When I started surveying the Manila Galleons, my thoughts wandered back to Mandaon. I asked myself: Did not the Spaniards start it all and the Americans finish it off? There was an astillero (shipyard) in Mobo, Masbate and just across Ticao Island there was a bigger one in Bagatao, Magallanes, Sorsogon. Those astilleros, plus two others at the western coasts of the Bikol mainland, built and repaired Spanish vessels, from the largest galleons to the smallest kasko (canoe) used for naval campaigns and exploration of the islands. Therefore there would be an exigent need for lumber fit for building seaworthy sea crafts. Mandaon was then a luxuriant forest that yielded excellent kinds of hard wood, the kinds that can withstand punitory thrashing in the high seas and, much later, the strenuous drubbing of railway tracks.
Bikol In The Galleon Times is an attempt to look at what happened in the Bikol Region and with the early Bikolanos particularly in places where there were astilleros at the time when, what used to be Ibalon, became the center of frenzied galleon building; at a time when the Dutch menacingly challenged the Spanish naval supremacy in South East Asia.
The engineering involved in building and in sailing the galleons was not discussed here. I peremptorily touched on the commerce that went with the Galleon Trade. I scratched the surface of the politics in the Galleon Trade. This monograph is limited to the information helpful towards the understanding that Bikol and the Bikolanos played a crucial role in the times of the Galleon—when Spain needed those ships most.
I do not carry any whiff of pretension to being a historian for I am but a student of Bikol culture and history. There is so much in our past, as Bikolanos, crying out to be brought to light by Bikolanos ourselves. Juan Alvarez Guerra, Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, Norman G. Owen, Malcolm Mintz, Jason Lobel, Westerners all, have been most helpful towards understanding ourselves. But I shrink in anxiety that we have to wait for those guys from across the oceans to tell us what we were, who we were, what we did, what and how we can be. Novelist Stephen King has opened the doors to alternative history. Let us tell our own stories. It can be done. It must be done.
Thus, I ventured to ask why Bikol and the Bikolanos appear to be insignificant footnotes in that historical period when Spain was able to instill fear in her rivals, and more importantly, she was able to maintain her domination of the high seas for over three centuries. Weren’t the fastest, biggest, grandest, costliest, cannon ball-resistant, and most celebrated galleons built in the Bikol Region using native skills and materials that helped bring full circle the Spanish shipbuilding technology at that period of history?
The study of Bikol and the early Bikolanos and the Manila Galleons is a complex circumstance. The data concerning the study are really hard to come by, almost as “extinct” as the galleons themselves. I had to cope with whatever locally available exiguous documents which are mostly written in Spanish, to boot. Besides, a researcher needs efficient connections and adequate funding to be able to dig up documents stacked in some archives or museums across oceans. Memory has also escaped the people in communities where once upon a time the construction of a Manila Galleon ruled lives, dreams, and futures. We have allowed the winds to blow our own stories beyond our reach.
Relics of the astilleros in Kabikolan failed to survive time and native insouciance. Even oral literature or oral tradition or testimony or oral history or plain orality seem to have forgotten the spell and the fascination that once-upon-a-time stories could beget.
Nevertheless—from here and there, anywhere and everywhere nearby—Bikol in the Galleon Times had to be done hoping that it may be able to open more windows to the past and perchance make out images if not colorful and blithe pictures out of the vast gray. The breadth of this monograph was hedged by available personal resour-ces, mainly financial, but the enthusiasm to dig deeper into the Bikolano contribution to the Galleon Trade as well as its impact on the Bikolano psyche is not a hauled up sail.
I hope that Bikolanos will learn, understand, and appreciate whatever little Bikol in the Galleon Times can share. It will be spiritually and culturally refreshing if more studies on this subject will be undertaken by Bikolano writers, scholars, and historians. This chapter of the Manila Galleon history, more particularly Bikol history, is scandalously understudied. It seems that whenever we wish to know who we were, who we are, where we are, where we will be, we turn to our conquerors for answers and validation. It seems that our subjugation persists well into these modern times because we allow it to eventuate, unwittingly or indifferently may be.
And by way of note, I spell Bikol and other indigenous words with a k but I observe the spelling of similar words as used in official documents. This is consistent with my advocacy of promoting Albay-Bikol to be able to vigorously contribute to the development of a comprehensive Bikol-Bikol embracing all languages in the region to foster clearer communication and appreciation among us, Bikolanos.
Raffi Banzuela
Kabang’an, Kamalig, Albay
November 30, 2011
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