Why I decided to write a novel about Intramuros set in 1762
It all began with a simple challenge–a response to the dominant presumption that the history of my nation, or rather the noteworthy part of it, began in 1872 with the martyrdom of the Gomburza priests (Fathers Gomez, Burgos and Zamora). While 1872 was a truly decisive event, having produced the first acrid fumes of a revolution about to blaze within the next quarter of the century, our shortsighted view pitched upon the spot where we think our history of nation-building began makes for a deficient understanding of how the Filipino identity came about.
To frame a response I knew I had to choose one central event not necessarily as momentous, but one that captured the legacies of the past era on one hand and on the other defined the colony, its people and government for the years to come. The year 1762, in my opinion, serves as a sensible demarcation that divides Philippine history into: 1.) its monastic beginnings and 2.) an age of involvement (albeit indirectly) in the messy mesh of global geopolitics. Not that I am dismissive of the archipelago’s vital role as a regional trade hub connecting Asia, the Middle East and Europe since the pre-colonial days, but after 1762, the colony was suddenly presented with a broader vista of a modernizing world, and from the sidelines it witnessed under the stray drizzles of European Enlightenment not only the entanglement of alliances and the creation of new nation-states, but more importantly the gradual decline of empires.
In the long run, my object is to revisualize the quiet impact of the Age of Reason (by way, for instance, of “Filipinos” who had the privilege of traveling to or interacting with the Old World) and its point of intersection with any nascent sense of collective belongingness triggered by the Othering tendencies of conquest and which came to a head in our yearning to become a nation. This task is too huge to be contained in just a single book, but somehow I must start somewhere, a prolegomenon to a saga of endemic pursuits geared toward self-determination.
The arrival of the British, an episode less known to us, heralded a discontinuance of European myths about a Manila that was mighty and impregnable as its Spanish colonizers might have probably portrayed back home. What they found (and this was not unexpected for English civil servants who had experienced Madras) was an ancient city crumbling to the teeth, savaged by corruption within and left under the mercy of tropical pirates and Dutch colonists without.
The redcoats came and occupied Manila not as an end in itself but as a collateral casualty of the Seven Years’ War, the so-called first true “world war,” which saw Spain France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and the Habsburgs locking horns with Great Britain, Prussia, Hanover and Portugal. The governor brought by the new conquerors, a descendant of the pirate Sir Francis Drake, administered the islands from inside Intramuros as though the colony was a dying business establishment. Except for a brief foray to subdue rebellious stragglers in Pasig and Marikina, the British didn’t venture outside the walled city’s gates, nor did they send an appreciable force to try to defeat the governor-pretender Simon Anda y Salazar’s government-in-exile entrenched in his loyal stronghold in Pampanga. They in fact sought war the least in the time of global war, and viewed the expedition merely as an opportunity for a one-time loot, a prized capture that would provide an admiral or a general retirement security at old age. This brushing aside was evident when, at the war’s conclusion in 1763, the archipelago was–either inadvertently or not–left out of the Treaty of Paris where the victors saw to it that they were to keep their territorial spoils, thus automatically reverting the islands to Spanish rule.
Yet the British occupation led to several realizations. Manila’s easy capitulation in the hands of weary sailors and a few hundred weather-beaten regulars underscored the already apparent neglect suffered by the walled city for decades. With cannons that looked like relics, military regiments composing of native and Mexican convicts, a nonexistent naval defense system, and armament barely enough for half a week’s fighting, Manila was an easy prey to any imperial force armed with the minimum battle readiness of the day. Furthermore, the Britons arrived at a time when the Spaniards were headed by a hesitant archbishop cum interim governor-general obviously unschooled in the art of war. The trauma that followed–the rape, the looting and the hanging of the defenders–jolted the Spanish leadership and by the 1770s resulted in subsequent improvements in the capital’s defense system under the leadership of, unsurprisingly, Anda y Salazar who in July of 1770 succeeded as governor-general thanks to his analysis of the islands’ conditions and his criticism of the corruption of the friars and past administrations.
Though Anda y Salazar’s improvements of Intramuros were not memorable enough, his efforts paved the way to the modernization of the walled city’s fixed defenses.
Meanwhile, from a foreign perspective, the awareness of Spanish weakness in their far-flung colonies piqued other powers’ interest in the Philippine Islands. Despite (or possibly because of?) their initial oversight Britain, in fact, toward the end of the 18th century dispatched a second expedition headed for the conquest of Manila under the leadership of Colonel Arthur Wellesley, Napoleon’s future bane and later 1st Duke of Wellington, but the expedition had to be called off as the squadron was suddenly ordered back to India to quell a native revolt. The Japanese, Germans, and the Dutch (who had long harbored imperial interest in the islands) had sent lesser feelers only to be occupied with their squabbles internal or across the border.
Since my concern at the moment is situated solely in the years that I think were the fulcrum of Spanish domination in the east as it vacillated from a once mythical power to an old artifact of the Age of Sail, there’s still a long way toward the deconstruction of the Philippines’ historical progress from 1762 onward and analyzing the dialectic stream of historicism that culminated in the events surrounding and following 1872.
