Manila Established and Manila Galleon Trade Begins
Andrés de Urdaneta found the return route across the Pacific in 1565, and the Manila galleon trade ran on it for 250 years. The problem was the tornaviaje. Ships could reach Asia from Mexico easily on the trade winds, and four Spanish expeditions had failed to get back — Magellan's survivors returned westward round Africa, and Loaísa and Villalobos were lost or captured. Urdaneta was an Augustinian friar who had spent eight years in the Moluccas as a young soldier and navigator before taking orders, and was ordered out of his monastery by Philip II because he was the only man alive with the experience. He sailed with Miguel López de Legazpi's expedition that established the Spanish presence in the Philippines, and then took a ship north from Cebu to about 38 degrees, well out of the tropics, to catch the westerly winds and the Kuroshio current, and ran east to California before turning south to Acapulco. The voyage took 130 days and half his crew died. The route worked, and one or two galleons a year sailed it thereafter. They carried Mexican silver west and Chinese silk, porcelain, ivory, spices and lacquer east — the first sustained direct exchange between Asia and the Americas, and the channel through which a large share of the world's silver reached China. The crossings were among the longest and deadliest routine voyages ever undertaken, with scurvy losses that sometimes ran to half the ship. The last galleon sailed in 1815. Urdaneta refused all reward and returned to his monastery. The route he found is why Spanish silver became the currency of China.
- Year: 1565 CE
- Category: Economic
