The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  When they perceived that the country was weak and could be occupied, they bestowed rich presents upon the king and demanded a plot of land as big as an oxhide for building houses and living there. The king did not suspect any trickery and assented. These men thereupon cut the hide of an ox into narrow strips, pieced these together until they extended the length of a thousand fathoms, and in this way encompassed the whole land of Luzon, which they then claimed, in accordance with their agreement.20

  This was the story of how Dido founded Carthage, which had found its way, perhaps in the storytelling of Portuguese travellers, all the way to China.21 Yet the gloomy view of Legázpi was that ‘this land cannot be sustained by trade’, by which he meant not that the creation of a trading base there would fail, but that the resources of the Philippines were not sufficient to keep Manila alive. Its future depended on becoming the hub for Pacific trade – which is what did happen.22

  Remarkably, the Manila galleon – often just one very large ship – was the main source of income for the Spanish population of Manila. The lifeline linking Manila to Mexico was fragile and was easily snapped. Even so, sailors and settlers were prepared to risk taking this route in the search for profit or sometimes out of curiosity. A vivid account of a journey to Manila survives from the hand of Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant who set out across the world in 1594, when he was about twenty-one years of age. He had been living in Seville with his father, learning ‘the profession of merchant’, and after three years there his father suggested that they should hire a small ship of about 400 tons, sail to the Cape Verde Islands, load the ship with black slaves, and transport them to the West Indies. This was (it is sad to say) a normal enough operation, apart from the fact that the Carlettis were Italian, and only subjects of Spain were permitted to ply these routes. It was therefore essential to find a Spanish backer; this was a woman from Seville who had married a Pisan businessman, and who agreed to front the expedition.23 The Carlettis arrived in the Caribbean safely, mourning the loss of slaves thrown into the sea after they died (so they said) from eating fresh fish, and on a whim they penetrated deeper and deeper into the New World, reaching Panama and Peru, and then up to Mexico, visiting Acapulco and next trekking up to Mexico City with a load of silver, buying and selling, and recording the wonderful sights they saw, for Francesco had decided that his account of the voyage was to be sent to Ferdinando de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany and an enthusiast for the promotion of trade – he showered the free port of Livorno with privileges that enabled Armenians, Jews and others to settle in the city.

  The Carlettis had it in mind to buy goods and take them back to Lima. The maritime route along the coast from Peru to Mexico was now fully functioning; it was a Spanish creation, for the Aztecs and the Incas had barely been aware of one another’s empire. But the longer they spent in Mexico, the more Carletti’s father was convinced that this was only halfway to where he needed to be: the Philippines. Once again they had to find a way of being taken on board when only Spaniards were allowed to buy passage to the islands. However, those who served on board were exempt from this rule – after all, the crews included large numbers of Filipinos, Chinese and even black Africans. The Carlettis were appointed as officers on board, though the captain agreed to find two sailors who would perform their duties so long as they renounced their officers’ pay. There was also an official limit of half a million golden escudos (converted into silver) on the amount of silver, mined in Peru and Mexico, that could be taken to the Philippines to pay for the goods available there. The Crown wanted to treat the Manila trade as a royal monopoly, but in reality there was plenty of opportunity to smuggle money into the islands, and goods out of them; the captain was fully complicit, for ‘he was used to carrying such things for various people who shipped money’, with the result that the amount of bullion on board was worth 1,000,000 escudos. Out of this, the captain was entitled to take 2 per cent as a fee, so one can see why he was perfectly willing to defy the Spanish authorities despite threats of confiscation and worse.24

  The outward journey was generally less of a trial, and after setting out in March 1596 the Carlettis enjoyed a ‘prosperous and very happy navigation’; there was always a following wind, so that the journey lasted sixty-six days, compared to the six months that a return trip might take. The ships took on fresh water in the Marianas, the islands Magellan had called the ‘Islands of Thieves’; it was loaded in the form of very stout lengths of bamboo cane, filled with water. All the inhabitants wanted was bits and pieces of iron, which were prized more than gold: ‘they were asking in the friendliest way, rubbing the palm of their hands along the side of their hearts, saying “Chamarri, her, her,” which means “Friends, iron, iron.”’ Francesco Carletti was especially impressed by the boats the islanders built, ‘so well made of the thinnest boards painted and worked with various colours, these mixed with much artistry, and sewed together without nails in a capricious and beautiful way and style, so light that they appeared to be birds flying over that sea’. He admired the outriggers that made sure the boats could never capsize or sink, because they buoyed up the boats, and the long, narrow sails ‘made in the manner of rush mats’.25 He was less impressed by the ‘barbarians’ themselves, whose men went around shamelessly naked.

