Cracks in the

Parchment Curtain
and other Essays in Philippine History
(Emended edition, with index)

William Henry Scott

Foreword: Renato Constantino

NEW DAY PUBLISHERS

Of the Christian Literature Society of the Philippines, Inc.
Quezon City
1982
 Contents
Foreword ....................................................................................................................................3
Acknowledgments and Apologies ...............................................................................................4
Cracks in the Parchment Curtain .................................................................................................6
History of the Inarticulate .........................................................................................................18
The Creation of a Cultural Minority ..........................................................................................25
Crusade or Commerce? Spanish-Moro Relations in the 16th Century .......................................34
Filipino-Spanish Face-to-Face Contacts 1543-1545 ..................................................................39
Boat-Building and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society ...................................................47
Filipino Class Structure in the Sixteenth Century ......................................................................71
Class Structure in the Unhispanized Philippines .......................................................................93
An Ilocano-Igorot Peacepact of 1820 ......................................................................................108
Colonial Whip.........................................................................................................................115
Semper’s “Kalingas” 120 Years Later.....................................................................................119
The Nine Clergy of Nueva Segovia .........................................................................................128
Struggle for Independence in Candon .....................................................................................150
Amor Patrio in the Philippine Insurgent Records ....................................................................169
Isabelo de los Reyes, Father of Philippine Folklore ................................................................177
Isabelo de los Reyes: Provinciano and Nationalist ..................................................................192
A Minority Reaction to American Imperialism: Isabelo de los Reyes .....................................207
 Foreword

Colonial historiography still exerts its influence on many writers of Philippine history. This is
understandable, for colonial conditioning persists in diverse and subtle ways and as a
consequence, too many Filipinos continue to carry the dead weight of colonial consciousness.
Fortunately, we have witnessed in recent years a heartening development in the writing of
history which has produced new interpretations of our past from the anti-imperialist viewpoint.
Important contributions to this new trend have come from both Filipino and foreign scholars.
Despite his nationality, William Henry Scott belongs more to the Filipino than to the foreign
group. He has lived with Filipinos for many years and has been assiduous in unraveling many
strands of our past. Moreover, he has done so not from the vantage point of Spanish colonialism
or American imperialism but from that of the Filipinos’ struggle for emancipation. Seeing the
past from the point of view of the colonized, Dr. Scott provides the reader with valuable
insights and much useful material for a deeper understanding of various periods of Philippine
history and aspects of Philippine life.
The essays in this collection may appear disparate in subject but they have an underlying
theme: a discussion of Philippine society for Filipinos. They demonstrate the author’s abiding
mission of helping Filipinos think as Filipinos.
It is high time that these essays which appeared in different publications were brought
together in one volume, for in this form the reader can better appreciate the unity of purpose
within the wide range of Dr. Scott’s investigations into the history and life of the Filipino
people he has come to love.
RENATO CONSTANTINO
February 24, 1982
 Acknowledgments and Apologies

The second printing of this book provides an opportunity not only to correct typographical
errors in the first edition, but to supply careless omissions, apologize for oversights, and
respond to suggestions by reviewers. Most of these articles were previously published in
journals whose editors are here belatedly thanked for their permission to reprint.
The title essay, “Cracks in the Parchment Curtain,” was written for the Horacio de la
Costa memorial issue of Philippine Studies 26:1-2 (1978), and “History of the inarticulate” for
Diliman Review (July-September 1979). “The creation of a cultural minority” was originally
delivered as a talk for the University of the Philippines Department of Sociology, published in
Solidarity (May-June 1976), and reprinted as Third World Study Series No. 4 (1978), IXTHUS
Special Issue No. 9 (1978), and a chapter in Mary Racelis Hollnsteiner’s 1979 Society, Culture
and the Filipino. “Crusade or commerce?” was written for Kadtuntaya 14 (1979) and reprinted
in Diliman Review (March-April 1980), and “Filipino-Spanish face-to-face contacts 1543-1545”
for the maiden issue of Pandiwa (July 1979) and reprinted in Leyte-Samar Studies 14:1 (1980).
“Boat-building and seamanship in classic Philippine society” was published by the National
Museum as Anthropology Paper No. 9 (1981), but actually appeared first in Philippine Studies
30:3 (1982). “Filipino class structure in the 16th century” was written for the Third World
Studies Center and circulated as their Paper No. 13 (1978), and revised for Philippine Studies
28:2 (1980), and “Class structure in the unhispanized Philippines” was written for the Frank
Lynch memorial issue of Philippine Studies 27:2 (1979).
“An Ilocano-Igorot peacepact of 1820” appeared in Philippine Studies 26:3 (1978),
“Colonial whip” in Diliman Review (January-March 1979), and “Semper’s ‘Kalingas’ 120 years
ago” in Philippine Sociological Review 27:2 (1979). “The nine clergy of Nueva Segovia” was
written for Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review 43 (1979), and “Struggle for
independence in Candon” appeared both in Ilocos Review 13 (1981) and Silliman Journal 28:3-
4 (1982). “Amor patrio in the Philippine Insurgent Records” was originally read as a paper at
the Third National Local History Conference in Bacolod City (November 1980) and published
in Diliman Review (January-February 1981); “Isabelo de los Reyes, Father of Philippine
Folklore” was read at the Fourth National Folklore Congress in Diliman (July 1980) and
published in Ilocos Review 12 1980); “Isabelo de los Reyes, provinciano and nationalist” was
read at the Second International Philippine Studies Conference in Honolulu (June 1981); and “A
minority reaction to American imperialism” was read at the Fourth National Conference on
Local History in Cebu City (November 1982) and published in Quarterly of Philippine Culture
and Society 10:1 (1982).
Several reviewers have recommended the inclusion of an index and bibliography. The
index is accordingly added to this edition, but a meaningful bibliography would entail a
prohibitive expansion of the book. “Class structure in the unhispanized Philippines,” for
example, was written after a year’s survey of all published literature on Philippine ethnography;
interested readers may therefore be referred to bibliographies I found especially useful myself—
namely, Shiro Saito’s Philippine ethnography: a critically annotated and selected bibliography
(University of Hawaii 1972), Frank Lynch’s “The Jesuit letters as a source of anthropological
data” (Philippine Studies 4:2 [1956]), and W. H. Scott’s “Manuscript holdings in the Dominican
Archives on the pagans of northern Luzon” (Historical Bulletin 11:3 [1967]). Direct quotations
in most of the articles are attributed to their source in footnote references, though I regret that
the suppression of annotations in “History of the inarticulate” caused translations by two other
historians to pass unacknowledged. These are the quotations on page 20 pertaining to Samar
which were taken from chapter one of Robert Bruce Cruikshank’s doctoral dissertation, “A
history of Samar Island 1768-1898” (University of Wisconsin 1975), and, at the bottom of the
same page, a Cavite letter published in Dennis Morrow Roth’s The friar estates of the
Philippines (University of New Mexico 1977), pp. 108-109. My apologies to these scholars.
WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT
Sagada, 9 June 1985
 Cracks in the Parchment Curtain

The terms “iron curtain” and “bamboo curtain” have become popular in the English-language
press to signify the state control of information in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic
of China which makes it difficult or impossible for outsiders to learn the true condition of their
citizens’ circumstances. Just so we might speak of a “parchment curtain” to signify the official
documents of the Spanish colonial regime which prevent the modern Filipino from forming a
clear picture of his ancestors’ conditions. It is the existence of this parchment curtain that
moved Filipino-historian Teodoro A. Agoncillo to his well-taken comment that it will never be
possible to write a real history of the Filipino people under Spain because the colonial
government enjoyed a monopoly on the production of source materials.
Yet there are cracks in that curtain, chinks, so to speak, through which fleeting glimpses
of Filipinos and their reactions to Spanish dominion may be seen. These are more often than not
unintentional and merely incidental to the purpose of the documents containing them. Original
letters and reports, bickering complaints among conquistadores, appeals for support, reward,
and promotion, long-winded recommendations, that were never implemented, and decrees
inspired by local obstruction of government goals—all these contain direct or implied
references to Filipino behavior and conditions. These insights do not generally appear in the
official histories which are based on the documents. The author of a history book has the task of
setting forth the end results of the events surveyed and so does not have time to cite such details
as do not illustrate his point. Yet every researcher in Spanish or Philippine archives quickly
learns that almost any document contains some little Filipino glimpse for which he was not
looking and which did not interest the author of the document. A few examples will show just
how interesting, or even significant, such details may be.
In 1971, I was searching for references to Juan de Salcedo in the Archives of the Indies
in Seville. I was writing a book on the history of Spanish contacts with the Igorots of northern
Luzon and was hoping to verify a tantalizing hint in Gaspar de San Agustin’s 1698 Conquistas
that Salcedo had discovered the Igorot gold mines. The problem was that the Conquistas was
published 120 years after Salcedo’s death and there were very few contemporary references to
him in other sources. Happily, I was able to locate his hojas de servicios, or “service record.”
These hojas de servicios are collections of sworn testimonies to a man’s service to the
King which would justify some personal reward or pension from the state. In Salcedo’s case,
the occasion was an appeal for pension on the part of his widowed mother, her claims being not
only her son’s services but those of his conquistador father, Pedro, in Mexico. The procedure
was for a notary public to swear in a number of witnesses and ask each of them a series of set
questions about the actual deeds of the person involved. The Salcedo testimonies run to three
inches of pages, of which the following is a fair sample:
To the sixth question he said that what he knows about it is that after making the
said journey contained in the preceding question, the said Juan de Salcedo begged and
supplicated the said Adelantado that he give him license to go to explore this island of
Luzon throughout the northern regions, and the said Adelantado pointed out to him the
difficulty of not having the ships for him to sail in, and the aforesaid then offered to look
for them himself at his own expense; and so he went and this witness saw him set forth
 from the City of Manila for the islands of Baco, Mindoro and Balayan and those nearby
them, and after some time he returned to this city with eight or nine fully manned native
boats; and, with license and instructions from the said Adelantado, he went to explore
the opposite coast of this island of Luzon, and after many days came back overland
through the Lake of Manila; and after his and his soldiers’ return, this witness learned
how he had circumnavigated 200 leagues of coast and discovered the provinces of
Pangasinan, Ilocos and Cagayan, and that it is a land rich with much gold; and that in the
said journey he and his comrades suffered many hardships and risked their lives by
making war against the natives because they were many and armed and fortified with
artillery, besides which they tried to give them poison in their food and drink to kill
them; so when he returned, he brought information, and gave testimony before a scribe,
of the towns and provinces which he had reduced to peace, which were given out as
encomiendas by the Governor, who at that time was Guido de Lavezares, because when
he arrived the said Adelantado was dead; and in this he gave special service to His
Majesty inasmuch as it seems to be a rich land from which much gold has been secured
and is expected to increase; and when he came, he brought as tributes he had collected
for His Majesty, a great quantity of gold which he turned over to the Royal Treasury;
and this he knows of this question, and it is public knowledge and well known, etc. 1
This testimony, like those of the other witnesses, is disappointing as far as the Igorot
gold mines are concerned. But it is very revealing of Filipino reactions to conquest north of
Manila, and may well explain the paradox of Juan de Salcedo’s reputation in written accounts.
On the one hand, he is remembered for his ability to ingratiate himself with surrendering
Filipinos—and vice versa—but, on the other, he was the object of strong criticism by
Augustinian contemporary Fray Martin de Rada for the excessive violence and bloodshed of the
northern expedition. Perhaps the vigor of the Filipino defense of their homes, coming especially
after the willingness of others to capitulate, touched off conquistador fury as it was to do in the
Island of Samar during American conquest 325 years later. Especially interesting is the
reference to artilleria which is made by most of the witnesses, and even more so the word
arcabuces which appears in one of the testimonies:
In the said journey and exploration, he passed through many hardships, wars,
hunger, and deprivations, and was observed to have really risked his life both by sea,
sailing along the said opposite coast which is rough, and by land among many enemies
who took up arms against him and gave attack, generally with arquebuses, poisoned
arrows, spears, and other offensive hand arms. 2
By artilleria we are presumably to understand such weaponry as the well-known Moro
lantakas, but by arcabuces some sort of handguns must be meant, if not actual arquebuses—that
is, large-bore, unrifled muskets ignited by matchlocks. Published accounts establish the
presence of such firearms in Muslim-controlled areas of the Philippines—e.g., the 1613 San
Buenaventura Tagalog dictionary defines astingal as “Arquebus, of the kind they used to use in
olden times in their wars and which came from Borneo”—but this appears to be the first

1
Archivo General de Indias Seccion Patronato, 75, No. 2, ramo 2. (See Appendix A for text.)
2
Ibid.
reference to them in northern Luzon. Of course, both Chinese and Japanese traders and corsairs,
who were armed with such weapons, were frequenting the area in Juan de Salcedo’s day, so
there is no reason why Filipinos should not have had firearms there, too. History’s silence about
them may simply reflect the fact that they were not important enough to the overall story of
conquest and conversion to be worthy of mention.
During the same period of research, I made a copy of the notarized document of 18 April
1571, which formalized Legazpi’s occupation of Manila with the legal niceties of which
Hapsburg imperialists were so fond. I was interested in the document because of one of Jose
Rizal’s comments in his annotated edition of Morga’s Sucesos: “The term ‘conquest’ cannot be
applied to more than a few islands and only in a very broad sense. Cebu, Panay, Luzon,
Mindoro, etc., cannot be called conquered. It was accomplished by means of pacts, peace
treaties, and reciprocal alliances.” 3
Despite due respect for Dr. Rizal, I doubted that treaties dictated by victors to
vanquished would, either then or later, be really reciprocal. Moreover, I suspected that they
would betray their farcical nature by representing the conquered as not only willing but happy
to accept defeat. The 1571 document did not disappoint this expectation.
In the river and town of Manila of the island of Luzon of the Philippines of His
Majesty’s Islands of the West, on the eighteenth day of the month of May of 1572 [sic],
before the very illustrious Senor Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, His Majesty’s Governor and
Captain General of the people and fleet of the discovery of the West, in my presence,
Fernando Riquel, senior notary, and the Governor’s and Father Fray Diego de Herrera,
Provincial of Order of San Agustin, being present, and Maestro-de-Campo Martin de
Goite, and Captain Juan de Salcedo, and Captain Luis de la Haya, and Captain Andres
de Ibarra, and other principal persons of the camp, certain Filipinos appeared, who, by
means of Benito Diaz Bustos and Juan Mahomat, Christian Filipino interpreter, declared
they were called Rajah Ache the Elder, and Rajah Soliman the Younger, lords and chiefs
of the town of Manila, and Si Bunaw Lakandula, chief of the town of Tondo; and they
stated that, in compliance with what the Governor had told them the day before when
they came to offer peace and friendship, all the chiefs had met together and decided
among themselves that it would be best for them to make peace and friendship with the
Spaniards and be vassals of His Majesty, and that concerning this they should give him
the reply that they had met and made the decision among themselves that they all, with
one common assent, wished to be vassals of the King of the Castilians, and as such they
offered themselves as of now, on their own part and in the name of all the Filipinos of
this region, inasmuch as what the three of them should do and agree to, all would agree
to;
And the said Governor said, by means of the said interpreter, that it should be
considered carefully because after making and agreeing to the peace, it would have to
remain true and perpetual, and that he who should break it would be punished, and in the
event they did not wish to be friends they could return without receiving any harm under
the safe conduct he had given them; and the said chiefs, having understood the aforesaid
through the said interpreters, stated that they had already taken good thought about the

3
Antonio Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1890), p xxxiii.
business and saw that peace and friendship was best for them and therefore they were
offering themselves as vassals of His Majesty;
And then the said Governor explained to them how he had come to these parts by
order of the Royal Majesty of the King of Castile, Don Felipe, our Lord, for their well-
being and benefit and to enable them to know the true God Almighty and to save them
from the error and blindness in which they and their ancestors had been living, and to
teach them his holy law and Catholic faith so that they might be saved and not
condemned, for. His Majesty’s main intention was just that, being the most Christian
prince he is, and for this purpose to send the religious who were present and others who
would come after; and that to acquire so great a good, it was necessary to be and remain
subjects of His Majesty and obey his royal orders; and the said Governor, acting in his
royal name, would take care to favor them and maintain them in peace and justice;
And then all the chiefs said with one accord that they were pleased and wished to be
vassals of His Majesty and as such promised to keep perpetual peace with the Castilians
whom they would obey in what they ordered them in the name of His Majesty, and
would be his slaves; and the said Governor said that he, in the name of His Majesty, was
receiving them as his vassals and would take care of them and favor them in his royal
name, and that if any Spaniard or other person of his company should do them any harm
or take anything from them by force and against their wishes, with payment or without,
they should notify him of it because he would punish him and indemnify them and
maintain them in peace and justice as vassals of His Majesty; to which they signified
they were greatly satisfied, and as a sign of true subjection and obedience, they rose
from where they were seated, and, kneeling down one by one, they and many other
Filipino chiefs and residents with them went and gave their hand to the said Governor -
in the name of His Majesty;
And his Lordship told them that if they wished to seal the peace and friendship they
had promised with some of the ceremonies they were accustomed to make among
themselves, he would do it in order to satisfy them; and the said chiefs said that among
them they were accustomed to draw blood and drink the blood, but that they considered
the said Governor like a father and, therefore, being confident in his word, they wished
to make the peace according to the use of Castile; and the said Governor told them that
the practice of Castile was to agree before a notary and witness, and the said chiefs were
contented with it;
And the said Governor ordered me, the said Fernando Riquel, to attest by writ of the
aforesaid all that took place; and the said friendship being made, the Governor took
possession of the said land and island in the name of His Majesty, making the acts and
ceremonies of true possession according to what is the use and custom, as took place
openly and peacefully with the said Filipinos; and, giving them to understand that he
was taking the said possession in the name of His Majesty, and the said possession being
taken and the peace dated and concluded, the said Governor informed the said Filipinos
that they were now ordered to make and complete the fort which they had begun on the
promontory in this river where His Majesty’s artillery would be placed and set up, and
that within the said fort they should make a house for His Majesty, and a large
storehouse for the necessary things, and that likewise outside the fort they had to make a
house and church for the religious in the place and location which they would select, and
 a house for the said Governor, and that these houses and church had to be large, and in
the same way they had to make another one hundred and fifty medium-sized houses in
which the people of the camp would be sheltered, which work they could have been
spared if they had not burned the town as they had, and at the same time he told them
that they should consider what arrangements he should make so the soldiers would not
take anything whatsoever of their property from them but could maintain themselves
without doing them any harm; and they all, with one accord, stated and promised that
they would make the buildings and houses declared above, and that when the work of
the said houses was finished they would regularly give food to three hundred Spaniards
in this town of the sort of provisions and food which they use and have in this land, all
of which they promised to comply with through translation by the said interpreters, the
aforesaid who were present being witnesses, and as proof of this, his Lordship, the said
Governor, ordered it to be attested by writ and signed it in his own hand.
MIGUEL LOPEZ DE LEGAZPI
Done before me,
FERNANDO RIQUEL 4
Considering the existential situation in Manila in April 1571, the Filipino participation
in this alien diplomatic ritual is not surprising, even taking the Spanish description at face value.
But what is surprising is that detail about their declining the offer to seal the pact in the Filipino
manner. Legazpi was no doubt willing to do what he offered—after all, he had already
performed this rite with Si Katuna in Bohol, and his field commander, Martin de Goiti, had
done the same with this very Soliman and his uncle only the year before. 5 Why did Ache,
Soliman and Lakandula not wish to do it again now? Is it possible that they had no real
intention of making or keeping the dictated pact and so were unwilling to seal it in a manner
that would have made it binding in their own eyes? At least we know that Soliman did in fact
counterattack the Spaniards a few weeks later. And if the testimony of the Spanish document is
to be accepted, we can also say that from the Filipino standpoint, no real peace pact had been
concluded.
One of the values of original documents is that they often contain data which their
authors included unintentionally or only in passing but which may be of greater historical
revelation than what the authors wanted to say. Ovid, for example, in a famous passage in The
Art of Love inveighing against the avarice of the opposite sex, says, “If you tell them you don’t
have as much money in the house as they’re asking, they say they’re willing to take a check.” 6
This passage may not prove anything about the avarice of women, but it certainly indicates that
checks were in use in Roman society 2,000 years ago. Similarly when Jesuit Father Francisco
Alcina wrote in 1668, “The gold they have now is very little in comparison to what they used to

4
Archivo General de Indias Seccion Patronato, leg. 24, No. 24. (See Appendix B for text.)
5
If a story recorded 105 years later is to be believed, they also swore “that the sun should rend them down the
middle, the crocodiles eat them, women not give them their favor nor desire them at all, if they should break their
word.”—Francisco de Santa Ines, Cronica de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno de N.S.P. San Francisco
(Manila, 1892), 2:58.
6
Artis Amatoriae 1:427-428.
have in olden times, though I recall that once when I was marrying an important Visaya, she
was wearing so much gold it made her stoop, and it seemed to me it reached 25 pounds or more,
which is a great weight for a 12-year-old girl,” he incidentally let us know that upper class
seventeenth-century Visayan ladies married at a rather tender age. 7 If Father Alcina wanted to
say something about gold but revealed something about Filipino society, his co-Jesuit Pedro
Chirino a half century earlier provides an example of the opposite situation—that is, of speaking
about social customs but disclosing something about gold:
It is proverbial among us that none of them who leaves a party completely drunk in
the middle of the night fails to find his way home; and if they happen to be buying or
selling something, not only do they not become confused in the business but when they
have to weigh out the gold or silver for the price (a very common practice among all
these tribes, for each one carries his own scales in his purse), they do it with such
delicate touch that neither does their hand tremble nor do they err in accuracy. 8
I had occasion to make use of this principle of “incidental intelligence” when trying to
find out when the word “Igorot” was first known to the Spaniards. The earliest examples I could
find were in two documents, both of the year 1593-1594. One of these was the report of a
Spanish expedition from Pampanga across the Caraballo Sur mountains into what is now Nueva
Vizcaya and down the Cagayan Valley to Aparri, and it includes a hearsay description of the
gold-mining “Ygolotes” in the mountains to the west. Since this was a report of new territory
being explored, the word may well have been a new one just learned by the author of the report
at the time. 9 But the other document is more revealing, for it is not concerned with describing
the Igorots themselves. Rather, it makes reference to them in such a way that their existence and
characteristics must have been common knowledge to the readers for whom the document was
intended, thus indicating that the term had been in use well before the time of writing. This
particular document was signed by a number of Dominican friars in the Convent of Santo
Domingo in Manila on 11 August 1593, and reads as follows:
The Province of Pangasinan must have some 5,000 Filipinos, and one of their
customs is to catch carabaos with pits and traps. They raise pigs, look for wax, make
wine, sell jars or pots, and accompany travelers through the unpopulated areas for
payment in silver. They don’t have mines or gold-washings, for which reason they
haven’t made a business out of gold. They sell their pigs and carabaos to the Igorots
when they happen to come down to buy them from them, and they don’t buy them from
all but only those who are friends and do them special favors, and therefore the towns
and Filipinos who ordinarily deal with the Igorots are very few, and all the others must
go and trade one with another so the animals only reach the Igorots by passing from
hand to hand; and as these only gather at certain times of the year, it is common that the
pigs die off, so the profit is very small and the gold they acquire from the Igorots is little.
The main income of Pangasinan is in the sale of rice and other foodstuffs to the
Spaniards and other travelers, since those who pass through this province are many and

7
“Historia de las islas e indios de las Bisayas” (MS 1668), Part I, Book I, Chapter 3.
8
Pedro Chirino, Relacion de las Islas Filipinas, 2nd ed. (Manila, 1890), p. 113.
9
Juan Manuel de la Vega, “Expeditions to the Province of Tuy,” in Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson, The
Philippine Islands 1493-1898 (Cleveland, 1903-1909), 14:281-326.
 they accompany them. All pay them in silver. The merchants and Spanish officials buy
the little gold they obtain from the Igorots, ordering their little gold chains here, and
therefore all the gold they have is used up in this way, and also the wax. 10
One and the same document may have different significance for different readers
depending on the interest of their particular research. When Father Chirino wrote the passage
cited above, he obviously intended to describe a social custom of the Filipino people—or
perhaps even to defend them against charges of depravity on the part of arrogant ethnocentric
conquistadores. But the modern Filipino may be more interested in the information it contains
about his ancestors’ economic condition than their ability to carry their liquor. Dominican Fray
Francisco Antolin, on the other hand, writing a book about Igorots in 1789, cited the same
passage for a very different purpose:
[Nor is] their being dealers in gold, whose weight and value they know very well
and measure by weighing with their own little scales or balances, any real proof of their
Chinese origin, since they had the same thing in other places with mines and placers, as
an early account by Father Chirino printed in 1607 [sic] says of the Filipinos of Bohol. 11
In 1918 Dominican Archivist Julian Malumbres made imaginative use of a 1647
document in his Historia de Cagayan, namely, as evidence of “the confidence which the natives
of Cagayan had in the Dominican fathers from the beginning; this reached such an extent that
they not only entrusted their souls to them as their spiritual fathers, but even their material
interests, naming them as their advocates with power of attorney in their temporal
negotiations.” 12 The document is the following:
I CERTIFY: as the oldest person of those who reside in this city of Nueva Segovia
[Lal-lo], by virtue of being the son of one of the first Spaniards who came on the
conquest and settling of this said city, that I heard it said many times by my mother,
Juana Perez (whom God keep), and by many other persons of the first conquistadores
and settlers of it, that the settlement of the Filipinos of Bagumbayan, which is a suburb
of this said city, was made by the Pampangos, Visayans, Camarinos and the Tagalog
Filipina who came with the first Spaniards on the conquest of this province and
settlement of this city; and that, after the pacification of the land, the General Juan Pablo
de Carrion, Lieutenant of the Governor and Captain General, who came on the said
conquest and bore authority and power to give out encomiendas and divide up lands, had
said to the said Filipinos who came on the conquest with the Spaniards that they should
settle in the place which they call Bagumbayan, and as a partial reward for the many
travails which they had suffered in the wars of pacification with the natives of the land,
he gave and assigned them lands in the nipa groves of the creek of Linao which the
Spaniards call Nipa Creek, that they might make nipa wine and make use of the profit
for the sustenance of themselves and their wives, because those Filipinos of the land did
not know how to make nipa wine, nor did they use it.

10
Francisco Antolin, “Notices of the Pagan Igorots in 1789—Part, Two,” Asian Folklore Studies, 30-2 (1970):32-
33. (See Appendix C for text.)
11
Ibid., p. 103.
12
Julian Malumbres, Historia de Cagayan (Manila,1918), p.40.
 These Filipino conquistadores continued this, and after the death of these first
settlers, their sons and grandsons; and for more than 54 years I have known these
Filipinos of Bagumbayan, most of them descendants of those referred to, always to make
nipa wine and sell it to the Spaniards, Filipinos, and other tribes, from what they gather
from the nipa groves, which the Lieutenant Governor gave as apportionment to their
fathers and grandfathers, enjoying the profit from what was assigned to each one; and in
the 33 years which I have been Notary Public of this Province, and before I was, I have
never seen, known, nor heard that any governor who has been in this Province in this
time, or alcaldes ordinarios when this city had a Council, ever prevented it, or imposed
any restraint on these Filipinos of Bagumbayan in the making of this nipa wine, or in
selling it to whom they wished, because they have no other occupation or resources for
making a living and paying their tribute than what they obtain from the wine which they
sell from their nipa groves.
And to register this certification as official and valid, in which legal recognition be
given the petition of the Filipinos of the said town of Bagumbayan and of the Reverend
Father Fray Lucas Garcia as their minister and vicar and the person who has power of
attorney for them for all their cases and negotiations, I give these presents, signed with
my name, which are dated in Nueva Segovia on the third day of the month of March of
the year of one thousand six hundred and forty-eight.
ALONSO GALINDO 13
Father Malumbres may have been right in thinking the Filipino people, in the lower
Cagayan Valley quickly learned to trust the friars as their spiritual fathers and legal
representatives, although not every historian would agree that the last line of this document
proves the fact. But he is certainly to be lauded as an historical researcher for having tried to
look through a crack in the parchment curtain to catch a glimpse of Filipino behavior, and for
having found it in their response to members of his own order. Given his particular interest, it is
perhaps not surprising that he failed to note that the Filipinos he was observing were not natives
of Cagayan at all, but, rather, descendants of the occupation forces a foreign government landed
in Aparri 66 years before. Of course, the fact that the Spaniards were able to recruit a Filipino
task force speaking four mutually unintelligible languages only ten years after their arrival in
Luzon is the sort of trivia that doesn’t get into sober history books—but it is the stuff out of
which the fabric of Philippine history was woven. Moreover, it is the stuff the parchment
curtain hides from us—the participation of the Filipino people in their own destiny. For it is just
possible that if those indios conquistadores had not joined Pablo de Carrion in 1581, there
might not have been any Dominicans in Cagayan for their descendants to put their trust in 1647.

APPENDIX A 14
A la Sexta pregunta, dijo que lo que de ella sabe es que despues de hecha la dicha
jornada contenida en la pregunta antes de esta, el dicho Juan de Salcedo pidio y suplico al dicho
Adelantado le diese licencia para it a descubrir esta isla de Luzon por la banda del norte, y del

13
Ibid., pp. 40-41. (See Appendix D for text.)
14
The original spelling and punctuation of these texts have been modified to conform to modern usage.
dicho Adelantado le puso por inconveniente no haber navios en que poder navegar, y el
susodicho se ofrecio de los buscar a su costa, y asi fue y le vide [sic] salir este testigo de esta
ciudad para las islas de Baco, Mindoro y Balayan y sus comarcanas, y a cabo de cierto tiempo
volvio a esta ciudad con ocho o nueve navios equipados de naturales; y con licencia y
instruction del dicho Adelantado, fue a descubrir la dicha contracosta de esta isla de Luzon, y
acabo de muchos dias volvio por la tierra adentro por la Laguna de Manila, y despues de venido
de el y sus soldados, supo este testigo como habia bojeado diezcientas leguas de costa y
descubierto las provincias de Pangasinan, Ilocos y Cagayan, que es tierra rica de mucho oro;
que en la dicha jornada padecio muchos trabajos y riesgo de la vida, el y sus companeros, por
haber tenido con los naturales guerra por ser muchos y armados y fortificados y con artilleria,
de mas de que en la comida y bebida procuraban darles ponzona para los matar, y asi cuando
vino trujo razon y testimonios por ante escribano de los pueblos y provincias que habia hecho
de paz, los cuales se encomendaron por el Governador, que a la sazon era Guido de Lavezares
porque cuando llego era ya fallecido el dicho Adelantado; y en esto hizo particular servicio a su
Magestad por ser como es tierra rica de donde sea sacado mucho oro y se espera mucha
cantidad de oro que se metio en la Real Caja, y esto sabe de la pregunta, y es publico y notario,
etc.

APPENDIX B
En el rio y pueblo de Manila de la isla de Luzon de las Filipinas del Poniente de su
Magestad a diez y ocho dias del mes de Mayo de 1572 [sic] anos, ante el muy ilustre Senor
Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, Gobernador y Capitan General por su Magestad de la gente y armada
del descubrimiento del Poniente, por presencia de mi, Fernando Riquel, escribano mayor y del
Gobernador, y estando presentes el Padre Fray Diego de Herrera, Provincial de la Orden de San
Agustin, y el Maese de Campo, Martin de Goiti, y el Capitan Juan de Salcedo, y el Capitan Luis
de la Haya, y el Capitan Andres de Ibarra, y otras personas principales del cameo, parecieron
presentes ciertos indios que, mediante Benito Dias Bustos y Juan Mahomat, indio cristiano
interprete, declaration llamarse Raha Ache el Viejo y Raha Solimane el Mozo, senores y
principales del pueblo de Manila, y Sibunao Lacandola, principal del pueblo de Tondo, y dieron
como ellos en cumplimiento de lo que el Senor Gobernador les habia dicho el dia antes, cuando
vinieron a ofrecer la paz y amistad, cerca de que se juntasen todos los principales y tratasen
entre ellos se les estaria bien hacer paz y amistad con los Espanoles y ser vasallos de su
Magestad, y sobre ello le diesen la respuesta se habian juntado y tratado lo entre si, y que todos
de comun sentimiento querian ser vasallos del Rey de Castilla y por tales se ofrecieron desde
ahora por si en nombre de todos los indios de esta comarca, porque lo que ellos tres hiciesen y
asentasen lo tenian todos por bueno;
Y el dicho Senor Gobernador dijo mediante la dicha lengua que lo mirasen bien porque
despues de hecha y asentada la paz, habfa de serverdadera y perpetua y el que la quebrantase
seria castigado, y caso puesto que no quisiesen ser amigos se podrian volver sin recibir dano
alguno por la seguridad que se les habia dado, y los dichos principales habiendo entendido lo
susodicho por las dichas lenguas, dijeron que ya ellos tienen bien pensado el negocio y visto
que le paz y amistad los estaba bien y por eso se ofrecian por vasallos de su Magestad;
Y luego el dicho Senor Governador les dio a entender como venia a estas partes por
mandado de la Real Magestad del Rey de Castilla, Don Felipe nuestro Senor, por bien y
provecho suyo y a darles a conocer a Dios verdadero todopoderoso, y sacarles del error y
ceguedad en que ellos y sus antepasados habian estado y ensenarles su Santa Ley y Fe Catolica
para que se salven y no condenen, porque la principal intencion de su Magestad era esta como
cristianisimo principe que es, y para dicho efecto enviar los religioso que presentes estaban y
otros que venian atras, y para conseguir tan gran bien era necesario y ser sujetos a su Magestad
y obedecer sus reales mandatos, y haciendolo asi el dicho Senor Gobernador [en] su real
nombre, tenia cuidado de los favorecer y mantener en paz y en j usticia ;
Y luego todos los dichos principales a una voz dijeron que ellos holgaban y querian ser
vasallos de su Magestad y por tales se ofrecieron de tener paz perpetua con los Castellanos a
que obedecerian lo que en nombre de su Magestad se les mandase, y serian sus esclavos, y el
dicho Senor Gobernador dijo que el en nombre de su Magestad los recibia por sus vasallos y
tenia cuidado de ellos y los favoreceria en su real nombre, y que si algun espanol o otra persona
de su compania les hiciese algun dano o les tomase cosa alguna por fuerza y contra su voluntad
con paga o sin ella, le avisasen de ello porque le castigaria y los desagraviaria, manteniendolos
en paz y en justicia como vasallos de su Magestad, de lo cual mostraron tener gran
contentamiento, y en senal de verdadera sujecion y obediencia, se levantaron de donde estaban
sentados y las rodilla [sic] por el suelo, uno a uno de ellos y otros muchos indios principales y
vecinos, que con ellos estaban, echaron la mano al dicho Senor Gobernador en nombre de su
Magestad;
Y su Senoria les dijo si querian hacer, para firmeza de la paz y amistad que prometieron,
algunas de las ceremonias que entre ellos se acostumbran que la haria para darles contento, y los
dichos principales dijeron que entre ellos se acostumbraba sangrar y beber la sangre pero que
ellos tenian el dicho Gobernador por padre y por eso confiados de su palabra querian que la paz
fuese a uso de Castilla, y el dicho Gobernador les dijo que la usanza de Castilla era asentarlo
ante escribano y testigo, y dicho principales fueron contentos de ella;
Y el dicho Senor Gobernador mand a mi, el dicho Fernando Riquel, asentase por auo lo
susodicho, todo como paso, y hecha la dicha amistad, el dicho Senor Gobernador tomo en
nombre de su Magestad la posesion de la dicha tierra y isla, haciendo los autos y ceremonias de
verdadera posesion segun y como es use y costumbre, lo cual paso en haz y paz de los dichos
indios, y dandoseles a entender como se tomaba la dicha posesion en nombre de su Magestad, y
fecha y asentada la paz y tomada la dicha posesion, el dicho Senor Gobernador les mando a los
dichos indios que luego mandasen hacer y hiciesen acabar un fuerte que tenian comenzado en -
la punta de este rio, donde se plantase y pusiese la artilleria de su Magestad, y que dentro del
dicho fuerte hiciesen una casa para su Magestad y una camarin grande para cosas necesarias, y
que asimismo fuera del fuerte habian de hacer una casa e iglesia para los religioso en la parte y
lugar que se les senalase, y una casa para el dicho Senor Gobernador, y que estas casas y iglesia
habian de ser grandes, y asimismo habian de hacer otras ciento y cinquenta casas medianas en
que se albergarse la gente del campo, lo cual se pudiera haberse escusado si ellos no quemaran
como quemaron el pueblo, y asimismo les trato y dijo que viesen ellos que orden se debia dar
para que los soldados no les tomasen cosas ninguna de sus haciendas y se pudiesen sustentar sin
less hacer dano, y ellos todos de una conformidad dijeron y prometieron que harian los edificios
y casas arriba declaradas, y que acabada la obra de las dichas casas, darian comida en este
pueblo a trescientos espanoles ordinariamente de los mantenimientos y comida que ellos usan y
tienen en esta tierra, todo lo cual prometieron de cumplir por lengua de los dichos interpretes,
siendo testigos sobredichos que se hallaron presentes, y para que consta a ella su Senona del
dicho Senor Gobernador lo mando asentar por auto y lo firme de su mano.
 DON MIGUEL LOPEZ DE LEGAZPI
Ante mi,
FERNANDO RIQUEL

APPENDIX C
La Provincia de Pangasinan cuenta hasta cinco mil indios, y su trato es coger carabaos
con hoyos y trampas. Crian puercos, buscan cera, hacen vino, venden tinajas o vasijas, y
acompanan a los pasajeros en los despoblados por la paga en plata. No tienen minas, ni
labaderos de oro, por lo que jamas ban usado beneficiardo. Venden sus puercos y carabaos a los
igorrotes, cuando les parece bajar a comprarlos, y no los compren a todos sino a aquellos que
son sus amigos y les agasajan. Y asi los pueblos e indios, que ordinariamente tratan con los
igorrotes son muy pocos, y todos los demas van vendiendo y contratando unos con otros, para
que de mano en mano vayan llegando los animales a los igorrotes; y, como estos no acuden sino
a ciertos tiempos del ano, es lo ordinario morirse los puercos, y asi es muy poca la ganancia, y
poco El oro que adquiren de los igorrotes. La mayor ganancia del Pangasinan esta en la yenta
del arroz y otros comestibles a los espanoles y otros pasajeros, que son muchos los que pasan
por esta Provincia, y les acompanan. Todo se les paga en plata. El poco oro que logran de los
igorrotes se lo compran los mercaderes y justicias espanoles, mandando labrar aqui sus
cadenillas, y con esto recogen todo el oro que pueden haber, y tambien la cera.

APPENDIX D
CERTIFICO: como persona mas antigua de los que residen en esta ciudad de Nueva
Segovia por ser hijo de uno de los primeros espanoles que vinieron a la conquista y poblacion
de esta dicha ciudad, que lo oi decir muchas veces a mi madre Juana Perez (que Dios haya) y a
otras muchas personas de los primerous conquistadores y pobladores de ella que la poblacion de
los indios de Bagumbayan, que es arrabal de esta dicha ciudad, se hizo de la india tagala,
pampangos, visayas y camarines que vineron con los primeros espanoles a la conquista de esta
provincia y poblacion de esta ciudad; y que, despues de pacificada la tierra, el General Juan
Pablo de Carrion, Teniente de Gobernador y Capitan General que vino a la dicha conquista, que
trajo poder a mano para dar encomiendas y repartir tierras, habia dicho a los dichos indios que
vinieron a la conquista con los espanoles que poblasen en el sitio que llamen Bagumbayan, y
por gratificarles en algo los muchos trabajos que habian padecido en las guerras de
pacificaciones por los naturales de la tierra, les repartio y senalo tierras en los nipales del estero
de Linao que llaman los espanoles comunmente, estero de la nipa, para que hiciesen vino de
nipa y se aprovechansen del usufruto para su sustento de ellos y sus mujeres, porque aquellos
indios de la tierra no sabian hacer vino de nipa ni lo usaban.
Estos indios conquistadores fueron continuando esto y por muerte de estos primeros
indios pobladores, sus hijos y nietos; y en mas de cincuenta y cuatro anos los he conocido
siempre a estos indios de Bagumbayan descendientes los m4s de ellos de los referidos, hacer el
vino de nipa y venderlo a los espafloles, indios y otras naciones de lo que cogen de los nipales,
que a sus padres y abuelos dio de repartimiento el Teniente Gobernador, aprovechandose del
usufruto do lo que a cada uno se le senalo, y en treinta y tres anos que ha soy Escribano Publico
de esta Provincia ni antes que lo fuera no he visto, sabido, ni oido que ningun Alcalde Mayor
que en esta tiempo ha habido en esta Provincia, ni Alcaldes Ordinarios, cuando habia Cabildo
en esta ciudad, lo haya impedido, ni puesto ninguna contradiccion a estos indios de
Bagumbayan en el hacer este vino de nipa, ni que ellos vendan a quien quieran, porque no
tienen otro officio, ni recurso para buscar su sustento y pagar su tributo, que lo que sacan del
vino que venden de sus nipales.
Y para que conste donde convenga y valga esta certificacion, en lo que hubiere lugar de
derecho, de pedimento de los indios de dicho pueblo de Bagumbayan y del R.P. Fr. Lucas
Garcia como su Ministro y Vicario y persona que tiene poder de ellos para todos sus causas y
negocios, di la presente y firmada de mi nombre, que es fecha en la Nueva-Segovia en tres dias
del mes de Marzo de mil seis cientos y cuarenta y ocho anos.
ALONSO GALINDO
 History of the Inarticulate

During the First Seminar for Provincial Historical Committees held in Manila in February 1970,
a keynote paper made reference to a thesis which has become a commonplace of modern
Philippine historiography—namely, that it is not possible to write a history of the Filipino
people during the Spanish regime because all the source materials were written by Spaniards for
Spanish purposes with Spanish prejudices. Commentator Renato Constantino, however, took
exception to this thesis in the following terms:
The dearth of historical materials about the Filipinos themselves poses a real
challenge to the creativity of our historians. Properly studied, however, the recorded
history of the articulate can yield data for a history of the inarticulate indios. Early
history may deal almost exclusively with the activities of the Spaniards but this does not
mean that the inhabitants of the country did not have a history of their own. From the
point of view of the colonizers, the people may have been an inert, passive mass to be
exploited and molded as they wished. A closer study will reveal that not only did
Spaniards and Spanish policy greatly influence the lives of the indios, these indios, by
their reactions, however circumscribed, also influenced Spanish policy and Spaniards,
whether the latter realized it or not. Thus, even that which is sometimes dismissed as a
history of Spain by Spaniards can yield, if only indirectly, insights into the development
of the native population.
Constantino then went on to challenge Philippine historians to reconstruct what would
be nothing less than a “history of the inarticulate.”
It would seem logical to conclude that certain edicts and policies were the result
rather than the cause of native behavior. The dynamics of social change can be seen in
the nature of these edicts. Correspondence may also yield clues on the history of the
inarticulate. If anthropological research can arrive at certain reconstructions of
Philippine life even without the benefit of recorded history, I see no reason why we
cannot recreate the life of our people during the period of Spanish occupation. Surely the
Spaniards who lived here reacted and interacted with the environment and with the
people. We may not be able to get numerous details but available data may allow us to
reconstruct broad trends and tendencies.
It is of course true that we are not going to learn very much about the Filipino people
from Spanish histories as such. The problem is not so much that what they say is biased, but
that they say practically nothing about Filipinos at all. The Spanish historian is interested in
telling the story of what Spaniards did in the Philippines and how they did it, and he gives little
space to the personalities or reactions of Filipinos undergoing the process. The great revolts
which convulsed northern Luzon from Pampanga to Ilocos Norte in 1660-1661 probably receive
no more than 150 pages in all published accounts, and even in these pages we find only one
detail which makes it possible to distinguish one Filipino protagonist from another—the fact
that Pedro Almazan of San Nicolas nursed such resentment against the Spanish occupation that
he kept one set of chains in his house for every Spaniard in the province. This colorful detail
presumably survived the screening process of colonial historiography for the purpose of
illustrating the total depravity of so disloyal a Spanish subject. The question the incident raises
for any historian interested, like Constantino, in the history of the inarticulate is not whether
Pedro Almazan was a disloyal Spanish subject or a patriotic Filipino hero, but just how many
Pedro Almazans went unrecorded in Philippine history.
This exceptional little detail about Pedro Almazan appears in the Augustinian
Conquistas of Fray Casimiro Diaz which was written a half century after the event, and must
therefore have been derived from some “primary source” like a contemporary letter or report.
It is just such sources which contain the sparse records of the inarticulate Filipinos’
history. Students familiar only with traditional history may be surprised at the title of a 1975
doctoral dissertation, “A history of Samar Island, the Philippines, 1768-1898.” What, after all,
could have happened in an out-of-the-way place like Samar during those years to qualify as
history except a rebellion or two or a half dozen shipwrecks? Yet Franciscan missionary
correspondence for just the one year 1775 includes such dramatic statements as “I came running
out with a saber in hand and the bully ran off cowardly like a deer,” and “I sent datus to whip
him for not wanting to hear Mass, and he drew his knife to kill me.” Parish life in Samar could
not have been so sleepy as the silence of history would suggest if friars could casually report
such incidents to their superiors as “I went up quickly to the parish house, put a canon by the
door [and] filled it with grapeshot, intending to rake all standing in the door.” These dramatic
quotations reflect more basic sociological conditions than the mere foibles of human
personalities, and it was the purpose of the dissertation to discover these root causes, not simply
to tell a good story. Examination of the chance correspondence cited made it possible to do so.
Correspondence may not only yield clues to the history of the inarticulate, it may
actually preserve the sound of their voices. Consider the Filipino of Cainta in 1577 who shouted
out at the Spaniards under cover of darkness, “What have we done to you, or what did our
ancestors owe yours, that you should come to plunder us?” Or the Igorot of Kayapa in 1787
who retorted to a Dominican friar trying to proselytize him, “So what about those Englishmen
who occupied Manila—they were white and Christian, weren’t they?” The faceless images of
Filipino obstacles to Spanish programs take on individual features with the cool rhetoric of a
Maguindanao datu like Pagdalanum addressing a whimpering Jesuit captive in 1613: “Since you
are a Christian, and have neither wife nor child, of what concern is it to you whether you die
here, or there, or elsewhere? Let God’s will be done.”
Nor did an 1835 complaint by the people of Tagudin, Ilocos Sur, against their friar vicar
who had ordered excessive floggings hesitate to threaten, “In similar cases of severity so harsh,
it may please you to call to mind what is wont to happen with carabaos, that however tame they
may be, they attack their own masters when these maltreat them and apply rod and whip too
often.” And in 1745 the leaders of the town of Silang, Cavite, left their mark in Philippine
history, if not in Philippine textbooks, by sending a polite letter to the friar administrator of the
Hacienda of Binan which began:
We have no other intention in writing you except to wish you good day and express
our hope that you will enjoy good health. In addition we must tell you that tomorrow, if
God be pleased, all of us of Silang are coming to our lands which you have usurped
without justice but because of the power of your money. We intend to destroy the house
which you are building in Monting Ilog, and also to destroy the dams which are being
constructed next to our lands.
Constantino also calls for detective work. Investigation and deductive reasoning of the
Sherlock Holmes variety are especially necessary in the case of popular stereotypes which have
blotted out ordinary evidence from the written record.
The standard Spanish analysis of relations between Muslim and non-Muslim Filipinos
may be taken as a case in point. It was the Spanish explanation—one might almost say
“canard”—that Moros were by nature or faith pirates and slave-raiders but that other Filipinos
were not. This simplistic stereotype proved so attractive to non-Muslim Filipinos under Spanish
tutelage over the centuries that it has nowadays called forth an equally simplistic Moro counter-
stereotype—that of all Filipinos living together in peace and harmony until the Spaniards
arrived to teach some of them to hate the others on the grounds of religion alone. Detective
work in Chinese records, unpublished Spanish documents, and early Visayan-Spanish
dictionaries, however, can solve this mystery by presenting, if not courtroom proofs, at least
convincing circumstantial evidence.
To begin with, Chao Ju-kua’s 1225 Chu Fan Chih reports that Visayan outriggers used
to raid the Fukien coast of China during the last decade of the preceding century, and
contemporary accounts say that the raiders themselves were “as dark as lacquer so that you
could hardly see their tattooes,” and suggest that they sailed by way of Taiwan and the
Babuyanes. The 1349 Tao I Chih Lueh of Wang Ta-yuan adds that these Visayans were such
notorious slavers that all other islanders of the Eastern Ocean ran away at the mere mention of
their name. (Wang also gives the selling price of Visayan slaves as two gold taels each.)
Three centuries later, old Samareno families could still tell Jesuit Father Francisco
Alcina the places they used to raid—e.g., Albay and the Catanduanes—and he himself was
acquainted with families in Borogan who were descended from Luzon captives. Father Alcina’s
parishioners could also recite long ballads about a Bohol princess who played so hard-to-get she
kept sending suitors off on successive raids to Jolo, Mindanao, Ternate, and finally China itself.
Indeed, a Spaniard by the name of Juan Flores, cast away during the 1543 Villalobos
expedition, survived in a Samar village for 18 years before perishing on just such an inter-island
raid with 30 of his Filipino townmates.
It is possible to compile a revealing list of specialized terms connected with such Viking
enterprises from the Alonzo del Mentrida 1637 Bocabulario de la Lengua bisaya-hiligueyna y
haraia de Las Islas de Panay y Sugbu y para las demas Islas like alang, or botong: traffic in
slaves, gongs, or porcelains; ayao: robbing like pirates on the sea or sacking towns or islands;
dolag: a contribution toward a captive’s ransom; or damilit: a slave placed face down “to launch
a ship over him.”
Slave-raiding, in short, was an ordinary Philippine practice when the Spaniards arrived
in the 16th century, and was not restricted to any one group of Filipinos, whatever their
language or religion. Thus, in all the major languages of the archipelago mangayaw means “to
raid enemy territory” whether for purposes of taking slaves, cutting off heads, or winning
basketball games. Then foreign military conquest deprived the Visayans of the means of
continuing the practice and so reduced them from competitors to victims. Subsequently, some
Visayans told Hernando de los Rios Coronel in 1621, “Let us be free, and let us have arms, and
we shall be able to defend ourselves as we did before the advent of the Spaniards.”
Another stereotype that needs reexamination for a better understanding of the history of
the Filipino people during the Spanish occupation is the supposed ease, speed, and thoroughness
of the Conquest.
 Most history texts assume, and some specifically state, that by the year 1600 the entire
population of the archipelago was under colonial control except for the Moros of Mindanao and
Sulu—and, the more perspicacious add, the Igorots of northern Luzon. That there was no
Filipino government challenging de jure Spanish control of the archipelago in 1600 is fairly
obvious, but that the total population was submissive to that control is not obvious. Indeed, in
view of the fact that Spanish records regularly tabulate the tribute-paying population but ignore
the existence of any other population, it is difficult to understand how the stereotype came into
existence in the first place. In the absence of comparative statistics, how did anybody conclude
what percentage of the population was conquered at any given time?
When the province of Isabela was created in 1856, its population was listed as being less
than that of the city of Laoag—yet it technically included all of eastern Kalinga and Bontoc and
the populous terrace lands of Ifugao. The census figure therefore represented not the entire
population but only those who were willing to be counted. The great land masses of the
archipelago never really came under Spanish control: as late as 1800 there were practically no
Spanish outposts in terrain higher than 500 feet above sea level except in the Caraballo uplands
of Nueva Vizcaya. As a matter of fact, except for the great central plain of Luzon, few
Spaniards in 1800 resided more than 15 kilometers from the sea coast. How many Filipinos
lived in these vast areas without paying tribute or hearing Mass?
During the Advent season of 1698, Archbishop Diego Camacho visited the
“innumerable pagans” of the hill districts to the south and east of Manila Bay—Antipolo,
Balayan, Taal, etc.—as well as Pampanga, where those around Mount Arayat were effectively
preventing overland communications with the Cagayan Valley. These independent Filipinos
were called tinguianes (from Malay tinggi, “high”), but they were not members of tribes
different from their lowland neighbors. Those around Manila were Tagalog-speaking hillsmen
all the way to the contracosta of Lamon Bay whose occasional dialect variants show up matter-
of-factly in the pages of early Tagalog dictionaries like those of Fathers Pedro de San
Buenaventura and Francisco Blancas de San Jose. They lived in symbiotic relationship with
subjugated Filipinos in the plain by providing them with forest products like the beeswax
without which a good tribute-paying Christian could hardly light a candle in the Manila
Cathedral. Collecting beeswax in the forest is a labor-intensive industry which requires many
hands producing a low yield during a short working season. One wonders just how many
independent Filipinos were required to supply the ritual needs of their more pious and
subjugated brethren.
One of Archbishop Camacho’s contemporaries, Dominican Procurator Alonso Sandin
thought such independent Filipinos vastly outnumbered the offers throughout the whole Islands.
“Actually,” he wrote the King at the end of the century, “it would be good if one in four were
converted.” Father Sandin was not just talking about Igorots and Moros, either. He was talking
about neighbors so close their complete independence kept attracting vassal Filipinos to run
away and join them. As late as 1881 more than one-third the population of Samar was listed as
independent, and when the central government pushed a plan to resettle all unconverted
Filipinos in registered barrios in the early 1890’s, Antique led the list with 154 such rancherias,
Cagayan running a poor second with 101. As late as 1865 the missionary friar of Bacolod could
recommend conversion by armed force—let them choose between “la reduccion o el castigo,”
he said—and, in fact, there was a steady proliferation of military zones and commands all
during the 19th century. Despite containment of the Moro threat by steam-powered warships by
the 1850’s, a comandancia politico-militar was created in Burias in 1855, to be followed by the
Military Government of the Visayas in 1860 for Cebu, Panay, Negros, Bohol, Leyte and Samar.
Soon afterwards its governor recommended separate commands in Negros Oriental on the basis
of the large number of unregistered and untaxed vagrants who occupied the 250 kilometers
between Isiu and Tolon. That the number of active military zones in Mindanao and northern
Luzon had increased from 11 in 1838 to 35 by the end of the Spanish regime may perhaps be
interpreted as the final mopping-up operations of a 300-year pacification campaign, but the
facts that Samar still had a military governor in 1881 and Concepcion, Iloilo, in 1888, that two
new military governments were created in Negros in 1889, and that the civil government of
Albay was requesting a military government for Catanduanes in 1891, make it clear that Igorots
and Moros were not the only Filipinos who escaped assimilation into the Spanish empire.
The reason we do not read about this 19th-century militarization of the archipelago in
history books is probably because history books are written and read by an articulate minority
interested only in the activities of others of their kind. We may thus become well informed
about the introduction of foreign capital and development of export crops, the resistance put up
by native vintners against government controls, or the execution of Spanish-speaking college
graduates on false charges of subversion—but not the decrees and penal legislation which
affected the lives of the inarticulate majority.
We can read even less about the inarticulate themselves, despite the fact that it was their
behavior, as Constantino pointed out, which caused the edicts and decrees to be promulgated in
the first place. Yet it is precisely these Filipinos who are taken as the criterion for the successful
conquest and conversion by which the recalcitrance of the Moros, Igorots, remontados, and
tulisanes can be measured. Were they really such law-abiding models of cooperation, docility,
and loyalty? An examination of the decrees and edicts themselves casts serious doubt on the
assumption.
Documentary references in the Philippine National Archives to Spanish attempts to keep
Filipinos literally in their place—that is, to prevent them from moving, migrating, or spending
the night someplace other than where they were legally registered—reach almost paranoid
proportions during the 19th century. In Ilocos in the 1820’s, for example, keeping an
unregistered visitor overnight was a crime punishable by 25 lashes at the town whipping post,
and Igorots in the nearby hills were liable to a thirty-peso fine simply for failure to report the
presence of a runaway Christian. In 1858 the Governor of Manila disapproved a request from
barrio Tipas to be separated from Taguig with an assessment of Filipino character that can be
found tediously repeated all through the Spanish regime:
The inhabitants’ dislike of settling in a common center is well-known, a reluctance
produced by an indolence so deeply ingrained in them that they are not willing to hike
out even a little distance every day to their fields and labors…Today a hut is planted in
some isolated spot, tomorrow it is converted into a house, and in a short time many
others appear scattered here and there—and all for the reason stated, or the equally
reprehensible one of escaping the vigilance of authority.
Among the regulations established for the Carabineras de Seguridad Publica in 1835,
forerunners of the Guardia Civil, the two longest articles are Nos. 26 and 27, concerning
suspicious dwellings separated from town centers, and those whose occupants have no fields,
cattle, or known means of support, respectively—all of which are to be put to the torch. The
harshness of the system—and its ineffectiveness—was obvious to even the Spaniards
themselves. On 1 February 1848, the Governor of Tondo Province reported to the central
government:
In the towns of San Mateo and Bosoboso where I spent the last week in search of
two captives escaped from the Governor of Bulacan, I learned that there are families in
the mountains who come from those and other towns who make their living by planting
tobacco, palay, and other vegetables for their maintenance which are destroyed every
year along with their houses, in the incursions which the Revenue Agents make to cut
their tobacco crops and by which they have been reduced to the most dreadful misery. I
concede that these runaway fugitives from the towns are remiss in their duties, defraud
the Treasury of the payment of their tribute, and increase the contraband by harvesting
tobacco which they then sell with prejudice to the Monopoly; but although I admit all
this, I cannot but recognize the consequences of leaving them without house or
livelihood, nor does it seem likely to me that they will be reduced to the centers by this
harsh method inasmuch as it has been employed for many years already without
producing that effect.
Most Filipino students know the story of how Jose Rizal was struck with a saber by a
Civil Guard one foggy night in Intramuros when he failed to render an obsequious salute, but
few realize that police regulations of the day amounted to virtual martial law, with no civil
rights to redress for military abuses.
The old Carabineras were authorized to apprehend not only vagabonds, dishonest or
unlicensed boatmen and cargo-carriers, persons breaking monopolies or creating disturbances at
fiestas, but even “domestic servants for quarrels inside the house, lack of respect, etc.” Their
Guardia Civil successors in 1863 were given more explicit instructions, chief among which,
needless to say, were those intended to restrict Filipinos’ freedom of movement: the Civil Guard
was to examine passports and licenses, stopping public vehicles to do so, permit no gatherings
after ten o’clock at night or passage through the streets “without a legitimate purpose,” and to
“enter houses situated in unpopulated areas at any hour of the day or night if he believes it
useful for the service.” Article 3 of chapter 4 of the regulations in effect in 1887 define the
extent of his authority unambiguously:
The Civil Guard not only has the duty to cooperate in the maintenance of public
order, obeying and executing instructions from the Chief of the Province or his
delegates, but also to perform this service by himself in the absence of authority;
therefore, all Chiefs, Officers, and troop members of this force are under individual
obligation to put down and reprimand whatever disorder or riot occurs in his presence,
without orders from any civil authority being necessary for taking action.
Naturally, there were stringent regulations against firearms of other weapons. An 1844
proclamation decrees a fine of P30 or two months in prison or at public labor—double for a
second offence, triple for a third—for the use, possession, sale, exchange, importation, or
toleration of arms of any sort or kind whatsoever, and specifically for the use, manufacture, or
sale of blunderbuses, carbines, sheathknives, swordcanes, daggers, butcher knives, harpoons, or,
in short, any kind of bladed instrument except bolts with rounded points.
These restrictions are not surprising in themselves, but the exemptions are thought-
provoking—that is, who is eligible for permits, to own firearms. Ships, both in coastal waters
and on the high seas, may apply on the grounds of self-defense; boats and barges “for defense
and security”; owners, administrators, and landlords of haciendas “for self-defense”; travelers
and merchants between provinces “if they need them for their defense and security”; and “in
addition to the exemptions stated, permits may be granted to any Filipino or mestizo who,
because of the extent of the lands he possesses, or the cattle, business, industry, or enterprises
he may have, or for some other just cause, is accredited with legitimate need to hold arms for
self-defense.” It would appear that anybody who owned anything in the colony was called upon
to defend it by the force of his own arms. Against whom was all this self-defense necessary?
Did Filipino bandits so disproportionately outnumber all the agents of public peace and
security? Or was it simply that all those identified with, and dependent upon, colonial law and
order were fair game for a Filipino people that had never really been conquered?
The answer to the question is contained in the history of the inarticulate. It is given in
those chance references to the Filipino people’s unwillingness to obey that colonial regime with
which their leaders cooperated and off which those leaders battened. It is contained in all those
records of Filipino resistance to interference with their livelihood and places of residence. And
it is unambiguously written in that mountain of legal documents whose unrealized purpose was
precisely to prevent that growth of inarticulate power which finally brought the writing of
Spanish history by Spaniards in the Philippines to an end.
 The Creation of a Cultural Minority

