Category Archives: Philippines

by | 27 December 2025 · 6:17 am

Humiliating Surrenders in 1942, 1945

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 295-296:

At 8.56 a.m. the eleven Japanese representatives were brought to the ship on a small launch, headed by the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, dressed in formal morning coat, stiff collar and top hat. As they stepped aboard they passed through a corridor of ‘sideboys’, enlisted sailors standing to attention who had all been chosen because they were at least six foot tall. Everything about this ceremony was meant to demonstrate the vastly superior might of the Allies, and especially the United States. As if to further underline this physical discrepancy, Shigemitsu had a wooden leg – he’d lost the one he’d been born with when a Korean rebel threw a grenade at him in Shanghai. It meant he now limped across the deck to stand in front of the surrender table.

Then, at 9.02, MacArthur and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz emerged. MacArthur stood at the microphone to the side of the table and began the proceedings, but before he sat down he said, ‘Will General Wainwright and General Percival step forward while I sign?’

Wainwright and the British General then emerged from the dignitaries lined up behind the table and stood either side of MacArthur as he sat down and signed the surrender documents. The Supreme Commander had also brought with him five fountain pens with which to sign the documents, and after writing his first signature turned to Wainwright. ‘He gave me the pen,’ noted Wainwright, who saluted awkwardly and took it, ‘a wholly unexpected and very great gift.’

MacArthur gave the second pen used to Percival, and the two generals returned to their places after the Allied signatures had been completed and it was the turn of the Japanese. First Shigemitsu hobbled forward and, bending over the table, signed. Then General Yoshijirō Umezu, the Chief of the Army General Staff. ‘We were, I felt,’ noted one of the Japanese delegates, the diplomat Toshikazu Kase, ‘being subject to the torture of the pillory. A million eyes seemed to beat on us with the million shafts of a rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire. I felt them sink into my body with a sharp physical pain.’

They were experiencing the humiliation of defeat. Of surrender. It was a terrible thing to endure, and yet General Wainwright, watching this, was unique among American senior commanders there that day in having signed an instrument of surrender of his forces – to the very regime that stood before him now. So too had General Percival, who stood alongside him; it had been Percival who had surrendered the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore – Britain’s largest ever defeat – in February 1942. And Wainwright had surrendered the whole of the Philippines three months later, in May; that also ranked as one of the worst military defeats in American history. The difference was that Percival had been the British C-in-C in Singapore from the outset, whereas Wainwright had not. Rather, the American was handed the poisoned chalice of command of the Philippines when MacArthur was ordered out by the President. And the defeat and surrender that had followed had been in part down to MacArthur himself and to the lack of preparation by the United States. It was certainly not Wainwright who was to blame, although in the long years since that day of infamy he had suffered plenty for it.

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Filed under Britain, Japan, military, nationalism, Philippines, Southeast Asia, U.S., war

by | 1 May 2025 · 9:12 am

1949: Vietnam War Goes International

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 290-293:

BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.

Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”

There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

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Filed under Burma, China, democracy, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, military, nationalism, Philippines, Taiwan, U.S., USSR, Vietnam, war

by | 26 April 2025 · 6:14 am

Japan’s March 1945 Coup in Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 102-103, 105-106:

SHORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON MARCH 9, 1945, A VISITOR ARRIVED AT the opulent Saigon offices of the French governor-general, Admiral Jean Decoux. It was Shunichi Matsumoto, Japan’s ambassador to Indochina, there ostensibly for the purpose of signing a previously worked-out agreement concerning rice supplies and French financial support for Japanese troops. As the signing ceremony ended, Matsumoto asked Decoux to linger for a private conversation. Matsumoto appeared nervous, the Frenchman later recalled, “something rare in an Asiatic.” It soon became clear why: Tokyo had ordered the ambassador to present an ultimatum, which required unconditional French acceptance no later than nine o’clock that same evening. The entire colonial administration, including army, navy, police, and banks, were to be placed under Japanese command.

