🪶 THE SMOKING QUILL | June 24, 2025

Return of the Lequios: Galvão and the Dourado Map Reignite a Forgotten Legacy

In the shadow of colonial rewriting, certain names were erased, meanings were warped, and maps were redrawn to fit imperial narratives. But ink leaves traces, and quills that once wrote truth still whisper from the margins of time.

In this installment of The Smoking Quill, we examine a long-forgotten account by Portuguese governor and historian António Galvão, alongside a rare label from the Dourado map (1570s) that may finally re-center the Philippines in its rightful place as the ancient Land of the Lequios. He wrote in the era of Pinto, yet never mentions him, but he does not define the Lequios geographically and in a description that cannot be anyone else.

[Read The Discoveries of the World  From Their First Original Unto the Year our Lord 1555 by António Galvão. Edited By C.B, Bethune for the Hakluyt Society.]

Galvão's Revelation: White Filipinos, Gold, and Maritime Supremacy

Galvão wrote in the early 1500s, predating Jesuit editorial dominance over colonial memory. In his account, a Portuguese voyage along the East coast of Luzon encounters a people at 15–16° North, unmistakably in Northern Luzon in the "Islands of the Philippinas.":

“The people be white [well disposed], the people be white [well disposed], and the women (well proportioned, and) more beautifull and better arraied then in any other place of those parts, hauing many iewels of gold, which was a token that there was some of that metal in the same countrie."

Why would Filipinos be classified white by the Portuguese? They defined not a modern scholar ignorant of their words such as Galvão. 

He continues:

“Here were also barkes [large ship with 3 masts]of 43 cubits in length, and 2 fathoms and a half in breadth [80']... which barkes were rowed with oars. They used to sail in them to China... and that if they would go thither they should haue pilots to conduct them,... the country not being above 5 or 6 days sailing from thence."

These are Filipino maritime traders, operating with precision ships and gold-lined societies. Galvão is not describing Japan, China, or Ryukyu—he is describing a Tagalog or Ilocano people of high civilization, matched by Boxer Codex illustrations from the same era.

15-16°N = Zambales, Pangasinan, or Southern La Union. That area boasts a gold trade network from Benguet to Aringay to Agoo especially in pre-colonial times. Even off the coast of Zambales, the Santa Cruz Junk has been found, likely of Philippine origin according to the initial findings. Even if of foreign origin, it proves significant trade. The residual elements of that area being gold rich traders still resounds. 

Galvão also mentions an active volcano in that area and it turns out, Mt. Pinatubo, awakened in the 1500's erupting multiple times include what is suggested to rival the more recent eruption in our era.  

He even documents black slaves obtained from regions near Cebu (likely Negros, though such populated several islands near), with the striking observation that these "black Moors" were clearly not native to the region meaning in ancient origin. Though likely not meant in a racist manner, these Portuguese were differentiating by merely black, white, and perhaps Chinese. Specifically, they pointed out the hair contrast to which Filipinos, in their opinion, fall into the "white" category regardless of darker complexion.

Some ridicule this reference to the Lequios as white, even like Germans, and that is what the Portuguese meant according to a Portuguese Governor in that time. He would know. A modern scholar without such context ridiculing, would not. Who are the wealthy, white islanders richest in gold, more eminent traders than the Chinese, who sail in large Junk ships, from the East of China and the Malay Peninsula? How is that difficult is the real question? One will never find this description of the Ryukyuans, though a wonderful people. They simply were not the Isles of Gold especially since they had little and even less alluvial gold deposits where the Philippines is #2 in untapped gold reserves on the planet. There is no comparison.

“There came vnto them also certaine barkes or boates handsomely decked, wherein the master and principall men sate on high, and vnderneath were very blacke moores with frizled haire [as if for parade or state] : and being demanded where they had these blacke moores, they answered, that they had them from certaine islands standing fast by Sebut, where there were many of them, a thing that the Spaniards much maruailed at, because from thence it was aboue 300 leagues to the places where the black people were. Therefore it seemed, that they were not naturally borne in that climate, but that they be in certaine places scattered ouer the whole circuite of the world [like other races].”

This was not a primitive people. This was a cosmopolitan trading society.