Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Both geography and the quality and size of the Spanish community radically restricted the extension of Spanish power. As one official pointed out to the Madrid government, the Philippines consisted of at least forty large islands, without counting the many smaller ones. A modern count of the extent of the territory arrives at a figure of over seven thousand islands, many of them with active volcanoes. The climate was tolerable but by no means hospitable: it was described by one Spaniard as ‘cuatro meses de polvo, cuatro meses de lodo, y cuatro meses de todo’, or four months of dust, four of mud, and four of everything.9 The ‘todo’ included, of course, monsoons, typhoons and earthquakes.

  The ban on conquests, and the permanent shortage of manpower, eliminated all possibility of occupying or dominating territory beyond the confines of the town of Manila. A few small outposts were set up elsewhere on the islands, in order to trade. The Spaniards themselves were based mainly on the largest of the islands, Luzon, populated principally by the Tagalog people. They made almost no attempt to settle on the large southern island of Mindanao. Spaniards visited the large group of islands in the central area, the Visayas, but they happened to be mainly missionaries. No attempt was ever made, or could have been made, to take control of the entire archipelago. The inhabitants of Mindanao, usually Muslim in religion and therefore known to the Spaniards as ‘Moros’, remained unsubdued for three centuries. Occasional expeditions were sent against them, particularly in the 1630s when they were found to be allying with the Dutch from Indonesia. Successes were scored in terms of engagements won and men killed, but they were all futile because the Spaniards were never in a position to occupy territory beyond that which they controlled around Manila. Even on the island of Luzon they never managed to dominate the mountainous north-eastern provinces, inhabited by natives whom the Spaniards called Ygolotes. In the other islands, meanwhile, the Spanish position was – outside the valiant and isolated missionary communities – hopeless. The natives of the mountainous areas there, perhaps the original inhabitants of the archipelago, were given the collective name ‘negritos’ or ‘blacks’, which like the word ‘moro’ was a meaningless extension to Asia of the vocabulary of the Iberian peninsula.

  In the imagination of Spaniards, and even more surely in their maps, the Philippines featured as part of their ‘empire’. Those who lived in the islands knew better. A leading judge, administrator and soldier of Manila, Antonio de Morga, reported in the 1590s that Manila ‘is a town of small means, founded by persons most of whom have little income’, and that ‘there are very few men in these islands who know how to manage a musket’.10 For a variety of reasons that are easy to understand, Spaniards from the peninsula were not attracted there. White immigrants, many of them of mixed race rather than pure Spaniards, came principally from New Spain. ‘Every year’, reported a Spanish lady from Mexico City in 1574, speaking of the personnel who were sent out to the Philippines, ‘they send two or three hundred extra men, they cannot send more because there are not many in this land.’11

  Fortunately for the Filipinos the impact of the Spanish invasion was minimal.12 There was no demographic disaster, for the natives had long had regular contact with all the neighbouring cultures of Asia, and were relatively immune to new diseases. There was no economic shock in the shape of new crops (such as sugar in the Caribbean) or mining (such as silver in Mexico), which would have called for the use of intensive labour. The native population continued to develop the forms of economy it had always possessed. Rice continued to be the basic produce of Luzon, unfortunately for the Spaniards, who had to accept eating it rather than wheat, which would not grow in the moist tropical climate. They managed to bring maize with them from Mexico, but the natives did not take favourably to it.13 They also brought cattle with them, for they could not do without meat. There had been no cattle in the islands before the coming of the Spaniards, and Filipinos had tended to live rather off fish, with occasional resort to fowl and pigs. The geography of the islands, however, was not conducive to ranching of the type known in Mexico, and cattle-raising never became extensive. Nor did mules or sheep thrive in the climate. Eventually the Spaniards took to importing Asian variants of the animals they knew, and Chinese horses became common. But even horses never had the impact on transport that might have been expected, for the topography, the climate, and the intense rains that made roads impassable all combined to reduce their utility.

