Part #121: Pablo Sanchez vs. The World
“Who’d have thought one man could have so much blood in him?”
–New Epigrams, Anonymous (2000)
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From – “Great Political Figures of the Last Three Centuries” by Michael P. Lamb (1987) –
Pablo Rodrigo Sanchez y Ruiz (a.k.a. ‘Pablo Sanchez’), 1797-1868. Founder of the political/quasi-religious ideology Societism (q.v.) and acknowledged as one of the most significant individuals to change the course of history for not only the past three centuries, but all of human history. Attempting a full life of Sanchez is beyond the scope of this book, but see Bibliography Appendix A for some recommendations. Born in Cervera (Catalonia, then Kingdom of Spain), to Francisco José Sanchez y Rodriguez and Maria Ana Figures i Fábregas; the eldest of four children, the other three being daughters. Sanchez grew up under French occupation due to the Jacobin Wars, his father (the mayor of Cervera) collaborating with the occupiers to spare the town. When the French were driven out in 1807, the mob executed Sanchez’s father and drove his mother and sisters into exile, while the boy Pablo hid from the revenge squads and escaped. The next few years are sketchy. Sanchez was recruited as a drummer boy for a local Kleinkrieger regiment, which was folded into the regular Neapolitan army after the partition of Spain (1808). Sanchez appears to have left at the end of the war and later worked in a menial role at the University of Saragossa, then as a bank clerk in Santander (1815).[1] He joined the Portuguese East India Company in 1817...
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From – “Pablo Sanchez as a Man” by Étienne Dubois (1978) –
Sanchez’s assignments for the PEIC were varied. For the ten years in which he served the Company, he travelled to almost every corner of the world, never setting down roots for very long in any particular place. Every region to which he visited left its mark on both the man himself and the worldview he was slowly developing. Important early on was the case of slavery. Sanchez had known little about the practice and was educated about it at firsthand while negotiating with Freedonians such as Josiah Quimbo about obtaining supplies to repair the Portuguese ship
Centauro. Left thoughtful by the obvious hostility by which the Africans treated the Portuguese, as well as what he had seen of the young colony, Sanchez and his ship next found themselves in Montevideo, then in Portuguese Brazil. Sanchez witnessed the restless trade of radical ideas in the city (and may have played a small part in it himself) that foreshadowed the Brazilian War. Most importantly for himself, however, Sanchez met the Meridian trader Luis Carlos Cruz. The two men forged their lifelong friendship in a bar brawl against one or more Linnaean Racialists who had apparently not realised that Cruz was himself of mixed white and red blood.[2] Cruz was Sanchez’s introduction to the Meridians’ more egalitarian practices towards the different races, which he would not witness firsthand until some years later.
After leaving Brazil, the
Centauro briefly visited Portuguese Mozambique, where Sanchez recorded that the local governors—though adamant about the superiority of the white man and his civilisation—were often cordial on a personal level with the local potentates such as the princes of the Matetwa Empire. This may have inspired Sanchez’s particular distaste for ideological hypocrisy that he expressed in later life. More generally, it also meant he observed the African natives of the Cape region and wrote extensively on how they differed from those in Freedonia and the rest of Guinea. Later, the
Centauro finally reached its intended destination of Goa.
Sanchez worked as a clerk in Goa for four years, but never really settled in the city. He was always travelling, whether into the hinterland as part of the delegations sent out to the Maratha princes to check they were still obeying the Portuguese-puppet Peshwa, or over the sea to Persia as part of the alliance that even at the time came to life to take advantage of the Ottoman Time of Troubles. Sanchez played a minor role in liaising with the Persians and observing their Ottoman and Omani foes, but managed to get out before the reversals (such as the Retreat from Najaf) that led to acrimony and the decay of the alliance. In many ways Sanchez seems to have led an almost charmed life, particularly during his time with the Company: he saw rapid promotion in Goa not only thanks to deserved ability on his part, but also because of an outbreak of fever that killed several of his superiors. He made considerable sums thanks to bribes from Maratha princes and other local potentates, which (thanks to the corrupt nature of the Companies at the time) enabled him to buy himself further up the ladder. By the time he formally left Portuguese India in 1822, Sanchez was one of the PEIC’s rising stars and had obtained the honourary rank of major in the Portuguese Indian Army, despite not having any real military experience beyond observing others.
