Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Dasmariñas's successor as governor, Francisco Tello de Guzmán, was no less optimistic about the capacity of the Spaniards in Manila to conquer Southeast Asia. ‘If there were six hundred spare Spaniards in these islands, and the money, one could conquer the kingdom of Siam’, was his view in 1599.90 He yearned for expansion, as a way of compensating for the evidently weak and exposed position of the Spanish colony, where at any time an alliance between Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos could wipe them out. In the event he managed to achieve a written treaty of friendship with Thailand in 1598, the first formal link ever agreed between Thais and Spaniards, though nothing further came of it. The idea of extending conquests largely as a protective measure seems to have been strong in Manila. A memorandum of 1596 to Philip II from Dasmariñas's son, Luis Pérez Dasmariñas, recommended the occupation of Taiwan as a way of defending the Philippines against a possible threat from the Japanese and the Chinese.

  Decades of empty proposals and of failed expeditions, however, may well have served to convince many in Manila that the occupation of Asia was unrealizable. Morga, who served as judge in Manila from 1595 to 1602, was one of those who opposed all schemes for conquest. At the dawn of the seventeenth century the idea of an empire in the east – an idea that had never been seriously entertained in Madrid – had faded, to be replaced by the reality of rivalry with the Dutch and English. By the same date the missionaries had also given up hope of a rapid conversion of the Asian continent. Only the Manila galleon continued to preserve the lifeline between the Spanish empire and East Asia.

  The northern Pacific seemed less accessible to Spaniards who had centred their activities largely in the Caribbean, but fairly soon it became an object of serious attention. The search for wealth in this sector did not exclude another goal that the Spaniards kept well within their sights: access to a northwest sea passage connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. The English and French, as we know, were actively involved in looking for such a passage, but Spaniards did not linger behind. They tended to call it ‘the strait of Anián’, a name derived from Italian travel writings. The instructions that Charles V sent to Cortés in 1523 emphasized the importance of finding a passage, and the conqueror dutifully gave support to attempts in 1532 and 1533 but they failed, in each case because natives killed the voyagers. There were legends enough and oral reports from Indians, about fabulous peoples and places towards the northwest. Among the creative influences on the imagination was the chivalric novel Las Sergas de Esplandián, published in Madrid in 1510, which carried the following account:

  I wish you now to learn of the strangest thing ever written or recorded by man. To the west of the Indies there was an island, called California, very close to the Earthly Paradise, inhabited by black women with no men among them, and who lived as the Amazons did.91

  The name California came to be applied specifically to the peninsula of Baja California, which was thought to be an island when first located in the 1530s. But it was subsequently used by Spaniards to apply to all the land on the northern Pacific coast, and when explorers reached Alaska in the eighteenth century they gave it the name ‘New California’.92

  In 1539, the year before he finally left for Spain, Cortés sent an expedition northwards up the Pacific coast under Francisco de Ulloa, which had no significant results. A different voyage in 1541 was likewise uneventful. At the same period other groups were moving north through the Gulf of California: Hernando de Alarcón in August 1540 found the mouth of the Colorado river and penetrated inland. The most famous of the early voyages was that of João Rodrigues Cabrilho, a Portuguese in Spanish service, who was sent out by viceroy Mendoza in 1542. He commanded two ships that in September 1542 touched into San Diego bay, which they named San Miguel. Cabrillo Point, as it is called today, affords one of the finest views of the ocean from the outskirts of the modern city. Cabrilho continued northwards and in October went ashore and claimed possession of the land. The vessels spent the winter up north, where Cabrilho died in January 1543 off modern Santa Barbara. His ships pressed on further but turned back when they encountered bad weather, arriving at the port of Navidad, from which they had sailed, in April.