During an open forum of the Baguio Religious Acculturation Conference in December of 1973,
an Igorot student in the audience addressed a question to the chair which began with the words,
“Sir, before we were cultural minorities…” The expression surprised many people present, and,
indeed, seemed meaningless to some. Anthropologists and tourists have made us so aware of the
difference between the so-called minorities and the rest of the Filipino people that we regard
them almost as a separate species—and it never occurs to us there may have been a day when
they were not cultural minorities.
The New Society, of course, calls these people cultural communities, and they have
come into new prominence since the promulgation of the goals of nation-building and national
consciousness which are expressed in such slogans as “Isang lahi, isang bansa, isang
tadhana—One race, one nation, one destiny.” These Filipinos used to be called ethnic
minorities because their ancestors resisted assimilation into the Spanish and American empires
and therefore retained more of the culture and customs of their ethnos, or “tribe,” than their
colonized brothers who eventually came to outnumber them. They scarcely appear in the
pageant of history presented in the Philippine school system because they lived outside Spanish
control and therefore show up in the Spanish records which form the basis of Philippine history
simply as outcasts, brigands, or savages. And from this same circumstance stems the fact that
our main knowledge of them is derived from 20th-century tourist descriptions or
anthropological studies.
Such studies and descriptions have the result, if not the aim, of making us aware of the
differences between these minority cultures and the majority culture. They do not, of course,
either ask or answer the question of how these differences arose, and therefore do not
contribute, or intend to contribute, to understanding why some Filipinos still dance the dances
their ancestors danced but others do not. Quite the opposite, they obscure the very question by
reinforcing a natural tendency to consider present conditions normative and static rather than as
the end product of an ongoing process of human history. Worse yet, they have fastened these
differences on the civic consciousness of the Filipino people by projecting 20th-century
observations into a prehistoric past complete with dates and details for which there is no
archaeological evidence whatever.
To the historian, however, limited as he is to records compiled by foreign chroniclers, no
such Filipino minority-majority division appears. The earliest accounts are more interested in
the difference between Spaniards and Filipinos than between one Filipino and another, and
beyond the facts that some Filipinos were Muslims and others were not, and that those in the
hinterlands lacked the cultural advantages of those in the trading ports they have little to say
about the characteristics or variations of Filipino life styles. Later accounts, on the other hand,
distinguish Filipinos from one another mainly by whether they had submitted to Spanish rule or
not, and so limit their cultural observations to such comments as references to the one as dociles
and the other as feroces. Nonetheless, it is possible by a careful survey of the accounts to
recognize the rise of a cultural concept in the mind of the Spanish observers which did not exist
at the beginning of their regime, a concept akin to that which we today would call a cultural
minority. It is a concept which arose in response to an historic process which was nothing less
than the creation of cultural minorities. What I propose to do here is to illustrate this process by
telling the story of one of these cultural communities as an historian, not as an anthropologist or
a tourist—that is, by restricting myself to the written accounts of what earlier observers found
worthy of record.
The cultural community I have chosen is the Isneg people of the Sub-Province of
Apayao of the Province of Kalinga-Apayao in the mountains of far northern Luzon. The sub-
province takes its name from the Apayao River which rises on the eastern slope of the largest
mountain range in the Philippines, the Gran Cordillera Central, which forms the watershed
between the Ilocos coastal plain on the west and the Cagayan Valley on the east, and flows into
the Pacific Ocean at Abulug about 25 kilometers west of the mouth of the Cagayan River at
Aparri. Both Spanish and contemporary sources consider mountains impenetrable barriers to
communication, and modern Filipino laymen have accepted this impenetrability as the
explanation for the cultural community’s existence in this area. This geographic situation is one
of two reasons I chose the Isnegs as my subject—to see whether Spanish records do in fact
indicate that these Filipinos lived in geographic isolation from other Filipinos.
The second reason is that at the time of the American occupation, the Isnegs might well
have served as the stereotype for what other Filipinos consider an ethnic minority—they were
illiterate, wore G-strings, cut off human heads, and sacrificed pigs to pagan deities. Blas
Villamor, first Filipino lieutenant-governor of the sub-province and brother of the first Filipino
president of the University of the Philippines, was quoted as saying that the natives of Apayao
were so savage they could never be pacified but would have to be exterminated. The question
we will ask is, Do the Spanish records portray these Filipinos as being so different from their
Filipino neighbors, and hostile to them?
Of course, there was no such province or sub-province in the Spanish period, nor does
the word “Isneg” itself appear in print until the 20th century. The area appears in historic
records for the first time soon after the Spaniards settled in the Cagayan Valley in 1581 to
prevent the Japanese from doing the same thing. When the Spaniards learned that a Japanese
settlement had actually been established there by a certain Tayfusa, a freebooter who lacked
only a monarch’s backing to qualify as a second Legazpi, they dispatched a fleet from Manila.
After defeating the Japanese, they remained there to discourage any such competition in the
future. Dominican Bishop Diego Aduarte, who arrived in the Philippines only 14 years after the
event, described the Spanish position in the following candid terms:
Thus the Spaniards remained in this province, but against the will of its inhabitants,
who wished to see them there as little as they wished to see the Japanese, and as they
promptly made clear by withdrawing farther into the interior, leaving them all alone with
no food, so that they quickly consumed all their provisions.
Bishop Aduarte may not have realized it but he had put his finger on one of the
techniques by which those mountaineer Filipinos called Igorots were later to resist Spanish
occupation for centuries. That is, Spanish conquistadores never grew their own food and the
Igorots were willing to abandon or burn their houses and fields rather than feed them. But he
did correctly diagnose another sort of Filipino behavior which worked in Spanish favor:
They were much aided in their plan to remain there by the many factions and wars
among the Filipinos, who could not live in peace but were constantly slaying one
another.
 One such faction was headed by a pocket-sized Napoleon called Guiab, who apparently
stood a good chance of conquering the whole lower Cagayan Valley. He operated with a task
force of 300 men, attacked anybody who resisted him, punished any disrespect or disobedience,
and rewarded his followers from the spoils of victory. As soon as he heard about the presence of
the Spaniards, he started sending them rice and chickens and even hogs—presumably because
he recognized them as men after his own heart and thus as potentially valuable allies. But the
local people begged the Spaniards not to join forces with this local conquistador, so, misreading
the message and overplaying their hand, the Spaniards captured Guiab and hanged him. But this
only set off a real resistance movement, complete with personal challenges to lay down their
firearms and come out and fight fairly, man to man—the same challenge, as a matter of fact,
Igorots were to shout down from the mountaintops when their turn came in the next century.
Another faction, however, the Spaniards were able to exploit more successfully. Along
the seacoast just west of the Cagayan River mouth, a Filipino by the name of Tuliao had been
feuding with his own brother for many years. Seeking to take advantage of the new political
situation, Tuliao asked for Spanish intervention on his behalf. So the Spaniards, as Bishop
Aduarte put it, “ended their quarrel for them by taking away the lands over which they had been
quarreling.” Such heavy-handed tactics, however, soon led to the outright killing of Filipinos
and made missionary work impossible for the friars who had accompanied the expedition, so
they withdraw in disgust and frustration.
For 14 years this military occupation was unable to extend its control much farther along
the coast than the mouth of the Apayao River. Then new missionary friars arrived to make use
of the personal relations, both positive and negative, that had developed between Filipinos and
Spaniards in the interim. In Pata they found Chief Yringan who had been won over by the
example of a Spaniard who had been cured of an illness by praying before a large cross, and in
Masi they were able to reconcile Chief Siriban who had taken to the hills after his two wives
had been flogged on the charge of bigamy. Both were among the first converts baptized on
Easter Day 1596, and Siriban volunteered allegiance for himself and his subjects in the
Plebiscite of 1597. (This Plebiscite was a kind of referendum in which Filipino chieftains under
Spanish control were asked if they wanted the Spaniards to remain or withdraw.) One town that
voted “yes” explained the choice by saying that the, greatest advantage of obedience to His
Majesty was in having Spaniards to liberate them from the tyranny of their chieftains, and friars
to liberate them from some of the Spaniards.
The following year, a priest was stationed in Abulug and began the construction of a
church. But the forced labor conscripted to build the church gave the people of Abulug second
thoughts about the advantages of a resident priest, so they sent a delegation of chiefs to Manila
to request the withdrawal of the friars. As the delegation was sailing down the Ilocos coast,
however, heavy weather drove them to put in at Vigan. Vigan was a community which had
accepted foreign occupation back in the days of Conquistador Juan de Salcedo himself 25 years
before, and their leaders now persuaded the Cagayan delegation that the Spaniards were here to
stay and that the best thing for them to do would be to return to Cagayan and make friends with
the missionaries there so they would have some allies against the abuses of the military. So that
is what they did. And so, too, the people of Fotol, a day’s journey up the Apayao River, asked
for a missionary priest when tribute-collectors appeared among them for the first time ten years
later. Thus the Mission of Santa Cecilia de Babulayan was founded in Fotol in 1610.
Now, Fotol is the modern Pudtol, Apayao, and it was until recently inhabited by people
who speak the Isneg language—that is, by Filipinos who have come to be called a cultural
minority—while the Ibanag-speaking natives of Cagayan who are descended from Yringan,
Siriban, and Tuliao are simply called Filipinos. This is a discrimination which does not appear
in the Spanish records.
For 15 years, mission work proceeded smoothly at Fotol, although its people remained
so independent-minded that the annual tribute-collector had to come in well-armed and quickly
depart. Then, on the first Sunday after Trinity in 1625, two of those mountaineer chiefs
approached Father Alonso Garcia and Brother Onofre Palao as they were eating lunch after
mass, and for the third time requested permission to return to the hills. When this was refused,
they draw their bolos, hacked the two clergy to death, and led all the converts and catechumens
back to the mountains. The following spring a Spanish punitive expedition destroyed the
coconut plantation in the deserted village, and then the Isnegs moved back again. Six years
later, friar missionaries returned, restored the work, opened two new missions, and in less than a
year baptized more than 500 new Christians. A shrine was erected on the site of Father Garcia’s
death, and the missions continued to flourish until a garrison of Filipino troops was stationed at
Fotol under the command of one Don Francisco Tuliao. Then, for what a Spanish chronicler
considered no reason at all—a traicion y sin motivo alguno—the troops killed some 80 Isnegs,
and the next year their avengers proceeded to burn the fort, kill 25 soldiers, and put their priest
in a boat with the church ornaments and send him safely downstream. Just six years later, two
new missionaries were assigned to Fotol, and by 1657 the misison was so flourishing it was
given charge of work in the Babuyanes.
The records which provide these details give us little insight into the culture of the
Isnegs, minority or otherwise, except that they were masters enough of their own destiny to be
able to accept or reject foreign missionaries as they chose. True, Bishop Aduarte does say that
Father Garcia’s flesh was thrown to the pigs after he was murdered—but this is no more
noteworthy a fate than that of a Spanish tribute-collector in Isabela a generation earlier whose
shin-bones wound up as rungs in some independent Filipino’s house-ladder. Aduarte calls the
Isnegs living farther upstream or higher in the mountains Mandayas, a term which literally
means “those up above.” (Daya/raya/laya—“upstream” or “up above”—is a root common to
many Philippine languages, and inland Filipino groups have been called Mandayas, Irrayas or
Ilayas all over the achipelago.) Moreover, he says that Father Garcia’s murderers were
Mandayas “whose native abode was in mountainous places above the Bay of Bigan in Ilocos.”
This reference to Vigan is a curious one, for Vigan and its bay lie on the west coast of Luzon,
while Fotol is in the eastern foot-hills on the opposite side of the Gran Cordillera. It probably
refers to Isnegs living so high on the crest of the watershed that they were identified with the
Ilocos rather than the Cagayan side, and thus reflects the fact that the great watershed of
northern Luzon did not prove a barrier to such Filipinos as wanted to cross it. And the events
following the Andres Malong uprising a few years later make the implication clearer still.
When Andres Malong raised the standard of revolt in Pangasinan in 1660, he shrewdly
circulated rumors that Manila had fallen into the hands of the Pampangueno rebels and that the
Spaniards had been driven out of the archipelago. The parish priest of Bacarra, Ilocos Norte,
foolishly accepted this propaganda at face value, and sent off a report to the Governor of
Cagayan by means of a parishioner named Magsanop. This Magsanop is referred to in Spanish
accounts as an Igorot, meaning a mountaineer, and was probably an Isneg from Calanasan,
judging from the following events. He was also an encomendero, and Maestro de Campo of
Bangui, an outstation of Bacarra, northernmost Spanish mission on the Ilocos coast at the time.
It is rare to find native. Filipinos, Igorot or non-Igorot, appointed to such sensitive positions in
the colonial government, but this area was the coastal frontier between Ilocos and Cagayan,, and
since neither Spaniards nor their vassals ventured to cross the Cordillera itself to reach their
outposts in Cagayan, it made good sense to appoint a native mountaineer commander of this
strategic area. These titles, however, proved insufficient to retain Magsanop’s loyalty, and
instead of delivering the letter, he read it—and then roused up 300 of his own followers in
revolt. They were promptly joined by allies from the Cagayan coast and Isnegs from Calanasan,
the uppermost settlement in the headwaters of the Apayao River. Part of Magsanop’s strategy
was a direct attack upon the new religion, and before he was captured by a combined force of
Spaniards and Filipino mercenaries, he had ransacked churches, destroyed religious ornaments,
persecuted faithful converts, and killed three friars. The Fotol mission disappeared in the
process.
Whatever Magsanop’s personal faith may have been, he had correctly analyzed the
missionary’s role in the foreign control that had been established along the coastal fringes of
northern Luzon and was now pressing up the waterways into the interior. As soon as the revolt
was put down, a military outpost was established at Bangui, and from there the friars began
working their proselytizing way up the Bulu River to reach some Isnegs called Payaos who had
not joined the rebellion. Some of these were resettled on the coast just east of Cape Bojeador
(where their descendants today have forgotten their ancestors were mountaineers), but the
headquarters of the mission remained in a mountain barrio on the Cordillera itself. Forty years
later, an Agustinian chronicler said that these converts were “very useful as allies against the
Calanasanas, a cruel and pagan tribe, and for this reason the Governors in Manila have
exempted them from paying tribute.”
Back in Fotol and Capinatan, mission work began again as usual after Magsanop’s
death, and ten years later one of Spain’s greatest missionaries, Dominican Fray Pedro Jimenez,
arrived to build two stone churches in the Apayao jungle with such speed local troops swore the
walls grew up miraculously every night. Whatever these troops’ credulity, their presence was
another symbol of the changes that were taking place in the Apayao Valley. Isnegs in the
garrison town were now subjected to different pressures, and began to have different interests,
from their independent neighbors. Thus in 1684, a daring chieftain from upstream entered the
fort in broad daylight and killed one Spaniard and one Filipino, and two years later the
missions, were suffering hunger because their inhabitants didn’t dare go out to work their fields
in the face of the feud which developed. Father Jimenez, by the shrewd use of local peacepacts
and appeals to former converts, was able to patch up the quarrels. But still the upstream
Mandayas would not come down: a generation before, some of their leaders had been
treacherously killed in Capinatan and their heads taken. Therefore, after considerable soul-
searching and argument with the military commander, Father Jimenez decided to go up the river
himself, unescorted and unarmed and undeterred by a well circulated threat against his life.
The threat, as it turned out, came not from the people of the Apayao Valley, but from the
Kalafugs just across the hills to the south in the Ripang-Conner area of the present Apayao-
Kalinga border. A glance at the map will make their interest in Father Jimenez’s movements
understandable. Kalafug was on a headwater tributary of the Matalag River which flows directly
into the Chico below Piat, but this route to Cagayan had been interrupted 70 years before by a
Spanish mission only ten kilometers downstream at Malaueg—now Rizal, Cagayan. There the
Spaniards began collecting tribute only five years after they began collecting it in Fotol, a fact
which evidently did not escape Kalafug notice—at least, they participated in the revolt which
cost Father Garcia’s life in 1625. Now Father Jimenez was planning to open a new mission in
what is today the Apayao sub-provincial capital of Kabugao. This would not only place the
Kalafugs in between two outposts of colonial advance but threaten a trade-route to Dingras,
Ilocos Norte, which supplied them with the means of maintaining their independence.
Moreover, two years later another friar moved still farther up the Chico and started to write a
grammar of the Itawis language on their southern flank. Thus the Kalafug threat to kill anybody
who participated in the founding of Father Jimenez’s new mission is not all that surprising.
When Father Jimenez finally met the Kalafugs in face-to-face parley under the
protection of his Mandaya hosts, he told them it made no sense for them to be at war here in
Cagayan and at peace over there in Ilocos just for the little trade they got out of it. It made no
sense, that is, to anybody planning to divide all of northern Luzon into two Spanish provinces
and reduce all the independent Filipinos in between to mere appendages of one or the other. But
it probably made perfectly good sense to those independent Filipinos themselves to come and
go, buy and sell, and make military alliances as they pleased. Those in Kalafug accordingly
crossed the mountains in 1690 and wiped out Father Jimenez’s new Mission of Nuestra Senora
de Pena Francia in Kabugao.
Father Jimenez’s personal account of his mission to the Mandayas has survived in
Dominican archives, and it contains another clue to the contradictions developing in the lower
Apayao Valley. He calls everybody indios—or, as we say, Filipinos—but among them he
distinguishes some as Enemigos. That he does not mean this word literally is indicated not only
by his spelling it with a capital letter like a proper noun, but by the fact that he applies it to his
hosts, companions and protectors as well as to the Kalafugs. But he only applies it to those who
have not surrendered to Christ and King. The term itself is evidently the literal translation of an
Ibanag word which vassal Filipinos in Cagayan were now applying to all their neighbors who
did not join the new society. And since the terminology of the new majority ultimately became
normative in the colony, by the end of the Spanish regime unsubjugated mountaineer neighbors
farther south, began to use it themselves. Thus American colonialists in their turn were able to
apply this inappropriate Ibanag word to a whole sub-province and teach three generations of
Filipinos born there to accept it with pride and confidence. The word is Kalinga.
This pagan-Christian, or independent-vassal, dichotomy continued after Father
Jimenez’s departure and death in 1690, and the Fotol-Capinatan missions did not spring back to
their old vigorous life again. Missionary friars continued to come up from the coast for
visitations, but could not overcome the effects of such incidents as the murder of 30 upstream
Mandayas in Capinatan in 1732. Conditions in the frontier mission of Malaueg on the
southeastern Isneg flank can also be cited to further illustrate the tensions. In 1740 two converts
were killed by neighboring pagans, and their people accordingly went out, killed ten and
captured five, and in 1741 made three more forays. Then the whole town was burned to the
ground except the church, and everybody had to depend on the parish priest for emergency
rations. At the same time, others migrated back to the hills to escape the tribute after they had
fallen into hopeless debt to the mayor when they had been prevented from working their fields
for two seasons by an epidemic of smallpox—a scourge unhappily introduced along with tribute
and the Gospel in the first place.
A letter from the priest-in-charge of Malaueg dated June 24, 1741, also gives insight into
the cultural changes accompanying these politico-religious conflicts. The letter includes two
requests of his superiors—one for tools to proceed with the gilding of the church altar, and the
other for clothing for those who had been unable to save enough to attend mass. That is, at a
time when a modern theologian might think the raggedy fire victims had special need of the
Sacraments, the hierarchy of value judgments in the colonial society gave precedence to
sartorial propriety over spiritual need. So, too, a contemporary decree in Ilocos made it a crime
punishable by 50 lashes to appear in a Christian town dressed in native Filipino attire, and in
Cagayan forbade naked bathing. And when an expedition of Malaueg converts was sent out 20
years later, armed with headaxes, muskets and their priest’s blessings, to punish the people of
Fotol for failure to pay tribute, they reverted to G-strings to do so.
Yet contemporary missionary correspondence from Apayao makes it clear that Spanish
friars there had not yet developed any scorn for the cultural minority they were unwittingly
creating by acculturating the majority. When Fray Jose Tomas Marin spent three years hiking
up and down the Apayao Valley and across the Cordillera, he addressed Isneg chieftains as
“Don So-and-so” and they addressed him as “Joseph” not “Father.” He describes them as
gracious hosts—they went out to catch fish when they learned he wouldn’t eat dogmeat, or any
meat at all on Friday—and independent. Some said they might consider moving down to the
missions if Cagayan produced as good textiles as Ilocos did (another example of doing business
on the “wrong” side of the Cordillera), and one promised to be baptized if Father would send
for his relatives in Isabela. They spoke of an evil spirit around the missions called Tributo
which ate people up, but invited the friars to settle among them or to come and go as they
pleased on one condition—that it be put in writing that no tribute collectors would accompany
them. They called Father Marin “the bravest father in the whole world” for his courage in
coming into their territory, yet his own letters give no hint that his life was in any danger among
them. In fact, like his great predecessor, Pedro Jimenez, he does not even mention the fact that
they were headhunters.
But the fact was mentioned by confreres living in those colonized parts of the
Philippines from which the custom had disappeared. Augustinian Fray Antonio Mozo, who
never set foot in Apayao, reflected the attitude of both Spaniards and Filipinos in the more
acculturated society by describing the Isnegs as bloodthirsty savages who lay in wait along the
highways to cut the heads off unwary travelers. So, too, a century later, Spanish minister
Sinibaldo de Mas enveigned against the custom of calling such Filipinos “Don” as dangerous to
the security of the colony because it failed to keep the Filipinos properly in their place. And
when in 1919 after another three generations of white man’s burdens and manifest destinies,
Dominican historian Julian Malumbres told the story of one of Father Marin’s converts who
was baptized with the full name of his Spanish sponsor, he found it necessary to add a footnote
explaining such lack of racial discrimination as being due to the missionary zeal of colonial
officers in a happier day of Spanish empire.
The transcordilleran trade routes that Father Marin followed continued to be used up into
the 20th century. During the Diego Silang uprising in 1763, an Augustinian friar in Banna,
Ilocos Norte, tried to get Filipino allies to deny the rebels the use of these communications, and
after he was released from a short captivity, he proceeded up to the Cordillera foothill mission
of Solsona to send messages to Spanish forces in Cagayan by this means himself. A southern
branch of this same route reached the watershed at Anayan on the Abra border, and from there it
was possible to reach Vigan in three days on horseback. After Father Marin’s day, Spaniards
did not make use of these Isneg trails themselves, but other Filipinos did: an 1805 report from
the Cagayan Valley states that Ilocano traders reached Malaueg—that is, Rizal—by crossing
Apayao over such a route. It is significant that the report refers to these Ilocanos as
“embezzlers” or “shysters”—extraviadores—for, in the eyes of the colonial government, all this
independence and untaxed commerce was strictly illegal. But by the beginning of the 19th
century, the colonial government’s views on legality weren’t very important in Apayao: the
Spanish missions in Fotol and Capinatan were never reopened, and the Isnegs were left free to
pursue happiness as their ancestors had pursued it, trading or fighting with their neighbors as
they chose.
Such fighting and trading of course threatened the security of Spanish subjects, the
collection of internal revenue, and the maintenance of government monopolies, and was
therefore a thorn in the side of Spanish sovereignty which grew more irritating with the passage
of time. After the invention of the Remington repeating rifle, therefore, Governor Valeriano
Weyler decided to end all this independence, once and for all. In 1891 he accordingly
announced the occupation of Apayao by the creation of the Comumdancias Politico-Militares of
Cabugaoan and Apayaos. The latter of these was garrisoned at Malunog on the River only 20
kilometers from the coast and never extended its authority as far upstream as Fotol, and the
former had its headquarters in Piddig, Ilocos Norte, and never entered the mountains at all.
Clues to this failure to carry out the occupation are probably to be found in two incidents which
happened at the time.
In 1888, some mountaineers attacked Dingras and the Governor of Ilocos Norte sent a
punitive expedition into the mountains to retaliate. On the Cordillera, the soldiers and their
commander were hospitably received by a local chief named Onsi. This Onsi had been
cooperative with the colonial government in the past and, as a matter of fact, had been
decorated with the Cross of Civil Merit for his services. All day, therefore, he feasted and
entertained his visitors in good Filipino fashion. Then, suddenly, the troop commander had
about 40 of his host’s people surrounded, and accused them of having made the attack on
Dingras. When Chief Onsi protested their innocence, the commander drew his revolver,
emptied all six chambers into the Isneg leader, and gave his men the order to open fire. Sixteen
Isnegs were shot down in cold blood. The Spanish government brought the officer to trial for
this unmilitary behavior, but the next trading party of Ilocanos who went into the area on
business never came out again.
An almost identical case happened in the Apayaos commandancy in Malunog just four
years later. The Commandant there gave a party in the garrison headquarters on the occasion of
his birthday and invited all the prominent Isnegs from Pamplona to Tawit to attend. In the midst
of the feasting and drinking, he suddenly had his guests surrounded and ordered some of them
seized and bound as suspects of the murder of seven Negritos. Some of the Apayaos managed to
snatch up their weapons, however, so the soldiers opened fire, killing one outright and
wounding many others. The suspects were then seized and imprisoned, but the government took
no action against the commandant. Father Julian Malumbres happened to be in Capinatan at the
time, cleaning two centuries of jungle growth off Father Jimenez’s old church, and when he
heard of the treacherous deed, he asked for custody of the prisoners and took them back up to
Capinatan with him. But there they made an attack upon his life, and he always afterwards
believed that the local military authorities had deliberately misinformed them that he had been
responsible for the treachery. Needless to say, the mission of Capinatan was not reopened.
 Before Governor General Weyler attempted to establish the two Apayao
commandancies, he asked the Augustinians for information about the area. Fray Ricardo Deza
of Dingras responded with a sketch map and the statement that the Isnegs were unapproachable
because of their living by the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and always lying
in wait for a chance to take some Christian traveller. In drawing this conclusion, Father Deza
evidently did not find the recent example of Spanish behavior noteworthy, or the fact that a
German pharmacist by the name of Schadenberg had just visited the remote barrios of
Calanasan the year before. He also seems to have forgotten that all his data had been supplied
by a half-dozen Ilocano businessmen and petty officials who had been hiking safely in and out
of Apayao for decades. In other words, if Apayao was unsafe for Spanish commanders and their
friar compatriots, it wasn’t unsafe for other people. The reason Father Deza missed this message
is probably because, like those treacherous commanders themselves and Blas Villamor 20 years
later, he lived at the end of a colonial process which had steadily divided the Filipino people
into two categories—the submissive and the unsubmissive, the faithful and the faithless, the
good and the bad. The Isnegs of Apayao clearly belonged to the latter group. No longer simple
indios like everybody else as they had been in the days of Bishop Aduarte and Fathers Jimenez
and Marin, they were now outcasts, brigands and savages. They were different from other
Filipinos, and therefore deserved different treatment. They were, in short, a cultural minority.
This, then, is a brief summary of the recorded contacts between the Spaniards and the
people of Apayao, but it is enough to illustrate the colonial experience of the Filipino people in
far northern Luzon. So far as we can tell, this people was divided into three language groups at
the time of the Spanish advent. Those in the lower Cagayan Valley spoke Ibanag, those on the
coastal plain along the South China Sea, Ilocano, and those in the mountains in between, Isneg.
None of these groups was united; none had kings or common governments, and none was either
a minority or a majority. They were all composed of independent baranganic communities
whose relations with each other, whether of the same language or different, varied from
isolation to cooperation or conflict according to circumstances. Then, under colonial pressure,
Filipinos in two of these groups submitted to foreign domination while those in the third did
not. So, as the years of occupation passed, the Ilocanos and Ibanags gave up more and more of
their own culture to assimilate more and more of their conquerors’ culture. In the process, they
became more and more like each other and less and less like their ancestors. The Isnegs, on the
other hand, preserved more of the culture of their ancestors and so came to look less and less
like their acculturating neighbors. By the end of the Spanish regime, this divergence had created
a real Filipino majority for the first time in history—those Filipinos who had the same king—
the Spanish King. And those who did not were just cultural communities. Thus by the magic of
colonial alchemy, those who changed most became today’s Filipinos while those who changed
least were actually denied this designation by a former president of the state university. In this
way a cultural minority was created where none had existed.
 Crusade or Commerce?
Spanish-Moro Relations in the 16th Century 15

It has often been said that Spanish relations with Muslim Filipinos were dominated by a
Crusading spirit. By this is meant an unrelenting drive to stamp out Islam, characterized by a
fanatical hatred to which any considerations of politics or economics were either secondary or
incidental. Extreme proponents of this view have considered commercial competition a mere
tactic of this Crusade: as Dominican Fray Francisco Antolin put it in 1793, “The best means of
waging war against an enemy power is to deprive him of his most profitable commerce.” 16
But it is possible to interpret the same relations from precisely the opposite point of
view—that is, that the Cross followed the commerce rather than vice versa. In this view,
commercial competition would be seen, not as a means for waging war, but as the purpose for
doing so. Kings and emperors would accordingly outfit expensive expeditions and sacrifice
their subjects’ lives not out of religious fanaticism but out of hope of gain. Spanish-Muslim
relations would therefore be characterized not by hatred of Islam but by love of profit.
This article looks into the historic circumstances under which the first Spanish-Muslim
contacts were made in the Philippines to test these two theories.
When Ferdinand Magellan offered to sell his services and the secrets of the Portuguese
spice trade to Spanish King Charles in 1517, Charles was a 17-year-old boy who had only
arrived in Spain the month before and could not even speak Spanish. He had neither a crown
nor a living allowance, and before Magellan set sail had inherited a multimillion-dollar debt
from his grandfather Maximilian who had died in such penury his grocery bills were literally
being paid by his banker. For all practical purposes, therefore, it was not Charles who made the
decision to sign a commercial contract with Magellan, but a German banker by the name of
Jacob Fugger. And Jacob Fugger’s motives were admirably unmixed—he wanted to realize
some return on the nine million dollars he had loaned Charles’s grandfather.
Magellan’s agreement with the King was a straightforward business contract which
stated what each party was to contribute and to receive. His instructions specified the precise
amount of deck space and cabin stowage each member of the ship’s company was to be allotted
for carrying his own merchandise and the percentage of the spoils of war to be enjoyed by
everybody from captain to cabin boy. His Majesty’s wares were to be sold first and at the best
price, and all pearls, diamonds, rubies and other precious stones were to be reserved for him.
Gifts and commercial advantages were to be offered kings or chieftains—but not weapons or
iron tools—hostilities were to be avoided as being inimical to future trade, and ships’ guns were
not to be discharged for fear of frightening the natives. And under no circumstances was
Magellan to leave the flagship himself or met foot ashore. Thus, all those mass baptisms in

15
A shorter, unannotated version of this article appeared in The Diliman Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (March-April
1980), pp. 8-10, 36.
16
W. H. Scott, “An original eighteenth-century view of Spanish rights of conquest,” Unitas, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Sept.
1970), p. 49.
Cebu and heroics in Mactan were in direct disobedience to his orders.
Magellan’s instructions also spelled out the purpose of his voyage:
The main thing you have to find on this voyage is the locations of the places or
territory which you will have to settle, noting where it is necessary that settlements be
made on the seacoast for the security of navigation and for the greater security of those
ashore; and those which are needed for safe navigation should be built in high or airy
places and not down in valleys, unless they are in places where ships coming from here
can make use of them to take on supplies and water and other things necessary for their
voyage; and this both in places where settlements are already to be found and where new
ones will be made, and you must see that they can be built in healthful sites not liable to
flooding, and where they can use the sea for loading and unloading without the labor of
carrying the merchandise sent from here overland; and if, in order to be nearer some
trade or mines you would have to go into the interior, it must be seen that the settlement
can be near some river so that the things coming from here can be transported by it from
the sea to the populations, because, there being no sort of beasts of burden out there, it
would be great labor for men, which neither those from here nor those from the Indies
could endure. 17
Special articles dealt with any Moros who might be encountered. If they were on the
Spanish side of the Papal Line of Demarcation, their ships were to be hailed and taken in fair
fight, important persons ransomed off, and the others sold as quickly as possible to avoid the
expense of feeding them. If their ports of origin lay on the Portuguese side of the Line, they
were to be firmly sent away and bidden never to return, and those who tried to resist might be
treated with enough cruelty to serve as a warning to others. But if they came from the Spanish
side, they were to be dealt with in accordance with articles 17 and 18:
17. And if some of the said Moros are natives of lands which lie within our
demarcations in which you see or learn there is merchandise or gold from which we
could profit, it would be good that they be well treated for this reason, and that you
explain that the reason you took the ships was that you thought they belonged to people
with whom we do not wish to make peace or have trade.
18. Upon arriving at the ports of which such Moros are natives, you shall send one
of them ashore to make known to its king or governors that you have come there by our
order to make peace and trade with them, and if they wish to accept it, you shall freely
release all those whom you have captive, and give back everything they brought with
them, by which action they will see that our purpose is not to do harm to those who are
willing to make a treaty of peace and trade merchandise with US. 18
By the time Magellan’s survivors returned to Spain, Charles had borrowed another three
million dollars from the House of Fugger to buy the title of Holy Roman Emperor. The voyage
had produced a half-million dollars worth of spices—every ounce of which had been purchased

17
“Instruccion que dio el Rey a Magallanes y a Falero para el viage al descubrimiento de las islas del Maluco,”
Colleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos que hicieron. por Mar los Espanoles desde Fines del Siglo
XV…(Madrid 1837), Vol. 4, p. 138.
18
Ibid., pp. 135-136.
from Muslims—and cost more than 200 Spanish lives—not one of which had been taken by
Muslims. Charles and the Fuggers therefore sent out a second expedition with even more
businesslike instructions: article 33, for example, ordered cooperation with Moros in Timor and
Borneo to hire local vessels and man them. 19 Two years later, fighting on three fronts in Europe
with his war chests emptier than ever, Charles mounted a third expedition to the Spice Islands.
While it was outfitting in Mexico, imperial armies full of German Protestants subjected Rome
to the most destructive sacking it had ever suffered, and took the Pope prisoner. Not for another
decade was Charles ready to try again. He then borrowed another half million from the Fuggers
to fight Turks, sold all claim to the Philippines for still another half million, and waited a decent
24 months before sending orders to the Viceroy of Mexico to start preparations for the
occupation of that archipelago. So thick-skinned is the conscience of a bankrupt monarch who
recognizes his duty to preserve and expand a Christian kingdom.
Ironically, all these attempts to tap the spice trade may very well have figured in the
accounts of the Royal Exchequer as Crusades. One of the main sources of royal income was the
Bula de Cruzada—the Crusade Bull. This was a privilege granted by every Pope since the
thirteenth century for the sale of indulgences to compensate Iberian monarchs for their expenses
in fighting infidels. By the time Charles’s son Philip II managed to bring Spain an
unaccustomed few years of peace and send Legazpi out to make his father’s dream come true, it
amounted to more than six million pesos a year.
The documentary records generated by these expeditions show them to have been
businesslike undertakings. Every one of their five commanders prohibited his men from buying
Philippine gold so as not to inflate its price. And when Charles graciously returned three slaves
sent him by the Sultan of Tidore, he retained a fourth who had spent too much time in the
marketplace comparing the price of spices and currency exchange rates. A document still exists
in the Archives of the Indies which records the ransom the “Governor of Palawan” captured in
1521 paid for his freedom, and so does another which attests to the amount of His Majesty’s
copper wire delivered as indemnification for a Muslim ship taken in 1565. And if any of the
survivors of the Cebu Massacre nursed a hatred for Islam so fanatical it could interfere with
business, they were able to control it long enough to kiss a Moluccan sultan’s hand and
slaughter all their pigs so as not to offend his Muslim nostrils while he repaired their ships and
loaded them with spices.
Nor was profit in the spice trade any respecter of race or religion. That Muslim vessel
captured in 1565 belonged to a Portuguese businessman living in Borneo, but its cargo belonged
to the Sultan of Brunei. And when Spaniards encountered the Portuguese in Ternate, they
fought their Iberian brothers from the decks of Muslim warships. (Andres Urdaneta was so
horribly burned in battle under Kitchil Rede, brother of the King of Tidore, that common gossip
attributed his becoming a monk to the fact that no woman would marry him.)
Indeed, the case can be made that whatever success the Spaniards enjoyed during their
first 50 years in the Philippines was obtained through cordiality with Moros. It was a Muslim

19
“And because there are no ships in that land for long voyages, and it is desirable to explore the lands near the
Moluccas, vessels should be procured from Timor and Borneo, which are the best, because if the Moros
themselves are taken into the business, they will be glad to sail in them.”—Antonio de Herrera Historia general de
los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierrafirme del Mar Oceano (Madrid 1601), Vol. 2, p. 277.
merchant who induced Saripada Humabon of Cebu to receive Magellan without demanding
harbor fees. It was the Sultan of Gilolo who sent two boats to ransom off Spanish captives in
Leyte and Samar during the Villalobos expedition, and the Sultan of Brunei who rescued three
others who had been sold to the King of Maguindanao (probably Sharif Kabungsuwan himself).
It was a Bornean pilot who acted as adviser to Legazpi in dealing with the Boholanos, and an
old Muslim married in Cebu who acted as his interpreter in that port. And, mirabile dictu, it was
Manila Muslims who saved his whole expeditionary force from being starved out by Cebuanos
who left their fields unplanted for two years for just that purpose.
As Legazpi’s chronicler says:
Truly, had God not mercifully provided for them, they would have been in even
greater trouble and need than they were, for two or three times when they were in dire
and absolute want, some ships of Moro merchants from Luzon arrived at the camp
without their knowing where they came from or why, whom the Governor received very
well and paid what they wanted, so the camp was supplied and had enough to eat,
whereas, had they had to maintain it by making war on the natives, they would certainly
have been lost and perished. 20
But the most fateful Muslim service to Spanish invasion was that rendered by a talkative
Bornean pilot the Spanish account calls a “chatterbox” who gave Legazpi a description of Moro
trade within the archipelago. The Spaniards already knew the patterns in the southern
Philippines from their ill-fated predecessors—that is, the Mindanao connection with Malacca,
Borneo and the Moluccas. But what about all those Chinese goods? And the reports of actual
Chinese junks anchored in ports like Butuan? The talkative Bornean supplied the key to this
puzzle:
Since what they carry are goods from China, boats from Borneo and Luzon are
called Chinese junks in these islands, and even the Moros themselves are called Chinese,
but in fact Chinese junks do not reach there [i.e., Butuan] because they are very big and
not fit for sailing between these islands. 21
Now the picture was clear. Chinese goods were brought to Manila in seagoing junks and
carried into the archipelago in shallow-draft Moro outriggers, and Moro outposts on the north
coast of Mindoro guaranteed this monopoly on domestic distribution. Then an east-west trade
route carried Indian wares from Portuguese Malacca along the coast of Borneo direct to the
international entrepots of Butuan and Cebu, while a Moluccan branch of the same route crossed
the Sulu Archipelago, passed through the Basilan Strait, and veered south at Sarangani.
With this information, the Conquistador’s work was cut out for him. First, Mindoro must
be neutralized to give access to Manila. Then, Manila must be taken to capture the China trade.

20
“Relacion muy circunstanciada de lo occurrido en el Real y Campo de la Isla de Zubu de las Islas Philipinas
desde 10 de Junio de 1565…” Colleccion de Documentos ineditos de Ultramar, II Series, Vol. 3 (Madrid 1887),
pp. 168-164.
21
“Relacion del viaje y jornada que el armada de su majestad hizo en el descubrimiento de las islas del poniente
que partio del puerto de la navidad el ano mil y quinientos y sesenta y quatro anos, de que fue por general el muy
Ilustre Senor Miguel Lopez de Legazpi,” Isacio R. Rodriguez, Historia de la Provincia agustiniana del Smo.
Nombre de Jesus de Filipinas, Vol. 13 (Manila 1978), p. 467.
Next, Borneo must be reduced to break the Malaccan connection. And lastly, Jolo and
Maguindanao must be neutralized for direct access to the Spice Islands to the south. Of course,
it is unlikely that Legazpi or any other Spanish commander ever envisioned this grand strategy
in its entirety. But in historic fact, this is the strategy which was actually carried out in a series
of Spanish acts of aggression—Mindoro in 1570, Manila in 1571, Borneo and Jolo in 1578,
Mindanao in 1579, and the Moluccas in 1582. These were the real opening engagements of the
300-year Moro Wars.
In view of the historic events which have just been surveyed, it hardly seems necessary
to invoke religious bigotry or fanatical hatred to account for the Moro Wars. True, Spanish
military efficiency was no doubt enhanced by a piety that eased kings’ consciences and a
prejudice which released conquistadores’ adrenalin. No doubt, too, their victims’ religion was
as much a target as their trade: after all, any community wealthy and cohesive enough to build a
mosque was probably strong and determined enough to defend both its religion and its trade.
Yet it is hard to doubt that the same wars would have been fought under the same circumstances
and with the same motives even if those Muslim targets had been Portuguese or Chinese—or
Hottentot.
Crusades the Moro Wars may well have been, and true crusading zeal may have fired
them. But if so, they were crusades for commerce, not for Christ.
 Filipino-Spanish Face-to-Face Contacts
1543-1545

The first attempt by any European power to occupy the Philippine Archipelago was an
unqualified failure: it not only failed to occupy, but of the 370 men who tried, only 146 survived
until the final evacuation two years later. The rest were either dead or enslaved. This was the
Ruy Gomez de Villalobos expedition of 1543-1545 sent out by the Viceroy of Mexico under
orders from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to establish a colony near the Portuguese-
occupied Spice Islands of the Moluccas. From the standpoint of European expansion, it
accomplished nothing. From the standpoint of the Filipino people, it accomplished almost
nothing—it simply stamped them for four centuries with the name of a 14-year-old Iberian
prince. It is therefore not surprising that the whole debacle receives little attention in standard
histories of either Spain or the Philippines.
Yet for purposes of understanding the unhispanized Filipino people on the eve of foreign
conquest, the eye-witness accounts left by the Villalobos expedition are worthy of scrutiny.
Members of the expedition spent 16 months wandering around the archipelago looking for food
and waiting for winds that would take them back to Mexico. One ship alone, the little San Juan
de Letran with a skeleton crew of only twenty men, logged more than 5,000 kilometers in
Philippine waters, including those of the San Bernardino Strait between Luzon and Samar and
the San Juanico Strait between Samar and Leyte, and completely circumnavigated the Island of
Mindanao. The first-hand reports of these ill-starred conquistadores are rich in the details they
observed in face-to-face contact with dozens of Filipino chiefs, hosts, and antagonists—the size
and shape of their ships, the amount of gold they wore on their persons, or the potency of their
poisoned arrows. More importantly, the details of Philippine foreign contacts provide a glimpse
of the political and economic scene in the archipelago in a day when Luzon was still the eastern
terminus of a Malaccan trade route, Cebu and Butuan were international entrepots, and
Sarangani Island was the last landfall for southbound traffic headed for the Moluccas.
It was on Sarangani Island that the first face-to-face contact was made on April 1, 1543.
There were only four settlements on the island at the time, and adults in any one of them might
easily have remembered earlier European contacts. In 1521, for example, a Spanish ship had
kidnapped two of their pilots, and in 1526 they themselves had sold three Spaniards to Sharif
Kabungsuwan of Maguindanao—one of them a debt slave, the other two outright purchases.
They therefore responded unambiguously when two Spanish boats now approached their shores,
and drove them off with arrows, wounding five or six of their occupants. They had no firearms
of their own but they knew what to expect, so they augmented the palisade of treetrunks which
was their first line of defense with a barricade of boats pulled up on the beach and filled with
sand. When the attack came, they retired to a fortified settlement in the hills naturally protected
by cliffs, evacuated their women and children, and put up a spirited resistance before
withdrawing in the face of Spanish firepower, carrying as much gold and porcelain as they
could and burying the rest. Then while the invaders were looting and digging up the village,
they all escaped to the Mindanao mainland.
The next contact was made at the mouth of the Pulangi River where the reputation of a
Maguindanao trading center had attracted the hungry Spaniards. The local ruler, Sharif
Makaalang Saripada, no doubt had his own memories of earlier contacts. In 1521, Spaniards
had kidnapped an uncle of his who escaped by jumping overboard off Sangi Island and
swimming ashore with his small son on his back, though the child lost his hold and was
drowned. When the Spanish ship now put a boat in the water to sound the bar at the mouth of
the river, they quickly surrounded it and attacked, killing one Spaniard and wounding the
others. As the survivors sailed back to Sarangani, hungrier than ever, they established a third
contact. Sighting ripened rice fields along the coast, they landed and started to harvest, but paid
for the crop in Spanish blood when the owners of the fields killed several of them before taking
to the hills. Their next contact was of a very different kind—two boats from Ternate with
Portuguese officers aboard, who put some Moluccans ashore to encourage their Mindanao
trading partners not to sell food to the Spaniards and to offer military assistance if needed. Then
they delivered a diplomatic note to Villalobos demanding that he depart and stop harassing what
the note referred to as vassals of the Portuguese King.
Just then a Spanish vessel showed up which had been lost during a storm at sea before
the fleet even reached Mindanao. This was a galliot, a small vessel with oars as well as sails: it
had been driven ashore on Limasawa Island where it stayed for two months before heading
south with a load of rice and other foodstuffs to look for the Commander. Villalobos sent it
right back to the Visayas for revictualing, accompanied by the San Juan which was to stock up
for a Pacific crossing and then head for Mexico. This double goal was accomplished in Leyte
and Samar—which the Spaniards called the Filipinas—and the San Juan sailed off into the
Philippine Sea on August 26, 1543. The galliot didn’t get back to Sarangani with supplies until
October, and Villalobos then decided to move north to the Visayas himself. Unfortunately, a
strong current flows south along the east coast of Mindanao at about the speed of a Spanish
galleon, so, with no winds at that season to overcome it, he had to seek shelter only halfway up
the coast. Then, more sensibly, he made use of three Philippine barangays whose outriggers and
shallow draft fitted them better to hug the reef-ringed shore. They were sent out with the galliot,
one after the other, in early November—two with about thirty men in each, and a smaller faster
one called a calaluz with only sixteen aboard.
The galliot was the first to run into trouble. Somewhere in the Visayas its crew was
ambushed while trying to buy food, and eleven killed: the survivors were soon so weak from
hunger they could neither row nor bail, and so drifted helplessly back down to the Mindanao
anchorage, empty: Villalobos then desperately sent them to “Resurrection Bay”—now Mayo,
Davao Oriental—for repairs, and when they did not return, went to look for them. At
Resurrection Bay he found no more sign of them than a letter at the foot of a tree saying they
had set sail for the Moluccas because of the prevailing winds and current. So, with nothing
more to look forward to than starvation in Mindanao, Villalobos gave up and followed, reaching
Tidore in April 1544.
The little calaluz, meanwhile, had fared even worse. It ran aground near the mouth of
the Abuyog River on eastern Leyte, and was seized and destroyed by Filipinos who took all its
occupants captives. (Three of them survived to serve their Filipino masters eighteen or twenty
years, and a Mexican cabin boy was adopted, married, and tattooed into Visayan society and
then poisoned by a jealous Cebuana lady 25 years later.) The other two barangays reached
Abuyog a little later, one of them after losing fourteen men on the northeast coast of Mindanao.
After waiting a month and suffering two more deaths, they decided to shift to Samar. There, at
the mouth of the Basey River, one of the boats was wrecked in the middle of the night with a
loss of ten lives, so the other one headed back to Resurrection Bay with an Augustinian friar in
command, leaving 21 of their comrades divided up as guests—or hostages—in the homes of
local chieftains. At the foot of the tree in Resurrection Bay, they found a note from Villalobos,
so, leaving a note of their own, they set out to follow him. But off the Talaud Islands they were
caught in a typhoon and blown 1,000 kilometers to the north; forty days later they managed to
make Basey more dead than alive. There they learned that the Mexico-bound San Juan had
returned and ransomed off their comrades, taken them on board, and sailed off. The last
barangay was now too badly damaged to be, seaworthy, so they beached it under one of the
houses, moved in with Filipino hosts, and waited to be rescued.
The Sam Juan had not made it to Mexico. Running into a storm in the North Pacific, it
had been blown back to the Marianas, and then returned to the Filipinas where it reached the
north coast of Samar on October 31, 1543—at the very time, that is, when Villalobos was
abandoning Sarangani and dispatching all those little boats. They anchored in a well-protected
harbor in the thickly populated bay at the mouth of the Catubig River, and were so well-
received by the inhabitants that they were even shown the local gold mines. They were able to
buy all the rice and pigs they wanted in exchange for Chinese porcelain they had looted in
Sarangani, and then they sailed westward from village to village because the strong
northeasterly winds prevented them from rounding the eastern headland. In one town they were
cordially received by a Chief Kobos who made them presents and gave them a calaluz because
their own ship’s boat had been stolen. (They got it back by holding Kobos hostage—“thus
repaying him for his good will,” as the Spanish account says—and then, learning that another
chief by the name of Turris had been party to the theft, went ashore, took his town, and killed
him.) Then, on January 3, 1544, in the treacherous currents off the northwestern corner of
Samar, they did just what dozens of Spanish vessels were to do for the next three centuries—ran
aground in San Bernardino Strait. The San Juan hung up on the rocks for two days before they
got her afloat by jettisoning cargo, and was damaged in the process.
Then, proceeding down the western coast of Samar, they learned about the San Juanico
passage from a chief called Si Katubay, but were attacked by three boats while taking soundings
in the calaluz. After fighting their way free, they learned about the two boatloads of Spaniards
on the Leyte coast at Abuyog. But, mindful of their Commander’s plight when they had left him
six months before, they headed for Sarangani instead. There, of course, they did not find him,
and so concluded that he must be among those Spaniards back in Abuyog. They therefore cut
trees to replace their damaged mainmast and bowsprit, losing a boatswain to Sarangani
vengeance in the process, and then set sail. Since the northeasterlies were still blowing, they
headed west along the south coast of Mindanao—carefully avoiding the mouth of the Pulangi
River, of course—and passed between Zamboanga and Basilan into the normal trade route from
Borneo and Sulu to the southern Visayas. They had a good trip, bought whatever they needed
along the coast, put in at Limasawa, and then rescued their comrades in Basey. From them they
learned that Villalobos had transferred to the coast of Mindanao the preceding November, so
they sailed back to Resurrection Bay and picked up their mail, so to speak—a letter from
Villalobos announcing his departure for the Moluccas, and another from the Augustinian friar
dated only nine days before, stating that he was following the Commander in the last surviving
barangay. Since the San Juan had no way of knowing that the friar and his barangay had
meanwhile been blown back to Samar, they left their own letter, proceeded south, and reached
Tidore two months later.
 Before the San Juan arrived, however, Villalobos had sent a rescue mission in two ships
supplied by the Sultan of Gilolo (northern Halmahera). The performance of this little taskforce
provides a nice testimony to the advantages of making use of native boats, native crews, and
native skills: it successfully accomplished its mission without losing a life, firing a shot, or
missing a meal. Leaving Tidore just as the southwest monsoon was starting to blow at the end
of May, they hired two blacksmiths and an interpreter in Minahasi, Suwalesi, and another on
Balut Island opposite Sarangani who proved to be as full of information about Filipino people,
politics, and natural resources as a modern tour guide. From Balut they sailed right up the
Mindanao coast which no Spanish ship had been able to navigate—stopping off at the tree in
Resurrection Bay en route, of course—called at Limasawa, and then ransomed off five
Spaniards in Leyte and thirteen in Samar, repaired the damaged barangay with the help of the
Suwalesi blacksmiths, and bought back a Spanish cannon which divers from Basey had
recovered from the sunken barangay. Their only failure was their inability to meet the price
demanded for three Spanish captives on the west coast of Samar, who were thus left behind to
spend the rest of their lives serving their Filipino masters as warriors. (The last of them, Juan
Flores, disappeared with thirty of his Filipino town-mates on a raid in 1562.) With the arrival of
the three Gilolo and Philippine vessels in Tidore in October 1544, the first Spanish attempt to
establish a colony in the Philippines came to its ignominious end. Its commander himself died
six months later of a tropical fever—or, as the Portuguese said, a broken heart.
All these unhappy adventures gave the Spaniards plenty of time to observe Filipinos and
Filipino behavior: there was hardly a day from early 1543 to late 1544 when they did not have
some sort of face-to-face contact. They fought, traded, and male blood compacts with Filipinos;
they slept in their houses, ate their food, and sailed in their boats; they killed and captured them
and were killed and captured by them; and some of them served them as slaves for decades
afterwards. Their recorded observations are therefore interesting enough to be quoted at length.
Italian pilot Giovanni Gaetano of the San Juan, first Spanish ship to circumnavigate Mindanao,
for example, provides our first general description of that island:
This island is very large: after circumnavigating it we found that it was 2,200
kilometers around, and extends mainly east and west; its highest latitude will be in 11°
30°, the lowest in 5° or 6°. It is inhabited by many and varied people: there are Moros,
gentiles, and different kings and lords who wear certain clothes without sleeves, short,
like Marlottas, which they call patolas, and the rich have them of silk like tafetta, and
the other people of cotton and in different styles. They have many offensive arms of iron
and steel, such as scimitars, daggers, and spears; and defensive arms they make of
animal hide, which is tougher and stronger than that of Anta. In a certain part of the
island which the Moros rule over, there is small artillery. There are pigs, deer, and
buffalos in that island, and other animals of the chase, and Castilian chickens, and rice
and palms and coconuts. There is no corn in it, but they use rice for bread, and a bark
which they call sagu, from which oil is extracted as from palms and they make bread of
it in that land. There is very special gold, which is dug out of mines in the same land;
they value it, and use it for exchange, and wear chains and jewelry made of it. On the
headland of this island on the west, there is much cinnamon, and the Portuguese touch
 there when they go to the Moluccas. 22
Garcia Descalante Alvarado, who commanded the final rescue mission in the Gilolo
ships, recorded some information he got from Leyte Chieftain si Katinga—though he thought
that was the name of his barrio rather than his own name, a common error in 16th-century
Spanish accounts.
Having picked up the Spaniards, I sailed along the coast of Abuyo Island [Leyte],
and the indios [i.e., Moluccans] in the boats captured an old Filipino along the coast,
from the town of Sicatinga, and because he had made peace with the Chief, I ransomed
him from those who had taken him, and took him back to his town. Desiring to get
information from him about various things of the land, I took him to the Reverend Fray
Geronimo Santiesteban, with a Spaniard who knew that language, and when I asked him
if there was any large town on the Island of Abuyo, he said, yes, that on the other side of
the island on the northeast was a large town called Sugut [perhaps Tacloban or
Carigara?], and that junks go there every year belonging to the Chinese who normally
stay there and have a house there with their merchandise. What they buy there, he said,
was gold and some slaves; he also told me that in the Island of Zubu [Cebu] there were
living Spaniards from Magellan’s time, and that Chinese are accustomed to come there
to buy gold and certain jewelry because that island has it. And near Zubu, he said, there
was another large island which is called Bulane [Butuan], which is rich in gold, and
junks from many places come to it and trade with them. On the north side of Tandaya
[Samar], he said, is an island which is called Albay, and there are gold mines in it. And
on the same north side of Tandaya, he said, there is another island, ten days’ journey
from Tandaya in their ships, which is called Amuco. The people there are white and
bearded, and in some parts of it they eat human flesh. They have large ships, and some
artillery; they trade with other islands and with China, and have a lot of gold and a very
great quantity of silver. From the Philippines to that island, he said, runs a chain of
islands. 23
Since the Spaniards were in the Philippines for purposes of trade, they naturally took
note of any signs of trade which already existed. At Sarangani, for example, “a lot of gold was
found and some bells, different from ours, which these people prize for their festivities; and
much perfume was found—musk, ambergris, civet, benzoin, storax, and others in both cakes
and oils, which they buy from Chinese who come to Mindanao and the Filipinas [i.e., Leyte and
Samar].” 24 They also naturally took note of anybody else, Filipino or non-Filipino, who was
there for the same purpose. Even Portuguese Governor Antonio Galvano of Ternate was able to
publish their observations of mercantile shipping in waters west of Samar:
There are also ships with oars, 20 meters long and four and a half meters wide, with
boards 8 cm. thick, and they said that they sailed in them to China; that if they wished to

