Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The heroism of the galleon route served to maintain Spain's foothold in the Pacific. At every stage, however, the handful of Spaniards depended on the indispensable collaboration of other peoples, foremost among them the Chinese, the real masters of the South Pacific and of Manila. Chinese had been trading to the islands long before the Spanish came. Spaniards relied on them for the building of vessels; the ships were constructed in the yards at Cavite (Luzon), out of trees felled by indigenous labour. Chinese and Malay workmen under the supervision of Spanish experts also constructed most of the ocean-going galleons in the islands.64 In the early seventeenth century a Philippine official suggested, however, that it might be better to buy vessels for local use from the Japanese. ‘The cost of constructing galleys and ships in the Philippines is intolerable, the little wood that there is costs blood, for the natives suffer great harm having to drag the timber by hand.’ Besides, he pointed out, ‘the iron has to come from Japan’.65

  The most important aspect of all, the nature of the trade from the Philippines, was determined principally by the Chinese. With good reason the merchants of New Spain called the Manila galleon the ‘nao de China’ or China ship. The Portuguese also had some part in the cargoes of the China ship, for from 1608 the traders of Manila were allowed to send one ship a year to Macao to buy supplies. The official restriction was of course never observed. Macao carried on a constant and profitable trade with Manila. The Portuguese ships arrived in the Philippines every June, bringing spices, black slaves, cotton and other items from India, and luxuries from Persia; they returned in January with Mexican silver.66 Since the trade officially did not exist, it never paid taxes, though the value of imports from Macao was put at an annual million and a half pesos.

  Spaniards liked to think of Manila as an outpost of the universal Spanish empire. In reality, it existed only because of the tolerance of the Chinese and Japanese. In the 1580s there were just a few hundred Spaniards in the city; by contrast, there were over ten thousand Chinese in the 1580s and possibly thirty thousand in the 1630s.67 Morga estimated the number of Japanese around the year 1600 at one thousand five hundred. The indigenous population, obviously, outnumbered both. The restriction of Chinese to the Parian did not avoid occasional bloody clashes. The problem of numbers continually weakened the Spanish position. A formal and comprehensive report sent by officials to the Madrid government in May 1586 pleaded for more settlers to be sent out, with the promise of freedom from taxes.68 In practice the islands attracted few immigrants from Spain itself. At the end of the eighteenth century some nine-tenths of the resident Hispanics had come from New Spain, a high proportion of them vagrants and criminals whom the authorities had transported. The Spanish governor in 1768 calculated that there had been fourteen sanguinary Chinese insurrections since the founding of the colony, perhaps the most serious of them in 1603, when the Chinese killed nearly half the Spanish population. The Chinese dominated both the internal and the external commerce of Manila. The bishop of Manila went so far as to claim in 1598 that ‘there comes each year from New Spain a million in money, all of which passes on to the heathen of China’.69

  Though the Spanish in the Philippines were few in number and their impact limited, they like their predecessors the Portuguese were able to capitalize on a small advantage: possession of firearms and especially of ship's cannon. Firearms were of course already known in the east (the Arabs and Chinese had used them), but never formed part of the Asian technology of war. When the Portuguese captured Melaka in 1511 they were surprised to discover a large stock of cannon that the defenders had apparently used only for ceremonial purposes. Subsequently, when they realized the possible advantages, Asian princelings employed Portuguese to make cannon for them. The Japanese quickly learnt from the Portuguese and began to use firearms as well as cannon. One of the most important moments in Asian history was in 1526 when Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, used guns and heavy artillery to help him overthrow the sultanate of Delhi at the battle of Panipat.

