Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa

Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who lived until 1592 and was born between 1530 and 1532, was a Spanish adventurer, author, historian, mathematician and astronomer, named governor of the Strait of Magellan by King Philip II in 1580. His birthplace is uncertain, possibly Pontevedra in Galicia or Alcalá de Henares in Castile. At eighteen he entered the royal military and fought in the armies of Charles V between 1550 and 1555, then sailed to New Spain and from 1557 lived for more than twenty years in Peru, where he gained a reputation as a navigator and obtained the Chair of Grammar in Lima. He joined Álvaro de Mendaña's expedition across the southern Pacific that found the Solomon Islands in 1568. In 1572 the viceroy Francisco de Toledo commissioned from him a history of the Incas, which he wrote at Cuzco from first-hand oral accounts and had read to forty-two indigenous authorities for correction.