22
Giovanni B. Ramusio, Delle Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice 1554, 2nd ed.), Vol. 1, fol. 275-v.
23
Garcia Descalante Alvarado, “Relacion del viage que hizo desde la Nueva Espana a las Islas del Poniente Ruy
Gomez de Villalobos.” Coleccion de Documentos ineditos relativos al Descubrimieinto, Conquiesta y
Colonizacion de las Posesiones espanoles en America y Oceania, Vol. 5 (1866), pp. 140-141.
24
Ibid., p. 122.
 go there, they would give them pilots for the trip, and that it would be no more than five
or six days’ travel. Boats and calaluzes also came to them, well wrought and nicely
adorned, and the lords were seated above and down below some negroes with kinky
hair, according to their stations. On being asked where they got them, they replied from
some islands near Cebu and Mactan where there are many, at which the Spaniards were
greatly surprised because there are no black people for more than 1,800 kilometers from
there. 25
The dynamics of power seem quite clear from the Spanish experience. Wherever they
went ashore in small numbers from small boats with no Filipino guide or companions, they
were attacked, killed, captured, or held for ransom. But when they showed up in a man-o-war,
they were only attacked when the attackers’ settlements were beyond range of the ship’s guns—
as in the case of Sarangani and Maguindanao. (Even those rice fields they raided along the
Mindanao coast were protected by coral reefs: when Villalobos later sent a warship with 70
soldiers against their owners, it ran aground five kilometers away and was lost with all arms and
supplies.) They were also attacked while taking soundings in strategic waters—at the mouth of
the Pulangi River, for instance, or the western entrance to the San Juanico Strait. It is to be
noted further that they were not attacked when they were traveling in Moluccan boats manned
by Moluccan warriors: quite the opposite, on their way back to Tidore, they were approached by
Sarangani chiefs who wanted to sue for peace.
This Moluccan connection is not surprising: it represents one of the Filipinos’ major
trade connections outside the archipelago. Only five years before the Villalobos expedition, the
Portuguese had baptized five or six Mindanao chieftains and taken their sons off to Ternate
where they were taught to read and write in the Governor’s house. The same governor also
introduced adult Filipinas to produce Portuguese mestizos in the fort itself, as well as two
Mindanao species of palm trees and a particular kind of melon. The western tip of Mindanao
was one of the landfalls on the Malacca-Borneo-Sulu-Moluccas route: ships veered right at
Sarangani and proceeded to Halmahera via the Talaud and Sangi Islands. That is why
Descalante’s Talaud interpreter was so knowledgeable about the area—e.g., “Along the coast of
Cesarea [i.e., Mindanao], he showed me the towns, and told me that it was a very thickly
populated island in the interior, but that the coast was depopulated because of their wars. 26 It is
tempting to think that this Moluccan connection reflected a common faith—that is, Islam—but
since the Muslim Sultan of Ternate was allied with the Portuguese in a 25-year-old war with the
Muslim Sultan of Tidore who was allied with the Spaniards, a common love of profit in the
spice trade would seem a more likely explanation.
The China connection is also clear in the accounts. Gold is reported to be their main
object, a mineral mentioned repeatedly in all five accounts from the Villalobos expedition, as
well as in every other Spanish account between 1521 and 1571. Indeed, the reader gets the
impression the Spaniards never saw a Filipino who was not wearing gold on his person—
whether earrings, necklaces, bracelets, or dental inlays. The Chinese are also reported as being
in the market for slaves: they apparently bought five of Magellan’s men who survived the Cebu
Massacre of April 1, 1521. (It is necessary to say “apparently” inasmuch as Visayans later in the

25
Antonio Galvano, Tratado dos Descobrimientos antigos e modernos (1563; 3rd ed. Oporto 1731), pp. 277-278.
26
Descalante, op. cit., pp. 137-138.
century were referring to Moro ships from Luzon and Borneo as “Chinese” because they dealt
in Chinese goods—such as two that were anchored in Butuan in Descalante’s time buying gold
and slaves.) The porcelain, silk stuffs, and metal gongs which appear as their major
merchandise are to be expected, but the great amount of perfumes and unguents found in
Sarangani is noteworthy since these are non-Chinese products of the tropics. The same is to be
said of the patola cloth reported in Mindanao: this is evidently a non-Chinese product of Indian
origin, and was reported from the Malay Peninsula as long ago as a Chinese trade report of
1349. What is significant about these products is that they are evidences of a much more
cosmopolitan commerce than mere trade runs between the coast of China and the Philippines.
But it is a third connection, mentioned for the first time in the Villalobos accounts,
which is most interesting—Si Katinga’s description of “Amuco” with its bearded white men,
artillery and large ships, direct trade with China, and abundance of gold and silver. This is a
pretty obvious reference to Malacca which is, in fact, reached from the Philippines by following
a “chain of islands”—that is, Luzon, Mindoro, Calamian, Palawan, and Borneo. But it is not
north of Samar ten days beyond Albay. What is evidently being reported here is that Philippine
connections with Malacca are maintained through Moro traders in Luzon, but that people on the
southeastern coast of Leyte are too far away to realize the difference. At the other end of this
trade route, the Portuguese in Malacca made a similar error in reverse: they thought the Luzones
were people who lived in Borneo. So they reported the fiercest warriors in the allied forces
Sultan Mahmud threw against Malacca from Bintang in 1525 as being Luzones from Borneo,
and so, too, the 1541 Mercator globe of the world shows “Luzon” as a tiny island off the
northeast coast of Borneo. Not until 1545, while Villalobos, was languishing in the Portuguese
Moluccas, did they learn the real position of Luzon, when Peter Fidalgo sailed 1,500 kilometers
up the western littoral of the archipelago and noted that the natives were happy to exchange
gold for silver at the rate of two to one. This Filipino sensitivity to the value of silver coinage is
one more testimony to the archipelago’s participation in an international commerce which was
already literally globe-circling in the 16th century.
It was precisely the desire to enjoy part of the proceeds of this globe-circling
international commerce which motivated the Spaniards to come back to the Philippines twenty
years later. By that time, the desire was deep enough to have dimmed the memory of all those
Spaniards who had starved to death on Sarangani Island or died, raving mad and in agony, after
eating poisonous crabs and lizards. Now even a survivor like Juan Pablo Carrion was hankering
for another try. Perhaps it was fond recollections of the hospitality of Filipino chieftains like
Iberein of Samar, who carried a thousand pesos of gold on his person and whose oarsmen were
collared in gold, which moved Carrion to recommend still another expedition in the following
glowing terms:
The fleet can stop in the Philippine Islands, which are islands of friends with whom
trade and treaties have already been established, and there are still eight Spaniards there from
the fleet in which I sailed. They are islands very well supplied with all manner of foodstuffs,
and islands of great commerce, very rich and large. They are in the best location in the whole
archipelago; their language and ports are known, and even the names of the chiefs who rule in
them, with whom treaties have been made and proven trustworthy. They are a people of great
good sense and culture. 27

27
“Relacion que el capitan Juan Pablo de Carrion, Almirante de la Armada que va a las Islas del Poniente, hace a
la majestad del Rey D. Felipe sobre la navegacion que la dicha Armada ha de llevar,” Coleccion de Documentos
ineditos relativos al Descubrimiento, Conquista y Organizacion de las antiguas Posesiones espanoles de
Ultramar, II Serie, Vol. 2 (Madrid 1586), pp. 207-208.
 Boat-Building and Seamanship
in Classic Philippine Society28

1. Plank-built boats in the Philippines

In October 1976, Butuan City Engineer Proceso S. Gonzales excavated four planks of an
ancient Philippine boat in sitio Ambangan of barrio Libertad, which had been discovered by
unauthorized “pot-hunters” looking for marketable Chinese trade porcelain. The find was
promptly announced in the public press, using Antonio Pigafetta’s early 16th-century Italian
spelling, balanghai, for barangay, presumably because that author mentions one that belonged
to the Rajah of Butuan’s brother. Dr. Jesus Peralta, Curator of the Anthropology Division of the
National Museum, then took charge of salvage archaeology at the site, and Research Assistant
Leonard Alegre subsequently removed the planks for chemical treatment and preservation. Just
one year later, nine planks from another vessel of the same type were discovered a kilometer to
the southeast of the first find, and were systematically salvaged and removed to Manila by
National Museum researcher Cecilio Salcedo. There they have been treated by a preservative
process known as PEG—i.e., polyethylene glycol—and will eventually be reassembled for
public display.
The location of the two finds appears to be a former shoreline—even a harbor
waterfront—subject to the strong currents of one of the mouths of the Butuan River which
evidently washed away all the disintegrating parts of the vessels except the hull planks, which
presumably survived because they collapsed flat onto the clay bottom and so presented no
resistance to the current. Other than these planks, nothing was recovered except a short piece of
one rib and three small pieces of what was probably a mast. It is therefore impossible to
reconstruct whatever interior fittings, thwarts, or superstructure the vessels may have had, or
oven to determine whether they had outriggers or not. On the other hand, the configuration of
the planks themselves is recognizable as a distinctive style of marine architecture which once
extended from Scandinavia to the South Pacific, from the third century B.C. until the present
time in a few remote corners of the South Sea. These facts, taken together with a Carbon-14
date of the 13th-14th centuries for the second find, determined by the University of Tokyo from
wood samples, make the Butuan discoveries one of the most significant events in Philippine
archaeology. Moreover, an even earlier date for the first find—it lay more than a meter below a
layer of midden materials containing Sung porcelain—makes the discovery an important event
in marine archaeology as well. Happily, too, comparison with other Southeast Asian vessels

28
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Social Science Research Council of New York for a grant in
1977-1978 which supported part of the research on which this paper is based; to Dr. Jesus Peralta, Mr. Cecilio
Salcedo, and Mr. Orlando Abinon of the Anthropology Division of the National Museum for sharing their
archaeological findings on two ancient boats excavated in Butuan and making the remains available for study; to
Butuan City Engineer Proceso S. Gonzales for photographs of the site; to Mr. Pedro Picornell, Vice-President of
PICORP, for his assistance with archaic Spanish nautical terminology; to Dr. Pierre-Yves Manguin of the Ecole
Francaise D’Extreme-Orient, Jakarta, for his constructive criticisms of the finished manuscript; and to Dr. G. A.
Horridge of the Australian National University for unstintingly sharing his vast knowledge of Southeast Asian
boat-building and literature on the subject, as well as the outright gifts of books, articles, photographs, drawings,
and pre-publication copies of his own papers.
built in this tradition makes it possible to describe the sort of boat these Philippine specimens
must have been and, moreover, by recourse to Spanish records, to describe their role and
significance for Philippine social life and progress.
The planks of the older vessel run the full length of the hull in one continuous piece—
almost 15 meters—and thus constitute what nautical jargon calls strakes. Those of the second
boat are made of two sections of doongon wood (Heretiera litorales) joined by Z-shaped scarfs,
and those next to the keel—i.e., the garboard strakes—are 20 cm. wide, 3 cm. thick, and pegged
to the keel every 12 cm. by hardwood pins or dowels 19 cm. long, driven into holes in the edge
of each board. The pegs fastening the other boards together are shorter—12 cm.—and those
which have come loose are 1.5 cm. in diameter and pointed at one end. The keel itself is hardly
worthy of that designation—it is simply a plank 1-2 cm. thicker than the other planks, though
46 cm. wide amidships and tapering to a point at both ends, thinning slightly to about 2.25 cm.
The most distinctive feature of the planks is a series of flat, rectangular protrusions or lugs
carved out of the surface of the wood on the upper side of each plank—that is, the inside of the
boat. They are 78 cm. apart, exactly opposite one another on each strake, average 30.7 cm. long,
16.5 cm. wide, and 2.5 cm. thicker than the planks themselves, and have four holes along their
edges through which cords or lashings can be passed. The purpose of both the lugs and the holes
is made clear by the fact that a fragment of transverse ribbing was found securely bound to the
lugs of the several planks it crossed by cordage of cabo negro palm fibers. These lugs are called
tambuko in Visayan and Maguindanao, as well as in many of the languages spoken in the
maritime cultures to the south of the Philippines. Their presence is the earmark of this older
ship-building technique.
In the more familiar modern ship-building technique, developed in both China and
Europe as long ago as the Middle Ages but still in use, a rigid framework of keel and ribs is first
constructed, not unlike the spine and ribs of a whale or carabao in appearance and function, and
the wooden planking of the hull is then nailed to it with metal spikes or wooden trenails. The
older technique was to build the hull like a shell first, plank by plank carved to fit, and to fasten
the ribs in afterwards. This technique is probably a natural development of the one-log dugout
canoe by adding one board to each side to obtain higher freeboard. The prototype seems to have
survived in Taiwan to be described in the 18th century by Huang Shu-ching in the following
terms: “A mangka is a single tree-trunk hollowed out, with wooden planks fastened on both
sides with rattan; since they have no putty for caulking and water easily enters, the barbarians
keep bailing with a ladle.” 29 By increasing the number of such additional planks, a fully
developed boat or ship is produced. But as the sides of the canoe, or banca, are thinned, some
transverse strengthening is required, and this can be provided by running strut-like thwarts
across the vessel, securing them to the sides without nails by means of tambukos and lashing.
Similarly, as the number of strakes is increased, not only is such transverse reinforcement
necessary, but the planks themselves must be firmly attached to one another. For this purpose, a
flexible rib can be pressed down across all of them and lashed securely to the matching
tambukos carved on each plank. Finally, a combination of such thwarts and ribs lashed together,
and even tightened by tourniquet action in the lashings themselves, produces a sturdy vessel
whose hull and other structural parts are held firm under prestressed tension. This is the sort of

29
Huang Shu-ching, Fan Shu Liu K’ao (1736), quoted by Ling Shu-sheng, Ming-Tsu-Hsueh Yen-Chiu-Suo Ch’i-
k’an (Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology) (Academia Sinica, Taipei), Vol. 27 (1968), p. 3.
hull the Butuan boats must have had.
Of course, since this technique provides no solid ribs to fasten the planks to, they cannot
be steamed, bent to shape, and held in place by nails. Instead, they must be carved to shape in
advance, no mean feat of carpentry in a boat the size of the Butuan examples. It is because of
the essential nature of this feature that boats constructed by this technique are called “plank-
built boats.” On the testimony of Spanish records, Philippine plank-built boats usually had
strakes hewn of one piece from stem to stern, even in 25-meter warships manned by crews of
over 200. Each of these planks was literally hand-carved out of half a treetrunk with an adze.
Saws, had they been available, would have been of little use for such shaping, especially
considering the projecting tambukos along one surface. Although these adzes were made of
metal during the Spanish period, it is worth noting that the same results could have been
attained with neolithic tools. Indeed, there is an elegant nephrite-jade chisel in the National
Museum which could perform such work.
Historically, there are two methods by which the planks in plank-built boats are fastened
together—sewing and edge—pegging. Sewing—or, better said, lacing—the boards together is
done by drilling a matching row of holes through the two boards near their adjoining edges, and
running rattan strips through them in the manner of lacing up a shoe or basketball. This is the
older technique and it can be performed with even a simple stone or bone drill, as was still
being done in modern times in remote Pacific islands. Sewing boats was a Luzon technique
noted in the San Buenaventura Tagalog-Spanish dictionary of 1613, which continued in use into
the present century. Barangayans or cascos with a capacity of two or three thousand cavans of
rice for loading and unloading ocean-going streamers were being constructed in Cagayan by
this method in the 1920’s. The timbers were cut in the Sierra Madres and floated downstream to
Aparri where they were reduced to boards, and then carpenters working in teams of two, one
inside the hull and one outside, drilled the holes, laced them with barrid rattan, and caulked
them at the rate of 15 centavos per hole, During the preceding decade, the turtle-eating,
seafaring Dumagats of Ambos Camarines were constructing nine-meter benitans by sewing
overlapping strakes together on a keel 30 cm. thick, plugging up all the openings afterwards
with coconut coir and pili resin. On the rare occasions when they lived ashore, they simply took
their boats apart and stored them under the house, ready to reassemble whenever they had
reason to take to the sea again.
Stone tools are probably inadequate for drilling deep holes in the thin edges of boards,
and it is therefore not surprising that edge-pegging does not appear in those distant Pacific
islands; whose inhabitants presumably migrated there without metal. Edge pegs do not provide
much strength for binding strakes together—for that, tambuko lashing is necessary—though
17th-century Spanish accounts indicate that Philippine edge pegs were secured within the
planks by having hardwood nails run through them, planks and all, after they were in place. But
pegs prevent the planks from sliding lengthwise and thus resist the shearing forces exerted on a
vessel as it twists in heavy seas, and are therefore sometimes found in ships built on rigid
frames in the modern manner. Edge-pegged plank-built boats are still being constructed in the
Batanes Islands with solid futtocks and ribs inserted afterwards with nails or trenails instead of
tambukos, and a Vietnamese specimen with a completely nailless hull of handhewn planks
arrived in Lubang Island in July of 1981 with 35 refugees aboard. But tambukos survived the
introduction of saws and nails right into this century: an old boat-builder in barrio Katuli of
Cotabato City recalls kinalawong bancas built in this manner with a five-piece hull—that is, a
dugout canoe base with two boards pegged to each side, with thwarts called tang or balawog
lashed to them. And the force of tradition is such that tambukos still show up anachronistically
in handhewn bancas in Butuan where they serve no functional purpose whatever, not even
having holes in them.

2. The plank-built man-o-war

By the time of the European arrival in Southeast Asia in the 16th century, the plank-built
boat had been developed into a highly refined man-o-war, nicely adjusted to the tools,
techniques, and materials available, and local political and commercial needs. They were called
korakora in Indonesia, but caracoas by the Spaniards in the Philippines. They were sleek,
double-ended warships of low freeboard and light draft with a keel in one continuous curve,
steered by quarter rudders, and carrying one or more tripod masts mounting a square sail of
matting on yards both above and below, with double outriggers on which multiple banks of
paddlers could provide speed for battle conditions, and a raised platform amidships for a warrior
contingent for ship-to-ship contact. Their tripod masts and characteristic S-shaped outrigger
supports show up in the 9th-century stone carvings of Borobudur, and their other features
appear in Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and English accounts over a period of
half a millenium.
Wang Ta-yuan, a medieval Chinese author, recognized the essential features of the
plank-built boat—i.e., light, flexible and nailless—in Madura in the early 14th century. Writing
at a time when the second Butuan boat might still have been afloat, he says:
They make boats of wooden boards and fasten them with split rattan, and cotton
wadding to plug up the seams. The hull is very flexible, and rides up and down on the
waves, and they row them with oars made of wood, too. None of them have ever been
known to break up. 30
Pigafetta noted the wooden dowels and bamboo outriggers in 1521, and Urdaneta gives
the dimensions of the outriggers five years later: they are six meters shorter than the hull, their
supports are three and a half meters long, and the innermost row of paddlers sits about a half
meter outside the hull. An Italian pilot with Villalobos in 1543 reported a ship with Negro
oarsmen in the Visayas, and the anonymous account of the 1565 Legazpi expedition says of a
Bornean three-master taken in Bohol, “It was a ship for sailing any place they wanted.” 31
Longer and more detailed accounts were given, in almost identical terms, by Portuguese
Governor Antonio Galvano of the Moluccas in 1544, Dutch Admiral Jacob van Neck in 1598,
and Mindanao missionary Francisco Combos, S.J., in 1667, while Manila Auditor Antonio de
Morga’s famous 1609 Sucesos includes a shorter but perceptive description. But it was
Combos’ brother of the cloth, Francisco Alcina, who recorded the most valuable description of
all in his unpublished 1668 “Historia de las Islas e Indios de las Bisayas”—three chapters in
which the construction of the plank-built warship is set down step by step by a man who had
actually built some.

30
Wang Ta-yuan, Tao I Chih Luch, ch. 45.
31
Anon. Relacion, in Isacio R. Rodriguez, Historia de la Provincia agustiniana del Smo. Nombre de Jesus de
Filipinas, Vol. 13 (Manila 1978), p. 463.
 To the casual observer familiar with the great Chinese war junks of the Ming Dynasty or
the Spanish galleons towering over the native caracoas, the plank-built man-o-war looks like a
primitive and flimsy craft indeed. Its planking seems skin thin and its bamboo tripods a sorry
substitute for those oaken masts which are almost symbols of strength and security in western
literature. Their low freeboard and wide-spreading outriggers crowded with seamen outside the
hull make them hardly recognizable as ships at all. A careful observer like Pigafetta realized
that their hulls were “very well made of boards with wooden pegs [though] above this they are
nothing but very large bamboos,” 32 but Ch’uan-chow Superintendent of Trade Chao Ju-kua
thought they were simply bamboo rafts. Their paddles with blades like dinner plates or elephant
ears show up in Chang Hsieh’s 1613 sailing directions as being “shaped like a gourd cut in half
and left hollow as water-bailers.” 33 Caracoa seamanship was also inexplicable: the sailors were
often in the water outside the boat. To bail out a swamped vessel, for example, they went over
the side to rock it and slosh out the water with paddles; and when emergency speed was needed,
the paddlers on the outrigger floats were literally in the water. Chang confuses these two actions
in the following terms: “On occasion, the men with these bailers jump into the water to rock the
boat and the speed is doubled.” 34 And who could imagine that a warship could be launched by
the simple maneuver of picking it up and running into the surf with it? This outlandish detail
reached the remote mainland study of scholarly Superintendent Chao to be expressed in his
1225 comment on Visayan mariners as follows:

They do not travel in boats or use oars, but only take bamboo rafts for their trips;
they can fold them up like door-screens, so when hard-pressed they all pick them up and
escape by swimming off with them. 35

But the comparisons are gratuitous. The caracoa was not designed to cross high seas in
any weather before any winds, out of sight of land “and provisions for months at a time,
carrying heavy cargos financed by international banking houses, and even heavier artillery for
slugging it out with competitors of their kind. Rather, they were intended to carry warriors at
high speeds before seasonal winds through dangerous reef-filled waters with treacherous
currents on interisland raids and high-profit ventures mounted by harbor princelings with
limited capital. For this purpose they were superbly fitted. If a fair comparison is desired, it may
be found in the Viking ships of Scandinavia. A third-century example excavated in Nydam,
Schleswig-Holstein, has a double-ended hull like the Butuan finds, with one-piece strakes
lashed to flexible ribs by cleat-lugs. But by the time of the later Butuan boat, the Viking ship
had developed along its own line of specialization into a heavy, rigid-ribbed, deep-sea vessel
capable of withstanding the buffeting of some of the roughest waters in the world—those of the
North Atlantic between Europe and America. In Southeast Asia, on the other hand,
specialization ran to speed and maneuverability in shallow coastal waters.

32
Antonio Pigafetta, Primo Viaggio intorno al Mondo (MS 1522), text in Blair and Robertson, The Philippine
Islands, 1493-1898 Vol. 33, p. 224.
33
Chang Hsieh, Tung Hsi Yang K’ao, ch. 5.
34
Ibid.
35
Chao Ju-kua, Chu Fan Chih, Part I: P’i-she-ya.
 The flexible hull, curved keel, shallow draft, quarter rudders, and protective outriggers
give the caracoa life-saving advantages in waters entailing a high risk of banging on coral reefs,
grounding on rocky coasts, or beaching on sandy shores. The force of direct underwater blows
that would stave in the hull of a rigid vessel, or at least loosen its nails, is instantly redistributed
to other parts of the prestressed plank-built hull, and rattan lashing that comes loose can easily
be tightened again or replaced. Nails entail a special disadvantage of their own: they loosen as
they rust and induce rot into the surrounding wood in the process. Quarter rudders are actually
large steering oars on one or both quarters that can be raised at a moment’s notice to avoid
underwater obstructions, and outriggers effectively act as fenders against contacts at water
level. Nor is the presence of the tripod mast on the plank-built hull mere coincidence. The pliant
caracoa hull precludes the stepping of a tall mast into a rigid keel on which it would exert the
strain of great leverage: instead, the more agile tripod can safely shift its burden with the
movements within the hull itself.
Outriggers serve a half dozen distinct functions in sailing caracoas. Their most obvious
purpose is to prevent rolling. They run just above the surface on a well-trimmed ship—“kissing
the water,” as Morga says—and are slued upwards at the ends to lessen water resistance. (The
17th-century Mindanao equivalent of keel-hauling was to, tie the culprit to one of the outrigger
floats.) They add the necessary buoyancy to keep a swamped vessel afloat, and missionary
accounts contain grateful tales of friars being brought safely to port by Filipino crews working
in water up to their necks. Outriggers receive the first force of heavy seas on the beam and, if
worse comes to worst, come apart first and so give a vessel time to seek shelter before breaking
up. Thus an anti-Moro task force dropped anchor off Panay in 1618 when its port outriggers
began to be strained by strong northeasterly brisas. Outrigger beams also provide support for as
many as four banks of paddlers for high speed in battle, and the whole outrigger structure
provides the handles by which the crew picks up a caracoa for beaching and launching. (A
hundred men can easily carry a five-ton vessel if they can get ahold of it.) Speed in launching
was an essential feature of self-defense for coastal villages exposed to raiding attacks, for boats
were regularly beached high and dry at night. Encumbering and destructive marine weeds
accumulate on an exposed hull in tropical waters in one or two weeks’ time, and shipworms—
according to Hernando de los Rios Coronel in 1619—could eat up the hull of a galley anchored
in the Pasig River in just twelve months.
The fact that the caracoa was double-ended made it extremely maneuverable in battle:
its paddlers could back it down as rapidly as drive it forward simply by turning around in their
places and shifting the helm to the other end. Paddles have the advantage of giving direct
control of the depth, length, and frequency of stroke—as Father Combes said, “Their paddling
is precise because they strike directly with the paddles right in their hands without being
fastened to anything.” 36 It is the use of paddles, of course, which requires such low freeboard.
Oars permit greater length and leverage, and can generally be worked longer than paddles
without tiring, though Father Alcina testifies that Visayans born and raised to the task can be
relied on to paddle from sunrise to sunset.
The caracoa’s shallow draft makes it less responsive than deeper vessels to the vicious

36
Francisco Combes, Historia de Mindanao y Jolo (Madrid 1667), 2nd ed. Pablo Pastells and W. E. Retana
(Madrid 1897), pp. 70-71.
currents of the narrow channels and interisland passages of the Philippine archipelago which
were the constant bane, and frequent undoing, of Spanish galleons. But it is a distinct
disadvantage for sailing in any wind other than one dead astern—for which reason Southeast
Asian trade-raiding was strictly seasonal. With no keel, center- or lee-boards, or large, deep
center rudder, and very little hull beneath the water, the caracoa was easily blown sideways on
a smooth sea and impeded by a choppy one. When running before the wind, its speed was
proverbial—probably 12-15 knots to a galleon’s five or six—and a factor in the Sulu Sultanate’s
survival as an independent maritime principality until the advent of steam. But with a wind on
the beam, the caracoa was already close-hauled, and it performed poorly in rough water in even
a quartering wind, and could hardly tack under any conditions. Thus when Commander Morga
sailed out of Mariveles Bay in October 1600 in a fresh northwester with choppy seas and
headed due south to intercept Dutch Admiral Oliver van Noordt off the Batangas coast, he had
to leave his two caracoas behind to cross over to Cavite inside Corregidor Island.
This same shallow draft, however, was an essential feature of the fine lines of a hull of
such hydrodynamic excellence the caracoa actually planed with a following wind—that is,
lifted up in the water. The common Philippine barangay shared this design, and its performance
was praised in such a pleasant and informative paean by Father Alcina that it is worth quoting at
length:
Let us say something about the speed of these ancient boats of the Visayans, which
was certainly great in a barangay of one encomendero of these islands called Pedro
Mendez, which—though I did not see it, I heard about it from many who embarked on it
many times—was so fast that nobody in it could keep his footing when they were
rowing; even though it had no more than two banks of paddlers, one on each side, it was
of low freeboard and long, so they struck the water well with their paddles. It used to
travel by paddling between sunrise and sunset from the town of Paranas—where many
of these barangays are made, and the same Filipino expert who made them made me a
little one—to the City of Cebu, where the said Pedro Mendez had his house, this being a
distance of more than forty leagues between leaving the one town as the sun was rising
and reaching the other before it set, which seems unbelievable since they were traveling
at more than four leagues an hour, but the number of witnesses leaves no room for
doubt. And I experienced practically the same thing in this little barangay which was
made in the same town, for I never met another boat and made romba—which is what
the Filipinos call recateado in Spain, which, for those who do not know it, is to race—
that would keep up with me and oftentimes when I was sailing near the edge of the sea
or some river, I noticed that no man could keep up with me no matter how long he ran
along the beach following me. 37
European explorers had the good sense to use native vessels from the very beginning of
their invasion of Southeast Asia. The ship Magellan’s friend Francisco Serrano ran aground in
1511 had been purchased in Banda, and, when Governor Gonzalo Pereira sent some Portuguese
officers to threaten Legazpi in Cebu in 1567, they made the trip from Ternate in two caracoas.
So, too, when Spanish Governor Acuna attacked the Dutch in that island forty years later, they
escaped with their families in four joangas, a sort of king-sized caracoas. Legazpi himself used

37
Francisco Alcina, Historia de las Islas e Indios de las Bisayas, MS 1668, cap. 10.
Filipino-built and Filipino-manned vessels for exploring the Visayas, and sent Martin de Goiti
to Luzon with fifteen of them in 1570. Smaller craft called biroco formed part of the Spanish
fleet sent to Borneo in 1579, and more of them were stationed below Manila during a Japanese
threat in 1942. Morga regularly used caracoas as dispatch boats and tenders, and by 1609 they
were in such common use the Spanish King was moved to order some improvement in their
design to protect their overworked indio crews from inclement weather. In the 17th century,
whole fleets of them were being built to fight fire with fire as Moro Filipinos contested Spanish
control of the Visayas. All the naval action during Sultan Kudarat’s long lifetime was made by
fleets of plank-built men-o-war with a thousand-year pedigree. And the six boats Captain
Francisco de Atienza carried up to Marawi in pieces in 1639 and reassembled on Lake Lanao
were genuine Philippine pre-fabs, too.
Hernando de los Rios Coronel once remarked that a caracoa was a boat that could be
sunk with one oar of a galley. As a matter of strict fact, Spanish galleys didn’t often get the
chance. As Father Combes accurately said, “The care and technique with which they build them
makes their ships sail like birds, while ours are like lead in comparison.” 38

3. Construction of the plank-built boat

Chapters 8-10 of Book 3 of Part 1 of Francisco Alcina’s unpublished “Historia de las
Islas e Indios de las Bisayas” are a detailed description of Visayan ship-building techniques in
the first half of the seventeenth century. Father Alcina was eminently qualified to write such a
description. He was a master shipwright of the first class himself when he arrived in the
Philippines in 1632, and by the time he wrote his four-volume Historia in 1668, he had built
several Philippine vessels himself and traveled thousands of kilometers along the coasts of
Leyte and Samar and other Visayan Islands. He was a keen observer of everything he saw from
flora and fauna to natural phenomena and human behavior. He spoke the people’s language,
learned their sea chanteys and folklore, and more than once saved galleons from grounding in
San Bernardino Strait by the expertise he had acquired. And he admired Filipino ship-building
skills warmly and entrusted his life to their seamanship gladly. His description of their methods
of constructing plank-built boats is as follows.
The master shipwright is called a panday, a title he shares with other craftsmen like iron-
workers and goldsmiths. He goes to the forest with his ax, a straight adze called a dallag, a
curved one called a bintong, and a spoon-bit called a lakob about 20 cm. long with a wooden
handle across it, and selects his tree. Lawaan is preferred because it is a strong hardwood which
grows large enough for a canoe 120 cm. wide to be hewn out of a single trunk. In the
Philippines, tropical trees generally have a punky center—the Visayans called it bokag—caused
by a fungus infection which enters through the root system and eventually rots and splits the
trunk. The center must therefore be rejected, though the two halves will be solid timber if the
tree is carefully selected. The outer four or five centimeters are also rejected as being aramay—
soft, spongey, or fibrous—and liable to grubs and woodlice. (Father Alcina accepts the Filipino
belief that if a tree is cut during the dark of the moon—say, after the 22nd of the month—the
aramay will crumble to dust in three days, but that if the tree is cut in the moonlight, even the
worst-infested aramay will not infect the rest of the trunk.) Since the tree is too large to be

38
Combes, op. cit., loc. cit.
moved conveniently on the ground, it is felled in just the position the panday wants. Then he
marks out straight guidelines along it with a cord called a kutur, and sets to work.
The entire outer form of the hull is adzed to shape before hollowing out the inside—
sharp at the bottom like a keel, pointed at both ends, and V-shaped amidships with sides no
thicker than a board. (The adze is evidently sometimes used like a chisel, for Father Alcina says
it is hammered with a mallet called a pakang.) To check the progress of the thinning process as
he works, the panday keeps boring holes through the sides with the lakob, all of which will be
plugged up watertight later. Then the interior is hollowed out, leaving the necessary tambukos
projecting for seating thwarts or ribs called agars with rattan. A good panday can make such a
hull nine or ten meters long and a meter and a half wide working by himself in just eight or ten
days.
Such a boat carved out of a single piece of wood is called a baroto—what the Tagalogs
call a banca, Father Alcina says—or a balasiyan. (Some are small enough for one man to lift.)
Usually a baroto or banca has one board added to each side—indeed, this may be the basic
meaning of bangka, for Taiwanese boats of this build observed by Fukienese coast guard officer
Chu Wen-ping in 1662 were called mangkas or vangkas. Since the boards themselves are called
timbaw, the baroto is now technically tinimbaw. To increase freeboard, from 20 to 40 cm. of
opak or dagpak bark may be added to the gunwales and secured with thin strips and nails of
rattan, or plaited palm leaves may be added as washboards called dalopi. But if the sides
themselves are raised high enough for cargo-carrying purposes to require oars instead of
paddles, the boat is called a birok or biroco. In Father Alcina’s day, these birocos were being
replaced by champans of Chinese design, except for short trips in local waters. It is impractical,
however, to build larger vessels on dugout canoe bases, so those above ten meters or so are
constructed on squared keels as real edge-pegged, plank-built boats. This is the size and style
which was known by the famous name of barangay or balangay, although the Tagalog version
was sewed or laced, not edge-pegged. Largest of all are the full-fledged warships called
caracoas, among which the joanga appears as an oversized model for special duty, the term
itself probably deriving from the huge, triple-planked Malay jong. A joanga that retired up the
Pasig River with a crew of more than 300 in the face of Goiti’s attack in 1570 was probably a
royal flagship providing maximum security for the person of Rajah Solayman or Rajah Acheh
Matanda.
It is to be noted that the flat- or round-bottomed Butuan boats, lacking either a real keel
or a canoe base, do not fit any of these categories, though they are within the barangay size
range. In addition, they display another unique feature—the center plank which serves as a keel
has two or three thin tambukos parallel to one another instead of the broad ones appearing on
the adjoining planks, though of the same length and thickness. In the absence of other known
examples, it is not possible to assign a function to this special feature. It is tempting to
speculate, however, that some sort of plank-shaped timbers standing on edge may have been
lashed to them to serve as a kind of interior keel—though these, of course, would have to be cut
out to fit the transverse ribs.
Construction of the caracoa begins with a keel of hard, red barayong or tugas wood.
Since this may be more than 25 meters long and has a gentle curve in profile—both Combes
and English privateer William Dampier call Philippine warships “half-moon shaped”—its
production from forest to finished product demands considerable skill and manpower. It is small
wonder that Filipino shipwrights could handily lay out and construct a thirty-meter mast ten
meters in circumference for a Manila galleon with no more Spanish assistance than a few
soldiers to keep them working without pay. The keel is extended at both ends about a meter by
stems of the same wood mortised into it, which continue its graceful lines into serpent-like
projections at both prow and stern which are gaily decorated for full-dress occasions. Because
of this curve, as much as a fifth of the total length of the vessel may be out of the water.
Next comes the carving of the first two boards to be fitted to the keel on either side, the
most crucial stage in the entire construction because it is their flare and curvature which will
determine the final contour of the hull and the consequent speed of the vessel. For this reason,
they are distinguished by special terms: the garboard strake is called dokot and the next one
lonor. The curvature itself is called lubag and the skill to produce it is the hallmark of the
master panday. Additional planks are then added with mangle, bahe (the trunk of the anahawis
palm) or brazilwood dowels every 20 cm. to a total of six or more boards on a side, depending
on the size of the boat. (Three to five appear to be normal for a barangay.) The tambukos have
already been carved out, of course—20 cm. long and 6-7 cm. thick on top but flush with the
surface of the plank below, and a meter to a meter and a half apart. (They are therefore thicker,
shorter, and farther apart than the Butuan specimens.)
Now the shell is left to season for a month or two, carefully elevated to avoid infestation
by termites. When it is sufficiently dried out, the planks are removed one by one and all the
broken pegs—“which are many”—removed and replaced. Then it is reassembled in three
distinct stages called sugi (“matching”), os-os (“tightening”), and pamota (“closing”). Sugi is
accomplished with a little wooden tool that acts like a scribe: it has a sharp iron point 2-3 mm.
above a projecting tongue or lip, and is small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. After the
planks have been put together again but not hammered tight, a carpenter with a strong grip
places the little lip on the upper edge of a board with the point biting into the side of the board
above. Then he runs it from stem to stern both inside and out, applying enough pressure to
incise a sharp line along the upper board near its lower edge. This mark naturally reproduces
whatever irregularities the original adzing may have left in the upper edge of the lower board.
The wood below this line can now be removed to leave a chink between the two planks of
constant thickness from one end to the other. This chink is then stuffed with pugahan- or idiok-
palm fibers called barok, as fine as goat’s hair, and the planks are ready for os-os tightening.
Os-os means to prevent something from sliding up or down by pulling against it with
cords: the belt a weaver uses with the back-strap loom to keep tension on the warp threads is
called an os-osan. In boat-building, the term means to run stout rattan lines under the hull,
fastening them securely at both ends to logs laid across the gunwales. Wedges are then driven
into the ends of each log, splitting them enough to increase their dimension and so draw the
rattan lines tight. While the planks are under this tension, their “eyelids are closed” (napirnga)
by pamota. This is done by driving holes through the pegs in each plank, locating them by
marks inscribed on the planks beforehand, by the use of a little tool like a nail punch with
square cross section. The nails themselves are square pins 4 cm. long of ipil, a strong wood
which produces a resin in salt water which remains so sticky the pegs may break off but the pins
themselves never loosen. Then the os-os equipment is removed and the planks are left so tight
you can hardly see the joints between them, Father Alcina says, and the whole hull is as strong
as if carved from a single block of wood.
Now, the shell having been finished, the hull itself is completed by the insertion of ribs
and thwarts. The thwarts are smoothed branches of wood chosen for its strength, toughness, and
light weight, with one or two holes at each end. By means of these holes they are lashed across
the boat between matching pairs of tambukos in corresponding strakes, seated on the tambukos
themselves. Father Alcina says they look like the rungs of a lader running from stem to stem—
as the tambukos themselves look like a little flight of steps up the inside of the hull from keel to
gunwale. On the uppermost of these thwarts the paddlers sit, and to all of them the longitudinal
and upright elements of the superstructure are lashed. The ribs also have holes in both ends, by
which they are lashed to the uppermost tambukos opposite one another after they have been
forced down in an arc and lashed to each plank they cross by braided rattan bindings—or palm
fibers, in the case of the Butuan boat—which pass through the tambuko holes and over the ribs.
The caracoa hull generally has a very narrow beam-to-length ratio of one to eight, or even one
to ten, and this interior bracing enables it to resist shearing and twisting forces which a more
rigid vessel of these proportions could hardly endure. But since these thwarts are only a meter
or so apart down the whole length of the boat, and occur between each set of strakes from keel
to gunwale, the hold has little space for cargo. This configuration calls attention to the fact that
the caracoa is a man-o-war, not a merchantman.
The caracoa hull is shallow enough in contour to draw very little water and to assure
low enough freeboard for four-foot paddles to reach the waves. This shallow draft not only
gives the caracoa a vital advantage over the Spanish galley, but in the 17th century guaranteed
the Maguindanaoans almost complete freedom of action in the labyrinthine estuaries of the
Pulangi River delta during their defense of that territory against foreign invasion. All European
observers comment that Filipino mariners are willing to sail with only one plank above the
water, or even “three fingers” in the case of small boats, or with bark or palm-leaf washboards
half submerged. Yet the caracoa carries a considerable load of superstructure. The one taken in
Bohol in 1565 “had three decks, although there was little space between one deck and
another,” 39 and some observed in the Visayas in 1543 were “well wrought and nicely adorned,
and the lords were seated above and down below some negroes with kinky hair, according to
their stations.” 40
The superstructure begins with the outrigger supports. Four or more crossbeams called
batangan, square or round in cross section and extending at least a meter beyond each gunwale,
are lashed to thwarts. Fastened to both ends of each of these with large square pegs and rattan
bindings are one or two outrigger supports of mangle wood called tadik—parallel to each other
with the batangan in between, if there are two. These tadiks are shaped like a letter-S lying on
its side, with the middle of the S crossing the end of the batangan, the inner arm rising above it
and fastened to it nearer the hull, the outer arm curving downward to hold the outrigger floats at
water level. The floats themselves—kates—are two, three, or four thick bamboos extending to
within two or three meters of both prow and stern at least two meters away from the hull,
slightly raised forward to reduce water resistance. The batangas carry one or two darambas,
bamboo or split-bamboo seats running fore-and-aft for additional banks of paddlers—or actual
oarsmen if an inner daramba is too high for the use of paddles. Inboard, the batangans carry
three cane-decked platforms or catwalks running the length of the vessel called burulan. The
middle one serves as an actual deck for the sailors handling the rigging and the persons and

39
Anon. Relacion, op. cit., loc. cit.
40
Antonio Galvano, Tratado dos Descobrimientos antigos e modernos (1563). 3rd ed. (Oporto 1731), p. 278.
cargo of important passengers like the master himself, or a rajah with his entourage of ladies—
seated on a still higher platform—and is just enough narrower than the full beam of the vessel to
leave room for the paddlers. The other two burulans are narrower (though still wide enough to
sleep on), far enough outboard to overhang the hull, and high enough to clear the heads of the
paddlers when they stand up to enter, leave, or handle cargo. Because of this configuration, the
two outboard burulans are called pagguray—“eyebrows”. All three burulans serve as fighting
platforms for the ship’s marines, but especially the two paggurays, and all have planks standing
on edge like strakes along the side, or decoratively carved railings. Such railings, covered with
canvas guards, saved Spanish soldiers from poisoned arrows in 1570 when Juan de Salcedo was
attacking a Batangas kota in Balayan from the deck of a Panay caracoa.
A tripod mast is technically not a mast at all but what nautical terminology—and Dr.
Morga—call shears—two poles fastened together like an inverted letter-V for use as a derrick.
In caracoas they are made either of wood or bamboo, and their legs stand on the darambas
pivoted on a pin which permits them to be lowered to decrease wind resistance in adverse
weather. The third leg stands on the centerline, forward. (What is probably the foot of such a
mast recovered at Butuan is 15 cm. in diameter and has a 2.5 hole running through it.) The
caracoa carries two, or sometimes, three, such tripods, each mounting one huge rectangular sail
wider than high, kept taut between two bamboo yardarms, a shape Father Alcina considers an
advantage in sailing close to the wind. Running rigging is simple—a block and tackle
(bognoson) for raising and lowering the sail, and braces of rattan rope at the ends of the yards.
The sail itself is made of matting woven of gaong, buri, or nipa fibers, or the burlap-like growth
called gonot which forms between the fronds of certain palms. Filipinos seem not to have used
cloth for their sails, although the Manila galleons were regularly propelled across the Pacific on
Ilocano canvas woven on back-strap looms. Such matting is also used for an awning called a
kayang which covers the whole working space of the vessel and elicits admiring praise from
European observers: sun and rain, Father Alcina aphorizes, “are the two great enemies of
sailors.” 41
Paddles are called bugsey and are about a meter or 120 cm. long, with a leaf-shaped
blade 20 x 40 cm.—sometimes used as a chopping board for preparing meals—and a cross-bar
handle at the top. Sailors take pride in the manufacture of their own paddles, and carve out
pony-sized ones for their sons as soon as they are old enough to hold one. Good paddling
requires athletic coordination and long practice, and the outcome of naval engagements can be
decided by the discipline of precise timing to the rhythm of sea chanteys or the beat of a brass
gong. Longer paddles called gaors for use in birocos or from the “upper deck” of caracoas are
actually oars, with thole-pins in the gunwales slanted toward the stern, a feature Father Alcina
considers an improvement over the European model which permits a careless oar to slip off.
The blade of a gaor is shaped like a large dinner plate and fashioned from a separate piece of
wood. In addition, the foreign-style oar with long slender blade was coming into use in the 17th
century and was called a gayong. So, too, the center rudder beneath a raised stern was replacing
the one or two quarter-rudder steering oars—or four in joangas—as early as Morga’s time, and
the western-type ram was being constructed on Philippine bows before 1600.
The caracoa carries four to six banks of paddlers of twelve to twenty men each, and can

41
Alcina, op. cit., cap. 9.
add two more by manning the bamboo outrigger floats for emergency maneuvers like
outdistancing pursuers. Galvano reports royal joangas in the Moluccas with 200 oarsmen to a
side in addition to 100 men-at-arms, and four joangas which attacked Fort Gazang,
Marinduque, as late as 1754 were reported—somewhat hysterically, perhaps—to be carrying
500 Moros each. But such large crews must have reached or exceeded the optimum point
between manpower and dead weight, for the ordinary Philippine man-o-war rarely carried more
than a hundred. A Bohol chieftain was buried in the early 1560’s with 70 slaves as crewmen for
his voyage into the afterlife, Procurator Rios Coronel thought 80-100 was normal in 1619, and
Italian Jesuit Marcelo Mastrilli traveled in a caracoa with 90 oars in 1637. The Spaniards used
still smaller ones in their Moro Wars: a fleet of 30-40 outfitted in Cebu and Oton in 1627
carried only 1,600 Filipinos and 200 Spaniards. The fighting elite who manned the burulan
decks in these warships counted less than a quarter of the ship’s total complement. But the
whole crew, oarsmen and all, were fighters in shore raids and were promoted from outboard to
inboard in recognition of their valor in action. And they enjoyed the prestige of, knights or
samurai in prehispanic Philippine society. They were called timawa—a term which quickly
degenerated under Spanish domination into “commoner.”