For almost five years, Decoux had dreaded the arrival of this moment. Ever since he took office, in July 1940, his overriding objective had been to preserve French sovereignty over Indochina, at least in a nominal sense, so that after the armistice the colony could still be a jewel in the empire. Now Tokyo had issued a demand that, if agreed to, would abolish French colonial control over Indochina. Decoux played for time, but Matsumoto did not budge—the deadline was firm. The Frenchman consulted with several associates, and at 8:45 sent a letter via messenger urging a continuation of the discussions beyond the nine o’clock deadline. The letter carrier went to the wrong building, and it was not until 9:25 that he could at last present the letter to Matsumoto. By then, reports of fighting in Hanoi and Haiphong had already come in. Matsumoto scanned the document, declared, “This is doubtless a rejection,” and ordered the Japanese military machine into action.

It was a carefully planned campaign, code-named Operation Bright Moon. Ever since October 1944, when U.S. forces began their reconquest of the Philippine Islands, the Japanese Military Command had feared that the Allies would use the islands to invade Indochina in order to cut off Japan from her forces in Southeast Asia. And indeed, South East Asia Command (SEAC), based in Kandy, Ceylon, under British admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, viewed Indochina as an increasingly important theater of operations. Bombers of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under Major General Claire L. Chennault operating from South China regularly attacked Japanese targets in Vietnam, sometimes ranging as far south as Saigon to hit ports and rail centers. To add to Tokyo’s concerns, French resistance inside Indochina appeared to be growing, and the Decoux regime seemed clearly to be switching its allegiance from Vichy to de Gaulle’s Free France. The concerns grew in January 1945, when American forces attacked Luzon in the Philippines. In conjunction with this attack, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, launched a brief but devastating naval raid along the Indochina coast between Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon, in order to deflect Japanese attention from Admiral Nimitz’s advance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese Thirty-eighth Army responded with a major reinforcement of garrisons in Indochina, especially in Tonkin, Annam, and Laos.

…

Viewed in totality, the available evidence—including the MAGIC intercepts—suggests strongly that Tokyo officials, increasingly resigned to the inevitability of defeat in the war, saw a takeover in Indochina as giving them a stronger position either for negotiation or for fanatic resistance. It’s also clear that their task was made easier by the chronic inability of French Resistance forces to keep their activities and plans secret. Many colons openly expressed their support for the Resistance, and French soldiers collected arms dropped in the countryside and deposited them in arsenals in full view of the Japanese. Portraits of de Gaulle even hung in the public offices of the French High Command. On top of all that, the Japanese had cracked the French codes and were reading all the French ciphers. Their surveillance of French activities was child’s play, and on the evening of March 9 they had their troops ready in strategic positions to negate the anticipated French moves.

Certainly the French were taken by surprise, even though they had drawn up plans to counter just this kind of Japanese thrust and even though intelligence reports had warned that an attack might be imminent. One by one that evening their garrisons fell. Almost without exception, the senior French commanders were captured in their homes or in those of Japanese officers with whom they were dining (the meal invitations being part of the ruse). In Saigon, Japanese forces moved immediately on Decoux’s palace and seized him as well as several other high-ranking French ministers. Throughout Indochina, they took over administrative buildings and public utilities and seized radio stations, banks, and industries. Public beatings and executions of colonial officials occurred in numerous locales, and there were widespread reports of French women being raped by Japanese soldiers—including in Bac Giang province, where the province résident’s wife was gang-raped.

