The Disastrous Voyage of the Santa Margarita

by Richard Woodman

  All such rumours, arguments and counter-reasoning Iago had heard in the days since he had secured his berth and brought his small household aboard. And such was the crowded state of the Santa Margarita that opinions had been freely voiced, as if all knew that, for the time being at least and while they were still attached to the shore by the thin thread of expedience, indiscretions might be aired without attracting the unwelcome attentions of their officers. This licence ran throughout the ship, for although Guillestigui had ordered Lorenzo to stop all shore leave for the crew, it did not prevent the sailors from their excessive wenching in those last nights when the officers retired to the great cabin to dine and the little canoes slipped alongside in the darkness and more girls scrambled up the ship’s side to slide into the hammocks with their chosen benefactors.

  ‘God’s blood,’ blasphemed Olalde with a wide grin as he watched one such shadow flit below, ‘what must our patron saint be thinking of us now?’

  But at last, on the fine sunny morning of 13 July 1600, all activity was stilled by the piercing blast of Diego de Llerena’s shrill whistle. The mass of humanity was called to order and assembled to hear the Mass according to station. Falling upon his knees with the devout, Iago watched as the whores emerged and clustered in apparent wonder before the elevated host. Ocampo reminded them that it was the day of the Deposition of St Mildred the Virgin and of another, uncanonized, virgin martyr Margarita, namesake of the ship’s eponymous patroness. Under these propitious auspices he warned them against sin, especially that of concubinage which greatly offended God and the very Sainted Margarita herself, after whom the ship was named. The men shuffled awkwardly but this was their only sign of contrition and, after a telling silence, Ocampo signalled the beginning of the voyage by further calling for Santa Margarita herself to intercede on their behalf, and to ask for God’s blessing upon their enterprise. Ocampo reminded them of their duty to God, and to the distant King’s majesty and, as he was bound to do, to their duty of obedience to Rey Felipe’s captain-general, Don Juan Martinez de Guillestigui.

  Ocampo raised his right hand, made the sign of the cross and blessed them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. As he lowered his hand, Guillestigui rose to his feet and seemed by his bulk to shoulder aside the spiritual power of Ocampo and assert that of the more immediate and temporal world. The captain-general called out an order. As the congregation broke up, Calcagorta went forward, climbed on to the forecastle and, taking the linstock from a waiting seaman, touched the glowing match to the breech of a gun. As the women trooped giggling below, the single discharge from the unshotted saker, the signal for the beginning of the voyage, made them squeak with a mixture of excitement and fear.

  A cable’s length away the San Geronimo, at the conclusion of her own devotions, dipped her pendant and discharged her own gun in acknowledgement. The twin concussions rolled over the water and were lost amid the swaying tops of the palms and the forest beyond. A short distance further from the San Geronimo two other ships did likewise. Then Llerena blew his whistle again and the cries of the mates and leading seamen filled the air as the topmen ascended the rigging and the mass of sailors, even an excited friar or two, bent their backs to the capstan bars and began the tedious task of weighing the anchor. Upon the Santa Margarita’s high poop stood the captain-general and his entourage. The sun glanced off their half-armour and ruffled the plumes in their morions. Behind them the red and gold of the great silken ensign, situated on its tall staff set above the empty Virgin’s shrine, lifted in the light breeze. As if a benison from God, this blew out of the north-east over the flat swamps and marshes beyond Manila. The men tramped round the capstan until the new iron anchor, transported across half the world from a smithy in distant Seville, drew out of the coral sand at the extremity of its heavy rope cable.

  Aboard the San Geronimo and the other vessels, men could be seen going aloft and casting loose their own gaskets. After what seemed an age to those, like Iago, waiting on the half-deck, the cry came from the beakhead that the anchor was first a-trip, and then aweigh. Calcagorta again fired the saker as a signal that the captain-general’s ship was under way.

  ‘Haul away and sheet home!’ bellowed Olivera and the cry was taken up by Llerena. The seamen and hurriedly assembled landsmen tailed on to the halliard falls and as they broke into a chanting rhythm, the heavy topsail and topgallant yards were hauled aloft in readiness.