By writing a first novel based on its events, it is my hope that after some time I will be able to at least help delineate the misty side of the bloody curtain that is 1872. I will not call it neglect–there have already been a good number of scholarship on the subject–but in order to realize why and how we ended up wishing to become a nation, more effort is required to understand the long road of how we got there.1762
To frame a response I knew I had to choose one central event not necessarily as momentous, but one that captured the legacies of the past era on one hand and on the other defined the colony, its people and government for the years to come. The year 1762, in my opinion, serves as a sensible demarcation that divides Philippine history into: 1.) its monastic beginnings and 2.) an age of involvement (albeit indirectly) in the messy mesh of global geopolitics. Not that I am dismissive of the archipelago’s vital role as a regional trade hub connecting Asia, the Middle East and Europe since the pre-colonial days, but after 1762, the colony was suddenly presented with a broader vista of a modernizing world, and from the sidelines it witnessed under the stray drizzles of European Enlightenment not only the entanglement of alliances and the creation of new nation-states, but more importantly the gradual decline of empires.
In the long run, my object is to revisualize the quiet impact of the Age of Reason (by way, for instance, of “Filipinos” who had the privilege of traveling to or interacting with the Old World) and its point of intersection with any nascent sense of collective belongingness triggered by the Othering tendencies of conquest and which came to a head in our yearning to become a nation. This task is too huge to be contained in just a single book, but somehow I must start somewhere, a prolegomenon to a saga of endemic pursuits geared toward self-determination.
The arrival of the British, an episode less known to us, heralded a discontinuance of European myths about a Manila that was mighty and impregnable as its Spanish colonizers might have probably portrayed back home. What they found (and this was not unexpected for English civil servants who had experienced Madras) was an ancient city crumbling to the teeth, savaged by corruption within and left under the mercy of tropical pirates and Dutch colonists without.
The redcoats came and occupied Manila not as an end in itself but as a collateral casualty of the Seven Years’ War, the so-called first true “world war,” which saw Spain France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and the Habsburgs locking horns with Great Britain, Prussia, Hanover and Portugal. The governor brought by the new conquerors, a descendant of the pirate Sir Francis Drake, administered the islands from inside Intramuros as though the colony was a dying business establishment. Except for a brief foray to subdue rebellious stragglers in Pasig and Marikina, the British didn’t venture outside the walled city’s gates, nor did they send an appreciable force to try to defeat the governor-pretender Simon Anda y Salazar’s government-in-exile entrenched in his loyal stronghold in Pampanga. They in fact sought war the least in the time of global war, and viewed the expedition merely as an opportunity for a one-time loot, a prized capture that would provide an admiral or a general retirement security at old age. This brushing aside was evident when, at the war’s conclusion in 1763, the archipelago was–either inadvertently or not–left out of the Treaty of Paris where the victors saw to it that they were to keep their territorial spoils, thus automatically reverting the islands to Spanish rule.
Yet the British occupation led to several realizations. Manila’s easy capitulation in the hands of weary sailors and a few hundred weather-beaten regulars underscored the already apparent neglect suffered by the walled city for decades. With cannons that looked like relics, military regiments composing of native and Mexican convicts, a nonexistent naval defense system, and armament barely enough for half a week’s fighting, Manila was an easy prey to any imperial force armed with the minimum battle readiness of the day. Furthermore, the Britons arrived at a time when the Spaniards were headed by a hesitant archbishop cum interim governor-general obviously unschooled in the art of war. The trauma that followed–the rape, the looting and the hanging of the defenders–jolted the Spanish leadership and by the 1770s resulted in subsequent improvements in the capital’s defense system under the leadership of, unsurprisingly, Anda y Salazar who in July of 1770 succeeded as governor-general thanks to his analysis of the islands’ conditions and his criticism of the corruption of the friars and past administrations.
Though Anda y Salazar’s improvements of Intramuros were not memorable enough, his efforts paved the way to the modernization of the walled city’s fixed defenses.
Meanwhile, from a foreign perspective, the awareness of Spanish weakness in their far-flung colonies piqued other powers’ interest in the Philippine Islands. Despite (or possibly because of?) their initial oversight Britain, in fact, toward the end of the 18th century dispatched a second expedition headed for the conquest of Manila under the leadership of Colonel Arthur Wellesley, Napoleon’s future bane and later 1st Duke of Wellington, but the expedition had to be called off as the squadron was suddenly ordered back to India to quell a native revolt. The Japanese, Germans, and the Dutch (who had long harbored imperial interest in the islands) had sent lesser feelers only to be occupied with their squabbles internal or across the border.
Since my concern at the moment is situated solely in the years that I think were the fulcrum of Spanish domination in the east as it vacillated from a once mythical power to an old artifact of the Age of Sail, there’s still a long way toward the deconstruction of the Philippines’ historical progress from 1762 onward and analyzing the dialectic stream of historicism that culminated in the events surrounding and following 1872.
By writing a first novel based on its events, it is my hope that after some time I will be able to at least help delineate the misty side of the bloody curtain that is 1872. I will not call it neglect–there have already been a good number of scholarship on the subject–but in order to realize why and how we ended up wishing to become a nation, more effort is required to understand the long road of how we got there.1762
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