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Filed under Britain, France, Japan, Laos, military, nationalism, Philippines, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 2 February 2025 · 6:36 am

Rescinding Emancipation in Manila

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The backlash against the campaign to free the Indians was strongest in the Philippines. The royal order of June 12, 1679, specifying that “no native could be held as a slave under any circumstance” and that “all Indians enslaved up to now are hereby set free as well as their children and descendants” caused a great deal of turmoil in Manila. As in Chile, the first recourse in the Philippines was to stall using the traditional formula: “This cédula [royal order] is of the kind that must be obeyed but not complied with,” observed the members of the Audiencia of Manila, “and we must write back to the Prince so that better informed he could send us his orders.” Their displeasure was patent. “When royal orders are so far apart from the natural law, they cannot be executed,” wrote an irate audiencia member to Charles II, “and with all due respect, even less so when that natural law is for the benefit of those who have been vanquished in war, for the victors would have a right to take their lives but only choose to take away their liberty.”

Yet even in the distant Philippines, there were some courageous crusaders. While waiting for the king’s reply, the audiencia’s attorney prodded his reluctant colleagues to make public the emancipation decree. The immediate result was a flood of requests: “So many were the slaves who crowded around this Royal Audiencia to claim their liberty that we could not process the multitude of their papers, even when being extracted in brief and summarily.” Many slaves around the capital abandoned their masters, who were left “without service,” as the archbishop of Manila, Felipe Pardo, observed.

It was in the provinces that the situation became truly critical. Native Filipinos faced total ruin, as they had most of their wealth invested in their slaves. Moreover, the slaves supplied much of the rice and other basic foodstuffs of the islands, and now “agitated and encouraged by the recent laws setting them free [they] went to the extremity of refusing to plant the fields.” The greatest threat of all was that “by setting these slaves free, the provinces remote from Manila may be stirred up and revolt, such as those in the Visayas and Nueva Segovia; and in the island of Mindanao, the malcontent Caragas and Subanos might well join forces with the Muslim insurgents there.”

In Chile the governor had taken the lead in opposing the Spanish campaign, but in the Philippines all branches of the imperial administration, including the governor, the members of the audiencia, the city council of Manila, members of the military, and the ecclesiastical establishment beginning with the archbishop, sent letters to Charles II requesting the suspension of the emancipation decree. Among the petitioners were Native Filipinos, for whom slavery had been a way of life since time immemorial. “When a principal native walks around town or visits a temple,” observed a Spanish chronicler, “it is with great pomp and accompanied by male and female slaves carrying silk parasols to protect their masters from the sun or rain, and the señoras go first followed by their servants and slaves, and then come their husbands or father or brothers with their own servants and slaves.” The emancipation decree came as a great annoyance to these Native slave owners. Those of Pampanga, a province on the northern shore of Manila Bay, in central Luzon, resolutely opposed the liberation of their slaves, whom they regarded as “the principal nerve and backbone of our strength.” They wrote a long letter to the king of Spain explaining how the Spanish galleons were built in the nearby shipyards of Cavite with teak and mahogany supplied in part by slaves: “And while our women together with our slaves plant the seeds, we men are up in the hills cutting wood for the royal yards.” By emancipating the slaves of Pampanga, the empire stood to lose its ships.

In the end, the Audiencia of Manila rescinded the king’s emancipation decree on September 7, 1682, and replaced it with a new decree: all previously liberated slaves had to return to their duties within fifteen days upon penalty of one hundred lashes and one year in the galleys (forced service as a rower aboard a galley, or ship). Charles II continued to press his case for liberation, but ending formal slavery in the Philippines proved very difficult.

In 1674, the Governor of Chile similarly resisted emancipation (p. 143):

The tenor of the governor’s letter was defiant, but it was consistent with a medieval legal tradition that can be summed up in the curious dictum “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but do not comply). In a vast empire such as Spain’s, royal officials used this response to show both their respect for royal authority and the inapplicability of a decree or order to a particular kingdom.

