Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island

1. A Clash of Spirits: Friar Power and Masonic Capitalism

1 A Clash of Spirits: Friar Power and Masonic Capitalism The Historical Construction of Capital-as-Evil Occurring as part of an Asiatic pandemic, the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in October 1820 claimed thousands of lives in Manila and the nearby towns following a devastating typhoon that ravaged the colonial capital.1 Because the epidemic was particularly fatal in the villages along the Pasig, the Spanish authorities decided to prohibit the use of river water. They also mounted a relief operation to which the medical personnel of the non-Spanish ships anchored at Manila Bay volunteered their services. In the midst of these extremely unsettled conditions, an invidious rumor began to circulate that the extrangeros or “foreigners” (also “strangers”) intended to annihilate the indios. They allegedly had perpetrated the cholera by poisoning the water and air of the capital, a scheme they were said to have furthered when their medical personnel administered poison, instead of medicine, to the victims of the epidemic. The evidence adduced for this supposed plot were the specimens of insects , reptiles, and other creatures found in the collection of a visiting team of French naturalists. The indios sought to avenge their grief. As the Russian consul at Manila, who happened to have been in Macao at that time, later reported: “On the 9th of October about 10 or 11 in the morning they collected, to the number of about 3,000 Men armed with pikes knives and bludgeons and proceeded coolly and deliberately to plunder and Massacre all the Strangers on whom they could lay their hands” (Dobell 1907, 41). Two detachments of troops failed to quell the tumult, which left twenty-eight persons dead: twelve French, two Dutch, and fourteen English and American merchants and seamen—the only pogrom of Caucasians in recorded Philippine history. The following day about eighty-five Chinese were also killed, having been accused of aiding the foreigners in spreading the poison.2 On 20 October 1820, the Spanish captain-general issued a decree to the natives of Tondo Province. In it he rebuked them for their credulity and blamed “certain malicious persons” in authority for having disseminated erroneous ideas that provoked the natives to rise against the foreigners .3 Though only obliquely blamed in the decree, members of the friar community, according to later accounts, were deemed responsible for the macabre episode (Pardo de Tavera 1905, 345; Regidor 1982, 5). That friars were the instigators of the massacre had a strong logical basis, however. Although an isolated incident, the 1820 carnage encapsulated the primary tensions of colonial society in the early nineteenth century, created by the long-standing dominance of the religious orders and their opposition to the entry of foreign merchant capitalists, who had been quietly admitted to the colony by liberal-minded governors/captainsgeneral from around the late 1780s. The admission of foreigners was a drastic reversal of Spain’s ancient policy of sealing off colonial possessions from rival Western powers, particularly in the islands Spain had called Las Islas Filipinas, where for centuries international commercial intercourse had been restricted to the galleon trade between Manila and Acapulco.4 The strain in the relations between ecclesiastical and certain types of civilian authorities in the colony reflected the mounting challenge that confronted Catholicism in Spain itself. As their statement against the liberal drift of colonial administration, the clergy apparently exploited the 1820 cholera epidemic and succeeded in doing so owing to the profound influence they exerted upon the indio. In contrast to the civilian authorities, the friars, as Captain-General Rafael Aguilar wrote in 1804, possessed “el arte de dominar el espiritu del Yndio.” 5 In an Englishman’s concurring opinion of 1820, “The degree of respect in which ‘the Padre’ is held by the [native], is truly astonishing . It approaches to adoration, and must be seen to be credited” (Anon. 1907, 113). Given their unique “art of dominating the indio spirit,” the friars would appear to have been the most plausible instigators of the massacre. In Cebu, a rebellion by natives in 1814 “may have been staged” to thwart wealthy Chinese mestizos from penetrating areas claimed by the Augustinians; if anything, the incident proved the friars’ 16 chapter 1 capacity, if they wanted to, to contain indio wrath and persuade them to lay down their arms (Cullinane 1982, 259, 262). During the two-day rampage in 1820, the friars were nowhere visible as...