The San Felipe Incident, 1596

On 12 July 1596, the Franciscan Baltasar de Medina writes, the galleon San Felipe sailed from Cavite, the port of Manila, heavily laden with merchandise for New Spain, under the command of Don Matías de Landecho.¹The Heibonsha encyclopedia, in the entry by Gonoi Takashi, gives the same outline: the ship left Manila in July bound for Mexico, was caught by storms, and on 19 October 1596 (Keichō 1, 8th month, 28th day) was carried to Urado in Tosa.²The Nipponica entry by Matsuda Kiichi says the ship had become unable to continue its voyage to Acapulco.³

Among the passengers was a young Franciscan, Fray Felipe de Jesús. Charlevoix tells his story. He had been born in Mexico City of Spanish parents and had been a wild young man; he took the Franciscan habit, gave it up, and was sent by his parents to trade in Asia. In Manila, moved by grace and by the memory of the friars he had known, he entered the Franciscan convent of Our Lady of the Angels. When his parents heard, they asked that he be sent home so that they could see him again, and he was put aboard Landecho's galleon.⁴

Urado was no ordinary harbour. The Yamakawa dictionary records that Chōsokabe Motochika, who had united Tosa and nearly conquered all Shikoku before submitting to Hideyoshi in 1585, had moved his seat to Urado castle, and that in 1596 he handled the San Felipe affair.⁸The lord of Tosa, Matsuda writes, forced the damaged ship into Urado Bay, where it ran aground and much of its cargo spilled out.³Motochika reported the arrival to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Captain Landecho also sent envoys to Hideyoshi to ask for protection.²Charlevoix names them: the sergeant major Antonio Malaver and Cristóbal Mercado, accompanied by two Franciscans.⁴Medina writes that the envoys took Fray Felipe with them as a companion, and that "from here he began the trials of the land, after the dangers of the sea."¹

The envoys sought help from the Franciscan commissary in Japan, Pedro Bautista, who as an ambassador of the Philippines had standing at court.¹⁴Charlevoix records that the Jesuits too, the bishop, João Rodrigues and Organtino, tried through their friends to help, but it was too late.⁴

Hideyoshi sent one of his commissioners, Mashita Nagamori, to Urado to confiscate the cargo and detain the crew.³Mashita was an able administrator. The Kotobank dictionaries describe him as one of the Toyotomi house's senior commissioners, lord of Kōriyama in Yamato with 200,000 koku, who had run land surveys and the supply of the armies in Korea and, as Britannica's entry puts it, chiefly handled finances.⁹Every Japanese dictionary agrees that he seized the cargo and the crew's money.⁵Our The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, 5 February 1597 page notes, from the town of Togitsu's history, that Hideyoshi's treasury was strained that year by typhoons, a great earthquake and the costs of the war in Korea.⁶Charlevoix makes the same point: Mashita told Hideyoshi that the richly laden galleon had come at just the right time to refill coffers emptied by the war in Korea and the embassy to China.⁴

What happened next is the heart of the story, and it is told in different ways.

Matsuda's account in the Nipponica is the most detailed. Hideyoshi had earlier assured the Spanish governor of the Philippines that Japan would rescue shipwrecked sailors. The pilot, Francisco de Olandia, was angry at the seizure. He showed Mashita a map of the world and pointed out how vast Spain's lands were and how small Japan was, and, in answering questions, said in effect that the King of Spain first sent missionaries abroad and advanced conquest together with the work of preaching.³

Charlevoix tells the same scene. On a day when the pilot was with Mashita at the lord of Tosa's house, seeing a map of the world in the room, he traced the provinces obedient to the Catholic King. Mashita asked how one man had come to possess almost half the world. "Nothing easier," the pilot answered: "our kings begin by sending religious to instruct the peoples in our law, and when they have made great progress, troops are sent to join the new Christians."⁴Charlevoix calls it "the greatest folly that a man with any glimmer of sense could commit," and says it dealt the Church a wound that was still bleeding a hundred and twenty years later.⁴

Medina, the Franciscan, puts it differently. Hideyoshi's favourites, he writes, coveting the ship's goods, were already advising him not to allow religious or Christians in his realm, because they were conquerors of empires under the cloak of the faith; and the "inadvertent and imprudent" pilot, whom he names Francisco de Landa, strengthened this "false and malicious" report when, shown a sea chart, he answered that the kingdoms had been won with the friars entering first with the Gospel and the soldiers after with their arms.¹

What is certain, Gonoi writes, is that the incident rekindled Hideyoshi's persecution of the Christians and was the direct cause of the martyrdom that followed.²

Shortly after Mashita returned to Hideyoshi, Matsuda writes, the Franciscan missionaries and Japanese believers in Kyoto and Osaka were arrested.³Hideyoshi used his expulsion order of 1587 as his ground.⁶Captain Landecho was told that he deserved to be treated as a pirate, but would be spared and should go back to Manila. Charlevoix adds that, according to Captain Diego García de Pedrazas, most of the large crew would have died of want if the Jesuit fathers had not hurried to help them.⁴

Medina tells how Philip came to be there. While the envoys waited in Osaka, news arrived that needed to reach the commissary, Pedro Bautista, quickly and safely, and the captain chose Philip, whose energy and trustworthiness had been proved, and sent him from Osaka to Kyoto.¹Philip of Jesus had been sent on to Kyoto, and was at the Franciscan convent there when guards were placed on it.⁴Pedro Bautista himself, our twenty-six-martyrs page records, had come to Japan as an envoy of the governor of the Philippines and had been received by Hideyoshi.⁶So the young friar who had been sailing home to his parents in Mexico was taken with Pedro Bautista and the others.⁴⁶

On 3 January 1597 the prisoners had the lobes of their left ears cut off at Ichijō Modoribashi in Kyoto; then they were paraded through Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai and marched in midwinter to Nagasaki.⁶On 5 February 1597 the twenty-six were crucified on the hill of Nishizaka.⁶Medina's book about Philip calls him "the proto-martyr of Japan."¹

The San Felipe was repaired and sailed from Urado for Manila in April 1597.²The Yamakawa dictionary adds that, back in Manila, the Spaniards negotiated for the return of the confiscated goods and for the handing over of relics of the martyred missionaries.⁵

On 8 June 1862 Pope Pius IX canonised the twenty-six, Philip of Jesus among them.⁶⁷Three years later the church at Ōura, dedicated to them, became the place where the hidden Christians of Urakami came out of hiding.⁶

The storm that drove a galleon into a Tosa bay set in motion Japan's first great martyrdom. Out of a quarrel over cargo and a boast at a map came the witness of twenty-six men and boys on a hill above Nagasaki, and a young Mexican friar who had been trying to go home found, in Japan, the cross that his shipmates said they had seen in the sky.¹⁴