He left Goa thanks to having been offered a more prestigious post in China. The Portuguese possessed northern Formosa and, like the other European trading companies supporting the new Feng Dynasty in southern China, enjoyed considerable trade privileges in ports such as Fuzhou and Hanjing.[3] Sanchez was initially assigned in an administrative role in Formosa, but the reports from the mainland intrigued him enough that he was able to leverage himself into a move to Hanjing. There he acted as the third most senior administrator of the Portuguese ‘Hongmen’ in their Outsiders’ Villages. Sanchez at the time appears to have been noted as competent if not spectacular, though there are so many forged propaganda ‘records’ about him (positive and negative) that it is hard to pick out the truth. He observed the birth of the Gwayese creole people, half white and half Chinese,[4] and (having seen the utility of similar half-caste individuals in India) was part of the push to use the Gwayese as interpreters and administrators for the benefit of the PEIC.
Sanchez was also peripherally involved in the opium affairs at the time. He smoked opium himself a few times and wrote of its effects, of how he had realised he was becoming addictive and had forced himself to give up the habit. His diary records a gruesomely evocative early account of a sweating-withdrawal[5] at first hand, but he eventually triumphed, illustrating the man’s extraordinary willpower (which the world would come to know for good and for ill). After experiencing its deleterious effects himself, Sanchez was naturally at the forefront of preventing the PEIC and other traders from trading in opium—not simply out of fear of the Feng ultimatum like many of his contemporaries, but out of a genuinely felt moral imperative. It was Sanchez’s investigative work that played a role in the Dutch being fingered as flauting the opium ban, ultimately helping to kickstart the Popular Wars.[6] He also wrote somewhat philosophically about the effects of opium, specifically that what could leave men as empty husks enslaved by addiction could also remove pain and save lives in medicine. “One is left with the impression that nothing is truly good or evil in nature—it is simply how we choose to employ it”. Over a century later, some of these writings would be twisted by so-called Sanchezista regimes to justify some of their more abhorrent practices.
He continued to amass promotions and personal funds during his time in China—the Feng might be a new regime, but they were not entirely free from the hopeless corruption that had characterised the old Qing. A series of events took place at this time that vastly influenced his later ideological views. As a reasonably important figure in the structural relationship between European traders and the Feng administrators that was developing in the Watchful Peace (the legacy of the Phoenix Men), Sanchez naturally had to deal with his opposite numbers among the Feng. At one point he even met the Dansheng Emperor towards the end of his reign. The man who had once been Governor Wen Kejing was settling well into the imperial dignity and had already nominated one of his three sons to follow him, which he would in 1831 as the Xiaohong Emperor.
Sanchez was present for the Emperor ennobling several Feng military officers and civil administrators who had won themselves glory and praise for their actions in the ongoing Anqing Incident with the Qing remnant to the north. Also present was one of the original Phoenix Men, Michel Ouais. Ouais was still subdued over the death of his friend Dirk de Waar shortly before—it is thought that de Waar’s demise helped hasten the opium-addled downfall of the VOC in China. Ouais, who naturally spoke Chinese well, gave a running commentary to the other European traders about the complexities of the honour which the Dansheng Emperor was bestowing. He spoke of how in the ancestral Han Dynasty, there had been a system of ranks of nobility which men aspired to. Under the Tang they had become less important as the Chinese’s famed system of civil service examination for mandarins came in, but the ranks had survived ever since, and there were many among the northern Qing with such noble titles. The Feng, however, had decided that what had once been a triumph of meritocratic governance over blood and court intrigue had since run its course and become a practice of corruption and teaching trivialities. Their position was doubtless exaggerated simply by their desire for a clean break with the Qing—the Yongzheng and Daguo Emperors had reformed the Chinese civil service in their time and it was no longer as corrupt as it had been under the Kangxi Emperor. Nonetheless, until a more modern teaching system could be brought in and the civil service rebuilt from the groundwork up, the Feng took the decision to rely on a new class of nobility created by the Emperor. Hereditary titles were relatively rare in China (Ouais explained) which helped prevent some of the problems associated with nobility in Europe—titles were held only for life.
