Trans-Pacific seafaring in the galleon age

The last galleon sailed from Manila to Acapulco, Mexico, in 1811, returning to the Philippines in 1815. From the inception of this trans-Pacific trade in 1572, natives (indios) from the Philippines manned the galleons along with Iberian sailors or mariners. In fact, as early as 1565, native sailors from the islands of Cebu and Bohol accompanied Urdaneta's trailblazing voyage back to the Americas.Footnote ⁵ In 1587 several indios from Luzon (‘Indios Luzones’) also took part in Unamuno's exploration of northern California, with many of them relied upon to be at the head of inland expeditions.Footnote ⁶ In regard to the galleons, in the late sixteenth century Iberian sailors comprised the majority of the crew, but by the early 1600s Philippine natives were in the majority, their proportion rising to two-thirds by the early 1700s.Footnote ⁷ They reached over 80% in the 370-men crew of the Santissima Trinidad in 1760.Footnote ⁸ As a key node in this trans-Pacific network, the port of Cavite served the galleons’ needs and provided its labour requirements.Footnote ⁹ By ethnicity, the native sailors were naturales (‘pure natives’), mestizos de Sangley (Chinese mestizos), and Sangleyes (Chinese), but in New Spain they were known simply as chinos (Chinese) or indios chinos (‘Chinese Indians’).Footnote ¹⁰

The Philippine sailors were generally ratings and not officers of these vessels; ‘Spaniards, too, sometimes sailed as common seamen, but their wage was very much higher than [indio] seamen of the same rating’.Footnote ¹¹ This prefigured the pattern of ethnicity-based differential labour rates, which would become pervasive with the liberalization of global shipping in the late twentieth century.Footnote ¹² Despite their lower wages, ‘the seamanship of the natives was universally accorded high praise’; they were ‘dexterous helmsmen’ and knowledgeable with the ‘mariner's compass’.Footnote ¹³

The galleons were governed by a set of rules that sought to impose order and strict discipline on board. This maritime law regulated the hiring, remuneration, and dismissal of mariners, and stipulated the duties and responsibilities of mariners and managing owners. All mariners had to make an oath of loyalty, after which they ‘could go nowhere except with the consent of the managing owner’.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the penalty for desertion was mild, if not unenforceable: ‘The mariner was bound to make compensation to the owner for all losses incurred as a result of the desertion, and in case he was unable to do so, he could be imprisoned until such time as he was able to pay.’Footnote ¹⁵ A further measure was to withhold payment in the Americas, with about four-fifths of a seaman's wages (in vouchers, not money) paid in the Philippines on the galleon's return.Footnote ¹⁶

Nevertheless, large numbers absconded. In 1618 seventy-five natives were on board the Espiritu Santo as common seamen, but only five returned.Footnote ¹⁷ In the course of the galleon's run of two and a half centuries, innumerable natives from the Philippines deserted and settled in the Americas, married local women, and created a stable population in Mexico City, Acapulco, and surrounding areas, which acted as a magnet that attracted other seamen to desert and remain in the Americas.Footnote ¹⁸ These former seamen took up occupations as farmers, distillers of tuba (palm wine), craftsmen, militiamen, barbers-cum-phlebotomists, peddlers, and so on. The Philippine natives and their descendants formed a mixed-race, low-caste enclave in Mexican colonial society, which nonetheless left a mark on mainstream Mexican culture and gave it an ‘Oriental heritage’.Footnote ¹⁹ There were other Asians there, as about 600 slaves arrived in Mexico from across the Pacific each year from 1600 to 1673.Footnote ²⁰ After the emancipation of chino slaves in 1672, fewer Asians arrived during the period from 1700 to 1815, perhaps only 30–40% of earlier arrivals.Footnote ²¹

Taylor posits that, despite the hardships of the trans-Pacific voyage, ‘shipping as seamen was merely the chance to escape from captivity or worse conditions in the Islands’.Footnote ²² But many also passed themselves off as sailors who ‘secured the position through favouritism in order to gain passage, and to share in a profitable trade’.Footnote ²³ It appears that a mixed set of motivations impelled natives to join the galleons’ crews, and later to decide to settle in the Americas. From Mexico, some of these men are believed to have made their way to Louisiana where they established settlements.Footnote ²⁴

A scientific expedition to collect botanical specimens from the Spanish colonies, commanded by Alejandro Malaspina, left Cadiz in the summer of 1789 with a crew of about 200 – at least four of them natives of the Philippines – who manned the corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida. As it explored the Americas, at least one Philippine native seaman, who had sailed on the galleons three times, joined Malaspina's expedition in Lima, Peru.Footnote ²⁵ In Acapulco, about half of the crew deserted; several of the replacements were Philippine mariners, who had been on the galleons. This crew sailed to Alaska in 1791 in a vain search for the Northwest Passage.Footnote ²⁶ The expedition returned to Acapulco, whence it sailed for the Philippines.

Before the close of the galleon age, natives of the Philippines had spread beyond the Spanish realm, reaching other parts of the Pacific Basin. The trade in fur in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, which traversed the Pacific Northwest, provided the opportunity for a number of Philippine natives to board American and British ships engaged in obtaining fur from Alaska for sale in China. It appears that, in June 1788, the first Philippine native reached Alaska on board the Iphigenia Nubiana, a 200-ton British-owned ship.Footnote ²⁷ The Iphigenia, which flew Portuguese colours,Footnote ²⁸ had sailed from Canton earlier in January of that year. A damaged foremast made the captain, the fur trader William Douglas, decide to take the stricken vessel to Zamboanga (‘Samboinga’), not to Batavia on Java, which was further south, or to Manila, which had not officially been opened to non-Asian ships. For a fee, Zamboanga's Spanish governor allowed the repairs to be made, which were completed in February. The Iphigenia had a crew of forty men, mostly Europeans, but there were also some Chinese. At least one was a native of the Philippines, whom the captain described as his ‘servant, who was a Manilla man’, who ‘spoke the [Spanish] language very well’.Footnote ²⁹ It is assumed that he could communicate sufficiently in English for him to be the ‘servant’ of the British captain, but it is not known whether this Manilaman boarded the ship in Canton or in Zamboanga. His language skills suggest, however, that this would not have been his first contact with the English-speaking world.

