The caracoa delivers fresh vegetables and fruit, as well as livestock in the form of pigs and chickens. The goods are a gift from the chief magistrate of Albay province.” The Bayanihan spirit came forth so naturally in those years.
“The travellers can barely believe their eyes when they take the floating garden, abundant with fruit and vegetables, aboard their ship.”
It is now over a month since the ship left Manila. But, after a painful beginning, the galleon finally approaches the embocadero – the entry point to the Pacific Ocean…
"To the great relief of all onboard, the galleon enter the open sea through the San Bernardino Strait. A long journey across the Pacific to the Americas lies ahead."
But ferocious storm, illness, cold, famine, deaths, despair and hardships one after the other, punctuated only by seemingly mystical events, are yet to come.
(*Embarking on the galleon San Jose in Manila Bay on June 29, 1696, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri kept a detailed journal of his journey to Mexico. On November 21 he lost “a pair of gold buttons with emeralds” after having “laid a wager that we should see land” by that day. The ship made landfall in January 1697. The crossing was part of his tour of the world by sea and land, begun in 1693 and completed in 1698, his account of which Gemelli Careri published in six volumes in 1699 and 1700 titled A Voyage Around the World.
