Nick Joaquin's La Naval de Manila brings us to the grandeur and power of the old Manila. As the essay shows us what is in store in that old city, it also shows us the valor, courage, and strength of both the women and the men of the old. It shows us hos Christianity has been strengthened by the image of La Naval de Manila.
As you read the essay, you would discover that indeed, we are each apart of this pilgrimage and as the world grows older and humanity is again being challenged, we know, though little, we have a task to do and a duty to fulfill.
LA NAVAL DE MANILA
Nick Joaquín
HISTORICAL NOTE:
The battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement between the combined fleets of
Venice, Spain, and the Papal States, commanded by Don John of Austria, natural
brother of the King of Spain, and a powerful Turkish armada under Ali Pasha.
After a desperate and sanguinary engagement, the Christian fleet routed the
Turks. Some 8,009 Christians were killed, but 20,000 Turks were killed,
wounded, or taken as prisoners. The Christian victory broke the Turkish naval
power in the Mediterranean and ended the last Crusade. Locale of the conflict
was near the Cursolari Islands at the western entrance to the Gulf of Patras,
Greece.
1. THE HISTORY
When on the first Sunday of
October, 1571, Cross and Crescent grappled at Lepanto, the Cross won a signal
victory. Gilbert Chesterton has, in a famous ballad, celebrated the victory for
what it is: the farewell gesture of Christian Chivalry. Wherefore, the break in
his voice. Lepanto was the last act of the medieval drama, and Chesterton,
being a Christian, lets the curtain fall, not upon the vivas and banners of Success, but rather upon the silence, the
stark waste of a Castilian plain, upon the figures of the Sorrowful Buffoon,
the Crusading Skeleton, the Knight Ridiculous.
His cast, though, is incomplete:
Selim the Sot, Don John of Austria, Felipe II, St. Pius V, Cervantes—there is a
grave omission, an omission the latter Chesterton would surely not have made.
For it is well known how firmly the Christian soldiery at Lepanto believed that
the Queen of Heaven herself had participated in the battle, that she had
appeared in the midst of the fighting with a rosary in hand and a sword in the
other, exhorting her champions and confounding her foes.
Certainly, St. Pius V, then pope,
and father of this crusade, had ordered that on the day of the battle the
rosary be publicly offered throughout Christendom in spiritual support of the
Christian navies; himself though aged and ailing, presiding on foot the
rogative procession in Rome. Being a Dominican, he was naturally to invoke most
fervently the aid of the great Patroness of his order and to place his
confidence in her rosary, those holy beads the continuous recitation of which
he and the entire body of the faithful were to lift to her all that day —now
meditating on the various mysteries of her life (the happy, the tragic, the
victorious), now chanting the graceful invocations of her litany— while out
upon the embattled Mediterranean the “last knight of Europe” chopped down the
arrogance of the Sot.
The Church was quick to
acknowledge the role of Mary at Lepanto; October 7, the date of the victory,
has ever since been her feast as Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, a feast and an
advocation of hers around which maritime traditions consequently clustered: the
Virgin of the Beads is popularly a Virgin of Sea Battles, a Virgin of Naval
Victories. Some eighty years after
Lepanto, she was
again to justify those titles, to manifest her power in the faraway Orient of
the conquistadores, to wield her mighty
beads in favor of a handful of islands: the small necklacelike archipelago that
had been named after the brother of the Lepanto hero.
Among those islands Spanish
Chivalry was being granted a long and active indian- summer. Indeed, if the Manco of Lepanto had come over instead of
moping behind in Andalusia, this sufficiently tearful world would have been
spared his Quijote: all dressed up and no place to go. For in the Philippines
the breed of hidalgos still had its
Moors to face, its turreted towns to defend, its unknown lands to conquer. If
Lepanto was its last act, our colonial history may be termed an oriental
epilogue to the miracle play of the West.
Besides Moors, there were also
the heretics — those Dutch and English buccaneers who had long harassed the
Manila galleons. It was the Age of Pirates. The notorious Drake had dared set
sail on Philippine waters and Thomas Cavendish once all but captured Iloílo. As
crusader and visionary had founded the Spanish empire under the banner of the
Cross, so now, pirate and buccaneer were unconsciously founding the empires of
the future—under the banner of the Skull and Bones.