In December 1788 another fur trader, Simon Metcalfe from New York, is reported to have brought his 190-ton brig, the Eleanora, to Manila for repairs. He was escorted by a Spanish ship, whose captain offered to help after the Eleanora had been ransacked and burned by pirates while anchored near Macau. In Manila, Metcalfe purchased a new longboat as well as a smaller boat. He also hired thirty native mariners, but in Macau one was dismissed for being a troublemaker. Thus twenty-nine Manilamen, together with American, Chinese, and Portuguese seamen, were with Metcalfe trading for sea-otter furs in Alaska during the summer of 1789. Presumably the Manilamen stayed on with Metcalfe, who made further voyages to the Pacific Northwest, where, in 1794, local inhabitants killed him and his crew.Footnote ³⁰ The British brig Gustavus III traded for sea-otter skins in Alaska in 1789 and again in 1791, with a thirty-one member crew that included at least one Manilaman (‘Minilia man’), whose name was mentioned in the journal of a sailor from Boston as ‘John Mando, Cabbin Steward’.Footnote ³¹ These fur-trading ships would often sail from Alaska to Hawaii, a destination that Manilamen also reached.

In fact, the trade in fur and sandalwood connected the Spanish Philippines to various ports in Oceania. Richards summarizes the available evidence from several ‘stray references’ in travel journals:Footnote ³²

Some Philippine sailors moved even further west from Manila through the network of British-controlled ports. In the 1790s Amasa Delano described seamen who were ‘well known under the title of Manilla-men’ as ‘said to be peculiarly savage’:

The galleon age enabled Philippine native sailors to span the Pacific, settle in the Americas, and even make it all the way to Spain. By the late eighteenth century, some mariners had also ventured beyond the Spanish world, becoming known as Manilamen, participating in multi-ethnic crews, and registering a small presence in southern Chinese ports linked to European and American commerce, various points in the South Pacific and Australasia, and key ports in British India. In the course of the nineteenth century, after the galleon age had come to a close, and as Manila was gradually opened to world trade from the 1790s to the 1830s, a rising number of Manilamen would find employment on American, British, French, Japanese, and other foreign vessels, and engage in other activities related to seafaring.

Transcontinental seafaring after 1815: from whaling to wider horizons

By the 1840s Manilamen had become active in the American whaling industry. Centred in Massachusetts, this industry saw its golden age commencing in 1835 and lasting for about two decades, until the onset of decline in the 1857 depression.Footnote ³⁴ Whaling in the Pacific began in 1818, and between 1820 and 1821 whaling vessels had gone all the way to the Japanese coast.Footnote ³⁵ Apart from the whaling grounds along the South American coast, whaling took place around several Pacific islands, in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, ‘Java, Malacca Straits, and into the Pacific about Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand’.Footnote ³⁶ Although Americans were the officers, the crews (which on average consisted of thirty-two men) were made up of different ethnicities. Manilamen ‘were usually the steersmen, or quartermasters, on American sailing ships in the Pacific’.Footnote ³⁷ Herman Melville's Moby Dick, first published in 1851 and based on the author's own sailing experiences, gave recognition to Manilamen in the whaling industry, at least as oarsmen, who were part of a multi-ethnic force: towards the end of the book, in chapter 100, we read: ‘In a moment [Ahab, the captain of the Pequod] was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars’.Footnote ³⁸

Although there are no estimates as to numbers, Manilamen figured prominently in Pacific whaling, whereas few were involved in whaling off the coast of Alaska. The latter had a late start, in 1848, with the peak registered in the early 1850s, although whaling there continued until the early 1900s. The crew lists of whaling ships that sailed to Alaska positively identified eight Manilamen, who were sometimes known by their Anglicized aliases: two sailing in 1865 (‘John Francis’ and Hosea Nupay), one in 1870 (‘Don Miguel’), two in 1871 (Eligio Duriques and ‘William Andrews’), one in 1873 (‘John Cross’ – Juan de la Cruz?), one in 1875 (‘Pedro Money’), and a final one in 1884 (‘Charles Concordia’). The sailor from 1875 was identified as from the ‘Sulu Islands’, while in 1884 the seaman's origin was listed as the ‘Philippine Islands’. The ages of these men ranged from eighteen to thirty.Footnote ³⁹

At the Philippine National Archives (PNA) one set of documents from 1852 reveals that nine men worked as auxiliaries on an American whaling ship, the Aussell Gibbs. Their names were listed as Ventura Rojas, Agustin Alarcon, Dionicio Cedillo Jorge, Marcelino Rojas, Hermogenes Francisco, Higinio Ferrer, Matias Torres, Jose Javier, and Marcos Carrion. The first eight were from Zamboanga, and the last was originally from Cavite, but had become a resident of Zamboanga.Footnote ⁴⁰ Their names suggest that they were not Muslims. Their remuneration was supposed to have been based on a share of the oil produced: for three of the men, it was a barrel for every 160 barrels of whale oil; for the remaining six, the pay was lower, at one barrel for every 170 barrels. In the argot of whaling, these ‘lays’ (the share in the proceeds of a voyage) were at the lowest end, just a notch above what an inexperienced foremast hand would earn, at one barrel for every 175 barrels. At the highest end, a captain could earn one barrel for every twelve.Footnote ⁴¹

The employment of these men was supposed to have been for a year, and the captain was to bring them back to Zamboanga at the end of the contract period, but apparently not everything went well. The men lodged a complaint with the US consulate in Singapore, asserting that they had been short-changed. As a result of this incident, the Spanish colonial government in Manila issued a directive to provinces ‘especially in the Visayas’ not to grant a passport to anyone intending to board a ship ‘to go to Europe, America, and other distant places’ unless there was a contract that stipulated the ‘corresponding guarantees’.Footnote ⁴²

This was not the first time that an American whaling ship had recruited in Zamboanga, and it was done by whaling ships that operated specifically in this part of the world. The Philippine natives were probably meant to fill up or complete the roster of the ship's crew, for they were hired near the whaling grounds for only a year, whereas from Massachusetts a whaling expedition to the Pacific was reckoned as lasting three years.

