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Because Portugal had taken advantage of the Spanish failures to occupy the Malukus, the expedition was told to find more spice islands nearby and establish a trade base on them. The king of Spain also wanted them to chart the wind patterns, to introduce the area to Christianity, and to be a thorn in the side of his nephew and rival, the king of Portugal. But the underlying goal was China—“the stimulus that pulled Spain, as the vanguard of Christendom, to search the seaways,” as the historian Antonio García-Abásolo put it in 2004. “One cannot overemphasize the continuity of the goals for the actions undertaken by Colón, [conqueror of Mexico Hernán] Cortés and Legazpi.” All of them sought China.

Legazpi and Urdaneta left with five ships on November 21, 1564. Reaching the Philippines, Legazpi set up camp on the island of Cebu, midway up the archipelago. Meanwhile, Urdaneta set about figuring out how to return to Mexico—nobody had ever successfully made the trip. Simply retracing the expedition’s westward route was not possible, because the trade winds that had blown the ships from Mexico to the Malukus would impede their return. In a stroke of navigational genius, Urdaneta avoided the contrary currents by sailing far to the north before turning east.

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On Cebu, Legazpi was plagued by mutiny and disease and harassed by Portuguese ships. But he slowly expanded Spanish influence north, approaching China. Periodically the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City dispatched reinforcements and supplies. Important among the supplies were silver bars and coins, mined in Mexico and Bolivia, intended to pay the Spanish troops.

A turning point occurred in May 1570, when Legazpi dispatched a reconnaissance mission: two small ships with about a hundred Spanish soldiers and sailors, accompanied by scores of native Filipino Malays in proas (low, narrow outrigger-type boats, rigged with one or two fore-and-aft sails). After two days’ northerly sail, they reached the island of Mindoro, about 130 miles south of modern Manila (which is on Luzon, the chain’s biggest island). Mindoro’s southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple. The Malays on the expedition learned from local Mangyan people that two Chinese junks were at anchor forty miles away, in another cove—a trading post near the modern village of Maujao (mah-oo-how).

Every spring ships from China traveled to several Philippine islands, Mindoro among them, to exchange porcelain, silk, perfumes, and other goods for gold and beeswax.4 Shaded by parasols made of white Chinese silk, the Mangyan descended from their upland homes to meet the Chinese, who beat small drums to announce their arrival. Maujao, which has a freshwater spring a few feet back from the beach, had long been a meeting point; local officials told me that archaeology students have found Chinese porcelain there that dates to the eleventh century. Legazpi had ordered the excursion’s commander to contact—politely, not aggressively—any Chinese he encountered. Hearing of the junks’ presence, the commander sent one of the two Spanish ships and most of the proas to meet the Chinese “and to request peace and friendship with them.”

Leading the contact group was Juan de Salcedo, Legazpi’s twenty-one-year-old grandson, popular with and respected by the soldiers despite his youth. Unluckily, high winds separated the vessels; Salcedo’s ship was pushed badly off course. The vessels spent the night in different harbors, protected from the storm by the high, narrow fingers of rock that define the coves. Temporarily leaderless but eager to gain the riches of China, the Spanish soldiers in the proas moved east at first light. Rounding a narrow, rocky promontory on the southern side of Maujao, they came upon the Mangyan and Chinese. The Chinese put on a show of force, one of Salcedo’s men later recalled, “beating on drums, playing on fifes, firing rockets and culverins [a kind of small, portable