  These important but random explorations achieved neither the Northwest Passage nor the wealth of the fabled California nor any secure hold on territory. The Pacific remained an open sea, into which the English were the first non-Iberians to sail.93 The English sea captain Francis Drake was active in the isthmus of Panama from 1570. In 1573, with the indispensable help of a group of runaway blacks (cimarrones), he pooled his resources with those of a French Protestant captain, and waylaid the silver convoy from Peru as it made its way to Nombre de Dios. It was on this expedition that Drake, like Balboa half a century before, saw the great expanse of the Pacific, and ‘besought Almightie God of his goodnesse to give him life and leave to sayle once in an English ship in that sea’.94

  His dream was realized a few years later, in a famous voyage which demonstrated clearly that the Spaniards had no real control over any part of the Pacific, either north or south. As the viceroy of Peru observed two decades later, ‘the entire defence of the Indies consists more in the ignorance which enemies have of it, and the obstacles posed by land and weather, than the forces which there are to resist them’.95 The vessels with which Drake set sail at the end of 1577 from Plymouth numbered five, among them his own Pelican. They were backed to the hilt by financing from the court and from investors. By the time he reached the Straits of Magellan his fleet was reduced to three ships, and he had renamed his vessel the Golden Hind. In the first week of September 1578 they entered the Pacific, and made a slow progress up the coast.

  Early in 1579 he learnt that the shipment of silver from Potosi was being taken by sea to Panama, caught up with the Spanish vessel in March, just north of the equator, and without suffering any resistance was able to board the ship and seize its shipment of 450,000 pesos. The total impunity with which he raided and plundered at every major port from Chile northwards was astonishing. By the time he reached the coast of Nicaragua his ship was so heavy with booty that it would have been foolhardy to set out across the ocean without further repairs. The search for a safe harbour took him well past San Francisco bay, towards a cove twenty-eight miles further north that has traditionally and probably justifiably been called ‘Drake's Bay’. There, during a stay of thirty-six days required to re-fit his vessel, the commander took possession of all the territory in his queen's name and called it ‘Nova Albion’. He then set out across the Pacific, through the Spice Islands and thereafter round the Cape of Good Hope to Plymouth, which he reached in September 1580, the first English captain to circumnavigate the globe, after an absence of two years and ten months at sea.96

  Drake's raid on the treasure-ship in Peru in 1579 was the first of its kind, and seems to have been the motive for resolutions in Madrid in 1581 to establish a fleet for defence. Typically, the resolutions took years to convert into action, but fortunately for Spain the Pacific was also a long way from Europe and very few vessels were able to repeat Drake's exploits. A force of five small galleons for defence was in operation by 1588.97 Drake was followed to the South Sea by Thomas Cavendish in 1587 and by Richard Hawkins in 1593. Cavendish, a young English gentleman, was notable as the first foreign sailor ever to seize the famous Manila galleon. He entered the Pacific with three ships in 1587, attacked the port of Paita in Peru and towards Panama seized a ship from whose pilot he gathered enough information to enable him to calculate the possibility of attacking the Manila galleon. In October he was at the southern tip of the peninsula of Baja California and narrowly missed the Manila galleon Nuestra Senõra de la Esperanza that passed the coast in November. He was able, however, to catch the Santa Ana, which, after two days of fighting and successfully repelling four boarding attempts, surrendered to his vessels on 17 November. Apart from Chinese silk and other luxuries the raiders got perhaps 600,000 pesos in gold, as well as silks, pearls and jewels. The Santa Ana was scuttled
and burnt, and its unfortunate chaplain hanged from a mast. The English then set out across the Pacific in a repeat of Drake's famous circumnavigation of the globe. Cavendish's own ship, the Desire, was the only one of his vessels to arrive safely in Plymouth in September 1588, just after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Queen Elizabeth is said to have commented, on seeing the riches: ‘The king of Spain barks a good deal but he does not bite. We care nothing for Spaniards, their ships loaded with gold and silver come hither after all.’ In an attempt to repeat his success four years later, Cavendish perished at sea near Cape Horn.