The younger traders, including Sanchez, listened in fascination as Ouais went on to list the titles that the Emperor was giving out. He would not immediately promote anyone save a national saviour to ranks as exalted as Prince or Duke (which he had given to men like Hao Jicai and Hu Kwa) but the men who had fought and intrigued to secure the Feng’s supremacy against the northerners were being granted the titles of Baron, Viscount, Count (or Earl) and Marquess. “But why would he give them European titles?” Sanchez asked, confused. Ouais laughed hollowly (the death of his friend was still weighing on him), and gently explained that the titles were just translations of the actual Chinese names, which had originally been made by the Jesuits many years ago.
Sanchez remained somewhat puzzled. “Why, then, do the noble titles correspond so exactly to ours?” he asked. “Perhaps there are some special Chinese ones that just didn’t come up this time? Or the Feng are emulating our ways?”
Ouais shook his head. “They work with us and treat us as something near equals, which is more than you can say for the Qing. But don’t go thinking that just because some of them see the importance of steam engines and oceanic navies that they want to be just like us. They want to copy the things we have so they can grow stronger, so we can never dictate to them. They are a proud people, after all, and their title system goes back thousands of years. Say rather that
ours resembles
theirs, young man.”
The affair left Sanchez thoughtful, and he wrote upon the subject (his own account is our main source for it) as well as musing about the Indian princes and potentates he had seen in Portuguese India, and the Persian and Ottoman nobility he had met during the intervention in the Time of Troubles. “Can there truly be such a universal template for governance that expresses itself in lands as far separated as Spain and China? Could it descend back to the dawn of humanity when all peoples were one? But what then of the radical Republics? They oppose nobility—do they then deny an essential feature of government? The French experiment certainly turned to chaos and instability, suggesting this might be true. But there are others. The UPSA, for one. I would very much like to see it again, and to meet Sr. Cruz once more...”
To a modern, well acquainted with the precepts of Societism, a natural reaction upon reading this (after shivering) would be to assume that Sanchez immediately went off in the direction of South America. But, surprisingly, Sanchez seems to have treated his experiences as nothing more than idle musings at this stage. He worked in China until 1827 and had the opportunity once more to travel farther afield—even to Yapon at one point, as the Portuguese sent a mission to spy on the situation there and how the rival Dutch were trading with the southern Yapontsi court. Sanchez himself was not one of the men to infiltrate Nagasaki (just as well for him, as four of them were caught out and executed by the local authorities) but did come ashore when they investigated Izumo Han, further up the coast. Sanchez learned that the typically fragmented state of government in Yapon at the time had worsened, and it was almost every man for himself. Prior to an earlier period of conflict in the sixteenth century (records are naturally sketchy[7]) Izumo had been one of the provinces dominated by the Mori clan, but the Mori had been crushed by the Tokugawa and Izumo left as a small independent fiefdom. Now the Mori were allied to the southern court (possessing long memories, and the north was dominated by the Tokugawa) and wished to regain control of Izumo.[8] The local Izumo ruler (Sanchez does not record his name), desperate for survival but knowing the northern court was too distant and fragmented to defend him, turned directly to the Russo-Lithuanians for help. The Portuguese spies, including Sanchez, record that a small Russian force arrived by sea to help defend the Izumo castle against the forces of the southern court, repulsing them. And, of course, afterwards a Russian ‘resident’ remained in that castle to ‘suggest’ to the Izumo prince appropriate courses of action in the future, if he wanted to retain that vital protection...
Sanchez’s last foreign visit of this period was to the Philippines. Having experienced war and drama during the Philippine War—and soon to see it again—Manila was recorded in his diary as a battered and complex but intriguing city. Sanchez wrote with some frustration of the many different languages spoken in the islands—doubtless simply venting some trouble he had had with interpreters, but this too would later be taken out of context by the regimes founded in his name. Sanchez also wrote prophetically that the war between the Portuguese-Castilians and the New Spanish had weakened the colonial regime in the Philippines and emboldened the natives, in particular the Sultan of Sulu in the south. “I suspect we have not heard the last of them.”