4. 17th-century Filipino seamanship

It need hardly be said that the two or three thousand Spaniards who occupied the
Philippines at any one time could not have done so without the Filipino manpower and skill to
build their galleons, teach their pilots how to get them in and out of Philippine waters, and then
sail them across the frigid upper latitudes of the Pacific. Early 17th-century attempts to
construct ordinary Spanish vessels produced some noteworthy disasters. Seven galleons built in
1610 to keep colonial competitors away from Philippine shores, so huge that the mast for one of
them cost the labor of 6,000 Filipinos for four months, were lost at sea without ever seeing
action. Mediterranean-style galleys could not keep up with Filipino men-o-war or follow them
into shoal waters, and their oars were too heavy for underfed Filipino slaves or convicts to
handle: two of them dropped dead in 1606 after six hours of rowing. Once the Dutch threat was
removed, however, the Spanish settled down to building heavy galleons to transship Chinese
goods over the Manila-Acapulco run, and light caracoas to fight independent Filipinos in the
southern part of the archipelago.
All these ships were built by raw Filipino manpower, but also by a certain amount of
skilled labor on the part of Filipino coopers, caulkers, smiths, and master carpenters. The
Manila government was rarely, if ever, solvent enough to meet royally approved pay scales, but
at least the scales themselves reflect official assessment of such skills. In 1619, for example, a
day when the minimum wage for forced labor was set at three centavos a day plus rations—and
a first-class slave cost P80—a Filipino shipwright who could lay out a mast or yardarm was
supposed to receive three to four pesos a month and a double ration of rice. And in 1636 when
the price of rice was fluctuating between fifty centavos and one peso per cavan and a Filipino
seaman’s wages were four pesos a month and 15 gantas of rice, a Filipino master blacksmith in
the Cavite shipyards was listed at eight and a half pesos and 50 gantas of rice. Only Visayan
pandays were taken on at this rate with no previous experience in government yards, however,
and Father Alcina has preserved the names of two of them—Figuman and Francisco Polacay of
Palapag. Another testimony to the value of the Filipino carpenter was the number carried in
Spanish fleets: of the 700 Filipinos lost in the Singapore expedition of 1616, 200 were
carpenters. Nor was their presence in shipyards ignored by Moros destroying Spanish galleons
on the ways—400 were carried off in one raid alone in 1617.
Filipino mariners did not practice celestial navigation, though Visayans distinguished
the major constellations to set their agricultural calendars. Their observations of the heavens
were for meteorological purposes: by the appearance of the atmosphere, the hue, thickness, and
configuration of clouds, the direction, force and steadiness of winds, and the color of the sun
and moon—Father Alcina says—they could predict typhoons three or four days in advance,
and, less accurately, the amount of moisture to be expected a whole season in advance. They
knew the Chinese mariner’s compass—they called it padaloman, literally, “place for the
needle”—but used it mainly at nighttime. For the most part, they navigated by piloting—that is,
by proceeding from one landfall to another, following island chains wherever they wished to go.
Even when islands cannot actually be seen, their presence is betrayed by ocean currents,
floating objects, the movement of birds or fish, and especially cloud formations on the horizon
and the kind of lightning they display. Magellan’s survivors took the Victoria from Cebu to
what is now Indonesia by sailing from one island to another, and in Timor they found a Luzon
ship which had no doubt got there by the same method. Similarly, Luzon traders carried their
gold, wax, and honey to Malacca by passing down the north coast of Borneo—where, as a
matter of fact, they were most probably business partners of the Sultan of Brunei to begin with.
Even the mainland coast of China can be reached by following the Babuyanes and Batanes
Islands to Taiwan in sight of mountain peaks almost the whole way, and when Visayan
caracoas raided the Fukien coast at the end of the 12th century, that is just where the Chinese
thought they came from.
But the nautical skill which made the Filipino seaman absolutely indispensable to
galleon shipping was his knowledge of the powerful and capricious currents of Philippine seas.
A current flows down the east coast of Mindanao, for example, at about the speed of a Spanish
galleon, and in the 16th century effectively doomed all survivors of the Loaysa, Saavedra and
Villalobos expeditions to Portuguese or Filipino captivity because they could get no wind to
oppose it. Ships could be spun around 180° in the terrifying whirlpools off the northwest corner
of Samar, and unwary boats were literally held captive for days at a time before being broken up
on coral reefs. Worst of all was the San Bernardino Strait between Luzon and Samar—rushing
torrents of water through which the colony’s mercantile lifeline passed as if between the blades
of coral knives. No Spanish captain could hope to get a returning galleon through that channel
after the rendavales started blowing from the southwest without a dozen Filipino boats as tugs
and a good Samareno pilot at his elbow. Such pilots were sometimes rewarded with princely
sums like one or two hundred pesos, contributed on the spot by grateful passengers—fifty pesos
from a general, slightly less from an admiral or commander, and six or eight each from
investors with cargo aboard. But, alas, colonial abuse eventually made it difficult to obtain such
expert services. An arrogant Piloto Mayor who ran the San Francisco Javier aground at
Borongan in 1655, for example, rewarded a Filipino pilot who saved the galleon Concepcion for
him 13 years later with nothing more than a blow with a cane. It is perhaps not surprising that
opinion in the Philippines attributed the loss of the San Francisco Javier to God’s judgment on
the cruelties connected with building it—and pleasant to record that the only silver recovered
from it went directly into the pockets of Filipino salvagers.
Filipino seamanship was appreciated by the colonial regime from the days when Morga
used to send his caracoas out with only one Spaniard aboard. Laws of navigation and
commerce promulgated in 1620 took it for granted that any Filipino born along the seacoast was
qualified to ship out as a common seaman on government vessels, and the sailors of Malate
were renowned for carrying Manila merchants to Cavite in any weather without ever having lost
a passenger or his goods. Galleons sailed in those days with an equal number of Filipino and
European deckhands—about 70 each, counting the Spanish gunners—but by the 1720’s
Filipinos outnumbered the others two to one. By the middle of the 18th century they had won
such a reputation abroad that there was hardly a Spanish ship in European waters which did not
have some on board. A memorial written in 1765 by Francisco Leandro de Viana says there is
no people in the whole world more dexterous on shipboard, or quicker to learn nautical terms or
skills, a judgment echoed by another Spanish author sixty years later: a Filipino will learn as
much seamanship with a few days’ practice as a European does in twenty years. Viana also says
of the Acapulco run, “There is hardly an indio who does not understand the mariner’s compass,
and therefore on this trade-route there are some very skillful and dexterous helmsmen.” 42 By the
19th century, Filipinos were migrating in such numbers to sell their skills outside the
Philippines that other colonial regimes placed restrictions on employing them. In 1827, for
example, the British in India limited them to four or five per vessel, and strung up offenders
from waterfront gibbets as a warning to their fellows.
Filipino seamanship and the importance of seafaring in 17th-century Visayan life is
nicely illustrated by a contemporary dictionary like Mentrida’s 1637 Bocabulario. It is
significant at the outset that boats seem to dominate the author’s consciousness even when he is
not defining nautical terms. Hugut, for example, he defines as “something taut, like the rigging
of a ship,” and kilikol as “to fasten one thing to another, like a boat towed astern,” and he gives
andoloy as “fast, like a ship” despite the fact that there is a special adjective for the swiftness of
ships—makilas. Not surprisingly, some nautical terms are extended to more general meanings,
while others provide the bases for colorful metaphorical images. Sangkap, for instance, is to
equip a ship with its full crew, while kasangkapan is, by extension, “Everything needed for
something”; and dapak, the sheathing of a ship’s hull, also means “To steal in the presence of
the owner”—perhaps like English, “to fleece.” Conversely, a common word may also be given
a special nautical meaning: ulat, “scar,” can mean either to raise a scar or to raise a sail.
However, as Visayan life styles changed over the centuries, so did the Visayan vocabulary. The
modern word lawig includes tethering and pasturing cattle, and sailing and travel in general, but
used to be defined:
Lawig: for a caracoa to drop anchor, even if not in port, and it refers to the ship, or
the people on it; lawigon: the anchor cable; lalawigan: to let out the cable a bit; lawigan
is the anchorage, which is usually a port but not necessarily.
Sakayan is the basic term for boat or ship, and its root is sakay, to travel by water,
whether by paddling, rowing, or sailing. The absence of any such word in English may serve as
a reminder that the Filipino people were a maritime people connected, not separated, by
interisland channels and seas. Filipinos and their culture passed throughout the archipelago by
sakay, and the connecting links are called bungalos, channels between islands. Indications in
the water of safe channels are sibir, and the dark waters which indicate the presence of shoals
are halum. Ordinarily, the Filipino sailor stays within sight of land if possible, though there is a

42
Francisco Leandro de Viana, Memoria (Madrid 1765), translated in Blair and Robertson, op. cit., Vol. 48, p. 301.
special term for a small boat putting out to sea—lu-aw. Hamgir is to follow the coast, and oway
is to track a vessel—that is, pull it along the shore or river bank by a rope. To steer directly
toward some point like a tree or peak, or a star, is tuhur, and to proceed from one point to
another without tacking or changing course is tagal.
Paddling—or rowing—is the basic method of sakay and has a well-developed
vocabulary. To row backwards without turning around in your seat is sibug, and to row at
forced speed is sagaysay. The sound of such fast rowing or paddling is hagulut, but striking the
side of the boat is hakdol or dakoldakol, and to splash water in the process is bungkals. Lamba
or lumba is an actual race between boasts. Paddle-power is also used to assist a vessel under
sail. This is called dalabay in general, but if it is done primarily to keep wind in the sails when
close-hauled, then it is called sogot. To sail at top speed lightly loaded—for scouting, for
example, or to deliver messages—is langpas, and a special boat for this purpose is lampitaw,
such as a Spanish attack force sends out in advance. Only two winds are distinguished in
relation to a vessel underway—tampiyok, a head wind, and tolot or solosor, a following wind
(“as is necessary,” the Bocabulario comments). In the case of tampiyok, the ship lowers its mast
with sail furled around it (hagukun) and removes its awning to reduce wind resistance.
(Awnings are carried away often enough for the process to have its own term—kakas or katkat.)
Then it proceeds against the wind—sombol or sompong—by manpower. To strike sails
suddenly, however, because of high wind, to anchor, or for tactical purposes, is landak. For a
vessel to be delayed by adverse winds is bungbung, and to be carried adrift or off course by
either wind or current is pilpil, or samapay if actually driven ashore.
The effects of the sea on Philippine shipping have a rich vocabulary of their own. Of the
four basic motions of a ship at sea—yawing, pitching, rising and falling, and rolling—the first
three are distinguished as waling, powat or limpowat, and luyan, but rolling is restricted to
kiyakiya, “the rolling of a boat without outriggers.” For waves to pound a vessel is amok, and to
drop one on shore, shoals, or reefs is buntar. Dapiya, dalapiya or tapowak is the general term
for destruction of all kinds—breaking up in heavy seas, beaching, striking reefs or rocks—while
sanglar is grounding or failing in less dramatic ways. Tokbol is to strike submerged obstructions
while underway, sigaksak to run aground on a sandbar or reef and be stranded or broken up, and
bungkag is to be destroyed in a flood. In distress, dagdag is to jettison cargo, hinubig is to work
pumps or bail, and laka is for tambukos to be broken off or stems to be loosened from the keel.
Tikyaob is to capsize, polang is to be lost at sea with all hands without a trace, but sangbat—
happily—is to go to a distressed vessel’s aid or pick up survivors or exhausted swimmers.
Another set of terms enables us to picture the waterfront of a port like Butuan—so busy,
perhaps, that men pass from one boat to another across the outriggers—tapon. The anchorage
itself is the lawigan. Awil is to anchor offshore or outside the shoals, hampil is to anchor inshore
with the bow touching the beach, and bulibuli or mulibuli is to moor by a stern line. Hangiya or
sangiya is to beach a boat, or to beach it enough so that it looks like a crocodile with its head on
the sand and its tail in the water. Sakay is to embark and kawas or hawas to disembark or
unload cargo, and cargo itself is lolan, though cargo stowed on the “upper deck” burulan for
special handling is orong or tampapaw. To shift or remove cargo to find something or get water
out of the hold is bungkal, but to do so for the purpose of trimming the ship to an even keel is
kankan. As the boat is loaded it naturally sinks deeper in the water—lobo—and if it is down by
the bow, it is sukmur. But added buoyancy may be given it by lashing bamboos along the hull—
kilikili. If the vessel is small, the captain himself—toway or tomoway—will be in charge of all
cargo, but if it is large enough, it will have a tugub—supercargo or purser. Joint ownership is
tapi. A busy port will have boats under repair, too. Tokor is to put a ship in drydock—that is,
shore it up with blocks under the keel. Lombo is to remove and replace some of the planks,
balarbar is a more extensive refitting by replacing the planks on both sides, and ungkag is to
strip it right down to the keel, rebuilding it with the old or new planks, or constructing a smaller
vessel on the same keel, or even scuttling it. A boat so old it actually becomes a useless derelict
is an apal.
The maritime vocabulary also permits an insight into ancient Philippine culture deeper
than the mere details of nautical architecture and boat handling techniques. Sakay is to embark
and travel by water, but the motivation for such embarcation and travel is revealed by another
form of the same word, hinakay—to pay freightage, rent a boat, or take passage in one.
Filipinos took to the sea, in short, for purposes of trade. But raiding was also an endemic part of
their interisland contacts. The Bocabulario defines bangga as “For two or more vessels to attack
or assault each other in battle, either because their crews intend to fight, or by chance,” and
abay as “Ships in convoy, or any enterprise for which people promise to stick together unto
death.” Moreover, as befits a real maritime culture, Philippine ships and boats partake of the
sacred. The common baroto without outriggers is used for a form of diviliation called kibang:
the occupants sit perfectly still amidships and the diwata (spirit) answers their questions by
rocking the boat. And the great war caracoas which the Chinese said made the name Visaya a
terror to all the islanders of the Eastern Sea, were dedicated with human sacrifices: damilit is to
lie on the ground prostrate, and mamamilit is to launch a ship over a slave in that posture.

5. The role of boats in Philippine society

Boats supplied almost all the Filipino’s personal transportation needs from carrying
basura out to fertilize his crops to attending weddings or wakes. The farmers of Bantayan
Island went to farm their fields in Cebu, and the miners of Camarines to work the gold deposits
of Masbate, by boat. But mainly, Philippine boats were used for four purposes—fishing, trade,
warfare, and a combination of the last two which the Spaniards called piracy but which might
more meaningfully be called trade-raiding. Fishing has always provided the major source of
protein for coast-dwelling Filipinos, but local waters are too rich in this food to offer much
incentive for the development of large and complex vessels. A barangay with only two or three
planks on a side will satisfy most needs, or even a baroto with nothing more than woven sawali
sides coated with beeswax or almaciga sap. It was trade that supported the Filipino boat-builder,
whether hewing out one-man canoes for carrying a bunch of bananas to the next barrio, or
constructing seagoing cruisers for handling such luxury cargo as gold, slaves, and Chinese
porcelains. A consideration of this trade, together with its related activities of warfare and
raiding, suggests that it inspired the refinement of the plank-built caracoa, justified the capital
investment of building and maintaining one, and made possible whatever political vassalage
existed between Filipinos in different islands.
In the early 16th century, Manila—or, more accurately, Luzon—was the only point in
the archipelago regularly sending Filipino traders to foreign ports. New converts to Islam, these
“Luzones” carried gold, wax, honey and foodstuffs to their partners or kinsmen in Borneo,
picked up camphor, and proceeded to Malacca for Indian textiles, hardware and jewelry. They
traded as far south as Timor, and were the easternmost agents of a larger network which
included a colony of 500 of their countrymen at Minjam, 250 kilometers up the west coast of
Malaysia from Malacca, and such notables as the Tumenggong of Malacca, Arejimute Raja,
who regularly sent vessels to Siam, Sunda and China, or Curede Raja who dispatched his annual
jong to China laden with pepper. It is not insignificant that Tome Pires, describing the great
Chinese metropolis of Canton before the Portuguese reached that port, ends with the note, “So
the Luzones say who have been there.” An Italian pilot of the Villalobos expedition has left a
tantalizing hint of possible direct trade with the Chinese mainland—an oared vessel encountered
in Visayan waters in 1543 that boasted of making the China run in five or six days but, alas,
with no mention of its port of origin. Whatever the case, by the middle of the century, Luzones
were no longer sailing direct to China if ever they had done so. Instead, they were dominating
or monopolizing the resale of Chinese goods within the archipelago which had been carried to
Luzon in Fukienese junks. One of them told Legazpi that “since what they carry are goods from
China, they call boats from Borneo and Luzon Chinese junks in these islands, and even they
themselves are called Chinese among these islands, but in fact Chinese junks do not reach there
[Butuan] because they are very big ships not fit for sailing between these islands.” 43
Thus it does not appear that the China-Philippine trade was conducted in Philippine
bottoms. That plank-built boats were able to do so is clear, but that they were regularly used for
this purpose is not. We know that Visayan. caracoas were on the Fukien coast in the 12th
century. Governor Wang Ta-yu of Ch’uan-chow was eye-witness to a raid by three chiefs with
several hundred followers sometime between 1174 and 1189; he said “the Visayan complexion
is as dark as lacquer, so their tattoos can hardly be seen.” 44 Two centuries earlier in 982,
Mindoro merchants appeared on the Canton coast with merchandise for sale, but the Chinese
report of the contact is too brief to reveal whether they arrived in their own ships or not. At any
event, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Ma-i on the southern coast of Mindoro opposite Ilin Island
was an entrepot for foreign merchantmen, and from there these imports were redistributed by
domestic shipping. The cotton cloth from Ma-i which was noted on the west coast of the Malay
Peninsula in the 1349 Tao I Chili Lueh was therefore probably delivered by non-Filipino
traders, no doubt of the same sort as those who flooded the Philippines with so much Sung,
Yuan, Ming and Sawankhalok porcelain that hundreds of thousands of pieces have survived. By
the 15th century, Ma-i had been eclipsed by another trading port in northern Mindoro which the
Chinese called Mao-li-wu, whose ruler sent a Muslim emissary to China in 1405. And by the
16th, Chinese merchants were delivering their wares direct to Manila Bay under contract to
Rajah Lakan Dula of Tondo, whence they were retailed for local consumption in native
outriggers.
The picture of Philippine domestic trade, however, is rather clearer—every community
traded with other communities, and most of them did it by boat. The inter-barrio feuding which
appears as endemic in Spanish accounts might suggest at first reading that such barrios were
perforce isolated from one another and therefore self-sufficient. But the same accounts
specifically name the betrayal of amicable intercourse as the major cause for war—“If a Filipino
goes to a town and they kill him there without cause,” as Loarca says, “or if they go to trade in
other towns as friends and they offend or maltreat them there and commit treachery against

43
Anon. Relacion, op. cit., p. 467.
44
Lou Yao, Kung Kuei Chi, ch. 88.
them under cover of friendship.” 45
If there were any Filipino communities which supplied all their own food, clothing,
tools, and weapons, Spanish accounts do not describe them. Rather, the total impression is one
of continual movements of rice, camotes, bananas, coconuts, wine, fish, game, salt, and cloth
between coastal barrios—to say nothing of iron, gold, jewelry, porcelain, and slaves. That is no
doubt why the Suluan Filipinos’ first reaction to Magellan’s appearance on Homonhon was to
go home and get two boatloads of coconuts and bananas to sell him.
When the Spaniards reached the Philippines, the main long-range trade item was rice.
Cebu was a redistribution center for the Visayas, drawing supplies from as far away as the east
coast of Minadanao, and Panay, which was second only to Manila in output. Rajah Katuna of
Bohol received a boatload of rice from a Leyte vassal in Cabalian during Legazpi’s visit in
April 1565, and that Adelantado himself only survived a two-year attempt by Cebuanos to
starve him out because of Moro deliveries from Manila at inflated prices. (It may be worth
noting that both these Surigao-Cebu and Leyte-Bohol rice lines could be controlled from a little
island called Limasawa where the Rajah of Butuan and his brother Kolambu used to go
“hunting.”) The Manila Bay area was supplied from four Pampanga towns with controlled
irrigation—Betis, Lubao, Guagua and Mexico—except during February and March when
Ilocano shipping brought it from both the Ilocos and Cagayan. The Bikolanos even had a word
for loading rice directly into a ship’s hold in bulk without anything under it—oray. But there
was a wide variety of specialized trade as well. The breeding of goats, for example, caused
Simara Island to be called Cabras Island, just as the sale of swine (babuy) and sugarcane wine
(basi) branded the Babuyan Islands and the Bashi Channel. Expert shipwrights supported the
economies of Cagayan de Sulu and tiny Buracay off Panay, while those of Catanduanes literally
peddled their wares by loading smaller ones into larger. Cuyo Islanders wove cotton but did not
grow it, and kept the inhabitants of neighboring islands in mat-weaving and salt-making
subjugation. Farmers on Batbatan Island raised wheat on the north coast of Panay, and Bohol
potters marketed their wares in Butuan, where prehispanic samples have been recovered from
archaeological sites.
The extent and value of this trade is indicated by the fact that Cebu was the second
largest settlement in the Philippines despite not having access to the ricefields, inland forests or
goldmines enjoyed by the competing ports of Manila and Butuan. Cebuanos told Father Alcina
that the prehispanic town had stretched along the beach for eight kilometers, and he believed
them on the evidence of ancient graveyards and house-posts exposed by erosion. But the most
impressive demonstration of Filipino merchandising was the delivery of imported trade
porcelains to every Filipino language group from Bontoc to Bohol, from Manila to Marawi—
war-making, slave-raiding or head-taking as they may have been. This is a distribution achieved
by no other product until American colonial power made 20th-century marketing techniques
feasible. Rajah Kolambu wined and dined Pigafetta out of Chinese porcelain, and when
Magellan requested rice, presented him with unhusked palay in Chinese porcelain. Such jars
and plates were priced in terms of human slaves, and included along with gold in that heirloom
wealth called bahandi without which no Filipino datu could demand respect or exercise
leadership. Nor were the Spaniards slow to assess the situation. When they sacked Sarangani

45
Miguel de Loarca, Tratado (MS 1582), text in Blair and Robertson, op. cit., Vol. 5, p. 140.
Island in 1543, they dug up some hastily buried porcelain and carried it off as prizes of war for
the Viceroy of Mexico, but traded it off for food in Samar instead.
Another evidence of prehispanic Philippine commerce is the vocabulary it produced,
samples of which can be found in the early 17th-century Spanish lexicons. The Mentrida 1637
Visayan Bocabulario, for example, provides such retailing divisions as dealing in basic
foodstuffs by sea (baligiya), rice and grain (dalawat), second-hand goods (lito), slaves (botong),
or notions for the ladies (biniyaga). Specialized terms running from barter to big business can
be selected from Marcos de Lisboa’s 1618 Vocabulario de la Lengua bicol—e.g., balabag, to
exchange goods; bahay, to pay in gold or silver; balos, to pay in labor; bongto, to sell on
commission; sangholi, to go into partnership; and hampil, a raid in which the junior partner
supplies half the outfitting expenses to the ship’s owner and receives one-third of the take.
Really high finance, however, is best displayed in the San Buenaventura Tagalog dictionary of
1613. There, tapa shows up as capital or company (e.g., Mag kano ang iniyong pinagtapa?—
How much have each of you put in the company? Mamolong salapi ang aping pinagtapa—We
are each putting in ten tostones as capital). Angka means to corner the market, and a dozen
terms for the usury to finance such ventures start with laba, 20% (pagihit if calculated monthly,
ganda if annually), and range up to ibayiw, 100%,, and dalawa-lima, 150%. The underlying
ethic of this economy is probably to be found in the word bitang which refers to the inexcorable
daily increase of the traditional agricultural loan. Father San Buenaventura defines its basic
meaning as “A mortgage such that while it is unredeemed the debtor and the one who gave the
money divide the field every year.”
Still another evidence of the extent of caracoa-carried commerce was the news they also
carried along Philippine coasts and from island to island all the way to the Moluccas. When
Loaysa’s flagship, the Santa Maria de la Victoria, anchored in Lianga Bay in 1526, its crew
ignored a local report of Spaniards shipwrecked farther south, not realizing that they had been
preceded a few weeks by the Santa Maria del Parral. A year later one of those Spaniards, then
serving a local chieftain by the name of Katunaw, was told about the Victoria’s visit by a native
of the Marianas Islands who had been impressed with ten others to work the leaking Victoria’s
pumps and then escaped. Two other survivors of the Parral wound up in Maguindanao, where
they were notified in 1528 by the Sultan of Brunei that he had been informed of their presence
by the Portuguese Governor of Malacca who was requesting their delivery to him, and that the
Sultan would gladly provide transportation if they wished to go—and they did. Magellan’s own
Victoria, leaving the Philippines after his death, found somebody on Palawan who could speak
enough Spanish to translate for them, and captured a Moro off the coast of Mindanao who had
been in the house of his good friend, Francisco Serrano, in Ternate. And all four of the post-
Magellanic expeditions were given word of the fate of the survivors of the Cebu Massacre of 1
May 1521, two of whom survived as Filipino bihags (captives) for 40 years.
But the caracoa is basically a warship, not a cargo carrier, and Philippine languages
distinguish even more tactics of war than of commerce. These include terms for raids, sneak
attacks, camouflage and ambush, bow-to-bow boarding, razing coastal villages, and probing
strikes to test enemy strength—as well as such refinements of personal conduct as Bikol togkod,
“to await enemies without fear,” Visayan patay, “to fight to the death rather than surrender,” or
Tagalog puli, “to take a fallen comrade’s place to avenge him.” All these variations fall under
the general heading of ngayaw or kayaw, a word which means “raid” and appears as mangayaw
in all the major languages of the Philippines and, indeed, of insular southeast Asia from
Mindanao to Malacca as well. This is the activity Spanish accounts inaccurately call “piracy.”
Modern international law defines piracy as robbery on the high seas, and although it is true that
mangangaw raiders took weaker vessels at sea, when they did so they were not breaking any
recognized law but rather performing a socially approved deed. Like the epic cattle raids of
Ulysses or Irish folk hero Cu Chulainn, mangayaw was the esteemed occupation of the able-
bodied male who could afford it. Its heroes’ feats were the stuff of lyric and legend, and Father
Alcina cites a Samareno ballad whose heroine is so coy she keeps sending suitors off on raids to
Mindanao and Jolo, then Ternate and finally Grand China itself. What was reprehensible in
Philippine morality was not the act of plunder itself, but doing it to those who had not done it to
you. That is why one of them climbed up in a tree in Cainta soon after the Spanish seizure of
Manila and shouted out in the middle of the night, “What did we ever do to you, or what did our
ancestors owe yours, that you should come to plunder us!” 46
Although mangayaw raiders took booty both ashore and afloat when they could, their
real object was slaves. Chattel slavery was common to civilized societies in the 16th century all
over the world and Spain was no exception: friars carried slaves across two oceans as personal
servants at His Majesty’s expense. But in economically diversified Europe, the trade was
licensed by national governments as separate monopolies. It is to call attention to this difference
that the mixed merchandizing of caracoa commerce is here referred to as “trade-raiding.”
Potential customers for this trade in the Philippines were legion because the purchase of slaves
was an ordinary area for investing surplus wealth—Bikol saleu means “to buy slaves, dogs,
houses, or boats.” Filipino communities supplied most of their own slave labor locally by usury
and penal action, but always preferred aliens for religious purposes—that is, sacrifice. (Loarca
considered this a commendable attitude: “They always see that this is a foreign slave, not a
native,” he says, “for they really are not cruel at all.”) 47 A foreign market was provided by the
petty potentates of maritime principalities to the south, and after the 17th century, colonial
plantations and households expanded it.
In the 16th century, however, ransom appears to have been a more regular source of
profit than outright sale: Visayan utao, for example, means “To display captives for exchange
on the boat without letting them go ashore.” Capture and liberation were daily facts of life, and
communities collected contributions to rescue victims or render them charitable aid afterwards.
If a man invested in a raid as a silent partner, he was obligated to put up half his active partner’s
ransom money as soon as he was captured, and was himself entitled to no return on his original
investment. A datu’s rank among his peers was indicated by his ransom worth—or what would
be called wergeld (“man-price”) if he were killed—and the capture of a high-priced individual
was the bonanza every raider dreamed of and planned for. Such men were treated with respect
and quickly ransomed since anybody who could afford to do so could expect to be reimbursed
at twice the sum he had advanced. As a matter of fact, to underestimate a man’s exchange value
was a non-too-subtle affront to his dignity—or what Mindanao Moros call maratabat. When
Spaniards captured a dignitary in 1521 whom Pigafetta called “the Governor of Palawan” and
ransomed him off for rice and livestock, he generously added coconuts, bananas, sugarcane, and

46
Letter from Fray Martin de Rada dated Calompit, 16 July 1577, in Nouveau Journal Asiatique, Vol. 8 (1831), p.
377.
47
Loarca, op. cit., p. 134.
jars full of wine, as it befit his station to do.
The importance of mangayaw trade-raids in Philippine society is indicated by the fact
that they were carried out by a separate social class. These are called timawa, and in classic
Visayan culture they are the sons or descendants of datus by secondary wives, who neither work
fields nor pay tribute but are obligated to man their datu’s boat, armed at their own expense,
whenever he puts to sea. In return, they receive a share of the spoils, and have the right to
transfer their services to another datu if they choose. But their captain—tomoway—is a datu and
has both authority and responsibility: there is a Bicol term, bonglo, which means “for a captain
to ransom his captured comrades.” His timawa are rewarded at his pleasure, just as their
children inherit at his pleasure, and all captives belong to him: a crewman must reimburse him
if he kills one. These are professions which were destined to disappear under foreign
occupation, of course: the mangayaw skills which could defend a Visayan community against
Mindanao and Sulu attack could also be turned against invasion from Leon and Castile. And as
they disappeared, the popular image of one group of Filipinos as helpless victims of another
was created by Spanish disarmament of all those who accepted their sovereignty.
Timawas assigned to paddle on the outrigger darambas were held in lower status than
those inside the hull, and those manning the burulan fighting deck were considered a real
warrior elite. In Malay, these latter were called “men-of-the-baileu [i.e., burulan],” and Antonio
Galvano describes their full hierarchy in the Moluccas as follows:
And the King travels up on the baileus with his captains and mandarins, and their
sons who are still youths down below paddling, and others at the paddles on the
cangalhas [darambas], and when they want to promote them, they elevate them to the
baileu and they do not paddle. This is the highest honor that is given. So long as they do
not perform any deed of valor, they may not carry a sword or receive such a promotion,
which is like a knighthood; and when they move them inside the hull, it is already a
greater dignity; afterwards, if they deserve it, they elevate them to the baileu and they
give up their paddles. 48
In the Philippines, it appears that the lower ranks of this naval hierarchy even included
those commoners the Spaniards indiscriminately called “slaves.” Such a non-timawa crewman
could theoretically save enough from his share of the spoils to buy his freedom and then work
his way up the military ladder until, if he were man enough for it, he might even attract a
following of his own and become a datu. The first conquistadores, however, accustomed as
they were to galley slaves in their own navies, did not recognize these Viking-like
professionals: Bernardo de la Torre in 1543 thought a Samar chieftain by the name of Iberein
was rowed out to his flagship by slaves wearing gold collars. The real timawa was usually an
experienced seafarer who shared such trade-raiding sophistication as his master’s command of
Malay, the lingua-franca of southeast Asian trade. Thus Magellan’s Malay-speaking slave was
immediately understood in Limasawa by the oarsmen serving the brother of Rajah Awi of
Butuan, one of the most cosmopolitan ports in the archipelago.
The caracoa may therefore be seen as a key to the political scene in the 16th-century

48
Antonio Galvano, text in Hubert Jacobs, A treatise on the Moluccas (c. 1544), probably the preliminary version
of Antonio Galvano’s lost Historia das Moluccas (Rome 1971), p. 41.
Philippines: those who had them dominated those who did not. Coastal communities that had
none—or could not launch them fast enough if they had—would, at the least, have been
potential victims for the slave trade. This is, in fact, precisely the condition later suffered by
Filipinos under Spanish occupation: as some of them told Rios Coronel, “Let us be free, and let
us have arms, and we shall be able to defend ourselves as we did before the advent of the
Spaniards.” 49 Yet not every community could build or man a caracoa. The man power, social
organization, and mechanical skill to extract two dozen curved planks 25 meters long from
hardwood giants in some interior forest, and then convert them into a sophisticated seagoing
vessel along the beach, could not have been available to all. Moreover, those burulan runways
indicate that the caracoa were designed for more advanced naval warfare than the simple
running down of the inhabitants of some defenseless fishing village. The crew of a caracoa
engaged in a naval duel who could get 200 paddles in the water simultaneously and carry out a
captain’s orders quickly could expect to survive the battle, carry off enough booty to contract
brides of their choice, and rear up another generation with skills like their own. The only
alternative to active participation in this seafaring, trade-raiding life style was alliance by blood,
marriage, or vassalage to those who practiced it.
To whatever extent the caracoa produced this political scene or was the product of it, it
was obviously an integral part of it. At the time Spanish friars started describing Philippine
society, there were coastal communities that purchased their security with annual tribute to a
distant overlord who sent his caracoas to collect it. But those with caracoas of their own are
not portrayed in such roles of outright subjugation. Rather, their chieftains appear as being
related to one another in a kind of political pecking order characterized by deference rather than
domination. Thus Katuna of Bohol had a rice-producing supporter in Leyte but himself deferred
to another Bohol rajah called Si Gala, and both of them were outranked by a Boholano with the
fine name of Pagbuwaya who migrated to Dapitan in 1563, quickly established lordship over
the Subanon there, and then joined the Spanish cause in 1565. Such peer relationships are still
distinguished in Maranao as pegawid “support” and pegawidan “supported.” There were also
those who topped a sufficient network of vassals, primus inter pares, to become harbor
princelings collecting anchorage fees in their own bailiwicks. How much an armed cruiser paid
in such fees in any particular port of call depended upon the relative ranks of the parties
involved, and these ranks were established by the protocol of exchanging gifts. That is what
Saripada Humabon of Cebu was evidently trying to establish after Magellan’s Victoria,
Trinidad and Conception fired off the heaviest guns ever heard in Philippine waters, and
dropped anchor. When he was informed that his visitors were not going to pay harbor fees
because their overlord was so powerful, he simply asked whether gifts were expected by three
captains or if one would receive for all. And it is also what Rajah Sultan Mansur of Tidore was
doing eight months later when he swore allegiance to the King of Spain on the Koran, and then
loaded the rotting Trinidad with so much spices her seams opened.

6. Summary
Planks from two ancient Philippine boats were discovered in Butuan in 1976-1977,

49
Hernando de los Rios Coronel, Memorial y Relacion (Madrid 1621), translated in Blair and Robertson, op. cit.,
Vol. 19, p. 218.
excavated by the staff of the National Museum, and dated to the 14th century by radiocarbon-14
technology. The boats were edge-pegged and plank-built—that is, their planks were hand-
carved, fastened together by pegs in adjoining edges, and lashed to ribs by means of wooden
lugs carved out of the planks themselves. This is a style of boat-building which once extended
from Scandinavia to the South Pacific from the third century B.C. to the present time in a few
remote Wands.
By the 16th century, a highly refined plank-built warship had been developed in
Southeast Asia which was called a caracoa In the Philippines. It was a sleek, double-ended
vessel 20-25 meters long, with low freeboard and light draft, quarter rudders and tripod masts
with square sails, a raised fighting deck amidships, and double outriggers with accommodations
for several banks of paddlers. In contrast to Spanish galleons or Chinese junks, the caracoa was
especially adapted for carrying warriors at high speed before seasonal winds through reef-filled
waters and dangerous currents. It was used mainly for interisland trade-raids by harbor
princelings with limited capital.
Filipino expertise in boat-building and seamanship was employed by the Spanish
colonial regime in caracoa fleets to fight Moros and in mercantile galleons to cross the Pacific.
Filipino nautical skills are attested by Spanish accounts, and the importance of the seafaring life
in classic Philippine culture is demonstrated by the vocabularies contained in early 17th-century
Spanish dictionaries of Philippine languages. A detailed description of Philippine boat-building
techniques is included in Francisco Alcina’s unpublished 1668 “Historia de las Islas e Indios de
las Bisayas.”
Boats were the only Philippine transportation, and all commercial and political contacts
depended upon them. Trade included the local exchange of foodstuffs, the exploitation of
special marketing patterns, and the distribution of imports like Chinese porcelain throughout the
archipelago. Slaves were taken in raids called mangayaw by trade-raiders whose exploits were
acclaimed in lyric and legend. Trade-raiding formed the basis of pacts between maritime leaders
in which precedence was expressed in terms of personal deference rather than political
domination. Communities that did not have the means for such trade-raids achieved security
through alliances by blood, marriage or vassalage with those who did. The caracoa may
therefore be seen as the key to the political scene in the 16th-century Philippines: those who had
them dominated those who did not.
 Filipino Class Structure in the Sixteenth Century50

The present paper offers summary results of a study of sixteenth century Filipino class structure
insofar as it can be reconstructed from the data preserved in contemporary Spanish sources. The
major accounts on which it is based have been available in English since the publication of the
Blair and Robertson translations early in this century, and have recently been made accessible to
the general Filipino reading public by F. Landa Jocano in a convenient and inexpensive volume
entitled The Philippines at the Spanish Contact. At least four of these accounts were written for
the specific purpose of analyzing Filipino society so that colonial administrators could make use
of indigenous institutions to govern their new subjects. Yet any history teacher who has tried to
use them to extract even such simple details as the rights and duties of each social class, for
purposes, of his own understanding and his students’ edification, knows how frustrating the
exercise can be.
The problems are many. The accounts were not, of course, written by social scientists
and are therefore understandably disorderly, imprecise, and even contradictory. They do not, for
example, distinguish legislative, judicial, and executive functions in native governments, nor do
they even indicate whether datu is a social class or a political office. On one page they tell us
that a ruling chief has life-and-death authority over his subjects, but on the next, that these
subjects wander off to join some other chief if they feel like it. They describe a second social
class as “freemen—neither rich nor poor” as if liberty were an economic attribute, while one
account calls them “plebeians” and another “gentlemen and cavaliers.” The maharlika, whom
the modern Filipino knows as “noblemen,” show up as oarsmen rowing their master’s boats or
fieldhands harvesting his crops. And a third category called “slaves” everybody agrees are not
slaves at all; yet they may be captured in raids, bought and sold in domestic and foreign
markets, or sacrificed alive at their master’s funeral. Moreover, if the data as recorded in the
original documents are confusing, they are made even more so by the need to translate sixteenth
century Spanish terms which have no equivalent in modern English. Thus pechero becomes
“commoner” and loses its significance as somebody who renders feudal dues.
It was a decade of frustrating attempts to resolve such contradictions that inspired the
present study.
Seven basic documents were used for the study: Miguel de Loarca’s Relacion de las
Islas Filipinas (1582); Juan de Plasencia’s Relacion de las costumbres de los indios se han
tener en estas islas and Instruccion de las costumbres que antiguamente tenian los naturales de
la Pampanga en sits Pleitos (1589); Pedro Chirino’s Relacion de las Islas Filipinas (1604);
chapter eight of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas; the anonymous late
sixteenth century Boxer manuscript; and the unpublished “Historia de las Islas e Indies de las
Bisayas” (1668) of Francisco Alcina.

50
This is a slightly modified version of a paper originally published by the Third World Studies, University of the
Philippines, as Paper No. 13 (1978). I wish to acknowledge with gratitude a grant in 1977-78 from the Social
Science Research Council, New York, which made possible the research on which this paper is based as well as a
companion piece, “Class Structure in the Unhispanized Philippines,” published in Philippine Studies 27 (1979)
137-59.
 Loarca was an encomendero in Arevalo, Panay, with ten years’ experience—including
the operation of a shipyard in Oton—at the time he wrote his account; it is therefore not
surprising that he includes more economic details than any of the others. Plasencia was a
Franciscan missionary for twelve years in the Tagalog-speaking lake district east of Manila,
who translated the Doctrina Cristiana which after his death became the first book printed in the
Philippines. His description of his parishioners’ customs runs to concise but comprehensive
statements indicating personal experience, careful observation, and thoughtful reflection. His
treatise on Pampanga law remained, the best work on Philippine custom law until Barton’s
Ifugao Law (1919). Chirino was a Jesuit who served during the 1590s in both the Visayas and
Luzon. His work is scholarly, organized, and edited for publication, but contains data on social
structure only incidental to telling the story of his Society’s early evangelizing efforts in the
Philippines.
Morga was a Doctor of Canon Law who held two of the highest offices of the colonial
government during the last five years of the sixteenth century, and although he spent
considerable time building and commanding fleets with Filipino manpower and materials, he
had no experience at the barrio level. His justly respected Sucesos is a professional, highly
literate, and chronologically arranged history whose eighth chapter is the most comprehensive
description of the archipelago and its people of his generation. Alcina was a Jesuit who,
although he arrived late on the scene—sixty years after Loarca—spent thirty years learning to
know the people and language of Samar and Leyte before writing his monumental work on
Visayan ethnography and natural science. His nine chapters on preconquest Filipino
government, warfare, and slavery remain the most penetrating study of Philippine society in the
Spanish period.
Since the so-called Boxer codex, of unknown but presumably Manila provenance, has
been largely ignored by historians, a few words may be said about it. Jocano used it to good
effect in the introduction to his The Philippines, but other scholars have tended to dismiss it as a
rehash of earlier accounts. Careful scrutiny, however, suggests that it is an original, eyewitness
description whose author was probably not even familiar with the other accounts. (Why would
he have ignored their accurate description of tattooing techniques and persist in thinking
Visayan specimens were applied with hot irons?) He provides the earliest description of how to
make that garment the Maranaos call a malong, gives a drawing of a sexual device well-known
from the other accounts, and makes explicit one fact the others only imply—that the gigilid
house-slave becomes a namamahay householder upon marriage. His unwitnessed data are
detailed but unstudied, and were evidently taken down from personal informants. He notes, for
example, that hunters working for Moro masters must be sure to reach the game before the dogs
do because Islamic law requires animals to be bled before butchering. The author was probably
an intelligent, observant traveler, perhaps a colonial officer, who did not stay long in one place,
could not speak any Philippine language, and used an interpreter given to Mexican spelling
conventions like aguiguilitl.
The goal of this study was to discover a distinct, non-contradictory and functional
meaning for each Filipino term used in the Spanish accounts. The methodology had four stages.
First, the original texts were examined and compared, with all such Spanish terms as
principales and esclavos etc., removed. Second, the Spanish use of the Filipino terms during the
first century of occupation was examined in contemporary dictionaries, decrees, and
correspondence. Third, the sixteenth century meanings of the Spanish terms in Spanish society
were studied, and their applicability to Filipino classes assessed. And, finally, a synthesis was
attempted which would resolve all contradictions by recourse to sectional variations, the
authors’ personal interests, and genuine anachronisms due to socioeconomic changes during the
second half of the sixteenth century. The results are presented below in two sections, one for
Luzon and the other for the Visayas, for obvious reasons of differences in the terminologies
themselves.

LUZON
Father Plasencia describes Filipinos as being divided into four social conditions or
“estates”: principales, hidalgos, pecheros, and esclavos. These appear to be functional divisions
as he conceived them, for he separates the common tribute-payer (pechero) from the “true”
slaves, calls the principales “datus,” and comments that they are “like knights” (como
caballeros), that is, holders of an office, not members of a class. In a separate treatise on custom
law, however, he only distinguishes three estates: those of ruler, ruled, and slave, as Doctor of
Canon Law Antonio de Morga also did, and like Morga does not equate principal with datu.
Members of the first two of these estates are enfranchised with the right to make or
break client-patron relationships, but are distinguished from one another for purposes, of
administering justice and fixing fines, wergeld, and inheritance. Those in the First Estate have
the right to trial by their peers, those in the Second to trial by those in the First. The Third have
no right to trial at all. They are not enfranchised in the eyes of the law and are dependent upon
their masters’ favor for justice; they do not even appear in the statutes Plasencia codified by
interviewing wise old men in Pampanga.
The Spaniards called all members of this First Estate, whether actually occupying
positions of rule or not, principales. Since the Real Academia Espanola defines principal as a
“person or thing that holds first place in value or importance and is given precedence and
preference before others,” it is a suitable term, more so than any English equivalent. None of the
accounts give a Filipino equivalent for this word, but it was surely either maginoo or some other
derivative of poon/puno (“chief, leader”). Plasencia translates “Lord God” as Panginoon Dios,
and one of the leaders who surrendered the Port of Manila in 1571 was Maginoo Marlanaway.
The force of the word is made clear in the San Buenaventura dictionary: puno is defined as
“principal or head of a lineage,” ginoo as “noble by lineage and parentage, family and descent,”
and maginoo as “principal in lineage or parentage, and senor (lord) is equated with all three.
They are obviously to be distinguished from nouveau riche imitators scornfully called
maygintao, “man with gold”—or, as San Buenaventura says, “Hidalgo by gold, not lineage, a
‘dark knight,’ as we would say.” Whatever it was called, the class constituted a birthright
aristocracy with claims to respect, obedience, and support from those of subordinate status.
They will be called “chiefs” in this paper, in the sense of being of the chiefly class, not in the
sense of being rulers.
People in the Second Estate had the theoretical right to shift allegiance from one
maginoo to another and so were called libres or libertos in later Spanish accounts, and freemen
in modern English. But they were not free in the sense that they had no chief at all: rather they
were vassals who rendered service to some overlord. Some paid feudal dues in the form of
agricultural labor and were called timawa, while others rendered military service and were
called maharlika. But in either case, whether men of substance following their lords to war or
humble farmers working his fields in season, they were enfranchised in the eyes of the law and
could bring suit.
The unenfranchised and disfranchised of the Third Estate were called alipin, a term all
Spanish sources translate as slave. The Academia defines esclavo as “one who lacks liberty
because of being under the control of another,” so the term does not necessarily connote chattel
or captive. In the Philippines, the majority of them were actually serfs, peons, bondsmen,
debtors, or dependents—or what Filipinos called “householders,” alipin namamahay. Those
who could be legally sold were called “hearth slaves,” alipin sa gigilid, and the distinction was
often deliberately blurred by oppressive creditors haling them before a Spanish judge who was
ignorant of Philippine social structure. All alipin were in a condition of more or less servitude,
but this servitude was negotiable so they could not necessarily be distinguished from the Second
Estate by their economic condition alone. What sets the alipin of the Third Estate apart from the
maginoo, maharlika, and timawa of the first two Estates is their want of franchise—the right to
change lords or file a law suit.
None of the accounts record any political office other than that of data, the ruler of a
barangay. Other Spanish sources refer to any super-baraganic political power, or pretensions to
power, as oddities or actual aberrations, especially the one at the mouth of the Pasig River
which they regard as an alien intrusion. Morga uses the world datu only once, applying it to
officers (mandadores) who assist a chief in the administration of a barangay, and barangay
itself he calls a parcialidad (faction or party). These variations probably reflect the viewpoint of
a highly places of colonial official stationed in a former harbor principality where his personal
contact with Filipinos was restricted to members of the ex-royalty. The principalia to whom he
refers had already absorbed the heirs of conquered rulers with impressive personal titles like
Rajah Matanda Acheh, Rajah Muda Solayman, and Si Bunaw Lakan Dula, who in their day had
obviously been superordinate to mere datus since Legazpi recognized their right to surrender
Manila in the name of all the other chiefs. By Morga’s day, twenty-five years later, their
descendants’ political prerogatives had already been converted into economic advantages like
exemption from tribute. The process is unconsciously reflected in the rhetoric of the original
accounts: they describe the role of the ruling chiefs in the past tense, but those of their subjects
and slaves in the present.
THE FIRST ESTATE

The Spanish accounts do not describe the class of maginoo but only the office of datu. A
datu, needless to say, must be a member of the maginoo class. The meaning of the word is made
clear by the early Tagalog-Spanish dictionaries: he is the ruler of a barangay (e.g., “nagdarato:
to rule the barrio or barangay”), and a barangay is a “barrio of people subject to one”—and
synonymous with dolohan, “barrio or faction of people subject to one head.” Plasencia thinks
each one of them was a single family in origin, and since barangay also means “boat,” he
speculates that the role of datu arose from the captain of a boat migrating to the Philippines with
his family, relatives, and servants. It is difficult to believe that Philippine barrios could have
maintained their discrete boatload identities across centuries or millenia, but Plasencia, like
other Spaniards of his day, thought the Filipino people had only arrived in the archipelago a
short time before. A more likely explanation would be that a datu is one who governs like the
captain of a ship, that is, with uncontested authority. In fact, most datus were captains of ships;
rowing for them is listed among their vassals’ duties in every one of the accounts. Perhaps a
barangay was the social unit necessary to build, launch, supply, and fight a man-of-war and
support its captain’s argosies.
At any event, a barangay varied in size from thirty to a hundred households, and was
normally part of a settlement (pueblo) which included other barangays, either contiguous to it
or at some distance. These settlements, or at least the land they occupy, appear to be what the
dictionaries call a bayan, namely, “place for a pueblo” or “pueblo where the people live,” as in
the question, “Kaninong pabuwisan ang bayang ito?” (Whose estate is the bayan here?)
Assuming this to be the case, a given barangay might have claims to swidden land in more than
one bayan, and serfs (alipin namamahay) might be inherited from one barangay to another but
could not be removed from the bayan itself. Taytay, Rizal had four barangays—and four
datus—with a hundred families each when Father Chirino arrived in 1591. The Boxer
manuscript thinks three or four datus are normal for such a settlement, in contrast to one or two
in the Visayas. Loarca says that if ten or more datus live in the same pueblo, they obey the
wealthiest among them, but Morga says only the best warriors are obeyed, while Plasencia
holds that the datus were not subject to one another at all “except by way of friendship and
kinship,” and adds that chiefs helped one another with their barangays in the wars they had.”
Sources of Datu’s Authority. The Boxer manuscript calls datus “senores de titulo”
(titled lords). Eligibility for title is maginoo lineage which is reckoned bilaterally, though the
office itself, being exercised only by men, passes through the male line from father to son or
brother. The office is the source of the datu’s authority, but his power depends upon the fealty
of men in the Second Estate and the support of those in the Third. Since the former are
enfranchised, they can in theory give their allegiance to the datu of their choice, and their
choice is usually the best warrior. (Datus who die with a reputation for bravery in battle go to
the grave accompanied by live slaves—in actual ships in the case of those of special Viking
valor.) A powerful datu, is therefore literally a popular datu, some so much so as to attract
others of their peers. In such cases, important decisions—especially legislative—are made by
the chief datu’s calling them all together and securing their acquiescence, his large house
serving as the barrio hall. (Loarca comments from Panay, “The Pintados do not have this policy
because nobody wishes to recognize another as more of a chief.”) All the accounts list, the
datu’s duties as twofold: to govern his people, and to lead them in war—though good
administrator Morga adds, “and succor them in their struggles and needs.” It is quite
understandable, of course, that nobody mentions the primary duty of any lord to his vassals—
that of defending them against their enemies, especially foreign invaders.
A datu has the duty to render judgment in any lawsuit filed by his followers. He
convokes the litigants, hears sworn testimony, and hands down a decision—all in the presence
of his people, and sometimes with the assistance of older men. His decision may be appealed,
however, to an arbiter of the contestants’ choice from another community, even a non-datu. In
the case of theft, the datu presides over—and may initiate and enforce—trial by oath,
divination, or ordeal. He also participates in dispensing justice within the First Estate, appearing
before a wise legalist acceptable to him and his accuser if he himself is sued, or combining with
his peers to initiate such action in the case of others, and to contribute police power to enforce
their decision afterwards. Where such arbitration fails, the plaintiff inaugurates a kin feud which
runs its violent course until mutual exhaustion satisfies honor and both parties agree to payment
of wergelds. The provisions of the law are handed down by tradition, but are liable to
amendment by consensus among ruling datus, and to circumvention by any among them
powerful enough to do so. Penalties vary with the relative social status of the parties, and
include restitution or indemnification in the case of theft, death for witchcraft, murder, sexual
advance, or infraction of religious taboo, and fines in all other cases. In the case of capital
punishment or the totally dependent status of gigilid slavery, the presiding datu takes possession
of the condemned man’s children and accomplices, and compensates the plaintiff himself.
Control over disposition of barangay real property is vested in its datu. The distribution
of irrigated land is of major consideration, but hillside swiddens are worked freely by any
barangay member or even aliens with claims through intermarriage or prior arrangement with
the datu. The datu has the right to retain certain land use privileges for himself: for example, the
restriction of access to fisheries, or the collection of fees from a market opened at a strategic
passage on a waterway. A datu may alienate territory—presumably on behalf of his entire
barangay—or even convert his rights into regular payments from his subjects. The ruler of Pila,
Laguna, for example, purchased it in gold from its former chief and then charged rentals from
his own maharlika for its use. It is noteworthy that the rate was fixed at four cavans a year
rather than at some percentage of the produce or size of the holding.
Services Received. A datu receives services, agricultural produce, and respect from his
people who, in Laguna at least, are called his katunguhan, literally, “those who go along.” The
respect is shown by such deferential behavior as covering the mouth with the hand when
addressing him, or contracting the body in a profound bow on entering his presence indoors and
raising the hands alongside the cheeks. The same deference is shown his family and
descendants, in office or out—to all maginoo, in short—and slander against any of them is
severely punished. He receives a share of harvests as tribute except from men of maginoo
lineage, and additional contributions such as a jar of sugarcane wine or tuba at unscheduled
seasons like feasts or funerals. Services are also of two kinds: seasonal field labor from which
nobody is exempted of whatever class or condition, participation in maritime and military
expeditions, and unscheduled occasions like house construction or opening new land, for all of
which work the laborers are fed or feasted. The importance of seafaring duties is indicated by
the considerable detail with which they are specified in the accounts: to equip and supply the
vessel and then to row it, either as slaves of warriors, or to come, provisioned and armed, as
soon as called and as often, and to follow wherever the datu leads.
Perhaps a clue to the Spanish assessment of the office of datu may be found in the fact
that Plasencia likens them to knights (como caballeros) while he equates maharlika, timawa,
and alipin directly with hidalgo, pechero, and esclavo, with no such reservation as como. A
caballero is one endowed with a caballeria (a knighthood) and a caballeria is an encomienda,
that is, “a commission: the office of certain knights of the military orders [or] the place,
territory, or fees of this office.” The Blancas de San Jose dictionary glosses encomienda with
pabuwisan, from buwis, tribute or dues (pecho)—which is what Chief Saripada Humabon
wanted Magellan to pay when he anchored in the port of Cebu. A caballero is thus one who
collects dues from a certain district. It is probably the lack of a reigning monarch qualified to so
invest Filipino datus that moved Father Plasencia to say como.
THE SECOND ESTATE

Philippine custom law calls members of the Second Estate timawa, which Plasencia
translates as “common people” (la gente comun) and Morga as “plebeians” (plebeyos), both
being terms which in sixteenth century Spanish suggest ineligibility to marry a person of royal
blood. Their franchise depends upon competence to enter into client-patron relationships, not
upon birthright; that is, if they are not in debt to anybody, they are free to make such contracts,
both as clients and as creditors to debtors or master to slaves. They enjoy agricultural rights to a
portion of the barangay land, both to use and bequeath, and to harvest without paying any
tribute. Although contractual relations vary and appear to include tribute in some cases, their
patrons are basically their lords, not their landlords. Their normal obligation is agricultural labor
worked off in groups when summoned for planting or harvesting, but they may also be liable to
work fisheries, accompany expeditions, or row boats. And, like members of the Third Estate,
they can be called out for irregular services like supporting feasts or building houses.
Membership in the Second Estate is largely acquired. The timawa have their ultimate
origin in the First and Third Estates. From the First they absorb the illegitimate offspring of
maginoo with their unmarried slaves and married serfs, and from the Third, those who have
successfully repaid debts, completed indenture, or literally purchased their freedom in gold. The
definitions in the early Tagalog dictionaries are unambiguous. San Buenaventura defines
timawa as “without servitude (esclavonia), neither rich nor poor,” and manga timawa as “the
free, the common people after the magnate,” and illustrates with the example, “titimawain kita
(I’ll set thee free).” Blancas de San Jose is even more illuminating:
A free man who was formerly a slave, and from this they say timawa of one who
escapes death by chance, like one in the hangman’s noose and the rope breaks, or the
bull that cannot be captured because of his bravery, and, changing the accent,
Nagtitimawak of a slave who has freed himself by running away from his master, and
the same with animals.
The Maharlika Aristocracy. The Second Estate also includes a birthright aristocracy
called maharlika who render military service. The maharlika accompanies his captain abroad at
his own expense whenever he calls and wherever he goes, rows his boat not as galley slave but
as comrade-at-arms, and receives his share of the spoils afterwards. Plasencia’s is the only
account which mentions maharlika and it does not explain the origin of their ascribed status.
Probably they were a sort of diluted maginoo blood—perhaps the descendants of mixed
marriages between a ruling dynasty and one out of power, or scions of a conquered line which
struck this bargain to retain some of its privileges. At any event, the maharlika are subject to the
same requirements of seasonal and extraordinary community labor as everybody else in the
barangay. Technically, they are less free than the ordinary timawa since, if they want to transfer
their allegiance once they are married, they must host a public feast and pay their data from six
to eighteen pesos in gold. Their profession was destined to disappear under the colonial regime,
of course, just as the mangayaw raids in which they practiced it disappeared. Indeed, it seems
that it was already being downgraded in Plasencia’s day: those datus controlling market places
and collecting fishing fees were exemplars of the socioeconomic changes which produced
chiefs like the lord of Pila whose maharlika were reduced to a kind of inquilino status. A
generation later San Buenaventura had already forgotten that they were “free” (libres) rather
than “freed” (libertos), and so, evidently, had the Filipino people by the next century when Juan
Francisco de San Antonio could cite as common Tagalog usage, “Minahadlika ako nang
panginoon ko (My master freed me).” The Blancas de San Jose dictionary defines them as
“freemen though with a certain subjugation in that they may not leave the barangay: they are
the people called villeins (la gente villano),” literally countryfolk living outside some
nobleman’s villa. In 1754—long after they had disappeared, of course—Juan Delgado simply
calls them “plebeians.”
Plasencia calls the maharlika “hidalgos” and, as a matter of fact, the parallels are
noteworthy. Training and maintenance for the warrior life are expensive for both the maharlika
and hidalgo, so they must be men of substance to enter their profession, though they may be
handsomely reimbursed in booty later. But substance alone is not enough: qualification in both
cases includes descent from others of their class-for four generations, in the case of the hidalgo.
Like the maharlika, the hidalgo is bound to his master by tighter feudal ties than the ordinary
vassal; in the event of breach of faith, his lord may seize both his goods and his person, while
even a serf is guaranteed the land to which he is attached. In like manner, the maharlika is fined
for breaking his contract if he leaves his datu. And if the hidalgo can no longer shoulder the
financial burden of warfare, he can ritually unmake his contract and drop down to a cheaper
vassal status, that of villano. Something like this seems to have happened to the maharlika
between 1590 and 1630.
THE THIRD ESTATE

An alipin is a man in debt to another man. His subordination is therefore obligatory, not
contractual: the other man is technically his creditor rather than his lord, and may be a maginoo,
maharlika, timawa, or another alipin. The alipin has birthright claim to work a piece of the
barangay land which cannot be taken away from him or he from it, except in the case of a
commuted death sentence by which he becomes a chattel slave. The alipin may be born as
such—in which case he is called gintubo—but what he really inherits from his parents is their
debt, indenture, or sentence. Although he cannot be legally seized or sold, his debt can be
transferred from one creditor to another for profit and to his detriment. For this reason, a man
who falls into debt seeks to become alipin to one of his own relatives if possible. As a matter of
fact, men in extreme penury may voluntarily seek the security of alipin status, that is, be
napaaalipin as opposed to naaalipin. Since the degree of alipin indebtedness can vary, when
that debt is passed on to heirs it also varies according to the mother’s status, and indeed,
according to the debts either parent has inherited from preceding generations. For example, if
alipin and timawa marry, their offspring will be only half alipin; or if an alipin has three non-
alipin grandparents, only one quarter—social conditions described in Spanish accounts with the
rather unsatisfactory expressions “half slave” and “quarter slave.” What all this means in
practical terms is that such alipin only work off half their father’s, or one-fourth their
grandfather’s, indebtedness during alternate months. Such partial alipin, moreover, have the
right to enforce their manumission if they can afford the price.
The normal alipin with land rights is called namamahay (householder), and the one who
has lost that right, alipin sa gigilid (hearth slave), a category which also includes those who
never had such a right in the first place, namely, captives or purchases. The Boxer manuscript
makes the curious remark that there is a kind of slaves of both namamahay and gigilid status
called tagalos. If this is not a flat error, it may have been obtained from some informant of
Bornean descent and thus may reflect an attitude based on a former relationship between the
two peoples.
Alipin Namamahay. Spanish accounts consistently translate alipin as “slave,” but their
authors just as consistently deplore the illogic of including the namamahay in the same category
as the gigilid, or even in the category of esclavo at all. That the gigilid—or at least some
gigilid—were chattel house slaves “like those we have,” as Morga says, was obvious, but it was
just as obvious that the serf-like namamahay were not. One of the longest entries in the San
Buenaventura dictionary belabors the point, and includes the following passage:
These namamahay slaves in Silanga, which is on the way to Giling-giling from
Lumban, make one field called tongo, and it is to be noted that they have no further
obligation to their master; in Pila, Bay, Pillila [Pililla] and Moron [Morong], they are
almost free for they serve their master no more than from time to time, and they say he
almost has to beg them to go with him to other places or to help him with something, the
same as he does with the freemen; in all the hills as far as Calaylayan, they serve their
master from time to time if he calls them, but if he calls them too often it’s considered
an abuse.
Father Plasencia solves the problem directly and sensibly: he calls them pecheros
(tribute-payers). The pecho they pay is called buwis and amounts to half their crop, and the one
who pays it is called nunuwis. Or his lord may agree to a fixed fee of four cavans of palay a
year instead, the same rate the datu of Pila was charging his maharlika for their land use in the
1580s. In addition, he is expected to present a measure of threshed rice or a jar of wine for his
master’s wedding feasts or funerals, and generally a share of any special foodstuffs he may
acquire for himself—for example, the leg of a deer taken in the hunt. Like everybody else, he
comes at his master’s call to plant and harvest his fields, build his houses, carry his cargo, equip
his boat, and row it when he goes abroad—not as a warrior but as an oarsman, unless relieved of
this status as an accolade for bravery—and in any emergency such as his master’s being sick,
captured, or flooded out. He owns his own house, possessions, and gold, and bequeaths them to
his heirs, but his ownership of the land he uses is restricted: he cannot alienate it. If his master
moves out of the settlement, he continues to serve him as a kind of absentee landlord, and if his
master dies, he is obligated to all his heirs, and must divide his services among them. Upon his
own death, his creditor has the right to take one of his children for gigilid domestic service in
his own house, but if he takes more, he is considered a tyrant.
A man enters namamahay status by three routes: inheritance from namamahay parents,
dropping down from the Second Estate, or rising up from gigilid status. If his debt stems from
legal action or insolvency, he and his creditor agree about the duration of the bondage and an
equivalent cash value for its satisfaction. In Father Plesencia’s day this never exceeded ten taels
in gold, or roughly the market value of 320 cavans of rice at Manila prices. This custom
continued under the Spanish occupation and so exercised the friars’ conscience that their
theologians argued the fine points of its morality for a century. (How long can a man justly be
indentured for such-and-such a debt? At what age does a child handed over for its father’s debts
become productive enough to be reckoned an asset rather than a liability?) Those who rose from
the ranks of the gigilid hearth slaves might actually have purchased their freedom, but mainly
they were transferred to namamahay householding when they married, simply for their master’s
own convenience. For this reason, it also seems likely—though the Spanish sources do not say
so—that captives and purchased slaves may have been set up in namamahay housekeeping
status from the beginning.
Alipin sa Gigilid. Gilid is the “innermost (or nethermost) part of the house where the
hearth is,” and the use of the term to distinguish a kind of alipin calls attention to the typical
place of their service—or, perhaps, conception. They are members of their master’s household
who, unlike namamahay householders, eat out of their master’s pot. They are as dependent
upon him as his own children, and from this circumstance arises his moral right to sell them. In
actual practice, however, he rarely does. He may transfer them to some other creditor, but raw
material for the slave trade or human sacrifice is not procured from the household, or even from
the alipin labor pool which implements a datu’s public and private projects. Quite the opposite,
they may be rewarded at their master’s pleasure—or his hope of motivating them—by being
permitted to retain some of the fruits of their labor, even to the extent of eventually purchasing
their liberty. Indeed, if they can accumulate enough gold, say through the trade of goldsmith or
participating in raids, they can buy their way not only into namamahay status, but even timawa.
(Juan Francisco de San Antonio, reporting the old thirty-peso manumission price 130 years
later, comments, “And if he gave sixty or more, he was free of everything and became an
hidalgo.”)
The main sources of alipin sa gigilid recruitment are the children born in their master’s
house, not infrequently natural children by his own alipin of either status, and those of men
under commuted death sentence who mortgage one of their own to somebody who can afford to
raise them, thus reserving their own liberty to support the rest. Once a hearth slave grows up,
however, it may be more practical and profitable to set him up in his own house instead of
feeding and housing him and his new family. All the accounts distinguish the namamahay not
only as having his own house separate from his master’s, but as being married and having his
own family. The author of the Boxer manuscript describes the situation with some surprise:
His master can sell him because none of these slaves who are in their master’s
house are married, but all [are] maidens and bachelors, and in the case of a male who
wishes to marry, the chief does not lose him; and such a one is called namamahay when
married, and then lives by himself, and, surprising enough, they would [even] give the
slaves who were in the chiefs’ houses permission to marry, and nobody would hinder the
men.
The terms gigilid and namamahay, therefore, more accurately distinguish a man’s
residence than his economic status, and are incidental to a sliding scale of downward social
mobility occasioned by punitive disfranchisement and economic reversal. The condemned
man’s debt to society or fiscal creditor can be, underwritten by some other man motivated by
kin loyalty or hope of gain. If both are alipin and neighbors and relatives, their new relationship
may be no more visible than a redistribution of their labor. But the social stigma is considerable,
for the gigilid of a namamahay is called by the insulting term bulisik, “vile” or “despicable.”
Still worse, the poor wretch who becomes the gigilid of a gigilid of a namamahay is branded
bulislis, “exposed,” like the private parts when one’s dress is hitched up—a term which may
reflect a relationship between master and slave.
Slaves purchased from outside the community, and captives taken in war or raids, are
also counted among the gigilid and may be real chattel without even the security of the parental
affection of some master in whose house they grew up. If they are destined for resale or
sacrifice, they may be temporarily employed—as field hands, for example—but will literally be
non-persons in society. But if they are brought into the community as functioning alipin, they
will perforce enjoy the rights of food, shelter, and work of other alipin. Their children will then
be born into society not as aliens but as gintubo, “children of alipin,” and as such be eligible for
whatever upward social mobility fortune may offer them.
The categories of namamahay and gigilid thus appear to have been dysfunctional at the
time they were first described by Spanish observers. If a man raised a gigilid slave to manhood,
married him off as a namamahay householder, and then seized one of his children to raise as a
gigilid slave, what was that child’s status on reaching maturity? Do these categories distinguish
membership in ascribed subclasses, or simply conditions of residence? The categories as
described would be fully functional only in a society in which real slavery was limited to
domestic service and slaves therefore lived in their masters’ houses, and men were born alipin
but not alipin namamahay or alipin sa gigilid. Gintubo, the birthright status of such alipin
commoners, would then serve to distinguish the operative core of the class from social
transients or newcomers who had not yet learned their role. But if such a society underwent
economic changes which either increased the value of slave labor or restricted slaveholders’
other sources of income, strong motivation for modifications would arise. That such changes
were taking place in the 1590’s but being resisted, is suggested by the following passage from
the Boxer manuscript:
If they have many children, when many have been taken and he takes more, they
consider it a tyrannical abuse, and once those who are leaving the chief’s house to marry
leave, they do not return to render him any more service than the namamahay do, unless
he uses force, and this they consider a worse tyranny inasmuch as they were given
permission to leave his house and he makes them return to it; and these slaves inherited
these customs from their ancestors.
This confusion of alipin status was brought to Spanish attention by an ill-fated attempt
to replace Filipino concepts of slavery with Christian concepts of slavery. Most contemporary
sources attribute the confusion to a combination of Filipino cupidity and Spanish ignorance, the
former using the latter for their own purposes. Typical is the following entry in the San
Buenaventura dictionary:
Gintubo [slavery] inherited from one to another; this is the first kind of slaves.
Nagkakagintubo: slaves of this kind. Gintubo ni ama: “My father inherited it”; this the
Filipinos say before the judges, and those who do not know the significance of the word
judge the slaves to be sagigilid, so it should be noted that under this name, gintubo, the
two kinds which follow [viz., gigilid and namamahay] are covered, and they should not
say that gintubo is sa gigilid since it also includes the namamahay.
Despite such well-intended erudition, however, the confusion was profound enough to
survive into the twentieth century, long after the alipin who caused it had disappeared. The
1972 Panganiban Diksyunario-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles defines gintubo as “a slave born in the
house of the master,” but considers it synonymous with anak ng alipin.

