Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
Much less would be known about the relations between Macau and the Philippines without the impressions registered by the travelers who passed through both these cities.
On March 25, 1596 Francesco Carlleti and his father António, merchants from Florence, left Acapulco and, sixty-six days later, after crossing the Pacific, arrived in the Philippines.
When the Spanish governor was informed of their desire to go to Macau, he refused to give them the necessary credentials because, by order of the king of Spain, “whoever went from the Philippines to China would lose their property, be arrested and sent to Lisbon.”
To counter this disagreeable decree, the Florentines decided, in May 1597, to leave clandestinely from Manila on a Japanese ship bound for Nagasaki, where they remained until March 3, 1598. They then left for Macau “carrying out the journey in twelve days on a ship whose captain was the son of a Portuguese father and a Japanese mother, with the company of several Portuguese.”
The presence of the Carletti in Macau, despite the support of the Jesuits with whom they had traveled and whom they asked “to keep their goods for them, as they feared that the Portuguese would take them away,” did not go unnoticed and soon they found themselves in a dungeon and subject to rigorous interrogation as the residents of the burgeoning port “had known they had been in the Philippines and were keen to maintain a ban on trade between Portuguese and Spanish.”
A huge bail and the promise to embark on the next ship bound for India freed Francesco from misfortune, but not his father, who would leave his bones in the City of the Name of God.
Malacca and Goa were mandatory passages before Francesco’s definitive return to Europe in 1602.
Also the Portuguese Pedro Teixeira, a contemporary of Carletti and like him a circumnavigator, passed through Manila, only in the opposite direction. Teixeira headed for the Indian Ocean, via Cape of Good Hope, but decided to return to Portugal via the Acapulco route “to shorten the way and see the world.”
His arrival, on the 22nd of June, at the “Cavite Bay, port of the island and city of Manila, head and government of the islands of Luzon, as the natives call them, and are what we call the Philippines,” happened after a prolonged stay in Malacca from where he took a message from Captain-General Martim Afonso de Melo, warning the Spaniards of the entry of the Dutch ships on that region.
José Manual Garcia concludes: “Perhaps it was the fact that he brought such information that explains the concession of the facilities that were agreed upon by the Spaniards when boarding one of the ships that was going to Acapulco, because as our traveler acknowledged his departure for that Mexican city was authorized by a license that the governor only gave ‘with great difficulty’ and was a great favor from the captain of the ship that left Manila on July 18, 1600, which had a cargo estimated at 400,000 ducats.”
Pedro Teixeira arrived in Acapulco on the first day of December 1600 and then he went to Havana, where he remained until July of the following year. In September he disembarked in Seville and a month later he arrived in Lisbon, thus concluding his tour of the world.
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