The Spanish governors were also hampered by the lack of effective support from the older colony of Mexico, which was so much nearer than the home land that they naturally turned to it for aid. One of them wrote pathetically to the King of Spain:
"And for the future ... will your Majesty ordain that Mexico shall furnish what pertains to its part. For, if I ask for troops, they send me twenty men, who die before they arrive here, and none are born here. And if I ask for ammunition, they laugh at me and censure me, and say that I ask impossible things. They retain there the freight money and the duties; and if they should send to this state what is yours, your Majesty would have to spend but little from your royal patrimony."
The Portuguese were a source of anxiety to the colonists until Portugal fell into the hands of Spain. The Dutch, too, who were growing powerful in the Far East, even took Formosa, which brought them altogether too near, but they were driven out of that island by the great Chinese pirate Koxinga.[13]
From the time of Legaspi to the end of Spanish rule there were occasional attacks upon the Chinese residing in the archipelago, who were never allowed to live in the Islands without exciting protest and dislike, based partly upon religious, partly upon commercial grounds. During the last one hundred years of Spanish supremacy, the greatest danger to their power was the presence of the Chinese. Efforts to exclude them were never effective or long enduring, and yet it was felt that the men who came as labourers and traders were the advance guard of an innumerable host. In business the Malay has never been the equal of the shrewd Chinaman, and although the latter might be converted and take a Spanish name, yet it was always gravely suspected that a search would find joss sticks smoldering in front of the tutelary deity of commerce hidden behind the image of the Virgin in his chapel.
So the Chinaman, like the Jew in medieval Europe, carried on his trade in constant danger of robbery and murder. This antipathy did not, however, extend to Filipina women, many of whom married the foreigners. Among the leaders in the Filipino insurrection against the United States, Aguinaldo, two of his cabinet, nine of his generals, and many of his more important financial agents were of Chinese descent.