  With the anchor sighted through the clear water as it rose steadily up to the Santa Margarita’s beakhead, the yards were braced sharp up and the topsails and topgallant sails let fall and sheeted home. Gathering way through the pellucid sea, they stood to the north close-hauled. Clearing the isthmus that secured Cavite as a bay within a bay, they beat majestically up towards the walls of Manila a few miles away, closing the city until they could see the heads of the curious upon the new ramparts and, in a jutting bastion, the flaunting standards of the governor and the flashing of the sun upon the gold crosses born by crucifers before the Archbishop of Manila. As the ships closed to within cannon shot of the bastion, the first of eleven guns saluted Don Juan Martinez de Guillestigui. As the sound of the last bombard faded, the wind bore down towards them the plaint of a hidden choir and the tolling of the cathedral bells.

  In response Lorenzo shouted for the main yards to be hauled aback and the helm put over. The other ships did likewise and the entire squadron hove-to to receive the archbishop’s distant and inaudible blessing. A large silk standard was broken out at the mainmasthead, its brilliant red, blue and gold lifting gallantly in the breeze, formal acknowledgement that Guillestigui received the royal mandate and the blessing of Heaven. While this ceremony was in progress a cock, one of a number of mixed fowl confined amidships in wooden basket cages, began to crow. This provoked irreverent sniggering among the crew. Guillestigui smiled beneath the steel curve of his helmet but Lorenzo called the seamen to order.

  As the ships began to drift inexorably away, a barge put out from the shore, the sunlight sparkling off the oars as they dipped in perfect unison. At the boat’s richly decorated stern a silk ensign trailed in the water and at its bow a small flag showed it bore the person of the captain of the port.

  A few moments later this officer, Don Felipe Corço, ascended to the deck, followed by a priest and, borne up behind the cleric at some peril to its dignity, two men with a painted statue of the Virgin Mary. The friars and priests on board, hemmed by the deferential nuns, drew close round this sacred image, and after due ceremony the Blessed Virgin was ensconced high on the poop in her shrine below the great ensign of His Most Catholic Majesty Rey Felipe of Castile and Aragon, of the whole of Spain, of Portugal, Lord of the Indies and the Most Mighty and Sovereign Prince on the face of the earth. To end this valediction, Corço bowed and presented Guillestigui with a new ensign which was hoisted in place of the old. This act finally severed their connection with the shore and Don Felipe Corço shook hands with the captain-general before he descended into his barge. It shoved off from the não’s side, the crew lying on their oars as the Santa Margarita’s yards were hauled to catch the wind, the great ship swung round and headed south-west. Each firing a salute as they turned, the Santa Margarita led her consorts as they in turn swung away from the city and began their long voyage towards Acapulco.

  With the wind free and white bow waves growing under their bluff bows and decorated, overhanging beakheads, the fleet of four vessels stood south-west down the vast bay, heading for the narrows and the open sea beyond. Standing on the half-deck, Iago gave a sigh of relief. ‘At last,’ he breathed to himself.

  Three

  A Foul Wind

  Iago’s relief was premature. It was immediately clear to him from his vantage point on the half-deck that much was indeed wrong with the Santa Margarita. Her decks remained cluttered with cargo most of which, he guessed, was unofficial trade goods belonging to the ship’s senior officers. He knew enough about the regular shipments made from Manila to Acapulco to
know there was a limit to the personally enriching private trade in which a ship’s officers could indulge. There was also a royal edict that limited the very lading of the ship herself, licensed by the governor and called the permiso; it was equally clear, from the gossip about the não, that this too had been exceeded. But what most troubled Iago was the dead feeling of the ship beneath his feet, a sensation only an experienced mariner would notice, a combination of lack of buoyancy, of lift to the seas, though these were small and appeared insignificant within the embrace of Manila Bay.

  The men most concerned about this were Juan Lorenzo, the pilot-major, and his mate, Antonio de Olivera, both of whom had expressed their anxiety to Iago. In the hours preceding their departure they had discussed the lateness of the season and the necessity for clearing the Embocadero, as they called the Strait of San Bernardino, before the end of August.

