When the galleons failed: a Philippine remedy manufactured in Mexico by Francisco Ponong-Banua
For several consecutive years the Manila galleons did not reach Acapulco and New Spain ran out of the Philippine snake-stone. Torrubia's Aparato (Madrid 1754) records what was done instead: he gathered the materials and Francisco Ponong-Banua, an Indio cacique of Nabua in Camarines, made them at Mexico by his own country's method, a luted pot in a slow oven replacing the rice-husk kiln. A named technician, a documented process adaptation, and cases the entry reads against the author.
Why this wins its question: Accounts of the Manila galleon are written as a trade route and a treasure fleet, and the Filipinos who crossed on it appear in them as an anonymous category — the chinos or indios chinos of Acapulco and the Costa Grande. This entry gives one of them a name, a town, a rank and a craft out of a 1754 Madrid imprint that English-language work on the galleon does not cite: Francisco Ponong-Banua of Nabua in Camarines, manufacturing at Mexico the Philippine remedy the galleons had stopped delivering, and doing it by his own province's method with the single substitution the American materials forced. It is a rare documented case of technology, rather than cargo, moving west across the Pacific, and it is set out with the three things that make it usable rather than flattering: the sentence that shows the maker was a dependent of the man who published his name, the author's own admission that he rode away before he learned whether his first patient lived, and the plain statement that the remedy did not work and why the cases he reports would look exactly the same if it did not.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The occasion is a supply failure on the transpacific route, stated as such. Page 32, paragraph 30: "Hallandome yo en Mexico, no llegaron en algunos años consecutivos los Galeones de Philipinas. Gran falta fue esta! Entonces todos carecimos de este antidoto soberano." The consequence named is not a shortage in the pharmacies of the capital but a shortage for a specific population: "Era preciso ocurrir à la necesidad de los pobres Indios, que eran picados de viboras en el Pedregal, que corre desde San Agustin de las Cuevas, hasta Cuyohacàn, donde abundan estas alimañas." The lava field between what are now Tlalpan and Coyoacán, at the southern edge of Mexico City, is given as the place and the Indians who worked in it as the patients. The chronology is not given on the page; the author places his American years around the middle 1740s elsewhere in the same section.
The maker is named, placed and described, which is rare for an indigenous artisan in this literature and rarer still for a Filipino one in Mexico. The same paragraph: "Juntè materiales, y con ellos las fabricò Francisco Ponong-Banua, Indio Cazique de la Provincia de Camarines, y en ella natural del Pueblo de Nabua, à quien criè desde chiquito, y estuvo veinte y siete años en mi compañia." A man of the Bikol-speaking province that section VI names as the most skilled workshop of these stones is carrying that province's craft across the Pacific and practising it in the viceregal capital. The rank the text gives him is cacique. The division of labour in the sentence is also plain and is left as the source has it: the friar gathered the materials, the cacique made the stones.
The dependence in the same sentence is part of the record and is not read as a partnership. "à quien criè desde chiquito, y estuvo veinte y siete años en mi compañia" is the language of custody and lifelong household service, written by the man who had the custody; the account gives no wage, no contract, no consent and no words of Ponong-Banua's own, and he appears in the book solely as the executor of a skill that its author is claiming for the Spanish nation. This entry names him because the source does, and states in the same breath that being named in another man's book is not the same as being credited. Nothing here establishes when he came to New Spain, whether he chose to, what he was paid, or what became of him.
The process adaptation is specified, and it is the technically interesting part of the passage. "Las hizo en el mismo methodo que se hacen en su tierra; solo huvo la diferencia de no haverse calcinado los trocitos de cuerno con la hipa, ò paja de arròz, sino en una olla nueva, embarrada la boca, y en un horno templado à fuego lento." Rice husk, which is the fuel and the packing of the Camarines method and the thing that regulates its temperature, is replaced at Mexico by a new pot with the mouth luted shut in a slow oven. The substitution is functionally exact: what the husk pyramid provides is a long, low, oxygen-poor heat, and a sealed vessel in a tempered oven provides the same, which is why the maker could change the apparatus without changing the product. Torrubia reports the result as indistinguishable — "Salieronme las piedras tan eficaces, como las de Philipinas, sin que sus virtudes jamàs hayan fallado en la aplicacion" — and the last clause is his testimonial, not a finding.
