When the Spanish described their attempts to colonise northern Taiwan (1626–1642), the documents they created occasionally discussed the people they met. Those glimpses offer us some of the earliest descriptions of the people in Taiwan’s north and the first attempts to colonise their lands. This work argues that the value of Spanish sources is in those earliest glimpses of Taiwan’s people and not just in their descriptions of a failed Spanish colony. With its thematic analysis and microhistory, this work shines a bright light on those glimpses, aiming to find out what we can know about the Taiwanese through Spanish eyes.