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by | 23 January 2025 · 5:26 am

Long-term Effects of Pacific Crossings

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 242-244:

Among other things, the newfound transpacific connection led to a population boom in Asia, driven by the introduction of New World crops, especially sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts. Today, China is the second-largest producer of corn in the world, after only the United States; China and India are the top two producers of peanuts; and New Guineans obtain more calories per person from sweet potatoes than anyone else in the world. Corn, for example, was domesticated in the Americas at least nine thousand years ago but spread across the Pacific only in the sixteenth century. In China, this New World crop made inroads along the Yangtze and Han River valleys, where rice had been cultivated for millennia. Rice requires flooded fields of arable land, so cornfields sprang up at higher elevations and in drier conditions, where rice cultivation was marginal or impossible, thus extending China’s agricultural frontier and transforming what had once been forested hills into cornfields. Roughly speaking, corn produced the same number of calories per hectare as rice, but with far less irrigation and labor. This led to a significant population boom. Although the precise timing and magnitude of this demographic expansion varied from one Asian nation to another, all of them benefited from the incorporation of New World crops. A full accounting of this vast energy transfer from the Americas to Asia has yet to be made, but the preliminary information shows that it was enormous.

Regular transpacific contact also created the first global trading system recognizable to us even today. Economic activities in the Americas came to depend not just on colonial-metropolitan relationships across the Atlantic but on supply and demand around the world—especially in Asia. Excellent examples are the great silver mines of Peru and Mexico, which constituted a mainstay of the economy of the Americas in colonial times and structured life for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who directly or indirectly, forcibly or not, became a part of the silver economy. Traditionally, this is told as a story of European empires extracting valuable resources from their American colonies. Left unsaid is that the most important end-market customer by far was not Europe but China, where a major tax reform known as “the single lash of the whip” replaced paper money with silver in the sixteenth century. With this tax reform, China instantly became a worldwide magnet for the white metal, absorbing the silver production of neighboring Japan and then turning to the New World mines, which produced upwards of eighty percent of the world’s silver between 1500 and 1800. Without China’s massive and persistent demand for silver, the mines on the American continent would never have attained the scale they did, nor would their profits have spilled over into other colonial enterprises and affected so many lives throughout the hemisphere. The sixteenth century gave rise to the first truly global economy, in which Asia’s relative demographic and economic weight was significant and at times paramount. This feature of our world economy has become familiar to us, as China has continued to demand global resources such as soybeans, copper, and steel, affecting markets all around the world.

By the end of the eighteenth century, British and especially American merchants began building on these earlier transpacific linkages to launch their own ventures. As the Spanish empire in the Americas crumbled in the early nineteenth century, American ships came to replace the old Spanish galleons. The story of the United States’ expansion through the Pacific is well known, as the nation took control of Hawai‘i, Guam, and the Philippines, opened direct trade with Japan and China, and forged a vast network of transpacific interests. As we live in a world increasingly centered on the Pacific, it is imperative that we understand how we got here. The voyages of Urdaneta and of Lope Martín, the Black pilot who now takes his place in world history, were at the dawn of this transformation.

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Filed under Britain, China, economics, food, Mexico, migration, Pacific, Philippines, Spain, U.S.

by | 22 January 2025 · 5:32 am

Finding the North Pacific Way East

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 189-192:

Not everything, however, was against the San Lucas expeditionaries. By paralleling the coast of Japan, they were riding the most powerful current in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese call it Kuroshio, or “Black Current,” owing to its characteristic cobalt-blue color. An integral part of the North Pacific Gyre, the Kuroshio Current is an enormous ribbon of warm water that starts in the Philippine Sea, brushes against the coast of Taiwan, and moves rapidly up the eastern side of Japan, snaking and pushing against the cold waters coming from the Bering Sea. After veering off from Japan, the current continues eastward for about a thousand miles as a free jet stream known as the Kuroshio Extension, eventually feeding into the larger North Pacific Gyre. This explains why historically some Japanese ships disabled in storms have washed up in North America. This may have occurred prior to 1492, although no hard evidence has surfaced. More convincingly, scholars have estimated that between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, more than a thousand Japanese vessels were swept out to sea. Among them, a handful are known to have made landfall in the Americas. A rice cargo ship called the Tokujômaru, for instance, ran into a storm that broke its rudder, causing it to drift for sixteen months until running aground in 1813 near Santa Barbara, California, with only the captain and two crew members still alive. Nearly twenty years later, a similar incident occurred when a merchant ship bound for Tokyo, the Hojunmaru, was knocked off course by a typhoon, only to reappear after fifteen months, rudderless and dismasted, in Cape Flattery, the most northwesterly point in the continental United States.

