Raniel Carmona Ponteras | Bibliotikal
In the 1520s, Chinese merchants arrived on the shores of Cebu, the Philippines, for their routine business dealings in the area. They brought merchandise from the mainland that was in high demand: porcelain, iron, and, most especially, silk. Upon reaching the markets, the Chinese noticed not only the indigenous Cebuanos but also a few Spaniards present. After a few days of trading, the Chinese sailed away to their next stop, adding the Spaniards to their cargo.
They bought them as slaves from the Cebuanos for the price of ‘unos bacanes de metal’, some pieces of metal.
The story comes from Sebastian de Puerta. He was part of the second Spanish voyage to Asia, which left Spain on 24 July 1525. They sailed westward, following the course taken earlier by Ferdinand Magellan's fleet in 1519.
The loss of lives during the first voyage was devastating. More than a hundred men, including Magellan, perished. Of the five large and expensive ships which left Spain's ports, only one returned, the Victoria. Yet the loss of life was counterbalanced by persistent whispers of prosperity, for the booty brought back was too tempting to ignore. Exotic goods hitherto only available through trading with Mediterranean middlemen were now in Spain’s hands, fresh from Asia, promising tremendous profits. It was too good to be true. There were reasons to believe that it was worth exploring again.
And so, a second expedition was launched. However, early on in their journey, ominous winds started to take over, slowly steering the fleet towards depths of depredation. Its captain, Jofre de Loaysa, succumbed to a fatal illness on 30 July 1526 after entering Pacific waters. The loss of their captain was just one of the many sombre crescendos in their overture’s morbid mood, as many of the men died at sea, became estranged from the rest, were killed by the hostile indigenous population, or were held in captivity, like Sebastian de Puerta.
In 1527, a third expedition set sail, commanded by Álvaro de Saavedra. It was Saavedra and his men who rescued Puerta on Philippine shores in the following year.
The losses across the three voyages significantly outweighed the combined profits returned to Spain. Yet, the potential of commercial gain was a golden gamble for fortunes untold and unlimited, too propitious to abandon. It was an easy decision, for the crown had already wagered on an earlier attempt to reach Asia by sponsoring Christopher Columbus' westward journey. While Columbus reached the Americas instead, the Portuguese, Spain's Iberian neighbour and rival, mastered the erratic winds that agitated the southern extremes of Africa, soon discovering a way to round the Cape of Good Hope. This gave them exclusive passage to the Indian Ocean and Asia’s lush emporia. Thus, it was in Spain’s best interest—and survival—that they, too, stretch their maritime muscles and test the limits of their imperial strength.
It is no wonder, then, that in less than a decade, Spain devoted so much energy and so many resources to test if they could have direct access to the opulent Asian production centres.
Sheer persistence alone failed to bring the Philippines under the sway of the Spanish crown. The archipelago was too far away, and not even a second stronghold in Mexico made overcoming the initial hurdle of distance any easier. Moreover, the complications brought about by the Treaty of Tordesillas (7 June 1494), which divided the world into the Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence/control, coupled with stranger winds and temperamental oceans, made the journey to the Philippines cumbersome, expensive, and deadly.
But Spain doggedly returned again and again, until eventually, in 1565, their efforts paid off. Under the command of Miguel López de Legazpi, Spain finally managed to establish a settlement in Cebu. This was promptly followed by another fortunate development.
The Augustinian friar Andres de Urdaneta was tasked to lead the return mission to Nueva España (New Spain). Before taking religious orders, Urdaneta had spent his younger years at sea. In fact, at the age of seventeen, he joined the Loaysa expedition as a page. For his valuable maritime experience and firsthand familiarity with the islands, he was later hand-picked by King Felipe II himself to take part in the Legazpi voyage. This proved to be a prescient selection, as Urdaneta duly delivered. From Cebu, Urdaneta took a northeast route, and just below Japan he and his crew encountered the winds that blew ships east, making the tornaviaje (return trip) possible (although errant members of the Legazpi voyage predated Urdaneta’s return to Acapulco by two months). These two accomplishments signalled the beginning of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines and the Galleon trade.
The Portuguese reacted by dispatching a fleet led by Gonzalo Pereira to Cebu. Upon their arrival in October 1568, they immediately blockaded all entry to its port, demanding the Spaniards vacate the area. Pereira was adamant in asserting that the archipelago fell within Portugal’s ambit as prescribed in the aforementioned treaty. Legazpi, however, stubbornly held his ground, effectively announcing Spain’s confidence in its own political command and influence. The result was a diplomatic stalemate which lasted for almost three months. The Portuguese eventually withdrew from Philippine waters and ceded the territory to the Spaniards, underscoring an unlikely victory for the Spanish Crown.
Once the Portuguese threat had dissipated, the settlers busied themselves with new concerns and considerations. What initially whetted their appetites were the spices that grew in abundance exclusively in the region. However, from where they were, cinnamon was the only spice of value the colonists could send back in bulk. Nutmeg and cloves, the two most in-demand spices, were native to the Moluccas, the famed Spice Islands now under heavy Portuguese watch. Seizing the said islands was obviously out of the question. So the Spanish hedged their bets in other ventures, but they did not have to look long and, most importantly, far. They were captivated by the allure of silk, a frequent cargo of the Chinese junks that regularly visited Manila and the promising prospects of shipping it back to New Spain and Europe, where it commanded high prices.
