The one thing most vitally needed by Spain was a strong fortress situated well within the territory of the Moros. Such a station would have to be amply fortified to withstand the Moro attacks, in order to insure a secure haven for all of the Spanish forces in Mindanao and Sulu. The Spaniards pored over the inadequate maps of the Moro territory, seeking a fortunate location of such post.

In 1635, Don Juan Cerezo de Salamanca, Governor-General of the Philippines, received reports relative to the Moro power concentrated about the site of the present city of Zamboanga. During that year, Padre Juan Batista Vilancio, who had been for years a captive in Jolo, escaped to Manila and brought to the ears of the Governor-General an account of the town where "the nobility of Mindanao held court." ¹

Salamanca resolved to take possession of this strategic peninsula, hoping in this manner to strike a heavy blow on to the Moro power. A fortress at Zamboanga would command the Straits of Basilan, the waters of which were the ordinary course of the pirate vessels infesting the coasts of Visaya. The region of Zamboanga, while not as important as the seats of the Sultans of Sulu and Mindanao, was nevertheless the territory of a minor king whose authority reached along both sides of the peninsula for a hundred miles on either side. Salamanca hoped to divide this unbroken front and his efforts were successful.

After due preparation, an expeditionary force under the command of Captain Juan de Chaves landed at Zamboanga on April 6, 1635. There de Chaves founded the town of Bagumbayan, which was the first name for Zamboanga, and from this station he soon reduced the towns of Caldera and Balvagan.

After Captain de Chaves' force of 300 well armed Spaniards and 1000 Visayans had cleared the peninsula temporarily of hostile Moros, the construction of one of the finest forts in the East was put into execution. On June 23, 1635, the foundations of the grand fortress of Nuestra Senora del Pilar was laid by Father Vera, engineer of the Spanish army.

The erection of this fortress was accompanied by serious interruptions in the way of Moro attacks. With only a portion of the massive walls in place, the Spaniards awoke one morning to meet the attack of 5,000 Moros, who entered Rio Hondo and hurled themselves upon the fortification.

The greatest weakness of the Moro as a fighting man has always been the inability to curb impatience. Siege work of a fortress is not for the Moros. Almost without exception, their attacks on a strongly fortified position were unsuccessful. Their policy is hand-to-hand attack upon sighting the enemy.

Cannon were hastily mounted upon the fragmentary walls and the Spaniards retired to the partial shelter to pour a terrible fire into the advancing Moros. The Moro wave broke on the uncompleted walls and the force eventually retired. Severe casualties were inflicted upon the Spaniards by the few bands of kris men who succeeded in penetrating the walls in the face of the cannon fire.

With the completion of Fort Pilar, a convenient base for operations paved the way for the first major victory of the Spaniards. This strong fortress, only ninety miles from the Moro capital, always remained as a serious bar to Moro aggression. The stout walls withstood many attacks, and in all of the long history of this fortress it was never captured.

The first victory for the men of the fortress and also the first major victory for Spain, was the destruction of a Moro pirate fleet. In 1636, Tagal, brother of the Sultan of Mindanao, gathered a large fleet recruited from Mindanao, Sulu and Borneo and made a cruise to the Visayan islands. The result was a glorious field day for the pirates. Every town of importance on the whole coast of the Visayas was looted.

When Tagal wearied of the slaughter and raised his hand to turn the prows of the pirate vessels to the south again, 650 captives lay trussed like chickens in the pirate hold.

One hundred miles form Jolo, a Spanish fleet, operating from the base at Zamboanga, intercepted the victorious Tagal as he rounded the treacherous angle of rough water at Puenta Flecha. Hampered by the hundreds of captives in the holds, the garays of Tagal were slow and unwieldy, and in the naval engagement that followed the Moros suffered a crushing defeat. Three hundred Moros, including Tagal, were killed, and 120 captives were set free. Tagal jettisoned many of the captives a the tide of battle turned against him, and the sharks at Puenta Flecha fed well on the bound bodies of Christian slave girls bound for the harems of Jolo.

The year 1635 had witnessed the arrival in Manila of a very efficient Governor-General and a perfect soldier. The coming of Don Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera marked a period of success for the Spanish arms which was not to be equaled again until the mighty soldier Juan Arolas arrived 250 years later.

In all the history of the Spanish conquest, these two names stand out to eclipse all others. Corcuera and Arolas, the first in 1635 and the second in 1885, were the only two Spaniards to command the whole-hearted respect of the Moros. They were fighting men of the first caliber and equal to the best traditions of the conquistadores.

After the extermination of Tagal had been conducted at Corcuera's instigation, he proclaimed, in 1637, a Holy War against the Mohammedans. This grand old soldier pursued the campaign with his customary vigor. He went to Zamboanga to take personal command of the expedition, and in February of 1637 he took the field against the cottas of the Sultan Correlat on the coast of Cotobato.

Correlat was one of the greatest figures of the Moros. He controlled a territory extending from Siocon to Davao, and it was said that more than 20,000 vassals acknowledged him as lord.

