The Second Coming of Filipinos to America

Wikipedia’s History of Filipinos in America lists the first landing of Filipinos in America as October 18, 1587 when the Manila galleon ship, Nuestra Senora de Buen Esperanza, under the command of Pedro de Unamuno landed in what is now Morro Bay, California with a crew that included Filipinos, then known as “Indios Luzones”. But no mention is made in Wikipedia about the second group of Filipinos to set foot in the Americas.
The shroud of ignorance about the arrival of the second groups of Filipinos to land in the Americas will soon be removed.A new documentary set to be shown on public television stations in December will inform the world that on November 6, 1595, the San Agustin, a Manila galleon ship that was sailing to Acapulco from Manila, touched ground in what is now Point Reyes, in Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ship’s manifest showed that it had a crew of at least 20 Filipinos. 
The new documentary film is entitled “The San Agustin: California Shipwreck” by independent filmmaker George Thelen. Conceived as an hour long documentary covering the 250-year history of the Manila Galleon trade and the journey of the legendary ship, San Agustin which was wrecked off Point Reyes, California in 1595, the film has been trimmed down to 25 minutes.
“I just ran out of funds to complete the film as I envisioned it,” Thelen told me when we talked about his film. “If I had the full hour to tell my story, I would have included more references to the Filipinos who sailed on the San Agustin,” he said.
But even the shortened version will note the arrival of Filipinos n America in 1595, he assured me.
The Marin History Museum, which is a co-sponsor of Thelen’s documentary, describes the fate of the San Agustin as follows: “More than 70 men were stranded in an unfamiliar land with little more than the clothes on their back when the San Agustin went down off Point Reyes in 1595. The Captain, Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno, would pilot the surviving crew more than 1500 miles back to Acapulco, using only a small craft the galleon had carried with her for the voyage across the ocean.
Cermeno left Manila bound for Acapulco three months earlier with a cargo of 130 tons of Ming Dynasty porcelain, silk, and other trade goods from China. After crossing the Pacific Ocean, Capt. Cermeno’s ship sighted land and docked in what is now Point Reyes in Marin County on November 6, 1595. Capt. Cermeno christened the bay “La Bahia de San Francisco”, the name it is still known today, San Francisco Bay.
The Spanish soldiers on board the San Agustin urged Cermeno to quickly resume the voyage to Acapulco but he rejected their pleas as wanted to explore the land that was not in any of their charts. As he set down to explore the land, he made contact with the local natives, the Coast Miwoks, who lived in about six villages in the area. Capt. Cermeno gave them cloths and other gifts while the Miwoks reciprocated with gifts of seeds and a banner of black feathers. 
At Capt. Cermeno’s direction, the Filipino crewmen assembled a small launch on the beach to explore the shallow waters nearby. Unlike the Filipinos with Capt. Unamuno who explored Morro Bay, the Filipinos with Capt. Cermeno stayed at the bay for three weeks. They would have stayed longer but unfortunately, a storm came, which pulled the ship’s anchor up and propelled the ship to the rocks, killing a dozen men, including a priest. It is likely that Filipinos were among the dozen men killed but there is no historical record of their names. 
As to what happened to the precious cargo of the San Agustin, according to Carl Nolte (“400th Anniversary of Spanish Shipwreck”, San Francisco Chronicle, November 14, 1995), “the Miwoks picked up the cargo, slept on the silk meant for the royalty of Europe, ate from the priceless blue porcelain of the Wan Li period of the Ming Dynasty”. 
Captain Cermeno and his remaining crew then built a larger launch from the materials they could find in Point Reyes and sailed out to Acapulco, which they reached without losing a man. The crew reported, however, that they had to eat their dog to survive.
Next week on November 6, on the 418th anniversary of the landing of the San Agustin in Point Reyes, I will meet George Thelen at the precise site where the second group of Filipinos landed in the Americas to mark the anniversary of the occasion.
( Rodel Rodis taught Filipino American History at San Francisco State University. He is a former trustee of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) and a former president of the San Francisco Community College Board. Please send your comments to Rodel50@gmail.com or mail them to the Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 or call 415.334-7800.)