had finally found Terra Australis he dubbed the island "Australia". He mapped all of Queensland's Pacific coast and reached the tip of Cape York naming the peninsula as "Tierra de Torres". While crossing the Torres Strait (OTL name) he had an encounter with some natives in the islands of it. He was surprised when the natives almost inmediately threw a deluge of frankly unaccurate arrows at them. He defined the islands as savages and the tittle has survived until the modern time as the Savage Islands (Islas de los Salvajes). Torres then sailed to Manila, arriving around January 1607 while in the way cartographing New Guinea.

Meanwhile, Queirós sailed south and further mapped the Vanuatu archipelago and OTL New Caledonia before going south to Ateroa. By that time, the generic name for OTL New Zealand changed from Ateroa to "Las Fernandinas" in honour of Juan Fernández, while Ateroa remained as the name of North Island. Queirós then decided to create a second settlement in Ateroa, Santa Marta [4].

After that, Queirós sailed around the North Island and sailed due South from the westernmost part of the North Island, arriving at a beach close to Okarito. The land he sighted was one of forests and mountains, reminiscent of those of northern Spain. He named the land "Nueva Asturias" and what IOTL became the Southern Alps received the name of "Picos de Europa" (Peaks of Europe), after a mountain range in Asturias that was the first sight of Europe for whalers coming from the Bay of Biscay. By then it was clear that the Fernandines were not part of Terra Australis and that Torres' discovery had a greater chance of being it.


The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon sailed from Banten to explore the western coast of New Guinea and crossed the limits of the Arafura Sea into the Gulf of Carpentaria, making landfall in the mouth of the Los Arbustos river [5]. He named the river R. met het Bosch which the Spanish later translated into it's current name. After that he decided to sail back to Ambon.


By the 1620's, the Spanish were in firm posession of Melanesia, having completely cartographed the Bismarck Archipelago (Islas de San Jaime), the rest of the Solomon Islands, all of New Guinea and the whole of New Zealand. Most of southern Polynesia was also sighted by the Spanish and some contacts had been stablished with the locals, usually with no good result.


[1] OTL Nande Island, Vanuatu
[2] The Kanaky, natives of New Caledonia. The Spanish forgot the last syllable
[3] OTL Fraser Island, Queensland
[4] OTL Whangarei, New Zealand
[5] Pennefather River, Queensland