by Henry Kamen
In the absence of any other centre of settlement in the whole Pacific, the Manila galleons were the only lifeline between New Spain and the Philippines. With the whole economy of Spanish Manila depending on them, they braved the winds and made the voyage once every year from Acapulco to Manila, and back again to Acapulco. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, as many as three or four ships might sail together. In 1593 the Spanish government, responding to years of protests from traders both in America and in the peninsula, restricted the sailings to two ships a year, with a limit on the amount of goods they could carry. Later, in 1720, a decree established that two ships should be the rule, though it remained normal for only one ship to do the crossing.
The sailings were unique in world history. The first galleon crossed the Pacific in 1565, the last sailed in 1815: for two and a half centuries the ships maintained, almost without a break, their perilous and lonely voyage across the vast ocean. Vessels sailed from Cavite in Manila Bay in June or July, helped by the monsoon winds out of the southwest. They drifted for five or more months across the Pacific. When they arrived in Acapulco a fair was held at which the goods were traded. At Acapulco they loaded up with silver and passengers, then returned in March to catch the northeast trade winds back across the Pacific.
The trip from Manila was the ‘longest continuous navigation in the world’,36 lasting an average of six months, though there were ships that did not make it in less than nine. The voyage was always accompanied by high mortality, without counting the extreme risk from storms. A witness in Mexico reported how one vessel, the Mora, ‘left China on the first of July 1588 and arrived in Acapulco on the third of February, after forty-three people had died on the voyage’.37 There were many terrible cases, like the Santa Margarita in 1600 which was beaten about by storms and in eight months was only able to reach the Marianas, by which time a mere fifty of the two hundred and sixty on board had survived; of the survivors all were killed by natives save one who escaped to tell the tale. In 1603 the San Antonio, which carried the richest cargo known till that date, as well as many of the Spanish élite fleeing from the Chinese uprising in Manila, was simply swallowed up by the sea somewhere out in the Pacific.38 In 1657 one ship reached Acapulco after more than twelve months at sea: all on board were dead. Laden with fabulous treasure and the coveted prey of all, the vessels succumbed to the enemy only four times and always to the English: in 1587, 1709, 1743 and 1762.39 Many more, unfortunately, to a total of well over thirty, fell foul of storms or simply disappeared at sea. The return from Acapulco was shorter, an average of four months.
The conditions of life on so long a crossing are fully documented by an Italian apothecary, Francesco Gemelli, who made the voyage in 1697:
There is hunger, thirst, sickness, cold, continual watching, and other sufferings, besides the terrible shocks from side to side caused by the furious beating of the waves. The ship swarms with little vermin bred in the biscuit, so swift that in a short time they not only run over cabins, beds and the very dishes the men eat upon, but fasten upon the body. Abundance of flies fall into the dishes of broth, in which there also swim worms of several sorts. In every mouthful of food there went down an abundance of maggots. On fish days the common diet was rank old fish boiled in water and salt; at noon we had kidney beans, in which there were so many maggots that they swam at the top of the broth.40
The galleon trade played a key role in the evolution of links between Europe and Asia.41 But it was not an isolated commerce. In reality it acted as spinal cord to a large body of commerce that was closely connected to it, and that extended throughout the Pacific, America and as far as the Mediterranean. Manila functioned in the first place as a centre for East Asian trade. Silver coins from Mexico became a fundamental commodity offered by the Spaniards; the Chinese brought their goods to Manila in order to benefit from the silver, which they exported to China. American silver in this way stimulated the Asian economy. In the peak year 1597 the amount of silver sent from Acapulco to Manila totalled twelve million pesos, a figure that exceeded the total annual value of Spain's trade across the Atlantic.42 In the wake of silver, trade with America brought new foods and crops to China, most notably maize, which in later generations helped the country to stave off threats of famine. In the twentieth century, China became the world's second largest producer of maize, after the United States.43
The Philippines were also a traditional part of the Japanese trading system. It was reported from Manila in 1575 that ‘every year Japanese ships come loaded with trading goods’, and that they also brought ‘ever-increasing amounts of silver from the productive Japanese silver mines.44 It has been calculated that between 1615 and 1625 an estimated 130–160,000 kilos of silver were exported from Japan, an amount that represented about 40 per cent of the total world output apart from that of Japan.45 The trade with Japan, however, did not last long. The Spaniard had their own silver from Mexico and though they may have desired it they did not in principle need Japanese silver. Moreover, the traders of Manila recognized the prior interests of the Portuguese at Macao, and did not compete with them. In any case, the problem of religion – as we shall see – soon cut short the links between Spaniards and Japan.
