LA NAVAL DE MANILA

Nick Joaquín
HISTORICAL NOTE: The battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement between the combined
fleets of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States, commanded by Don John of Austria, natural
brother of the King of Spain, and a powerful Turkish armada under Ali Pasha. After a desperate
and sanguinary engagement, the Christian fleet routed the Turks. Some 8,009 Christians were
killed, but 20,000 Turks were killed, wounded, or taken as prisoners. The Christian victory broke
the Turkish naval power in the Mediterranean and ended the last Crusade. Locale of the conflict
was near the Cursolari Islands at the western entrance to the Gulf of Patras, Greece.

1. THE HISTORY
When on the first Sunday of October, 1571, Cross and Crescent grappled at Lepanto, the Cross
won a signal victory. Gilbert Chesterton has, in a famous ballad, celebrated the victory for what
it is: the farewell gesture of Christian Chivalry. Wherefore, the break in his voice. Lepanto was
the last act of the medieval drama, and Chesterton, being a Christian, lets the curtain fall, not
upon the vivas and banners of Success, but rather upon the silence, the stark waste of a
Castilian plain, upon the figures of the Sorrowful Buffoon, the Crusading Skeleton, the Knight
Ridiculous.
His cast, though, is incomplete: Selim the Sot, Don John of Austria, Felipe II, St. Pius V,
Cervantes—there is a grave omission, an omission the latter Chesterton would surely not have
made. For it is well known how firmly the Christian soldiery at Lepanto believed that the Queen
of Heaven herself had participated in the battle, that she had appeared in the midst of the
fighting with a rosary in hand and a sword in the other, exhorting her champions and
confounding her foes.
Certainly, St. Pius V, then pope, and father of this crusade, had ordered that on the day of the
battle the rosary be publicly offered throughout Christendom in spiritual support of the Christian
navies; himself though aged and ailing, presiding on foot the rogative procession in Rome.
Being a Dominican, he was naturally to invoke most fervently the aid of the great Patroness of
his order and to place his confidence in her rosary, those holy beads the continuous recitation of
which he and the entire body of the faithful were to lift to her all that day —now meditating on
the various mysteries of her life (the happy, the tragic, the victorious), now chanting the graceful
invocations of her litany— while out upon the embattled Mediterranean the “last knight of
Europe” chopped down the arrogance of the Sot.

The Church was quick to acknowledge the role of Mary at Lepanto; October 7, the date of the
victory, has ever since been her feast as Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, a feast and an
advocation of hers around which maritime traditions consequently clustered: the Virgin of the
Beads is popularly a Virgin of Sea Battles, a Virgin of Naval Victories. Some eighty years after
Lepanto, she was again to justify those titles, to manifest her power in the faraway Orient of the
conquistadores, to wield her mighty beads in favor of a handful of islands: the small necklace
like archipelago that had been named after the brother of the Lepanto hero.
Among those islands Spanish Chivalry was being granted a long and active indian- summer.
Indeed, if the Manco of Lepanto had come over instead of moping behind in Andalusia, this
sufficiently tearful world would have been spared his Quijote: all dressed up and no place to go.
For in the Philippines the breed of hidalgos still had its Moors to face, its turreted towns to
defend, its unknown lands to conquer. If Lepanto was its last act, our colonial history may be
termed an oriental epilogue to the miracle play of the West.

Besides Moors, there were also the heretics — those Dutch and English buccaneers who had
long harassed the Manila galleons. It was the Age of Pirates. The notorious Drake had dared
set sail on Philippine waters and Thomas Cavendish once all but captured Iloílo. As crusader
and visionary had founded the Spanish empire under the banner of the Cross, so now, pirate
and buccaneer were unconsciously founding the empires of the future—under the banner of the
Skull and Bones.

One such marauding expedition, a Dutch fleet of five, threatened Manila on March 15, 1646,
when there happened to be but two galleons ready to defend her: the said galleons sallying
forth undaunted nevertheless, trusting to win (as the chronicles say) “more by spiritual weapons
than by weapons of war”; and while riding to face the enemy, “the members of the said armada
did with much devotion recite the Holy Rosary, on their knees and in two choirs, all trusting that
by such means they might be found worthy to succeed against the foe.”

