Magellans New Route to the East

In 1517, Magellan moved to Seville, Spain, where he met a well-connected Portuguese transplant, Diogo Barbosa, married his daughter, Beatriz,
and had a son. The Barbosas secured Magellan a meeting with the Spanish court to discuss Magellans idea for a voyage. Inspired by the voyages
of Christopher Columbus, Vasco Nez de Balboa and other explorers, Magellan had devised a plan to find a westward-sailing, all-water route to
the Spice Islands (also called the Moluccas). Young King Charles I readily approved and financed the expedition.
On Aug. 10, 1519, Magellan set sail with 270 men and five ships: the Trinidad (commanded by Magellan), the San Antonio, the Victoria, the
Conception, and the Santiago. From Spain, the fleet sailed to Brazil and then headed south, hugging the coast. They were searching for a fabled
water passage that would allow them to cross South America without going around Cape Horn.
Going was hard. Magellan searched Rio de la Plata, a Brazilian estuary, fruitlessly for a long time. Many crewmembers were freezing in the bad
weather or starving. At Port San Julian, off the coast of Patagonia (which Magellan named), the crew mutinied against Magellan on Easter
midnight. He quelled the uprising, killing one captain and leaving another behind. He also sent the Santiago ahead to scout, but it was
shipwrecked. Most of the crewmembers were saved, and the fleet spent a winter of harrowing storms in Port San Julian.
When the weather improved, Magellan set sail again. On Oct. 21, 1520, he finally found the passageway that would come to bear his name. The
Strait of Magellan is a curvy, narrow channel that separates Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America from the continental mainland. Sailing
through it was treacherous: dangerous to navigate, freezing cold and foggy.
It took the fleet over a month to pass through the 350-mile strait. During that time, the captain of the San Antonio turned his ship around and
sailed back to Spain taking a good deal of the supplies with him.

After 38 days on the strait, the fleet finally emerged at the Pacific Ocean in November 1520. They were the first Europeans to see this ocean.
Magellan named it Mar Pacifico because its waters appeared calm in comparison to the difficult strait waters. Magellan underestimated the size of
the ocean, and the ships were unprepared for the journey. Many crewmembers starved while searching for land. Finally in March, the ships
landed at Guam. There, they were able to replenish their foot supplies before sailing to the Philippines.
Upon landing at Cebu, Magellan was overcome with religious zeal and decided to convert the natives to Christianity. Some of the natives agreed
to convert, while others did not and the split caused problems in the population. The Cebuan king became Christian, and sought to fight
against a neighboring group, the Mactan, who did not convert. The Cebuanos asked Magellan to join them in their fight, and he agreed.
Against the advice of his men, Magellan led the attack, assuming his European weapons would ensure a quick victory. The Mactan people,
however, fought fiercely and struck Magellan with a poison arrow. Magellan died from the wound on April 27, 1521.
After Magellans death, Sebastian del Cano took command of the two remaining ships, the Trinidad and the Victoria (the Conception was burned
because there were not enough men left to operate it). A former mutineer, del Cano led the ships to the Spice Islands. After securing the spices
they had so long ago set out for, the ships set sail for Spain. The Trinidad was attacked by a Portuguese ship and left shipwrecked.
In September 1522 three years and a month since the journey began the Victoria docked back in Seville. Only one ship of the original five
and only 18 men of the original 270 survived the voyage. Among them was Antonio Pigafetta, a scholar who had kept a detailed diary of
the expedition. Though Magellan did not make it around the world, he did lead the first expedition to do so. And though the Strait of Magellan
was too dangerous to be used as a regular route, its mapping proved invaluable to the European understanding of the world as did the
European discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the empirical proof that the world was round.

Voyage to the Philippines

On March 16, 1521, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, attempting to sail around the world for Spain, reached the Philippine archipelago.
Magellan and his expedition were the first Europeans to reach the Philippines, a stop on the first circumnavigation of the globe, though
Magellans portion of that journey would soon end.
The expedition of five ships and 250 men had left Spain on September 20, 1519. Magellan sought a western route avoiding the southern tip of
Africa, which Portugal controlled to the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) of Southeast Asia. Magellan survived two mutinies before sailing around
the southern tip of South America, finding the strait named for him, in November of 1520. Reaching calm waters after a dangerous passage,
Magellan named the ocean west of South America the Pacific Ocean.
As the ships continued sailing west, supplies dwindled, the crew was forced to eat leather and drink a mixture of salt and freshwater, and men
began dying of scurvy. Fortified by provisions secured at island stops along the way, the ships reached the Philippines in March 1521.
Magellan spent more than a month in the area, trading with local leaders and trying to convert them to Christianity. He grew angry at one chief
who refused to cooperate, however, and ordered an attack on his village. Wounded in the fighting, Magellan bravely held his ground while the
rest of his men escaped back to the ship, but then received more wounds and died on the beach.
It took until September of 1522 for the remains of the expedition, 17 survivors under the command of Juan Sebastin de Elcano, to reach Spain.
Though he did not complete this voyage, Magellan is considered the first person to circumnavigate the globe because earlier in his career he had
sailed an eastern route from Portugal to Southeast Asia, the same region he had reached on his last, fatal voyage by sailing west.

