The Last Plan to Seize the Manila Galleon

Abstract

THE MANILA Galleon trade always posed a temptation to English sea dogs, from the first voyage of 1565 until the last ship came to anchor at Manila in 1815. The Napoleonic conquest of Spain and the ensuing chaos in the Spanish colonies helped to bring the hoary trade to an end, though it was Fernando VII who finally lowered the moribund commerce into the grave. The last galleon to bring Manila cargo to Acapulco reached that port in 1811. The same year, Mexican rebels seized the silver which was to be shipped to the Orient on the Manila-bound ship and, in 1813, the army of Morelos captured the town and burned it. Two years later the Magallanes pointed its prow toward Cavite and brought to an end an epoch of maritime history. The names of the Englishmen who captured galleons in the MexicoPhilippine trade are from the roster of England's great sea warriors. Thomas Cavendish took the Santa Ana off Cape San Lucas in 1587 and, more than a century later in 1709, Woodes Rogers seized the Encarnacidn. In 1743 Commodore George Anson captured the Covadonga and sold her at Macao, after relieving her of millions of pesos in silver. The last to fall a victim of the English was the giant Santisima Trinidad, taken by Admiral Cornish in 1762. The last plan to capture the Manila Galleon was conceived by James Creassy, an English engineer active in the drainage of the fens. Creassy evolved a great plan in 1775 to seize Panama for England and to help the colonies in Latin America throw off the Spanish yoke. Part of this plan was the projected attack and capture of the Manila Galleon. Thirty years after he first set his plan to paper, Creassy was still trying to interest influential Britons in his project. Two versions of his plan have been found in California libraries. One, a manuscript in the Bancroft Library, is dated May 15, 1790. The other, some fifteen and a half large sheets of script, is in the Sir Joseph Banks manuscript collection of the Sutro Branch, California State Library, in San Francisco. Creassy envisaged a role in the project for Banks, but this particular manuscript he addressed to John Baker Holroyd, Lord Sheffield. The plan is in the