History

Wake of the Manila Galleons
By Bob Schulman

Imagine it’s the 16th century, and you’re on a 2,500-ton Spanish super-galleon sailing off the coast of Mexico. You’re on your way back from a long, dangerous voyage to Manila, where traders from New Spain (Mexico) swapped silver coins and ingots – looted from mines across Mexico and Peru – for silks, porcelain, spices and the other riches of Asia.

Winds on the return portion of the trip took you to Northern California, after which your ship lumbered down the California coastline to the tip of the Baja Peninsula, then skirted the Gulf of California to the Mexican mainland.

On the way to your home port at Acapulco are some of the most gorgeous bays in the world at Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo and Zihuatanejo. But your captain casts a nervous eye on these spots – particularly on Zihuatanejo -- because they’re known to shelter pirate fleets. And yours is the biggest prize of all.

The story goes back to 1565, forty-four years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. In the Far East, silver rules. Emperors, pashas and shahs want to fill their palaces with the shiny stuff from across the sea. Meanwhile, the viceroys, marquises and grandees of Mexico want to fill their royal haciendas with silks and porcelain from China and hot stuff from the Spice Islands.

So East and West made a deal to swap their goods. The trading post would be at Manila, a Spanish colony already serving as a commercial link between Europe and Asia. To get there from Mexico, the westerners came up with a new breed of four-deck jumbo ships big enough to carry millions of silver pesos (coins about the size of a U.S. silver dollar) and as many as 1,000 traders, crewmen, soldiers, clergymen, settlers and others traveling to the Far East.

The vessels went down in the Spanish history books as the “Naos de China” (ships of China), in the Chinese books as what translated to “the Silver Argosies,” and in the English books, “the Manila galleons.”

Their eastbound voyages started at Acapulco, Mexico’s chief western seaport, where the galleons were loaded with silver and supplies for Spain’s overseas colonies. They sailed out of the bay under protection of the five gun-studded bastions of Fort San Diego, then latched on to the westerly trade winds to arrive in Manila two to three months later.

It was a lot harder getting back. The ships, now re-loaded with Asian treasures along with returning passengers, frequently had to sail as far north as Japan and even the Aleutians to find winds and currents heading back across the Pacific. Usually, they ended up off the California coast near Cape Mendocino (170 miles north of modern-day San Francisco); from there, they caught winds blowing off and on down the shorelines of California, Baja California and western Mexico.

The trip from Manila to Acapulco typically took five or six months, and it was fraught with perils. Not only did the sailors have to worry about storms, tricky currents, starvation, dehydration, scurvy, and rocky, fog-shrouded shorelines, but their exotic cargoes were the prize targets of pirates, privateers (a sort of legal piracy) and wartime enemies of Spain.

No wonder of all the galleons’ voyages – they trekked back and forth across the Pacific singly or in pairs for 250 years until Mexico booted its Spanish rulers out of the country in the early 1800s -- around one out of five trips ended in some kind of disaster.

PIRATES ON THE PROWL

It didn’t take a galleon scientist to figure out when the homeward bound ships would show up off the coast of Mexico. They usually left Acapulco in January or February to take advantage of the season’s steady winds to the Philippines. They’d arrive in Manila in late spring, and after a few months of trading would start the homeward voyage around July – which would normally put them along the Mexican shoreline heading to Acapulco by mid-winter.

So all the pirates had to do – when they weren’t otherwise picking off coastal commerce -- was to find a cozy harbor and sit around for a few months waiting for the galleons’ enormous sails to pop up on the horizon.

Among the brigands’ favorite hideaways were spots now enjoyed by visitors to Mexico’s modern-day luxury resorts running south from Cabo San Lucas and nearby San Jose del Cabo down to Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo and Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo, the latter having the last sheltered bay before Acapulco. If the ships could make it past there, the last 150 miles to their home port were usually a breeze.
Zihuatanejo’s snug, meandering bay, however, was a formidable hurdle. Often lurking there were ships flying the Jolly Roger under the command of such notorious swashbucklers as Sir Francis Drake, William Draper and Thomas Cavendish. Perhaps most familiar to the bay was the fleet of English raider George Anson, variously known as a pirate, a privateer and a legitimate wartime commodore sent to Mexico to prey on Spanish shipping.

World explorer and historian Owen Lee tells the story of one hapless galleon on its way back from Manila that blundered into the bay – right into the cannons of pirate ships at anchor in the harbor. Fine Chinese silks from the ship drifted ashore on a local beach, from which it got the name still on the maps today, Playa La Ropa (beach of the clothes).

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARES

The galleons’ grueling trans-Pacific voyages were just part of the silver-for-silk odyssey. It began at mines across Mexico, from which raw silver was smeltered into coins and ingots to be carried overland to Acapulco, and at the mega-veins of Peru, from which the coins went by sea to Acapulco.

When the galleons returned full of porcelain, silks, spices and the like, they were off-loaded at Acapulco where the single largest share – the so-called King’s Fifth (equivalent to a 20 percent tax on the cargo) -- was earmarked for a 7,000-mile trip to the Royal Court of Spain. Another share of the goods was set aside for sale or trading at the port, while other portions went to merchants who’d helped finance the trip. Still other portions “mysteriously disappeared” from the docks to show up for sale elsewhere in Mexico and at Spanish ports all the way down to Peru.

The King’s Fifth was carried by mule trains and on the backs of Indians over crude roads from Acapulco half-way across the country to Mexico City – where more trading (and pilfering) was done -- and then on to eastern Mexico’s main port at Veracruz. From there, treasure fleets embarked periodically on an arduous trip to Spain, first having to dodge pirates hiding just outside the bay in the Gulf of Mexico.

Their route took the vessels through more pirate-infested waters in the Caribbean to a stop at Spanish-colonized Havana, after which the sailors’ remaining challenges were to stay afloat and on course during horrendous weather across the Atlantic.

By the time the Asian treasures got to the Royal Court in Spain, much of the goods had traveled two-thirds of the way around the world.

Bob Schulman was vice president-public relations for Frontier Airlines until his retirement four years ago. Now a freelance writer specializing in Mexican destinations, he is a member of the Mexico Writers Alliance and the Society of American Travel Writers. Schulman, who lives in Denver, Colo., is a frequent visitor to Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo.

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