  ‘If we do not succeed,’ Lorenzo had confided, ‘the season of the great storms, los baguiosas, will be upon us and we shall have trouble making the Vuelta.’

  Iago had agreed. ‘I know. It was one such that destroyed the Rainha de Portugal,’ he said, and he followed Lorenzo’s example of crossing himself as the pilot-major uttered a heartfelt prayer that they might not encounter such a wind. The Chinese, Iago recalled, called such a phenomenon taifun, meaning ‘great wind’, and his experience aboard the Rainha de Portugal was not one he wished ever to repeat. Now Iago regarded the cluttered deck, full of bales and boxes, which although lashed down greatly impeded the men as they trimmed the yards and, on Olivera’s orders, let fall the huge lower sails. Watching their clumsiness, Iago doubted if one in three was an experienced seaman. It was all very well to build ships in the Philippines, he thought – and there was no doubt that the Santa Margarita was a well-built and well-found vessel – but little thought had been given to manning a mighty vessel on government service so far from Spain. A number of her crew were, like himself, distressed mariners, men left ashore at Cavite or Manila by the vicissitudes of the seafaring life. A few of these had been shipwrecked, others had overstayed their leave, deserters who had run for a month’s lotus eating in the villages that lay in the jungle beyond the Spanish Pale. Such adventurous spirits might be assimilated by the indigent population but all courted hostility, disturbing the relationships forged by the natives. They were often found with their throats slit, or crucified in grim emulation of the images the Filipinos found these haughty invaders worshipped with such ardour and extravagance. The lucky among them returned contritely to their duty and were taken aboard locally built ships, of which the Santa Margarita was the latest, largest and most magnificent example.

  In addition to these wild characters there were always those seamen left ashore through sickness who, having recovered their health, were shipped out from the hospitals run by the Church authorities. To these had to be added the mixed riff-raff of raw recruits swept up from the waterfront: the wasters, the aimless vagrants, the men of mixed blood, failed tradesmen, reluctant found-out fathers-to-be, reformed drunks and a few Filipinos who, for some dark undiscoverable reason, wished to sail east having heard Heaven knew what half-truths about the lands beyond the sunrise.

  And with this polyglot crew came their ‘concubines’, a euphemism to cover the numerous women recruited through love, lust or cynical promises of future riches for services that were, Iago guessed, best left to the imagination. For now they had been driven below, from where a babel of voices squabbling over space and possessions, complementary bones of contention that would keep arguments going for many weeks, rose to the windswept upper decks. The women, apart from the extra mouths they brought on board, could have their own divisive effect upon a crew picked up from such disparate sources as were those upon whose skill the voyage of the Santa Margarita would depend.

  Assessing them now, driven by Llerena and his mates with their rattans and rope’s ends, Iago did not think them up to much, though he knew that after a week at sea – if the weather was kind to them – a competent crew might be fashioned from such rough material. And in their favour they did at least have the long passage through the relatively sheltered waters of the vast archipelago that made up Rey Felipe the Third’s oriental colony. The thought made Iago look ahead, under the roach of the heavy forecourse that lifted and fell with the wind and the sluggish motion of the heavily laden ship.

  The Bataan Peninsula swept down from the north, closing Manila Bay from that direction with its dense afforestation. Off its distal point, like a military outwork, lay a hump-backed island he knew to be called Corregidor. The main entrance lay to the south of this island beyond which the southern jaw of the bay met it, rising to a series of jungle-clad peaks. He could see the features of the land with perfect clarity, for the air was dry and the sky clear, save for a bank of low cloud ahead of them, as the Santa Margarita and her three consorts forged their steady way to the south-west.

  When they had passed the entrance they would swing south and then south-east, almost doubling back and passing south of the main island of Luzon and north of the lesser Mindoro to the south. Then they would weave their way south and east, along Luzon’s long, indented coast until they finally doubled its southernmost point. Finally, turning north-east with Samar to starboard, they would pass the channel named for San Bernardino but called by the pilots the Embocadero, before reaching the wide waters of the Pacific Ocean. From there they would begin the Vuelta, the homeward, eastwards passage, reaching up to the higher latitudes and the steady westerly winds discovered by the Augustinian friar Urdaneta in the San Pedro thirty-five years earlier.