This case also indicates that, in the Spanish Philippines, passports could be processed and granted at the provincial level, where seafarers were being directly recruited by foreign shipping concerns. This practice was consistent with the localized control over population movements all around the world until the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by an era of limited border controls in the second half.Footnote ⁴³ In the Spanish Philippines, however, localized issuance of passports apparently persisted until the century's end, despite the attempt at centralization of the colonial state towards the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is noteworthy that, by mid century, men in Philippine port towns, especially in the Visayas and Mindanao, were being recruited for work in the oceans of the world, even before the first three provincial ports (Iloilo, Zamboanga, and Sual in Pangasinan) had been opened to world trade for the first time in 1855.Footnote ⁴⁵ Foreign-owned ships could go to a provincial port such as Zamboanga and Iloilo to recruit seamen, even before it was legal to export commodities from those same ports.

Nevertheless, Manila was the main recruitment centre for Manilamen seafarers. In 1851 forty vessels – twenty American, eleven English, four French, one Spanish, one Portuguese, and three of different South American nationalities – hired 221 native seamen to work on board these ships.Footnote ⁴⁶ Twelve of the vessels hired either just one or two locals, but one Ecuadorian frigate hired eighteen local seamen, and two English barks (barcas) each hired seventeen. The ships’ destinations stretched across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. Twenty-seven legible contracts specified the following ports as the final destination: Boston (seven), New York (five), San Francisco (three), Liverpool, London, and Sydney (two each), and New Bedford, New Orleans, Peru, France, Singapore, and Calcutta (one each).Footnote ⁴⁷

The contracts identified the hired workers, except for a handful from the Manila area, as natives of different provinces outside Manila. Among the most frequently cited provincial origins were Camarines Sur, Ilocos Sur, Pangasinan, and Albay, in Luzon; Cebu, Negros, Iloilo, Antique, Leyte, Capiz, and Antique, in the Visayas; and Zamboanga in Mindanao. It is possible that these men had either migrated to Manila or had been on board a vessel previously. Rather than return to their home provinces, they had probably stayed on in Manila for the opportunity to board another ship. In any event, the diversity of provincial origins suggests the extent to which international seafaring had penetrated various localities in the Spanish Philippines.

The seafarers were paid 11 or 12 pesos per month, usually with an advance equivalent to two months’ work to be paid before the journey. They were to be provided rations on board, and the employer was responsible for defraying the cost of passage back to the Philippines. Anticipating desertions, the contracts that these men signed, usually with a crude cross after their names, barred them from leaving the ship until it had reached its final destination. Most were hired as seamen (plaza de marineros), although a few were employed for the position of steward (mayordomo), such as the lone Manilamen on the New York-bound frigate Ana Maria.Footnote ⁴⁸

Writing in 1851, after residing in the country for three years, Robert MacMicking in his Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines enthused over the literacy of Manilamen sailors in comparison to British seamen:Footnote ⁴⁹

As Morton Netzorg who produced an annotated edition of MacMicking's book in 1967 noted, ‘The Manila men were known worldwide as highly capable crewmen aboard merchant vessels’.Footnote ⁵¹ These seafarers from the Philippines probably covered the major sea-lanes of the world.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, some of these men would have acquired formal nautical training from the Escuela Náutica de Manila. This school for seamanship was inaugurated on 5 April 1820 in Intramuros, although in 1898 it relocated to Binondo.Footnote ⁵² Similar schools were reportedly established in Ternate, Cavite, and in Zamboanga.Footnote ⁵³ The Manila school was originally intended to train young Spanish creoles and peninsulares, as well as children of Europeans (students had to be at least thirteen years old), but probably by the 1850s it had opened its doors to the native population to sustain its enrolment. The nautical school's most famous graduate was Juan Luna, who enrolled there in 1869 as a thirteen-year-old. After five years of theoretical courses and practical sailing to Asian ports such as Hong Kong, Amoy, Singapore, and Batavia, he obtained the certificate of piloto de altos mares tercer clase (‘pilot of the high seas, third class’). While in port he took up landscape painting and eventually, in 1877, he left for Madrid to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, distinguishing himself by winning the gold medal in the 1884 Madrid Exposition of Fine Arts for his Spoliarium.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Escuela Náutica de Manila survives today as the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, located in San Narciso, Zambales Province.

The transcontinental diffusion of Manilamen seafarers was notable not only in mid century, but also in the late nineteenth century. At the Philippine National Archives, one document executed in Manila concerns the request for permission to board an English ship in 1893, involving two men who hailed originally from the Visayas – Benedicto Ynfanta of Antique and Pedro Belitacio of Panglao, Bohol.Footnote ⁵⁵ Other documents pertain to the application for passports by seafarers returning to the Philippines, granted by Spanish consulates at the point of embarkation. For instance, in Newcastle upon Tyne a passport was granted to an unmarried male, a native of Dagupan, on 24 October 1888.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Hong Kong, on 3 December 1888, the Spanish consulate granted a passport to a forty-six-year-old seafarer from Capiz, who had disembarked from an American vessel and was then about to return to the Philippines.Footnote ⁵⁷

The fiery Filipino patriot Graciano Lopez Jaena, in a speech delivered at the Ateneo Barcelonés on 25 February 1889 and published in La Solidaridad in its issue of 28 February 1889, offered a transatlantic view of these seafarers:

The exact basis of Lopez Jaena's figure of 15,000 to 20,000 sailors may be questioned, but he was correct about New York and Philadelphia as large ports with seafarers from the Philippines. No doubt there was a sizeable colony of ‘Filipinos marineros’ in Barcelona, but his statement that there were Philippine sailors in almost all the ports of England, France, and the United States relies on a bit of exaggeration. Nevertheless, in some of those ports Manilamen had in fact settled down. For instance, a seafarer from Cebu, whose name appears in the archival record as Alberto Patino (Patiño?), left the Philippines in the late nineteenth century ‘before the Spanish American War and established his home in England’, married an Englishwoman, and lived in Liverpool. They had five children, two of whom moved to the United States. Patino died in an accident in 1917.Footnote ⁵⁹