  Spain's success in establishing its activity in the Philippines led commentators to exaggerate the potential of Manila, regarded by one seventeenth-century Italian traveller as ‘so equally situated between the wealthy kingdoms of the east and of the west, that it may be accounted one of the greatest places of trade in the world’.14 Successive attempts to capture the port by the Chinese, Dutch, Americans and Japanese, are good evidence of the undoubted value of the outpost. But the Spaniards were never in a position to exploit their advantage adequately. ‘The Philippines ought to be considered of little importance’, Legazpi reported in 1569, ‘because at present the only article of profit that we can get from them is cinnamon.’15 The other much-prized spices, such as cloves, were to be found further away, in Maluku which was deemed to belong to the Portuguese. The Philippine Islands had a primitive economy, with little exploitable wealth. Moreover, the Spaniards were few in number, adventurers rather than settlers or traders.

  The poor prospects for trade in the Philippines made it imperative to continue with attempts to subdue nearby territories. The small Spanish numbers were obviously incapable of undertaking an effective ‘conquest’ of the islands, but succeeded through a judicious combination of force and alliances in dominating the public life of the area. By the 1570s the Spaniards considered that they were masters of the Philippines, and their optimistic spokesmen began to send to Spain serious suggestions that Philip II should consider a conquest of the rest of the Pacific. It was a glaring example of the inability of Europeans to understand the complexity of Asia. Though the Spaniards were relatively secure in Luzon, they had no control over Mindanao (into which they did not venture until about 1635) and other parts of the archipelago. Muslim traders and warships, active in the islands, attacked them constantly. Manila was a highly vulnerable and isolated outpost, wholly outnumbered by native populations, subsisting not only because of its own tenaciousness but even more because of the tolerance of the two major powers in Asia, the Chinese and the Japanese. Rather than being, as it pretended to be, the capital of a colonial territory, it was little more than a small trading outpost, similar to the Portuguese outposts of Goa and Macao. When necessary, the Spanish soldiers could make armed excursions into surrounding territory, but they never effectively controlled the Philippines.

  In 1569 Legazpi wrote to New Spain that because of the lack of local items to trade he hoped to ‘gain the commerce with China, whence come silks, porcelain, perfumes and other articles’. All the luxury goods in the Philippines came from outside. By good fortune a link with roving Chinese traders was established in 1572, and the next year the galleons to Acapulco were able to take their first rich cargo: 712 rolls of Chinese silk and 22,300 pieces of porcelain. The impact on consumers in New Spain was sensational. ‘They have brought from there’, observed a lady of Mexico City, ‘rich goods better than any to be found in Spain and more finished than anything of its kind in the rest of the world, such as satins, damasks, taffetas, brocades, gold- and silver-cloth, woollen shawls of a thousand kinds; chinaware finer than that of India, quite transparent and gilded in a thousand ways, so that even the most experienced persons here cannot make out how it is made; an abundance of jewels and chains of gold, wax, paper, cinnamon and quantities of rice.’16 The shipment guaranteed Manila's commercial survival, and established the basic pattern of the colony's economic life for the next two hundred years.17

  Relations with the Asian mainland were strengthened in 1574 when the Manila authorities collaborated with officials of the Ming dynasty in order to repulse an attack by Chinese pirates. Ther
eafter the small settlement in Manila, apparently an outpost of the powerful Spanish empire, became in reality an entrepôt for the Chinese government, which carefully refrained from interfering in its affairs so long as the commercial advantages remained clear. ‘The Chinese’, reported a Spanish official, ‘supply us with many articles, such as sugar, wheat and flour, nuts, raisins, pears and oranges, silks, porcelain and iron, and other things that we lacked before their arrival.’18 The commerce grew and so did the population of Manila, as Spaniards from Mexico drifted there in search of opportunity. The steady traffic created by the arrival of junks (a term applied in our day to small coastal vessels but used at the time for large masted ships of between a hundred and six hundred tonnes) 19 from mainland China, guaranteed prosperity to the small colony. The few hundred Chinese sailors who came in the three junks that initiated the trade in 1572, swelled to a registered six thousand five hundred and thirty-three visitors who were estimated to have come from Southern China in the year 1605.20

