The first printed views of the Philippines and its inhabitants date back to 1602, appearing in a published account of Olivier van Noort’s three-year circumnavigation of the globe. Araling Panlipunan classes taught us about Ferdinand Magellan’s tragic expedition in 1521, but completely skipped over later circumnavigators.
Surely Van Noort’s 1598–1601 voyage deserves a place in our history textbooks. He was, after all, the first Dutchman to circumnavigate the globe, and he spent two full months in the Philippines, from Oct. 14 to Dec. 14, 1600. Had Van Noort or later Dutch incursions into the Philippines succeeded, we would have ended up as part of the Dutch East Indies—modern-day Indonesia—and developed under a vastly different cultural trajectory than Spanish colonization.
Van Noort dropped anchor in Albay, off what is modern-day Legazpi on Oct. 14, 1600. I initially mistook “La Baye la baye” for Laguna de Bay; it actually depicts Albay Gulf. On the left side of the print, a series of hills and mountains trail northward toward Mount Mayon, which served as a landmark for later sea captains.
In Spanish colonial records, the Dutch and English were routinely vilified as “pirates,” who hijacked Spanish galleons plying the Manila–Acapulco route to plunder their rich cargoes of American silver and Asian luxuries. To conceal their Dutch nationality, Van Noort flew a Spanish flag and, speaking in French to Spanish officials in Albay who boarded his ship, claimed to possess a license from the King of Spain.
The Dutch print even depicts a Spaniard aboard Van Noort’s flagship, the Mauritius, kissing the hand of a sailor disguised as a friar! Following this, Van Noort was allowed to purchase provisions for his onward voyage. Van Noort’s ruse was so convincing that the unsuspecting Spaniards even gave him directions on the best route to Manila!
For me, the most fascinating detail in the engravings is the depiction of an inhabitant of Capul Island, shown bearing a bow and arrow and covered in full-body tattoos. Unable to read old Dutch, I rely on early English translations for this image. The first reads: “The Indians go most naked, their skiinnes drawne out with indelible lines and figures.”
The second states: “The natives of these islands are mostly naked, having their skins marked with figures so deeply impressed [tattooed] that they never wear out.”
The third translation provides even richer detail: “The Indians are mostly naked, though some wear a linen cloth. There were also quite a number that were Spanialised [Hispanicized], wearing trousers and shirts. And then there are the foremost Indians that descend from nobility, that have very nice and beautifully cut engravings on their skin, and because it has been engraved with iron and ink it can never be erased.”
Sources offer different explanations for how the Dutch ruse was ultimately exposed. One account claims a sharp-eyed Spaniard examined van Noort’s commission documents and noticed they were issued not by Philip III of Spain, but by William, Prince of Orange. Another version blames an escaped Spanish-American prisoner, while yet another points to enslaved Black men who jumped ship and ratted out the Dutch.
To cut a long story short, a hastily assembled Spanish fleet under Dr. Antonio de Morga—comprising the flagship San Diego, the San Bartolomé, and a handful of requisitioned local and Chinese vessels—intercepted Van Noort’s Mauritius and Eendracht near Fortune Island on Dec. 14, 1600.
The Spanish battle plan called for both the San Diego and San Bartolomé to ram the Mauritius, lock the ships together to allow Spanish troops to board, and seize the Dutch vessel from both sides. However, San Bartolomé disobeyed orders and pursued the smaller Eendracht, leaving the San Diego to fight the Mauritius alone.
When Dutch crewmen retreated into the hold, Van Noort set a fire inside the ship to force his men back out on deck to fight. Meanwhile, the overloaded San Diego, heavily burdened with extra cargo, with gun ports underwater, began taking on water from collision and cannon damage. Panicked Spaniards cut the lines tethering them to the Mauritius, and San Diego “sank like a stone.”
In his “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas” (1609)—that José Rizal annotated and republished in Paris in 1890—Morga claimed a victory. He swam four hours to Fortune Island, proudly clutching the captured Dutch flags in his hands.
Because Rizal had placed Morga on a pedestal as a most reliable historian, generations of Filipinos fell for Morga. That changed in 1991, when the wreck of the San Diego was excavated from the sea, yielding more than 35,000 intact artifacts now preserved at the National Museum of the Philippines.
Van Noort limped back to Holland, but left a different account: Morga lay paralyzed on a mattress inside the San Diego, rendered speechless by sheer terror. Marine archaeology and Dutch logbooks frame Morga’s fictions as face-saving. Now, it is our turn to rewrite the history books.
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