In time, therefore, the little outpost of Manila, whose future had seemed bleak to Legazpi when he first settled it, became the lifeline for the trade of East Asia with Europe. ‘From China’, commented a Spanish Jesuit in 1694, ‘they began to bring their rich silks when they saw our silver, and also provided the islands with cattle and even with ink and paper. From India and Melaka there come to Manila black and white slaves, both men and women, hardworking and industrious, and from Japan a great amount of wheat, flour, silver, weapons and other things.’46 The Portuguese in Macao played a key part in the trade. Chinese silks, inevitably, represented a threat to European producers. A director of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), Van der Hagen, wrote in 1619 that since most of the silk went directly to Europe from America it would be fatal to the silk industry of Holland. The Dutch in Indonesia therefore waged an active campaign against the junks, and in 1622 alone they destroyed eighty off the China coast.47
The positive results of a successful external trade, however, were a contrast to the internal impact on the Philippines. Morga reported in 1596 that the settlers had neglected both defence and agriculture: ‘this trade is so great and profitable that the Spaniards do not apply themselves to or engage in any other industry’. The colonists invested in the galleons but not in their own lands; around 1600, no more than five or six Spaniards in all Manila were active farmers.48 In contrast to the extensive development of great estates by both Spaniards and Portuguese in the New World, in Asia the Spaniards ignored agriculture. ‘The Manileños have no lands’, an eighteenth-century French visitor reported, ‘and so no assured income.’ The main reason may have been the absence of an easily exploitable fund of slaves, but on the other hand the Spaniards could have made use of paid native labour. Whatever the explanation, the undeniable consequence was that the Spanish population depended heavily on food imports for survival. Only a small number of the junks trading to the islands brought goods for the export market, the majority carried food. Of ten Chinese junks captured by the Dutch in the area in 1617 seven were ‘fruit junks’ with food for the Spaniards, only three carried silks.49
Manila developed into a showcase of the best and the worst that Western colonialism could offer to other peoples. It was at its best as an international mart, at which the most incredible riches changed hands between traders from all parts of the globe. First in importance came the silk cloths, of every type and quality, as well as the superb variety of silk apparel and stockings, all of it from China. Then came the cottons, some from Mughal India but also from China, as well as gold and jewellery, ivory and jade and porcelain, and perfumes such as musk and camphor. The varied and precious spices came from Maluku, but also from Java and Ceylon; only cinnamon came from the Philippine Islands themselves. It rained rich
es, but solely for the brief season – at most three months in the year – when the fair was held and the goods prepared for loading on the galleons. After that Manila relapsed into indolence for nine months.
The Spaniards did not work, for they did not need to. As a consequence, not a single aspect of the resources of the islands was ever developed by them. At the beginning their enthusiasm was fired by evidence of gold, and Legazpi reported the natives wearing gold ornaments. An expedition to northern Luzon in 1572 commanded by Salcedo did succeed in returning with fifty pounds of mined gold.50 But the hostile natives killed Salcedo during a second expedition, and the Spaniards thereafter decided that it was impossible to develop mining, both because of the impenetrable country and because of the lack of a labour force. In later years efforts were made to mine gold, which was exported in limited quantities to New Spain. But there were great difficulties in establishing mines and finding the necessary labour, and the profits from the galleon were much greater. It was an astonishing case of the complete dereliction of a patrimony by its owners. The privileged few lived in a paradise that they never exploited. When the British captured the city in 1762 (Chapter 10) they were profoundly disappointed by the contrast between its reputation and its poverty. The eighteenth-century French navigator La Pérouse commented that ‘the Philippines resemble the estates of those great lords whose lands remain uncultivated though they would make the fortune of a great number of families’.51
At the end of the eighteenth century the wealthy citizens who controlled the city of Manila made their own unequivocal assessment of the situation.