…

The San Lucas voyagers reported an unexpected abundance of life in that part of the ocean, an observation that confirms their whereabouts. The collision of the warm Kuroshio Current with subarctic water produces eddies of plankton that are visible even in satellite images. In turn, the plankton attract a variety of animals. The Spanish expeditionaries saw “pig fish as large as cows” and marveled at the “dogs of the sea with their paws and tails and ears . . . and one of them came aboard and barked at us” (almost certainly sea lions, with external ear flaps and very vocal, in contrast to true seals). Quite fittingly, the men of the San Lucas also crossed paths with the greatest migratory species of all. “Black shearwaters followed us, shrieking all day and night,” Don Alonso recalled, “and their cries were very unsettling because no sailor had ever heard them like that.” Sooty shearwaters pursue a breathtaking figure-eight migration spanning the entire Pacific. As they range from New Zealand to Alaska and from Chile to Japan, these noisy birds dive for food in some of the most productive regions of the Pacific, including the plankton-rich eddies off the coast of Japan, where some must have spotted the San Lucas slowly making its way in a northeasterly direction.

Climbing to forty degrees and up to forty-three degrees of northern latitude, the pioneers overshot the warm waters of the Kuroshio Current. They had journeyed farther north into the great ocean than any other Europeans, sailing through frigid waters coming from the Bering Sea. Only Magellan’s Trinidad had plied this part of the Pacific more than forty years earlier, where a storm had dismasted it and forced the last survivors to turn back. Extreme cold—that old nemesis of previous return attempts—became a serious concern for the crew members of the San Lucas, especially because they were missing most of their clothes after the washing party had to abandon them in Mindanao months earlier.

The San Lucas voyagers now faced “the greatest cold of winter,” as the captain put it, “even though it was the middle of summer in June and July.” For thirty days the sky turned so dark and stormy that they were unable to see the Sun or the stars. On June 11, snow fell on the deck and did not melt until noon. Lamp oil became so frozen that the bottle in which it was kept had to be warmed over a fire, “and it still came out in pieces like lard.” Modern historians have sometimes seized on such unlikely details to discount the veracity of Don Alonso’s account. “Porpoises as big as cows present no difficulty,” wrote one of these skeptics, “but it is unlikely that cooking oil would freeze in mid-summer.” Lamp oil freezes at around fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the process can start even at higher temperatures. Sailing by the Aleutian Islands in June, especially during the Little Ice Age, would force such doubters to amend their opinions.

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Filed under Japan, Mexico, migration, North America, Pacific, Philippines, science, Spain

by | 21 January 2025 · 5:12 am

Micronesia and the North Pacific Gyre

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 120-121:

The second arrow shot across the Pacific, the Villalobos expedition of 1542–43, essentially retraced the previous track and confirmed that the best way to sail from the Americas to Asia was indeed via a straight path across the ocean just north of the equator. Wind maps of the North Pacific show a broad westward-moving band of winds (and currents) between five and twenty-five degrees of northern latitude, connecting Mexico and the Philippines. Wide, continuous or nearly so, and quite regular all year round, this portion of the North Pacific Gyre amounts to a veritable highway across the ocean, far easier to locate and navigate than the northern portion for the return trip, as we shall see.