The two forces met in the bay of Bolinao, the battle beginning at two in the afternoon and ending
at six in the evening, with the Dutch fleeing in panic, “their lights covered and much damage
done to their ships, but of our side not a man was lost.
”On July 29 of the same year this armada of two was again to sally forth in defense of the City,
enemy having in returned; this time on seven large vessels “which carried such powerful artillery
and some eight hundred men, not including the sailors — and this battle (fought between
Bantón and Marinduque) was one of the fiercest and bloodiest in our day, lasting from seven in
the evening till four at dawn — at which time, seeing how grievously maltreated their ships were
and one on fire, they did retreat and seek shelter, and would not give battle though we called
them to it.”

Two days later the enemy reappeared with six ships, and hostilities were resumed off the coast
of Mindoro, this conflict enduring from noon to the Angelus, when the Dutch fled a third time,
one ship lost and another crippled — “and our armada did acclaim that victory as miraculous
and did attribute it to Our Lady saying that she herself had fought and not men; and many did
testify how, during the battle, voices moved in the air crying: Viva the Faith of Christ and the
Blessed Virgin of the Rosary!” Before the initial battle, moreover, the commandinggeneral,
seeing the great disparity between forces, “did make a vow to the Virgin of the Rosary,
promising her a feast of thanksgiving should the victory fall side, and with every man in the
armada to come on bare feet and offer thanks at her shrine in Manila; which vow and promise,
when laid before the soldiery, they did accept and ratify.
”This vow, still unfulfilled, was to be renewed at the express order of the governor-general of the
Philippines, for hardly had the two triumphant galleons reached Cavite when news came of a
fresh Dutch fleet approaching Mariveles. Though much battered and in need of repairs, the
armada of two had once again to go and grapple with a superior force, this fourth encounter
taking place between the islands of Luban and Ampil, and raging steadily for ten hours, “until
seeing themselves hard-pressed, the enemy did escape and take flight, our ships pursuing and
giving fire still, though one, our Capitana, had been hit in the side and was much feared for and
yet did not sink.”

About a week later three of the Dutch ships, repaired and re-equipped, returned to the scene
and found the disabled Capitana alone, her sister ship having sailed ahead, “and they did
surround and fiercely set on her and did fire so close that there was long a danger of their
boarding the ship; but our men, calling on God and Our Lady, did rise to the contest in such
manner that they wrought a woeful destruction among the enemy, and did totally destroy one
ship and scatter the others, which, fleeing, were discovered and severely punished by the
Galera, a ship dispatched to our assistance — and though our Capitana had been engaged on
such close quarters that for hours it seemed to rain bullets, nevertheless we had but four men
dead.”
Only fifteen men, in fact, had been lost by the defenders in all five battles. And these
victorieswere decisive: the Dutch were to trouble the islands no more, were never again to
overcast with Calvin’s shadow the tiny Rome growing up by the Pásig. This last attempt of theirs
to besiege it had but furnished that “noble and ever loyal city” with one more festival, its most
traditional one. For the armada heroes were not to be content with the simple fulfillment of their
vow. True to that age-old courtesy towards heaven, with which the hidalgo has ever insisted that
any victory of his arms is not so much a victory of his courage as of his faith, they were urgently
to demand from the cathedral-chapter of Manila an official recognition and declaration of those
five victories as miracles wrought by the Mother of God.

The ecclesiastics were, however, not to be hurried: the witnesses must first be heard, the
evidence examined; only after six years did they pronounce a decision, declaring “that the five
victories achieved by Catholic arms over the enemy Dutch in the year 1646 were and must be
considered as miracles, vouchsafed by the divine Majesty of God through the intercession of the
Blessed Virgin, Our Lady, and the devotion to her Holy Rosary; wherefore it is authorized that,
as miracles, the said victories be commemorated, preached, and celebrated.”
And commemorated, preached, and celebrated they have ever since been among us, in a feast
which is purely ours, yet spaciously historical too, kept always on the second Sunday of
October, and popularly known as the “Naval de Manila.”