  The galleon trade also gave an enormous boost to the immigration of Chinese21 from the nearby mainland, mainly the province of Fukien. The Ming dynasty followed Confucian principles of public conduct, and disapproved of trade with foreign nations, Asian or otherwise. Despite disapproval by their regime, the merchants of south Fukien took an active part in overseas commerce; they began settling in Manila from the 1570s and in the Japanese port of Nagasaki from 1600. When the Spaniards first arrived in Manila there were about a hundred and fifty Chinese in residence. By 1586 the Chinese population of Manila, known to the Spaniards as ‘Sangleys’, numbered ten thousand, easily dwarfing the Spanish and mestizo population of around eight hundred. They were the first large colony of Chinese ever to be established outside mainland China.22

  The Spanish authorities were logically alarmed by the flood of immigrants, and in 1582 created a special quarter of the city, known as the Parian (from the local Chinese word for ‘marketplace’), to which the Chinese were in theory restricted. It was impossible, however, to avoid the reality that the immigrants from the mainland monopolized retail trades and dominated the crafts and agriculture. ‘The truth is’, Antonio de Marga admitted in the 1590s, ‘that without these Sangleys it would be impossible to maintain the town, for they operate all the trades.’23 The fact is seldom reflected in the references made by Spanish historians to their Asian empire. At the same period a Jesuit reported that ‘from China come those who supply every sort of service, all dexterous, prompt and cheap, from physicians and barbers to carriers and porters. They are the tailors and the shoemakers, metalworkers, silversmiths, sculptors, locksmiths, painters, masons, weavers and every kind of service.’24 The growth of Manila was at every stage made possible only by the Chinese merchants, artisans, farmers and general labourers who contributed by their work, investment and imports to the development of one of the most thriving ‘European’ cities of Asia.25 It was in practice the only city in the Philippines. Many other small settlements grew up, thanks largely to the efforts of Spanish missionaries, until they reached a total of around one thousand by the end of the colonial period, but they were not significant as urban centres.

  Though the Spanish presence in the Philippines was a small one, it was maintained thanks to a certain common interest among the races. All the residents united resolutely to defend themselves against attack from outside. In 1597 when Muslim pirates from the islands of Mindanao and Jolo attacked Luzon, the population drove them off successfully. In October 1603 the Spanish mounted an expedition within Luzon against the Sangleys; a common anti-Chinese sentiment united the two hundred Spaniards, three hundred Japanese and fifteen hundred Tagalogs who took part.26 But tensions between the Manila communities also erupted occasionally into bloody violence. There were massacres of the Chinese by Spaniards, chiefly in 1603, 1639 and 1662, with the active help of the Filipinos, who were always willing to get rid of the Chinese. The brutal treatment of the fundamentally peaceful Chinese population was always counter-productive. After an estimated twenty-three thousand of them had perished in the massacres of 1603, Morga reported that ‘the city found itself in distress, for since there were no Sangleys there was nothing to eat and no shoes to wear’. The majority of remaining Sangleys emigrated to the mainland, leaving a community of about five hundred. By 1621, however, their population had again risen, to twenty thousand.27

  The Spanish population, by contrast, failed to grow. As late as 1637 Manila counted only a hundred and fifty Spanish households within its walls, an incredibly small number after some eighty years of colonization. The lack of European women forced the settlers to marry Asians, and a population of mixed blood rapidly came into existence. As in the New World, Spaniards employed the indigent peoples in tasks for which they were not suited or prepared, with negative consequences for the native economy. The bishop of Manila, Salazar, complained in 1583 of ‘the excessive work to which they subject the natives, leaving them no rest nor time to sow their lands, so they sow and harvest less’. In particular, natives were used as manpower for the constant expeditions that were made around the islands, with the result that ‘a great number of them have died’.28 ‘They treat the natives worse than dogs or slaves’, was the indignant conclusion of a report drawn up in 1598 on the clergy of Luzon.