The Spanish conquerors of these islands did not leave Spain to take up the plough in the Philippines, much less did they undertake so long and unknown a navigation to set up looms and transplant new fruits. That which led those great men to abandon house and country and to face so many dangers was their interest in gold and spices. The natural inclination of men to seek their fortune by the shortest road led them to migrate with the sole aim of freighting the Manila galleon. None but Spaniards of adventurous temper have ever come to the Philippines, and they have not been suited for the development of industry. Since the founding of this community there has not been, nor is there now, any other means of conserving the islands, than the Acapulco ship.52
Spaniards appeared in East Asia at a crucial period of its evolution, when the hitherto dominant Ming dynasty of the Chinese empire was in decline and tributary states such as Japan began to assert their autonomy. China was for its rulers the centre of the universe, the ‘Middle Kingdom’, a superior and self-sufficient civilization that claimed to despise other civilizations. Foreign trade was deemed unnecessary, but because it none the less happened all imports from overseas were classified as ‘tribute’ and all exports were considered ‘gifts’. In effect, foreign trade was banned until the year 1567, when the dynasty permitted two main trading areas: to the west (Southeast Asia) and to the east (Japan and Manila).53 When the foreign Manchu emperors of the Ching dynasty began their conquest of China in the mid-seventeenth century, the warlords in the south (among them the redoubtable admiral Cheng Cheng-kung, known to foreigners as ‘Coxinga’) remained faithful to the Ming and continued the policy of trading. When Ming resistance finally ended in 1683, the Ching rulers adopted a more open trade policy, and lifted all bans in 1684.
In Japan the traditional system of government, in which supreme power was exercised by a ‘Shogun’ in the name of the emperor, was unable to resist internal dissension. Many of the great daimyos and their noble vassals (the samurai) enjoyed great autonomy, engaged freely in trade and welcomed the appearance of Portuguese merchants and missionaries. After 1570 power in the Japanese Islands was taken over by two famous leaders, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98) and, after his death, by Tokugawa Ieyasu. They presided over the gradual unification of the islands and the consolidation of military power under a new Shogunate in 1603, based in the city of Edo. Hideyoshi's dream was to overthrow the Chinese empire and establish Japan's supremacy in the region. To this end he sent an immense army into Korea (1591-1592), at the same time as he sent out threatening missives to Taiwan and the areas of the Pacific, including the Philippines, which had previously been (under their Japanese name Ruson) an important trading area.
The receipt in Manila in 1593 of Hideyoshi's letter profoundly disturbed the small Spanish community, which relied exclusively on Japan for some of its necessities and was in no position to resist an invasion. In 1594 governor Luis Pérez Dasmariñas in response sent a special mission to the imperial Japanese court, bearing gifts of European clothing together with a conciliatory message. A Franciscan friar who accompanied the mission saw with his own eyes the unbelievable might of the Japanese nation. He expressed his astonishment at the power of the emperor to conjure up for his service tens of thousands of warriors, ‘in amazing numbers’. On one occasion he saw over fifty thousand soldiers being employed to construct a new city, and reported that the quantity of men sent to the war in Korea were ‘infinite in number’.54 Manila, he concluded, must be on its guard.
Hideyoshi favoured the extension of trade, and encouraged the growth of silver mining, which helped to finance it. But he wished to control the terms on which commerce was conducted. When he paid a visit to Kyushu in 1587 he discovered that the local lord of Nagasaki had ceded the port to the Portuguese Jesuits seven years before.55 He thereupon made what was, for Europeans, a momentous decision: to expel the Portuguese Jesuits from Japan, while still continuing good relations with the Portuguese merchants. In practice, he suspended the operation of the decree, and the Jesuits continued their work discreetly. Hideyoshi's decisions were in fact unpredictable. The most serious conflict arose over the fate of the Mexico-bound Manila galleon San Felipe, which was wrecked on the coast of Tosa (island of Shikoku) in 1596.