Patino would not have been the only seafarer who opted to settle down in a foreign location rather than return to the Spanish Philippines, as innumerable native seamen did during the galleon age. Netzorg's annotation of MacMicking, citing Brady, stated that ‘a member of the crew of the Confederate raider Alabama visited Cape Town in 1863’ and decided to stay there permanently and live as a ‘fisherman’ at Kalk Bay.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Manilamen ‘among the crews of other vessels touching’ at the southern tip of Africa found out about him, they reportedly saw his pioneering success and also decided to jump ship to live and work in Kalk Bay.Footnote ⁶¹ Amid their trans-Pacific voyages, some Manilamen had also settled in Hawaii by the 1850s.Footnote ⁶²

Manilamen as mercenaries: from California to Shanghai

In the course of the nineteenth century, a few hundred Manilamen engaged in naval adventurism and mercenary activities. The first known engagement of this nature occurred in November 1818, when Hypolite Bouchard, a Frenchman who had taken Argentine citizenship, led two ships in a siege of Monterey, California, for thirty days. The goal was to liberate California, then a relatively isolated possession of Spain ruled through Mexico. One of the two privateers, the Santa Rosa, commanded by the American Peter Corney, had a crew of about a hundred men: thirty were Sandwich Islanders (Hawaiians), with the rest made up of Americans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Creoles (Mexicans), Manilamen, Malays, and a few Englishmen.Footnote ⁶³ Anchored near the shore, the Santa Rosa was fired at and abandoned the following morning, the men fleeing to the Argentina commanded by Bouchard, which remained in the middle of the bay. The force eventually captured and sacked Monterey, but reinforcements from San Francisco and Santa Barbara forced the privateers to flee.Footnote ⁶⁴ What eventually happened to the Manilamen is unknown. However, Mercene conjectures that they were recruited in San Blas, Mexico, where the Santa Rosa had originated, San Blas being an alternative port to Acapulco during the galleon trade, where several indios had settled.Footnote ⁶⁵

The involvement of Manilamen seafarers in mercenary activities came to the fore in Frederick Townsend Ward's militia, which he put at the service of the Qing government to defend the key treaty port city of Shanghai, and quell the Taiping rebellion (1850–64). This was a private army, initially known as the Foreign-Arms Corps. In February 1862, the governor of Kiangsu christened it the Changsheng Jun, the Ever-Victorious Army.Footnote ⁶⁶ Born in 1831 in Salem, Massachusetts, Ward came from a family of ship-owners and sailors. He first went to China in 1847, and again in late 1851 and 1857. In 1860 he was in China together with his younger brother Henry, who went into commission trading, while Ward was employed on the American ‘Admiral’ Gough's pirate-suppression steamer Confucius.Footnote ⁶⁷ As the Taiping rebels pushed into Shanghai, leading Chinese officials sought some form of foreign military assistance. Ward's acquaintance with a local businessman named Charles B. Hill, together with Gough's endorsement, were instrumental in his introduction to Yang Fang, a banker and former comprador of Jardine Matheson and Company. Yang, who would become Ward's father-in-law and business partner, was a close associate of Wu Hsü, who in turn was the right-hand man of Hsüeh Huan, governor of Kiangsu in 1860, who controlled Shanghai's foreign affairs from 1857 to 1862.Footnote ⁶⁸ Forming the well-funded Foreign-Arms Corps, ‘Ward found himself in an ideal position to engage in a little filibustering’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As a mercenary, he was rewarded with a regular and substantial salary, and promised large bonuses for the capture of rebel-held towns.Footnote ⁷⁰

In Shanghai in 1860, Ward initially hired a group of American and European adventurers from among discharged seamen, deserters, and other drifters, but they proved to be undisciplined. In searching for better men, he ‘took to the waterfront once again’ and there made the acquaintance of someone who immediately became his aide-de-camp, ‘Vincente [Vicente?] Macanaya. He was twenty-three in 1860 and one of Shanghai's large population of “Manilamen” – Filipinos who were handy on board ships and more than a little troublesome on land’, as Carr journalistically put it.Footnote ⁷¹ By the middle of the nineteenth century a considerable number of Manilamen were found in this part of China. Smith recounts that they were ‘Reputed to be brave and fierce fighters’ and ‘were plentiful in Shanghai and always eager for action’.Footnote ⁷² That there was a sizeable number of Manilamen in Shanghai is also attested by reports that appeared in 1862 in the Daily Shipping and Commercial News of ‘stabbings and murders in the run-down rooming houses where the derelicts congregate, such as those run for the “Manilamen” in Bamboo Town’.Footnote ⁷³ In the siege of Huzhou, which ended in August 1864, along with the Qing army was ‘a strong force known as the Ever-Triumphant Army, a mixed band of Chinese and Filipino mercenaries, commanded by French officers’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Working for the Taiping side were, according to the British governor of Hong Kong, ‘a host of filibustering cutthroats and deserters (subjects of the Queen) who, under the pretense of joining the patriots, are committing every species of robbery and outrage’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In addition to British and other European deserters, there were ‘at least five “Manilamen”, longhaired and dressed in Chinese style, and worshipping God the Taiping way, also stationed in Zhenjiang. They serve as executioners for their Taiping masters, one of them being assigned to kill women found guilty of breaking the Taiping laws’.Footnote ⁷⁶

There are reasons to believe that the Spanish authorities were aware of the filibustering activities of Manilamen on the southern Chinese coast. Archival evidence indicates that, at least from August to December 1860, Vicente Macanaya was one of a six-man Cuerpo de Policía of the Spanish Consulate in Shanghai, with a monthly salary of $30.Footnote ⁷⁷ Whether Macanaya was simultaneously a police officer of the consulate and Ward's aide-de-camp cannot be ascertained. However, despite a neutrality agreement, the Spanish consulate in Shanghai allowed Manilamen during the 1850s and early 1860s ‘to accept random mercenary employment with virtual impunity’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, ‘One consul, Señor Infante de Murroz [Muñoz?], not only refused to block the employment of Spanish subjects, but actually encouraged mercenaries to enter the Chinese military service.’Footnote ⁷⁹