  The demand for labour led to an important new element in the demography of the Philippines. To make up for the general shortfall in manpower, and also to recruit household help, all Spaniards during the sixteenth century imported African slaves, who were traded to East Asia by the Arabs and the Chinese. ‘The country is flooded with black slaves’, according to an observer at the end of the century.29 As in the New World, blacks did not long remain slaves, and soon made themselves into a vital component of the labour force. In 1638 the number of free blacks serving in Manila as soldiers, labourers and sailors was estimated at around five hundred.30 In the end, the city became a thriving commercial centre in which the Spaniards formed only a small part of the population. ‘The diversity of the peoples who are seen in Manila and its environs’, reported a friar in 1662, ‘is the greatest in the world, for these include men from all kingdoms and nations – Spain, France, England, Italy, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Muscovy; people from all the Indies, both east and west; and Turks, Greeks, Persians, Tatars, Chinese, Japanese, Africans and other Asians.’31

  The sailing-ships on the Pacific were, like the early vessels on the Atlantic, entirely at the mercy of the winds. They had to contend not only with two quite different wind systems in the north and south Pacific, but also with the seasonal monsoons and regular typhoons in the Asian islands. Early vessels, like those sent out by Cortés to Maluku in 1527, had no difficulty sailing westwards to their objective, but failed completely to find a way back. Survivors had no option but to return to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope. Villalobos and his ships likewise failed to return. The first vessel to make the eastward journey across the Pacific was one that deserted from Legazpi's expedition in 1565. The first to make a carefully recorded return voyage was another ship from the same fleet, under the command of Legazpi's grandson Felipe de Salcedo but piloted by the veteran Urdaneta. It was sent back to Mexico with a small shipment of cinnamon and reached Acapulco in Mexico in September 1565, after a four-month crossing that took advantage of the favourable winds at a latitude of around 40° north. The achievement was historic: for the next two centuries galleons commuted every year between Manila and Acapulco, sticking closely to the well-tried route and suffering mishap only in the event of bad weather or war. The itinerary remained thereafter the basic one followed by all Spanish vessels coming from Asia.32

  The establishment of an ocean route did not lead, as it had done in the Atlantic, to imperial expansion. It is true that there were serious doubts, aired in the council of the Indies in 1566, about whether the line of demarcation in the Pacific allowed Spain to operate in the Philippines and the Spice Islands, but in practice these scruples were ignored. Sailors spread stories of fa
bulous wealth on legendary islands, especially two, known as ‘Rica de Oro’ (Gold Rich) and ‘Rica de Plata’ (Silver Rich), which tantalized the appetite of adventurers throughout the sixteenth century.33 But there were few vessels, whether Asian or European, on the Pacific, and those engaged in long-range trade always gave priority to a safe arrival rather than hazardous exploration. The Spaniards occasionally touched at islands, such as Papua (1528) and Tahiti (1567), that might give them reliable shelter on their long voyage, but never found an adequate stopping-place.

  The lack of a halfway port on the Pacific crossing always remained a major obstacle that never ceased to prove fatal. Ships’ captains were urged by Spain to keep a lookout for the legendary islands. In 1611 the merchant Sebastián Vizcaino, whom we shall encounter later, crossed to Japan from Acapulco and then on his way eastward made a fruitless search for them, which took several months, declaring decisively on his return to New Spain that ‘there are no such islands’. In practice, the Spaniards lacked the means to explore the Pacific, and therefore missed, among other places, the islands of Hawaii, which lay at a latitude (20° north) midway between the routes and currents normally used by their vessels. Hundreds of galleons crossed both ways across the Pacific during more than two centuries, yet never once chanced on the advanced native civilization of Hawaii.34

  Attempting to establish alternative routes was a thankless task. Alvaro de Mendaña with two ships (and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa as his second-in-command) made a voyage from Peru in 1567 towards Maluku,35 and came upon an archipelago which he named the Solomon Islands (among the isles that received names were Guadalcanal and San Cristobal). The Spaniards had a brief but bloody encounter with the natives, and returned to Callao via California. Mendaña returned to the area with 4 vessels and some 380 intending colonizers in 1595. Their first landfall was at islands that he named Las Marquesas de Mendoza, after the wife of the then viceroy of Peru. By the time the newcomers left two weeks later, two hundred islanders had been killed. The fleet went on to the Solomons, but after two months struggling against the lack of their accustomed food, the unfamiliar climate, and a spate of deaths including that of Mendaña himself, the colonists withdrew. Sailing past New Guinea, they arrived starving in Manila early in 1596.