Chapter 26
Lakandula
Manila Bay
Lakandula was the ruler of Tondo, across the Pasig River from Maynila. When Legazpi arrived in May 1571 he came out in a small boat to welcome him and to ask pardon for Rajah Sulayman and the elder rajah, and the chiefs made peace. On 3 June 1571 the Spaniards and their Visayan allies defeated a fleet from the towns to the north at Bangkusay.
Who led the fight at Bangkusay?
The Spanish records describe a young chief of Macabebe, in Pampanga, who led the boats from the towns north of Manila Bay and was killed in the battle, but they do not give his name. He is remembered today as Tarik Sulayman, a name his supposed descendants gave in the 1800s, and the National Historical Commission’s marker of 2016 honours him as a nameless hero.
April 1571
Back on Panay, swarms of locusts have eaten the rice for two or three years, and people are hungry. News has come from Mexico and Spain: ships, soldiers, and the king’s letters confirming Legazpi as governor, and ordering that the lands be settled.
Legazpi goes first to Cebu, where he makes the settlement a city, with forty or fifty Spanish citizens, and names it after the Santo Niño: the City of the Most Holy Name of Jesus. Then, pressed by his friars to leave hungry Panay, he sails for Luzon on 20 April 1571, with about 230 arquebusiers and twenty-six or twenty-seven ships, large and small, his own and his allies’.
16 May 1571
When the people of Maynila see the governor’s whole fleet entering the bay in the middle of May, they set fire to their town, rebuilt since last year, and cross the river to the town of the chief the Spaniards call Alcandora: Lakandula, ruler of Tondo.
That afternoon Lakandula comes out in a small boat to welcome Legazpi, “in peace and friendship.” He speaks for Rajah Sulayman and the elder rajah, and asks Legazpi to pardon them for fighting the year before. Legazpi tells him to come back the next day with both of them, and he will treat them as sons.
On 16 May Legazpi steps ashore at Maynila, and the three chiefs come to him and declare themselves his friends. They offer to bring the towns around the bay to make peace too. They cannot: there are “five, six, or ten chiefs” in a single village, the Spaniards find, and no one rules them all.
3 June 1571
Not everyone wants peace. A town the Spaniards call Butas, across the river and a league and a half away, joins its neighbours and warriors from the river towns to the north, among them Macabebe in Pampanga, and they send word that they want war. They come as far as Lakandula’s town to shout their defiance.
On 3 June, the feast of Pentecost, Goiti goes out to meet them with seventy soldiers and the Visayan allies. Twenty or thirty war boats come at him, with a great cry, firing culverins and arrows. The Spaniards lash their boats together in pairs and row slowly in, firing their arquebuses, until the attackers turn for the shore. The Visayans leap into the water after them. The Spanish account says hundreds were taken prisoner, and the next day the prisoners were divided among the soldiers as slaves, “reserving a fifth for his Majesty.”
Among the dead is the young chief of Macabebe who led them. The Spanish records do not give his name.