  However, in terms of the alleged military impact of Europe on Asia the employment of firearms was only of marginal value. Europeans never came to dominate the indigenous civilizations of East Asia in the first three hundred years of contact, and the part played by firearms in this picture was (as in the New World) little more than anecdotal. Deadly use of arquebuses and cannon against a relatively defenceless civilian population showed that Spaniards could kill indiscriminately but achieved little else. In the Philippines the natives simply vanished into the bush, which allowed the invaders some breathing space and helped to facilitate settlement. But there were never enough firearms or Spaniards to bring about any real ‘conquest’ of anything, and Western weapons never played a significant role.70 Nor in the islands was it practical to launch cavalry charges, as Pizarro had done in Peru, with the few horses imported from New Spain (the first horse came to the Philippines only in 1575).

  Europeans in Asia had to contend with the fact that native civilizations always fought back, and always successfully.71 Contact with firearms did not significantly affect the nature of their land warfare against Europeans. In cases when they took over the use of firearms, the armaments simply reinforced traditional weapons in established war strategies,72 and impressive items such as cannon were often kept purely as symbols of power rather than as a means to acquire power. Possibly the only context in which Europeans achieved an important advantage against Asians was when they brought cannon into play from on board a ship.73 This gave them unquestioned mastery at sea, and quickly condemned unarmed vessels such as the Chinese junk to a defensive role.

  The Spaniards in the Philippines, however, were always in a vulnerable position. When they needed firearms they had to import them from Japan. Any technological advantage they may have enjoyed over Asians became purely theoretical. They successfully adapted the Mediterranean galley for use in Asian waters, and were quickly imitated by the Chinese. But the galley had its limits in terms of the waters it could navigate. For rapid manoeuvres the Filipinos who attacked Spanish settlements preferred the caracoa, which used eighty to one hundred rowers and was ideal for the coastal waters of the islands.

  ‘Conquest’ in any real sense was never achieved through advanced armaments, and became possible only when Europeans were able to recruit indigenous manpower. Auxiliaries from south India, for example, achieved the Portuguese conquest of Melaka; the Portuguese could not have done it alone, with or without firepower.74 Elsewhere Europeans survived simply because it suited the local authorities to tolerate them. Their numbers were in any case almost negligible. It has been estimated that in any one year between 1600 and 1740 there were not more than fifty thousand Europeans to be found in the whole of Asia,75 a figure that pales before the scores of millions who peopled the continent and continued their lives quite oblivious of the existence of strangers on their shores. In mainland Asia in 1576, according to an Italian Jesuit who worked along those coasts, there were possibly around three hundred Spaniards, mostly traders within the Portuguese areas of influence. The colony at Manila was a good example of the fragile European presence. One of the higher estimates for the number of Spaniards in the islands was given by Giovanni Botero, who reported in the 1590s that ‘the number of Spaniards there amounts today to one thousand six hundred, of whom less than nine hundred are soldiers’.76 The totals were certainly optimistic. A census of the year 1584 reported that there were only 329 ‘Spaniards’ in Manila available for military service, and no more than 713 in all the Philippines, the term ‘Spaniard’ being one that also included those of mixed race. Four years later the bishop of Manila stated that there were only eighty Spanish householders in the city.77 It was a small base on which to construct the domination of the most populated continent on earth.

  After two generations of successful settlement in America, however, it was difficult for Spaniards to rid themselves of the ‘conquest’ mentality when they ventured into the Pacific. The colonization of a tiny corner
of the Philippines did not by any means end their ambitions in East Asia. Explorers continued at intervals to penetrate in other directions. We have touched on the expeditions of Mendaña to the Solomon Islands. Shortly after, in 1605, the Portuguese captain Pedro Fernandes de Quirós landed in the New Hebrides, which he claimed for Spain under the name of ‘Austrialia del Espíritu Santo’ ‘Australia [i.e. the “southern lands”] of the Holy Spirit’. The southern islands, however, had no visible wealth to exploit and were inhabited by primitive tribes. Quirós went back to Spain and spent years trying to convince the court to grant him funds to explore the great undiscovered continent to the south of the Pacific, but it was all in vain. Spanish pretensions were set on the more attractive cultures of mainland East Asia, which offered opportunities for trade, possibilities of evangelization and hopes of imperial expansion. A Spanish Australia, which almost lay within the grasp of the Portuguese navigators, never came to form part of the empire.