Corcuera found the cotta he attacked well fortified and garrisoned by a force of 2,000 Moros. In this campaign the Spaniards were a small force against fantastic odds.

The battle was the first Philippine counterpart of some of the campaigns of Cortez in Mexico. In routing Sultan Corellat at Lamitan, Corcuera deserves more credit as a fighting man than does Cortez for his successful assault upon the city of Mexico. The Moros had no legend of Quetzalcoatl to stay their kris against the blond-bearded Spaniards. Where the Aztecs viewed Cortez with religious superstition, the Moros had only religious hatred for Corcuera. Cortez had been the first white man to Mexico. The Rio Grande River in the Philippines had seen the rout of the two Spaniards who preceded Corcuera. Instead of the rude obsidian knives of the Aztecs, the Spaniards at Lamitan found themselves opposed by a flashing kris which was the equal of their Toledo blade. The lives of many of the soldiers of Cortez in Mexico were spared because of the desire of the Aztecs to take them alive for the sacrificial stone on the altar of Huitzilopochtli. In Mindanao the Moros sacrificed no captives; their object was to kill as quickly as possible with one stroke of the kris.

We see Corcuera mounting a small hill to look down into the court of Correlat which swarmed with thousands of naked, howling savages. We wonder what the old soldier thought as he gazed upon this scene. Two Spaniards had preceded him to Cotobato. Corcuera must have thought of Captain de Ribera bearing his sick men to sanctuary fifty-eight years before. He must have remembered that Esteban Rodriguez de Figueroa had passed that way to die on the Rio Grande River.

Whatever Corcuera's emotions as he gazed down the valley to the horde of brown kris men waiting to resist him, there can be no question as to his valor. At a flourish of a mailed fist, the Spanish plumes disappeared into the wave of Moros.

We are indebted to Father Crevas for an account of this campaign. From him we learn that corcuera, with a squadron of small vessels and a dozen flat boats, entered the river, defying Correlat. "The forces which he had were five companies; his own of 150 men, those of Captain Nicholas Gonzalez and Lorenzo Orella de Ugalde of 100 men each; another company of sailors; another of Pampangos; all the rest were rabble and pioneers. The same day he reached the river, he entered, with seventy men, the court of Correlat, defended by more than two thousand armed Moros."

As we consider the caliber of the men who opposed Corcuera that day, we wonder how he kept his small company from being overwhelmed. The Spaniards had arquebuses, but they were slow and laborious to reload. A great deal of the combat must have been hand-to-hand. Pitched to religious fervor, a Moro was the equal to any Spaniard in hand-to-hand battle, and yet Corcuera survived to win a brilliant victory.

Lamitan, the court captured by Corcuera, appears to have been the town known at present as Pagalamatan. The carabao horn mail of the Moros proved ineffective against the arquebus fire, and the Spaniards carved their way through the court to force the retirement of the Moros.

Corcuera then divided his troops into two corps, one commanded by himself and the other under Nicholas Gonzalez. "The latter entered from the rear the place where Correlat had retired as a last refuge, while Corcuera engaged from the front."

This expedition does not appear to have penetrated farther than the delta of the Rio Grande River. Corcuera had passed the morning in sounding the river channel and giving chase to pirate vessels. The afternoon was devoted to the engagement with Correlat.

After spending six days in the vicinity of Lamitan, near the present site of the town of Cotobato, Corcuera retired after destroying sixteen towns and forcing Correlat to the mountains. Padre Cuervas continues:

The spiritual was apparently not neglected in the Cotobato campaign!

Corcuera was a consistent soldier. The next year he duplicated his success in an assault upon Jolo. In January of 1638 he set sail for the Moro capital with eighty ships and a force of 2,000 men. For sixty years the city remained in Moro hands, and had successfully withstood Spanish attacks in 1628 and 1630. Not since Figueroa in 1578 had a Spaniard set foot in Jolo.

Corcuera found the town well fortified and garrisoned by several thousand warriors. After a siege of several months he captured the town and left a force of 200 Spaniards as a garrison. Corcuera retired to the safety of the walls of Fort Pilar in Zamboanga, leaving the inadequate Jolo garrison to develop into conspicuous martyrs of history.

This garrison remained in the Sulu capital for seven years, and there was never a day of the occupation that did not witness and assault of the Moros. Upon several occasions the garrison was almost exterminated, and a steady stream of replacements filtered down from Zamboanga as the line of Spanish graves grew longer and longer.

Corcuera closed his campaign against the Moros with a series of indecisive battles against the Sultanates of Buhayen and Basilan, and in 1640 all Spanish forces were withdrawn to Manila with the exception of the pitiful farrison at Jolo. Fear of a war with the Dutch inspired this movement of the Spanish troops, but as nothing came of the threatened Dutch conflict the troops were returned to Mindanao to resume the assault.

Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera remains as one of the conspicuous figures of the Spanish conquest of Mindanao. He was a perfect soldier. His reward for distinguished service in the field against the Moros was paralleled by the treatment Cortez and Balboa received at the hands of the Spanish crown. During his term of office as Governor-General of the Philippines (1635-1644), he incurred the displeasure of the Friars, and upon being succeeded by Diego Fajardo, he was haled into court, fine $25,000 and thrown into prison for five years. He was finally released by a Royal Order and given the tardy award of Governor of the Canary islands.

There was no worthy successor to Corcuera for more than a decade, and his equal did not appear on the Philippines for more than two centuries. The respect imposed by this grand campaigner was soon forgotten, and by 1645 we find conditions in Mindanao and Sulu more terrible than before. In that year there were more than 10,000 Christian slaves in Moro hands in Mindanao alone, and the harems of Sulu were filled with thousands of women from every nationality in the Philippines. During this period there began a series of ferocious wars in Jolo, which resulted in the ultimate wiping out of the Spanish garrison at the Moro capital during the year 1645. The garrison was not reestablished in Jolo again for almost a century.

Father Combes, writing in 1663, describes the Moro assault on a landing party at Jolo:

By 1646 the situation had become so intolerable that the Spaniards negotiated terms for a lasting peace. On April 14 of that year a treaty was signed between Spain and the Sultan of Sulu. It remained in force only a short time. A permanent alliance between Spain and the Moros was impossible. There remained always the intolerance of the Spanish priests and a fanatical desire to force Catholicism upon the equally rigid Mohammedans.

With the collapse of this treaty it became increasingly evident to the Spaniards that there was need for more fortifications. Accordingly, in 1649 it was decided to establish a chain of supporting forts in the Sibuguey country north of Zamboanga. This country, never penetrated to any extent by the Spaniards, was the eat of a strong Moro power directed from Cotobato.

On March 2, 1649, a decree from the Governor-General ordered the construction at Sabanilla in the Bay of Illana, of a fort capable of holding 200 men. According to Crevas, the work was placed under the supervision of Father Vera, who had accomplished such a miracle of engineering at Zamboanga.

Almonte came to Sabanilla and found at the scene of the work a reserve of reinforcements which had arrived from Manila in four small boats. Here the forces were organized for an intensive campaign against the Cotobato Moros. Almonte left as a garrison at Sabanilla, Captain Pedro Navarro and Sergeant-major Jose de Victoria with a force large enough to attract the attention of Sultan Correlat.

Sergeant-Major Pedro del Rio was then sent into Cotobato valley with a force of 1,000 well-armed men. He was accompanied by Father Guitierez who was acquainted with the region due to previous service as Ambassador to the court of the Sultan of Mindanao.

Almonte then left Adjutant Alvaro Galindo with a force of sixteen vessels to attack the Moro villages along the coast, and he himself, with eight little boats, ascended the Rio Grande River for fifteen leagues to the fort of Sultan Moncay. Almonte was followed by several smaller vessels and a galley.

This campaign, a simultaneous assault upon the Moros from four directions, was the most ambitious action of the early Spanish conquest.

Arriving before the fort of Moncay, Almonte sent Adjutant Cristobal de las Eras with two brigantines to a point ten miles farther up the river where the Moros had an extensive plantation of sago. This plantation, cultivated by slaves and ill-defended by the Moros who were concentrated within the forts, was destroyed by De las Eras, together with all of the small vessels anchored there.

The loss of the plantation was a serious blow to the Moro defenders, as the sago represented an important part of their food supply. ⁴

De las Eras then aided Almonte in the reduction of the cotta of Moncay, which was demolished by artillery fire after a four-day siege. The success was accompanied by the death of many Moros who hurled themselves upon the arquebuses of the Spaniards to seek death in preference to defeat.

While this major action was in progress, Captain Lopez Lucero carried a sizeable force to the mountains. Where he made a complete ruin of fields, groves, orchards and villages. Simultaneously, Sergeant-major Pedro de la Mata Vergara occupied the cotta of the brother-in-law of Sultan Moncay.

All of this done, Almonte left a suitable garrison and retired to the fort at Sabanilla.

The Spanish fort established at this time upon the ruins of the cotta of Moncay represented the extreme limit of Spanish penetration into the Cotobato Valley until shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. This Spanish fort, known as Boayen, was commanded successively by Captains Cristobal Marquez, Lopez Lucero, Francisco Zabala and Benavides y Sornaz. It was constructed of wood and nipa palm, with walls reinforced by earth filings. The fort was never of much value to the Spaniards as it was so completely isolated in the middle of unconquerable territory. Expeditions conducted from it were mere sallies, with immediate retreat to the walls of the fortress.

This mode of warfare distinguishes the whole Spanish conquest of Mindanao and Sulu. The countryside was never under Spanish control, and the soldiers were never able to walk with safety outside the walls.

The Spaniards had no mode of attack in Mindanao. In general, they waged a defensive warfare, building strong fortifications and staying within them.