Extant accounts of the building of Ward's Foreign-Arms Corps indicate that Macanaya recruited other Manilamen, some of whom were probably already on the crew of the Confucius captained by Gough, on which Ward had worked and which had a crew of Chinese, Manilamen, and Americans. During the late 1850s Gough's mercenary enterprise ‘operated under semi-official auspices’, given that he was employed by an organization known as the Pirate Suppression Bureau, which seemed acceptable to Beijing and to the American authorities until well into 1860.Footnote ⁸⁰ Earlier, in 1853–1855, during the Small Sword Uprising, when secret-society militia gangs mounted a coup and took over Shanghai for seventeen months,Footnote ⁸¹ Manilamen as well as French, British, and American sailors had fought ‘as mercenaries on both sides without appreciable consular interference’.Footnote ⁸² In July 1860 Ward's force of ‘somewhere between one and two hundred Manilamen’ successfully assaulted Sung-chiang.Footnote ⁸³ Subsequently, many ‘deserted in a dispute over pay, but replacements were quickly and easily found’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Ward's Foreign-Arms Corps included Manilamen, Americans, and Europeans, but, because of rigid discipline (which included capital punishment), there were many desertions.Footnote ⁸⁵ Called Lüsong Yiyong (foreign militia from Luzon) by the Chinese, Manilamen remained a major part of Ward's army, even after the recruitment and training of Chinese fighters.Footnote ⁸⁶ Several dozen of them, under Macanaya, comprised Ward's corps of personal bodyguards, until Ward died in battle in September 1862.Footnote ⁸⁷

Manilamen in the Straits Settlements

British Singapore, founded as a free port in 1819, served as an important node in the global maritime network in which the Manilamen circulated. There must have been a sizeable number of them in the economically vibrant Straits Settlements since the mid nineteenth century, but their presence began to be recorded officially only with the first modern census in 1871. In the 1891 census, the category of ‘Manilamen’ – alongside groups labelled as ‘Achinese’, ‘Boyanese’, ‘Bugis’, ‘Dyaks’, and ‘Javanese’ – fell under the broader classification of ‘Malays and other Natives of the Archipelago’, a practice that persisted until the 1901 census.Footnote ⁸⁸

Census data show over a hundred Manilamen in the Straits Settlements in the 1880s and 1890s (Table 1). Their numbers fluctuated, but by 1901 over a hundred of them were again enumerated. In Malacca, their numbers dwindled to virtually nil, as this port faded into insignificance and became a mere shadow of its ancient glory. In Penang, the number of Manilamen rose from seven in 1881 to thirty-two by the 1891 census. The largest concentration of Manilamen was found in Singapore, where ninety were recorded in 1881. Although this number would decline to thirty-four in 1891, it would rise steadily in the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Table 1 Selected census data on Manilamen and Filipinos in the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States (FMS), 1881–1921

^aPhilippino Race ^bFilipinos ^cno data

Sources: Straits Settlements, Population: according to the census taken in 1881, Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1881; E. M. Merewether, Report on the census of the Straits Settlements taken on the 5th April 1891, Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1892; J. R. Innes, Report on the census of the Straits Settlements taken on the 1st March 1901, Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1901; Hays Marriott, Report on the census of the Straits Settlements taken on the 10th March 1911, Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1911; J. E. Nathan, The Census of British Malaya, 1921, London: Waterlow and Sons Ltd., 1922.

Undoubtedly, the majority of labour migrants from the Spanish Philippines were single men, a pattern consistent with the dominant trend of Asian migrations during this period. Yet, subsumed under the Manilamen category were a number of women, who were counted in the 1881 and 1891 censuses of the Straits Settlements, indicative of a settled population (Table 1). That these migrants had families could be inferred from the population of children aged below fifteen, which made up nearly one-fifth of all the ‘Manila people’ recorded in 1901.

Deducing the occupations of Manila women and men from the available census data is, unfortunately, not possible. Certainly many would have been involved in seafaring as their current or previous occupation. Transient seafarers were probably accounted for by the 57% of Manilamen who were recorded in the 1881 Straits Settlements census as belonging to a ‘floating population’. A curious observation is the decline in this floating population in the 1891 census, and its total disappearance in the 1901 census. Unless this was a result of changes in census enumeration techniques, it would appear that more Manilamen settled down in British Malaya, coinciding with the increased arrivals of Manila women from the late nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth.

Tropical Australia's pearl-shell industry

Commencing in 1869, the pearl-shell industry on Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait of north Queensland, Australia, obtained divers and crew from Singapore. This was after an earlier attempt to import labour through Batavia in the Dutch East Indies had fallen through. As John Douglas, the Government Resident on Thursday Island, recalled:

It is not clear whether the Manilamen were recruited in Manila, or perhaps Hong Kong, and then trans-shipped to tropical Australia via Singapore, or whether recruitment was made among the population of Manilamen in Singapore. One study has suggested that recruitment in the 1870s was carried out in Singapore and Hong Kong.Footnote ⁹⁰ Whether any recruitment was made directly in the Spanish Philippines cannot be ascertained. However, in 1912, in the early part of the American colonial period, there is reference to the use of the merchant house of ‘Messrs. H. W. Peabody and company, an influential firm at Manila’ to recruit Filipinos, although the venture was said to have been unsuccessful, because by this time Australia's pearl-shell industry could not compete with the Hawaiian plantations’ aggressive recruitment of Philippine labour.Footnote ⁹¹

It may be conjectured that, at the outset in the 1870s, some Manilamen left behind their occupation as seafarers to try out the Australian pearl-shell industry, where their contracts continued to refer to them as ‘seamen’. In Singapore these early groups of Manilamen would have undergone medical examination, been vaccinated, and signed a three-year contract, although two-year contracts became quite prevalent by the late 1890s on Thursday Island.Footnote ⁹² They could extend their contracts or sign with another employer, but the last employer, having paid a bond, was compelled to repatriate the workers to Singapore.Footnote ⁹³

