On April 20, 1710, Manuel Pérez y Crespo was born in Pitiegua (Salamanca). Sixteen years later, exactly 300 years ago today, he professed as a religious, having completed his year of novitiate, in the convent of the Augustinian Recollects of Barcelona, attached to the Recollect Province of Aragon, which had the Virgin of Pilar as its patron.
However, somehow the “missionary zeal” gripped our protagonist when he was already 39 years old and had been a religious for 23 years. He requested to join the Missionary Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine and redirect his life to the Augustinian Recollect missions in the Philippines.
He embarked in Cádiz on February 13, 1749. It was the twentieth voyage of Recollect volunteers from the Provinces of Spain to the Philippines. The journey was neither easy nor short: he arrived in Manila in July of the following year, 17 months later.
His first assignment was in Mobo (Masbate), the land where he learned Bisaya. It belonged to the Diocese of Nueva Cáceres, with a temperate and healthy climate, mountainous and fertile terrain with good irrigation, gold mines, and main crops of rice, corn, wheat, cacao, sugarcane, cotton, abaca, legumes, and fruits.
Two years later, the Provincial Chapter of 1752 appointed him prior of nearby Ticao, an island just over 30 kilometers by sea from Mobo. With its 334 km², Ticao is one of the three main islands of Masbate Province, along with Masbate itself and Burias Island.
Ticao today encompasses four municipalities (Batuan, Monreal, San Fernando, and San Jacinto) and is known for its archaeological landscape, with thousands of pre-Columbian artifacts (inscribed stones, gold spikes, burial jars, jade beads, rock statues, and petroglyphs). Ticao is a special conservation area for manta rays and even boasts a rare subspecies of warty pig, now nearly extinct.
When Friar Manuel arrived at this paradisiacal place, it was the eve of the most tragic decade for the Augustinian Recollects regarding the long sequence of kidnappings, murders and violence committed against the missionaries during the raids of the Muslim tribes of Mindanao.
Their preferred victims were Christian villages, with their parish priests and missionaries at the forefront, who were captured and later ransomed. Faced with the inaction of the civil and military authorities, the Augustinian Recollects in the Philippines constructed numerous defensive structures to protect the population throughout the archipelago.
The Muslim tribes, masters of the seas south of Luzon, invaded Ticao in 1754. They captured Friar Manuel Pérez and took him back to Masbate, where they placed him in full view of the inhabitants of his former parishioners in Mobo to demand a ransom.
The Parish offered 500 pesos for his release, and the exchange was arranged on the beach with twenty witnesses: ten townspeople and ten pirates. It was a trap: the rest of the pirates were lying in wait, hidden, and they took the money and not only recaptured Friar Manuel, but also three of the ten townspeople who had come to the meeting as witnesses to the exchange.
The four kidnapped men were taken to Mindanao, the island of origin of their pirate captors. There, Friar Manuel remained imprisoned until he was ransomed for 800 pesos during a diplomatic visit by Captain Pedro Gaztambide.
Having regained his freedom, the Recollect friar resumed his community life and pastoral mission. He was first sent to Cagayan de Oro, in the far north of the Philippines, 500 kilometers north of Manila, the place furthest from Moorish piracy.
Three years later, at the Provincial Chapter of 1778, he was appointed master of novices and vice-prior of the Intramuros convent in Manila, so that he could pass on to the younger religious his very long experience as a missionary who had to overcome enormous obstacles and rebuild himself from captivity.
In 1761 Friar Manuel was sent to Mariveles and in 1763 he died in Cabcaben, a neighborhood of that municipality in the province of Bataan.
