The reduction of the Philippines to Spanish rule was the work of men of the sword; the retention of rule was largely due to men of the Cross. Although King Philip's treasury paid heavily to establish and maintain the network of mission stations, their close supervision and moral domination of the country people helped a mere handful of Spaniards—never more than 5000 until the very last years of the régime—to maintain a hold over the scores of jungly and mountainous inhabited islands (Figure Plate XIII, “MANILA AND LUZON, 1635. ”).^[37] Even so, that hold was at times precarious, and in the Muslim south never really complete and assured: although, after the occupation of a ‘royal’ village in 1578, Governor Sande officially annexed the whole of Borneo, even the treaty made three hundred years later (1876) with the Sultan of much smaller Jolo was ‘written on water’,^[38] and Cross and Crescent remain in armed conflict to this day. The hispanisation of the Philippines by the Gospel was a continual drain on the royal treasury—only in 1701–31 was there a surplus, for the rest the administration was carried on by heavy subsidies from New Spain;^[39] but the Galleon trade put much treasure into private pockets—not least into those of Philippine ecclesiastics.

Here indeed, in a vulnerable wedge between the farthest eastward penetration of an expanding Islam and the expansionist Japan of Hideyoshi, was the end of the world for Iberian expansion westwards. The Philippines were ‘Spanish by the grace of New Spain, of Legazpi and Urdaneta, the true testamentary executors of the abortive dream of Columbus’.^[40] It follows that the islands were the colony of a colony, and all through the voluminous reports to Spain run complaints of the alternate indifference and interference of the Viceroy in Mexico. These documents in the earlier volumes of Blair and Robertson give a wonderful view of the agitated intrigue, the tinsel grandeurs and real miseries of life in this small frontier pond, which was yet too close to mighty and mysterious Asian empires to be merely a backwater.

Each new Governor reports proudly that he has built or is building an efficient- 158 -

- 159 -galley fleet to cope with the Moros; each successor finds only a few rotting boats, or none. The Chinese traders and artisans—the ‘Sangleys’—are a constant problem: they bring poor shoddy silk and will take only gold and silver, making profits of 100 or 200 per cent; their cheap cottons ruin local crafts and drive the ‘Indians’ into laziness and vice; they force up prices. Yet we need them for the commodities they bring (including, after two decades of settlement, even food) and to carry on the artisan and retail trades that Spanish gentlemen cannot be expected to handle; and then there are doubtless vast possibilities in China, both for commerce and conversion. We ought to put down the infamous crime of sodomy that the Sangleys are said to perform on their ships, corrupting the simple Indians—‘but, since the punishment may hinder commerce, it will be necessary to observe moderation’ until your hard-pressed Majesty advises us. Between the Chinese and the Mexicans, the Manila merchants are squeezed out, and so much money is drained away. The widows of noble conquistadores marry beneath them to keep the encomienda in the family, which is a disgrace to civil society, bad for morale and morals. Church and State are often at loggerheads: Bishop Salazar, playing the las Casas, vehemently attacks the atrocious ill-usage of the Indians, but per contra officialdom alleges that ‘the friars make use of them by the hundreds … whipping them as if they were highwaymen’, and have ‘no grief or pity’. Manila has ‘not even a prison, and that under an Audiencia’. To get money for the urgently needed fortification of the city, Governor Dasmariñas monopolises the sale of playing-cards and imposes a 2 per cent property tax, but applying this to the clergy he incurs ‘the censure of the bull of the Lord's supper’ and is excommunicated. He retorts that the clergy are ‘all better merchants than students of Latin’, and this is backed up by a list of consignors to Acapulco by the Galleon—all ecclesiastics or Audiencia officials. With under 600 Spanish citizens in 1599, the colony doesn't really need an Archbishop and three Bishops and all their underlings—‘one is sufficient’. We may let an Archbishop have the last pungent word: Majesty in Madrid

With all this, there was a great deal of vigour and panache. Legazpi died in August 1572, and his followers took far too seriously, given their scant resources, his boast that ‘we are at the gate’ of the great realm of China. Within eighteen months of his death, his notary Fernando Riquel was writing (January 1574)- 160 -that the many very populous cities on the year's journey between Canton and Peking ‘could be subdued and conquered with less than sixty good Spanish soldiers’—con menos de 60 españoles buena gente.^[42] Even assuming that a cipher has been dropped out, Tomé Pires, dying in a Chinese jail half a century earlier, could have told him better. It is a neat comment on these delusions of grandeur that before the year was out Manila itself nearly fell to the assault of a mere pirate.

