The Manila Galleon, 1565-1815: the Lure of Silk and Silver
From 1565 until the year of Waterloo, great Spanish galleons continued to cross the Pacific, bearing cargoes of American silver. ‘This prodigious voyage’ took a heavy toll of life. Yet still (wrote a Chronicler) ‘the desire of gain prevails...’
A sixteenth-century Spanish historian, Francisco López de Gómara, described the Iberian seafarers’ discovery of the ocean routes to the East and West Indies as being “the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of Him who created it.” Even in the year of the sputnik many people, including those who are other than Christians, may think that he was not far wrong.
For the most striking feature of the history of civilization prior to the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery was the dispersion and isolation of the different branches of mankind. The societies that waxed and waned in the whole of America, and in a great part of Africa and the Pacific, were completely unknown to those in Europe and Asia. Western Europe had only the most tenuous and fragmentary knowledge of the great Asian and North African civilizations.
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