VISAYAS
Both Loarca and the author of the Boxer manuscript record a Visayan cosmogony which
divides mankind into five types or species: datus, timawas, oripun, negroes, and overseas
aliens. The myth presents them all as offspring of a divine primordial pair who flee or hide from
their father’s wrath. According to the Boxer version:
They scattered where best they could, many going out of their fathers’ house; and
others stayed in the main sala, and others hid in the walls of the house itself, and others
went into the kitchen and hid among the pots and stove, So, these Visayans say, from
these who went into the inner rooms of the house come the lords and chiefs they have
 among them now, who give them orders and whom they respect and obey and who
among them are like our titled lords in Spain; they call them datos in their language.
From those who remained in the main sala of the house come the knights and hidalgos
among them, inasmuch as these are free and do not pay anything at all; these they call
timaguas in their language. From those who got behind the walls of the house, they say,
come those considered slaves, whom they call oripes in their language. Those who went
into the kitchen and hid in the stove and among the pots they say are the negroes,
claiming that all the negroes there are in the hills of the Philippine Islands of the West
come from them. And from the others who went out of the house, they say, come all the
other tribes there are in the world, saying that these were many and that they went to
many and diverse places.
The details of the myth are revealing of Filipino views of their own social hierarchy:
class distinctions are presented as being of the same order as racial differences. The ruling class
is secluded and protected in the inner security of the house—“lo mas escondido de la casa,”
Loarca says—with their privileged timawa retinue standing between them and the world in the
front sala—“mas afuera”—and their more timid oripun supporters occupying the very walls of
the house. And, completely beyond the pale of Philippine society, are the soot-colored negroes
of the hills, and such literally outlandish races as the Spaniards themselves, descendants of
those who “left by the same door through which their father had entered, and went toward the
sea.” Equally significant is something the myth does not say: it fails to distinguish the rice-and
cotton-producing Filipinos of the uplands from those along the coast who supply them with salt,
fish, and imported trade porcelains.
Sixteenth century Visayans therefore saw themselves as divided into three divinely
sanctioned orders: data, timawa, and oripun. The word datu is used as both a social class and a
political title: the class is a birthright aristocracy or royalty careful to preserve its pedigree, and
the office is the captaincy of a band of warrior supporters bound by voluntary oath of allegiance
and entitled to defense and revenge at their captain’s personal risk. These supporters are
timawa, and they are not only their datu’s comrades-at-arms and personal bodyguards, tasting
his wine for poison before he or any other datu drinks it, but usually his own relatives or even
his natural sons. Everybody else is oripun. They support timawa and datu alike with obligatory
agricultural and industrial labor, or its equivalence in rice. When the Spaniards reached Cebu,
they found the subordination of the oripun to the other two orders so obvious and the distinction
between datu and timawa so slight, that they did not at first recognize the existence of three
orders. Legazpi, after three busy years of conquering, cajoling and coopting them, thought there
were only two orders of Pintados: rulers and ruled. And a half century later, old Samarenos
recalled the timawa as a lower order of datus, and even an extinct class in between called
tumao.
THE FIRST ORDER

Members of the datu class enjoy ascribed right to respect, obedience, and support from
their oripun followers and acquired right to the same advantages from their legal timawa. In
theory at least, they can dispose of their followers’ persons, houses, and property, and do in fact
take possession of them at their death. Land use and disposition are not mentioned in any of the
accounts, presumably because Visayan sustenance comes exclusively from swiddens, forests, or
the sea. Since the sons of a ruling datu have equal claim to succession, competition is keen
among them, and official datu wives practice abortion to limit such divisive possibilities to only
two or three offspring. Significantly, a myth recorded by Loarca attributes the invention of
weapons and introduction of warfare to a quarrel over inheritance. In fact, it is normal for a
datu’s brother to separate from him and form another settlement with a following of his own.
To maintain the purity of their line, datus marry only among their kind, often seeking high-
ranking brides in other communities, abducting them, or contracting brideprices running to five
or six hundred pesos in gold, slaves, and jewelry. Meanwhile they keep their own marriageable
daughters secluded as binokot, literally, “wrapped up.” Social distance is maintained by such
deference as addressing them in the third person, keeping off the noisy bamboo-slatted floor
while they are sleeping, or the strict observance of their mourning taboos by the whole
community. Furthermore, competition from bold and wealthy kin is discouraged by such
protocol sanctions as restricting the size and ostentation of their houses.
Datus of pure descent (for example, potli nga data or tubas nga datu, or the four-
generation lubus nga data) also recognize another lineage of lesser nobility called tumao.
Literally, tumao means “to be a man,” that is, without taint of slavery, servitude, or witchcraft.
These are the descendants of other or former datus, or of an immigrating datu’s original
comrades, or the kin of a prominent local ruler—“senor y dueno del pueblo”. From this tumao
rank come a ruling datu’s personal officers, such as his Atobang sa Datu (Prime Minister), and
from their sons come a corps of Sandig sa Datu (“Supporters of the Datu”), though after fifty
years of Spanish occupation both the titles and offices had disappeared. Datus also maintain
sandil concubines, some of them binokot “princesses” of high rank captured in raids who bear
them illegitimate offspring with no inheritance rights beyond their father’s favors while alive,
but who are usually set free upon his death. These are the timawa, whom the origin myth
considers a separate order of men, but whose descendants were fondly respected as a third grade
of the first order long after colonial rule had rendered all such distinctions meaningless. Those
timawa who are released on their father’s death—slaves freed from above, so to speak—are
called by the special title, ginoo. By Alcina’s day, however, the term timawa alone survived as a
designation for the ordinary Visayan tribute-payer who was neither chief nor slave, while ginoo
took on the general Tagalog significance of “sir” because of Manila’s new prestige as the
colonial capital.
Datu’s Duties and Functions. The following which a datu rules is his sakop, haop, or
dolohan—what is elsewhere called a barrio or barangay, and what Alcina translates as
“gathering” or “kin” (i.e., junta, congregation, or parentela). The office or estate of datuship is
therefore a ginaopan or gindolohanan. The visible house cluster of such a group is commonly
called a gamoro, but like two other terms for village or settlement, lonsor and bongto, the word
originally referred to a collection of people, not houses. The Boxer manuscript states that such
followers obey their datus because “most of them are their slaves, and those in the settlement
who are riot are the relatives of the datus.” In the event of a datu’s capture in war, these
relatives contribute to his ransom in proportion to the closeness of their kinship. Some datus can
raise fighting forces of between 500 and 1,000 men-at-arms, either through confederation with
other datus, or by actual overlordship (senorio). Si Dumager of Langigey, Bantayan, for
example, imposed a 20 percent inheritance tax on slaves and other property after such a
conquest, a form of servitude (esclavonia) which, Loarca reports, “is still being introduced
among all the Filipinos along the coast, though not the uplanders.” If any of these super-
baranganic chieftains were ever dignified with the title of hadi (king), none of the accounts
record it. Quite the opposite, Alcina comments scornfully of a legendary Visayan hero named
Bohato: “He conquered so many ‘kings,’ as they are wont to call them around here, who were
nothing more than some gang leaders not even deserving the name of captain.”
A ruling datu has the duty to execute judicial decisions handed down by experts in
custom law, which execution among his peers is likely to institute a family feud. All crimes are
punishable by fines, even murder, adultery, and insubordination to datus, though these latter
three are technically capital offenses commuted on appeal to enslavement or servitude which is
both negotiable and transferable to kin and offspring. Petty larceny (reckoned at less than P20)
and other civil offenses are not transferable except that children born during the period of
bondage become the property of the creditor. Grand larceny, however, is a capital offense, and
datus themselves are liable to prosecution—though, of course, they can afford the fines or
wergeld necessary to avoid slavery in any case. Where a datu’s own honor or interests are
involved, he acts both as judge and executioner, and may abuse this position to procure
additional indentured or slave labor by outright perversion of justice.
The datu’s main function is to lead in war. Warfare—mangubat in general, mangayaw
by sea, and magahat by land—appears as endemic in all the accounts. It takes the form of
raiding, trading, or a combination of both, and is terminated or interrupted by blood compacts
between individuals or whole gamoros. Slaving is so common everybody knows the proper
behavior patterns. A captured datu is treated with respect and his ransom underwritten by some
benefactor who will realize a 100 percent profit on the investment. Men who surrender may not
be killed, and the weak and effeminate are handled gently; a timawa who kills a captive already
seized must reimburse his datu. A commanding datu rewards his crewmen at his own
discretion, but otherwise has full rights to profit and booty. In the event of a combined fleet, the
datu who provides the predeparture sacrifices to ancestral spirits and war deities receives half
the total take. Visayan men-of-war are highly refined specimens of marine architecture which
call for considerable capital investment to construct, outfit, and operate, and are launched over
the bodies of slave victims. If a silent partner invests in such a venture, he receives half the
profits but no interest on his capital. And, in recognition of the risks involved, he must ransom
his active partner in the event of capture, without claim to reimbursement or return on his
original investment.
Datu’s Commercial Interests. The Loarca account is full of indirect testimony to a
datu’s commercial interests. Coastal Visayans barter cotton from uplanders for marine products
and Chinese porcelains, and datus let out cotton in the boll to the wives of their oripun to return
as spun thread. It will be recalled that medieval Chinese accounts list cotton and porcelain as
exchange goods in their Philippine trade, which was conducted from deep-draft, sea-going junks
anchored off shores whose natives handled local collection and distribution. It may also be
recalled that when Magellan opened a store in Cebu, his customers paid for their purchases with
gold weighed out in scales carried for the purpose, as Igorots in the Baguio mine fields were
still doing three centuries later. Many social customs appear to favor the pursuit of business,
too. Although betrayal of visitors from allied communities is a just cause for war, outstanding
debts can be collected by force in such settlements without danger of war simply by seizing ‘the
sum from any of the debtor’s townmates, who will then be entitled to collect twice the amount
from the debtor himself. And in contrast to loans of palay, which carry an interest rate of 100
percent compounded annually, cash (i.e., gold) is loaned out with no interest; rather, it is an
investment from which the lender gets a percentage of the profits it earns. Indeed, it is just
possible that Loarca gives a hint of a new form of usury which arose in direct response to his
own encomendero presence: “Nowadays, some loafers who do not feel like looking around for
their tribute to pay, ask to borrow it and return a bit more.”
THE SECOND ORDER

The timawa are personal vassals of a datu to whom they bind themselves as seafaring
warriors; they pay no tribute, render no agricultural labor, and have a portion of datu blood in
their veins. Thus the Boxer manuscript calls them “knights and hidalgos,” Loarca, “free men,
neither chiefs nor slaves,” and Alcina, “the third rank of nobility” (nobleza). Although a first-
generation timawa is literally the half-slave of some datu sire, once he achieves ginoo status
through liberation, he is free to move to any settlement whose lord is willing to enter into feudal
relations with him. Such contracts call for the timawa to outfit himself for war at his own
expense, row and fight his datu’s warship, attend all his feasts, and act as his wine-taster; and
for the datu to defend and avenge the timawa wherever he may have need, risking his person,
family, and fortune to do so, even to the extent of taking action against his own kin. The timawa
are his comrades-at-arms in his forays and share the same risks under fire, but they are clearly
his subordinates: they have no right to booty beyond what he gives them, and they are chided
for battle damage to his vessel but not held liable. But as his comrades-at-arms, they share in the
public accolade of a society which esteems military prowess so highly that women are courted
with lyrics like, “You plunder and capture with your eyes; with a mere glance, you lay hold on
more than mangayaw-raiders do with their fleets.”
The timawas’ relations with their datus are highly personal. When they attend his feasts
and act as wine-tasters, they are there as his retinue and familiars—“out front in the main sala,”
as the creation myth puts it. If they are not their dates’ actual relatives, they behave like
relatives: they are sent as emissaries when he opens marriage negotiations for his son, and they
enjoy the same legal rights in prosecuting adultery. They are men of consequence in the
community and may be appointed stewards over a datu’s interests. At the time of his death, the
most prominent among them acts as major domo to enforce his funeral taboos, and three of their
most renowned warriors accompany his grieving womenfolk on a ritual voyage during which
they row in time to dirges which boast of their personal conquests and feats of bravery. But they
are not men of substance. Although they may lend and borrow money or even make business
partnerships, their children, like everybody else in the community, inherit only at their datu’s
pleasure. As Loarca says in speaking of weddings, “The timawas do not perform these
ceremonies because they have no estate (hacienda).”
The Timawa’s Distinct Role. Since both datu and timawa are what would be called non-
productive members of society in Marxist terms, they form a single class in the economic sense,
just as Legazpi thought they did. But in the Visayan body politic, the timawa serve a separate
and distinct function: they are the means by which the datus consolidate their authority and
expand their power. By limiting their own birthrate, monopolizing advantageous marriages, and
controlling inheritance, they preserve their authority; and by producing a brood of warrior
dependents tied to them by both moral and economic bonds, they provide themselves with a
military support whose loyalty can be expected and competition suppressed. Such social
specialization would serve of trade-raiding society well, and may have been doing so for
centuries before the Spaniards arrived. Medieval Chinese merchantmen avoided Visayan waters
because of the notoriety of their slavers, and Chinese records indicate that Visayan raids were
not unknown on the coasts of China itself. But the timawa role was destined not to survive
serious modification of this economy. Datus with control of cotton-spinning underlings, or
irrigated rice lands to apportion their followers, would have less need for such Viking services.
And whatever needs remained would quickly be disoriented, deflected, and destroyed by
occupation by a superior military power. The history of the word timawa suggests that just such
changes took place in the Philippines in the sixteenth century.
When the Spaniards first met the timawa in the Visayas, they were the hidalgo-like
warriors Loarca describes. But in fertile wetrice lands around Laguna de Bay and the Candaba
swamps, they were found to be “plebeians” and “common people,” farming rather than fighting.
As Plasencia says of them in Pampanga, “Every chief who holdes a barangay orders the people
to plant, and has them come together for sowing and harvesting.” Their former military
functions were now being performed by another order with the elegant name of Maharlika
(“great, noble”) who were probably the genetic overflow of the aristocracy which occupied, or
arose in, the Laguna lake district earlier in the century. By 1580, however, many of these
“noblemen” found themselves reduced to leasing land from their datus. By the end of the
century, any claim to Filipino royalty, nobility, or hidalguia had disappeared into a
homogenized principalia, and the word timawa had become the standard term to distinguish all
other Filipinos from slaves. Thus did the King himself use it in his instructions to Governor
Gomez Perez Dasmarinas in 1589, as well as the Archbishop of Manila in promulgating a
graduated scale of stole fees in 1626. And in Panay, meanwhile, regardless of whatever changes
had already affected the timawa calling, Loarca was helping to make it completely
dysfunctional by the exercise of foreign military power. As former warriors had to seek their
living by other means, he found it necessary to describe their order not simply as timawa but as
“true” timawa or “recognized timawa, as if there were counterfeit versions around. If there
were, they would have been victims of the inflation which led to the term’s final debasement in
the modern Visayan word, which means “poor, destitute.”
THE THIRD ORDER

Oripun are commoners in the technical sense of the word, that is, they cannot marry
people of royal blood (datus) and are under obligation to serve and support the aristocracy of
the First Order and the privileged retainers of the Second. They are under this obligation not
because they are in debt, but because it is the normal order of society for them to be so; it is the
way mankind was created. Their usual service is agricultural labor, and a distinctive
characteristic of the upper two orders of society is that datus and timawas do not perform
agricultural labor. Within this limitation, however, members of the Third Order vary in
economic status and social standing, from men of consequence (who may actually win datu
status through repute in battle), to chattel slaves born into their condition in their master’s house
generation after generation. And at the very bottom of the social scale, the oripun technically
include—if for other reason than that there is no place else to assign them—those non-persons
destined to join some deceased warlord in the grave, along with Chinese porcelains and gold
ornaments.
The class of oripun is common to all the Visayan accounts, but the particular subclasses
which reflect the socio-economic variations within it differ considerably. The differences are
not merely in terminology, as would be expected from Samar to Mindanao, but in actual
specifications. In the most favored condition, for example, are Loarca’s tumataban and
tumaranpok, the Boxer manuscript’s horo-hanes, and Alcina’s gintobo or mamahay, all of
whom can commute their agricultural duties into other forms of service such as rowing or
fighting or actual payments in kind Loarca’s ayuey (“the most enslaved of all”) only serve in
their master’s house three days out of four, and in the Boxer manuscript (which spells it
hayoheyes) they move into their own house upon marriage and become tuheyes who do not
even continue further service if they produce enough offspring. Plasencia’s “whole slaves,”
however—for example the four-generation lubus nga oripun—hand over the whole fruits of
their labor. This is a stricture which may be the result of social breakdown under colonial
domination, since a characteristic of Philippine slavery otherwise universally reported is the
theoretical possibility of manumussion through self-improvement. These variations no doubt
illustrate different economic conditions, crops, markets, and demands for labor, as well as
individual datus’ responses to them. They also illustrate a social mobility which ultimately
embraces all three social orders.
Condition of Higher Subclasses. Oripun are born into the Third Order just as datus and
timawa are born into the other two. But their position within the order depends upon inherited
or acquired debt, commuted criminal sentences, or victimization by the more powerful—in
which latter case they are said to be lopot, “marked, creased,” or, as Alcina puts it, “unjustly
enslaved.” Those in serious need may mortgage themselves to some datu for a loan, becoming
kabalangay (“boat-mates”?), or may attach themselves to a kinsman as bondsman, but debts can
also be underwritten by anybody able and willing to do so. The tumataban, for example, whom
Loarca calls “the most respected” commoners, can be bonded for six pesos, their creditor then
enjoying five days of their labor per month. The status of tumaranpok, on the other hand, is
reckoned at twelve pesos, for which four days’ labor out of seven is rendered. Both of these
oripun occupy their own houses and maintain their own families, but their wives are also
obligated to perform services if they already have children, namely, spinning and weaving
cotton which their master supplies in the boll, one skein a month in the case of the tumataban,
and a half month’s labor in the case of the tumaranpok. Either can commute these obligations to
payment in palay: fifteen cavans a year for the former, thirty for the latter. Thus a tumataban’s
release from field labor is calculated at five gantas a day and a tumaranpok’s at three and a half.
So, too, the creditor who underwrites a P12 tumaranpok debt receives 208 days of labor a year,
but one who invests in a P6 tumataban, only 72. Since Loarca states that rice is produced in the
hills in exchange for coastal products, such commutation enables an uplander to discharge his
obligations without coming down to till his master’s fields. A coast dweller, on the other hand,
has to be a man of considerable means to assume such a tribute-paying pechero role.
Another oripun condition is that of horo-han (probably uluhan, “at the head”). These
perform lower-echelon military service in lieu of field labor, acting as mangayaw oarsmen or
magahat “foot-soldiers” and their children take their place upon their death (but have no
obligation prior to it). They are part of the public entertained and feasted during a datu’s
ceremonial functions, where their presence moved the author of the Boxer manuscript to
comment with tourist-like wonder, “They are taken into their houses when they give some feast
or drunken revel to be received just like guests.” The oripun called gintobo, mamahay, or johai
also participate in raids, though they receive a smaller portion of the booty than timawas, and if
they distinguish themselves regularly enough by bravery in action, they may attract a following
of their own and actually become datus. They are also obliged to come at their datus’ summons
for such communal work as house-building, but do not perform field labor; instead they pay
reconocimiento (a recognition-of-vassalage fee) in rice, textiles, or other products. But, like the
timawa above them and indentured bondsmen and slaves below, they cannot bequeath their
property to their heirs: their datu shares it with them at his own pleasure. This arbitrary
inheritance tax enables a ruling datu to reward and ingratiate his favorites, and leave others
under threat of the sort of economic reversal which sets downward social mobility in motion. A
P12 debt can plunge a man into the depths of ayuey household slavery, with the high probability
of transmitting that status to his offspring since any children born during his bondage will
become the property of his master.
The Ayuey Condition. These ayuey are at the bottom of the oripun social scale. They are
literally domestics who live in their master’s house and receive their food and clothing from
him, and they are real chattel. As Loarca says, “Those whom the natives have sold to the
Spaniards are ayuey for the most part.” They either have no property of their own or only what
they can accumulate by working for themselves one day out of four. They are generally field
hands with the same manumission price as the tumaranpok, namely, P12, and their wives work
as domestic servants in their master’s house. They are usually single, however, but are given a
separate house when they marry and become tuhey, working only two days out of five. Their
wives, however, continue to serve until they have children; then, if they have many, they and
their husbands may be absolved of all further ayuey servitude. Their children, needless to say,
do not inherit.
First-generation ayuey are debtors, purchases, captives, or poverty-stricken volunteers
seeking security. Those who are enslaved in lieu of payment of fines are called sirot, which
means “fine,” and those seized for debts, or imputed debts, are lupig, “inferior, outclassed.”
Creditors are responsible for their debtors’ obligations, so another route by which commoners
are reduced to ayuey status is for their creditors to cover some fine they have incurred.
Purchases may be outright—for example, either adults or children in abject penury—or by
buying off somebody’s debt, in which case the debtor becomes gintubus, “redeemed.” Actual
captives are bihag, whether slave or not at the time of capture, and are sharply to be
distinguished from all other ayuey because of their liability to serve as offerings in some human
sacrifice. (Loarca notes approvingly, “They always see that this slave is an alien and not a
native, for they really are not cruel at all.”) It is not impossible that Spanish disruption of
traditional slaving patterns produced an increase in domestic oppression on the part of those
datus who were called principales. At least Alcina comments, “They oppressed the poor and
helpless and those who did not resist, even to the point of making them and their children
slaves, [but] those who showed them their fangs and claws and resisted were let go with as
much as they wished to take because they were afraid of them.” But, in any event and whatever
their origin, first-generation ayuey all have one thing in common: they are the parents of the
second-generation “true” slaves.
The “true” slaves, as distinguished from those commoners of varying degrees of
servitude who are slaves in name only (nomine tenus, as Alcina says) are those born in their
master’s, house. The children of purchased or hereditary slaves are called haishai. If both their
parents are houseborn slaves like themselves, or purchased, they are ginlubus (from lubus, “all
one color, unvariegated”), and if they are the fourth generation of their kind, lubus nga oripun.
But if only one of their parents is an ayuey of their status, they are “half slaves” (bulan or pikas)
and if three of their grandparents were non-slave commoners, they are “one-quarter slaves”
(tilor or sagipat). “Whole slaves” may also be known as bug-us (“given totally”) or tuman
(“utmost, extreme”). But some of them are cherished and raised like their master’s own
children, often being permitted to reside in their own houses and usually being set free on their
master’s death; these are the silin or ginogatan. Thus there is no given word for “slave,” but
only a graduated series of terms running from the totally chattel bihag to the horo-han
commoner “at the head” in the upper level of the oripun order. And the initial step up this social
ladder is the normal expectation of the houseborn ayuey at the bottom, for when his master
marries him off to another houseborn ayuey, he is set up in his house where he and his wife
serve both masters. When his children are born, they become slaves to both masters, too, but as
soon as they grow up, he himself assumes tumaranpok status. Thus as Visayan house slaves
move upward into the dignity of vassalage, they leave enough of their offspring behind to
supply their masters’ needs.

CONCLUSION
The sixteenth century Spanish accounts say that Filipino society is divided into three
classes, to which they assign the European feudal concepts of rulers, military supporters, and
everybody else. This having been said, they proceed to give information which indicates that
this three-class analysis is inadequate for an understanding of the society being described. On
the one hand, in economic terms, the three classes appear to be only two. In Loarca’s Visayas,
for example, the upper two classes live off food and export products produced by the third class,
while in the Tagalog areas reported by Morga and Plasencia, the lower two classes work the
fields of the upper. On the other hand, in social terms, the indigenous class designations are not
readily reduced to three, and, worse yet, seem to shade off into one another confusingly. This
confusion probably arises not so much from an inadequacy in the Spanish descriptions as from
the basic fallacy of originally expecting to find three—or any other number—of static pan-
Philippine social classes. What might more logically be expected would be the description of a
society, or societies, observed in the process of change, that is, of class structures caught in the
midst of ongoing development and decay, so to speak. Such an expectation can be readily
fulfilled by a reconsideration of the accounts.
VISAYAN CULTURE

Of the two cultures described, Visayan and Tagalog, the former appears to be the more
basic and stable—not stable in the sense of unchanging, but in the sense of being flexible
enough to absorb much changes as confront it. This flexibility is provided at both top and
bottom of the social scale. At the one end, a chief can retain and restrain competing peers,
relatives, and offspring if he has the personality and economic means for it; but if not, they can
migrate to other communities that can use their services, or found new ones of their own. At the
other end, the owners of chattel slaves can demand their and their children’s services if they
have need of them, but are not obligated to do so. The political units of this society are small—
less than 1,000 persons at most—and are potentially hostile to one another unless related by
blood, intermarriage, trading partnerships, or subjugation through conquest. Weaponry is too
unsophisticated to be monopolized by individuals, so political power is exercised through
client-patron relationship. The economy is based on products from swiddens, forests, and the
sea, and their redistribution through a pattern of trade-raids which make public protection
necessary. Chiefs fulfill this function by means of specialized warships designed for speed,
maneuverability, and operation in shallow, reef-filled waters, but with limited cargo capacity.
These are the conditions to which Visayan social structure is fitted, as those of Mindanao and
Luzon probably were in their day, too.
 The chief of a Visayan community is called a datu, and the social class to which he
belongs is called by the same term. A lesser aristocracy descended from former or subordinate
datus is called tumao and provides the datu’s officers, retinue, and bodyguard. Descendants of a
datu’s illegitimate offspring are called timawa and constitute a warrior class whose members
may attach themselves to a datu of their choice. These three social classes form an economic
upper class supported by the labor of a lower class called oripun who are born, impressed, or
sold into their class. A variety of statuses or subclasses have been generated among them by a
society’s particular needs for labor or crops, and differences of personal debt. Most members of
this class live at such a low subsistence level that debt is a normal condition of their lives: it
arises from outright loans for sustenance or from inability to pay fines, and its degree
determines individual oripun rank. Among these subclasses are the following:
Ayuey: a domestic slave or bondsman whose offspring are the property of his master.
Bihag: a captive.
Ginlubus: the child of two domestic slaves, born in their master’s house.
Ginogatan: a cherished household slave favored with separate quarters and usually
liberated upon his master’s death.
Gintobo: an oripun who performs military service and also pays a vassalage fee in kind.
Gintubus: any oripun whose debt has been underwritten by another man.
Haishai: the child of a purchased or hereditary slave.
Horo-han: a high-status servitude of military service in lieu of field labor, but passed on
to the next generation.
Lupig: any oripun seized for debt.
Sirot: any oripun whose status results from an unpaid fine
Tuey: a married ayuey set up in housekeeping by his master; he normally becomes a
tumaranpok when his children are old enough to replace him.
Tumaranpok and tumataban: two grades of servitude requiring specified kinds and
periods of labor from both man and wife; the first is reckoned at twice the second
in terms of debt or tribute if labor is commuted to payment in kind.
LUZON CULTURE

Luzon culture in the time of Morga and Plasencia differed from the Visayan in at least
three particulars: it enjoyed more extensive commerce, it had been influenced by Bornean
political contacts, and it lived off wet rice. Spanish records of the first generation of the
Conquest consistently refer to Tagalog business interests as exceeding those of the Visayans,
which, on the testimony of tribute-collector Loarca, were hardly undeveloped. Augustinian Fray
Martin de Rada attributed the absence of human sacrifice in the Manila area to the fact that
Tagalogs were “more traders than warriors,” and Legazpi found Philippine internal trade
dominated—or monopolized—by ships from Borneo and Luzon, which the Visayans called
“Chinese” because of the origin of their wares. Manila itself had probably been founded early in
the century by adventuresome Nakhoda Ragam Sultan Bulkeiah of Brunei, who also counts as
the fourth Sultan of Sulu. Rice was grown under controlled irrigation in Pampanga, and in such
deep water along the shores of Laguna de Bay that it was harvested from boats; the San
Buenaventura. dictionary lists thirteen terms for rice and six for “transplant,” and gives a
detailed description of the process. This last consideration alone would be enough to account for
three constant references in the descriptions of Tagalog social structure missing from the
Visayan accounts: those to land use, inheritance, and universal field labor.
COMPARING VISAYAN AND TAGALOG CULTURES

Tagalog material culture is therefore more developed than the Visayan, and its social
structure is accordingly more complex and less stable, that is, it is in a process of differentiating
because of inability to absorb the changes confronting it. Any attempt to equate it with the basic
“three-class” Visayan social system is therefore probably unrealistic. Such an attempt was made
by Jesuit Francisco Colin in the middle of the seventeenth century: he equated Visayan datu
with Tagalog maginoo, timawa with maharlika, and oripun with alipin. However, such an
equivalence would require, in the first place, that the Visayan timawa become a common part of
the Tagalog vocabulary in just twenty years. This is possible; but it is less possible than that
Plasencia, after ten years’ residence in Philippine barrios, could have committed so gross an
error in his study of Pampanga law as to mistake this Visayan import for a native term.
Moreover, if the Spaniards transferred the word, they transferred it to a class which did not exist
in the Visayas: farmers who work their datu’s fields, pay him no tribute, and can transfer their
allegiance to another datu. In the second place, the terms simply are not equivalents. A man has
to be born a maginoo, but he can become a datu by personal achievement. The Visayan timawa
neither pays tribute not performs agricultural labor, while the Tagalog maharlika not only
works his datu’s fields but may even pay rent on his own. And the Luzon alipin are divided into
two sharply defined subclasses, while the Visayan oripun are not.
It is much easier to account for both, the similarity and the dissimilarities of the two
systems by presupposing a common terminology being applied to new or emerging classes
resulting from economic development. Maginoo, for example, expands the membership of the
datu ruling class by appeal to descent rather than office, that is, from an actual founding
ancestor, if the root of maginoo is really puno which means “origin, trunk, stem” as well as
“chief.” Datus of this class have a privilege Visayan datus do not—they can call out all non-
maginoo subjects to plant and harvest their fields, as well as to perform all sorts of other
personal labor. Thus all non-maginoo form a common economic class in some sense, though
this class has no designation, presumably because it represents so recent an expansion of
maginoo authority. This subject class may then be divided into two subclasses according to
whether their members are in debt or not. Those who are, are alipin, and those who are not are
timawa and maharlika.
The timawa warrior class of old has now disappeared, probably due to decreased need
for their service, and the term is being applied instead to former alipin who have escaped
bondage by payment, favor, or flight—but not, like Visayan oripun, by military prominence.
The maharlika are a birthright warrior class found only in Laguna whose ancestors were
probably associated with Bornean influence or intrusion; they are, in increasing numbers,
coming to rent land from their datus. The alipin, too, are divided into two subgroups. If, unlike
their oripun counterparts, they have rights of usufruct to irrigated land, they are called
namamahay and may be either renters or sharecroppers; but if they are domestic slaves or
bondsmen without such rights, they are called alipin sa gigilid and, unlike Visayan ayuey,
constitute an actual caste in defiance of the social mobility which is characteristic of Philippine
class structure. And if alipin are removed from a barangay by purchase, donation, or bequest,
their datu loses their labor without compensation—but they cannot be removed from the bayan,
a circumstance which would favor the growth of political centralization.
All these details which distinguish Tagalog from Visayan social structure would appear
to reflect an intensification of agricultural production, a decrease in slave-raiding activities, and
an increase in the power of the ruling class. And, in retrospect, consideration of the details
which portray the societies themselves would appear to present, in a single century, cameo
versions of those stages through which the economic determinist usually pursues the course of
human history across three millenia.
 Class Structure
in the Unhispanized Philippines51

The term “hispanization” was used by historian John Leddy Phelan to refer to the process by
which profound changes were made in the socioeconomic life styles of the Filipino people
during the Spanish occupation of their archipelago. The term has been rejected by some on the
not unreasonable grounds that the end products of this process were neither Spaniards nor
hispanic but remained uniquely and distinctly Filipino. Be that as it may, the term is a useful
one for the social scientist if for no other reason than that it distinguishes a condition which did
not exist before the Spaniards arrived and never existed in areas where they did not govern. The
indigenous Filipino cultures in these latter areas did not, of course, remain static during the
three centuries of Spanish domination elsewhere, nor were they completely isolated, from or
unaffected by what was happening to their neighbors. Yet they were never absorbed into that
Christianized, tribute-paying society which resulted from whatever hispanization did take place,
and as such, may meaningfully be called “unhispanized.” It is class structure in such of these
unhispanized areas as survived into the twentieth century which the subject of the study whose
summary conclusions are resented here.
The sources for the study are of three kinds. First are a dozen full-fledged ethnographic
studies of unhispanized cultures in the mountains of Mindanao and northern Luzon between
1905 and 1940, which may be considered primary sources, as well as several minor ones, and
another dozen produced since World War II in Mindoro, Palawan, Basilan, and Jolo, as well as
Luzon and Mindanao. Secondary sources are shorter studies, articles, or notices between 1880
and 1975 which contain data valuable for one of two different purposes: either to substitute for
more serious studies where these are lacking, or to correct and amplify material in the first
category. The third are my own studies, empirical observations, and familiarity with field
research since 1954 on the Cordillera Central of northern Luzon, and interviews in the southern
Philippines during 1977-1978 with field workers and social scientists who were themselves
members of cultures being investigated. In large part, the methodology employed made use of
these three categories in sequence—that is, the basic research was done in the primary sources,
extended or refined by study of the secondary sources, and then assessed and organized by
recourse to the third.
Even a cursory glance at this literature makes it obvious that all Filipinos living in the
unhispanized Philippines do not share one and the same social structure, and probably never
did. Some are fishermen, some are farmers, and others are hunters and gatherers of forest
products. Some live in mountainside swiddens, some on houseboats, and others in coastal ports

51
The author acknowledges with gratitude a grant from the Social Science Research Council, New York, which
made possible the research on which this paper is based, as well as a companion piece, “Filipino Class Structure in
the 16th Century” (Third World Studies Paper 13, Diliman 1978). The research project itself had the interest and
encouragement of Fr. Frank Lynch from its inception, and an earlier version of the present paper, in fact, was
scheduled for discussion with him the day after his sudden death. It is therefore some slight solace to be able to
contribute to this memorial volume in his honor (Philippine Studies 27 [1979]; 137-59) a small token of my respect
and affection for the man as scholar, priest, and friend, and to acknowledge my debt to him for many favors
granted both in the academic world and elsewhere.
so commercially developed they collected harbor fees. Some are economically self-sufficient,
while others live in symbiotic relations with neighboring societies that produce different
foodstuffs. These ecological factors alone would preclude any single class structure for all.
Food-gatherers wandering through the woods in bands of ten or twenty persons are not likely to
develop any significant social stratification, nor, on the other hand, are terrace-builders who can
monopolize food production likely to remain egalitarian. Complete perusal of the same
literature, moreover, indicates that there are not as many kinds of social structures as there are
ethnolinguistically distinct societies. It is therefore neither necessary nor desirable to describe
each one of them in turn, but rather by types or categories, each type representing a particular
class structure. The criterion for making these divisions will be their own perception of social
classes as reflected in their languages, classifying them according to the functions of the upper
or dominating class, where such a class is distinguished. There is historic precedent for
classifying societies according to their forms of government, and it is appropriate to do so in the
present case since all the unhispanized societies themselves define the dominating class—if
any—more sharply than any other classes which may exist or be thought to exist.
Four types will be distinguished, and they will be described in what anthropologists call
the ethnographic present. That is, they will be described, insofar as practicable, as they existed
in their functional heyday at the close of the Spanish regime, but in the present tense. This
procedure not only avoids the stylistic monstrosities of contending present, past, present perfect,
and pluperfect tenses, but makes possible the recognition of class structures or behavior patterns
which may have outlived their functions or even survived into the present decade in modern
guise. The four categories are as follows:
1. Classless societies—societies with no terms which distinguish one social class from
another;
2. Warrior societies—societies with a recognized class distinguished by prowess in
battle;
3. Petty plutocracies—societies with a recognized class characterized by inherited real
property; and
4. Principalities—societies with a recognized ruling class with inherited rights to
assume political office, or exercise central authority.

TYPE 1: CLASSLESS SOCIETIES

Societies in the first category are characterized as “classless” because they distinguish
no class or group which exerts authority or advantage over other classes or groups by virtue of
ascribed or acclaimed status. Typical are the Hanunoo of whom Harold C. Conklin has written
that their society is “bilaterally structured, loosely stratified, and predominantly
egalitarian…[with] no formally recognized or titled leaders even of a jural sort, no chiefs, no
headmen, and no servants” (Hanunoo Agriculture in the Philippines [Rome: United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization, 1957], p. 11), or the Ilongots of whose social structure
Renato Rosaldo could write a whole dissertation without even mentioning the subject of chiefs
or leaders. In addition to other groups of Mangyans in the mountains of Mindoro and the
Ilongots of Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya and Isabela, this category includes the Tiruray of
Cotabato, the Sulod of Panay, the Bataks of Palawan, and the Negrito or darker-skinned peoples
of Luzon, Negros, Panay, and Mindanao who are called Agta, Aeta, and Ati in some places,
Dumagat along the eastern and southeastern coasts of Luzon, Magahat in Negros Oriental, and
Mamanua in the interior highlands of Mindanao. Also to be included in this category are non-
Negroid mountaineers called Bukidnon in Negros about whom data are insufficient to make a
description, the Katalangan “Kalingas” of Isabela whose traditional social structure has been
eclipsed by that of their Ibanag-Ilocano neighbors, and, presumably, the Ikalahan of Nueva
Vizcaya who are reported to have a completely egalitarian society despite the presence of terms
for rich men and servants or slaves. All of these societies either farm swiddens or hunt and
gather forest products for their sustenance—or, in the case of some of the Dumagats, live off
fish and turtles. They normally function in groups of around fifty members on the average: the
Magahats have been reported to have groups as small as three persons, the Hanunoo and Sulod
as living typically in five or six household settlements, the Baler Negritos as moving about in
bands of ten families or so, and both the Bataks and Ilongots as living in groups of from five to
fifteen households.
Like all societies, these have three minimal needs for leadership in decision-making
situations—two in the ordinary course of events and a third when occasion arises. The first is
the settlement of personal disputes and the prevention or punishment of crimes to maintain the
internal security and unity of the group, and the second is the organization of economic
activities calling for a larger labor force than can be mustered by one family. The third is
dealing with outside groups when contacts require it.
Juridical decisions are made either by the eldest male in the group, or an old man whose
reputation for wisdom attracts disputants to his authority. He is generally a specialist in
customary law, but knowledge is not esoteric or limited to him: decisions are made publicly, in
conjunction with other wise elders, or actually in an informal council. The object of the
adjudication is to prevent rupture within the society, and successful settlement requires not only
the satisfaction of the plaintiff’s grievance but also the condemned’s acceptance of the decision,
inasmuch as the judges have no police powers. Penalties for theft and breaches of faith—
especially of marriage contracts—are restitution or indemnification in kind, but murder or
sexual offense may lead to individual retaliation by force, and incest is usually considered a
crime against the whole community and so requires commensurate penalization. Sanctions are
either supernatural or public pressure, with an extreme recalcitrant occasionally withdrawing
from the group to seek his living elsewhere.
Group activities such as hunting expeditions or the, building of fishtrap dams—or
raiding parties among those societies which mount them (for example, Ilongots do, Mangyans
do not) —are under the direction of the one or group who organizes them, although there may
be some carryover in leadership from one of the “chiefs” or elders mentioned above if they
happen to be qualified for this particular role. With this latter exception, such group leaders to
not retain any authority once the expedition is disbanded. But these group activities require
considerable leadership while they last, especially if they call for the complete mobilization of
the male population. Ilongot hunting expeditions with dogs or nets require coordinated division
of labor, and fish dams constructed by the Taubuid Mangyans of Occidental Mindoro involve
series of wood-framed earthworks two meters high in conjunction with 150-meter channels to
redirect the streams.
None of these societies have traditional means for dealing with aliens at a political level,
although the formalization of chieftaincy has been a frequent response to contact with more
powerful groups. The Batangan Mangyan ngulo “headman” often deals with representatives of
the Manila-based government in this capacity, and is nowadays expected to be brave, successful
in farming, and adept in sorcery, as well as wise. Their Mangyan neighbors of Bacu and Naujan
call such a leader amo or puno, and give him a special location near the door in the communal
dwelling which he shares with in-laws, and the Palawan Bataks early in this century actually
recognized a non-Batak as agalen, or protector and go-between. But the more common historic
response to this situation has been withdrawal either peacefully or with a vigorous enough
response to cost the aggressor some loss of life for his encroachment. Violence against outsiders
by those societies with more warlike traditions, however—such as the Ilongots who take heads
to attain full manhood, or Negrito groups who kill to fulfill mourning rites—calls forth only
temporary leadership and is conceived of as individual rather than communal action.
None of these societies have any concept of the ownership of real estate. The land itself
is the property of supernatural personalities whose permission must be ritually secured for safe
and fruitful use, and, similarly, wild forest products or game are either the possessions of, or
under the protection of, spirits whose prerogatives must be recognized by ritual or even token
payments in kind. The products of the land, however, are owned by those who grow them, and
may be alienated or loaned. Fish and game taken in group enterprises are divided equally among
the participants and their dependents, or according to an agreed schedule which recognizes
divisions of labor, risk, or leadership. Though all these societies are supported by subsistence
agriculture or no agriculture at all, there is considerable variation in their economic standards.
At the one extreme, forest-dwelling Negritos own no more possessions than can be carried on
their persons when following game or searching for new foodstuffs, while, at the other, swidden
farming Ilongots and Hanunoo Mangyans practice such integrated agricultural techniques that
they produce sufficient surplus for the accumulation of imported trade items like Chinese
porcelains and brass gongs which serve as heirloom wealth rather than as practical utensils.
Such wealth may lead, in turn, to such advantages as better marriage partners—i.e., more
productive ones—and among the Tiruray is exchanged in palavering sessions which provide the
arena for displaying that society’s most esteemed public skill. Yet it has not given rise to any
significant descent lines. Nor has another incipient potential for descent specialization among
the Batangan Mangyans, the inheritance of skills in sorcery, produced any class of petty
aristocracy. The same may be said of prominent leaders among the Sulod who have not
produced an aristocracy despite the deference shown their kind in special burial rites. This
overall lack of social stratification, taken together with a political development so stunted it
knows no techniques for pursuing or resisting territorial aggrandizement, suggests that these
societies developed in an environment of unlimited resources in land.

TYPE 2: WARRIOR SOCIETIES

Societies in the second category are characterized by a distinct warrior class, in which
membership is won by personal achievement, entails privilege, duty and prescribed norms of
conduct, and is requisite for community leadership. These “braves” are men who have won a
reputation for ferocity in battle—or, more accurately, for the number of lives they have taken in
battle or elsewhere—and are recognizable by distinctive costume or tattoos. The Manobo of
Agusan and Cotabato, the Mandaya, Bagobo and Tagakaolo of Davao, and the Bilaan of the
Davao-Cotabato border region call them bagani or magani, while the Isnegs and Kalingas of
northern Luzon call, them mengal or maingel. Some of these groups’ neighbors appear to have
belonged to this category, too, before external military force “tamed” their warriors and
replaced them with political appointees who could be held responsible for the collection of
tribute or taxes and the control of resistance to imposed authority. Typical are the Subanon
whose timuway elders have been cast in this role at various times by Boholano, Moro, Spanish,
and American overlords during the past four centuries as their warrior chiefs disappeared, or the
Bukidnon of the province of that name who are still undergoing such a process. The Kulaman of
South Cotabato nowadays recognize not only civil leaders called datus but chief datus and even
a sultan with a rajah muda heir to the succession. So, too, the Bilaan now consider their fulong
leaders datus, and a bong fulong, a presiding datu. And among the Tinguians of Abra adjoining
the Kalinga and Isnegs, the only political title recognized in 1900 after three centuries of
sporadic colonial jurisdiction was a village headman called lakay—who, however, was typically
elected by a group of prominent men who were themselves maingel braves.
The major occasion for exercising military skill among these societies is during raids
called mangayaw into unallied territory, but individual attacks are made by stealth or as
opportunity presents itself, including suicidal one-man forays. Captives or heads may be taken
in these raids, or occasionally booty, but not territory. Individual incentive for organizing,
leading or participating in such raids is desire to avenge an affront to personal or family honor,
to fulfill mourning requirements or placate blood-thirsting deities or spirits threatening death
through illness, to relieve the pain of intense bereavement, or simply to achieve personal
prominence or mercenary reward. In many of these societies, such behavior is undergirded by a
specific metaphysical basis. The Bagobo pantheon includes a sky deity called Mandarangan
who requires human blood and wreaks vengeance through natural catastrophes like drought if
neglected, and the bagani constitute an exclusive and qualified priesthood for his service. Full-
fledged Mandaya and Manobo warriors go into action under spirit possession by their individual
warrior deities and behave with berserking frenzy at the moment of kill, while Tinguian braves
in the grip of battle used to lap up the blood dripping from severed heads held aloft. And in
northern Kalinga, the sangasang shrine on the village outskirts is the haunt of guardian spirits
who need to be fed periodically with human heads.
Since all unallied persons are potential victims for warrior chiefs, public and personal
safety requires considerable vigilance, and travel for economic pursuits or actual trade is done
under military escort. To facilitate the importation of such necessities as salt or luxuries as
brass, trading partnerships or peace pacts are established to guarantee safe conduct, especially
of aliens from nonwarrior societies, with individual braves ritually undertaking such
responsibility. In Kalinga this system has developed into a network of bilateral non-aggression
pacts called bodong between any one village and all others, each held by a pair of pact-holders
who personally guarantee the reception, security, and fair treatment of their partners’ people—
or revenge of their deaths.
Warrior chiefs carry weight in group decisions but membership in their class does not
guarantee a position of community leadership. Real leadership requires the additional
qualifications of skill in arbitrating disputes and sufficient wealth to feast visitors and succor
dependents in time of need. There are terms to distinguish wise legalists or respected family
founders—like Bagobo pandi and matanom or Kalinga—mangitudtuchu—but no title for a
village headman or clan chief, even in the case of uncontested individual dominance. Nor do
these chiefs, individually or collectively, exercise any more influence beyond their own
communities than a reputation for ferocity in battle. The baganis recognize several grades of
achievement among themselves with distinctive costume variations, and a top-grade warrior
chief attracts to himself a following of lesser chiefs, as well as a kind of cadet corps; and among
the Mandaya, these constitute a brotherhood competent to accept or reject aspirants technically
eligible for membership, and collectively make political decisions for the community. In
Mindanao, the typical settlement pattern is a cluster of from three to six houses, sometimes
stockaded or built in trees for defense, around the larger house of a chief to whom lesser braves
have attached themselves. No such formal attachments are found in northern Luzon, but the
presence of warrior chiefs is considered essential to the safety of any kin settlement. In Kalinga,
the dominant leader in such a group will be the full-fledged leader, or pangat, rather than
simply the maingel brave.
Legal cases are argued before a judge or judges acceptable to both litigants, or their
assembled relatives as a jury, in public drinkfests which constitute the major—and in some
cases the only—occasion for community self-identification, and their cost is ultimately borne by
the loser. The family of each litigant musters the most eloquent advocates available to it and
backs them with an intimidating array of braves. Decisions are made by the fine adjustment of
general principles of custom law to the comparative social standing of the contending parties,
such status arising from their total warrior strength and heirloom wealth. Penalties are fines,
wergeld, or death, and are exacted if necessary by braves acting out of kin loyalty, appointment
by the “court,” or for hire. The immediate object of the settlement is to prevent either party from
resorting to the lex talionis for satisfaction.
All societies with warrior chiefs live by swidden farming, although the Kalingas have
adopted terraced pond-fields in the recent past. Braves clear their own fields like everybody
else—for which reason mangayaw raids tend to be seasonal—except among the Mandaya where
baganis live exclusively off the tribute of their dependents and so qualify as a sort of “parasite
class.” Agricultural surplus is produced by increasing labor force through polygyny, progeny,
sons-in-law, dependents by blood or debt, or slaves. The heirloom wealth necessary for high
social status consists of imports like porcelain, brassware and beads, or local manufactures like
weapons and goldwork. It is accumulated mainly through brideprice, wergeld and legal fees,
and is thus more likely to be the result of personal power than the cause. However, such
substance enables the rising bagani to select low-status victims whose wergeld he can afford, or
the Kalinga maingel to let his son practice by wounding such a person in his own community,
and thus favors the rise of an aristocracy.
In Mindanao, slaves are taken in mangayaw raids, women and children for labor, men
for sale to external slave markets, and the handicapped for sacrificial victims, and they
constitute a monetary unit of exchange in calculating wergeld or brideprice. The warrior
societies of northern Luzon, on the other hand, have no living memory of slave-raiding,
although Spanish records indicate that Isnegs formerly did. What may be a vestige is the
Kalinga bobbonan, “those you can order around,” or poyong, an individual who may be an
incompetent introduced into a household through misfortune, suasion or force, but who may
also be a competent adult who volunteers for such attachment because of insufficient family
connections for personal safety or economic security.
The introduction of terraced wet-rice technology among both the Tinguians and the
Kalingas has contributed to the eclipse of the warrior chiefs, and in southern Kalinga has
produced a propertied class called by the Cordillera and Ilocano terms for the “wealthy”—
kadangyan and baknang, respectively. Moreover, in the Tanudan valley of Kalinga, specialized
grades are developing within this class based on the possession of both heirloom wealth and
terraced fields.