While in the Philippines, Sanchez became attached to a Portuguese ship commanded by Captain Sintra, the same man who had first brought him around the Cape of Good Hope to India several years ago. Sintra was down on his luck, but he had just had a stroke of good fortune at last: he had learned the location of a New Spanish treasure ship that had been travelling on its way to the Philippines (to bribe local fighters with gold) during the Philippine War, but had been sunken by Castilian forces. Naturally the Castilians had hoped to take it intact, but the sinking had been an accident. It had long been assumed the ship had gone down in the open ocean, too deep to be recovered—so had said the official report of the captain of the Castilian ship, the
Argonauta. In any case the
Argonauta itself had been lost with all hands not long afterwards, destroyed by the New Spanish.
Sintra, however, had found a drunkard in a bar who claimed to be the last survivor of the
Argonauta, the last witness to the fate of the treasure ship
Señora de Guaymas. The drunkard, named Rámon Salinas, said that the
Argonauta’s captain had seen the treasure ship go down in shallow waters, but given a fake report and sworn the crew to secrecy, with the intention of returning later with hired South Seas divers to recover some of the treasure and keep it for themselves—perhaps turning pirate. Of course the
Argonauta was lost soon afterwards, but Salinas had not been on board. He had been stranded on an island by the captain for reasons Salinas refused to go into, but perhaps involved the fact that the first mate’s daughter had accompanied him on board. As it was, Salinas had been rescued surprisingly quickly by a passing New Spanish ship. He had sought after the treasure himself, of course, but lacked the money and connections to launch such a trip. Until now.
Sanchez was sceptical, but was eventually convinced to take part in the plan. He used his connections with the PEIC to invent a mission to explain their absence. The
Argonauta hired their divers—from the Friendly Islands,[9] coincidentally mere months before their conquest by Apehimana, Warlord of the United Mauré. Against all the odds, it turned out that Salinas had been telling the truth. The wreck of the
Guaymas was found in shallow water off the Philippine coast, and with the aid of their divers, the crew of the
Douro was able to reclaim between a quarter and a third of its treasure—the rest being too bulky to remove from the wreck. Despite the usual acrimony over how to split the riches, Sintra was able to hold the crew together and divide the gold equitably. Sanchez had begun the voyage moderately well-off, but now he was genuinely rich. He decided that, while his job was an interesting one that had taken him all over the world, he had a desire to get on in—no pun intended—society, and to do so he would need an education. Now he had the means to obtain one.
Like Sintra, Sanchez resigned from the PEIC and returned to Iberia. While Sintra is believed to have blown his riches on gambling and drink, Sanchez made some careful investments. Apparently foreseeing that chaos would come again to Europe (though, to be fair, that is hardly a remarkable assumption), Sanchez was careful to split his investments between the banks of many countries to ensure his riches could not be lost in a single blow. He then used his money to enrol in the University of Salamanca in Castile. He was intrigued in the fields of history, geography and linguistics after his experiences abroad, and began his studies in early 1828. Though supposedly only a student, his firsthand experience of the East—as opposed to teaching from books—meant that some of the professors deferred to him, and he found himself a reasonably important and popular figure within the faculty.