One such marauding expedition, a
Dutch fleet of five, threatened Manila on March 15, 1646, when there happened
to be but two galleons ready to defend her: the said galleons sallying forth
undaunted nevertheless, trusting to win (as the chronicles say) “more by
spiritual weapons than by weapons of war”; and while riding to face the enemy,
“the members of the said armada did with much devotion recite the Holy Rosary,
on their knees and in two choirs, all trusting that by such means they might be
found worthy to succeed against the foe.”
The two forces met in the bay of
Bolinao, the battle beginning at two in the afternoon and ending at six in the
evening, with the Dutch fleeing in panic, “their lights covered and much damage
done to their ships, but of our side not a man was lost.”
On July 29 of the same year this
armada of two was again to sally forth in defense of the City, enemy having in
returned; this time on seven large vessels “which carried such powerful
artillery and some eight hundred men, not including the sailors — and this
battle (fought between Bantón and Marinduque) was one of the fiercest and
bloodiest in our day, lasting from seven in the evening till four at dawn — at
which time, seeing how grievously maltreated their ships were and one on fire,
they did retreat and seek shelter, and would not give battle though we called
them to it.”
Two days later the enemy
reappeared with six ships, and hostilities were resumed off the coast of
Mindoro, this conflict enduring from noon to the Angelus, when the Dutch fled a
third time, one ship lost and another crippled — “and our armada did acclaim
that victory as miraculous and did attribute it to Our Lady saying that she
herself had fought and not men; and many did testify how, during the battle,
voices moved in the air crying: Viva the
Faith of Christ and the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary!” Before the initial
battle, moreover, the commanding- general, seeing the great disparity between
forces, “did make a vow to the Virgin of the Rosary, promising her a feast of
thanksgiving should the victory fall side, and with every man in the armada to
come on bare feet and offer thanks at her shrine in Manila; which vow and
promise, when laid before the soldiery, they did accept and ratify.”
This vow, still unfulfilled, was
to be renewed at the express order of the governor-general of the Philippines,
for hardly had the two triumphant galleons reached Cavite when news came of a
fresh Dutch fleet approaching Mariveles. Though much battered and in need of
repairs, the armada of two had once again to go and grapple with a superior
force, this fourth encounter taking place between the islands of Luban and
Ampil, and raging steadily for ten hours, “until seeing themselves
hard-pressed, the enemy did escape and take flight, our ships pursuing and
giving fire still, though one, our Capitana,
had been hit in the side and was much feared for and yet did not sink.”
About a week later three of the
Dutch ships, repaired and re-equipped, returned to the scene and found the
disabled Capitana alone, her sister ship
having sailed ahead, “and they did surround and fiercely set on her and did
fire so close that there was long a danger of their boarding the ship; but our
men, calling on God and Our Lady, did rise to the contest in such manner that
they wrought a woeful destruction among the enemy, and did totally destroy one
ship and scatter the others, which, fleeing, were discovered and severely
punished by the Galera, a ship
dispatched to our assistance — and though our Capitana
had been engaged on such close quarters that for hours it seemed to rain
bullets, nevertheless we had but four men dead.”
Only fifteen men, in fact, had
been lost by the defenders in all five battles. And these victories were
decisive: the Dutch were to trouble the islands no more, were never again to
overcast with Calvin’s shadow the tiny Rome growing up by the Pásig. This last
attempt of theirs to besiege it had but furnished that “noble and ever loyal
city” with one more festival, its most traditional one. For the armada heroes
were not to be content with the simple fulfillment of their vow. True to that
age-old courtesy towards heaven, with which the hidalgo
has ever insisted that any victory of his arms is not so much a victory of his
courage as of his faith, they were urgently to demand from the cathedral-chapter
of Manila an official recognition and declaration of those five victories as
miracles wrought by the Mother of God.