TYPE 3: PETTY PLUTOCRACIES

Societies in the third category are called “plutocracies” because they are dominated
socially and politically by a recognized class of rich men who attain membership through
birthright, property, and the performance of specified ceremonies; and “petty” because their
authority is localized, being extended by neither absentee landlordism nor territorial
subjugation: These societies are found only on the Cordillera Central of northern Luzon, and the
wealthy class is called kadangyan in the Ifugao, Bontoc, and Kankanay languages, and baknang
in Ibaloy. Qualifications are both ascribed and acquired—inherited wealth from either parent in
the form of real property, and a public prestige feast, or graded series of feasts, in which the
butchering of animals feeds and indebts the whole community. The kadangyan is entitled to
distinctive patterns in dress and required to marry and bury in prescribed extravagant fashion,
and marries within his class. To exercise leadership and maintain status, the kadangyan must
revalidate his membership with periodic prestige feasts, and public prominence requires the
display of heirloom wealth (gongs, beads, and porcelain) and the tattoos of a headtaking
veteran. Community decisions are made by kadangyan peers acting either collectively in
council or competitively as individuals. Qualifying property must be inherited terraced rice
fields for kadangyan status, though agricultural land may be less important for baknang status
in the Benguet gold fields than access to mineral rights or acquired wealth like cattle.
It might be mentioned that the Kalinga neighbors of the Bontocs and Ifugaos also farm
irrigated rice terraces and reckon real property as a qualification for leadership and prestige, but
have no ritually sanctioned kadangyan class. Moreover, inherited property is not enough: to be
really respected, a Kalinga must add to his inheritance by his own efforts.
Real estate may be increased by construction of new terraces, foreclosure of mortgages,
indemnification for torts or breach of contract, or, occasionally, outright purchase. Acquired
land, however, does not qualify as a basis for kadangyan status until passed from one generation
to another. Fields are held in usufruct by individuals descended from the original builder, and
require periodic chicken sacrifices which establish a metaphysical sanction against alienation
outside the descent line. Fields are frequently mortgaged, and occasionally sold, to meet such
crisis expenses as crop failure, illness, accident, or funerals, and in Ifugao and Benguet, at least,
profits from such transactions provide the capital for a usury with high interest rates and
inheritable debts which produce dependence or bondage. Animals provided for community
sacrifice in times of public need, moreover, are everywhere repaid by communal labor whose
value exceeds the price of the animal.
These petty plutocracies occupy the most precipitous terrain farmed in the archipelago,
and the availability of water sets limits to the number of terraced fields that can be built. The
produce of such fields must be supplemented by root crops grown in swiddens, which do not
constitute a basis for kadangyan heritage. Swidden land left fallow may theoretically be
reopened by any descendant of the first person to clear it, though the unwieldy size of bilateral
kin groups sometimes leads to restricting or rotating it to one particular family. In practice, such
land is used by any person who wishes to work it unless one of the claimants invokes prior
right. Forests and woodlands are public property, though restricted to certain communities. Rice
is the preferred staple of diet, and a fair index of economic and social standing is the
comparative percentage of rice and root crops consumed, those at the top of scale leaving
granaries full of rice to their heirs, those at the bottom tasting it only during ritual or prestige
feasts. Kadangyans thus enjoy a better diet, but they have more fields to work and livestock to
tend and so do not constitute a leisured class.
Small landholders who have not attained kadangyan status but might reasonably
entertain such hopes are called by terms conveniently translated as “poor” —e.g., Ibaloy abitog,
Kankanay kodo, or Bontoc kokitak—but the fact that they live under constant threats of
economic reversal is reflected in the Ifugao terms namatuk or mabitil, “those who may hunger.”
They might also be described as economic competitors whose progress can be measured by the
number and quality of rites de passage, healing sacrifices, and welfare feasts they have
performed. Those who are literally propertyless, and therefore doomed to non-competition, are
called nawatwat in Ifugao, the “disinherited” or “passed by.” The catastrophic nature of such
penury is expressed in almost moral terms in Bontoc lawalawa (from lawa, “bad”)—perhaps
“cursed” or “despicable.” Such persons may be debt peons but there is no class of chattel slaves
except in Benguet where purchased or captured slaves—baga-en—used to be employed for
mine labor. External economic contacts have also given rise to new terms, such as the Ilocano
baknang for salaried or stockholding nouveau riche of non-kadangyan lineage, or northern
Kankanay komidwa, literally, “second-class” property holders.
These petty plutocracies display considerable descent line specialization, only some of
which is attributable to migrations or intermarriage. Not only do all kadangyans inherit specific
privileges and ritual requirements as a class, but among them those who complete more or less
of a lifetime cycle of graded ceremonies found lineages of greater or less prestige. Individuals
of some descent lines may be required to perform sacrifices in a special manner—for example,
by butchering a larger number of animals—while some fields or sacred sites receive sacrifices
which can only be offered by heirs of a particular lineage. And there are community agricultural
rites which require priests or priestesses descended from a successful predecessor, of their kind.
There are thus alternate styles of performing given wedding or funeral rites, and for selecting
burial sites, which reflect status.
Terraced rice fields are small, scattered, and difficult of access, so efficient use requires
pooled labor with gangs based on consanguinity or residence working each family’s holdings in
turn. Up to a certain limit, no adjustment is made for overall size, so larger landholders may
receive a disproportionate share of the total community labor. The basic principle in water
rights is that older fields take precedence over newer, and new fields should not be constructed
higher than old ones on the same water source. In Bontoc, control of water may be exercised by
irrigation societies which in some places construct canals and flumes, dam and divert streams,
and occasionally drill tunnels, but in Ifugao a group of farmers hire a kind of sheriff for this
duty. All agricultural activities are scheduled to a mandatory ritual calendar, with some fields
enjoying special rights or precedence. In Ifugao, the right to plant and harvest before others is
vested in a kind of village representative—the tumona, “one who goes first,” or the manungaw
ritual rice chief who declares the dates of the cycle. Either of these therefore enjoys enough
manipulative authority to qualify more nearly as a political officer than any other role
recognized among Cordillera cultures.
These terrace-based societies support populations distributed in communities of 800 to
2,000 persons, but settlement patterns differ greatly. In Ifugao, five to ten houses are a typical
concentration of adjoining houseyards, though they are usually within sight of several other
such clusters and may be within earshot of 100 more distant neighbors. In Bontoc, on the other
hand, communities of similar size are so compact that most houseyards are contiguous, and so
urban they are divided into political wards of from ten to fifteen households with ritual and
judicial ward centers called ator (or dap-ay in Kankanay). Benguet settlement patterns fall
between these two extremes, tending to be more atomized the farther they are from river banks.
None of these settlements or house clusters, however, have any designated chief or headman.
Communal decisions are made, directly or ultimately, by the cumulative power of the
plutocrats, but the methods vary as much as the settlement patterns do. In Ifugao they are made
in debates which pit individual personalities against one another, but in Bontoc and Benguet in
councils of old men called amam-a or dallakay. Such Bontoc councils are held in the various
ward centers where, although powerful personalities exert more influence than others, a
consciously egalitarian concept moves peers to curb the self-interest of the more powerful
among them. In Benguet, such gatherings—called tongtong—are invoked only for specific
cases and are not only dominated by the leading plutocrats but restricted to them. So, too, in
settling disputes and trying crimes, Ifugao and Bontoc procedures differ: Ifugao litigants depend
on virtuoso go-betweens called munkalon, a role of high social esteem, while Bontoc cases are
heard in ator assemblies of elders where personal or kin interests are theoretically subordinated
to the common weal. Responsibility for the exaction of legal penalties in Ifugao lies with the
victor’s kin, but police power is exerted in Bontoc by group pressure and threat of withholding
ward cooperation. Ator wards may themselves perform some of the same functions as
individuals—e.g., bring suit against one another, hold peacepacts with another community, and
act as war-making units for mangayaw headtaking revenge. Moreover, the Bontoc ator system
appears to set standards of village solidarity and limits to individual leadership which are
unique among the unhispanized societies examined in this paper.

TYPE 4: PRINCIPALITIES
Societies in the fourth category are dominated by a recognized aristocracy with
birthright claim to allegiance from followers, which produces local overlords with individual
political titles who, in turn, recognize the birthright claim of one among them to allegiance from
all the others of their class. They thus constitute, in theory or in fact, principalities with more or
less centralized political organizations—or even royal states, considering the fact that their
rulers must be direct descendants of other such rulers—and their sovereignty has frequently
received international recognition in the past. The central authority in each is competent to
create titled offices and appoint supervisory subordinates, and the aristocracy which supports it
occupies the upper levels of a social continuum of client-patron relationships which descends to
disfranchised debtors and unenfranchised slaves, as well as tribute-paying subjects of varying
status in other language groups. All societies in this category profess Islam—for which reason
they were called moros in Spanish—and are found only in the Sulu Archipelago, the flood plain
of the Pulangi River valley, the Lanao lake region between Illana and Iligan Bays, and a few
outlying islands like Cagayan de Sulu.
The aristocracy is called the datu class, and its members are presumably the descendants
of the first settlers on the land or, in the case of later arrivals, of those who were datus at the
time of migration or conquest. In any given locality, one among them, usually the senior, is the
political head of a community composed of his immediate family and relatives, dependents, and
slaves. Such an office of datuship, as distinct from mere membership in the class, imparts
authority but not power. The datu’s power stems from the willingness of his followers to render
him respect and material and moral support, to accept and implement his decisions, and to obey
and enforce his orders, and is limited by the consensus of his peers. Followers give their support
in response to his ability and willingness to use his power on their behalf, to make material gifts
or loans in time of crisis, and to provide legal or police protection and support against
opponents. The datu’s most frequent service is juridical—to resolve petty differences without
violence, to render amicable-settlement decisions without recourse to formal courts that
administer Islamic or customary law, or to augment his followers’ military capacity to exact
satisfaction from offenders in other communities. Failure to discharge such duties may result in
the quiet withdrawal of cooperation and support, so that autocratic behavior on the part of any
datu is the result rather than the cause of subservience on the part of others.
The community’s land is inherited and held in usufruct by individuals, but the datu has
ultimate right of disposition and may invoke it in case of disputes or significant demographic or
ecological change. The land itself may be encumbered but not alienated—that is, may not be
removed from the community’s use—and the practice of some datus in the twentieth century to
sell parcels outright, in good faith or in bad, has occasioned considerable bloodshed. The datu
receives more or less material support from his community—a portion of crops, payments for
tenancy or share-cropping, labor service, or most importantly, unscheduled contributions for
prestige feasts, the costs of hospitality required for public functions, or an enterprise which
affects the whole community. The fact that land use payments tend to be fixed rather than
proportional to productivity illustrates the concept that control is exercised over persons not real
estate. The datu, in turn, is expected to succor his followers in time of financial emergency, and
to provide both material and military aid in time of danger. If the produce of his community is
limited, his economic role is one of redistributing wealth rather than accumulating it, but if he
has access to greater surplus, he and his family are freed from productive labor, and he can
devote his full energies to business, adjudicating, and politicking, and use his capital to
participate in maritime trade as merchant, raider, entrepreneur, or investor.
The political role of a datu may extend beyond his own community, in which case his
power stems from client-patron relations with other datus, and his authority from an individual
political title assumed curing an inaugural prestige feast. Ideally, such titles should be inherited
and have been bestowed originally by a superior in the political hierarchy, preferably the
paramount ruler of a royal state, but in practice they are often created on the initiative of a datu
who can muster the necessary support to make the title functional. The word datu itself may be
used as such a title, but generally titles are of extra-Philippine linguistic origin. They may be
merely ceremonial or actually reflect an historic office such as Rajah Muda (“young ruler” or
heir apparent), Kapitan Laut (“sea lord” or admiral), or Panglima (“one of the five,” a sort of
chief minister with viceregal authority). Most prestigious among them are the native term datu,
rajah (Hindu), and sultan (Arabic), and this latter is invariably held by the royal incumbent of
those principalities with most centralized governments—e.g., the Sultanates of Sulu and
Maguindanao. But all such titled overlords exert their authority over their supporting lesser
lords rather than over the populace which may technically be subject to them. So, too, their
claim to territory occupied by their supporting datus, as distinguished from alien or unoccupied
land, is made effective by these datus.
Supernatural sanction is given the royalty of these states by the traditional Islamic
concept that a ruler of Muslims must be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad—a sharif, that
is. The requisite Arab genes were introduced by two fifteenth century sharifs who married one
or more of the daughters of local datus, their offspring thereby inheriting rights to the land
occupied by their maternal grandfather’s followers. In the comparatively centralized Sultanate
of Sulu, this royal line went largely uncontested except for intradynastic competition, but in less
centralized Maguindanao, cooperation was often begrudging on the part of other specialized
descent lines—those originating from the sharif’s companions or peers, for example, or his first
official appointees, and even a lineage of local rulers with claims to descent from a third sharif
otherwise unknown. Moreover, the practice of polygyny and the inheritance patterns of a
bilateral kinship system have produced whole societies in which even humble citizens can claim
technical descent from a sharif. Thus among the Maranao, a loose confederation of
principalities sharing a common language and culture boasts such a high proportion of datus
around Lake Lanao that their overlapping and interlocking client-patron relationships have
effectively forestalled the emergence of a centralized state.
A reigning sultan has de jure right to collect taxes, tariffs, and a variety of fees, dispose
of property and delegate authority, and appoint a considerable roster of judges, ministers, and
administrative assistants. He holds court, renders justice in response to appeals, and is
advised—and sometimes inhibited—by a state council. He maintains a personal bodyguard and
the loyalty of a corps of datu warriors, but does not enjoy the monopoly on the means of
violence which is characteristic of the modern nation-state. On the contrary, military power is
widely diffused, and the skills and attitudes essential to mercantile or piratical expeditions by
sea, and mangayaw slave raids, are still available for the settlement of disputes involving
personal or family honor. Certain offences so strictly require physical retaliation that to submit
them to legal arbitration or settlement by fine or wergeld is to advertise a socially debilitating
lack of virility. In times of civil war involving armies, battles may actually be joined in response
to sexual crimes committed by members of invading forces.
Enfranchised members of the community who are not datus are called sakop. Like datus,
they have the right to use land, to make and unmake client-patron relations, and to enter into
ritual brotherhoods or feuding alliances with their peers. Unlike datus, however, they cannot
ordinarily hold titles. Sakop means “follower” or “vassal in Maranao and Maguindanao, but the
Taosugs of Sulu distinguish this datu-sakop dichotomy with the more prosaic expressions
bangsa mataas, “high birthright,” and tau way bangsa, “people without birthright.” Performing
the functions of vassal, of course, requires a certain economic viability, and those who lose it
also lose status and may become temporarily or permanently disfranchised. A man in such
straits may voluntarily enter into bondage—what the Maranao call kakatamokan—or be
involuntarily condemned to debt peonage or indentured servitude by legal action, and become
what the Maguindanao call ulipon and the Taosug kiapangdihilan. In addition to such
enfranchised and disfranchised members of the community, there are two distinct sorts of un-
enfranchised persons—captive or chattel slaves (banyaga or bisaya), and an outcaste non-
Muslim boat people called Badjaw by outsiders, who act as fishermen-clients to Sulu patrons
but retain a precarious freedom to shift allegiance simply by sailing away in the middle of the
night. Membership in all these “classes” can be inherited.
These class rankings are important in calculating wergeld and brideprice, but are less
useful for understanding the social structure of daily life because they disguise the dominating
man-to-man relationships which determine an individual’s actual social condition. Unlike the
bagani “killer,” maingel “brave,” or kadangyan “richman,” the class terms current in these
principalities reveal interpersonal political relations. The banyaga is not a slave in the abstract:
he is owned by a particular person; and the debt peon is not in debt in general: he is in debt to a
particular creditor—a creditor, in fact, who is expected to protect him against other creditors.
The sakop is the vassal not of the datu class but of his own datu, and datus themselves—
“rulers,” that is—do not rule geographic domains but bodies of individual followers. Even the
chief datu of them all, the sultan, exerts his authority not over a realm but over his datu
supporters, some of whom may in fact be neither Muslim nor even members of his society.
Everybody, in short, is somebody else’s man, and the Maranao articulate the fact semantically
by distinguishing the pegawid “supporters” from the pegawidan “supported.” The fact that these
classes constitute a continuum is reflected in such a high degree of social mobility that the
former slave population has been largely absorbed during the present century. The socially
disapproved but not infrequent practice of procreating across class lines combines with bilateral
descent claims to produce status refinement every time it occurs. For this reason the
determination of brideprice in the upper ranks of society is both complex and weighty; and
because a man can easily slip from one status to another, he defends that status to the death and
avenges any threat to it with violence.

CONCLUSION
Class structures in the unhispanized Philippines range from societies which distinguish
no classes at all to those which distinguish either economic or political classes. This variety can
conveniently be described in four general categories according to indigenous terminologies,
enumerated in ascending order of class differentiation as follows: (1) those which distinguish no
class differences at all, (2) those which distinguish a warrior elite, (3) those which distinguish
the wealthy, and (4) those which distinguish a literal ruling class.
It is obvious that the two extremes of this sequence reflect economic or ecological
variations as well as social or political specialization. Those Negritos who almost literally own
nothing and scavenge for their daily food not surprisingly have neither economic classes nor
political organization; and, no more surprisingly, the Sultanate of Sulu is dependent upon a
class structure which makes possible the exploitation of that commerce whose profits maintain
the structure. With these two extremes in mind, the four types of class structure may be
reviewed.
CLASSLESS SOCIETIES

These societies produce little or no surplus from their environment. Some live by
gathering forest products, some by hunting and gathering, some by exchanging game or forest
products for foodstuffs; others live by combined hunting, gathering, and limited cultivation, and
still others by such integrated swidden farming, hunting, fishing, and sale of forest products that
they can afford manufactured imports like brassware and porcelain. Most do not make war—
indeed, the Tiruray and Mangyan are among the few Filipino cultures with no weaponry,
memories of military valor, or warrior traditions. Yet the Batak of Palawan once had such a
reputation for bravery they were spared Moro slave raids, many Negrito groups commit
homicide as a mourning rite, and the Ilongot have remained the most notorious headtakers in the
archipelago. Two economic comments may be made about these war-making groups—first,
they do not share the same level of economic development (e.g., the Ilongots produce much
more than Negritos, but about the same as Mangyans or Tiruray), and, second, they practice no
coup-counting which might produce a warrior elite.
WARRIOR SOCIETIES

Although economic data are unavailable for assessing overall productivity, empirical
observations suggest that warrior societies generally possess more imported trade items as
heirloom wealth than any of the societies of type 1, and those in Mindanao have rich traditions
of metallurgy and weaving unequaled in the classless societies. Their languages distinguish a
class of warrior elite—not a warrior class among nonwarriors, but a class of superior warriors in
a society where all males are expected to be warriors. How much economic advantage accrues
to this class is not clear except in the case of the Mandaya whose bagani warrior chiefs are
known to live off tribute from lesser warriors—or nonwarriors. Yet, like the Negrito food-
gatherers or Mangyan agriculturalists of type 1 societies, these warriors do not own—that is,
inherit, mortgage, exchange, alienate, or bequeath—real property. The criterion for placing the
Ilongot in type 1 and the not dissimilar Isneg in type 2 is not economic development, but the
existence among the latter of a class term, maingel, which distinguishes a category of men with
shared status, privilege, and responsibility in the community.
PETTY PLUTOCRACIES

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that type 3 societies are former warrior societies
whose intensive farming of irrigated terraces has produced a land-owning and -inheriting class
which takes precedence over military veterans—and which must rank as one of the most sharply
defined classes in ethnographic literature. The full-fledged kadangyan must not only be of
kadangyan lineage but he acquires his personal rank in a ceremony as specific as ordination to
the priesthood or receiving a doctorate. These societies produce more food, support larger
populations, and exhibit greater economic gaps than either the classless or warrior societies.
Their landed elite exploit the labor of dependents and debtors, but are not a leisured class
inasmuch as they work part of their own fields, often alongside actual debt peons. Despite a
common class structure, type 3 societies differ considerably. The Ifugao upper class are kin-
oriented, usurious, and competitive, while their Bontoc counterparts’ individualism and self-
aggrandizement are curbed by ideals and sanctions of village or ward solidarity. Benguet elite,
on the other hand, are actual capitalists dealing in gold and cattle, are not dependent upon rice
land, and have long since given up such warrior insignia as tattoos or human trophies. And if
the assumption is correct that type 3 societies developed out of type 2, the Kalinga would
illustrate a transitional stage—terrace-building warriors among whom a land-based kadangyan
class is rapidly developing.
PRINCIPALITIES

The economic base of the type 4 societies is much broader than that of type 3, for, in
addition to practicing sedentary agriculture, they have upper classes that engage in more or less
maritime trade, and enjoy a certain amount of slave labor. Yet their elite are literally defined as
a ruling class, for datu is the root of the verb, “to rule.” Appropriately, all other classes are
defined in political rather than economic terms, too—supporter, vassal, slave, etc.—in contrast
to the nonelite of the petty plutocracies who are simply called “poor.” Moreover, the
principalities are constituted as states with centralized, or centralizing, governments. It is this
class structure which provides the socioeconomic specialization necessary to exploit both
domestic and, foreign commerce. Or, to put it the other way around, it is this commerce which
provides the profits by which the ruling class maintains the society’s class structure. Thus, that
principality with the most extensive international trade, the Sultanate of Sulu, is not only the
most centralized state but its Taosug hegemony provides the only example in Philippine history
of all members, of one language group recognizing one ruler. Similarly, that society with the
least extended commerce, the Maranao of Lake Lanao, have never achieved a centralized
government, but rather produced a creative array of political offices and competing titles. Such
political class structures sharply set type 4 societies off from type 1, 2, and 3, not only in having
central authorities and politically defined classes, but simply in having political offices in the
first place. For neither the classless and warrior societies nor the petty plutocracies have any
recognized political titles or offices at all. A Moro can speak of “my datu” but no Bontoc or
Ifugao says “my kadangyan.” When a Cordillera plutocrat gives his inaugural prestige feast, he
becomes one more kadangyan, but when a Maranao mounts the same social display, he
becomes the one and only Sultan sa Lambayanagi or Datu sa Marawi, etc.
It is to be noted, however, that all the warrior societies of Mindanao have developed or
received centralized datu-like offices in the past century. These were usually imposed or
inspired by Moro states for purpose of tribute or trade, a process which has left mixed memories
in those societies which effectively internalized them. The Ulahingan epics of the Cotabato
Manobo frequently celebrate some tribal flight from Moro tyranny, but modern savants recall
their ancestors’ vassal offices with pride and refer to tribute to some rajah as fond gifts. And the
process continued into the twentieth century—and, indeed, is continuing still. The Suyan Bilaan
above Sarangani Bay were “organized” in 1917 by a Bicolano adventurer with contacts in the
local constabulary, and the Bukidnon, who distinguish “high datus” from ordinary ones,
actually founded a “Bukidnon Tribe Datu Association” in 1960. But the production of such
offices has not been the inevitable result of Moro influence or overlordship. The Tagbanua of
Aborlan, Palawan, for example, have developed so distinctive a social structure it cannot be
fitted into any of the four categories. This is a class-conscious system obsessed with the
dominance of “high bloods” over “low bloods” and a full roster of Moro titles like Laksamana,
Panglima, Urang Kaya, and even Saribung-sawan (i.e., Sarip Kabungsuwan) but with no
political power—something presumably supplied from outside.
The warrior societies of northern Luzon, on the other hand, have produced no such datu-
like leaders—perhaps for want of a Moro example. A few Kalinga pangat were set up early in
this century by American governors as local deputies, but the institution was not absorbed into
that warrior society’s class structure—a fact made manifest today by the present government’s
inability to locate indigenous loci of power that might be co-opted to advance national interests
like dam-building in the Chico River valley. In Benguet at the turn of the century, however, a
few baknang had become virtual manorial lords replete with baga-en slaves, silbi serfs, and
pastol cowhands, and it was probably their availability as political leaders which moved the
American occupation forces to establish the colony’s first civil government in Benguet.
Otherwise, the complete lack of political offices among type 3 societies must come as a
disappointment to the social scientist since these societies are obviously more advanced than the
swidden-farming warrior societies—in terms of economic development, the emergence of a
landowning elite, and the construction of monolithic terrace systems. Perhaps the ability of
these petty plutocrats to carve up whole mountainsides into terraces, plant them to rice in
accordance with a strict communal calendar, and allocate and control water rights without the
least tribal chief, datu, or central authority, may profitably serve as a warning against simplistic
theories of the emergence of class structure and political organization.
 An Ilocano-Igorot Peacepact of 1820
Translated by John Flameygh, CICM, and W. H. Scott

Introduction
In the 1960’s the Rev. Henri Geeroms, CICM, discovered an eight-page Ilocano manuscript
bound into the back of the unpaginated Libro de Casamientos de este Convento de Tagudin,
Ano de 1734 y Bautismos of St. Augustine’s Church, Tagudin, La Union, with a Spanish
superscription which reads as follows:
1820. Pact made by the community of Capitanes Pasados and the principal Cabezas de
Barangay of the towns Bangar and Tagudin with the Igorots of Bacong, Kayan and
Cagubatan and other settlements of the Igorots who pay recognition fees to the King, our
Lord (whom God keep), officially witnessed by the Gobernadorcillos of the said towns,
Don Agustin de Valencia and Don Simon de los Reyes.
The document is in fact a peacepact entered into for the purpose of restoring the
highland-lowland trade which had been broken off three years before by the death of an Igorot
in Tagudin and the retaliatory killing of an Ilocano of Bangar. It is a valuable document for the
study of historic Igorot-Ilocano relations: its text indicates that it is based on even earlier
peacepacts, and its very existence suggests that the old men of Besao cited in James
Robertson’s 1914 “The Igorots of Lepanto” (Philippine Journal of Science, Vol. 9) were not
being fanciful when they said their ancestors had possessed a written pact with Candon and
Santa Lucia, I.S., in the time of Lepanto Military Governor Antonio Perea (1853-1856). It is
also a valuable document for the study of what is, after all, a very old and indigenous Filipino
institution.
Peacepacts are at least as old as written Philippine history. At the time of the Spanish
advent, there was no Filipino government strong enough to monopolize military or civil power,
and individual leaders made seasonal raids called mangayaw for purposes of vengeance, booty,
or slaves. Under these conditions, some means were necessary to permit the safe movement of
forest products to the coastal ports, and the import of such foreign products as Chinese
porcelains and their distribution throughout the archipelago by the tens of thousands afterwards.
The pacts which made such commerce possible were promptly extended to the Spanish
invaders. Those in which the first generation of conquistadores participated were actually non-
aggression pacts—unlike such western-style mutual aid treaties as Francisco de Atienza made
with the Sultan of Sulu in 1645 and 1646. Technically, these pacts served two different
purposes—to guarantee safe passage to strangers, as in the case of Legazpi’s pact with Si
Katuna of Bohol in 1565, or to bring hostilities to an end, as in the case of Martin de Goiti and
Soliman in Manila in 1570—differences which are still formally distinguished in Bontoc
peacepacts today.
By the beginning of the 17th century, the Spaniards considered the legitimacy of their
occupation of the archipelago an accepted fact and so no longer recognized any Filipino bodies
as competent to make such pacts. In frontier areas where such legitimacy was not recognized by
independent Filipinos, however, the institution continued, and hard-pressed military
commanders and lonely missionary friars regularly made use of them during the 17th and 18th
centuries. By the 19th century, these unsubjugated areas began to loom large in Spanish plans to
put the colony on a paying basis: they represented an untapped source of tribute and, especially
in northern Luzon, wrought havoc with the Tobacco Monopoly’s profits. It is against this
background that the Ilocano-Igorot peacepact of 1820 must be seen.
The Agustin Decdec of Kayan (Mountain Province) who figures as one of the chief
signatories of the pact, was an Igorot chieftain with pretensions to authority over 27 neighboring
communities (as his son Soliman and nephew Sakyod claimed in Malacanang in 1814), who
very possibly had a few drops of Spanish blood in his veins. (Judging from his name, his great-
grandfather Miguel Mestizo, who received the title of Maestro de Campo of Igorots in Vigan in
1700, appears to have been born and baptized during the short-lived Spanish occupation of
Kayan in 1667-1668 under the patronage of the Archangel Michael.) Back in Decdec’s youth,
the central government had neither the will nor the means to prevent the untaxed highland-
lowland commerce which involved most of the colony’s gold production. But by 1820,
Monopoly revenue agents were roaming the narrow Ilocos coastal plain, and Kayan itself had
been reported in 1811 as the major local source of contraband, what with its
“superabundantisimas siembras de tobaco.” Wise producers like Decdec therefore dutifully
paid the minimal “Recognition of vassalage” fees required of law-abiding pagans, and when
their traditional peacepact with their lowland customers and partners broke down in 1817, they
restored it by submitting to legal proceedings in the Spanish town hall. To these circumstances
we owe the production and preservation of the present document.
The word “peacepact” is nowadays most popularly associated with the name of the
Kalingas in northern Luzon, both because of anthropologist Roy Franklin Barton’s classic study
of their particular use of this institution, and because of their much publicized opposition to
government plans to build a series of hydroelectric dams in their territory. The traditional
Kalinga peacepact was instituted by two warrior leaders who guaranteed to enforce its terms by
their personal prowess, and is characterized by a series of reciprocal feasts between the two
parties in which grievances are arbitrated and valuable goods exchanged as gifts and
indemnities. Such a procedure also characterized the Apayao peacepacts in which Dominican
Fray Pedro Jimenez participated in the 1680’s, and it is probably such a pact-holder whom
Father Jose Tomas Marin refers to as a native Maestro de Campo in the same river valley in
1741. The actual stipulations agreed to during these palavering exchanges are defined in what
the Kalingas call the Pagta, and are nowadays committed to writing in Ilocano or English. The
final development of the Kalinga system occurred during the early 20th century under the
impetus of Lieutenant Governor Walter Franklin Hale who, to enhance American control of
local custom law, required every region to hold a peacepact with every other region. It is this
refinement which causes the modern Kalinga to believe—somewhat fondly, perhaps—that
peace, law, and order can be maintained throughout the sub-province by an interlocking
network of bilateral non-aggression pacts.
The modern Pagta, with its formal articles set down in writing, naturally invites
comparison with the 1820 peacepact. Kalinga peacepacts invariably state the names of the
covenanting parties, the boundaries of its jurisdiction, and a brief code of laws covering murder,
wounding, theft, hospitality, and sexual misconduct. It will immediately be noted that the 1820
pact satisfies all these requirements except the last—perhaps because Igorot-Ilocano relations
were strictly business. In particular, the stipulation that a thief shall restore twice the value of
the stolen goods is a standard Kalinga judgment, and the requirement that Igorot visitors to
Bangar and Tagudin must be received in the homes of the babaknang—literally, “the wealthy”
—would certainly meet Pagta hospitality standards. Moreover, in the matter of rhetoric, the
Bangar-Tagudin willingness to pay the indemnity while denying the guilt has a fine Kalinga
ring—though probably no Pagta would commit the obfuscation to writing so baldly. All in all,
therefore, it would seem that the 1820 document is an example of a stage of development in a
valid Filipino tradition which extends from modern Kalinga back to 1528 when Alvaro de
Saavedra first drew blood in Sarangani Bay with some Filipino chieftain whose name is lost to
history.
A Note on the Text and Translation. A few words in the Ilocano text are Spanish. We
have been unable to locate any meaning for bajar in Kakapitan Bajar, but the Spanish
superscription indicates that these Filipino officials were Gobernadorcillos. Likewise, the
Kakapitan ti Barangay of the text are shown to be Cabezas de Barangay. Picota, technically “a
pillar or column of store or masonry they had at the entrance to certain places where the heads
of the executed and condemned were exposed,” we have rendered more delicately as “whipping
post.” Extraviadores are literally those who lead astray, but other early 19th century documents
indicate that these were “shysters” or “embezzlers” such as lowland traders who mulcted
ignorant mountaineer customers, so we have translated, “unlicensed peddlers.” The
proscriptions which employ these terms, incidentally—25 lashes for receiving a visitor and a
thirty-peso fine for harboring “apostate Christians,” that is, lowlanders who take to the hills—
reflects a government reaction to the Filipinos’ constant attempts to escape the stern hand of
colonial law and order.
The Ilocano of the text is understandably archaic, and sometimes confused. It is recorded
in an orthography which appears quaint to the modern eye, and proceeds for four pages in one
almost unbroken sentence—as equivalent Spanish documents of the period also do. The
signatures occupy another four pages. Not including those of the certifying priests, there are 60
names, mostly of Spanish origin—e.g., Arzadun, Castro, Lopez, Villanueva—executed with the
grand flourishes the Spaniards call rubricas. The 18 Igorot names—such as Ayaon, Dagtayan,
Lumas-i, Sao-anan or Tilitil—all executed in the scribe’s penmanship, are listed under the
towns of Bacong, Batugan, Bulibay, Cagubatan, Ibato, Kayan, Lapang, Luconan, and Taba-ao.
We have modernized the Ilocano orthography and broken the text into paragraphs for
more convenient reading and to give the appearance of a modern legal document. The first two
paragraphs are given below in the original orthography, however, as a sample for those who
may be interested.
Dacami daguiti Cacapitan Bajar cadaguiti Yli ataguding quen Bangar, D. Agustin de
Valencia Then.tes maiores D. Fernando Bernave, quen D. Matheas Morales Mupez
Cacapitan pasados quen daddomapay a Babacnang, a Cap. ti Barang. y cadaguiti sinao
a`Yli, Agsipud iti ysacsaclang ti tribunal iti Yli a taguding, ni D. Agustin Decdec,
Panglacayan quet agturay cadaguiti Igorot a sacopna iti lugar amanagan Cay-ang,
Cagubatan, Bago, quen dadomapay Rancheros daguiti Padada a Ygorot, quet quinamet ti
Mtre de Campo iti Rancheria amanagan Lap-angan, ani D. Paad, tapinalaoagda
amaquisorotda iti naimbag a Aramid quen nalaing a Ornos amaipuon nagtuqueng ti
panaga allatio, agapo iti ipapatay ti maisa a Ygor.t ay Bago, ani Lambino, tanatay iti
lugar amanagan Ambalayat, a daya, quet lacam ti Yli ataguding idi taoen a sangarevo
ochogasut sangapolo quet Pito…
 Translation
WE, the Gabernadorcillos of the towns of Tagudin and Bangar, Don Simon de los
Reyes and Don Agustin de Valencia, Tenientes Mayores Don Fernando Bernabe and Don
Mathias Morales Lopez, the Capitanes Pasados, and several other prominent persons who are
the Cabezas de Barangay of the said towns:
WHEREAS, there have appeared in the courthouse of Tagudin Don Agustin Decdec,
elder and leader of the Igorots whose territory is in the places called Kayan, Cagubatan and
Bago, and several other Igorot farmers and also the Maestro de Campo of the settlement called
Lap-angan, Don Paad, to declare their willingness to accept just and lawful decision concerning
the suspension of free travel in these parts resulting from the death of one Lambino, Igorot of
Bago, who died in the place called Ambalayat, to the east of, but still within the jurisdiction of,
the town of Tagudin, in the year one thousand eight hundred and seventeen;
AND, WHEREAS, we, the two towns, similarly wish that the places which have been
violated should be exonerated, and the old customs be restored so that we can go to the places
of the Igorots, and they come to us;
THEREFORE, we, the two towns, have agreed to come to this place called Sagat, and
with us also, the Very Reverend Father Fray Francisco Hernandez, Prior and Missionary of the
town of Tagudin, because of his mercy and desire to institute good law and order among us, and
to prevent all quarrels with the Igorots.
There has been fighting because of the death of the said Lambino, and the Igorots
claim that he died of his wounds, but many of us from Tagudin attest that he died of a
sickness that befell him. And although we from Tagudin are grieved that they demand
Eighty Pesos as a consolation for the relatives of the deceased, we consent, in
consideration of our desire that the old custom of free travel without danger from the
Igorots be restored, to give the said Decdec and his companions the amount of Fifty
Pesos for the deceased, and an additional Thirty Pesos because they claim that this sum
belonging to the said Lambino was lost when he died. But this will not all be given in
cash, but some of it in textiles. It will be given to the said Decdec and Paad in the
presence of the said Very Reverend Father Prior, of us from Tagudin and Bangar, and of
the Igorots from Bacong and several other settlements of Igorots and new Christians.
And these things are given not as payment for the life and money of the deceased, but
because of our desire that the Igorots will come to our towns again so that they grow
accustomed to giving recognition to the King, our Lord (whom God bless), and, above
all, to accept our sacred Faith, and also so that they will not repeat any killing of us
Christians, as they did when they killed one of our townsmen from Bangar, Pedro
Lusano, with arms and by stealth, he haying been killed, in December of the year in
which Lambino died, in a place called Balingaong, which is Igorot territory but belongs
to the jurisdiction of Bangar. Thus they took their revenge on one from Bangar for one
who died in the territory of Tagudin. But even so, we wish to live in peace and accept
the institution of law and order.
AND, the said Decdec and Paad having received the money, and the Very Reverend
Father Prior Francisco Hernandez having witnessed and confirmed the agreement and peacepact
with the Igorots, he ordered that a Cross be erected here in this place called Sagat as a sign of
the boundary with the Igorots. We from Bangar shall be responsible for the territory south of the
[Amburayan] River, and to the east of us, the boundary of the Igorot territory shall begin in a
place called Godel, and, going south, follow the crest of the mountains, including the places
called Takima, Lolonga, and Balay Silet. West of this line shall be the jurisdiction of our town,
and the Igorots must take responsibility east of this line, and also east of the said Cross in the
territory north of the [Rio Chico] Creek. Those from Tagudin shall be responsible for the
territory north of the River eastward as far as the said Cross, including the places east of their
town. This is the boundary we have agreed to with the Igorots.
If someone should die because of wounds, we agree that only the place where it
happened shall be obliged to pay Fifty Pesos to the relatives of the deceased, as was
done according to the pacts and treaties of past years, but legal action shall be taken
against the place where the killing occurred without delay so that fighting not break out.
Likewise, with this pact we agree not to prevent the collection from the debtors of the
amount they owe.
We also agree that patrols shall be stationed in the place called Apadi, and that over
the River to the northeast, it shall be the duty of Tagudin to patrol, and below the River,
to the southwest, those from Bangar, so that thieves will be prevented from bringing
animals and other contraband upstream.
We, the two towns, will not receive [unregistered] visitors, and if there are any who
do, they shall be given 25 lashes at the whipping post, as is the custom. The Igorots
likewise promise that they will not let thieves stay in their places, or hide stolen animals
and other things of value there, and that if one is caught with such things, he shall be
fined twice the value of the stolen goods. And they also will not receive visitors in their
place, especially unlicensed peddlers, to the detriment of good law and order. The
Igorots, moreover, are ordered that, if any apostate Christians should be found in their
places, they must apprehend them at once, and that if, after due investigation, it is found
that they have permitted them to remain at large, they shall be fined Thirty Pesos.
We also agree that when the Igorots are in our towns they shall stay in the houses of
prominent people, and not in the houses of people who are not respected, so that their
stay will be safe and that they will not have their things stolen.
THIS PACT we have made in the presence of the said Father, and we request him, and
also our Very Reverend Father Prior of Bangar, Fray Manuel Gonzales, to make the documents
in five copies, two of which shall be taken by the two towns, by the two priests, and one shall be
given to the Igorots.
AND WE, the Gobernadorcillos, Tenientes Mayores, Capitanes Pasados, and the
several other prominent persons, all Cabezas de Barangay, sign it with our names, and the
witnesses who are our companions all verify it, this fourteenth day of January of the year one
thousand eight hundred and twenty.

Text
DAKAMI dagiti Kakapitan Bajar kadagiti ili a Tagunding ken Bangar, D. Simon de los
Reyes ken D. Agustin de Valencia Ten.tes mayores D. Fernando Bernabe, ken D. Matheas
Morales Lopez, Kakapitan pasados, ken dadduma pay a Babaknang, a Kap. ti Barang.y kadagiti
sinao a ili:
AGSIPUD iti isaksaklang ti tribunal iti ili a Tagudin ni D. Agustin Dekdek, panglakayen
ket agturay kadagiti Igorot a sakopna iti lugar a managan Kay-ang, Cagubatan, Bago, ken
dadduma pay a rancheros ken dagiti padada a Igorot; ket kina met ti Mstre. de Campo iti
rancheria a managan Lap-angan a ni Don Paad. Ta pinalawagda a makisurotda iti naimbag a
aramid ken nalaing a ornos a maipon nagtukeng ti panagallatiw a gape iti ipapatay ti maysa a
Igorot a Ibago, a ni Lambino; ta natay iti lugar a managan Ambalayat, a daya ken lak-am ti ili
a Tagudin, idi tawen a sangaribo, ocho gasut, sangapolo ket pito;
KET AGSIPUD iti padapadakami a dua a ili a agkalikagum a mangdalus kadagiti lugar
a natalawan, ken iti met pannakasubli ti damn a kadawyan a pannakabalinmi a mapan iti lugar
dagiti Igorot, ket kastada met kadagiti ilimi;
TIMPOYUGMI a dua a ili ti inmay ditoy lugar a managan Sagat. Ken itoy met MRP Fr.
Fran.co Hernandez, Prior ken Mstre. ti Doctrina iti ili a Tagudin, a gape iti kaasina ken ayatna
a mangisungsung kadakami iti nalaing a ornos, ken di pannakapalnuay dagiti addu a susik
kadagiti Igorot.
Iti pannakaaramid ti ringor iti ipapatay ni sinao a Lambino. Palawagen dagiti
Igorot a natay a gapu iti pannakasugatna. Ket addu met ti agdatag. kadakami a
Itaguding a natay a gapu to iti dimmateng a sakitna. Ket no pay naldaang ti nakenmi a
Itagudin iti panagdawat dagiti simaklang iti Walo Pulo a Pesus a pangliwliwa kadagiti
partes ti natay, ipoonmi iti ayatmi a maisubli ti daan a kadawyan a panagalallatiw nga
awan ti peggad kadakuada a Igorot, annurotenmi a yawat ken sinao a Dekdek ken
kaduana ti Lima Pulo a Pesos a biang ti natay, ken Tallo Pulo pay a Pesos, a palawagen
dagiti simaklang a napukaw a pirak ni sinao a Lambino idi ipapatayna. Ngem saan a
pasig a pirak-ab-abel ti daducma. Ket maaramid ti pannakayawatna kada sinao a
Dekdek ken Paad iti saklang ti sinao a MRP Prior, dakami a Itagudin ken Ibangar,
Igorot a Ibakong ken dadduma pay a rancherias dagiti Igorot ken bago a Cristianos.
Ngem dagiti a maited di maipoon iti pagbayad iti biag ken pirak ti natay, ngem gapu
laeng iti ayatmi a mangisungsung kadagiti Igorot iti yaaday kadagiti ilimi, tapno
ammoenda a anamongan ti Apo nga Hari (a Dios ti aluadna), ket nangrona ti Sto. a
Pammati, ken tapno dida surnadan ti mamapatay kadagiti a Cristiano. Nga kas iti liput
a naramidda, a panamapatayda iti kailianmi a Ibangar, a ni Pedro Lusano, to natay iti
armas iti lugar a managan Balingaong, a lak-am kadagiti Igorot a ipangutang, a lak-am
ti ili a Bangar idi bulan ti Diciembre idi tawen a ipapatay ni sinao a Lambino. Ta
imbalesda iti Ibangar ti natay iti lak-am ti ili a Tagudin. Ngem nupay kasta, agsaodkami
laeng iti natalna iti pannakisurot iti pannakaaramid ti nalaing a ornos ken, kapia.
KET ITI kalpasan ti pangawat da sinao a Dekdek ken Paad iti sinao a pirak, ket
mainatangan ket mapnekan unay iti sinao a MRP Prior Fr. Fran.co Hernandez ti nalaing a
pannakaaramid ti panagtimpuyogmi ken panagkakappiami kadagiti Igorot, imbilinna ti
pannakabangon ti maysa a Cruz ditoy lugar a managan Sagat, a tanda ti pagbebeddenganmi
kadagiti Igorot. Ket iti abagatan ti Karayan ti biangmi a Ebangar ti aywanan. Ket iti
pannipodanmi iti daya a pakibeddengan kadagiti Igorot iti lugar a managan Godel,
umabagatan dagiti panpantok dagiti banbantay, agtungpal kadagiti lugar a Takima. Lolonga
ken Balay Silet; ket iti laud dagitoy a lugar agtongpal iti ilimi, ket dagiti Igorot biangda met a
ayowan ti daya dagiti naipalawag a luglugar, ken daya met ti sinao a Cruz, nga umamianan iti
Karayan a Bassit. Ket dagiti Itaguding iti met bangar ti Karayan iti amianan a agpadaya a
agtungpal met iti sinao a Cruz, ken dagiti luglugar iti daya ti ilida. Ta dagitoy a
panagbebeddeng a nagpanugotanmi kadagiti Igorot.
No kas addanto mattay, anno maranggaran kadakami, a agtutulag idinto met laeng
akinlak-am ti rumbeng a mangted iti Lima Pulo a Pesos kadagiti partes ti matay, kas
naaramid kadagiti suplak ken tulag kadagiti napalabes a tawen. Ket maisagana met iti
justicia a akinlak-am ti pakatayan ti matay ti mangakop, tatapno awanto ti duadua,
anno susik a maaramid iti dina. pannakaimatang. Kasta met daytoy a tulag timpuyogmi
a di makatubeng, iti panagsingir kadagiti a mautang iti rebbengda a bayadan iti
nagpautang.
Kasta met a timpuyogmi a isaad dagiti rondas iti lugar a managan Apadi, ket iti
bangir ti Karayan, iti amianan a dumaya, biangmi a Itaguding; ket iti bangir ti Karayan
iti abagatan ken dumaya met, ti ayowanan dagiti Ibangar tatapno matubeng dagiti
mannanakaw a agissurong kadagiti animal ken dadduma pay a maiparit.
Ket awan met ti makabalin kadakami a dua a ili a mangisurong kadagiti
sangsangaili. Ket no addanto masarongkaran, masaplitto iti duapolo ket lima a
maisakab picota, a kadawyan. Ket inkari met dagiti Igorot a dida palas-uden kadagiti
lugarda dagiti mananakaw ken mataktakaw a animales ken dadduma pay a adda
pategna ta no addanto masukalan, dobliendanto a bayadan iti rebbeng a pateg ti
tinakaw. Ket didanto met palas-uden iti lugarda dagiti sangsangaili, ta mapadasan a
luttuadan ti makadadael iti nalaing a ornos. Ket nangrona kadagiti estraviadores, Ket
maibilin met kadagiti Igorot ta no addanto agpapaing a Cristiano iti ilida,
dagusendanto a baluden. Ket na baybay-anda, iti no vario a pakasukainan, madusanto
iti Tallo Pulo a Pesos.
Kasta met a tulagmi kadagiti Igorot nga iti kaaddadat ditoy ilimi, agdagusda iti
balay dagiti babaknang, ket dida agdagus kadagiti kakailian a di gawgawayen dagiti
tao, tatapno maispal dagiti pagdagusanda iti dida pannakarangranggas, ken
dipannakataktakaw dagiti kukuada.
KASTA MET timpuyogmi a maimatangan toy sinao a Padre, ket dawatenmi a ipaayna a
certificacionan. Ken iti met MRP Priormi ili a Bangar, Fr. Manuel Gonzales. Ket maarmid a
agkalima. Ta iti dua, agsinsinkami a dua a ili. Ket iti dua agsinsin met dagiti dua a papadre.
Ket iti maysa maited kadagiti Igorot;
KET firmaanmi a nainaganan a Kakap.n Bajar, Ten.fes mayores, Kakap.n passados ken
dadduma pay a babaknang a Kakap.n ti Barang.v, ket patalgeden dagiti saksi a mangadkadua
kadakami ita a sangapulo ket uppat ti Enero, sangaribu ocho gasut ket dua pulo ti tawen. 52

52
Note: The Spanish certification by the two witnessing priests gives the date as January 24, 1820.
 Colonial Whip
A FILIPINO RESPONSE TO FLOGGING IN 1835
On February 17, 1835, the people of Tagudin, Ilocos Sur, filed a complaint in Vigan against
their parish priest, requesting his replacement because of the excessive number of floggings he
had ordered during his two years’ tenure in that town. The complaint is preserved in a thick file
of related documents in both Spanish and Ilocano marked Carpeta 2a Numero 1°, in the
National Archives, Section Provincias, Ilocos Sur Bundle 14, and is presented here in
translation.
The complaint itself cites the cases of a former Chief Constable who received 300
lashes, and two citizens working off their public service in the Convento who each received
almost 100, and appends a list several pages long of men who have been flogged and women
slapped—some of them as many as 50 times. To their reports of sheer maltreatment, the
petitioners add the facts that many of those who have been flogged like common criminals were
appointed town officials, and that the community’s own gobernadorcillos, far from having
intervened on their behalf in the name of justice, were the very ones who carried out the Friar’s
excessive orders. The document is written with considerable passion and even includes a veiled
threat (Do not the tamest carabaos turn against their masters if whipped too much?) and is a nice
display of the command of rhetoric in their own tongue which the provincial gentry enjoyed in
the early 19th century. And it is a clear Filipino response to flogging.
The complaint does not question the institution of flogging itself but only its
misapplication. The Filipino people by 1835 had learned to live with flogging for a dozen
generations, and the picota, or whipping post, was an ordinary fixture of the colonial town plaza
and is mentioned often enough in official Spanish documents. Tagudin’s own picota, for
example, appears in a peacepact which that town made with the Igorots in 1820—viz., “We, the
two towns, will not receive [unregistered] visitors, and if there are any who do, they shall be
given 25 lashes at the picota, as is the custom.” 53 Sometimes, however, to impress a larger
audience, the culprit was whipped through the streets. Thus on February 20, 1762, a certain
Juan Damay of Piat, Cagayan, who had been apprehended distributing subversive literature
from Diego Silang, was paraded through the main streets of Nueva Segovia (Lallo) on a carabao
while official flogger Francisco Zamorano laid on 200 strokes. 54
The Tagudin example being presented here does not represent an isolated case.
Dominican Fray Romualdo Aguado recorded the following case in Ilagan, Isabela, during the
same century:
When the English were in possession of the capital of the Archipelago, there was an
Ilocano traitor, sold out to those foreigners, who managed to arouse the Province of
Ilocos, the mob rising up against the upper class, the Spaniards, and even the clergy.
Some emissaries came from Ilocos to stir up the Provinces of Cagayan and the Missions.
The laboring class of Ilagan, who are said by all those who have dealt with them to be

53
Flameygh and Scott, “An Ilocano-Igorot Peacepact of 1820,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 26 (1978), No. 3.
54
Julian Malumbres, Historia de Cagayan (Manila 1918), p. 80.
 the best in these provinces, seemed to have been won over because of some little
grievances, so when Father Vicente de Castro heard about it, he tried to do whatever he
could to prevent them from being carried away by a few malcontents. So he called those
old men who had the most influence to the Convento, and pointed out to them the evil
which they would commit in revolting against the Faith and the King and the dire
consequences which would result from it. They replied that they were not, contemplating
any such thing and that they cherished the Holy Faith which had brought them out of the
darkness of their paganism, and, moreover, respected and obeyed the King and his
representatives; but that they could no longer endure the way the gobernadorcillos and
principales treated them like slaves, flogging them without mercy for the least fault, and
that they had decided to put an end to this tyranny by giving them a good lesson.
The Father therefore thought they were considering some massacre of the upper
class, and so preached to them a long time to dissuade them from their intention, but
they replied that they had already made up their minds to carry out what they had
planned, but that he should fear nothing. It was the 2nd of February, 1763, Candlemas,
and after mass the whole town gathered in the plaza, and one of the old men shouted,
“Now!—the gobernadorcillo to the whipping post!” Whereupon, three or four of the
huskiest came out of the crowd and, seizing him, held him down across a boat and
administered 25 lashes in the way he was accustomed to do with the commoners
[cailianes]. Then they did the same with the Cabezas, and with that they were
satisfied. 55
Of course, the Spaniards did not invent flogging as a means of controlling their Filipino
subjects; it was an old and, accepted part of their own penal tradition. Among Spaniards,
however, it was applied only to low-class law-breakers, not government officials—an attitude
obviously absorbed by their hispanized subjects in Tagudin who produced the 1835 document.
But although it was not introduced for that purpose, flogging did prove to be a useful instrument
for retaining control of the colony, not because of the pain inflicted but because of the manner
in which it was inflicted—that is, by fellow Filipinos. For in this way Filipino resentment was
directed not against their colonial masters but against those Filipinos who did their master’s
bidding, as the 1763 Ilagan case makes clear. And this reaction continued right up to the very
end of the Spanish regime: the first thing the citizens of Bacolod City did after the revolutionary
forces raised the Philippine flag on November 6, 1898, was to run professional flogger Amos
Holliza out of town. 56
Renato Constantino once challenged Philippine historians with the remark, “Even that
which is sometimes dismissed as a history of Spain by Spaniards can yield, if only indirectly,
insights into the development of the native population.” 57 These examples of Filipino responses
to flogging may give some such insight into the development of the Filipino people’s political
consciousness. For those in 1763 vented their wrath on their Filipino tormentors while
expressing loyalty to the regime which was the root cause of that torment, and those in 1835

55
Julian Malumbres, Historia de Isabela (Manila 1918), pp. 72-74.
56
Ma. Fe Hernaez Romero, Negros Occidental between Two Foreign Powers (Bacolod City, 1974), p. 72, n. 7.
57
“Gaps in Philippine History,” 1970, reprinted in Constantino, Insight and Foresight (Quezon City, 1977), p. 6.
more clearly recognized the source of their suffering but only sought to have it transferred
elsewhere. But the Filipinos of 1898 accurately analyzed the colonial process by which flogging
had been introduced into the Archipelago and sought to rid themselves of it for all time.