  Among the survivors from the Santa Ana were its Portuguese pilot, Sebastião Rodrigues Cermenho, and the Basque merchant Sebastián Vizcaíno, a man of considerable experience in the trade between Manila and Mexico, whom we have already encountered in the context of Japan and who played an important part in exploration of the Pacific coastline. In 1595 Rodrigues Cermenho returned from Manila in the galleon San Agustin, making landfall in November at a point some sixty-five miles south of the California–Oregon boundary. Continuing farther south past Drake's Bay, he found an inlet which he named the Bay of San Francisco.98 A sudden storm wrecked the galleon, and the crew had to make their way back to Mexico in a boat and without their precious cargo.

  The following year Vizcaíno set out from New Spain with the objective of finding a suitable harbour on the Pacific coast, but had to turn back after an abortive attempt to found a settlement on the Baja coast. The failure of this first expedition did not deter him, and he continued to insist to the government that a suitable port be found on the northern coast for the Manila galleons. Permission was given in 1599 for another reconnaissance, and in May 1602 he set sail with three ships (and official financing) from Acapulco. Although the voyage suffered severe tribulations of sea, wind and cold (they reached their northern limits in January 1603), and the death from illness of a quarter of the crew, it was epoch-making for it touched on all the major coastal features of California, to which Vizcaíno gave names that still remain in use. Monterey Bay, which he charted and named after the then viceroy, was deemed so attractive by Vizcaíno that it became the objective of later attempts at settlement. Moreover, exceptional efforts were made to remain on good terms with the natives, who proved both amenable and hospitable.

  A Carmelite friar who had been on the voyage, Antonio de la Ascensión, drew some conclusions about the possibility of extending the empire into California.99 The first point of settlement, he said, should be the point of Baja California, which could be controlled with up to two hundred soldiers, based in a camp with a watch-tower, ‘for when in lands of heathen Indians, although they may have declared themselves friendly they must not be trusted’. The camp would serve not simply as the centre for spreading religion, but also for bringing in all necessary animals and cultivating wheat. Indians should be brought in from New Spain to teach the Baja natives their music. Young local Indians should be selected to learn the Spanish language, which would facilitate the work of conversion, which should be entirely under the control of the crown. At the same time, no encomiendas of any sort should be permitted.

  Vizcaíno continued to play a fundamental role in Spanish plans for the Pacific, but not in California, his principal interest. Instead, he was dragged away to search for mythical islands and to make contact with Japan. The expansion of the empire into the northwest was thus delayed by over a century. The Audiencia of Mexico was advised in 1629, for example, that there were no obvious riches along that coast, since no gold ornaments had been found on natives, that looking for a harbour was not a priority since only a few days more would take the Manila vessels directly to New Spain, and that foreigners could not conceivably reach the area since it was such a great distance from Asia or from Cape Horn.100 No thought was given to what then seemed impossible: that other nations would approach the Pacific from inland, or from across the land mass of the North American continent. By the 1630s officials had ceased to believe in the straits of Anián, and therefore refused to back further initiatives. Interest continued in one form or another, and individuals went pearl fishing, but the north Pacific coast beyond Cape Mendocino remained an unknown land.

  In December 1552 the Jesuit missionary Francisco Xavier died of fever virtually alone on the island of Sanchian off the South China coast. Xavier, a noble from Navarre, spent his entire career as a missionary within the orbit of the Portuguese padroado, and both wrote and spoke Portuguese during his work. His achievements did not form part of the history of Spain's religious enterprise. Like other orders at this period, however, the Jesuits never restricted their membership by nation, and from the beginning Xavier counted with the close collaboration of Castilians who worked within the scope of the padroado. Long before Spanish ships established their base in the Pacific, Spanish Jesuits were beginning to build an empire for Christ in the same seas, thanks to the prior work of the Portuguese. Xavier and two Spaniards founded the Jesuit mission in Japan in 1549. Forty-three years later, when a general meeting of resident Jesuits took place at Nagasaki, five Spaniards held all the principal posts in the order; the other eight fathers attending included four Portuguese and four Italians.101 The successes of the clergy were rapid and remarkable: the Church in Japan grew to have an estimated 150,000 members in 1584.102