The ecclesiastics were, however,
not to be hurried: the witnesses must first be heard, the evidence examined;
only after six years did they pronounce a decision, declaring “that the five
victories achieved by Catholic arms over the enemy Dutch in the year 1646 were
and must be considered as miracles, vouchsafed by the divine Majesty of God
through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady, and the devotion to
her Holy Rosary; wherefore it is authorized that, as miracles, the said
victories be commemorated, preached, and celebrated.”
And commemorated, preached, and
celebrated they have ever since been among us, in a feast which is purely ours,
yet spaciously historical too, kept always on the second Sunday of October, and
popularly known as the “Naval de Manila.”
2. THE IMAGE
The institution of this feast
was, of course, to enhance the fame of that marvelous Virgin of the Rosary
enshrined at Sto. Domingo church; was
indeed to focus on her the Marian devotion of the City. But even before all
this, votive gifts that covered her chapel from floor to ceiling and the ever
increasing splendors of her cult, shrine, and wardrobe could testify to the
effectiveness of her thaumaturgic powers, to the volume of her clients, and to
the faith and gratitude she inspired. It needed but these naval successes of
1646 for the devout to see in her truly the great Lady of Lepanto, giver of sea
victories.
And yet, of all the famous
Virgins of the Philippines, this one alone has not been seafaring, has never
guided a galleon safe into Acapulco, or come sailing from some old shrine in
Spain to occupy a new one in the Islands. A “native Virgin,” she was sculptured
in Manila in 1612, the joint masterpiece of a Chinese catechumen and an officer
of the Spanish garrison, the work being commissioned by Don Luis Pérez
Dasmariñas, then governor-general, by whom the image was presented to the
Manila Dominicans for their newly erected church and priory at the mouth of the
Pásig.
Life-size, of combined wood and
ivory, the image is arrayed as a royal lady at the court of the Felipes — just
such a figure, in fact, as John of Austria and his men would have imagined
heaven’s Queen. In the pronounced majesty of her aspect and bearing, she
exemplifies the transition from the simple gothic Virgins, where it is Mary’s
motherliness that is most stressed, as the emphasis, in these more elaborate
images of the seventeenth century (the Spanish “golden age,” and the period of
the great monarchies), has shifted to her dignity and power, the properties of
queenship; while a still later phase of devotion (for the firmer the creed, the
more flexible and progressive the devotion) would seek out what is most
maidenly, most virginal, most girlish in
her, turning piously from Maria Theotokos to Mary the person, and progressing
from the Murillo madonnas, through the cult of the Immaculate Conception, to
such purely modern concepts of her as the Lourdes apparition and the Virgin of
the Medal.
In our Santo Rosario (as she is
popularly called), though very much of the “golden age,” there are both gothic
and modern elements. The posture is a stiff and conventional as any feudal
Virgin’s: the Child on one arm, the other outstretched; but the face is
individualized, is warmly human, and was surely chiseled by the Chinese
catechumen. The features strike one as oriental (now, especially, when time has
mellowed the ivory to a delicate brown), the cheekbones set high, the eyes
small and slanting. Around her famous jewels (tributes of three grateful
centuries), three hovers as brilliant a cluster of legend, each rare stone
having a romance behind it — the great one, especially, blazing on her forehead
(a “carbuncle,” the old people called it,
and which they will further tell you, a monstrous snake that once
haunted the Manila walls had carried about in its mouth, but would greedily lay
aside for a bowl of milk; its greed serving at last to trap and kill the
monster, its treasure being despoiled to adorn, quite appropriately, the image
of her whose feet had crushed the serpent’s head). Her annual novena has become almost as legendary for its
splendor, and the earliest memories of many a Manilan of devout family are of
October evenings at these rites — of the blaze of chandeliers within the gothic
and crowded vastness of Sto. Domingo, with a black sky looming and a windy rain
whipping through the windows; the dramatic quality of the music, the prayers,
the sermons; the sound and smell of corn popping and chestnuts crackling on
coals outside on the patio and the acute loveliness of the Despedida, that haunting song with which the
ceremonies have always closed and which, once heard, is not to be forgotten,
ever evoking afterwards the atmosphere peculiar to these evenings; their
indefinable excitement and vague joyousness.
