Global cargo, colonial burden: Museum revisits Galleon Trade
A full-size replica of a Spanish galleon stares out into Manila Bay, the centerpiece of a museum that will transport visitors back to the 17th century, when conscripted Philippine mariners hastened the era of globalization.
The Museo del Galeon, which focuses on the hulking Espiritu Santo, aims to tell the story of Spain’s 250-year-long Galleon Trade across the Pacific from the perspective of the Filipinos who built and crewed the towering vessels.
“This is a land with a great tradition of seafaring, but often under inhumane and degrading conditions,” the museum’s executive director, Manuel Quezon, told AFP, as he noted that Filipinos still make up a quarter of the world’s sailors.
“And it is one that we don’t flinch from telling,” said Quezon, who is also an Inquirer columnist.
Transporting culture, disease
The Espiritu Santo, built with forced labor in 1603, was one of 181 treasure ships that made hundreds of trips between Manila and the Mexican port of Acapulco between 1565 and 1815 under harrowing conditions that historians say killed one in three crewmen.
“It was the first global trade, connecting three continents,” said Francis Navarro, director of archives at the Ateneo de Manila University. “It made the world smaller.”
Sailing west across the Pacific for three months, the ships brought silver coins from Spain’s American colonies to Manila, where they would be exchanged for luxury goods like silk, porcelain and jade from China.
The return voyage lasted as long as a year, with cargo then transported across Mexico by mule before heading to Spain, completing a trade loop between the old and new worlds.
The galleons brought more than silver to the Philippines. They brought ideas, food, religion, fashion and more—the things that “made us who we are,” Quezon said.
But the colonial trade also transported pests and disease, ravaged the archipelago’s forests and wrecked communities.
Forced labor
Able-bodied men from these communities were required to offer 40 days of unpaid service to fell trees and build ships under Spanish foremen.
Others were forced into service as sailors for up to 10 years at a time.
Cramped inside vessels overladen with precious cargo, crew members subsisted on a miserable diet of hardtack, an unleavened bread, and salted meat and fish that routinely spoiled and left many gravely ill.
“You had an astounding mortality rate of about 30 percent per voyage,” Quezon said.
Deadly rebellions were sparked in some areas where galleons were built, Navarro added, including on the Cavite coast along Manila Bay.
The multi-continent trade would only end with Mexico’s fight for independence from Spain.
‘Filling in the blanks’
Fourteen years after its conception, the museum at the SM Mall of Asia complex opens May 1. Visitors can walk the decks of the replica ship immersed in a giant, wrap-around LED display of star-studded night skies.
Artifacts from voyages line exhibits surrounding the vessel, including part of a Chinese tomb that once served as ballast in the hold of a galleon.
“We’re filling the blanks in with this museum,” Quezon told AFP on a tour ahead of its opening. “The child who comes through, we want them to realize that many of the things that they take for granted have absolutely amazing stories behind them.”
Funding for the “billion-peso” ($16.5 million) project came from the Philippines’ wealthiest families after bids to secure financing from the government and a Mexican billionaire faltered.
Local hardwood gone
But while the Espiritu Santo is a physical marvel, it will never set sail.
Early in the process, Quezon, a historian and grandson of a former Philippine president, learned to his dismay that the local hardwood and water-resistant species used to build the galleons had long been wiped out.
A wooden galleon of Espiritu Santo’s size would have required 800 trees that could now only be found in the forests of Myanmar, he said.
While the museum representation is scrupulously faithful to what is known of the original vessel’s design and dimensions, it was built largely with fiberglass and other man-made materials.
“In those days, you would have leveled entire forests just to be able to produce a single galleon,” Quezon said. “That would have been irresponsible, particularly because it wasn’t meant to float.”