  The most desirable area of expansion was the Spice Islands, theoretically under control of the Portuguese, to whom the Spaniards gave support for most of the sixteenth century. This situation changed when in 1605 the Dutch arrived and expelled the Portuguese from Ternate and Tidore. The Portuguese withdrew to Manila, from where governor Pedro Bravo de Acuña in the following year launched an expedition to drive out the Dutch. Using troops from Manila and a thousand Filipino auxiliaries, he expelled the intruders and set up a Spanish fort – the first of its kind in Maluku – on Ternate. In 1612 the administration of the garrisons was officially put under that of Manila. The Spaniards developed a small town on the island, populated by Moluccans, Chinese, Filipinos, Portuguese and Spaniards, and also maintained bases in Tidore, Gilolo and Pilolo. The coming of the Spaniards was seen, through the vision of the Aragonese historian Argensola far away in his library in Saragossa, Spain, as a triumphant conquest of the archipelago of Maluku.78 The reality was that, like other European settlements in Asia, the bases were tolerated by local rulers because they posed no serious threat. The Spanish garrison on Ternate did not exceed two hundred men, and on Tidore one hundred and fifty.79 The sultan of Ternate, meanwhile, had an army of four thousand men armed with muskets and swords and could afford to ignore the quarrels of Europeans, who benefited his realm by their trade.

  The Dutch continued to have a base on Ternate as well as in the other islands. They were now the most formidable European power in Asia, with bases already in Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Malaysia and India. Their large and well-armed ships easily outmatched anything the Portuguese and Spanish could put up against them. The Spaniards hung on grimly in Maluku, resisting Dutch attacks and the dissolution in 1640 of the union with Portugal. Meanwhile they managed to get hold of a good part of the trade in cloves: in 1640 it was estimated that they exported nearly as much as the Dutch did.80 In practice the whole adventure was a costly mistake. In 1640 the financial cost of supporting the Spanish presence in Maluku was almost equivalent to the value of the annual situado received from New Spain.81

  It was above all the missionaries, their enthusiasm always running ahead of realities, who felt that their presence in the Pacific was an omen of great events. Early successes at conversion in Japan, and the continuous threat from Muslim princes and pirates in the South China Sea, emboldened them to take more positive steps. It seemed a particularly good idea to capitalize on the traditional hostility between Japan and China, and use Japanese help against the latter. They pressed on Philip II the need to conquer all Asia; one or two of them went, all alone, to the mainland of Southeast Asia, confident of success. When the king got wind of such proposals, he always played them down. ‘Touching the conquest of China which you feel should be undertaken at once,’ he wrote to the zealous governor of the Philippines in April 1577, ‘the opinion here is that the matter should be dropped, and instead you should cultivate good relations with the Chinese and not give aid to the pirates who are their enemies, nor give them any just cause for annoyance with us.’82

  His caution was lost on the colonists in the Philippines, who felt that their precarious position could only be remedied by a firm occupation of the mainland of Asia. Francisco de Sande, third governor of Manila, felt that six thousand men would be enough to conquer the whole of China. The successful occupation of Portugal by the Spanish crown in 1580 unleashed the imperialist and messianic imagination of the king's subjects, among them some Portuguese clergy. The Portuguese bishop of Melaka in 1584 urged Philip II to undertake the conquest of the nearby Muslim sultanate of Atjeh, and after that to take over the whole of Southeast Asia. ‘All this’, the optimistic prelate assured the king, ‘can be accomplished with four thousand men.’83 The Portuguese Jesuit Francisco Cabral, writing from Macao in June 1584, assured the king that the conquest of China would be easy using only three thousand Japanese Christians, for the Japanese (he said) were a warlike race. In the same months the authorities in the Philippines expressed an identical view. The bishop of Manila suggested to the king that Japanese warriors be used, and the governor of the town assured Philip that ‘the enterprise of China is the greatest and most profitable and most noble one ever offered to any prince in the world, and also the easiest’.84

