Francesc des Valers

Francesc des Valers, also recorded as Francisco de Valeriis or Francesc Desvalers, was a Mallorcan navigator of the 14th century of whom only one documented episode is known: the licence he received in 1342 to take part in an expedition towards the newly discovered Atlantic islands. Nothing secure is known of his birth, his death or his earlier career; his figure emerges from the protocols of the Kingdom of Mallorca and vanishes from them again.

On 16 April 1342 the lieutenant of King James III of Mallorca granted a licence to Francesc Desvalers, together with Pere Margre and Bartomeu Giges, to travel to the 'partes insularum noviter repertarum et vulgariter nominatarum insulas Fortunarum', that is, to the regions of the recently discovered islands, commonly called the Fortunate Isles. The royal mandate appointed Desvalers captain of two cochas, the Santa Creu and the Santa Magdalena, and set feudal conditions: the eight patrons and ship-owners who financed the enterprise paid homage and acknowledged the King of Mallorca as prince and lord of whatever islands, towns or castles might be taken, to be held as a feudum honoratum.

The documentation allows us to state that the expedition sailed and returned, although it does not prove that Desvalers himself went ashore. On 26 October 1342 Guillem Jaffe of Sineu, who had sailed on a ship bound for the Canaries, appointed a procurator to claim the wages of a voyage that, by his own statement, had lasted five and a half months; the dating of the April mandates and of the October claim places the departure in late April or early May and the return in early autumn. One of the captains of the cochas, Pere Margre, died during the crossing, and the fleet came back to Mallorca with a captive of Canarian origin, a woman named Tamanizazen.

The licence of Desvalers illustrates how quickly the news about the Canaries, brought by the Genoese expedition of 1336 and the Portuguese expedition of 1341, aroused the interest of merchants and navigators of the western Mediterranean. For James III, on the eve of the war that would pit him against Peter IV of Aragon in 1343, the islands promised a maritime lordship of his own, away from the Aragonese orbit; for the ship-owners, orchil dye, skins and, very soon, slaves. Unlike Nicoloso da Recco, whose enterprise was narrated by Boccaccio, that of Desvalers survives only in administrative and judicial records, which obliges us to present it as an expedition planned, authorised and carried out, but whose concrete course remains largely unknown.