  In many respects, the approach to Manila was the most dangerous part of these voyages. Manila lies on the western side of the large northern Philippine island of Luzon, and to reach it ships had to pass through the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and Luzon, and then manoeuvre through narrow channels and past shoals into Manila Bay. Even before the galleon carrying Carletti had passed Taiwan, a typhoon started to blow, and at that point the sails were at last lowered, and the galleons were immobilized for eighteen days, running short of fresh water. Carletti described how water was rationed and orders were given not to cook any food, on the grounds that this made people drink more (the meat taken on board was heavily salted); all one was allowed was ship’s biscuit moistened in water and oil, and sprinkled with sugar. These privations seemed distant memories once the storm abated and the ships anchored off Luzon, taking on fresh fish and marvellous fruits: ‘truly those bananas in that region seemed to me one of the most delicious fruits to be found anywhere in the world, and in particular certain ones that had a very subtle odour, so that one could desire nothing more welcome or more flavoursome.’26

  Carletti was not as overwhelmed by Manila as he was by Philippine bananas. He recognized that its layout and the style of its houses were similar to what he had seen in Mexico City, which was much larger, though he thought Manila was better defended by its thick walls and a garrison of 800 Spanish soldiers, which made sense as they faced many enemies in a sea that contained, he said, 12,000 islands. But he was impressed by the profits that the Spanish settlers were able to make: ‘from the merchandise brought there by the Chinese and then transported to Mexico, they still earn 150 and 200 per cent.’

  Whatever those islands lack is brought there from outside. From Japan comes the wheat flour from which they make bread to serve to the Spaniards; from there also come divers other things that they bring on their ships and sell. And the Chinese – that is, those from the province of China – also come there each year with some fifty ships laden with raw silk that has been spun and woven into pieces of velvet, satin, damask or taffeta, as well as much cotton cloth and musk, sugar, porcelain, and very many other sorts of merchandise, from all of which they make very noble trade with the Spaniards, who buy it from them to take it to Mexico in New Spain.27

  The year Carletti arrived there were only about a dozen of these junks in port, and everything was snapped up quickly. Carletti attributed the lack of Chinese goods to a big fire in the Chinese quarter of the city; but, as will be seen, there were other interruptions: pirate raids, riots by Chinese settlers, and so on.

  Carletti did not simply report on business opportunities; he was also fascinated by the Filipinos themselves: the Moros, who enjoyed gambling o
n cockfights, and the heavily tattooed Bisaios, the pagan population, whose men pierced their penises with studs, which somehow increased their ‘lustful pleasure’, though at first, at any rate, the studs made their female partners extremely uncomfortable. But he was full of praise for the islands – ‘everything is good in those islands.’28 Aware that the Spanish government made it very difficult for foreign merchants to trade out of Manila, the Carlettis next conceived a plan to sail by way of Japan to China, the East Indies, Goa and Lisbon. This was no more straightforward than attempting to load merchandise on ships bound for Acapulco. Castilians were forbidden to enter the Portuguese area of trade, under pain of confiscation of goods and imprisonment. This rule still held even though Philip II of Spain had succeeded to the throne of Portugal in 1581, following the death of King Sebastian in battle against the Moroccans and of his childless heir shortly afterwards. It was a way of keeping the peace between enemies who had a common monarch but not a common purpose.