Not having been previously involved in pearl-shell diving, the early batches of Manilamen on Thursday Island learned from the handful of ‘white divers’ the techniques of deep-sea ‘dress-diving’, which relied on crude and heavy breathing equipment. The recruits, reported Douglas, ‘soon learned to work in the diving dress, and some of them proved to be excellent divers’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Manilamen, as well as Malays, South Sea Islanders, and Japanese, began to increase in number as the few ‘white divers’ left, because the latter were said to have found the work ‘too hard, the life monotonous and rough, and the climate and other conditions too trying’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Until the turn of the twentieth century, Manilamen continued to receive training as deep-sea divers with each fresh arrival. For employers, training new divers was more economical than relying on expensive, experienced ones: ‘Many owners will not sign on well-known divers, but prefer to break in men and make divers of them than take a man with a reputation.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Manilamen found ‘much favour as “excellent divers and excellent citizens” ’.Footnote ⁹⁷

By the early 1890s, however, the Japanese ‘began to be appreciated as a better class of diver than the Manila men’, probably because the Japanese were seen as ‘fatalists, and will dive in deep waters and take all sorts of risk’.Footnote ⁹⁸ With the depletion of the accessible seabed, the demand for Japanese divers to fish in deeper waters mounted. The Japanese eventually came to form the core of pearl-shell divers and crew, and by the 1880s they were recruited directly in Japan.Footnote ⁹⁹ By agreement of the Queensland colonial government and the Japanese imperial government, Japanese workers were contracted for three years.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By the late 1890s, however, they had begun to be seen as ‘a menace to the white community’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Their presence raised the spectre of Japanese domination and control of the pearl-shell industry. In 1898 the issuance of new pearling licenses was restricted to British subjects. In 1900 the Queensland and Japanese governments agreed to limit the number of Japanese in the colony through joint action in the issuance of passports.

The Manilamen seemed more cautious, bringing in lower profits, than the Japanese. Still, a Manilaman known as ‘cranky Francis’ was commended for having ‘done a lot of deep sea diving at Darnley Island’.Footnote ¹⁰² Another suggested that

In the Torres Strait in 1895 and 1896 there were, respectively, 49 and 66 Manilamen who were deep-water divers and masters (‘persons in charge’), and the number in such responsible positions rose to 90 in 1899 (Table 2). A few amassed wealth to become ‘employers or owners’ engaged in pearl-shell fishing.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, most Manilamen served as crew members, who were in unskilled occupations, such as deckhands, pump hands, cooks, shell-cleaners, swimming-divers, and assistants of dress-divers. In total, Manilamen in the Torres Strait's pearl-shell industry numbered 191 in 1897. The number peaked at 334 in 1899, and it hovered around 250 until 1902 (Table 2). At the century's turn, the aggregate number of labour migrants from the Philippines in pearl-shelling in the whole stretch of tropical Australia totalled well over 600, counting 319 in Western Australia in 1901Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and 49 in Darwin in the Northern Territory in 1902.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This was more than three and a half times the number of Manilamen on the Malay peninsula at around this time.

Table 2 Manilamen and Filipinos in the pearl-shell fishery of the Torres Strait, Queensland, Australia, 1895–1914

^aIncludes crew engaged in bêche-de-mer and tortoise-shell fishing; data for 1896 and 1903–14 are from Evans, ‘Thursday Island’. Evans’ figures on the number of crew members from 1897 to 1902 are much higher than those found in Dashwood, ‘Report’, which are shown in the table above.

^bTotal figures for 1896 and 1903–14 do not include the number of employers or owners.

^cno data

^dNumber of masters and divers combined for 1895–96; sourced from Hamilton, ‘Report’.

Sources: Dashwood, ‘Report’, p. 4, Table 2, p. 26, Appendix O; Hamilton, ‘Report’, p. 35, Appendix P; Evans, ‘Thursday Island’, table between pp. 111–12, unnumbered pages.

The earnings of Manilmen depended on their level of skill. Crew members were paid fixed wages, but deep-sea divers were offered an incentive system that raised their pay according to the catch. One source reported, ‘I have a Manilla man to whom I am paying £24 a ton, two others £20, and two others £18, according to their degree of merit’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Since ‘white divers’ were said to have earned £25 per ton,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ the Manilamen were comparatively cheap labour. In general, divers worked six hours a day, in what contemporaries described as ‘hard work’, with many retiring and ‘walking about maimed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It was reported that ‘coloured divers’ took stimulants, including ‘a great deal of opium’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While out at sea for some six weeks in a row, divers and crew were supplied with basic provisions, as stipulated in the contract. The diving gear, which was worth £140 (‘the pump might last for years, the dress perhaps not more than six weeks’), was apparently at the employer's expense, as £6 or £7 per month were put down for depreciation.Footnote ¹¹¹

Although most Manilamen in northern Australia worked in the pearl-shell industry, some were involved in other activities. In the bêche-de-mer industry in the Torres Strait, Manilamen and Japanese were placed in charge of Aborigines and Torres Strait and South Sea Islanders in the collection of sea slugs off the Great Barrier Reef, at depths of two to three fathoms.Footnote ¹¹² In 1902, in Perth, Western Australia, a lone Manilaman, ‘Peter Marris’, was reported as a ‘foreigner’ who engaged in ‘wood-cutting’, which earned him £3 to £3 10s per week.Footnote ¹¹³

