The Confusion

Such are the Diseases and Terrors of the long Calms, where the Sea stagnates and corrupts for Want of Motion; and by the Strength of the Scorching Sun stinks and poisons the distrest Mariners, who are rendered unactive, and disabled by Scurvies, raging and mad with Calentures and Fevers, and drop into Death in such a Manner, that at last the Living are lost, for Want of the Dead, that is, for want of Hands to work the Ship.

–DANIEL DEFOE,

A Plan of the English Commerce

M INERVA DROPPED ANCHOR below the burning mountain of Griga in the Marian Islands on the fifth of September. The next day the Shaftoe boys and a squad of Filipino sailors went ashore and ascended to the rim of a secondary cinder-cone on the western slope of the mountain proper. They established a watch-post there, within sight of Minerva. For two days they flew a single flag, which meant We are here, and still alive. The next day it was two flags, which meant We have seen sails coming out of the west, and the day after that it was three, meaning It is the Manila Galleon.

Van Hoek had the crew make preparations for departure. The next morning the Shaftoe boys struck their camp and came down, still coughing and rubbing their eyes from the fumes that hissed out of that cinder-cone day and night, and after splashing around gleefully in the cove for a few minutes, washing off dust and sweat, they came out to Minerva in the longboat and announced that the Galleon had commenced her long northward run at dawn.

For two days they wove a course among the Marian Islands-a chain that ran from about thirteen degrees at its southern end, to about twenty degrees at the north. Some of the islands were steep-sided volcanoes with deep water all around, but most were so flat that they did not rise more than a yard or two above the level of the ocean, be they never so large. These were belted all round with dangerous shallows, and yet they were easy to overlook in darkness or weather. So for a few days their energies were devoted to simply not disembowelling themselves on coral-reefs, and they did not see the Manila Galleon at all.

Some of the islands were populated by stocky natives who came and went in outrigger canoes, and one or two even had Jesuit missions on them, built of mud, like wasps’ nests. The sheer desolation of the place explained why they’d chosen it as a rendezvous point. If Minerva had set out from Cavite on the same tide as the Galleon, it would have been obvious to everyone in the Philippines that some conspiracy had been forged. Almost as bad, it would have added several weeks to the length of Minerva’s voyage. The Manila Galleon was such a wallowing pig of a ship, and had been so gravely overloaded by Manila’s officialdom, that only a storm could move it. The exit from Manila Bay, which took most ships but a single day, had taken the Manila Galleon a week. Then, rather than taking to the open sea, she had turned south and then east, and picked her way down the tortuous passages between Luzon and the islands to the south, anchoring frequently, and occasionally pausing to say a mass over the wrack of some predecessor; for the passage was marked out, not with buoys, but with the remains of Manila Galleons from one, ten, fifty, or a hundred years past. Finally the Galleon had reached a sheltered anchorage off a small island called Ticao. She had dropped anchor there and spent three weeks gazing out over twenty miles of water at the gap between the southern extremity of Luzon, and the northern cape of Samar, which was called the San Bernardino Strait. Beyond it the Pacific stretched all the way to Acapulco. Yet Luzon might as well have been Scylla and Samar Charybdis, because (as the Spaniards had learnt the hard way) any ship that tried to sally through that gap when the tides and the winds were not just so would be cast away. Twice she had raised anchor and set sail for the Strait only to turn back when the wind shifted slightly.

Boats had come out to the Galleon at all hours to replenish her stocks of drinking water, fruit, bread, and livestock, which were being drawn down at an appalling rate by the merchants and men of the cloth who were packed into her cabins. Indeed this had been the whole point of taking the route through the San Bernardino Strait, for by going that way they had been able to get two hundred and fifty miles closer to the Marianas without passing out of sight of the Philippines.

When finally she had broken out on the tenth of August-a month and a half after departing Manila-she had done so fully provisioned. Almost as important, the officials, priests, and soldiers who had stood by at the foot of Bulusan Volcano to witness and salute the great ship’s departure had seen her venture forth into the Pacific alone.