The first application is dated, placed to the league and honest about its own end. Page 33, paragraph 31: travelling from Mexico to the visitation of the province of Guatemala in 1746, he reached Tanatepec on 2 February, "Pueblo todo de Mulatos, en el que acaba el Govierno de Nueva España, finaliza tambien el Obispado de Oaxaca, y comienza el nuevo Virreynato, y Arzobispado de Goatemala", at the foot of the Monte de la Gineta from whose summit both seas are visible. There he found a mulato bitten by a rabid coyote — "es una especie de Lobos" — whom the neighbours were already expecting to die within hours "segun sus experiencias". He had three of the largest stones he carried applied to the injured thigh; the man quieted and improved notably, having vomited twice. Then the sentence that makes the passage worth citing: "No sè el final efecto, porque proseguì el camino el dia tres." An author who publishes a cure and admits he left before the outcome is a better witness than one who does not.
The second application is a household case in Mexico with the names in it. Page 33, paragraph 32: a coach mule belonging to "mi intimo Amigo Don Francisco Xavier Gamboa, Abogado insigne de aquella Corte" went rabid, bit a sheep that lived with it and bit the coachman Joachín on the shoulder blade. Joachín's whole back swelled and "huviera muerto rabiando, como murieron la Mula, y el Carnero, à no haverlo socorrido con cinco piedras, que le hice poner en el lugar mordido, las que alli se mantuvieron por ocho, ò mas dias, hasta que al fin de ellos cayeron por sì mismas". The friend named is the jurist whose Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas of 1761 this corpus holds as a separate object, which places the episode in an identifiable household of the capital. Page 34 closes the run of cases by recommending that from that day forward it be inexcusable for anyone not to carry the stone always about him.
The cases do not support the conclusion drawn from them, and the reason is specific rather than general scepticism. Rabies has an incubation of weeks to months and most people bitten by a rabid animal never develop it, so a bitten man who is alive and improving days later is the expected outcome under no treatment; the mule and the sheep dying while the coachman lived is exactly that base rate, not a controlled comparison. In the Tanatepec case the neighbours' expectation of death within hours describes an envenomation course that a rabid bite does not have, and the author left before any outcome existed to report. Adsorbent material held on a wound for eight days will draw fluid and may reduce local swelling; neither venom already in the circulation nor rabies virus already in the nerves is reachable that way. These are the ordinary modern readings and are not taken from the source.
The language of the passages is left on the record because it is part of the evidence about the man reporting. The people relieved at the Pedregal are "los pobres Indios"; Tanatepec is "Pueblo todo de Mulatos"; and the survival of the man treated there "tuvo entre aquellos barbaros Mulatos calificacion de caso maravilloso" — the word barbaros applied to the community whose own experience of coyote bites he has just cited as the local prognosis, in the same sentence in which their judgement of the event is quoted approvingly. An entry that printed the Afro-descendant and indigenous patients of these pages without the words their physician used for them would be reporting the eighteenth century as the twenty-first would like it.
What this episode is and what it is not. It is a documented instance of substituting for a failed transpacific import by reproducing its manufacture in the Americas, with the technician named, his province and town given, and the one process variable that had to change stated exactly — which is more than most eighteenth-century technology transfers into New Spain leave on paper. It is not evidence that the product worked, and it is not evidence of an institution: there is no workshop, no apprentice, no licence, no protomedicato approval and no continuation after the author left; a friar and one man in his household made stones for as long as the galleons failed. Whether Ponong-Banua taught anyone in Mexico, whether any further stones were made there after 1750, and whether the practice reached Mexican pharmacies at all are not answered by these pages.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 32, 33 and 34 of the Madrid 1754 printing, paragraphs 30 to 33 of section VI. No date is printed for the failure of the galleons or for the manufacture at Mexico, and this entry deliberately supplies none; the only dated event is 2 February 1746 at Tanatepec, and the identification of that place with any modern town is not attempted here. Nothing external was consulted: no galleon register, no Franciscan chapter record, no notarial or parish document naming Francisco Ponong-Banua, and no independent trace of the coachman Joachín or of the case in Gamboa's household. Duhamel, cited on the same page from the Histoire de l'Académie des Sciences for 1683 by way of Regnault for sucking the wound and applying salt, is reported as Torrubia prints him and was not checked. The medical statements in this entry's seventh claim are modern and are not in the source.