To minimize the threat of connivance among pearl-shell divers, employers made it a point to send out a lugger with a multilingual crew. When the invaluable Japanese became too much of a problem, one employer admitted that Manilamen served as a foil: ‘by all means keep two or three crack Manilla men even if they do not pay us as well as the Jap [sic] hirers. It was only by putting a Manilla-man into the Cissy and threatening to do likewise with other boats that I induced the Japs [sic] to accept my improved hiring agreement of January, 1897.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, the overall effect of a racially and culturally mixed labour force in the pearl-shell industry was said to be one of relatively peaceful coexistence. On Thursday Island, ‘There is scarcely a corner of the earth that does not contribute its quota to the ethnological mosaic. Specimens of nearly all the European and Asiatic nationalities are in evidence. … Amid all this racial diversity there is a well-maintained average of orderliness.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ The practice of employing a mixed migrant workforce, which ran counter to the sentiment of White Australia, has been traced to the ‘pragmatic racism’ of colonial capitalists and authorities, as Noel Loos aptly termed it.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In addition to the largely contractual, maritime workforce, a number of Manilamen and their families settled down in tropical Australia. On Thursday Island it was reported that ‘Of the Philippinos [sic] also a few are married women, for it is the custom of Manila men, when he is sufficiently well off, to order a wife from the conventual schools at Mecao [sic]’. Those who could not afford to import wives from Macau or Hong Kong intermarried with ‘a few aboriginal women’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Some Manilamen on the island also married Melanesians.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The practice of settling down in families was associated with that of applying for naturalization as British subjects (which, however, was not transferable from one British colony to another). Unlike the Japanese (‘there does not seem to be any demand on their part for naturalisation’) but like ‘Malays who are British subjects, and South Sea Islanders’, the Manilamen were said to be ‘very eager to become naturalised’; ‘A good many of them … who are married and have been here for a certain time apply for letters of naturalisation, and generally receive them’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Manilamen and migration at the turn of the twentieth century

The reasons for migration during this period cannot be ascertained, but Philippine labour continued to move amid the revolutionary ferment from the mid 1890s to the early 1900s. As part of the usual comings and goings, some Manilamen based overseas returned to the Spanish Philippines. Among them were Candido Iban and Francisco del Castillo, who returned from Australia in 1894 or 1895, joined the Katipunan, and ‘donated 400 pesos of their 1000 pesos Australian lottery prize’ for a printing press.Footnote ¹²⁰ These funds were probably used to print the only issue of the movement's organ, Kalayaan, which began clandestine circulation in January 1896 and caused a surge in the revolutionary movement's peasant membership.Footnote ¹²¹

Information seems to have flowed through migrant networks, directly linking the origin to the destination. Moreover, specific migration chains appear to have existed at the turn of the century. In Kalk Bay, ‘In the period of the Filipino revolt against Spain still more came and their descendants … now number several hundred’.Footnote ¹²² In the Straits Settlements there were 111 Manilamen in 1891, and 244 in 1911. Reflecting the changed political status of the Philippines under American rule, the 1911 census changed the classification of Manilamen to Filipinos, a category subsumed under ‘Other races’. The number of Filipinos rose further to 282 in 1921 (see Table 1), and if the Federated Malay States are added there were over 400 Filipinos on the Malay Peninsula. Amid the throes of the revolution against Spain and the Filipino–American War, the number of Manilamen in pearl-shell fishing on Thursday Island rose from 212 in 1896 to peak in 1899 with a headcount of 344 (see Table 2). Subsequently the figures fluctuated but remained at over 200 until 1904. From 1905, numbers steadily declined. Restrictive immigration rules and structural changes in pearl-shell fishing resulted in the Filipino population in Australia dwindling to insignificance by the start of the First World War.

There is no information on the overall number of Filipino seafarers in the early twentieth century. Overseas employment opportunities elsewhere seem to have shut down, stagnated, or undergone very modest growth, and the crewing of vessels entered a period of nationalization inimical to foreign seamen. However, with the Philippines under American imperial rule, a new labour emigration stream that saw unprecedented numbers move commenced in the early twentieth century, with Hawaii and the US mainland as the destination. In 1903 nine Filipinos were recruited to join the US Navy; by the First World War their number had risen to 6,000.Footnote ¹²³ Although in some ways a continuation of earlier patterns of migration, the movement of Filipino migrants to the United States is an altogether different story,Footnote ¹²⁴ and that of Filipino seafarers in the US Navy remains to be told.

The maritime world as international workplace

Sometimes singly or in pairs, at other times in larger numbers, Manilamen joined multi-ethnic, multiracial, and polyglot workforces on board vessels that crossed the major oceans of the world. Being the only Philippine native in a mixed workplace did not seem too daunting as to deter a Manilaman from becoming a crew member. Even if they retained their ethnic enclaves, Manilamen evidently knew how to engage with other cultures, including the underside of port life, as in Shanghai. The Manilamen's cross-cultural experiences would have made them into cosmopolitans, who contributed to the vibrancy of world maritime cities such as Philadelphia, Singapore, Liverpool, and Barcelona. The exposure to Spanish colonial culture had prepared them to engage with other cultures and to adapt to new circumstances, and their Anglicized aliases were a sign of this cosmopolitan sensibility. Cosmopolitanism need not be associated exclusively with the highly educated, especially those in the managerial and capitalist classes, for even highly mobile workers, particularly those in world maritime ports, can be cosmopolitans.Footnote ¹²⁵

The immersion of Manilamen in the global maritime world would have differentiated them from other Philippine natives who did not have these sailing experiences. In what ways were those experiences unique? Seafaring by its very nature was very specialized, ‘an occupation with significant psychological and social ramifications for its workers’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Because of the distinctive maritime culture of sailors, ‘it is quite appropriate to regard men socialized in those shipboard usages as at least bicultural, as having available simultaneously two or more distinct yet intertwined cultural systems or resources, based on their origins and on their international occupation’.Footnote ¹²⁷ This was unlike the fluidities of Spanish colonial society, and the constant negotiations of social relations that it engendered.Footnote ¹²⁸ The vessels on which Manilamen worked were a type of ‘total institution’ that emphasized roles and positions, hierarchy, and order:

These rigidities could explain some of the desertions, and the venturing into other sea-based occupations such as pearl-shell diving.

