Cosme Damian
Aboitiz Achaval Sea Captain & Man of the Philippine Waters

Cosme Damian Aboitiz Achaval was born on 27 September 1856 in Lekeitio — a small town of fishermen, whalers, and mariners clinging to the cliffs of the Bay of Biscay, on the Basque coast of northern Spain. He was baptised the same day at the Basílica de la Asunción de Nuestra Señora, a magnificent Gothic church that has watched over Lekeitio's harbour since the 15th century, a place where generations of seafaring families had stood before him to receive the sacraments before heading out to sea.

Lekeitio is not a town that produces bankers or farmers. It is, to its bones, a maritime town. Founded in 1325, it developed as a fishing village and an important port for maritime trade, closely linked to the fishing industry and particularly to whaling in its early years, which contributed to its economic growth and cultural heritage. To be born in Lekeitio in 1856 was to be born into a world where the sea was not a metaphor but a livelihood — and where a young man of ambition and courage looked not inland, but outward, to the horizon.

His parents were José Antonio Aboitiz Ansola and María Carmen Achaval Marcue-Erquiaga, and he was one of several children in a family that bore one of the oldest Basque surnames in the province. The Aboitiz name appears in records going back centuries in the coastal villages of Bizkaia. Cosme Damian had brothers and sisters — Juan Antonio Marcos, Ysabel, José Concepción, Blas, Juan, José Francisco Sales, Tomás Valentín, and Jesús Florentino — a large and vigorous family that would eventually scatter itself across the world.

The particular world that Cosme Damian grew up in was one crackling with change. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, when he was thirteen, had transformed the old geography of empire. The voyage from Europe to the Philippines — once a four-month ordeal around the Cape of Good Hope — was now a matter of weeks. Steam engine technology and the Suez Canal together created what could only be called a game-changing moment for anyone in the maritime trades, and especially for young Basques with seafaring skills and colonial ambitions. The Philippines beckoned.

Cosme Damian was not the only member of his family drawn to the Philippines. His first cousin, Paulino Martín Aboitiz y Mendazona, had already made the leap. Born in Lekeitio on June 22, 1851, Paulino was the youngest child and second son, and as was the custom of the day, the eldest son inherited the farm, leaving nothing for him. With nothing to inherit and everything to gain, Paulino made the voyage to the Philippines in 1871 as a young man of twenty.

The two cousins — Paulino and Cosme Damian — both from the same small Basque port town, would each carve out their lives in the Philippine archipelago, though along very different paths. Paulino built a trading empire starting with abaca fibre in Leyte; that small company, after a century, became one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines, with interests in banking, energy production and distribution, real estate, food, and infrastructure. Cosme Damian chose the sea. He became a ship's captain — the most direct expression of the Lekeitio tradition — navigating the inter-island waters of the Spanish Philippine archipelago.

By the time Cosme Damian was in his late twenties, he had earned his captaincy and was commanding inter-island steamships for McLeod & Co., one of Manila's premier shipping operators, headquartered in the port district of the Philippine capital. The Philippines under Spanish colonial rule was a sprawling archipelago of seven thousand islands, and the inter-island trade was the lifeblood of its commerce — sugar from Negros, abaca from Leyte, tobacco from the Cagayan Valley, all moved by ships like his.

His vessel was the SS Remus — a sturdy iron steamship built just seven years earlier in Scotland. The Remus was a working ship, not a mail steamer or a luxury liner; she carried cargo and passengers between the islands, connecting the provincial ports to Manila in the manner that made the entire colonial economy function.

Of Maria Piñaga, Cosme Damian's wife and the mother of at least one of his sons, relatively little is recorded — as was so often the fate of women in 19th-century colonial records. She appears in the genealogy as Maria Aboitiz Achaval, born Piñaga, and what we know of her comes largely in fragments and echoes.

The Piñaga surname is a Spanish name found in the Philippine colonial context. Whether Maria herself was Spanish-born, a mestiza of Spanish and Filipino heritage, or from a Spanish family long established in the islands, remains an open question. What is known is that she and Cosme Damian had at least two sons together — or at least Alejandro Blas was born in Manila in 1892. The family tree notes suggest some complexity here: there is an account that Alejandro Blas's mother may have died after his birth, and that Cosme Damian may have subsequently remarried, with his second wife being a different Maria Piñaga, or the same. The exact situation requires further research.

What we do know, poignantly, is the record of her death: Maria Piñaga Viuda de Aboitiz — Maria Piñaga, Widow of Aboitiz — died on 29 January 1922 in Manila. The word viuda (widow) tells us that by 1922, Cosme Damian had already died. She outlived her captain husband. The notice of her death appears in the January 26, 1924 issue of Estudio, the weekly Catholic magazine edited in Manila by her son Alejandro Blas de Aboitiz — a fitting tribute, quietly placed in the publication her own son ran, two years after her passing.

Maria Piñaga died in Manila, the city where her husband had made his life as a sea captain, where her son had become a lawyer and a magazine editor, and where the family name had taken root in the islands. She was, in her quiet way, the anchor of the family in the Philippines — the one who stayed, who kept the home, who raised the children while Cosme Damian sailed the inter-island routes.