  The answer to the problem the Carlettis faced was to steal out of Manila at night carrying their bars of silver on board a Japanese ship, for Japan was ‘a free region in which neither the Portuguese nor the Castilians rule’. This ship was similar to a junk, and Carletti was fascinated but not entirely convinced by the sail, which, he said, folded up like a fan but was really quite weak, and he was intrigued also by the fragile rudder.29 Portuguese ships arrived each year at Nagasaki, sailing in from Macau on the coast of China, so that there would be no great difficulty in heading for the South China Sea after looking around parts of Japan, which was not yet closed to foreign traders, and where Carletti encountered a leaf called cha, or tea, and warm rice wine – his experiences in Japan will be examined later.30 Carletti’s account of Manila clearly demonstrates the city’s place at the hub of networks linking the Spanish Philippines not just to Mexico, and through Mexico to Spain, but also to China (when the junks arrived) and northwards towards Japan; nor in reality were the Portuguese always unwelcome in the city. As a centre of exchange, Manila was connected to the maritime trading centres of the entire known world.

  III

  Manila, with its fine harbour and its fertile hinterland, was a cosmopolitan city, though that is not to say that relations between its many different peoples were always cordial. The Spanish presence was complicated by the fact that the conquerors were Catholic and that they were in constant contact with Muslims, Buddhists, Daoists and pagans. While the Spanish settlers in Manila, numbering 7,350 in 1650, confined themselves to a fortified city, which came to be known as Intramuros, ‘within the walls’ (still the name of old Manila), the suburbs of Manila teemed with Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos.31 There had been a settlement at the site the Filipinos called Maynila for some time, and the Spaniards thought of calling the city ‘Sweet Name of Jesus’, but somehow a hispanized version of the old name seemed simpler.32 The Chinese presence in the Philippines already had a long history when the Spanish conquerors arrived. In the Song period, from the mid-tenth to the late thirteenth century, Chinese junks regularly visited the islands, for this was a period when the imperial court encouraged private trade. But private trade continued unofficially even under the sterner policies of the early Ming emperors; the Philippines were among the places visited by Zheng He’s fleet, since the Yung-lo emperor was keen to draw the islands under his overlordship and had already sent an official to the island of Luzon in 1405 in the expectation that he would take charge of the place.33 Two years later Zheng He’s fleet arrived, and then and on other occasions tribute reached China from the islands, including gold, precious stones and pearls, but Filipino boats continued to come to China, and spices from Java and the Moluccas were collected in the Philippines by Chinese merchants who evaded the official ban on private trade. The clearest evidence for intensive contact between China and the Philippines before the arrival of the Europeans comes from the description of local chieftains dining off porcelain in Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage, while archaeological finds even in the Philippine uplands, away from the coastal areas visited by shipping, show that gifts of Chinese ceramics were used to bond the highland chiefs to the powerful datus, or petty rulers, of low-lying regions. Admittedly, the datus kept the finest porcelain for themselves.34

  It rapidly became clear that Manila could not live without China, just as it could not live without Acapulco. After a great massacre of the Chinese in 1603, a Spanish commentator complained that the city ran out of food, even out of shoes, for the Chinese were not just traders but artisans: ‘it is true that the city can neither go on nor maintain itself without these Chinese’.35 The Spaniards knew the Chinese as Sangleys, a corruption of the term seng-li, which in the Amoy dialect of Chinese meant ‘trade’.36 The Sangleys arrived on big junks that carried up to 400 passengers, some of whom could be expected to stay put in Manila, settling in the Parían, or Chinese quarter. The junks were quite unlike European or Filipino vessels; each end was square, and the deck was covered with little huts roofed with palm leaves, while the hold was divided up by partitions, so that if the ship sprang a leak only one partition at a time would be flooded. Merchants rented space in these partitions, storing their cargo for a fee of 20 per cent of the price the goods fetched; another 20 per cent or more went to the Chinese brokers in Manila who helped manage the sales, if need be by handing out bribes to Spanish officials, although officially goods were sold through a system of wholesale bargaining which met the needs of Spanish merchants – with little or no knowledge of Chinese, they remained suspicious of the bargaining ability of the Chinese.37 Already familiar with old Maynila, the Chinese junks came in ever greater numbers once the Spanish city had come into being, recorded arrivals rising from only six in 1574 to forty or more each year by 1580, and generally at least thirty could be expected to arrive, so long as the Chinese knew that the Manila galleons had come into port with the silver needed for settling bills. The visit was brief, to allow for the monsoons and the danger of typhoons: out from China in March, and leaving Manila by early June.38

