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Chapter 1: Manilamen and Seafaring: Engaging the Maritime World beyond the Spanish Realm
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24 Migration Revolution 24 Chapter 1 Manilamen and Seafaring: engaging the Maritime World beyond the Spanish realm Seafarers from the Philippines, who number over 340,000, constitute one of the largest national groups in global merchant seafaring today, employed mostly on various types of tankers, passenger cruise liners, bulk carriers, and container ships. About 24 per cent of them hold officer positions, 37 per cent are ratings, while 39 per cent are classified as nonmarine (POEA 2010a). Despite their dominance in this ethnic labor niche, it has been said that they have been the most overlooked among Filipino overseas workers. Recently, however, Philippine seafarers have received increasing attention in the scholarly literature, with a great deal of exploration of issues of identities and masculinities (Tyner 2002; Sampson 2003; McKay 2007; Fajardo 2011; Swift 2011; Galam 2012). Despite this welcome change, there has been little recognition of the deeper and broader history of seafaring in the Philippines. It is true that there is widespread reference to Spanish galleons and the Philippine natives who worked on them.1 Even Filipino seamen refer to the galleons to anchor their occupation in a longer historical frame, summon a sense of pride, and draw connections between their contemporary experiences and the courage and hardship of the natives on board the galleons: “We’re a seafaring people … but during the galleon times, that is when we proved ourselves as seamen”; “The history of Filipino seafaring is long … now we are just carrying on that tradition”; “Just imagine, the Native sailor didn’t have modern instruments during the galleon times like we have now. The Native sailor was a real sailor. Their life was hard. 1 The classic work on the galleon trade remains that of Schurz (1939). Manilamen and Seafaring 25 Our life is hard too, but their life was harder”; “Sometimes the galleons and the Native seamen come to mind when I’m at sea …. They really had guts. But it’s like we’re the same. Filipino seamen still have to have guts today. Our lives are still hard” (Fajardo 2011: 42–3). Such remembrances , however, occlude a richer and more extensive history of seafaring. After the last galleon arrived in Manila in 1815, most historical accounts are silent about the remainder of the nineteenth century. The long hiatus is broken only by accounts of Filipino engagement in the US Navy beginning in the early twentieth century. This general amnesia about a wider seafaring history may be seen as the unintended triumph of territorially bounded colonial historiography, with its inability to account for a history that exceeded the confines of the Spanish imperial realm. Interestingly, the forgetting of the wider history of seafaring has also affected Philippine nationalist historiography. The aim of this chapter is to sketch a larger history by focusing on Manilamen, labor migrants from the colonial Philippines who worked on vessels that linked the Philippines to other parts of Asia and to Africa, Europe, the Americas, Australia, and other parts of Oceania. Evidently they left of their own accord as free migrants, many settling down in ports around the world, and in other locations where they engaged in occupations tied to the sea. Even on land, their numbers in any one location were volatile as they moved in response to the changing structure of opportunities. They traveled and crossed state borders as Spanish subjects, but in the Anglophone world they were known as “Manilamen” or “Manilla men,” and in some places they were colloquially called “Manillas.” To understand the history of Manilamen and Philippine global seafaring, this article recapitulates some themes of the galleon trade and explores the history of Philippine seafarers beyond the Spanish realm, beginning in the late eighteenth century. The account ends in the early twentieth century, when a radically new historical context would alter Philippine seafaring, and the seafarers themselves would be known as Filipinos instead of Manilamen. The narrative presented here pulls together the available information from various sources, both primary and secondary. Although neither comprehensive statistics nor in-depth biographies are available, there is enough information to sketch the global dispersion and movement of Manilamen, and to make inferences about migrant identities in the international workplace and their identification with the homeland. Despite relocation to a distant place, the [100.26.140.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:27 GMT) 26 Migration Revolution difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization where this was possible, it would appear that Manilamen retained some form of...