Some of the islands were populated by stocky natives who came and went in outrigger canoes, and one or two even had Jesuit missions on them, built of mud, like wasps’ nests. The sheer desolation of the place explained why they’d chosen it as a rendezvous point. If Minerva had set out from Cavite on the same tide as the Galleon, it would have been obvious to everyone in the Philippines that some conspiracy had been forged. Almost as bad, it would have added several weeks to the length of Minerva ’s voyage. The Manila Galleon was such a wallowing pig of a ship, and had been so gravely overloaded by Manila’s officialdom, that only a storm could move it. The exit from Manila Bay, which took most ships but a single day, had taken the Manila Galleon a week. Then, rather than taking to the open sea, she had turned south and then east, and picked her way down the tortuous passages between Luzon and the islands to the south, anchoring frequently, and occasionally pausing to say a mass over the wrack of some predecessor; for the passage was marked out, not with buoys, but with the remains of Manila Galleons from one, ten, fifty, or a hundred years past. Finally the Galleon had reached a sheltered anchorage off a small island called Ticao. She had dropped anchor there and spent three weeks gazing out over twenty miles of water at the gap between the southern extremity of Luzon, and the northern cape of Samar, which was called the San Bernardino Strait. Beyond it the Pacific stretched all the way to Acapulco. Yet Luzon might as well have been Scylla and Samar Charybdis, because (as the Spaniards had learnt the hard way) any ship that tried to sally through that gap when the tides and the winds were not just so would be cast away. Twice she had raised anchor and set sail for the Strait only to turn back when the wind shifted slightly.