First the local population and then Hideyoshi's agents seized the cargo of the wealthy galleon, despite the protests of the Spaniards. ‘The loss of this ship was a very great one’, Morga wrote from Manila to Philip II, ‘she was worth a million and a half pesos.’ But worse was to come. The pilot of the ship boasted to the Shogun's agents of the power of the Spanish empire, and the part to be played in it by the Franciscan friars who were on board. The affair precipitated the first serious persecution of Christians, whom the Shogun considered a threat not only to traditional religion but also to his own control over the administration. He ordered the execution of twenty-six Christians; the number consisted of seventeen Japanese laymen, three Japanese lay brothers, and six foreign Franciscans. They were crucified at Nagasaki on a cold winter's morning in February 1597, after being subjected to public humiliation. In reply to a protest from the governor of the Philippines, Francisco Tello, the Shogun argued that ‘if Japanese went to your kingdoms and preached the law of Shinto, disturbing the public peace, would you be pleased? Certainly not, and therefore by this you can judge what I have done.’56 ‘I will’, he decided, ‘that there be no more preaching of this law.’57
The situation changed in 1600, when the supporters of Hideyoshi's son and heir were routed in battle by Ieyasu (1542–1616), who established his Tokugawa dynasty as shoguns of Japan for the next two and a half centuries. Despite the continuing fragility of the Christian presence in Japan, Ieyasu favoured trade with the Spaniards, and by 1609 the commerce between Nagasaki and Manila had reached proportions that preoccupied the Portuguese, formerly the chief purveyors of goods from Japan. Between 1600 and 1635 more than 350 Japanese ships went to Asian ports with an official permit to trade. Many of the Japanese merchants were in fact Christians who used the trade as a way of keeping in touch with the outside world. Since they did not usually wish for Mexican silver from the Philippines, they took back Chinese silk, Spanish wine and glass, and other items.
Trade with Japan was essential to the life of the Spaniards in the Philippines. There was no metal or weapons industry in the islands and from the 1590s the Spaniards depended on Japan for iron, copper, nails, bulle
ts, gunpowder, and hemp for rope. There was a great fear that the persecutions of 1597 would mean the end of imports, but the Japanese were keen to trade and from 1602 there was a fairly tranquil interchange of goods. Japan, indeed, saw the continuation of the trade as evidence of Manila's good intentions, so that from 1602 the Spaniards took care to send an official ship every year. The captains of the vessels, some of them Portuguese, were veterans of the Asian shipping routes. The instructions issued to the captain of the vessel in July 1606 show clearly the purpose of the voyage. ‘The ship you are taking carries merchandise from the citizens of this town, but the only purpose and intention is to maintain good relations with that kingdom of Japan.’ The instructions in 1607 were equally specific: ‘the only purpose of this ship is that it goes and returns as a way of maintaining the peace with that kingdom’.58 There was no doubt, however, that the ship was also a lifeline for supplies. The treasurer of Manila in 1607 reported that the Japan ship ‘when it comes back brings silver, saltpetre, hemp for rope, flour, nails, iron and copper, all of them essential goods which we cannot do without’.59 A priest in the Philippines commented with evident satisfaction that ‘when the trade with Japan flourished, Manila was the pearl of the Orient’.60
The relations with Japan came to an end in the second decade of the seventeenth century, when Ieyasu became convinced that the Christians represented a threat to the state. The Spaniards made a last effort to improve their position with the Japanese. In 1611 Sebastian Vizcaino was sent by the viceroy of New Spain on a special mission that included the task of discovering the islands Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata, but was directed principally to establishing contacts with the Japanese regime.61 His ship, which also carried a group of twenty-three Japanese Christians returning to their country after a visit to Europe, left Acapulco at the same time as the Manila galleon did, in March 1611. On his arrival in Japan in July he sent the appropriate messages to officials and was given permission to proceed to the capital, Edo. At the end of the month he and the Japanese were conceded an audience with Ieyasu, who, however, did not show any interest in the Spaniards.62 Although he spent over two years in Japan, travelling round the country, meeting Christians and taking soundings of the harbours for possible future use, he achieved nothing of consequence. His mission a failure, Vizcaino returned with his vessel to New Spain, where he arrived in January 1614. It was a year of great consequence for Spanish interests in Japan, where in February a decree ‘on the expulsion of the Bateren’, i.e. the Jesuits, was issued by the Shogun. Till that decade, the Japanese government had limited its pressure on Christians largely to the foreign clergy and the local samurai who had befriended them and adopted their religion.63 Now it took a much firmer attitude, directed at all Christians. In October 1614 the decree of expulsion was put into effect in reality, unlike Hideyoshi's edict of 1587. In November a large number of European and Japanese clergy left the islands for Macao and Manila.