12 - The Sound and the Fury : A Vigorous Admonition from the King of Spain to the Audiencia of Manila (1620)

Summary

Abstract

This document is the main part of a letter sent to the officers of the Audiencia of Manila in 1620. It addresses the accumulated abscess of the colony's financial situation and the abyssal contrast between private lucre and public expenses. Its particular interest lies in the efficiency and vigor of its exposition: the undisclosed administrator of the Council of the Indies, which was presided over at the time by Fernando Carrillo (1617–22), unsurprisingly the former president of the Council of the Treasury (1609–17), seems to explode with anger, denouncing the wrongdoings and unfaithfulness of the Spanish community and more particularly of the royal officers of the Philippines.

Keywords: Alonso Fajardo, transpacific trade, Philippines, colonial Philippines, Spanish government in the Philippines

The question of the intense trade between Asia and the New World through the establishment of the Manila galleon transpacific route is certainly one of the most discussed in Philippine historiography. The problem of the Philippines’ deficit is equally central to the appreciation of the first configuration of Spanish colonialism in Asia and was already the subject of many debates and quantifications during the seventeenth century.

Consequently, the articulation between these connected issues— namely, the contrast between enormous private profits, which relied on the importation of a silver cargo close to 2 million pesos a year at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and an annual public shortfall of around 230,000 pesos, seems to be an essential study. To what extent could this paradoxical situation have weighed on the relationships between the Council of the Indies and the local administrators of the Philippines? Here is an inescapable question to the understanding of the contrasted signification of the Spanish presence in the Philippines, in the global context of the Hispanic empire.

It was in the early 1590s, under the administration of Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmarinas (1589–93), that the colony opened its long cycle of deficits, due to the increase of military expenses, whether to prevent external threats (English and Japanese, among others) or to pre pare offensive projects (the conquest of Mindanao, Moluccas, projects regarding China).