But, of course, even as he settled down, the Popular Wars were being ignited elsewhere. Sanchez became concerned by reports that the New Spanish were planning another invasion to regain the throne for Charles IV. While travelling through Castile, a country he had not seen for years, he was shocked that not all the burns and scars he saw afflicting cities were the result of the Jacobin Wars. Others had been inflicted during the abortive New Spanish attack during the Philippine War. He wrote in his diary of the misery that must have been caused by such a pointless and quixotic attempt, and feared what might come now, as it seemed Portugal was beset by enemies on all sides. There were rumours of a Christmas uprising in Madrid. Sanchez travelled there and shared his views of the pointlessness of war in a speech,[10] only to find himself faced by an angry mob who called him traitor and Portuguese-friend and threw stones at him. The mob were soon crushed by Alfonso XII’s troops, but Sanchez was nonetheless shaken by the experience. He returned to Salamanca, where some of his sympathetic colleagues advised him why he might have gone down so badly. Some suggested that it was simply because the people of Madrid did not know Sanchez as well as they did, and were already ready to hate him, regarding him as a simple Portuguese cat’s-paw. But there were others. There was a professor named Víctor Marañón, a regressivist aristocrat known to complain about the increasing number of students from bourgeois backgrounds. Of course, Sanchez was himself from a fairly bourgeois family, but Marañón seemed not to realise this. Marañón had a deep contempt for the working classes. He was an Enlightenment liberal of the patriarchalist, elitist school, the sort of man who would have supported Bernardo Tanucci a few generations before. He viewed the Jesuits with suspicion, but saved his real scorn for the man in the street. “Priest-ridden, empty-headed, he can be ordered about by any Jesuit, any churchman, anyone in a black robe! He does what he has always done, what he is told to do. Some say he should be able to vote for elected representation! I tell you, his landlord would tell him who to vote for, and then he would tell his son, and they would carry on mindlessly voting for the same family for all eternity, like a machine—like one of those Automata we keep hearing about. He’s not like you or me.” So Sanchez records his words, then adds his own addendum: “Marañón is a fool, but even a fool can sometimes stumble upon a great truth. Can it be...?”
Events followed swiftly. At the Battle of Cape St Vincent, the Castilian fleet sank the Dutch. Initially there was some jubilation in Castile at this victory against a traditional foe. But soon details began to leak out, probably aided by New Spanish agents. Public anger arose when the battle was presented (not inaccurately) as the Portuguese ordering their Castilian minions to throw themselves under a steam-carriage for them. As it was, the Portuguese had kept their own fleet safe and secured themselves against New Spanish invasion—or so they thought. But their act had nonetheless stoked resentment and hatred in Castile itself.
The First Spanish Revolution, as it was later known, began—ironically—in Salamanca itself. The Castilian government was convinced that the university town was loyal. It was relatively close to the Portuguese border and they knew of high-profile supporters of their regime such as Sanchez himself. But the students, ah, the students. Filled with big ideas and raging hormones, weathervanes for the tide of public anger...Sanchez was shocked and appalled when would-be revolutionaries seized control of university buildings in the name of Charles IV, flying the flag of New Spain. He was one of the people who tried to negotiate with them, and ended up dodging bullets. He did not write about the incident until later (thanks to the desperate situation) but seems almost to be weeping in his words: “These were young men I had worked alongside, some of whom I had even helped the professors teach! And now they spat on me and called me traitor as though they had never seen me in their lives before! Marañón was right, it had nothing to do with how well the crowd knew me. They are simple seized by a madness, a madness that makes them see their fellow man as a monster. They do not even have the excuse of prejudice about superficial differences, as I saw in my voyages, as I saw in my childhood when the mob turned on the French. They are Spaniards fighting other Spaniards for the sake of still other Spaniards. Why? WHY?”
The little revolution in Salamanca inspired other minor risings elsewhere, but these were only of the order of those seen during the Philippine War. On their own they would easily have been crushed, they would have amounted to nothing...but Portugal’s enemies had one more card to play...
[1] As noted in Part #100, the part about him being in Saragossa is based on rather unreliable sources, but is often repeated without citation, as it is in this case.
[2] I.e. a mestizo, ‘red’ being native American Indian.
[3] The new name for Canton / Guangzhou.
[4] Actually Gwayese originally meant adventurous Chinese youths who ran off with the Europeans and were disowned by their families. It was only later that it was applied to the mixed-race children that were a result of this and of traders marrying native women. The author got a bit confused. See Part #104.
[5] We would say ‘going cold turkey’.
[6] This is debatable, as the discovery was mainly thanks to work by the Feng themselves rather than Europeans. The author may be naturally exaggerating Sanchez’s importance at this stage.
[7] Specifically this refers to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.
[8] This is a gross oversimplification—it’s an attempted reconstruction by historians after the fact, possessing almost no primary sources, and is also tainted by being seen through the lens of prejudice that tends to look down on the Japanese.
[9] Tonga.
[10] See page quote for part #60.
) had an earlier begining. 