With China becoming the premium consideration for commerce in the region, doubts concerning their presence in the Philippines began to disturb the Spaniards in the archipelago. A total accounting of the problems, casualties, expenses, and difficulties it took to set up even a rudimentary settlement in the islands resulted in lopsided losses, and many felt that it was time to abandon the colonial project. Legazpi himself shared this opinion.
This anxiety later gave way to more troubling persuasions, the most extreme being the idea of actually conquering China. If the Philippines were not commercially worthwhile, it would have to be of some military and maritime use. Fransisco de Sande, appointed Governor-General of the Philippines from 1576 to 1580, devised a plan for a military takeover of China, starting with an offensive to be launched from the Philippines. In his letter to the king, he outlined a formula for an invasion; he said that a Spanish force of only about 3,000-4,000 men was needed because, according to him, the Chinese generally had no weapons and were terrible marksmen. If all these were followed through and granted by the king, Sande assured the crown that Spanish victory would be ‘muy facil’, very easy. But nothing of the kind materialised.
Instead, a Sino-Spaniard commercial connection blossomed.
Fiscal woes over hyperinflation set about by unregulated printing of paper money forced Ming China (1368-1644) to widely circulate a more stable currency. A coinage was ideal, but the questions of which material to use and where to get it were of crucial concern. Silver was the undisputed optimal choice. They just needed a lot of it to meet their demands, which required looking elsewhere as the Chinese mainland did not have much of the precious metal. Fortunately, a great deal of it could be found in the markets of Manila, readily available to be exchanged for goods. These were mostly mined and minted in the Americas and were then shipped in vast quantities by the Spaniards aboard massive galleons.
A cursory study of this development makes it look like this was an equally win-win situation for both parties. Nevertheless, a closer inspection reveals that the Spaniards benefited significantly from the arrangement. In China, silver was valued much higher, best exemplified by its worth in proportion to gold. The exchange rate there dropped as low as 6:1, meaning that only six quantities of silver were needed to exchange for a single quantity of gold. In other places, gold demanded a higher return, requiring as much as twice the above quantity of silver. This proved advantageous to the Spaniards because it allowed them to purchase more with less from the Chinese than if they were to trade their silver with others.
The temperaments of these two superpowers were balanced by the strategic location of the Philippines, specifically Manila. Although a Spanish colony, the Philippines are distant from Spain, significantly weakening the crown's control over its governance and security. In contrast, while China was geographically close, it lacked formal authority over the archipelago's government despite its long-standing trade connections with indigenous communities. History favoured China. Politics empowered Spain. Geography was the great arbiter of interests. But, in this arrangement, were the indigenous people of the archipelago a central concern to Spain or China?
Evidently not. To maintain the fleets of galleons and also to build new ones, the Spanish government in the Philippines concocted a system of brutal labour deployment where locals were forcibly rounded up and then sent to cut down the forests for very low pay if they were paid at all. After felling the required trees, the Filipinos were also tasked to build the ships, and some were even conscripted to fill Spain's military retinue. Overall, the indigenous population suffered extreme hardships from their colonial overlords.
While the colonists refused to listen to indigenous pleas for just compensation and repose, the Filipinos found an unlikely ally in Felipe III, the king himself, who heard echoes of their cries as they reverberated across the waves. In a decree issued on 6 March 1608, Felipe ordered the Spanish officials in the Philippines to address the complaints of the indigenous population. But the colony had a life of its own, which, although it obeyed much of what was ordered of them by the crown, the distance enabled them to continue abusing the local workforce with impunity.
By the 1590s, Spain’s foothold in the archipelago was more than formidable, enough to crush and repulse sporadic eruptions of local revolt, which would later punctuate the first decades of the seventeenth century. By then, their identity and objective in Asia were already clearly defined. Imperial tastes have changed. The spice islands gave way to the salty seas when it came to economic importance. Thus, the chief commercial justification for maintaining the Philippines was less for its domestic production but more for its high return in labour and materials extraction and as a venue for trade with China. It was a much different time and scenario from the one witnessed by Sebastian de Puerta.
Instead of enslaved people, the Chinese brought back silver. The Spaniards shipped prized porcelain, ceramics, silks, and other oriental merchandise to Europe through Mexico. Meanwhile, the Filipinos were turned into mere cogs to keep the machinery of trade going.
Further Reading:
Felipe Fernández Armesto, Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (Bloomsbury, 2023).
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2002).
Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales, The Silver Way: China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565-1815 (Penguin Books, 2017).
The Cambridge History of China vol. 8 part II, eds. Denis Twitchett and Frederick Mote (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Harvard University Press, 2013).
Raniel Carmona Ponteras is a Filipino biologist and historian. He has done research on evolutionary biology, Philippine tarsier conservation, medical biochemistry, and the many ways natural history and precolonial Visayan history overlap. His current research is on precolonial trends and techniques in Visayan placenames, particularly in his home island of Negros, as part of his longer work on the history of the Hiligaynon. For more of his works, you can visit his Visayan history website.