  This trade was dominated by silk and porcelain. At first some of the Spaniards were rather dismissive when talking about the quality of the silk coming from China, but once the Chinese had a good sense of the distant markets they were trying to reach all this changed. They imitated the silks of Andalusia, and opinions differed about which was better, Chinese or Andalusian silk cloth. The business community of Seville looked with disapproval on the expansion of the silk trade from China to Manila and from Manila to Mexico, having assumed that Mexico would be their own special market. Chinese kilns showed similar adaptability to Chinese looms. In the seventeenth century Chinese potters knew what the Europeans and the Japanese wanted, and modified their designs accordingly. What resulted was a European and Spanish colonial taste for Chinese goods, subtly altered to meet the cultural preferences of the purchasers; this was an important moment in the encounter of Chinese civilization with the West. Antonio de Morga, president of the high court, or Audiencia, at Manila late in the sixteenth century, itemized the goods that arrived on these junks:

  Raw silk in bundles, of the fineness of two strands, and other silk of coarser quality; fine untwisted silk, white and of all colours, wound in small skeins; quantities of velvets, some plain and some embroidered in all sorts of figures, colours and fashions, others with body of gold and embroidered with gold; woven stuffs and brocades, of gold and silver upon silk of various colours and patterns, quantities of gold and silver thread in skeins; damasks, satins, taffetas and other cloths of all colours … 39

  That was only the silk; they also brought linen and cotton cloth, hangings, coverlets, tapestries, metal goods including copper kettles, gunpowder, wheat flour, fresh and preserved fruits, decorated writing cases, gilded benches, live birds and pack animals – each junk must have been the sixteenth-century equivalent of a floating department store. So responsive were the Chinese to the demands of the market in Manila and Mexico that they sometimes jumped to the wrong conclu
sion. A Spaniard had lost his nose, probably from venereal disease, and he commissioned a wooden nose from a visiting Chinese craftsman, whom he paid very generously. On his next trip to Manila the craftsman thought he had worked out how to make himself a small fortune, and brought a whole cargo of wooden noses, only to discover what he should have noticed earlier: that the Spaniards in Manila already had noses of their own.40

  All this was paid for with enormous quantities of Peruvian, and to a lesser extent Mexican, silver shipped out from Acapulco on the annual galleon voyage. One estimate for the quantity of American silver mined between 1500 and 1800 is 150,000 tons; only some of this was carried west on the Manila galleons (apparently 12,000,000 pesos of silver were sent to Manila in 1597, 5,000,000 in most years), but even so the export of American silver had a dramatic effect on the silver-starved Chinese economy.41 The Ming emperors had tried to deal with the shortage of silver within their empire by continuing the Mongol practice of issuing paper money. Foreign rulers who received gracious gifts of paper money in exchange for their tribute may well have wondered whether this was fair exchange, especially when (as in 1410) an embassy from the Philippines brought the emperor a present of gold.42 Another possibility was to collect taxes in grain, but Chinese officials responded to the influx of bullion by accepting payments in silver instead, as it was easier to transport; and then a decision to rationalize a whole series of taxes into what was evocatively called the ‘Single Whip’, in about 1570, made silver payments the norm. In the very long term the gold:silver ratio in China became less extreme; it stood at 1:5.5 in Canton around 1600, but could be as high as 1:14 in contemporary Spain. In China as in Europe, the arrival of large amounts of bullion pushed up prices, leading to a ‘great inflation’; on the other hand, the arrival of so much silver drove economic expansion within Ming China by vastly boosting the money supply.43 Meanwhile visiting merchants could buy gold cheaply with silver so long as the Chinese exchange rate was much more favourable than elsewhere. There were opportunities to make a considerable fortune by shifting bullion around the world from places rich in silver to places poor in silver, something the Genoese and Venetians had known in earlier centuries.44 A Portuguese merchant commented in 1621: ‘silver wanders throughout the world in its peregrinations before flocking to China, where it remains, as if at its natural centre.’45