Chapter 28
The Governor’s Chest
Manila
Miguel López de Legazpi died in Manila on 20 August 1572. He was succeeded as governor by the royal treasurer, Guido de Lavezaris, who had first come to these islands with Villalobos thirty years before.
How did the Manila galleon trade begin?
It began with Legazpi’s settlement and Urdaneta’s return route. Chinese merchants came to Manila in growing numbers after 1571, bringing silk and porcelain, and Spanish ships carried these goods across the Pacific to Acapulco, returning with Mexican silver. The galleons sailed the route almost every year from 1565 until 1815.
20 August 1572
On 20 August 1572 Miguel López de Legazpi dies in Manila. He has been in the islands seven and a half years, and he never went home.
In a chest his officers find the king’s decree making him governor and captain-general. The man who takes his place, by an order from Mexico, is the royal treasurer, Guido de Lavezaris.
Lavezaris first came to these islands thirty years before, as the accountant of Villalobos’s starving fleet, and went home by way of India, carrying ginger to plant in Mexico. Now he governs the islands that Villalobos’s men named Felipinas.
29 June 1573
In June 1573 Lavezaris writes to the king. In eight years, he says, only seven hundred soldiers have come to the islands, and as fast as they come, others die. Luzon is large, rich in rice, fish, pigs and buffalo, and full of gold mines.
The Chinese merchants come more every year, and earlier in the season, and bring richer goods, because the Spaniards treat them well. The Portuguese have told them that the Spaniards are robbers, but more ships come anyway. If merchants would come from Mexico to buy, he writes, they could make their fortunes.
They will. Within a few years the galleons are carrying Chinese silk and porcelain from Manila to Acapulco, by Urdaneta’s road, and Mexican silver back the other way, and they will go on doing it every year for two hundred and fifty years.
Finis