Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
Thanks to several sources of the time, we can confirm the close relations of Bartolomeu Vaz de Landeiro with the Philippines, China and Japan. The Portuguese merchant became – in the latter country – a symbol of the authority of Macau, helping the Jesuits to build churches, endowing them with money for their missions on the ground and “supporting their political allies with weapons and money,” as researcher Lúcio de Sousa tells us in a note on the subject of legal and clandestine commerce in the early days of Macau. They called him “king of the Portuguese.” Such was his reputation.
And Landeiro, to perpetuate it, in the opinion of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Colin, author of the Labor Evangélica de la Compañia de Jesús en las Islas Filipinas, “went everywhere in a retinue of richly dressed Portuguese and a body of guards composed of eighty slaves, Muslims and blacks, armed with halberds and shields.”
Basically, he dressed and always acted like a king, and in Guangzhou he would help the Chinese authorities to fight endemic piracy, even hunting the fearsome Lin Daoqian in waters neighboring Siam.
The fight against this scourge benefited the Portuguese so much – “that thus saw their presence in Macau and good diplomatic relations with the Chinese authorities safeguarded, eliminating possible competition and commercial rivalries” – like the Chinese, who saw in these western barbarians a considerable military force, convenient patrol in the China Sea and “a vigorous commercial force, capable of supplying China with silver and gold” and bringing wealth to its ports and its trading communities, always abundant in people and initiative, throughout that region.
In 1583, Landeiro would represent the city of Macau in the Philippines and there he would sign a commercial agreement embodied in the three ships he sent there, “the first to sail from Macau to Manila”; these ships – remember – fundamental to the recovery of the economy of a Manila deeply shaken by the great fire of 1583, and also to ensure its defense in the face of the imminent possibility of a rebellion on the part of the Chinese community, “composed of the so-called sangleyes,” against Spanish colonizers.
It didn’t take long for Landeiro’s ships to start competing with Chinese junks in terms of commercial activity on the island of Luzon, and it was due to his nephew, Vicente Landeiro, the first contact between the Spanish was now established in Manila and Japan, more specifically the port of Hirado, where the Landeiro ship would land on August 4, 1584.
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