Indeed the twin feasts of the Naval de Lepanto and the Naval de Manila on the first and second
Sundays of October have imparted to that month so intimate and traditional a
flavor of festivity that it has become the month most truly special to Manila,
the month when in full typhoon season, the City broke out into the biggest
celebrations: these of the Naval;
besides the fiestas of San Miguel, Sta. Cruz, and Binondo; the month that
started the display of hams and cheeses among its grocers and of turrones among its sweetshops, when her
markets overflowed with apples, grapes,
oranges, pomelos, and her sidewalks with chestnuts and lanzons; the month when
back in our childhood, the very air turned festive and the Circus came to town
and the season opened at the old Opera House.
3. THE DEFINITION
The story of the Naval having identified itself with Manila, it
can yield a full pertinence only to the Manilan with a pious eye for the past;
but equivalent traditions are embodied for, say, the Visayan in Cebú’s historic
image of the Holy Child, or of the Bicolano in Naga’s famed Virgin of
Peñafrancia. There is indeed no Philippine town or village, however humble,
that does not feel peculiarly itself, as
belonging to that spot of ground and no other, because of some patronal cult
traditional to the locality, some holy image there venerated and investing the
site with legend and association. When we talk today of the need for some
symbol to fuse us into a great people, we seem to forget that all over the
country there lies this wealth of a “usable past,” of symbols that have grown
through and through the soil of the land and the marrow of its people.
The angels keep their ancient
places,
Turn but a stone and start a
wing; ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangéd faces
That miss the many-coloured
thing.
But the past can become “usable”
only if we be willing to enter into its spirit and to carry there a reasonably
hospitable mind. As long as we regard it with hatred, contempt, and
indignation, so long will it remain hateful and closed to us. Like a mirror (to
borrow Aldous Huxley’s image of the Future), it will meet us with spears if we
advance towards it with spears. And as long as we remain estranged from it, so
long will we remain a garish and uncouth and upstart people, without graces
because without background. Henry James has noted what an infinite amount of
history it takes to form even a little tradition, and what an infinite amount
of tradition to form even a little taste. Merely from his viewpoint, the
esthetic one, it should be instantly apparent how little we can afford to spare
a single one of our four hundred years of conscious history. Towards our
Spanish past, especially, it is time we became more friendly; bitterness but
inhibits us; those years cry for a fresher appraisal.
To accuse the Spanish, over and
over again, of having brought us all sorts of things, mostly evil, among which
we can usually remember nothing very valuable “except, perhaps,” religion and
national unity, is equivalent to saying of a not very model mother that she has
given her child nothing except life. For
in the profoundest possible sense, Spain did give birth to us — as a nation, as
an historical people. This geographical unit of numberless islands called the
Philippines — this mystical unit of numberless tongues, bloods and cultures
called a Filipino — was begotten of Spain, is a Spanish creation. There is as
great a gulf between the pre-Spanish drift of totem-and-taboo tribes and our
present existence as one people as there is between protoplasm and a human
creature. The content of our national
destiny is ours to create, but the basic form,
the temper, the physiognomy, Spain has created for us. If she had managed, for
instance, to conquer Borneo along with these islands, we would have had four
stars in our flag and (possibly) that swaggering self-confidence a big
territory is apt to foster. Or Spain might have succeeded in holding only the
island of Luzón, in which case we would have found ourselves a group of very
minor islanders to whom the Visayans would be, not brother-“Filipinos,” but
peoples as strange and remote as the Borneans now seem to be.
For three and a half centuries we
lay within the womb of Spain; the Revolution was our violent birth; and in the
bitterness with which we have ever since regarded the great and tragic nation
to whom we owe so much, Freudians may read a parallel to that obscure enmity
that haunts the relations of even the most loving son with his father—an enmity
that perhaps voices the resentment of matter that has been wrenched out of its
sleep and burdened with consciousness. It is just such a resentment—most
vividly expressed in the poetry of Houseman (“Oh, why did I awake? When shall I
sleep again?”) —that underlies much
of our present vengefulness towards the Spanish. It should also help to explain
the sluggishness of which we have been accused, and which, along with the
equally famous “fatalism” of ours (so blankly accepted as native to us, being
oriental, with no attempt to explain its presence or locate its source) may be
no more than our blood’s memories of the communal tribe-house, where custom and
taboo lay heavy upon life, pre-determining all event, all action, all speech
even (we still dimly recall the taboo on uttering the chief’s or parent’s
name); within whose rigid circle— everything being pre-ordained,
pre-established—men moved as in a trance, without having to exercise their
wills, and, therefore, without creating history. The dreaminess thick in our
nature, our incapacity for decisive thought or action (as in the see-saw
character of our politics) may, if analyzed, be found to derive from our
failure so far to break loose completely from primeval carry-overs, from those
submerged longings for the tight, fixed web of the tribal obedience—the
mechanicality, the drift, the “even tenor” of passive vegetation as against the
pain and effort of responsible and personal existence.