  In the same decade Philip II's own cosmographer, the Neapolitan Giovanni Battista Gesio, whose enthusiasm at the occupation of Portugal inspired him to offer opinions on broad matters of imperial policy, advised the king that Luzon was as strategically important as Flanders or Italy. Gesio had already made the government happy by informing them that the Philippines lay well within the area of the Pacific demarcation line allotted to Spain. He now looked further ahead to the possible conquest of all the lands that had been assigned to Spain, and assured Philip that Luzon should be the base ‘for the enterprise of Japan and, much more important, of China’.85 These were the years, it should be recalled, when ‘the enterprise of England’ was also on the king's agenda.

  Perhaps the most ambitious of the proposals was a petition dated 26 July 1586, signed by all the officials of Manila and taken to the council of the Indies in Madrid by the Jesuit Alonso Sánchez, a resolute supporter of the invasion of China. The move was probably inspired by the visit made earlier that year to Manila by a group of eleven Japanese Christians from Nagasaki. The memorial recognized the immense power of China, described as a high civilization ‘superior to us in everything except salvation of the faith’.86 Notwithstanding, it proposed an invasion force of twelve thousand Spaniards, brought in specially from the New World or even from Spain, plus six thousand Japanese allies (obviously to be recruited from the many Christians in that country) and an equal number of Filipinos. The dimensions of this army, surpassing anything attempted by Spain in its entire history as an imperial power till that date, was at least evidence that the proposers were aware of the enormous task that would face an invasion. In every other respect the plan was a flight of folly. Sánchez sailed for New Spain, and eventually reached Madrid in January 1588. It was the very worst moment to suggest a military adventure, for the Great Armada against England was just about to sail and the king had neither mind nor money to attend to anything else. The Jesuits in Madrid were appalled by Sánchez's plan and their new superior, José de Acosta, a veteran of the Indies, went to talk to him. Acosta roundly rejected any idea of military intervention in Japan or in China, basing his argument on the high culture and civilized government of the states of Asia, which he contrasted with the ‘primitive’ societies that the Spaniards were combating in the New World.87 The Sánchez proposal came to nothing, but it was not the end of such ideas. In March 1588 a Spanish Augustinian friar in Macao suggested to the king that four thousand Japanese Christian warriors under Spanish leadership could easily conquer all China.

  There were always adventurous spirits among the Spaniards in Asia. A handful of Spanish mercenaries offered their services to the king of Cambodia in his wars against Thailand, but their protector was defeated and they were taken off as prisoners.88 They later escaped to Manila, and pr
oposed to the governor in 1595 a military alliance with Cambodia against Thailand. They argued that one thousand Spaniards (or only three hundred, if Cambodia also helped) would be sufficient to conquer all Thailand, a move that would open the doors to the riches of Asia and the ‘conquest of the entire mainland’. The young governor Luis Dasmariñas embraced the plan with great enthusiasm. In January 1596 an expedition of three small vessels and a hundred and thirty men set out from Manila for Cambodia. After over seven months of fruitless wandering, the majority of them returned frustrated to Manila, where the outcome of the expedition confirmed the opposition of some Spanish leaders to military adventurism. However, a few Spaniards continued to make their way to Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, and took part in power struggles at the royal court in the years 1598–9, but were finally and bloodily eliminated by the Muslim groups that were in the ascendant. The irrepressible Dasmariñas, meanwhile, on his own initiative had mounted in 1598 an expedition of over a hundred men that was scattered by storms in the South China Sea. Of the three vessels only one, with Dasmariñas on board, made it to mainland Cambodia. The men survived a year and a half before returning to Manila.89