Spanish Conquest to the Islands

Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521.

The Philippine islands first came to the attention of Europeans with the Spanish expedition around the world led by Portuguese explorer
Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Magellan landed on the island of Cebu, claiming the lands for Spain and naming them Islas de San Lazaro. He set
up friendly relations with some of the local chieftains and converted some of them to Roman Catholicism. However, Magellan was killed by
natives, led by a local chief named Lapu-Lapu, who go up against foreign domination.
Over the next several decades, other Spanish expeditions were sent off to the islands. In 1543, Ruy Lpez de Villalobos led an expedition to the
islands and gave the name Las Islas Filipinas (after Philip II of Spain) to the islands of Samar and Leyte. The name would later be given to the
entire archipelago.
The invasion of the Filipinos by Spain did not begin in earnest until 1564, when another expedition from New Spain, commanded by Miguel
Lpez de Legaspi, arrived. Permanent Spanish settlement was not established until 1565 when an expedition led by Miguel Lpez de Legazpi, the
first Governor-General of the Philippines, arrived in Cebu from New Spain.
Spanish leadership was soon established over many small independent communities that previously had known no central rule. Six years later,
following the defeat of the local Muslim ruler, Legazpi established a capital at Manila, a location that offered the outstanding harbor of Manila
Bay, a large population, and closeness to the sufficient food supplies of the central Luzon rice lands. Manila became the center of Spanish civil,
military, religious, and commercial activity in the islands. By 1571, when Lpez de Legaspi established the Spanish city of Manila on the site of a
Moro town he had conquered the year before, the Spanish grip in the Philippines was secure which became their outpost in the East Indies in spite
of the opposition of the Portuguese, who desired to maintain their monopoly on East Asian trade. The Philippines was administered as a province
of New Spain (Mexico) until Mexican independence (1821).
Manila revolted the attack of the Chinese pirate Limahong in 1574. For centuries before the Spanish arrived the Chinese had traded with the
Filipinos, but evidently none had settled permanently in the islands until after the conquest. Chinese trade and labor were of great importance in
the early development of the Spanish colony, but the Chinese came to be feared and hated because of their increasing numbers, and in 1603 the
Spanish murdered thousands of them (later, there were lesser massacres of the Chinese).
The Spanish governor, made a viceroy in 1589, ruled with the counsel of the powerful royal audiencia. There were frequent uprisings by the
Filipinos, who disliked the encomienda system. By the end of the 16th century, Manila had become a leading commercial center of East Asia,
carrying on a prosperous trade with China, India, and the East Indies. The Philippines supplied some wealth (including gold) to Spain, and the
richly loaded galleons plying between the islands and New Spain were often attacked by English freebooters. There was also trouble from other
quarters, and the period from 1600 to 1663 was marked by continual wars with the Dutch, who were laying the foundations of their rich empire in
the East Indies, and with Moro pirates. One of the most difficult problems the Spanish faced was the defeat of the Moros. Irregular
campaigns were conducted against them but without conclusive results until the middle of the 19th century. As the power of the Spanish Empire
diminished, the Jesuit orders became more influential in the Philippines and obtained great amounts of property.

Occupation of the islands was accomplished with relatively little bloodshed, partly because most of the population (except the Muslims) offered
little armed battle initially. A significant problem the Spanish faced was the invasion of the Muslims of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. The
Muslims, in response to attacks on them from the Spanish and their native allies, raided areas of Luzon and the Visayas that were under Spanish
colonial control. The Spanish conducted intermittent military campaigns against the Muslims, but without conclusive results until the middle of
the 19th century.
Church and state were inseparably linked in Spanish policy, with the state assuming responsibility for religious establishments. One of Spain's
objectives in colonizing the Philippines was the conversion of Filipinos to Catholicism. The work of conversion was facilitated by the absence of
other organized religions, except for Islam, which predominated in the south. The pageantry of the church had a wide plea, reinforced by the
incorporation of Filipino social customs into religious observances. The eventual outcome was a new Christian majority of the main Malay
lowland population, from which the Muslims of Mindanao and the upland tribal peoples of Luzon remained detached and separated.
At the lower levels of administration, the Spanish built on traditional village organization by co-opting local leaders. This system of indirect rule
helped create in a Filipino upper class, called the principala, who had local wealth, high status, and other privileges. This achieved an oligarchic
system of local control. Among the most significant changes under Spanish rule was that the Filipino idea of public use and ownership of land
was replaced with the concept of private ownership and the granting of titles on members of the principala.
The Philippines was not profitable as a colony, and a long war with the Dutch in the 17th century and intermittent conflict with the Muslims
nearly bankrupted the colonial treasury. Colonial income derived mainly from entrept trade: The Manila Galleons sailing from Acapulco on the
west coast of Mexico brought shipments of silver bullion and minted coin that were exchanged for return cargoes of Chinese goods. There was
no direct trade with Spain.