Just as earlier Atlantic navigators had used the Sargasso Sea to orient themselves, the Saavedra and Villalobos expeditions began identifying some of the Micronesian—that is, tiny—islands on the way to the Philippines. To get a sense of the difficulty, we need to consider that all the Micronesian islands add up to 271 square miles, or a quarter of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States, but are scattered over a patch of the Pacific that is roughly the size of all the contiguous states in the Union. Still, the Saavedra expedition was able to sight a group of low-lying atolls they grandly called “las Islas de los Reyes,” or “the Islands of the Kings” (probably the present-day Faraulep Atoll at 8.6 degrees of northern latitude). More promisingly, the Villalobos expedition spotted a small island with many coconut palms and thickly inhabited (likely the present-day island of Fais at 9.7 degrees of northern latitude). The captain called it Matalotes because, as they passed, some of the islanders paddled toward the vessels and called out in cheerful Spanish, “Buenos días, matalotes,” or “Good morning, sailors.” Somehow they had interacted with Spaniards before.

The Legazpi expedition pursued the same direct trajectory across the Pacific as the previous two voyages and benefited from the knowledge acquired up to then. The four vessels in Legazpi’s squadron remained safely inside the band of favorable winds and currents of the North Pacific Gyre, covering the six thousand miles between Mexico and the first Micronesian islands in record time. At every stage of the journey, the pilots—the very best in all the Spanish Empire—knew their precise location relative to the North Pacific Gyre because they estimated their latitude (north-south distance) every day.

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Filed under language, Mexico, Micronesia, migration, Pacific, Philippines, Spain

by | 19 January 2025 · 6:00 am

Spanish Shipboard Life, 1564

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 103-105:

Life aboard the ships followed new rhythms and obvious improvements over Navidad. The mosquitos and other insects vanished almost instantly (though not the fleas and lice), and the ocean breeze provided effective relief from the heat. The expeditionaries also gained immediate access to foods that had been denied to them before. Each soldier received a daily ration of one pound of hardtack and either a pound of meat or half a pound of dried fish along with fava beans or chickpeas. Doled out in three square meals a day, this was more than enough. Every Sunday afternoon, some cheese was added to the ration for variety. The liquids on offer were also generous: three pints of water per day along with wine, enough not only to keep hydrated but also to soak and soften the hardtack. Commander Legazpi had said nothing to the four ship captains about the distribution of spirits, but we know that the crew members would never have consented to crossing the Pacific without this indispensable tonic for the body and mind. Indeed, alcohol was an important tool, deployed especially during storms to steel the mariners’ resolve and “warm their stomachs.”

These rations were tangible improvements. Yet the negatives far outweighed the positives, beginning with the cramped conditions. To understand the sailors’ circumstances in a way that makes sense to us, we must imagine a good-sized urban apartment occupied by about one hundred strangers. A single toilet—but no shower or sink—would have to do for everyone, along with a very rudimentary kitchen and no furniture other than sea chests (wooden boxes) scattered all over the deck and below and serving as chairs and tables as needed. Two or three times a day, pages brought out platters of food into which everyone stuck their fingers liberally to get the best pieces of meat or servings of chickpeas. At night, everyone but the most privileged had to find a reasonably level surface to sleep on—always too close to others—and try to get some rest in spite of the noises, odors, and constant movement. Spending merely a week in these conditions would have been taxing, yet the expeditionaries had to endure this for months.

Aboard the ships, there was strict regimentation. Everybody “without skipping anyone if not for illness” was assigned daily to a four-hour shift. This could occur at any time of the day or night, with the worst shifts having evocative names like “drowsiness,” or modorra (from midnight to four), “dawn,” or alva (from four to eight), and so on. The time was measured carefully with multiple hourglasses, or ampolletas, that had to be turned without fail every thirty minutes, and the assigned tasks ranged from moving barrels and serving as lookouts to pumping out the awful-smelling water that always collected at the bottom of the ship. Those on shift could also be ordered to perform navigational duties like hoisting and trimming sails, not only because the crew was spread too thin but also “to get everybody trained and accustomed to such work in case of necessity.” The remaining twenty hours of the day were far more leisurely. With so much time to kill, the expeditionaries were tempted to play cards or engage in other games of chance, betting their daily rations, clothes, and weapons. Of course, all of this was strictly prohibited, as was invoking the name of God in vain or using profanity, a constant occurrence among seamen. Any of these infractions could lead to punishments ranging from public shaming and withholding of one’s daily ration to imprisonment and torture for repeat offenders.