  ‘It is good, is it not, señor?’

  Iago was jerked from his reverie. Beside him stood the dark-robed figure of a friar. ‘I am Fray Mateo Marmolejo, señor, and you . . . ?’

  Iago fought off his natural revulsion to the inevitable probing endemic to every man who sought to conceal his innate wickedness under a woollen habit.

  ‘I am Iago Fernandez, Father.’

  ‘A sobrasaliente,’ Marmolejo said knowingly, ‘I understand.’

  ‘Fray Mateo is well informed.’

  The man shrugged and smiled. ‘It is my business to know all the secrets of the human heart; your station is an open matter. What does a gentleman-adventurer seek aboard the Santa Margarita, Don Iago?’

  Despite an inner resentment at being forced to explain his presence, Iago was wise enough to know that an early openness might save him later interrogation by the importunate Marmolejo or others of his ilk. ‘Expedience makes me seek a passage home to Spain, Fray Mateo,’ he said in as friendly a manner as he was able. ‘I was the sole survivor of the Rainha de Portugal of Lisbon.’

  ‘A Portuguese vessel?’

  ‘Yes . . . She was wrecked on her way to Macao.’

  ‘God have mercy,’ Marmolejo interjected, crossing himself, forcing Iago to follow suit. ‘How many?’

  ‘Upwards of one hundred and twelve souls, Father, though I cannot now recall the correct number.’

  ‘They are known to God,’ Marmolejo said, crossing himself again, ‘thanks be to Him for His infinite mercy.’ The crossing was repeated before the friar resumed his questioning. ‘Did you seek service with the Portuguese?’

  ‘I was serving the interests of Sevillian merchants, the House of Gomez, who had chartered the ship. There was much done after the union of the two kingdoms.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ Fray Mateo fell silent for a moment, clearly diverted from the thrust of his queries. Iago was minded to move away and end this catechism but could find no pretext. Both men watched a seaman in the waist below coiling down the fag end of a topgallant halliard and then Fray Mateo said conversationally, ‘We are blessed by a fair wind. God is good, my son.’

  ‘God is good, Father, but is it wise to attribute every favourable detail to his bounty? Whom do we seek as author of the petty misfortunes that will, inevitably, assail us upon this long and dangerous voyage?’

  ‘Why, to the Devil, of course . . .’ Fray M
ateo responded sharply, so that Iago regretted his remark, ‘and God’s will will be done, for He shall triumph.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Iago said in hurried amendment.

  ‘And what do you anticipate will inevitably assail us on our voyage?’ Marmolejo asked pointedly.

  Iago shrugged and smiled. ‘While every seaman must keep his true faith in God, he would not be a seaman if he did not always prepare for the worst, particularly in the way of the weather.’

  ‘Yet that is part of God’s creation and therefore of God’s ineffable purpose.’

  Iago bit off a retort that God must have taken mightily against seamen to so often bend his ineffable purpose to their hardship and destruction. Such a remark would expose him to a charge of blasphemy and was highly incriminating. Instead he remarked: ‘And a wise mariner secures his vessel as best he may.’

  ‘And is the Santa Margarita not so secured?’ Marmolejo asked with such innocence that Iago had to look at him to discover the friar meant no sarcasm.

  ‘Were I her master, I should not so clutter her decks,’ Iago answered, gesturing at the state of the waist, then, instantly regretting the confidence, adding, ‘I say that between ourselves, Fray Mateo, for I should not like to be thought disloyal . . .’

  ‘But you have your anxieties?’

  ‘In a professional sense, yes.’

  Marmolejo waved his own hand towards the cluttered deck with its cargo of boxes and bales, crisscrossed with lashings set tight with a toggle of wood inserted between adjacent strands and twisted to tension the lines. ‘This is what troubles you?’