Translation
Lord Governor:
Nicolas Bautista and Vicente Gabriel, married and tribute-payers of the Town of
Tagudin, we, with the peaceful petition and other requirements which we bring with us, do
appear before you in proper order and deepest humility, and declare:
That when the petition referred to is translated into Castilian for your convenience, you
will see that this Town of Tagudin finds itself at present under a painful and truly heavy burden
for two years up to the present caused by our Reverend Father Fray Juan Sorolla;
For he ordered one Ex-Chief Constable, namely Don Cipriano Manzano, to receive a
penalty of almost 300 lashes; another two individuals performing their public service in that
Convento, namely Nicolas Bautista (I, the first) and Adriano Pablo, he ordered to receive almost
100 lashes each ; and that if all those flogged in the said Town should be taken into account and
recalled, they will be 300 persons, more or less; and the least lashes which any received will be
25; to which may be added another number (which is no longer known) of women slapped,
from both the gentry and the non-gentry, as you will be able to realize by the list of names of
flogged, and women slapped, on pages 2 and_________; leaving unspecified here other cases of
penalties and afflictions which you will find contained in the petition referred to on pages 3 and
4-v and in their copy on p.___________, all having occurred in only these past two years since
the said Reverend Father came to us; for confirmation of which, and public or secret
investigation, you can send a commission at your own convenience to the said Town;
And if in only the period of two years such damage has been done and so many
floggings, which reached not only 50 or 100 lashes, but more than 100, and the slapping of the
women up to 50, what will it be like, Sir, what will it be like if that Reverend Father should stay
four or five years in the said Town? Will he not completely consume us and flay us alive
through floggings? But leaving all this aside, we come, Sir, to the point of major consideration
and weight:
Why were those six Constables, with two Chiefs and two Lieutenants, whose names are
placed in the list on p._______, and for what reason or law ought they to have been castigated
with lashes, the same as thieves while in the actual performance of their duties as Peace
Officers, and for the slightest shortcomings? Why have the Gobernadorcillos, of the past two
years and the present one, permitted that these their officers and subordinate Constables and
Lieutenants should be flogged like thieves, there being other decent punishments appropriate to
their role as Peace Officers? Why, Sir, did they not hold consultations about such excesses and
such irregularities and inform this Superior Court for its appropriate action? The excesses
already referred to of more than 100 lashes, of which it would appear that the Gobernadorcillos
could not have been uninformed because of the nature of their office, and to subject Peace
Officers, do they not make them then, Sir, common criminals, or utter criminals?
Another point of complaint or claim which that community of Tagudin has against the
three Gobernadorcillos referred to, past and present, namely, Don Bartolome Manuel, Don
Eusebio Manuel, and Don Andres Manuel, is their not having wished to defend us from such
castigation, but that, rather, they were the executors of all the orders of the said Father; which
complaint is what is being presented to you now for such correction as you should decide on as
being suitable for an example to others.
Is it possible, Lord Governor, that that miserable population should suffer such cruelty
and pain? Are we not civilized men, faithful Christians and loyal tribute-paying vassals of the
Royal Crown of Spain? Is it not manifest that we always manage to comply with the [duties of
the] Church, hearing Mass and sermons, confessing and receiving Communion, and paying gold
and the stipend every year? And if it is so, Sir, why such severity? The Tinguians and Igorots of
that jurisdiction of Tagudin who already desire to come and be Christianized, will they not be
frightened and driven away with such reports of severity and floggings?
In similar cases of severity so harsh, it may please you to call to mind what is wont to
happen with carabaos, that however tame they may be, they attack even their own masters when
these maltreat them and apply rod and whip too often. (God forbid, Sir, God forbid that such
misery should reach that extent in that unhappy Town, and, with more dire things afterwards!)
Therefore, that poor community asks and supplicates that it may please you to solicit
from our Most Excellent Lord Bishop that he deign to replace our aforesaid Father Minister
with another who will treat us like sons, the only remedy so the well-disposed and maltreated
men of that poor Town should no longer suffer so crushing a burden; and that you so urge that
said Most Excellent Lord Bishop, by means of our kissing and washing his kind feet with tears,
and your own solicitude, our Governor, that he should be pleased to grant these his poor sheep
the favor they beg; and for this we swear in the name and spirit of the said community, not
proceeding from malice, and with all else necessary, etc.
NICOLAS BAUTISTA
VICENTE GABRIEL
In the Superior Court of Vigan on the
seventeenth of February of the year one
thousand eight hundred thirty-five.
I sent it to the Interpreter so that it might be understood. Thus the Superior Justice, the
Governor, disposed, ordered, and signed, to which I bear witness.
CALDERON
Before me,
ANTONIO MARIA REGIDOR
 Semper’s “Kalingas” 120 Years Later

In May of 1860 a young German naturalist by the name of Carl Semper hiked over the Sierra
Madre mountains from Palanan with a small safari of Filipino cargadores and spent a week
among a little-known tribe in the headwaters of the Katalangan River which flows into the
Pinakanawan River in the present municipal center of San Mariano, Isabela. A brief letter he
wrote from Aparri which was published in Vol. 10 of the Zeitscrift fuer Allgemein Erdkunde the
next year contains the only description of these people in ethnographic literature. According to
this description, they were a typical Filipino “cultural minority”—growing their own food,
smithing their own tools, practicing their own religious rites, decorating their artifacts with
distinctive designs, and trading forest products for metal and salt. But their religion was already
suffering attrition, they dressed like lowlanders and wove no cloth of their own, and apparently
did not make war either among themselves or with their neighbors. They thus appear to have
been in 1860 on the outer edge of the acculturative process by which their Gaddang and Ibanag
neighbors had shifted from minority to majority status a century earlier.
Curious to see the continuation or results of this process 120 years later, I spent the
second week of April, 1978, in the upstream hamlets of Diboloan, Dilumi, Andarayan, Kadsalan
and Ambabuk in the same area. 58
The people in question were called Kalingas then and are called Kalingas now, although
they are referred to in Spanish records as Catalanganes, a term still applied to their easternmost
dialect. Kalinga—pronounced with the ng of singer, not finger—is the Ibanag word for
“enemy” and was applied to pagans in the mountains and foothills on both sides of the Cagayan
River all during the Spanish regime. It is still used by Ilocanos in Isabela to refer to their
immediate mountaineer neighbors. There is no tribal or linguistic connection between these
“Kalingas” and the people of the subprovince of that name in Kalinga-Apayao, however, nor
would any observer familiar with both of them think so. Quite the opposite, I was unable to
distinguish “Kalingas” from Ibanags or Ilocanos by physical features alone. Much less could I
recognize, or give credence to, Semper’s view that their eyes, stature, and skull type betray an
ultimate Chinese or Japanese origin.
Semper had spent a week among the Negritos on the Pacific side of the mountains
before crossing over, and concluded that the Negritos he saw in Katalangan were new arrivals
because he observed no Kalinga-Negrito mestizos among them. By this test, there must be such
intermarriage today. Two of about a dozen Negrito women and children I saw were a warm
chocolate brown instead of black and one was as yellow as if jaundiced, while an otherwise
typical Kalinga in a G-string was a dull charcoal black. (A man of direct Kalinga-Negrito
parentage I met in San Mariano had the mixed features one would expect except in one
particular—he was taller than the average Kalinga.) Moreover, three items in a Katalangan
word list recorded in Dilumi were considered to be Negrito terms by more sophisticated
informants in Disulap—panyana (how), sitbing (near) and dumekel (to swell up).

58
The author wishes to express his thanks to Mayor Carlos Domelod, ex-Mayor Jose Miranda, and Mr. Rogelio
Miranda of San Mariano, Isabela, Councilor Jesus Corpus of Barrio Disulap, and Mr. Ipiyak Impiel of Sitio Dilumi
for their hospitality, cordiality, and assistance in collecting data for this paper.
 These Negritos inhabit the forest close to Kalinga settlements and show up with wild
game in season to barter for corn and other agricultural products. They seem to have an
ambivalent reputation among the Kalingas. On the one hand, they are characterized as timid and
retiring in their relations with non-Negritos, but, on the other, as hostile or even dangerous in
their own forest haunts. The leading citizen of Dilumi believes that his grandfather was killed
early in the century by a Negrito arrow for no other reason than “that’s what they do when they
want you to move.” They are reported to fasten red-cloth warnings along the trails when they
are at war among themselves, and collect cash from travelers who wish to pass through. The
“wars” themselves presumably arise from a custom which requires mourning relatives to take a
life following a death in their family. One Kalinga readily translated mangayaw for me, the pan-
Philippine term for head-taking or slave-raiding, as “to fight,” but all others were quick to
volunteer the information that this was a Negrito word unknown to Ilocanos, Ibanags or
Kalingas.
The word mestizo now refers mainly to Ibanag-Kalingas who, together with Ibanags and
Ilocanos, outnumber “pure” Kalingas about four to one. These non-Kalinga settlers generally
farm swiddens the same as Kalingas do, although there are more permanent farms between
Disulap and Minanga, and I saw one plow in Diboloan. Semper refers to such non-Kalinga
intrusion as “Tagalische”—and deplores its influence as lazy and untidy: e.g., they make simple
roofs of bamboo instead of thatching them, and just throw the garbage out the door. But he must
be using the term to mean lowlanders in general since even today San Mariano’s Tagalog
population is so small its families are easily named and counted. Spanish references to short-
lived Dominican and Franciscan missionary efforts in the 1750’s give no hint of outside
migration, but in the 19th century become rather emotional about the movement of “lawless”
elements from Isabela and Nueva Vizcaya—that is, Filipinos rejecting tribute-paying vassal
status. Several punitive expeditions were sent in to flush them out, and a Royal Order in 1897
attempted to accomplish the same goal by reestablishing the defunct missions.
Aggressive Ilocano migration began only in this century, but now constitutes a
dominating element both in agriculture and in ventures requiring capital investment. English-
speaking informants frequently referred to the dispossession of Kalingas by lowland
immigrants, but I was unable to locate any specific examples. The Ilocano, Ibanag, Kalinga-
mestizo and one Bikolano settlers in Ambabuk, for example, where most of them are employed
in logging concessions, found the site unoccupied 12 years ago. Settlers of whatever origin
seem to move around in the normal course of swidden farming without dispossessing anybody.
Kalinga mestizos from Minanga have recently settled in Kadsalan to be near the facilities of a
log pool (whose personnel come mainly from Tarlac), while others moved to both Disulap and
Andarayan for their wider tracts of land. On the other hand, many Kalingas have shifted
westward to be nearer the markets for their produce. The logging concessions themselves,
however, are held by high-ranking military officers not resident in the province.
Semper found G-strings only in the more remote settlements, and I saw them only in
Dilumi, small and made of plain white cloth purchased in town. Little bags hanging from the
neck for betelnut are also made of this cloth but are evidently different from the large bags
Semper mentions when describing the Kalingas as passionate chewers. The distended ear lobes
of Semper’s days with as many as six earrings in each, have disappeared: Kalinga women now
have their ears pierced in modern Filipina fashion, and the men not at all. I was shown some
heirloom earrings more than an inch in diameter, a quarter-inch thick, and hollow, which were
made of some thin sheetmetal like tin with a brassy tint; these are probably what Semper refers
to as “badly gold-plated earrings” obtained from Christian or Chinese peddlers at exploitative
prices. Some women also retain inherited necklaces of small glass and porcelain beads of many
colors, and every man in a G-string was wearing a choker of the same sort. Semper mentions
tattooing—which has completely disappeared—but not teeth decorating, and colored wicker
strings and brass coils binding the wasp-waists of both sexes, a practice formerly esteemed in
the lower Chico valley of Kalinga-Apayao and still found among Ilongots.
In consonance with his thesis of a Mongolian origin for the Kalingas, Semper says they
tattoo themselves with Chinese characters, and that their other decorations display a similar
source of inspiration. Unfortunately, I was unable to test this analysis by direct observation
since I saw no indigenous designs of any kind save a simple crisscross border done in white
paint on the edge of a prayer shelf in one house, and a very pleasing design of repeated
diamonds carved in high relief around the wooden cylinders of a small forge in Diboloan. The
forge itself was dismantled, but its feather-lined pistons still, functioned perfectly. It had
belonged to the grandfather of the present smith whose only available samples of workmanship
were metal sheathing on some sticks and grubbing hoes for swiddening. (I .don’t know what to
make of Semper’s further reference to smithies being found in practically every house—“die
Schmeide, die fast is keinem House fehlt.”)
The Katalangan River provides a natural route to Palanan, and Semper’s barrio
Ambabuk is still the last settlement before cresting the Sierra Madres—as it was during Military
Governor Mariano Oscariz’s incursions of the 1850’s—while the last public school is in barrio
Disulap just northeast of the river junction at Minanga. The national highway ends at Disulap—
“Km. 420”—but Diboloan, Dilumi, Andarayan, Kadsalan and Ambabuk are all accessible
during the February-to-August logging season by motor trails across which loggers haul
apitong, lawaan, mayapis, narra and tanguili to sawmills in San Mariano. The slopes are less
precipitous than on the Cordillera Central: Semper noted their rich red soil, and all six of the
barrios mentioned above are on navigable streams. Semper said the air was fragrant with the
odor of blossoms which nourished the bees that provide one of the major Kalinga trade items,
and the fertility of the valley is still impressive. Despite at least two centuries of slash-and-burn
swidden farming and 20 years of logging so intensive the sound of power saws was audible in
most sitios, I saw no significant areas of cogon grass or raw erosion. Where the hillsides were
not actually smoldering with the fires of new swiddens, they were densely covered with either
centuries-old timber or thick bamboo groves and hectares of bananas. Isolated hardwood trees
and logs, rejected by cutters and still burning from swidden fires, were surrounded by green
grass, undergrowth, and banana plants.
Semper found no more than five or six houses in any one settlement, and this has
remained the preferred Kalinga, housing pattern up to the present. The 12- and 13-house
clusters I observed in Dilumi and Ambabuk were responses to pressure exerted by the
Philippine Army as part of its counterinsurgency strategy. Modern Kalinga architecture
conforms exactly to Semper’s description of 1860:
Their houses are small and low, most of them made of bamboo and rattan; no nails
are found in them—everything is tied together. The houseplan is very simple—a rather
long rectangle with the kitchen at one end with a square area next to it unenclosed but
under the same roof; the interior and the kitchen form only one room with the kitchen
being separated from the main room only by a crossbeam showing through the floor.
 Next to the kitchen a ladder, which is taken in at night, leads up from the little open
space under the roof, where the pilan stands for pounding rice. As a rule there are only
two windows in each of the long sides of the house, and to one of these a small
extension is attached, a kind of small storeroom. The roofs are well constructed in such a
way that the edges are rounded off, which they achieve in a very simple manner and
whereby it has the advantage that the grass they use for thatching, as long as eight feet
overall, lies parallel. During my four-week stay I did not see them thatch a single roof.
Bamboo roofs are rarer; these are slightly inclined, the split bamboos being placed with
one groove up, the next down, with the upper one fitting into the lower so there are just
as many drainspouts spread along the width of the house as pieces of bamboo. They are
very good protection against rain, but any strong wind easily dislodges them. The roof
always completely encloses the room except for two little holes at the end of the
ridgepole; but they provide no ventilation so the interior is always completely full of
smoke above. Over the years such a lot of soot accumulates from the high density of the
smoke that everything becomes shiny black.
Although Semper does not mention it, in the better houses the posts are hewn of
hardwood—four on the kitchen side, four down the middle, and three on the other side—with
large carved pegs mortised into them to support the floor beams. The walls are made of
interlocking half-sections of bamboo placed vertically. None of the houses I saw were older
than 15 years, yet many had been abandoned instead of being repaired, a new one frequently
standing right alongside the old one. Non-Kalinga informants believed that Kalingas never
repair a house or salvage material from the old one for constructing a new one, and it was
indeed the case that among the two dozen houses I examined closely, only once did I find even
the smallest repair made with fresh rattan lashing. Considering the investment in labor which
these structures represent, such a custom would strongly suggest some forgotten taboo, perhaps
one requiring the abandonment of a house in which a death has occurred. Of course, entire
settlements are regularly abandoned in the normal pursuit of swidden technology, perhaps after
a decade or two, with the swiddens themselves being shifted around the nearby slopes every
third or fourth year as the tough growth of cogon roots makes them uneconomical to replant.
Semper noted that rice and corn were stored in two different kinds of granaries, and this
is still true. Corn is kept in simple bamboo cubicles with a flat sloping roof, but rice in rather
elegantly fashioned structures with a gabled roof and triangular cross section. These latter stand
on five-foot hardwood posts, square at the base but rounded above and fitted with a shoulder to
receive a large disk-shaped rat guard. Two two-by-fours mortised into the top of the posts
support the bamboo floor of the granary, and all these parts are tightly lashed together with
rattan in neat symmetry. In the case of the two floor beams, these lashings pass through
diamond-shaped holes chiseled through them, and then through cup-shaped recesses carved out
of the post below with a little crossbar left intact to take the loops of the binding. With the
exception of the two floor beams, all this carpentry has been accomplished without saw, drill or
adze. The roof and the triangular ends are made of a thick, tightly bound cogon thatching.
Semper called the Kalingas good farmers, and praised their soil as productive, their
fields as well-kept, and their houseyards as neat and clean. He listed rice, corn, sugar cane,
camote, ubi, gabe, ginger and a superior quality of tobacco among their crops, but assessed
swidden capacity as being insufficient for their total needs. Their apparent material comfort he
attributed to their trade in wax and the fish which they caught with nets, hooks and lines, and
bows and arrows or by poisoning the streams, and sold salted. Most of these observations would
be appropriate to a settlement like Dilumi today.
Dilumi stands some 2,000 feet above sea level on the crest of a small ridge between the
Dilumi and Disosoap Creeks which flow into the Katalangan River. Its nearest neighbors are to
be found three kilometers to the northeast in Andarayan on the banks of the Katalangan itself,
with woods of mixed second growth and bamboo tangled with vines and rattan in between. A
logging trail climbs up steeply from the west and disappears up an even sharper incline into the
dark towering forests of the Sierra Madres to the east. The settlement occupies a relatively level
site which was only logged off ten years ago, a fact completely obscured by its surrounding
stands of bamboo, and neat houseyards with squash vines, banana plants, and coffee trees. In
addition to a number of granaries and sheds, it contains twelve occupied houses and one
abandoned, the better ones thatched with cogon and the poorer roofed with bamboo just as
Semper said. Its 60-some inhabitants are all related, and the nearest thing they have to a village
Chief is a wise old man by the name of Ipiyak Impiel whose only son is in his 40’s.
Ipiyak’s father migrated into the area from Ambabuk early in the century after his own
father had been killed by Negritos, and here Ipiyak married, paying no brideprice but
performing a brief period of service for his father-in-law. After exhausting the local swidden
potential, the family moved to Andarayan where there was more open space, especially
convenient for their unpenned pigs and chickens. There his father died and was buried under the
house as a sign of respect, and Ipiyak eventually returned to Dilumi to occupy the creekbank
just below the present village. For a while prior to the introduction of chain-saws he worked as
a sawyer, and still occasionally sells handhewn house-posts. He and his neighbors only recently
moved into the present site in compliance with Army orders to concentrate, and will presumably
not be permitted to continue their former migratory practices. This threatens some hardship
since a swidden plot must be left fallow for at least eight years, and they will have to increase
their trading activities to supplement the decrease in food crops. Two crops of corn can
ordinarily be grown in the same swidden from which one crop of rice has been harvested, but
this year has been so unusually dry that these crops are threatened, and even the gardens on the
edge of the village are not being worked.
Ipiyak occupies the best-built house in the sitio, and its interior furnishings can be seen
at a glance—two wooden chests and kapok pillows in one corner together with a few sleeping
mats woven in Dilumi, heavy handmade hunting nets hanging form the walls and elongated eel
traps made by Ipiyak himself, thin cotton blankets thrown over a rattan clothesline among a few
shirts and dresses, a handsome bolo and sheath peddled from central Luzon and a stone corn
mill of a type no longer manufactured, and, tucked into the bamboo walling, a sprig of fresh sili
pepper and an arrow with a graceful well-honed point Ipiyak hammered out of a six-inch nail
with no more forge than a charcoal fire. Near the three-stone hearth in the kitchen were some
clay cooking pots made in Santa Maria (Isabela) and a water jar with a spigot fired in, an
assortment of spoons, glass tumblers and enamel plates, and suspended over it a few ears of
drying seed corn and a container of salt. No religious paraphernalia was to be seen in the house
but out in front were four little bamboo legs that once supported a tiny spirit house where Ipiyak
used to make food offerings to the anitos. Around the house were a number of small wooden
mortars of different designs and some four-foot lengths of bamboo for carrying water up from
the spring, and hanging under it were almost a dozen pestles glossy from use. Near the door a
whetstone and water bowl were set into the ground, and nearby stood separate granaries for rice
and corn, and a few sheds for outdoor work and wood storage during the rainy season. All
around were coffee trees in fragrant bloom.
The first time I saw Ipiyak, he was returning from the woods with a pair of homemade
goggles around his neck, a string of small fish in one hand, and a rubber-band gun in the other
which fires an arrow fashioned from the rib of an umbrella. The second time, he was carrying
the looped cords of a snare for catching wild chickens, and had the domestic decoy under his
arm. Neighboring children were carrying wicker fish traps and some boxlike ones they made
themselves out of bamboo and wire mesh. (Near Diboloan I noticed a dugout canoe with
gracefully flaring sides used for carrying fishnets deeper into the stream; Semper says the
Kalingas sold such boats in Ilagan for six or eight pesos.) Ipiyak also hunts for deer and wild
boar—a, long-legged beast with an elongated snout that can tear up swiddens like a miniature
bull-dozer—either by himself with bow and arrow and dogs, or in hunting parties with dogs to
drive the game into stout nets. He also barters meat from Negritos but not in sufficient quantity
to constitute a regular or significant source of protein.
Dilumi’s fields do not produce a year’s supply of rice and never did. (I was served
commercially polished rice, bagoong, and five-year-old Tanduay rum for lunch.) Evidence of
its consequent dependence on trade were to be seen everywhere. Wild beeswax, a forest product
traditionally used for stiffening the threads of looms since prehispanic times, has been replaced
in importance by bananas, although the accompanying honey is now also marketed. Coffee is
also a recent cash crop with trees planted between all the houses and a small coffee mill
mounted on one houseporch. For moving the heavy bunches of bananas to the nearest creek for
transportation downstream, Dilumi has as many carabao carts as houses—all with solid wooden
wheels cut by hand—and tethered between Diboloan’s 13 houses I noted six carabaos kept for
the same purpose. Stacked up along the road were 20-foot lengths of four-inch mabu bamboo,
tied together in bundles of about 25, ready to be dragged to the same creek where outside
merchants will come upstream empty-handed, buy them for rafts, and then load them with
bananas for the trip to markets in San Mariano or Ilagan. This traffic in bananas, bamboo and
rattan, incidentally, is regulated under licensed government concessions.
There is little to show in Dilumi today for the extensive religious paraphernalia reported
by Semper—sacred pots in a corner of the house and wooden tablets with what appeared to
Semper to be Chinese characters engraved on them, little spirit houses and special carved
benches consecrated out in front, and gongs to be played during religious ceremonies by
suspending them from the belt while kneeling and beating them with both palms. Although I did
not see them, such gongs still exist and are played in the manner described during festivals in
which food offerings are made to anito-spirits. One house in Diboloan had two such blackened
pots behind the door, and a broken-down spirit house in the yard—and such spirit houses also
used to be erected in the fields. Of carvings there was no trace, although there was a bamboo
bench in front of one house in Ambabuk with a sort of flagstaff attached from whose cross-arm
two bits of white cloth fluttered. There was such a pole in Dilumi, too, and I was told they were
common to most Kalinga settlements. No Kalinga informant seemed to know anything about
the wooden tablets, but an elderly Ilocano of long residence remembered having seen some sort
of boards incised with vague whorls and curved lines, but no figures, whether drawings or
writing. All of these relics were explained as signs of respect for anitos, but it was rather
indignantly denied that anitos had any connection with departed ancestors. Ipiyak himself said
that he did not know what happens to the spirits of the deceased with a finality that discouraged
further inquiry.
Perhaps the most interesting section of Semper’s account is his description of this
religion.
They are dedicated to a religious cult which, even as crude as its present form is,
still betrays the fact that it was brought here from abroad and did not spring from this
soil. There are two pairs of gods—Tschiehonan (male) and Bebenangan (female); and
Sialo (male) and Binalinga (female); these are the only true gods, for whom they
annually celebrate a general fiesta in a certain rancheria, where a house is consecrated
to them, the same one in which the last priest hantasan and his wife talamajau lived.
Since their death, they have been without a priest, and their entire cult is limited to the
annual fiesta held in June. To these gods, big wooden tablets are dedicated, hung
diagonally under the roof opposite the door and covered with written characters very
reminiscent of Chinese. In one house I also saw a carved picture of a god. I regret that I
lacked the time and patience to make a sketch of it, for later illness forced me to get
away from this unhealthy region sooner than I had intended. Besides these four, they
also have a multitude of others which are really housegods, called anitos. These are the
souls of their ancestors, to whom they ascribe’ the function of protecting their houses
and possessions after their death. The lore of these anitos is very complicated; in what
follows I will try to bring together what I was able to gather in separate bits here and
there. When a person dies, he can only be made an anito when he has grandchildren;
then, however, he remains one for all descendants in the family. Thus it can happen that
there are a multitude of anitos in the same house—that is to say, if the family has lived
together in the same house for a long period of time, which is quite common here. If a
son or daughter leaves the parental home, they remain without any anito until both
parents die; then the children divide the available anitos among themselves, though
certain ones always remain in the old house. When a married son dies without
grandchildren, neither he and his wife nor his children will become anitos. Every anito
will be called by the name which the bearer of the soul made into a housegod had during
his lifetime. Certain objects and places are hallowed to these anitos. In one corner of the
room stand ollas shaped like pot-bellied spittoons, which are consecrated to the oldest
anitos; they watch over the house and the welfare of the whole family. In the open space
before the house stand little houses a foot-and-a-half to two feet high, rough copies of
the big ones; these are the dwellings of those oldest housegods. To the eldest among,
them, furthermore, the little open space in front of the ladder, where the pilan, stands, is
consecrated; it must not be defiled either by fire or food. Then one or more benches with
certain ornamentation are found in the houseyard. One almost always has a long piece of
bamboo and a small piece of wood at the upper end in the shape of a plain half-moon on
whose wider part are (Chinese?) characters. These are consecrated to the younger anitos.
Finally, even the smithy which is lacking in few houses belongs to an anito. When the
grandfather of a large family dies, as many anitos will be made of him as he has sons
who have founded new families—that is, as soon as these have children of their own. If
there are many anitos in the same house, and the children separate at the death of their
parents, they divide these among themselves, but the oldest ones always remain in the
ancestral home. Also, it seems as if these may complete their services some time; at
least, I was told several times when I asked the reason for the complete lack of those
ollas in one old house, that they had just thrown out a bunch of them a short time before
 as being of no more use. Necklace and finery which they wear during their lifetime are
kept sacred; people will not sell them at any price, and ascribe miraculous powers to
them against all diseases. Also the anitos have fiestas at certain times—at the beginning
of sowing and shortly after harvest. Then big fiestas will be organized to the anitos, and
the best gifts of food and drink be gathered, and must not be touched until a little of
every bowl has been offered to them.
Many of Semper’s observations are ordinary characteristics of indigenous Philippine
religions. Friar missionaries all during the Spanish regime noted conjugal pairs of Filipino
deities and an ancestor worship directed to anito spirits, and the common fate of such worship
was to quietly survive the loss of a formal priesthood and pantheon as Semper noted. The
hallowing of household objects and spaces, the tabooing of ritual cooking pots, and the
preserving of heirloom jewelry is almost universal. So, too, is the conviction that postmortal
well-being is dependent upon sacrifices made by direct descendants. But although there is also a
concept that a man’s destiny is only truly fulfilled in the birth of his grandchildren, the idea that
elevation to anito status is actually prevented by a want of grandchildren would appear to be
unique. And the idea that one man becomes more than one anito after death is so strange as to
raise doubts. Moreover, if the Kalingas really held such a belief, China would be a poor place to
seek its origin. Prior to the founding of the People’s Republic, the Chinese son was absolutely
duty bound to perform those sacrifices without which his father’s soul—not his grandfather’s—
could not be laid to rest. An indigenous origin for such a belief would be more likely. But
perhaps still more likely would be the possibility that Semper was simply mistaken. At any
event, it is too late to examine any 19th-century specimens of supposedly Chinese writing in the
Katalangan valley today. But it is not too late for a sympathetic ethnographer to discover
whatever anito cult is still being practiced by men of Ipiyak’s generation.
What first attracted my attention to Semper’s report was its evidence that a Filipino
minority had maintained its identity until the middle of the last century while living in close
contact with the Filipino majority and dependent upon it. Most Filipino communities that
preserved an unhispanized culture to this late date were comparatively self-contained and
economically self-sufficient. Such peoples in the mountains of both Mindanao and northern
Luzon were self-sufficient in food, manufactured their own cloth and tools, wore distinctive
costumes and built distinctive houses, practiced their own religion and followed their own laws,
and traded with other Filipinos only for salt, iron, and Chinese porcelain/and brassware.
Semper’s Kalingas, however, displayed no such cultural independence in 1860, and appeared to
be on the verge of absorption into the anonymity of the majority Filipino population. What
might have happened to these people by 1978? Would they indeed have disappeared—or would
they still be recognizable in their own historic territory? My April visit made it clear that the
latter is the case.
Of course, the acculturative process has continued and is continuing. A century of
migration into the Katalangan valley has outnumbered its Kalinga inhabitants and limited their
access to potential swidden land. If Semper is correct in thinking that they used to live in one
site for several generations—though surely not in the same bamboo house—the population must
have been small enough then to permit the shifting of fields around a wooded area within reach
of that one site. This must have been the case in Diboloan whose oldest inhabitant was born
there, as were her parents and grandparents. But Ipiyak shifted his residence four times during
his lifetime, and the present residents of Ambabuk, Andarayan and Kadsalan all settled there
less than 20 years ago. It was due to the social pressure—and ridicule, no doubt—of this influx
of hispanized Filipinos that the district’s unhispanized Filipinos gave up their tattoos and
earrings, and all esthetic expression of their religion. This impetus for change appears to have
been comparatively mild, with an easy mingling of Kalingas and Ibanags, but much less benign
forces are confronting the same people in the 1970’s—namely, modern logging operations and
military counterinsurgency campaigns.
The creeks which feed the Katalangan River flow out from among some of the most
magnificent stands of timber in the archipelago—mahogany giants 100 to 200 years old. A
logger who delivers three of these five-foot logs realizes a cool profit of one thousand pesos, as
sure a magnet to the capitalist heart today as gold was to the conquistador’s in days not long
past. The Sierra Madre forests that produce this bounty also provide admirable cover for
guerrilla warfare, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines cannot ignore the fact that loggers
and insurgents work the same territory. The Army has already restricted swidden-farming
movements, and some of the farmers themselves have suffered the consequences of its
investigative techniques. (Ipiyak was sent home from such an interrogation vomiting blood in
February 1978.) On the other hand, the logging operations have not yet exerted their full
negative impact on the area, and even perform ameliorating functions at present. Their log pools
provide occasional employment and a source of discarded material, their roads give improved
access to the markets on which Kalingas depend, and their trucks offer free transportation for
those willing to travel at their own risk. (The risk is small, as a matter of fact: the roads are so
tortuous and the loads so heavy that drivers must keep their trucks under control at all times by
means of six-wheel drives, two-speed axles and remodeled transmissions.) But as soon as
loggers have ripped through a stand of timber, farmers move in with fire and open a new
swidden. Since the trees involved would take centuries to replace, this unwitting combination of
efforts promises the complete destruction of the Sierra Madre forest cover in the foreseeable
future—and the Kalinga way of life along with it.
Meanwhile, however, that simple fringe culture appears not merely to have survived but
to be flourishing. It is a rough life style of limited horizons and steady demands on physical
labor. But it is not without a certain dignity and independence, and does not entail the raw
exploitation experienced by the Philippine peasantry and proletariat. It is true that Ipiyak
receives no modern medical or dental care and that his children do not go to school—but then,
young Kalingas in Dilumi have full sets of teeth as solid as ivory, and do not face such modern
fate as the three one-armed dynamite fishermen I met among their better educated neighbors.
All in all, the struggle for existence and pursuit of happiness in the Katalangan valley today is
probably not significantly different from what it was a century ago.
Semper’s Kalingas 120 years later are thus just about what they were in 1860—a group
of Filipinos with their own identity and language, living in symbiotic relationship with Filipinos
of another culture and heritage, and dependent upon the primordial exchange of forest products
for foodstuffs and manufactured goods. As such, they nicely illustrate a stage of Philippine
history which other groups in the archipelago occupied for centuries or even millenia.
 The Nine Clergy of Nueva Segovia

Uncatalogued in the Historia eclesiastica de Filipinas section of the University of Santo Tomas
Archives, is a little manuscript volume of some 200 folios of 12.5 x 16.5 cm. entitled, “Various
Accounts, or Martyrdoms of the Nine Clergy of [the Diocese of] Nueva Segovia implicated in a
supposed conspiracy in the Provinces of La Union and Ilocos Sur as being connected with the
Tagalog Insurrection which broke out at the end of August of 1896, Manila” (Relatos various o
Martirios de los nueve Clerigos de Nueva Segovia complicados en una supuesta conspiracion
en las provincias de la Union e Ilocos Sur, como relacionada con la Insurreccion tagala, que
estallo a fines de Agosto de 1896, Manila). 59
The first six folios contain a dedication which reads as follows:
To our Confessor, the Reverend Father Luis Viza of the Society of Jesus, Professor
of the Ateneo Municipal of Manila.
Very respectable Father:
By way of introduction and as a small token of the gratitude of the Clergy prisoners,
we take pleasure in presenting you the following Accounts of our cruel martyrdoms. In
these you will see what depths human passions can reach, even in persons who by their
profession or calling ought to exercise more self-control than other men. If they are read
carefully, many details of the deeds to which they refer will seem incredible or at least
dubious, considering the status of the persons involved in them; especially if we assure
the reader in good conscience that we have given no reason at all, either in our political
or our moral and religious behavior, for such harsh and barbarous atrocities; that is to
say, we are completely innocent of the charges of which they so groundlessly accuse us.
For, as priests, we know very well that Masonry is a doctrine condemned by the Church
and, moreover, contrary to our own religious sentiments; and so it is easy to understand
that for us to have fallen into so lamentable an error, it would be necessary for us to be
some sort of evildoers or to have taken leave of our senses.
On the other hand, we do not have the least information that any Masonic lodges
exist by whatever chance either in the province of La Union or of Ilocos Sur, and
therefore it is not possible to believe that even the laymen who are accused like us were
really affiliated with the said proscribed society, unless some of them were in some
lodges established in another province.
Therefore, we are firmly convinced that we are not victims of mere chance or
circumstantial evidence, but of a deliberate plot premeditated for some purpose we will
not venture to ascribe; and certain prior events which we saw ourselves have led us to
draw this conclusion. As soon as the first news of the current events were known in the
two provinces, the Parish Priests, who were all Augustinians, began to get unusually
agitated, meeting frequently in the Capital, that is, San Fernando, where the Provincial
Vicar Forane resides, after which they got in touch with those in the Province of Ilocos

59
The author is indebted to the Reverend Fr. Pablo Fernandez, O.P., Dominican Archivist, for permission to xerox
this manuscript volume.
 Sur and the Fathers Superior of the, Seminary, who were of the same Order; and even
though we were not able to learn anything about the reasons for their frequent
conferences, it came to our ears nonetheless that some of them actually said that they
were planning to “clean out” the provinces, beginning with La Union.
As it turned out, in the middle of last September, the “Conspiracy” was disclosed in
La Union which resulted in the immediate imprisonment of a number of prominent
persons, thanks to a denunciation made, as we later learned, by a certain telegrapher,
Primitivo del Pilar. We also know that to persuade this person to commit such a
scandalous infamy, threats were employed together with deceitful promises.
And afterwards, on the night of the 8th and 9th of November, came the
imprisonment of some persons in Vigan because, according to some newspapers in this
Capital, another “conspiracy” had been discovered in Ilocos Sur; and some days later,
the Fathers of the Seminary likewise discovered the terrible “conspiracy” which was
being plotted by some Seminarians.
But we are confident that the protection of Divine Providence will not permit the
attainment of the sinister goals set by the persons who have plotted our downfall; and to
obtain this singular favor from Heaven, we earnestly supplicate your prayers to God for
us, sinners and unworthy priests though we be.
Manila, Bilibid Military Prison, Department of Political Prisoners, 11 March 1897.
For all my companions,
MARIANO DACANAY, Priest.
Father Dacanay was well qualified to speak for his fellow prisoners: he was the only one
of the nine who hadn’t broken under torture. Coadjutor priest of Aringay, La Union, at the time
of his detention and a former faculty member of the Vigan Seminary, he was one of four priests
among the nine clergy. The other three were Fathers Adriano Garces, Mariano Gaerlan, and
Bartolome Espiritu, coadjutors of Balaoan and San Fernando, La Union, and Sinait, Ilocos Sur,
respectively. The other five were seminarians in the Vigan Seminary—deacons Gabino
Carbonel, Ambrosio Mina and Miguel Florentin, and subdeacons Apolonio de la Pena and
Luciano Bernabe.
The “martyrdoms” of the title were not deaths, of course, but death-like torments, the
Spanish term martirio being applicable in both contexts. They were actually a series of
floggings so brutal as to have inflicted lifelong scars, administered either by Civil Guards under
the direction of Augustinian friars in the Seminary, in their presence and with their assistance,
or by Volunteers under civil authority in the La Union provincial capital of San Fernando, with
the knowledge and connivance of Vicar Forane and Parish Priest Fray Rafael Redondo—a
contribution to the counterrevolutionary cause for which he later paid with his life. 60
Father Luis Viza, to whom the little collection of confessions or testimonies is
dedicated, was Chaplain to political prisoners in Bilibid at the outbreak of the Revolution. Since

60
He and two younger friars were executed by Revolutionary forces during the Candon uprising of March 26-28,
1898, “to give an account of their misdeeds to their Creator.” “Hechos biograficos,” Kandon, 23 January 1899,
National Library: Philippine Insurgent Records, Selected Documents Folder 682.
he was a Jesuit, one does not know by what route the manuscripts came to rest in Dominican
archives, but there is another copy in the same hand and with the same signatures in the Jesuit
archives in San Cugat in Spain. 61 The U.S.T. copy appears to be a preliminary draft since it
includes emendations, revisions, and repagination, and lacks three of the signatures of the San
Cugat copy.
The story of the martyrdoms, now long forgotten, received due publicity during the
Malolos Republic. Five of the accounts were published in full in La Independencia in
September and October 1898, and all reprinted in Salvador Pons y Torres’ Defensa del Clero
filipino in 1900. In September 1898, too, Father Espiritu forwarded an account in both Spanish
and Latin to the Vatican Secretary of State as an actual suit for submission to the Curia on
“whether or not the Spanish regulars who took an active and leading part in the tortures to
which nine Filipino clergy were subjected in 1896 had incurred excommunication and
censure.” 62 Rebel journalist Isabelo de los Reyes publicized the incidents in his sensational
Memoria sobre la Revolucion filipina in 1899 for a Spanish audience in Madrid not yet
recovered from the fascination of the grisly details of contemporary torture cases in Montjuich
Castle. A foreign journalist whiled away his time waiting to interview President Aguinaldo in
Malolos in November 1898 by examining a set of little mannikins depicting Filipinos being
tortured by Spaniards, one of which represented a friar in the act of flogging a grotesquely
bound victim at his feet. 63 And on January 29, 1900, Fathers Jose M. Chanco and Mariano
Sevilla addressed a formal communication to Papal. Delegate Chapelle in which they referred to
the “inhuman martyrdom of the nine clergy” as having been carried out “with the knowledge
and permission of the Bishop and Ecclesiastical Governor of the Diocese, also friars.” 64
In the face of all this turn-of-the-century publicity, the silence of the Spanish clergy
involved is noteworthy. One of the younger Filipino victims, Deacon Ambrosio Mina, wrote
Pons in 1900 that neither he nor seminarian Apolonio de la Pena had signed or authorized the
accounts published in his Defensa del Clero Filipino—but their signatures appear in the original
documents as sharp and clear as all the others. So far as the friars themselves are concerned,
their only public comment appears to be a brief passage by one who was not personally
involved—Father Graciano Martinez—in the Memorias del Cautiverio he wrote while he was a
prisoner of war himself. It appears in a chapter whose main burden is that most of the friar
prisoners’ sufferings at Filipino hands was due to the baleful influence of La Independencia’s
propaganda:
Anyway, we will forgive them the fakery of this literature; what cannot be forgiven
under any circumstances is their having circulated those Accounts…of events no less
imaginary than the poems of that same literature (which is, as one would say, another
Insula Barataria like that domain Don Quixote gave Sancho Panzo), with which four

61
A microfilm copy of this item appears in Reel 46 of the “St. Louis Collection,” Item E-II-e, Rizal Library,
Ateneo de Manila University.
62
Salvador Pons y Torres, El Clero secular Filipino (Manila 1900), p. 36.
63
Edwin Wildman, Aguinaldo; a narrative of Filipino ambition (Boston 1901), p. 154.
64
Achutegui and Bernad, Religious revolution in the Philippines, Vol. 4 (Manila 1972), p. 44.
 feeble minds hoped to besmirch the illustrious religious of the Vigan Seminary. 65

* * *

The story of the events Father Dacanay refers to as plot, conspiracy and martyrdoms
begins just a week after the outbreak of hostilities at Balintawak when, on August 30, 1896, the
Bishop of Nueva Segovia, Dominican Fray Jose Hevia Campomanes, sent the following circular
letter to all parish priests in Ilocos Sur and La Union:
Your Reverences will already have learned from the newspapers about the huge
Masonic and antipatriotic conspiracy recently discovered in Manila, thanks to Divine
Providence and the Most Holy Virgin Mary who keeps watch over this beautiful
archipelago. Some parties of fugitives, no doubt connected with it, have appeared in the
surroundings of the Capital, which fortunately have already been attacked by our troops,
and the others are retreating to find refuge in the mountains, for which reason the
provinces nearest Manila have been declared in a state of siege. His Excellency, the
Governor General, has taken the necessary steps to maintain order and security so all
loyal citizens can live in tranquility.
Inasmuch as this conspiracy is due principally to the anathematized Masonry,
irreconcilable enemy of the one true Religion, the Catholic Church, which we have the
good fortune to profess, we recommend to your Reverences extreme vigilance over
everything in these circumstances, and expect from your well-known zeal that you will
advise us immediately of any indication you may note of danger or opposition to
Religion and the Fatherland, and most especially of Masonic or antireligious
propaganda, so that appropriate action may be taken…God guard your Reverences many
years. 66
The first to be caught in the resulting witch hunt was Primitivo H. del Pilar, telegraph
operator in San Fernando. On September 10, he executed a sworn statement in which he
confesses to antipatriotic ideas, abjures Masonry, humbly begs pardon from Mother Spain, and
implicates a dozen other men as party to a Tagalog conspiracy to assassinate all Spanish
officials and priests in the province. A fitting sense of drama is supplied by the final paragraph:
I swear that the major part of the outsiders here in the capital were members and
committed to the goal; I don’t know [all their] names but I believe business contractor
Jose Sanchez must know them; nor do I know where they may have gone or be in
hiding, since all I know is that I heard a conversation in Tagalog between two who
passed by the station who were talking and said, “Tomorrow we move!” and all this took
place the day previous to the present one. 67
Then he spent two days concocting a list of supposed assassins together with their individual

65
Op. cit., p. 180.
66
I am indebted to Seminarian Danilo Laeda of the Archdiocesan Seminary, Vigan, for a copy of this circular from
the Libro de Ordenes episcopales, Caoayan, Ilocos Sur.
67
National Archives: Sediciones y Rebellones, NA-24 (Book 2, 1895-1897). Gobierno de la Provincia de la Union.
targets, with the help of provincial governor Don Antonio Diaz de Cendreras, Volunteer
Enrique Lete, and Vicar Forane Rafael Redondo—under duress and against his will, as he was
later to testify in a retraction before Military Judge Rafael Ripoll in Manila.
Arrests began on the 12th, and on the 13th Father Gaerlan was called in by Father
Redondo and asked what he knew about the reported conspiracy. When he said he knew
nothing, his superior told him darkly that he had better be mighty careful because he was
treading on very slippery ground. On the 18th the first suspects were shipped off to Manila for
deportation to Palawan, and the next day Father Gaerlan and the coadjutor priests of Aringay
and Balaoan were notified by telegram to report to Vigan. Fathers Dacanay and Gaerlan
embarked on a coastal steamer on the 20th, and Father Garces followed on the 22nd. In Vigan
they reported to the Provisor—that is, the Ecclesiastical Governor of the Diocese—Fray
Casimiro Gonzalez, who immediately sent them across the plaza to the Seminary.
The old Vigan Seminary was a tourist-attracting example of Spanish colonial
architecture which extended along three sides of the city block just across the plaza from the
episcopal palace and cathedral until it was destroyed by fire in 1968. Airy living quarters with
high ceilings and huge capiz-shell windows overhung a cool dark ground floor of masonry
whose thick walls could muffle even the noisiest reactions to physical torture. In back, well
water for bathing and cooking was raised to the second story by a well sweep which, if need
arose, could also serve to suspend a man by the neck until he confessed or lost consciousness.
And below, backing up against the Government House to the north, was the secluded oasis of
the Seminary garden where friar faculty could read their breviaries and students take their
recreation—or, as the Provincial Governor was soon to charge, plot to murder their professors.
Somewhere within these Baroque surroundings Fathers Dacanay, Gaerlan and Garces were
placed incommunicado in separate cells under lock and key.
For the next two weeks the three Filipino clergy were interrogated and abused. One after
another, friars entered their cells to accuse them of being Masons and subversives—Provisor
Gonzalez, Vice Rector Urbano Alvarez, Episcopal Secretary Hilario Estevez, and Professors
Antonio Blanco and Gabino Olaso. All their protestations of ignorance of subversion and
innocence of Masonry produced reactions of violent anger, insults, and blows. Threats and
statements that they had already been implicated by testimony on the part of arrested laymen
were interspersed with affable cajolery and promises of intercession with the Bishop on their
behalf if they would only tell what they knew. Their bodies were minutely inspected for tell-tale
scars from Katipunan-like blood oaths, but all requests to make their confessions, receive
communion, or present appeals to the Bishop were denied. Finally, Father Blanco told Father
Gaerlan that their case had proceeded from bad to worse, and on October 2, he and Father
Garces were placed in leg irons.
The following night, Father Gaerlan was—ominously—permitted to make his
confession. A week later the Provisor visited him for the last time. He was told to remove his
cassock and prepare for delivery to civil authority since it was an established fact that in the La
Union conspiracy he had agreed to murder the Governor and his whole family. That same day
the Vice Rector turned him over to an officer and three Civil Guards for delivery to the steamer
Churruca in the port of Salomague, but only after a cruel little despedida he described in his
Account as follows:
Some of the superiors were in my room only a few minutes before my departure
 from the Seminary, to send me off with insults, contempt, jibes, and laughter, telling me
that as soon as I reached Manila, my head would roll. 68
Father Garces’ turn came next.
Adriano Garces was what would be called an activist nowadays. A contributor to the
only Filipino—owned and—edited newspaper in the colony—Isabelo de los Reyes’ El
Ilocano—he had corresponded directly with Overseas Minister Manuel Becerra in 1893 about
the low stipends received by Filipino clergy, and the next year had actually been included in a
list of filibusteros (subversives). Now, in the middle of October, his tormentors made him write
a letter to Father Juan Pakting, assistant parish priest of Namacpacan (now Luna, L.U.), to send
all his private papers. None of these, however, proved to be incriminating. On October 21 he
was told that he had been named as an accomplice by confessed conspirator Luciano Almeida—
to which he replied evenly that if Almeida said such a thing, either he was out of his mind or
they had tortured him. The following day he was stripped of his cassock, taken to bid farewell
to Father Dacanay, and sent off with the same sort of black humor as Father Gaerlan had
suffered—“If you escape Bagumbayan; you won’t escape the penal colony; but before either,
you’re going to get a really first-class drubbing in La Union just like that criminal Gaerlan.” 69
That same day, leg irons were placed on the last priest prisoner, Father Mariano
Dacanay—translator of religious literature, editor of Fray Cipriano Marcillo’s sermons,
contributor to El Ilocano, and former instructor in geography and history in that very seminary.
Father Dacanay’s own account of what happened next may serve as a measure of the stuff the
man was made of.
On the 27th of the said month, the Provisor came, to see me again, submitting me to
the same interrogation; and when I insisted on my innocence and the obvious untruth
that a Catholic priest could be so disgraceful as to fall into Masonry, which he knows is
condemned by the Church, or of approving the separatist cause which suggests an idea
of revolution and shameful treason repugnant to the truly Christian heart, even in his
thoughts, he insulted me with the harshest names, and ordered me flogged in his
presence and of the other fathers superior, with Fray Antonio acting as flogger, who
gave me 25 lashes. The Vicar General also ordered that from that day on I should not be
given anything to eat but plain rice and water, an order scrupulously carried out until my
departure from the Seminary on November 7.
On the night of the 28th, Father Blanco visited me again in my quarters, and when
he could not wring a declaration out of me that satisfied him—that is, a lie which would
compromise me—despite his alternate threats of death and promises of immediate
freedom, he flew into a rage and also gave me a cruel blow.
On the morning of the 29th of the same month, the Provisor visited me once again,
with the same intention that I should confess the truth to him—that is, that I should be
untrue to my conscience and admit the charges falsely—and since he did not get what he
wanted, he had four European Civil Guards called with the consent of the rest of the

68
Relatos varios, fol. 11v.
69
Ibid., fol. 36-36v.
fathers in the Seminary, and charged them with the atrocious work of torturing me. For
this purpose, the said Guards placed me “bamboo-foot” (a barbarous punishment, which
is riot fit even for animals, applied in the following manner: the victim is made to squat
down on his haunches, a thick bamboo is passed beneath both knees, and then his two
wrists are tied together in front with a rope, with his arms under the bamboo on each
side; in this position, the victim is nothing but a ball, for if he attempts to move, he is
sure to roll over on the ground) and in this contorted and painful position, struck me
many blows on the shoulders with a thick bamboo they call “brute” every time I
answered in the negative, leaving me horribly swollen and bruised. Present during this
heartrending and horrendous spectacle were the Provisor and the seven superiors of the
Seminary who, instead of sympathizing with my sufferings and cruel torture, much to
the contrary watched my martyrdom with visible signs of pleasure, for they even went to
the extent of encouraging the Guards to treat me even more cruelly—Father Gabino
Olaso, for one. During my torment, the fathers said that if I died on account of those
lashes, they would put my corpse in a box and just throw it in some corner; and when
they saw me murmur a prayer between clenched teeth—because during my torture I kept
praying the Memorare of St. Bernard to the Virgin to implore her protection in those
most cruel moments—they laughed at me, and said, “What can this hypocrite be
praying!” And when I fell over due to the blows and the fatigue caused by such a
contorted posture, rolling over on the floor, they added to my sufferings by kicking me
roughly as if I were a football, and when I fell, I struck my head against a post, causing a
wound, and another time I rolled over near Father Gabino, who was pacing quietly
around the room, and he gave me another tremendous kick in the head which completely
stunned me.
This martyrdom of blows from the “brute” and the “bamboo-foot” was repeated on
the 2nd and 4th of November, morning and afternoon, always in the presence of some of
the fathers of the Seminary, and I figure the lashes my tormentors gave me reached 300.
And on the last day cited, the Provisor and the Bishop’s Secretary, Father Hilario
Estevez, saw me when they entered my room with another native priest, 60year-old Don
Antonino de la Cuesta, who was also a prisoner, and when they were all inside, the
Provisor said to the Guards, “Give him what you gave the other one”—indicating me.
And when I looked at the Provisor and begged him to have mercy on me, he replied with
obvious anger, “No pity for you, you rascal!”
But despite such horrendous tortures, God and the Most Holy Virgin must have
heard my constant prayers and granted me the moral strength to triumph over their
fiendish efforts right up to the end, still insisting on my denials in accord with the
dictates of my conscience.
I also recall that on the 22nd of October after midday, the Seminary fathers entered
my room with a lot of noise, escorting Father Garces, who was going to be sent to
Manila that same day, they said, and in raucous amusement they told him in sarcastic
tones, “Say good-bye to your partner in crime: you’ll soon have a bullet in your head,
for as soon as you get to Manila, they’re going to shoot you in Bagumbayan.” And they
made us shake hands right then, and Father Garces said to me with the deepest emotion,
 “Farewell, my brother, pray for me.” 70

* * *

Father Gaerlan reached San Fernando on October 13 and was taken directly to confront
the man he had supposedly planned to assassinate, Governor Diaz de Cendreras. Upon seeing
him, the Governor leaped to his feet and grabbed him by the throat, shouting that he would
strangle him, until the section chief of the local Civil Guards, Lieutenant Jesualdo Iglesias,
managed to calm him down. He was then bound by three Guards and taken to the ground floor
of the Lieutenant’s quarters, where he was thrown down and asked if he were a Mason. When
he replied in the negative, the Lieutenant ordered two Guards to beat him to death, and they
started in methodically, one on each side. After some 200 strokes, faint from lack of blood and
delirious with pain, Father Gaerlan agreed to say he was a Mason. So, kneeling at a bench in his
blood-soaked trousers, he painfully wrote out a dictated statement which the Lieutenant then
carried across the plaza to the convento.
It took another four days, however, to expand and refine this statement into the detailed
confession required by the complexity of the “conspiracy”. The Governor assured him that if he
confessed his involvement he would be set free, and Vicar Forane Redondo added, “It’s no use
for you to deny it since we already know everything, and if you keep on withholding what you
know, you’ll get in the neck what Father Burgos got.” The turning point came on the 15th when
the Governor escorted him to the convento, where Lieut. Iglesias and several friars were waiting
for him.
As soon as I got there, the Father Vicar showed me a paper containing many
questions written out in his own hand, and said that I should answer them all, point by
point like a moral case. After it was read to me, I answered that I didn’t know anything
about the events it dealt with, and protested against the punishments and coercion
inflicted on me in the Lieutenant’s house, since it was only under duress that I had
consented to write what he dictated to me; and I begged him on my knees to take me
under his protection, not only as Vicar but as parish priest, inasmuch as I was
completely innocent. But, far from being moved, he told me that if that was true, I had
perjured myself because I didn’t have to declare what was untrue even if they had killed
me; and besides, he said, he considered me guilty anyway because even if I was neither
a Mason nor a party to the plot under investigation, it was impossible to believe that I
was ignorant of it. And when I kept insisting that I knew absolutely nothing, that father
flew into a rage and handed me over to those gentlemen.
The Lieutenant then hit me on the back of the neck, and threatened me with his

70
This is translated from the San Cugat copy (see note 3 above), which has, the advantage of being shorter, the
names of many lay suspects having been suppressed.
Father Dacanay could still display the scars of this experience during an interview with Father Isaias
Edralin, S.J., in 1919. “Look at the marks, Father Edralin, from the lashes given under orders of the friars in the
Seminary. And he uncovered his shoulders, and I saw four long scars on the father’s shoulder from the floggings of
twenty years before.” I am indebted to the Reverend Dr. John Schumacher, S.J., for this citation from the
“Protestas del clero filipino contra el cisma” in the Achutegui Collection, Loyola House of Studies.
 revolver right in the fathers’ presence, and forced me to sign the declaration he had
dictated in his house, assuring me in a threatening tone that I would have to answer the
cited questions that afternoon. Then he called two Guards, whom he ordered to bind
me—as they did right in front of the two reverend parish priests, Fray Mariano Garcia
and Fray Leandro Collado, and Fray Anacleto Fernandez, who were present—and then
to take me to the jail and put me in the death house…
In the afternoon, two Guards got me out and took me to the Office, tied, where I
found the Governor and a certain Primitivo del Pilar, whom I believe they called to
confront me, as he did, and from this encounter I concluded that the said Pilar was the
false accuser of everybody who was being investigated in San Fernando, for when I
challenged him to prove his accusations, he could only keep repeating himself without
looking me square in the eye. Then the Governor told me to answer the questions we had
discussed, and when I said I was completely ignorant of their answers, the two of
them—the Governor and the Lieutenant—got angry and, the former getting his cane and
the latter his revolver, they threatened that if I didn’t answer to their liking in five
minutes, I would be beaten to death or killed in some other way they would hate to tell
me. Intimidated by this threat, I acceded for the second time, and wrote down what the
Lieutenant and the aforesaid Pilar dictated to me. 71
Father Garces arrived on the 24th, and caused more trouble for himself and everybody
else before he was ready to cooperate than Father Gaerlan had. Failing to answer a set of
questions in Father Redondo’s handwriting presented by the Governor, he was dragged off to
jail in full view of startled passersby, and there mauled and left on the flagstones without mat or
pillow in a hot, dark cell with tightly closed windows. The next day, five lengths of rattan were
broken over his buttocks during floggings under the Lieutenant’s house, and still he resisted all
suggestions, threats, and promises from both the Governor and the Vicar for two more days. He
was therefore turned over to Volunteers Enrique Lete and Provincial Physician Jose Maria
Cisnal, who took him to a lonely beach in the middle of the night where they quickly reduced
him to incoherent acquiescence by beating the scabs off his pus-filled wounds. They then let
him recover for two days in solitary confinement, with bedding and fresh air, before Lete, the
Governor and Father Redondo came to help him make a good confession. With their assistance,
he was able to produce a declaration that finally satisfied them, which he signed on November
3. The following is a fair sample of the sort of fantasies it contained:
Copy of the Covenant made during the meeting held in the telegraph office and which is
referred to in the letter I cite from Daniel Lopez:
Since an insurrection against Spain is going to be made shortly by the Province of
Manila for their independence, the undersigned, committed to this ideal as true sons of
the Philippines, swear on their word as noble and loyal gentlemen to undertake their own
in this province, in the form and manner following:
1. All the Spaniards will be killed except the mestizos.
2. The date of execution is set for the 14th of September, Monday, between eight
and nine o’clock at night, at the sound of two rather long bugle blasts of equal duration.

