Giving thanks

April 23, 1610, was a Friday. In those days, Ermita, originally known as Lagyo, was still directly by the sea, and it featured a shrine, with a tower that bore a light at night and during storms. The light served as a beacon to guide ships as they came near the shore, and because of that, the faithful referred to the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary as “Our Lady of Guidance,” “Nuestra Señora de Guia.”

On that day, the statue of the Virgin was brought from her shrine in La Ermita—the hermitage by the seashore—to the Cathedral in Manila, five kilometers away. Before the image, the faithful gathered in prayerful petition—for an expedition had sailed forth, to confront a Dutch fleet bent on conquest. The Spanish squadron, under the command of Juan de Silva, was composed of two galleons (the flagship San Juan Bautista with 26 guns, and the Espiritu Santo with 22 guns), two galleys, two galeotas, and four merchantmen, against a Dutch five-vessel squadron commanded by François Wittert in his 26-gun flagship, the Amsterdam.

This battle would come to be known as the First Battle of Playa Honda; there would be two more in 1617 and 1624, all against the Dutch, and all Spanish victories. But for the purposes of our story, this victory was the result, some piously insisted, of the intervention of Our Lady of Guidance.

As battles went, all of the Playa Honda (today known as Botolan, Zambales) battles were minor victories in the nearly endless skirmishes at the outskirts of the colonial empires battling for European supremacy. The names of the protagonists, the ships themselves, the faith professed by those praying for victory, are, to us, both foreign and domestic; both the stories of occupiers and yet part of the tale of the occupied, with the difference that until we started writing our own history, our own names were generally unwritten or recalled.

This thought kept coming back to me as we came closer and closer to tomorrow’s formal inauguration of the Museo del Galeón. This is a museum dedicated to telling the story of the 250-yearlong galleon trade, the annual journeys from Manila to Acapulco, in Mexico, and back again. In two and a half centuries, 181 galleons made 798 voyages. Each voyage was a demonstration of daring–but also, a Faustian bargain in the quest to gain both gold and souls: historian Jan de Vries tallied 2 million Europeans making trading voyages to Asia between 1580 and 1795, of whom only 920,412 survived (a mortality rate of 54 percent; one life for every 4.7 tons of Asian cargo brought to Europe). Notice the absence of the lives of others, including our own, the ones who built and crewed, to a large extent, these ships.

This was something those of us involved in the Museo del Galeón vowed to rectify: the galleon trade is an important, even crucial, part of our collective story; but it cannot be detached from what came before–our world and history before Western conquest—and must include our story after, in which we have become one of the biggest players in the maritime industry, with all the challenges that it represents to families and society alike.

It is remarkable that we are a fundamentally maritime nation, yet landlocked in so many of our mentalities. It is our hope that by experiencing what it might have been like to enter and explore a galleon, a sense of curiosity and wonder—even recognition?—might be kindled in Filipino and foreign visitors alike.

Yes, the heart and soul of the museum is a ship: a historically accurate representation of the galleon Espiritu Santo—the same one that participated in the First Battle of Playa Honda. Here comes a quirk of fate that can convince you there must be something auspiciously at work behind the scenes: the Espiritu Santo was chosen to be the galleon to represent, life-size, full-scale, visitable, and explorable by young and old alike, long before we thought we’d have our inauguration tomorrow. In fact, at first the Espiritu Santo was chosen because it seemed, uniquely, never to have had to participate in battle, only for further research to show that it had; and as it turned out, more discoveries were to come.

But to know what these are, you’ll have to come and visit us in the Mall of Asia Complex, where the museum’s remarkable building stands, thanks to the commitment of the Sy family to the museum. Born of the vision of the late Sen. Edgardo J. Angara, a statesman who did not live to see his ideas come to fruition, brought to living reality by the careful stewardship of Angara’s successor, Carlos Salinas, and a board that is not only distinguished, but dynamic, and with a staff of young, idealistic professionals, we hope to welcome you aboard the Espiritu Santo starting May 1.

Tomorrow, we give thanks that this large but formerly little-known chapter in our collective story is coming to life, to help all of us look at the encounters between cultures that helped create who we are.

You can learn more about us at: https://museodelgaleon.org/

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3