La Naval de Manila by Nick Joaquin

Nuestra Señora del Santisimo Rosario - La Naval de Manila

Blogger's note: While doing a research for writing a new blog entry for a certain venerated image, I came across this piece of a gem on the annals of literature dedicated to the Virgin of La Naval written by its foremost devotee - the Quijano de Manila Nick Joaquin, National Artist for Literature. It's just imperative for me to place it in my blog so that our future generation can appreciate this masterpiece dedicated to La Gran Señora de Filipinas.

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.

THE HISTORY

St. Pius V miraculously witnessing
the Battle of Lepanto

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 Miracle of the Battle of Lepanto

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 avocation 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.

The Battle of La Naval de Manila

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.”

La Naval de Manila by Botong
Francisco

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.”

Our Lady of La Naval stained glass art
at Colegio Filipino in Rome

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.”

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 lanzones; 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.

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-colored 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 aesthetic 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 avocation 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.

Quijano de Manila

October 1943

Reference:

Joaquin, Nick, La Naval de Manila and Other Essays, De La Salle University Press, Manila, January 1, 1998.

About Quijano de Manila

Nicomedes "Nick" Márquez Joaquín (May 4, 1917 – April 29, 2004) was a Filipino writer and journalist best known for his short stories and novels in the English language. He also wrote using the pen name "Quijano de Manila." Joaquín was conferred the rank and title of National Artist of the Philippines for Literature. He has been considered one of the most important Filipino writers, along with José Rizal and Claro M. Recto. 

Before becoming one of the leading practitioners of Philippine literature in English, he was a seminarian in Hong Kong – who later realized that he could better serve God and humanity by being a writer. This is reflected in the content and style of his works, as he emphasizes the need to restore national consciousness through important elements in Catholic Spanish Heritage. In his self-confessed mission as a writer, he is a sort of "cultural apostle", whose purpose is to revive interest in Philippine national life through literature – and provide the necessary drive and inspiration for a fuller comprehension of their cultural background. His awareness of the significance of the past to the present is part of a concerted effort to preserve the spiritual tradition and the orthodox faith of the Catholic past – which he perceives as the only solution to our modern ill.

In his last will, he offered his National Artist medal to the miraculous image of Nuestra Señora del Santisimo Rosario - La Naval de Manila and it can be seen at the peaña base) of the image up to this day.