Note 56 — Appendixes to Part II

Her Majesty, feeling assured that conquests in themselves, and later their maintenance, absorb the profits which accrue from the countries already acquired, prefers to any conquest advantageous trade and commerce. Convinced, therefore, that the most profitable and lucrative policy is to conquer or secure such places as on account of their fortunate location may prove to be at the same time strong military and mercantile posts and so both promote and protect commerce, she cannot but approve the ideas your Excellency’s predecessor expresses in his communication numbered 14, and desires, that upon adopting the system in accordance with those ideas, you confine yourself solely, in all enterprises of conquest, to occupation of territory either abandoned or uninhabited, or to that which, notwithstanding its being settled, would cost little and would not give occasion for a costly war. In order to increase our commercial advantages in Sulu, and to raise up rivals to the Portuguese, it would be well to grant protection and reduction in duties to the Chinese junks56 under the specific condition that they do not sail under the flag of any other nation (without mentioning the Portuguese by name in order not to occasion the resentment of this power) and to secure in Sulu for those who adopt the Spanish flag, a reduction of duties although not as much as that which should be granted to Spanish vessels. Thus it is the will of her Majesty that you be directed, commanding, with the same purpose in view, that your predecessor state to you explicitly, which are the measures that he would have adopted, had he been authorized to do so, in order to avoid the blow to our commerce threatened by the Portuguese, depriving us with the double expedition from Macao and Singapore to Sulu, of the advantage over all other nations which still remained to us in this traffic; and that your Excellency obstruct, by all the means in your power, the association of interests between the commercial houses of Manila with those of Macao and Singapore, if the same were intended to secure special privileges in the island of Sulu to the products of the Philippines to the injury of the national commerce.