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by | 18 January 2025 · 6:56 am

New Spain Demographics, 1500s

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 89-91:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

Lope Martín was from Lagos, an old port near Portugal’s southwestern tip that had historically served as a stepping-stone from Europe to Africa. In the summer of 1415, a powerful fleet had gathered there before crossing the Mediterranean to capture Ceuta. In later years, Lagos had turned into Prince Henry the Navigator’s base of operations. Famous local pilots included Alvaro Esteves (who charted the “gold coast” of Africa) and Vicente Rodrigues (one of the foremost pilots to India). As Portuguese fleets had traced the contours of western Africa, Black slaves had flowed back into Lagos, giving rise to a sizable slave and free population of African ancestry. This contingent did much of the work around the city, in the harbor, and aboard the ships of exploration. Many of the apprentices and sailors in Lagos were Black slaves whose salaries were pocketed by their masters or free Blacks engaged in the harsh life of the sea.

Lope Martín was, as we have seen, a free mulatto, that is, a person of mixed Afro-Portuguese descent. Although little is known about his early years, he must have cut his teeth aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships of exploration, carrying sacks of flour and climbing ratlines to the top of the mast. The fleets outfitted all along the southwestern coast of Iberia, on both the Portuguese and Spanish sides, constantly required fresh recruits like him. Towns like Huelva, Moguer, and Palos de la Frontera had supplied Columbus with a crew willing to risk their lives across the great ocean in 1492. Less than one hundred miles in length, this stretch of Portuguese-Spanish coast was at the time the preeminent maritime region in the world. Somewhere in this exploited and often brutal milieu, where knife fights could erupt over insignificant incidents, Lope Martín went from page (children of eight to ten) to apprentice (older and more experienced) to mariner (twenty and older and in possession of a certificate), all the while voyaging to Africa, the Americas, and perhaps as far as Asia. Lope Martín’s passages likely ended in different Portuguese and Spanish ports. These comings and goings must have taken him away from his native Lagos, well inside Portugal, toward the Spanish border, and finally to Seville, the only Spanish port open to trade with the New World.

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by | 17 January 2025 · 6:46 am

Magellan in Spain

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 52-55:

Columbus’s exploits loom so large in our understanding of the past that other great discoveries recede into the background. In truth, any reasonable observer at the turn of the sixteenth century would have conceded that, even after Columbus’s famous voyages, Portugal’s lead in the global race had widened until becoming almost unassailable. Portuguese navigators reached the tip of Africa in 1488 and found the route to India a decade later. King Manuel I of Portugal took pleasure in writing lengthy letters to the Spanish monarchs, his in-laws and rivals, informing them, “Our Lord has miraculously wished India to be found” and telling them about the spices, precious stones, elephants, exotic peoples, and the immensely profitable trade carried on there. “We are still awaiting news from the twenty-five ships that we sent the previous year [1502],” Manuel gloated to Ferdinand and Isabella in one of his letters, “and after they come back in September there will be time to send some more.”

In the meantime, Spain could point to only a few Caribbean islands and inklings of an unknown continent, but no precious spices, porcelain, or silk. The new lands did offer some gold, but they never replaced the original quest of finding a western approach to the incalculable riches of the Far East. Spaniards explored the continent blocking their way, looking for a passage that would connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. They came up empty-handed until Fernão de Magalhães—a Portuguese defector like the Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín a generation later—put Spain back in the race. Ferdinand Magellan had come of age during Portugal’s torrid expansion into Asia in the 1500s. Yet he had a falling-out with the Portuguese crown and went knocking on neighboring doors. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Magellan’s move to Spain.