The prime work of Christianity
for us (as for all the peoples of its information) has been this awakening of
the self, this release and expansion of the consciousness, a work undoubtedly
still in progress, we being not yet fully awake nor perfectly conscious;
immature Christians at best; Catholics but not catholic;
enclosed within the Faith as within a sect; having still to realize that to
open oneself to this, “one of the great, conjoint, and—so to term it—necessary
products of the human mind… rich in the world’s experience,” is to let in “a
great, tide of that experience and (to make), as it were, with a single step, a
great experience of one’s own, and with great consequent increase to one’s
sense of color, variety, and relief, in the spectacle of men and things.”
That passage from Pater will ring
with special accuracy to the Manilan who has grown up on the story of his
city’s principal feast, and who, year after year, from earliest childhood, has
participated, with pious “attentiveness,” in its popular celebration—in the
culminating pageant especially: that of the procession (Manila’s “procesión de las procesiónes”), where in her
triumphant march through the streets of her city, the miraculous image has for
glittering escort the flower-and-fruit of the Dominican sanctoral: St. Vincent
Ferrer, who could move the very stones to penance, and St. Rose of Lima, first
bloom of American faith; Aquinas, who took all knowledge for his province, and
the ecstatic Catherine of Siena, “that intellect of a man’s ablaze within the
quintessence of womanhood”; the founding father, St. Dominic, terror of the
troubadours; and, of course, St. Pius V of Lepanto, and St. Joseph.
Our Manilan will realize that
such practices, such pieties, have developed in him—long before the possibility
of books—a “sense of infinity,” of being “at home in history”; so that no page
of Aquinas, however profound, no ecstasy of St. Catherine’s, however mystical,
but strikes him now as intimately clear and long familiar, for a feeling that
he has known those people all his life and has often seen them strolling along
the streets of his city. The Battle of Lepanto will always smell to him of rain
and popcorn and roasting chestnuts; upon mention of the Elizabeth pirates he
hears the high tremolo of a boy’s voice keening the Despedida. And, conversely, the most local, the most native
objects will, like windows in a tower, open out for him upon immense vistas,
upon the whole crowded spectacle, in fact, of “men and things.”
Many an October evening, while
watching this procession of the Naval,
and having divined, by a general excitement, the approach of the Image, he has
heard the cries and trumpets of the passing concourse dissolve into the cries
and trumpets of battle — that battle being, confusedly, now the medieval one
against the Albigensians (when Our Lady, through St. Dominic, instituted the
Rosary), now the Lepanto debacle, now the Philippine skirmishes with the Dutch;
and he has understood afresh how these various wars were really one, that, in
this particular advocation of hers, Our Lady has been concerned with the same
conflict: the supreme and eternal one between pagan fate and Christian freedom;
that, whether it be the Albigensian cult of suicide, the kismet of Islam or the predestination of
Calvin, her beads have ever been wielded against the same foe; despair — and in
defense of the same article: spiritual unction. And the trumpets of battle
dissolving again into the trumpets of the procession, he has then seen her
blaze into vision against the skies of his city, borne upon cloud on cloud of
incense and music, her face on fire with jewels and mysterious with the
veneration of centuries, with gleaming rainbows forming and falling all about
her and silken doves bobbing whitely among her flowers of gold and silver—Oh,
beautiful and radiant as an apparition! —the Presence at Lepanto, Lady and Queen and Mother
of Manila, the Virgin of the Fifteen Mysteries.
October 1943
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