Tata Grandfather Viray
Tata G
randfather Viray was born in 1821 or 1822, he was not sure which, the son of an Ilocano boat-builder.
“I grew up playing in Cavite and Vigan boatyards. Those yards build vessels native to our islands, small chatta, covered cargo boats, casco, flat-bottomed barges, and twenty-oared viray surf boats.”
“No one remember huge Spanish galleons once built in Cavite. That was centuries ago – for trade with Mexico and Spain.”
Drawings in the Spanish friars’ old books showed Tata the tall prow and stern, many decks crowded with great cannon, towering masts, and broad sails of the old 1500-ton galleons. Tata’s father told him of the thousands of natives that slaved for the Spanish, in the earliest Spanish polo, to cut trees and haul timber for the shipyards to build the galleons. Before the Spanish trade monopoly collapsed, and the last of these treasure ships sailed in 1815, the galleons carried millions of pesos in gold coin, the wealth of the Philippine Islands, between Manila, Acapulco and Madrid. As a boy, Tata imagined one day constructing magnificent vessels like the Spanish galleons, but until then was content to fashion small outrigger bangkâ, bilog, and barangay, and vessels for the coasting trade.ngkâ, bilog, and barangay, and vessels for the coasting trade.
When Tata was ten years old his father left Cavite and took his family back home to Caoayan, south of Vigan in Ilocos Sur, on the west coast of northern Luzon. Vigan looked west out over the South China Sea toward China, and north toward Japan, and had long been a center of Asian commerce, competing with Manila in the trade of tobacco, indigo and pearls for silk and pottery, when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century and imposed their language and religion on the “heathen” Ilocanos. Continue reading →