Magellan caught up with the roving Spanish court at the town of Valladolid. For someone accustomed to the sound of waves and the proximity of sailboats, it must have been strange to have to journey to the middle of Iberia to propose a maritime venture in a town surrounded by agricultural fields and interminable plains. He did not arrive alone but was accompanied by two brothers, Rui and Francisco Faleiro, both cosmographers whose reputations exceeded Magellan’s. The trio complemented one another well. Magellan came across as a man of action who had fought in India, Malaysia, and North Africa, while the Faleiros were armchair academics. As they waited for an audience with the Spanish king in February and March of 1518, the Portuguese visitors grew unsettled by what they heard. The new monarch, Charles I, was an awkward eighteen-year-old who had come from Belgium just a few months before and had great difficulty communicating in Spanish let alone Portuguese. Worse, the trio had to tread carefully in a court riven by a power struggle between Charles’s advisers recently arrived from Belgium and the old Spanish officials from the previous monarch.

Interestingly, during the early negotiations Rui Faleiro rather than Magellan emerged as the leading voice. The older of the two Faleiro brothers, Rui was deferentially referred to as a bachiller (or bacharel in Portuguese), the highest university degree one could get at the time. Before leaving Portugal he may have been considered for a new chair in astronomy established at the oldest university in the kingdom (what is now the University of Coimbra) by the Portuguese king himself. It was the highest position in the field. One of the reasons that perhaps impelled Rui Faleiro to join Magellan in Spain was being passed over for this prestigious appointment; academic rivalries and pettiness were already alive and well in the sixteenth century! In spite of this setback, and notwithstanding a rumor that “he was possessed by a familial demon and in fact knew nothing about astrology,” Rui Faleiro remained a top European cosmographer. Sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described Rui Faleiro as “a great man in matters of cosmography, astrology, and other sciences and humanities.” There is little doubt that he was extremely accomplished if mercurial and mentally unstable. Rui’s younger brother Francisco Faleiro was just as talented and would go on to find long-term employment in Spain as a leading nautical expert. Together the two Faleiros and Magellan were very credible petitioners.

On the day of the audience, Magellan and Rui Faleiro arrived not with charts as would have been expected but with “a globe that was very well painted and showed the entire world, and on it Magellan traced the route that he would follow.” The two petitioners explained that they intended to cross from one ocean to the other “through a certain strait that they already knew about.” Even though the globe was detailed, the portion of South America where the strait was supposed to be had been left intentionally blank. Magellan and Faleiro had evidently taken some precautions in case anyone present at the audience should wish to steal their project.

Their knowledge of a passage between the oceans—the alpha and omega of many New World explorations—would have been more than enough for the royal sponsorship. But Magellan and Faleiro went further. As one witness at the audience recounted, “They offered to demonstrate that the Moluccas [Spice Islands] from where the Portuguese take spices to their country are on the side of the world that belongs to Spain, as agreed by the Catholic Monarchs and King Juan of Portugal.” The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had established a line of demarcation running from pole to pole through the Atlantic but did not contemplate extending the line to the other side of the world. As Portugal and Spain, however, had continued to sail in opposite directions, such an antimeridian had become necessary. Measuring longitude or east-west distance was still extraordinarily difficult in the early sixteenth century, so no one knew quite where to draw this line in the distant Pacific. All the same, in the early 1510s the Portuguese had planted trading forts in Malaysia and the Spice Islands while Spain had stood by helplessly. Yet in the winter of 1518, Magellan and Faleiro had become persuaded that the Spice Islands were actually on the Spanish side, a conclusion all the more startling in Spain because it was coming from these top Portuguese navigators and cosmographers.

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