  In the South China Sea the way ahead was not so easy. The Spaniards found that Islam had arrived before them. They had been brought up in a culture that encouraged hostility to ‘Moors’ and Moriscos, and were aware of the wars against the Muslims in Africa. All the missionaries in Asia, and none more than Xavier himself, were on their guard against the ever-menacing power of the crescent, which had penetrated the Mediterranean and now seemed to be sweeping across the Indian Ocean. Islam was still a fairly new religion in South East Asia, disseminated along trade routes by Arab and Chinese Muslims in specific areas only. Muslim merchants seeking spices brought their faith to the southern Philippines and Maluku. Based on his experience in the islands of the area, Legazpi felt that Islam was not so deeply rooted as to constitute a challenge. Though many natives were now Muslim, especially in Jolo, Mindanao and Ternate, their practice of the religion barely extended beyond the use of circumcision and abstinence from pork. In Luzon there was virtually no evidence of Muslim penetration. It seemed logical for Legazpi to conclude that the field was wide open for implanting Spanish religion. The indigenous population in the Philippines seemed to take readily to the new culture offered by the white settlers. The use of images, incense and rosaries, together with colourful ceremonies and attractive temples, was not so different from the public practice of Hinduism and Buddhism. The Christian God could also be identified with the power, wealth and success of those who were his followers, and the natives were not so foolish as to reject sharing in the possible advantages of this situation.103

  Spanish religious orders arrived in the Philippines soon after Legazpi: the Augustinians were the first in 1565, followed by the Franciscans in 1578 and the Jesuits in 1581; the last were the Dominicans in 1587. Many of them had experienced disappointment with the missionary effort in America, and they now eagerly embraced the challenge to convert all Asia. It was a dream that, as we have seen, also had imperialist aspirations for conquest not simply of souls but of territory. In New Spain the great Franciscan scholar Bernardino de Sahagún, disillusioned already by the gains made for the faith there, expressed his conviction that the way ahead was in Asia. ‘It seems to me that Our Lord God is opening the road so that the Catholic faith may enter China. When the Church enters those kingdoms I believe it will last for many years, for in the islands, here in New Spain, and in Peru it has been nothing more than a stopping-place on the way to coming into contact with those people.’104 The almost mystical urge to move on from America to Asia was also shared by several other eminent missionaries of that generation, among them Las Casas and the first archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga.

  Europeans were undoubtedly fascinated by Asia. The Augustinian friar
Martín de Rada went to Fukien from Manila and in 1575 published an account of his visit, which was fortunately used by Juan González de Mendoza in his History of the great realm of China, published at Rome in 1585. The book went through thirty editions in the principal European languages, and provided for readers a vision of the power and mystery of the unknown east. Spanish writers were in no doubt that China had to be respected as a high civilization. It was, however, Japan that eventually most earned the fear and respect of Spanish intellectuals. The apparent success of the Jesuit mission there stimulated the popularity of Jesuit newsletters which were published in Spain. Philip II himself in 1584 gave audience to a group of young Japanese Christian nobles who were passing through on their way to visit the pope and were persuaded by the king to visit his pet scheme, the monastery-palace of the Escorial. All Asia, with its rich cultures, appeared open to the aspirations of the Catholic missionaries. In 1569 a Portuguese Dominican, Gaspar da Cruz, author of the first European book on China, suggested that the discovery of the whole globe by Spaniards and Portuguese signified that the time for the conversion of all peoples, and thus for the end of time, was at hand. ‘The world shows great signs of ending, and the scriptures are about to be fulfilled.’105