The maritime world, however, also had a liberating dimension. Linebaugh and Rediker have argued that the ‘motley’ crew of workers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic was an incubator of revolutionary ideas and practices, inventing the strike (1768) and helping to instigate the American Revolution (1776).Footnote ¹³⁰ By the nineteenth century, this aspect of earlier Atlantic maritime culture resonated with the readiness of Manilamen to assert the terms of their contract, as did the nine seamen from Zamboanga on the whaling vessel Aussell Gibbs and the Manilamen involved in mercenary activities in Shanghai. Indeed, while the indio was renowned for submissiveness for most of the colonial period, the shackles seem to have been loosened in the greater maritime world. Although it could not be said for all, the revolutionary dynamic was apparent in returning migrants (such as Candido Iban and Francisco del Castillo) who joined the revolution against Spain, and those based overseas who nonetheless contributed to the revolution. For instance, in January 1898, an intelligence report by the Spanish consul in Hong Kong suggested that three of the leading Manilamen on Thursday Island (M. Evangelista, G. Evangelista, and Mariano Reyes) had formed an extension of the ‘revolutionary junta’ based in Hong Kong, and were collecting financial contributions from among the Philippine natives there.Footnote ¹³¹

State, nation, and migrant identities

The burgeoning studies on contemporary Filipino seafarers highlight the role of the Philippine state in promoting seafaring as an ethnic and gendered niche and providing the framework for narratives of masculinity and identities. Even without the sort of direct intervention that the Philippine state has resorted to since the 1970s, states do impact on their migrant populations. As John Torpey has argued, the imperatives of territorial rule are evinced in the way that states put into effect the ‘embracement’ of their subjects: that is, states ‘register’ their populations and render them ‘legible’.Footnote ¹³² They monopolize the right to authorize and regulate movements, and devise systems of registration, along with standardized documents such as passports, travel certificates, and identity cards. States seek to identify individual persons uniquely and unambiguously, in their personal and collective identities.

Notwithstanding the weaknesses of the Spanish colonial state, its very existence and attempts to regulate cross-border movements left a stamp on the social identities of migrants from the Philippines, from the galleon age through to the early part of the twentieth century. Despite relocation to a distant place, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization where this was possible, it would appear that Manilamen retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined – were they in Thursday Island, Hawaii, Singapore, Kalk Bay, Liverpool, or New Orleans.

This observation is illustrated by the simple fact that, on the Malay Peninsula, they and their descendants could be enumerated as Manilamen, when the modern censuses of British Malaya relied on the respondent's subjective identity.Footnote ¹³³ The persistence of the category, starting from the first census of the Straits Settlements in 1871, is indicative of a sizeable group of migrants, who continued, from one generation to the next, to regard themselves as somehow associated with ‘Manila’. In various other ports they were known and subsequently registered in texts and documents as Manilamen. Today, for instance, the descendants of Manilamen in Kalk Bay recognize their Filipino roots.Footnote ¹³⁴

The label ‘Manila’ was emblematic of a place of origin. It could be deemed as a centralizing code within the colony as well as a cartographic shorthand for Las Islas Filipinas outside its borders, the effect being to aggregate the islands under one conceptual umbrella. In Australia in 1897, Manila was deemed to be the ‘nationality’ of migrants, even if ‘Philippine Islands’ was also recorded as ‘country’ of origin.Footnote ¹³⁵ Although not every migrant was ethnically Tagalog, almost all identified with the capital Manila, even then a ‘global city’Footnote ¹³⁶ that was known and recognized by the rest of the world outside the Spanish realm. Thus, tobacco from Ilocos became known internationally as ‘Manila cigars’, and abaca from Bicol was processed to produce ‘Manila hemp’ and ‘Manila paper’. Even José Rizal, who met Suehiro Tetchō on board a ship from Yokohama to San Francisco in 1888, introduced himself, when he was mistaken for a Japanese, as from Manila (Manira), rather than from Las Islas Filipinas. In his writings, Suehiro referred to Rizal as the ‘gentleman from Manila’, that is, as a Manilaman.Footnote ¹³⁷ A convenient label that enjoyed brand recognition, Manila appears to have been applied to and appropriated as a social marker by the men and women who travelled or migrated overseas, regardless of their exact origin in the islands. In that sense, the category showed glimmers of an emergent national community.

Nonetheless, ‘Manilamen’ could well have been a mere geographic designation, emblematic of Manila's colonial status. This was akin to ‘Filipino’ during much of the Spanish period, a term that referred to creoles born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from Spaniards born in Europe. ‘Filipino’ began to be appropriated as a collective label in the 1860s, in conjunction with the creole nationalism that began to crystallize amid the struggle over the control of parishes between the Spanish friar orders and the secular, mainly native, clergy.Footnote ¹³⁸ This nationalist current, however, was extinguished with the suppression of the 1872 Cavite mutiny. The distinctions of colonial society in the Philippines – whether one was indio natural or mestizo, creole or peninsular, Tagalog or Ilocano – were what mattered ‘inside’ the Philippines. These distinctions, including the island or province of which one was reckoned to be a native, were indicated on the contracts and passports of seafarers. Colonial Manila's direct embracement was largely at the local or provincial level.

Nonetheless, many Manilamen demonstrated their patriotism when the 1896 revolution against Spain finally erupted. Their cosmopolitan politics did not necessarily exclude nationalism. Indeed, their being ‘Filipino’ began to be stamped on their identities overseas. In the record of passports issued outside the Philippines, although not consistently, available records show that returning residents who applied for passports from Spanish consulates, whether in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Newcastle upon Tyne, were identified in these documents as ‘filipino’, at the same time that the person's town and province of origin in the Philippines were also mentioned, as was traditionally done.Footnote ¹³⁹ Even the migrant domestic worker, external to the colony, was a ‘criada filipina’ (Filipina maid).Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The terms ‘filipino’ or ‘filipina’ in these Spanish documents were still largely geographical labels, and whether the individuals who carried these passports identified themselves with that label cannot be determined. Nonetheless, the Spanish consulates seemed to have echoed unwittingly the nationalizing label of ‘Filipino’ that the ilustrados (educated youth) had began to appropriate in Spain as a badge of national identity since the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁴¹ If we are to go by the census categories in the Straits Settlements, the Manilamen outside the Philippines continued to be known collectively as Manilamen in 1901, even as the revolution against Spain that commenced in 1896 had begun to assert the founding of a Filipino nation, a monumental undertaking to which many Manilamen as long-distance nationalists contributed while overseas. It would not be long, however, before Manilamen as a whole would identify themselves and be known by the world as Filipinos.