This Cantonese sea-rover, Lin Ah Feng, or to the Spaniards Limahon, commanded some three score well-armed junks and was seeking a new base, having made the China coast too hot to hold him: his most prominent lieutenant was a Japanese. He landed near Manila on 29–30 November 1574, and his two assaults were beaten off only by very desperate fighting, and some luck. He retired to Pangasinan, some 175km north of Manila, and set up a little kingdom, which in March 1575 was blockaded by land and sea by Juan de Salcedo, Legazpi's youthful grandson and the most notable conquistador of Luzon. During the blockade Salcedo met a Chinese warship under Wang-kao (‘Omoncon’), sent to track Limahon down. This was of course an excellent opportunity to open relations with China, and Wang agreed to take an embassy, led by Fray Martin de Rada, back to Fukien. Unluckily, Salcedo thought that Limahon was safely boxed up, and conducted a leisurely investment: the pirate was an abler man than the Spaniards accounted him and was able to build up a fleet of small craft from the remains of his fleet, burnt by Salcedo. At the beginning of August he slipped away, to meet an obscure end.

The result for the Fukienese embassy was disastrous: the Chinese suspected collusion. After an initially good reception, Rada and his companions were brought back to Manila by a Chinese mission, and there were further misunderstandings with the foolishly arrogant new Governor, Francisco de Sande. The Chinese wanted Limahon's head, or at least presents suitable to their rank; Sande could not produce the first and on a point of pique would not provide the second. The envoys agreed to carry Rada and another friar back to Fukien, but beached them in northern Luzon; and there was no further talk of the virtually promised Spanish base on the Bay of Amoy, the very site for which had been pointed out to Rada. Sande's reaction was an absurd antipathy and scorn for all Chinese, so that this very promising opening for friendly relations was replaced by crazy schemes of conquest—schemes which in their wild disregard of common-sense, let along logistics, recall King Picrochole even more than Don Quixote.^[43]

There were tremors also in the south: Drake was at Mindanao and the Moluccas in 1579, and eight years later Thomas Cavendish sailed into San Bernardino Strait and right through the southern islands, as though the Spaniards were in the Philippines to no purpose.^[44] These were mere premonitions; more immediate was the threat from the north. In 1580–1 a Japanese freebooter set up a base in Cagayan, in the north of Luzon, and was expelled in 1582 only after very hard fighting. Japan had been included, rather vaguely, among those neighbour- 161 -kingdoms whose conquest would be both pious and glorious, and perhaps easy, but more sober thoughts began to creep in: ‘These occasions are not so much a matter of jest as they have been hitherto; for the Chinese and Japanese are not Indians’ but as valiant as many Berbers ‘and even more so’. Matters were to become even more serious from 1582, for in that year Nobunaga was assassinated, to be speedily avenged by his even abler general Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi's advent to power heralded an intensified drive towards consolidation in Japan, if not an end then at least a very marked limitation to the freedom of action of the Kyushu daimyo, and in due course a menacing expansionism. By 1593 any merriment was on the other side: ‘The Xaponese laughed [and] said that the defence of these islands was merely a matter for jest. …’^[45]

In 1582 also news reached Manila and Macao of the forcible union in 1580 of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns. A completely separate Portuguese administration in the Indies as well as in Europe was guaranteed by the Cortes of Thomar (1581), which accepted the Spanish takeover, and until late in the ‘Sixty Years Captivity’ the promise was honoured; nevertheless the change could not but lead to complications—commercial, political, religious, military. The ancient rivalry survived in the forced marriage, and was often very sharp indeed. Loyalty to a single Crown could not wish away the competition for the trading, and mission, rights in Japan.