71
Relatos varios, fols. 15v-18v.
 3. The persons charged with this undertaking will be armed with revolvers, as well
as swords, sabers or rifles if they have them.
4. Each shall arrange to have at least eight men at his disposal, two of whom shall
be armed with revolvers, the rest with bolos.
5. Prior to the hour set above, they must be ready and on the alert, and when they
hear the two blasts on the bugle, will immediately come out of their shelter or hiding
places to carry out their missions.
6. Taking any booty without the prior knowledge and permission of the Chief, Don
Luciano Almeida, is absolutely prohibited.
7. On the completion of his mission, the leader closes up the house under lock and
key, leaving two of his men to guard it, and immediately comes down with the rest of his
men to help the others.
8 The same will take place in the other towns on the same day and hour as in the
capital; and after they have finished, they will come to the capital without losing any
time for whatever may be necessary and to receive orders from the Chief.
The persons assigned are:
For the Capital D. Luciano Almeida and D. Ramon de la Rosa will take care of
the Governor himself. Pio Lopez of the fathers, with the assistance
of Father Mariano Gaerlan. Ireneo Javier and Florencio Baltazar
of the Judge. D. Pedro Hernandez of the Fiscal, D. Pedro Padua of
the Administrator. D. Jose Castaneda of the Civil Guard
Lieutenant. Anastasio Posadas of Senor Castel. D. Daniel Perez of
D. Enrique Lete. D. Ramon Hernandez of D. Froilan Sabugo and
his nephew, Anacleto Diaz of Senor Abaroa. D. Gregorio Collado
of D. Rafael Lete. Vicente Carbonel of Senor Romero. Roman
Florentino of the Registrar. Benito in charge of the Physician’s
estate and farmers, of the Civil Guard quarters.
Bangar Manuel Bautista and Francisco Lopez of the father.
Balaoan Luciano Resurreccion of the father, with Father Garces as his
assistant if necessary. Municipal Captain D. Juan Rodriguez and
his subordinates of Senor Zaidin and Senor Castella.
Namacpacan D. Manuel Resurrection of the father.
Bacnotan Emerencia Padua of the father.
San Juan D. Simon Galbey of the father and Senor Illeras.
Santo Tomas D. Sixto Zandueta of the father.
Agoo D. Gabriel Tabora of the father and D. Eugenio Zafra of the
Spaniards.
Aringay D. Juan Baltazar of the father.
Since nobody has been assigned to Carlatan because of the shortage of men, three of
the groups assigned to the capital will proceed to the said barrio as soon as their
 missions have been accomplished. All that has been said above will be carried out to the
letter; and anybody who does not do so without reasonable and grave cause will be
punished with death.
San Fernando, June 1896—Luciano Almeida—Ramon de la Rosa—Daniel Perez—
Ireneo Javier—Pio Lopez—Jose Castaheda—Vicente Carbonel—Sixto Zandueta—
Gabriel Tabora—Luciano Resurreccion—Florencio Baltazar—Pedro Padua—Simon
Galbey.
This copy is made from memory of the original which was signed in the meeting
which took place in the telegraph office.
ADRIANO GARCES 72
Still the Vicar, the Governor and Lete were not satisfied, but kept running back and forth
between their two captives with new demands and threats. There was the matter of Father
Gaerlan’s supposed assassination victim, for example. When he arrived in San Fernando, he
was accused of being the intended murderer of the Governor, and had confessed himself as
such. But in Father Garces’ reconstruction of events, it was Father Redondo who appears as his
target. On November 6, therefore, the Vicar himself visited Father Gaerlan in his cell to call this
lapse of memory to his attention and require him to amend his declaration accordingly. But
Father Gaerlan balked. He stated firmly that he had signed all the false statements he was going
to—and it took Lete and two assistants a whole hour on the beach to change his mind. Then,
clinging to the edge of a bench back in his cell, too weak to hold the pen, he dictated the
required statements to Volunteer Cisnal, with Lete slapping the sense into him and Father
Garces’ declaration held conveniently in his sight. “From this experience and from what I heard
them say, he later wrote, “I concluded that, after having made Father Garces declare falsely by
the force of beatings, they found his declaration more detailed end incriminating so, no doubt to
make their victory more complete, they tried to force me to make that new declaration conform
to his by means of the same cruel and barbarous punishments.” 73
Father Dacanay arrived the following day. It is probably a testimony to the fortitude and
stoutness of heart he had displayed in the Vigan Seminary that the Governor turned him directly
over to Lete without any preliminaries. And it was those same qualities that enabled him to
survive the night and leave the following record of the experience:
At ten o’clock the same night, three Volunteers came to the jail for this purpose—
the aforesaid Lete, a certain Abundio Sabugo, and another whom I did not know but
later learned was the acting Provincial Physician—got me out, and took me to a lonely
spot on the beach some distance from town. As soon as we got there, they tied my
elbows and feet with long ropes, threw me on the sand, pulled down my trousers to
expose my buttocks, and then while one pulled the rope on my feet, and another the one
on my elbows, the third—Lete himself—flogged me viciously. When he got tired,
another relieved him, and so they proceeded, one alternating with another to give me
lashes with the greatest ferocity. When all three got tired, they suspended their work for

72
I am indebted to Father Schumacher for a copy of this document from the Servicio Historico Militar (Madrid),
Seccion Ultramar Armario 13, Tabla 1/a, Legajo 4.
73
Relatos varios, fol. 24-24v.
 some minutes to smoke a cigarette, for they said they had enough time before dawn,
chatting cheerfully all the while. One lighted a match to look at my buttocks, and
another said he was sorry he had forgotten to bring a little alcohol to pour over my
buttocks and set on fire. One suggested placing me face tip to whip my stomach, to
which Lete responded that they could do that when they finished my buttocks; and
another recommended taking me to the edge of the sea and putting me under the water,
and one even went so far as to say it would be better to squeeze my testicles—that then I
would really sing. And after this short break, they flogged me again with great ferocity
to complete a martyrdom which lasted until midnight when they quit, not for want of
enthusiasm or strength but because the three bamboos they had brought with them were
worn out and split. When they stopped, they poured grains of sand over my buttocks to
increase the pain of the wounds the strokes had made. As we started back, I could not
stay on my feet as a result of the maltreatment, so two of them had me hold them by the
arms, but since I kept falling down anyway because I was so weak I couldn’t even use
my hands, Lete boxed me on the right temple one time I fell, seriously damaging my eye
on that side.
When Lete saw that it was impossible for me to walk, he went off in search of
people to carry me, while we stayed behind, the two Volunteers sitting right down while
I lay there collapsed, listening to their conversation. Among other things, I clearly
understood that one was asking how many lashes they had given me, and the other
replied that it must have been something like 600, and I believe he was not short in his
calculation, either, for I remember that when they decided to quit the punishment, one of
them said he wanted to give me a despedida and so dealt me another fifty-some strokes,
and the other two followed his example, each one giving me the same number or a little
less. After some time, Lete returned with three men, who carried me to a vehicle waiting
on the road; we all returned to town in it, and they took me straight to the jail. In the
calesa, since I could not sit down because of my wounds, they just put me between their
feet somehow, like a dog.74

* * *

Back in Vigan, meanwhile, two Filipino priests remained in the Seminary—former

Sinait coadjutor Bartolome Espiritu and 60-year-old Antonino de la Cuesta of San Esteban.
Father Espiritu had been summoned to Vigan for reassignment just two days before the arrival
of the three La Union coadjutors. He was told to take up residence in the Seminary but given no
assignment, so he requested the Bishop’s permission to begin spiritual exercises, which was
granted. For the next seven weeks he remained there, presumably in religious retreat, with the
Vice Rector occasionally dropping in to chat, report current events like the detention of his
three brother priests, and inquire about the leading citizens of Vigan and whether or not they

74
See note 12 above.
Enrique Lete y Cornell, a Spanish mestizo from San Fernando, La Union, was Jose Rizal’s classmate in
the Ateneo, and elder brother of Rizal’s fellow propagandist, Eduardo Lete, in Spain. He was killed—one is
tempted to say fortunately—during a small uprising in Santo Tomas, La Union, on April 11, 1898.
were Masons. To these questions, Father Espiritu replied that he knew nothing about it. But at
the end of the first week in November, he noticed that the door of his room was being locked
except when he went out to make his meditation in the morning and say mass. This was just the
time when old Father Cuesta was signing incriminating declarations against those Vigan
ilustrados.
Perhaps because of his age, Father Cuesta had received a different approach from the
friars: they promised him a parish if he would cooperate. When he indignantly refused, they
called in the Civil Guards to “give him what they gave the other one”—that is, Father Dacanay.
In this way he was persuaded to sign the documents which resulted in Bishop Hevia’s order to
arrest the cream of the local gentry on the night of November 8-9—Lino Abaya, Gregorio Sy-
Quia and Mena Crisologo, for example. Abaya was a Candon ilustrado of such prominence
visiting Governors were entertained in his house, and Gregorio Sy-Quia was a Chinese mestizo
and the richest man in Vigan. And Don Mena Crisologo was an authority on canon law who had
served as notary to Bishop Hevia’s predecessor, so effectively, in fact, as to have caused the
excommunication of two Augustinian friars.
Two nights later, Vice Rector Alvarez and Father Blanco entered Father Espiritu’s room
dressed in the uniform of the Volunteers and carrying a rifle with bayonet fixed, and ordered
him to write down all he knew about the conspiracy. When he demurred, they punched him in
the eye and said they would be back in two hours for his statement. At 11:30 they returned with
Vigan Ayuntamiento Secretary Francisco Llanes (who claimed to be a representative from the
central government in Manila), hit him over the head with a revolver when they discovered that
he had written nothing, and dictated a statement and made him sign it. Two days later the
following press release was dispatched to La Politica de Espana en Filipinas, one of the friar
organs in Madrid:
Vigan, 13 Nov. 1896.—We have just discovered a horrible conspiracy here, like the
one in La Union, Manila, and other places. It was discovered by accident. From a
reference by one of the three Filipino clergy involved in the conspiracy in San Fernando,
La Union, discovered on Sept. 13, the most worthy Senor Hevia Campomanes, Bishop
of this diocese, ordered another coadjutor priest called, to the Seminary from San
Esteban (Ilocos Sur), and he, who had been in Manila in the year 1890 and initiated into
Masonry by Isabelo de los Reyes, has started declaring and revealing all that had been
plotted for an uprising on Sept. 10 to kill all us Spaniards.
As a result of this, important prisoners have been taken, and three or more have
admitted everything. The prisoners are the richest and most prominent persons here,
among them the Mayor of the Ayuntamiento, Gregorio R. Sy-Quia, a Chinese mestizo,
holder of the Crosses of Isabel the Catholic and Carlos III.
It is known that the conspiracy in the guise of Masonry (which is not prosecuted by
the authorities) existed in all the provinces of the Archipelago, although not in all was its
work so advanced as in Manila and the adjoining provinces.
But if it had not been discovered in time by Father Gil, you can imagine what would
have happened to all the Spaniards and how many sacrifices it would have cost Spain to
recover so vast a territory.
In the whole Diocese of Nueva Segovia, seven indio clergy have been implicated up
 to the present; it is believed that there will turn out to be more.
We must start suppressing this clergy and replacing them with religious from the
Peninsula, even the coadjutors themselves. The most Reverend Father Hevia, according
to my information, is of the same opinion, and it seems that he already said so to the
provincials of the Orders in the years ‘91 and ‘92, recommending to them the
desirability of increasing the number of students in the schools in Spain.—AVS 75
At eight o’clock in the evening of the 17th, the Vice Rector called the eldest seminarian
out of evening prayers, 35-year-old Gabino Carbonel, and took him to the Rector, Fray
Bartolome Fernandez, who then took him to the Government House next door. There,
Provincial Governor Pedro Lopez Hernando threatened him, bloodied his nose, ordered him to
write his name in the secret form Masons use, and sent him back to the Seminary to think things
over. Four days later he was taken back to the Government House and confronted with a letter
supposedly from one Agripino Carbonel, a political detainee in Palawan they claimed was his
relative. Back in the Seminary that night, the Vice Rector, brandishing a revolver, accused him
of being a Mason and, the next morning, of planning to murder him. On the 23rd he was turned
over to the civil government to experience techniques of persuasion different from those
employed in San Fernando, but just as effective.
Two volunteers, one of them a Filipino by the name of Joaquin Angulo, tied his hands
and feet together behind his back and left him in that position all morning. In the afternoon they
returned with the comment, “Let’s give him a new shape,” and reduced him to a painful ball by
fastening his wrists below his knees. In this posture he very quickly agreed to sign whatever
they wanted, but was so bruised and stiff they had to massage his arms and shoulders with
alcohol and let him recover overnight. But his whole ordeal was not without a few incidents
which under other circumstances might have served as comic relief. A printed sheet covered
with odd diagrams of the human figure and cabalistic notations, which was supposedly found
among his personal effects, turned out to be a Singer Sewing Machine advertisement. And when
he finally signed a declaration that he had become a Mason in 1880, he obligingly used a code
name—Masoy Noson. It took the Governor an hour to notice that this was an anagram on No
soy Mason (“I’m not a Mason”), but when he did, he rushed back to Carbonel’s cell livid with
rage, and slapped, punched, and kicked him prostrate.
The next morning—the 26th—the Deacon was ready to cooperate. Angulo came armed
with a revolver and a list of seminarians and got him to make a declaration implicating Luciano
Bernabe, Miguel Florentin, Ambrosio Mina, Apolonio de la Pena, and Francisco Paredes, a
student of dogmatics and moral theology, as well as Father Espiritu—and sign it with a more
plausible Bagino Bocarnel. The same afternoon, he was forced to identify two letters as being in
the hand of his “relative” Agripino Carbonel, one addressed to him and the other to his “tenant”
Pio Pilar. The first read, “I suppose you are well aware of what’s going on: we can do nothing
for you here in Balabac where we’ve been deported, but if you want to make an armed uprising,
you can approach Pio Pilar and he’ll tell you what to do,” and the second, “You will receive
such-and-such a number of rifles, Mausers, etc., on the steamer N_______.” 76 Having

75
Op. cit., Jan. 15, 1897.
76
Relatos varios, fol. 101.
completed this work, Deacon Carbonel spent the next two days trying to get some priest to hear
his confession, abjure his perjury, and relieve his conscience, and then attempted suicide by
gashing his stomach with a broken bottle. In both efforts he was unsuccessful.
That night a raid was made on a house in Candon in which the local gentry were
rehearsing a zarzuela and moro-moro for the coming Fiesta of Santa Barbara. Roberto
Guirnalda, two of his sons, and several other men were arrested and brought to Vigan. The next
day the Governor spent the morning interrogating them, and at four o’clock that afternoon went
to the Seminary and had Bernabe, Florentin and Pena called out of class, one after the other.
Bernabe found the Governor in the visitors’ sala with some of the Seminary faculty,
talking together in low voices. He heard them agree that the subdeacon’s guilt was written all
over his face. He was then ordered to kneel before the Governor and confess the existence of a
cabal in the Seminary, while the Rector rushed off to his quarters and came back with a
bayonet, which he handed to the Governor. Then, with the Rector hitting him from behind and
the Governor pricking his chest with the bayonet, he was angrily cross-examined. “I see
everything that goes on in the Seminary garden during your recreation period from the
Government House,” the Governor said. “You were holding meetings; you’ve been plotting—
you, Gabino Carbonel, and all your comrades—to kill the Spanish fathers!” 77 Seminary
Secretary Fray Mariano Rodriguez agreed, and the Governor sent for Father Blanco and told
him, pointing to Bernabe, “Here, here’s your assassin!” The Governor then spit in his face and
turned him over to the Rector, who took him to his room and made him stand with his shoulders
to the wall while the Vice Rector beat Miguel Florentin in front of him.
So began a week of friar fury and brutality of such intensity it can only be accounted for
by supposing that they really believed they had just barely escaped being murdered in their beds
by their own students. The seminarians moved through this nightmare in a daze, stunned not
only by physical blows but by terrifying demands like “Confess you agreed to kill Father So-
and-so!” They were slapped and flogged, kicked and pummeled, and threatened with revolvers
pressed to their temples. Bernabe was struck in the face with a bunch of keys, forced to kneel in
an act of contrition, and then—“Get up, you animal, you brute, you chongo!”—stripped of his
cassock. 78 Florentin was thrown to the floor in the Rector’s room and trampled, and then
suspended by the neck from the well sweep until he lost consciousness. In between, they were
all abusively denounced, interrogated and cross-examined, and occasionally brought face to
face in hopes of finding contradictions in their stories.
Finally, on December 1, Deacon Florentin and Subdeacon Pena were turned over to civil
authority, accused of having plotted to murder Fathers Alvarez and Canteros respectively. On
the 2nd, Subdeacon Bernabe managed to escape, but was forced to return when he discovered
that the whole town of Vigan was so intimidated by the current reign of terror that not even his
own relatives would take him in. On the 3rd, Deacon Mina was called in, accused, knocked to
the floor, kicked back to his feet, struck with a revolver, and examined for any blood-oath scars.
When he fell to his knees and invoked the name of God and the Virgin, he was struck for
blaspheming those sacred names with his presumably Masonic lips. Then he was stripped of his

77
Ibid., fol. 128.
78
Ibid., fol. 132.
cassock and turned over to the civil government together with Bernabe. On the 4th, Father
Espiritu was seized and handed over on grounds specified in Carbonel’s declaration—that he
had been planning to murder two young students of Peninsular Spanish parentage. And on the
5th, they were all put on board the Churruca just two hours after Volunteers had finally
managed to get Mina’s signature on a statement that he had been party to Father Espiritu’s plan.
Father Antonio de la Cuesta was evidently never sent to Manila, whether because of his
age or because of arrangements he may have made with his tormentors. Probably he is the
Filipino priest referred to in an article in the Madrid paper, La Justicia, as an example of
Filipino venality and crudeness for having asked for a parish in return for his services. 79 And
theology student Francisco Paredes did not reach Bilibid, either. Instead, he was sent to join the
Candon prisoners on the ground floor of the Government House, together with his father,
Procopio—and one Pio Pilar, Municipal Captain of Bantay.
The Churruca put in at San Fernando on the 6th and picked up Fathers Dacanay,
Gaerlan and Garces—but not before they were subjected to one final indignity at the hands of
the provincial government. They were made to swear affidavits before the appointed Judge
Inspector, Lt. Jesualdo Iglesias himself, that confessions had been made of their own free will
without any coercion. Then they were sternly warned not to change any of their statements in
Manila or they would pay dearly for it, and delivered to the steamer with elbows bound, and
placed in irons.
The Churruca reached Manila on the 7th, and the Vigan prisoners were taken to Bilibid,
the La Union clergy to the Archdiocesan Seminary in Intramuros. There they were treated with
the dignity befitting their calling and the sympathy their condition deserved. Learning that
Bishop Hevia was spending Christmas in Manila, the three addressed letters to him, reporting
their ordeals and begging his mercy and justice. His reply was delivered not to them but to the
Rector of the Seminary by his secretary: place the three of them under lock and key. The Rector
replied that the Seminary was not a jail, and that Fathers Dacanay, Gaerlan and Garces were
priests and would be treated like priests. But on New Year’s Eve, he received government
orders to transfer them to Bilibid. Thus they reached their final prison, and there they stayed,
receiving the spiritual ministrations of Father Viza and composing their Accounts—and
translating Jose Rizal’s “Ultimo Adios” into Ilocano—until the military courts got around to
investigating their cases. Not surprisingly, no substantiating evidence was found—“neither
documents, proclamations, letters, arms, nor a single blood-incision,” as Father Garces said—so
they were all released on April 3, 1897.

* * *

To read the “Martyrdoms of the Nine Clergy of Nueva Segovia” from beginning to end
is a little ordeal in itself, one that shakes the reader’s faith in the nobleness of human nature.
Under a new colonial regime, however, the Filipino people themselves were spared this faith-
shaking ordeal, thanks to an American school system that suppressed all details of history that
might expose the less pleasant aspects of colonialism. Odious comparisons between Spanish

79
Isabelo de los Reyes, La sensational Memoria sobre la Revolution filipina de 1896-1897. (Madrid 1899), p. 25.
Governor Diaz de Cendreras who arrested Father Garces in 1896 and American General Jacob
H. (“Howling Wilderness”) Smith who arrested him again in 1900, would hardly have
contributed to that docile sense of gratitude which was to be instilled in two generations of
Filipino subjects. So successfully was the memory of the Ilocano “martyrdom” erased from the
national consciousness that when Father Dacanay was included in the Dictionary of Philippine
Biography in 1955, no reference was made to that trial by torture which must have been the
most significant event in his life. Why then resurrect this 85-year-old tale of brutality and
oppression now?
Well, in the first place, with Filipinos sitting in the United Nations Organization as
delegates of a sovereign state, there would seem to be no reason to keep the ugly face of
imperialism benignly masked. Quite the opposite, in a day when brutality is no longer the
prerogative of colonial regimes, it can be argued that it is a service to mankind to call Evil by its
own name. And in the second place, the increasing use of brutality by legitimate governments
against their own citizens has produced a violent world in which more men live under threat of
state torture than do not. And in the third, the parallels with the Filipino experience are
sobering: where once lists of Masons were compiled by methods disavowed by Malacanang, so
now lists of Communists are produced under the same circumstances. How is such behavior as
that of those State servants or Church ministers toward the Nine Clergy of Nueva Segovia to be
explained? What are the roots of torture?
It must be said at the outset that it is hard to doubt the veracity of the Filipino accounts.
Aside from their palpable ring of truth and the high improbability of the detailed confessions
supposedly volunteered, had the military courts entertained any doubt about them, the four
priests would certainly have been charged with slander of the most vicious sort. Yet they were
all released at a time when the military outcome of the Revolution was being hotly contested
and at least a dozen of their brothers of the cloth were supporting the resistance behind
insurgent lines. More significantly, they were all reinstated the next year without retractions,
punishments, or penitence by the very bishop who must have known the whole truth, and lived
on to pursue distinguished careers in their chosen calling. Father Garces continued to be an
activist until his untimely death in 1905: he presented a memorial to the Malolos Constitutional
Assembly, served as Vicar Forane of Pangasinan, suffered American arrest, and joined the
schismatic Aglipayan Church (Iglesia Filipina Independiente). Father Dacanay added to his
already noteworthy reputation as Ilocano writer and translator of religious works, also suffered
American arrest, and died in 1930. Father Espiritu received the Licentiate in Theology from the
University of Santo Tomas in 1899, and later occupied important diocesan posts like Fiscal
Eclesiastico. Father Gaerlan joined the Aglipayan movement in 1902, but later returned to the
Church of his fathers.
Spanish testimony was not completely wanting, either. Vital Fite, third ranking official
in the Ilocos Norte provincial government at the time, wrote three years later:
In San Fernando, La Union, Roman Florentino was selected as the key of the
[supposed] movement because he had won a case over the nullity of a debt contracted in
illegal gambling against Pablo del Moral, who was married to the daughter of his
deceased relative, Fray Florencio [del Moral], former parish priest of Aringay. Together
with Florentino, his closest relatives and friends were put in jail, and by means of the
aforesaid tortures they managed to implicate the physician D. Luciano Almeida and
notary D. Ireneo Javier as chiefs of the ill-fated rebellion, and the priests D. Adriano
 Garces, D. Mariano Dacanay, and D. Mariano Garcilan [sic]. The latter were
barbarously beaten despite their religious calling, and from two of them denunciations
were obtained of many rich men of Ilocos Sur, Pangasinan, and Abra. 80
Connoisseurs of evil will have noted that the behavior itself ranged from hot blood to
cold. While Father Olaso was giving vent to sadistic ferocity in the Vigan Seminary, Bishop
Hevia was keeping his own role covert and hands clean in the episcopal palace across the plaza,
while Father Redondo was studiously producing false confessions in his own penmanship.
There were actually two plots—one in La Union and one in Vigan—both fabricating murderous
conspiracies if not out of whole cloth, at least out of fabric no more substantial than deliberate
rumors. Indeed, there may actually have been a still larger plot, for at the same time the Ilocano
priests were being flogged by officers of the Guardia Civil, four others from Bicol were
undergoing the same treatment at the hands of Augustinian verdugos in the oldest convento in
Manila. They had been arrested in Camarines Sur the same day their Ilocano brothers were
ordered to Vigan, and Father Gabriel Prieto was sent to his doom in Manila the same day Father
Gaerlan was handed over to his fate in San Fernando.
It is possible, of course, that some of the men arrested were guilty of subversion in
general terms even if not of the acts they were forced falsely to confess. Some of them were
prominent Masons or propagators of the revolutionary gospel, and many fought in the
Revolution of ‘98 and occupied positions under the Revolutionary Government. But the
opposite is just as possible—namely, that they were maltreated not because they were
revolutionaries but that they became revolutionaries precisely because of their maltreatment.
The three Guirnaldas of Candon, for example, father and sons, returned from their Bilibid
incarceration confirmed supporters of Katipunan goals.
The La Union plot was a masterpiece of intrigue and ingenuity: it took two months—and
no small loss of blood—to perfect, and was marred only by a few blunders like putting such
expressions in the mouths of Masons as “our sacred sect,” and confusing the Katipunan with
Freemasonry. Filipino sources give Fray Rafael Redondo full credit for this villainous triumph:
he is referred to matter-of-factly as its author in an official document from the people of Candon
to President. Aguinaldo on January 23, 1899, and in a 1911 memoire of the Revolution by
Roberto Guirnalda, and there are still elderly Ilocanos who can recite the details as they learned
them in their childhood from the lips of actual victims. Provincial Governor Enrique Polo
reporting his death in 1898, however, more delicately refers to “revenge for the rather
unbending nature of his personality.” 81
The Vigan plot, in contrast, was clumsy in the extreme. Based on two letters supposedly
delivered through the postal service from Balabac penal colony in Palawan in the unheard-of
time of 15 days, it would have required the exhibit in court of the two envelopes with their
cancelled stamps. When this oversight finally occurred to the plotters, the Rector desperately
called Deacon Carbonel in at the last hour and accused him of having stolen one of them. “But,
Father,” the Deacon replied, “how is it that the letter is in the Government House while the

80
Vital Fite, Las Desdichas de la Patria (Madrid 1899), p. 110.
81
“Estado de las Provincias de ambos Ilocos en Abril de 1898,” Vigan, 19 April 1898, National Archives,
Sediciones y Rebellones, NA-19 (18741898), Book I.
envelope was in your Reverence’s quarters?” Any answer would have called attention to the
fact that the Seminary was tampering with the Government mails, so Father Fernandez angrily
stripped Deacon Carbonel of his cassock and turned him over to the Civil Guards. Clumsier
still, notices kept appearing in friar organs in both Manila and Madrid which, if true, would
have been confidential details known only to military courts trying sensitive cases still sub
judice. Nor did they stop there. Two weeks after their victims were released, Fray Eduardo
Navarro published a book which soberly recounted the calumnies as actual historic incidents of
an insurrection he called the “height of ingratitude and an abominable mixture of base
passions.” 82
What is remarkable about all this deviant behavior is that it was being practiced by
Spaniards who must have been the most principled men in the colony—priests and provincial
governors. It is therefore easiest to explain by recourse to their own principles. These have been
summarized by a modern Augustinian author in one succinct statement: “The highest norm of
their conduct was love of Spain.” 83 In practice, this seems to have meant the subordination of all
precepts of honesty, justice and charity to the goal of preserving that social structure which
placed them in positions of power and privilege, and the destruction of any force or person that
threatened it. Thus the sanctity of the state and the blasphemy of subversion justified any
immorality or illegality to attain that end, and excluded all insurgents from common
considerations of human decency. 84 In the 1890’s, Spanish state and society seemed to be
endangered by rebellion overseas and anarchism at home. The Cuban Revolution broke out in
February 1895, and shocked Spaniards by what they considered its savagery. Cuban General
Maximo Gomez, being unable to match Spain’s 100,000 troops, waged a war of economic
attrition that by January 1896 was, burning canefields within sight of Havana itself. The next
June, an anarchist bomb was thrown into a public procession on Corpus Christi Day in,
Barcelona, and public outrage unloosed an orgy of arbitrary arrests and revolting tortures in
Montjuich Castle. Thus when Father Dacanay’s tormentors suggested squeezing his testicles on
the beach in San Fernando, they were simply alluding to the latest techniques from Peninsular
dungeons.
But torture in the Philippines also had racist overtones, especially in the case of mestizo
Volunteer Enrique Lete whose sadism may have been a subconscious desire to identify with
Spaniards rather than indios. (Mena Crisologo later wrote a zarzuela called “Neneng” in which
a Filipino playboy who joined the Volunteers because the friars were imprisoning Masons is
greeted with cries of “Traitor!”) Beds, tables, and chairs being symbols of social advancement
for the Filipino tao, the Ilocano clergy were made to sleep on the bare floor, eat plain rice

82
Eduardo Navarro, Filipinas: estudio de algunos asuntos de actualidad (Madrid 1897), p. viii.
83
Teofilo Aparicio, La persecution religiosa y la Orden de S. Agustin en la independencia de Filipinas (Valladolid
1973), p. 152.
84
While these lines were being written, Pope John Paul II was delivering a message in Malacanang Palace in
which he said:
“Even in exceptional situations that may at times arise, one can never justify any violation of the
fundamental dignity of the human person or of the basic rights that safeguard this dignity. Legitimate concern for
the security of the nation, as demanded by the common good, could lead to the temptation of subjugating to the
State the human being and his or her dignity and rights.’“—Daily Express, February 17, 1981.
without utensils, and suffer wounds which made it impossible for them to sit on chairs. As W.
E. Retana wrote sarcastically in Madrid in January 1898:
To those who know the common indios in the Philippines, the sight of Aguinaldo
and his troupe lodged in one of the better hotels in Hongkong could hardly fail to
provoke a good laugh. And they, accustomed to eating with their hands while squatting
on their heels, must have made the sign of the cross on seeing all those plates and
silverware. 85
Racism may also explain the special ferocity of young Father Olaso and Blanco: they were both
new in the Philippines and at then time had just been transferred to the Seminary from one-year
assignments in Igorot mission stations.
The reason the friar faculty in Vigan appeared in military uniforms and that bayonets
were so handy in the Seminary was that they were all reserve officers in the newly formed
Volunteers. The Vigan unit was sworn in on October 12, and when Fray Gabino Olaso kicked
Father Dacanay in the head, he had just been unanimously elected their chaplain. The Ilocos
Augustinians had been looking for subversion since the 1880’s as a matter of fact, and used to
accuse Recoleto Bishop Cuartero of being too fond of Filipinos to notice it. But most friars had
guns anyway. When the Government required all these to be registered in January 1897, the
Dominican Provincial took the occasion to “give some advice about the use of firearms”:
Repeating rifles, Mausers, etc., are unsuitable arms for the religious calling, which
no Religious should use except in very exceptional circumstances, and therefore their
acquisition is hardly in conformity with sacred canon and the religious poverty which we
have embraced. Therefore, we exhort your Reverences to follow ancient custom and be
satisfied with a hunting rifle of some sort, or at most a revolver for self defense in case
of individual need because of the dangers of the times. 86
Filipino victims themselves wasted no time looking for such background causes for their
maltreatment: they were all persuaded they were victims of personal vengeance. Certainly Mena
Crisologo had good reason for such suspicions: as the former bishop’s ecclesiastical notary, he
had formulated all episcopal disciplinary action for five years, including the excommunication
of two Augustinians. Father Garces had long been a thorn in friar flesh who, despite opposing
their political candidates and hobnobbing with their opponents, had survived their reporting him
as subversive once before. And seminarian Francisco Paredes’ poor old father, lying on the
floor of the Government House in Vigan with a bad case of eczema and his hands tied behind
his back, believed his only crime had been to take his daughter out of a girls school founded by
Bishop Hevia with imported nuns as faculty. As one of his sympathetic cellmates luridly
recounted the story ten years later:
Procopio had a young daughter, and sent her to add to the small education she had,
but unfortunately when, she grew older in that school, the Bishop used to visit every
morning and afternoon, and then even at night, and noticed that Procopio’s virtuous
daughter was the most beautiful of all the girls there. And although a lover never

85
La Politica de Espana en Filipinas, January 15, 1898.
86
Fray Bartolome Alvarez del Manzano, O.P., Prior Provincial, Manila, 19 January 1897, Libro de Ordenes
provinciales de Villasis, Pangasinan, 1849-1898.
 changes the object of his affections no matter how ugly he may be, the Bishop began to
neglect his cherished mamadres, and the girl, because they would then have rejected her
except for her studies, resented their treatment and did not like them. The Bishop, his
fever mounting, exhausted every ploy and amorous advance to obtain the full fruits of
his yearning but when the girl realized the heat of his passion, she notified old Procopio,
her father, who immediately came and took his daughter out of that school. 87
However exaggerated or untrue these scandalous suspicions may have been, the friars
who were their objects seem to have had no second thoughts about end goals justifying even
passionately deviant means. At least, one of them who left the Ilocos under threat of
excommunication rushed into print with the following accolade as soon as he learned the details
of their performance:
It is a glorious triumph for the Augustinian Order that its sons, successors of
Urdaneta, Martin de Rada, and Diego de Herrera, should have discovered the three nerve
centers of the present nefarious insurrection—in Manila, Father Fray Mariano—Gil,
parish priest of Tondo; in the Province of La Union, Father Fray Rafael Redondo, parish
priest of San Fernando; and in Ilocos Sur, the Fathers in charge of the Seminary in
Vigan. All of them deserve reward from the Fatherland for benefits so singular and so
worthy of encomium. 88
It was this passage which stretched to the breaking point the patience of two of the
conspiracy’s most distinguished victims—President Gregorio Sy-Quia of the Vigan
Ayuntamiento and Malolos Congressional Delegate Mena Crisologo. Invoking the name of
justice, therefore, they addressed a petition to the President of the Republic on November 5,
1898, which presented evidence to warrant the appointment of a military court to try the persons
named as respondents to charges of calumny, frustrated murder, and falsification of documents;
it specified the respondents’ current whereabouts, and requested their apprehension and transfer
for trial to the scene of the alleged crimes, and imprisonment if found guilty with confiscation
of their property to cover the cost of the proceedings. Accompanying the petition was a twelve-
page supplementary document entitled, “The Vigan Conspiracy” by Don Mena, which
presented an account of the activities of the accused with the factual details that would have
been available to an official of Don Mena’s position at the time—Legal Representative of the
Town Council (Sindico del Ayuntamiento). It was also enlivened by a few personal touches such
as the following:
Upon our arrival in Manila, we were conducted to Bilibid with elbows bound, and
crudely insulted by Spanish ladies in the streets through which we passed, including one
Senora on a balcony who shouted out this affectionate taunt at the top of her lungs, “Kill
the dogs!” 89
Don Mena began “The Vigan Conspiracy” by quoting the passage from Eduardo
Navarro’s Filipinas already cited. To this he responded with a statement of his own motivations

87
“Poon ti ili a Candon” (1911), Ayer MS 1713a, Newberry Library (Chicago, Illinois). I am indebted to Mr.
David Tabooy of St. Andrew’s Theological Seminary for assistance with this translation from Ilocano.
88
Navarro, op. cit., p. 252.
89
National Library, Philippine Insurgent Records, Selected Documents 974.3.
for committing the story to writing. It was a simple statement, but it provides one final and
compelling reason for reviving the tale of the Nine Clergy of Nueva Segovia. It is as follows:
As one of the victims, he who writes these poorly penned phrases desires to
perpetuate those meritorious friars memorable deed by transmitting their names to
posterity so that they may never again be forgotten by the generations to come. 90

90
Ibid.
 Struggle for Independence in Candon

Like many towns in the Philippines, Candon (Ilocos Sur), has a public plaza with a statue of a
patriot brandishing a bolo overhead in one hand and clutching a red flag in the other. To the
casual tourist, this may look like another Andres Bonifacio, but to the people of Candon he is
“Ilocos Sur’s last rebel”—Isabelo Abaya, leader of the Candon Uprising of March 25, 1898, a
date which for years was better known to Candon children as the Ikkis ti Kandon (“Cry of
Candon”) than as the Feast of the Annunciation.
The hero thus memorialized was Federico Isabelo Abaya, born in 1866 to well-to-do
Proceso and Severa Abaya. Contemporaries remembered him as an indifferent and resentful
student, shy and uninterested in class activities, who reacted bitterly against the monotony of
memorizing long passages in Spanish. The experience produced a hearty dislike of that
language he came to consider the symbol of submission to a colonial regime which placed the
parish priest in a position to interfere in private and public affairs, and Civil Guards in a
position to maltreat local citizens in or out of the line of duty. Such was the attitude which
resulted in his leaving the Vigan Seminary where he had been sent to complete the secondary
course. From these disappointing school days, he found relief in becoming a better horseman
than his two elder brothers, and devoted his time to his parents’ stable of spirited animals from
the nearby province of Abra. Young Belong’s youth therefore exhibited the classic earmarks of
a late 19th-century rebel—resentment of formal education and rejection of authority, shyness
covering an inner bitterness, and the virile gratification of galloping spirited horses across open
fields.
It was not as a youth, however, but as a 33-year-old businessman dealing in cotton
textiles that Belong joined—or perhaps formed—a subversive society called the Espiritu de
Candon. His comrades were Pio Madarang, Toribio Abaya, Nazario Gray, the Guirnalda
brothers Fernando and Francisco, his own brother Manuel, and his nephews, Manuel, Jr., and
Leon. On March 24 of that fateful year of 1898, Nazario Gray was arrested and tortured and at
an official banquet that night, a Spanish mestizo by the name of Arturo Liquete who was one of
Belong’s friends, learned that the authorities had a complete list of the underground members.
He immediately warned Isabelo, who decided to take action at once. Accordingly, he gathered
his followers together, armed with homemade guns, spears, bolos, clubs, and axes, and at two
o’clock the next morning, led them into the plaza. They fell on the guard quarters, seized and
wounded its commander, and received the surrender of all the Civil Guards. They then took the
convento, and led parish priest Rafael Redondo and two young friar visitors out to the suburbs
of Bucong and beheaded them. Then the red flag of revolt was run up the flagpole in the town
square, and the so-called Republic of Candon was born.
Two days later, however, the Spaniards landed shock troops at Pating southwest of the
municipal center. Captain Belong had marched north to take Santiago, and his other forces had
gone east and south in two separate columns. The town was thus undefended when Spanish
cazadores (“hunters”) marched in unopposed. Most of the rebel forces disbanded, but leaders
like Isabelo and the Guirnalda brothers escaped. Both Fernando and Francisco were later
captured in Tubao (La Union), but escaped to Pangasinan, where Francisco disappeared and
was never seen again. In Candon, meanwhile, Manuel, Leon and Toribio Abaya were executed,
along with Desiderio Agbulos, Victorino Gadut, Urbano Galac, Roberto and Placido Guirnalda,
Pio Madarang, Severo Paredes, and Father Valentin Rubio.
The intrepid Isabelo made his way into the Igorot mountains to the east, and
subsequently served in the Revolutionary Army under Colonel Manuel Tinio, recruiting Igorots
whom he led in the Battle of Caloocan at the beginning of the Philippine-American War in
February 1899. A year later he became commander of guerrilla forces in southern Ilocos under
Colonel Juan Villamor, and was killed in action on May 3, 1900. The American military
command desecrated his body by displaying it bloody in the plaza at the spot where the present
monument stands. Kapitan Belong quickly passed into legend both in U.S. field reports and the
hearts of the people of Candon—an unscrupulous bandit warlord to the one, a patriotic Robin
Hood to the others, complete with wonder-working anting-anting.
Such is the story of the Candon Uprising as it is known to the people of Candon and as it
has been told from time to time in Sunday supplements and souvenir programs of town fiestas. 91
Like the more famous uprising of Andres Bonifacio 17 months earlier, it occurred by accident
because of the premature disclosure of its plot. But while Bonifacio’s plans, had they not been
aborted, are well known, the plans of Isabelo Abaya and his comrades have never been
explained. What would have happened in Candon had Nazario Gray not been arrested and
tortured on March 24? Were Isabelo and his followers dreaming, in that revolutionary twilight
zone between Biyak-na-Bato and the Battle of Manila Bay, of a little Ilocano republic, a
Republic of the Philippines with its capital at Candon? Just how local were their plans and how
isolated their movement? What, in short, was the contribution of the Candon Uprising to the
cause of Philippine independence, and its role in Philippine history?
These are questions which recommend an examination of the Candon Uprising in the
brighter light of the total Philippine Revolution.

* * *

Candon in the 1890’s was a prosperous provincial town with a proud history whose
native name memorialized the fact that Spanish conquistadores had recognized its prominence
before any missionary friar arrived to rededicate it to some European saint. Kandong is a kind
of tree, and the original specimen lives on in local legend. Under its branches, old folks say,
mountain traders bearing the products of mines and forests used to gather until some Spanish
friar recognized its implications for ancestor worship and chopped it down for lumber to build
his church. And under its branches, too, were held those legendary wrestling matches which
reflect a day when Candon chieftains were far-ranging warriors called maingel (“braves”)
besting Ilocano, Igorot and Pangasinan champions alike. Similarly, Candon’s two largest
families, the Abayas and Madarangs, being of Igorot descent, proudly maintained those
surnames in the face of Governor Claveria’s 1849 decree which fastened names like Gacula,
Gironella, and Guirnalda on more tractable families.

91
I am indebted for discussion of the Candon legend to Attorney Joselino Abaya, who first told me the story in
1959; to Mr. Jose P. Alcance, author of the unpublished “Candon: yesterday and today”; to Mr. Leandro B.
Ablang, authority and author of many articles in English and Ilocano about the resistance movements in Ilocos,
particularly “The cry of Candon” (Philippines Free Press, Mar. 26, 1960) and “Ilocos Sur’s last rebel” (Ibid., Mar.
25, 1961); and to anthropologist Patricia Torres for sharing her 1981 field notes.
 An exposition of local products which accompanied the town fiesta of 1892 gives a nice
sampling of the community’s commercial vitality. Agricultural products were divided into six
categories, one of which was medicinal plants, exhibited by “native herbolarios of both sexes
who will give instruction in their qualities.” 92 Mineral products included Igorot gold, copper
from Mankayan, and iron from Gambang. Silver medals were presented to Mena Crisologo of
Vigan for an entry of 113 hundred-weight of top-quality indigo produced in his plant that year;
to Roberto Guirnalda for a machine he invented out of bamboo for processing maguey; to
Nazario Gray for an exhibition of cows, mares, stallions, sheep, goats and kids; to Placido
Guirnalda for a native Aeta house together with its inhabitants and a descriptive catalogue of
their life and customs; to Francisco Teofisto Guirnalda for an entry of 18 different kinds of
edible root crops collected in the municipality; to Victorino Abaya for a display of decorated
seashells he worked himself; and to Isabelo Abaya for a display of textiles, blankets, and table
linens woven of Ilocano cotton.
Nor was the exhibition without its cultural aspirations. Ilocano publications and
manuscripts were exhibited along with books in other languages dealing with Ilocos, as well as
artifacts and weapons from inhabitants of the Candon mountains. Gold medals were awarded
Fray Rufino Redondo of San Juan for his novels and short stories in Ilocano, and to Isabelo de
los Reyes for a complete three-year run of his biweekly El Ilocano, as well as copies of his own
writings in German, Ilocano, Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog. And the Spanish Baguer Barbero
zarzuela troupe came all the way from Manila to perform for the occasion, moving El Comercio
to a good-natured allusion to Ilocano thrift, “May they bring back a lot of fifty-centavo pieces
from the good Ilocanos.” 93
Such commercial potential and cultural pretensions were the characteristics of a Filipino
bourgeoisie eager for reforms who considered the friar orders the major obstacles to obtaining
them. The friars in turn considered such reforms a direct threat to both their power and prestige
and the very system which provided it. Unable or unwilling to distinguish loyalty to Faith from
loyalty to the State, they lumped all dissension together under the subversive heading of
Masonry, whether criticism of their personal failings or actual plots against the security of the
state. Thus when the Revolution broke out in 1896, all the Ilocano prize-winners listed above
were arrested and imprisoned except one, Isabelo Abaya. If Isabelo was overlooked because of
his youth or lack of prestige, his exclusion was an example of the friar penchant for picking the
wrong targets, for he was the only one of the Candon proprietors who took up arms against
Spain in the Revolution of ‘96.
There is no evidence, or even likelihood, of any Masonic lodges in Ilocos in August
1896, much less of any Katipunan cells or underground plots to overthrow the colonial regime
by armed force. Yet counterrevolutionary fury broke over the Ilocos provinces like a tropical
typhoon just two weeks after the Cry of Pugad Lawin in Manila. It struck San Fernando (La
Union) first on September 10, with the arrest of a hapless telegrapher who was forced to confess
the existence of an assassination plot which was sheer fabrication, and pinpoint both its
supposed agents and their targets. Three days later, 28 men had been implicated by the same
method, and on the 17th their number was increased by three Filipino priests. Then the storm

92
La Ilustracion Filipina, Jan. 7, 1893.
93
Op. cit., Nov. 4, 1892.
center moved north to the Seminary where, early in November, a 60-year-old priest was beaten
into naming the cream of Vigan society as a Masonic cabal, and by the end of the month five
seminarians had signed confessions of having been plotting to murder all their professors. From
Vigan, the storm swept on into Ilocos Norte where it finally blew itself out in a little one-friar
reign of terror in Sarrat which reduced 20 men to incarceration and torture.
The machiavellian mastermind behind the mother plot was Fray Rafael Redondo, parish
priest of San Fernando and Vicar Forane of La Union. Fray Rafael was an absolute caricature of
a friar, whose own bishop’s reports read like something out of a Rizal novel:
From the time he arrived in the Diocese, I noticed he must be having illicit relations
in Cabugao. He was confronted with the case, and after consultation it was considered
best to transfer him to Santa, where he is continuing his relations with the same woman,
and they already have three children which public opinion attributes to Father
Redondo. 94
But not even Rizal ever painted such vignettes of cold-blooded calm in acting out so
villainous a scenario. Fray Rafael not only wrote out the original score in his own hand—that is,
the questions and the correct answers his victims were supposed to supply—but orchestrated
their continuing torment to bring conflicting confessions into harmony. When his own
coadjutor, Father Mariano Gaerlan, begged on bended knees to retract his forced confession he
told him coldly that no honest man could be forced to sign a false confession even if they killed
him. And when Father Dacanay, lying prostrate on the floor of his cell wet with wounds which
would leave lifelong scars, pleaded for the solace of the sacraments, he turned his back and
strode out, mumbling something about “souls in hell.” 95
Lino Abaya, Candon’s richest citizen, had been caught in the Vigan witch-hunt, so his
townmates watched the terror mounting to north and south with increasing apprehension. Just
then, their parish priest of 30 years died, scholarly old Fray Gaspar Cano, author of the first
biographical catalogue of his Order in the Philippines. His interim replacement was 24-year-old
Fray Pedro Ordonez on his first parish assignment, and his youth posed the threat that he might
be influenced by his more sanguinary superiors, but also held out the possibility that his head
might be turned by flattery. They therefore decided to mount an extravagant town fiesta to win
his good will—or, as one of them put it, “kiss his behind”—agkan amin nga ubet ti cura. 96
Candon’s official patron is San Juan de Sahagun, whose feastday is celebrated on June
12, but the town traditionally honors Santa Barbara on December 4 in a kind of second town
fiesta. Thus the nervous townsfolk had a ready excuse for providing their new rector with a
rousing welcome, and so they began their preparations early in November. They decided to
present a second theatrical number this year as an added attraction to the usual Ilocano moro-
moro, a Spanish zarzuela called El Rey que rabio (The King who went mad) which had been a
howling success in Madrid and Manila only the year before, and had never been shown in the

94
Fray Mariano Cuartero to Fray Manuel Diez, Manila, Aug. 31, 1885, Archivo General de la Orden de Agustinos
Recoletos, Rome, Caja 60. I am indebted to the Rev. Father Angel Martinez Cuesta, OAR, for a copy of this letter.
95
“Relatos varios o Martirios de los nueve Clerigos de Nueva Segevia,” fol. 15v (Feb. 4, 1897), Archives of the
University of Santo Tomas, Seccion “Historia eclesiastica de Filipinas.”
96
“Poon ti ili a Candon” (1911), Ayer MS 1713a, Newberry Library (Chicago, Illinois).
provinces at all. But on the night of November 26, while Roberto Guirnalda was rehearsing the
moro-moro in his house and his son Placido was teaching the zarzuela songs in the town hall,
the Civil Guards burst in and arrested Roberto, his sons Fernando and Francisco, and Victorino
Abaya. The four of them were carted off to Vigan that same night, and kept there with elbows
bound behind their backs for 16 days of what modern counterinsurgency terminology would
call “shrewd questioning.” Despite this ordeal, they kept insisting they didn’t even know what a
Mason was, so they were all shipped off to Manila in irons at the end of December.
If the Guirnaldas really didn’t know what a Mason was, there was no better place to find
out than the Department of Distinguished Political Prisoners in the Bilibid Military Prison.
There they could mingle not only with Masons but with Katipuneros and revolutionaries of
every stripe, and compare notes with members of their own class who had had splinters inserted
under their fingernails or electric current applied to their private parts. There they could read an
Ilocano translation of a poem Dr. Jose Rizal had smuggled out of Fort Santiago the night before
his death, and listen to rumors about how friars had printed subversive pamphlets on their own
press and got a Carabinero who was Archbishop Nozaleda’s nephew to insert them in his
sister’s luggage. But most significantly, there they could hobnob with that human dynamo of a
province-mate, rebel journalist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was devoting his full time to
interviewing prisoners, disseminating gossip, and writing a series of articles so sensational he
was soon afterwards deported to Spain’s choicest dungeons in Montjuich Castle, Barcelona. It
must have been a political education the Guirnaldas did not quickly forget.

* * *

Early in April 1897, the military courts released those prisoners charged in Father
Redondo’s fake conspiracy, and Father Redondo himself was transferred out of San Fernando to
spare him their vengeance. The Guirnaldas were released on the King’s birthday, May 17, but it
took them three months and considerable expense in gifts for Auditor General of War Nicolas
Pana to get clearance to leave Manila. When they reached Candon on August 13, they learned—
to their horror, no doubt—that their new parish priest was Rafael Redondo. They presented
themselves dutifully to kiss his hand, but he minced no words in telling them he didn’t believe
they were innocent at all, and was sure they were each the head of an insurgent gang. Their
release by military jurisdiction he dismissed loftily: after all, they had been released not because
their innocence had been proved, but because their guilt had not been. Unable to reply to such
logic, the Guirnaldas decided to stay out of his way as much as possible.
Fray Rafael seems to have been intent on living up to a reputation that made English
author John Foreman ready to believe he had beaten his Filipino coadjutor with the prickly tail
of a rayfish, stripped naked, and tied to a bench. Before the year was out, he had confined
coadjutor Valentin Rubio to the convento, enlisted the Civil Guard Teniente del Puerto as his
crony, and intimidated the whole town. He had his daily rations of eggs, chickens, firewood,
and cattle fodder doubled, required the church to be repaired without supplying materials,
demanded an extra servant, and refused to pay for any of these services as his young
predecessor had perhaps naively done. The municipal petty officers were caught between
ingratiating themselves with the friar and the commander, and avoiding vengeance from their
oppressed townmates. The Guirnaldas observed the developing contradictions in the light of the
lessons they had learned in Bilibid, and started to worry about the possibility of an uprising that
would wreak its vengeance not only on friar oppressors but on upperclass townmates as well.
As soon as the Pact of Biyak-na-Bato was signed, therefore, they sent Francisco to Manila to
find out what was going on.
What was going on was that one of their provincemates, the prominent Isabelo Artacho
of Vigan, was trying to recruit an anti-Aguinaldo faction among the remaining officers of the
defunct Biyak-na-Bato government. As reported by Francisco’s brother Fernando 14 years later:
He [Artacho] consulted many Tagalog leaders about a plan for another revolution
for, he said, Don Emilio would never return, then being very rich in Hongkong and
caring no more for the Philippines and the cause for which the Filipino patriots had
suffered so much. So when Francisco Guirnalda went to see his Tagalog friend, he was
warmly received by the latter. They spoke of the Hongkong affair and the probable
consequent uprising, and then Francisco was asked if he had forgotten how much he had
suffered. Francisco signified his willingness to join in the proposed uprising and signed
an agreement for himself and his brother and father. Then he returned to Candon, where
he related all that he had observed and done, and his brother and father readily approved
of his actions. 97
The peace treaty also brought Isabelo Abaya home, for he had been among those who
laid down their arms at Biyak-na-Bato. He must have left Candon early in the Revolution
because when he recruited some Igorots in western Bontoc in 1897, he invoked the name of
Bonifacio, not Aguinaldo. According to three of the Igorots themselves—Degan, Bodkaw and
Dakwag of Sagada (Mountain Province)—he took them to San Juan del Monte and enrolled
them in a secret society called Iglesia Monastica Filipina, which was separatist in purpose, and
eventually grew to a membership of more than a thousand. 98 There they were taught to drill
with arms and recite Christian prayers. They also reported that they were paid off at Biyak-na-
Bato, which probably means that they had served under Artemio “Vibora” Ricarte (an Ilocano
whose real name was Dodon) since he was the only general there who surrendered twelve
spears in addition to the usual firearms, swords and bolos. And it was probably their presence,
too, which inspired Retana’s sarcastic references to Aguinaldo’s “Igorot army” and to the
ceremonies themselves as having been celebrated with “banquets, flimflam, embraces, and
parades of indios in G-strings.” 99
At the time Francisco Guirnalda was making his Katipunan commitment in Manila,
General Francisco Soliman Makabulos of Tarlac was still holding out in O’Donell. On January
14, he went through the formality of surrender, collected his share of the second Pact payment,
and went home to prepare for the renewal of hostilities. By the end of February, he had
established contacts throughout the Central Plain as far north as Lingayen Gulf, where
Mangatarem was fortified on the Zambales border in the west, and San Nicolos in the Agno

97
Fernando Guirnalda, “The Republic of Candon” (1912), The Silliman Journal, Vol. 26 (1979), p. 33.
Guirnalda mistakenly thought Artacho had accompanied Aguinaldo to Hongkong and had just returned
after a quarrel with him there.
98
Manuel Kiley, “The life and pagan practices of western Sagada,” The University of Baguio Journal, Vol. 7
(1972), pp. 180-181.
99
Valley in the east. This was a movement into Ilocano-speaking territory, and the Ilocos
provinces were in fact a natural place to seek support for the continuing struggle: they had
escaped destruction during the war but were a deep reservoir of resentment from the traumatic
arrests of ‘96. La Union in particular was full of amnestied prisoners and deportees ready to act,
and an incident which occurred in Agoo at the time indicates just how explosive the atmosphere
was.
The Bishop of Nueva Segovia (Vigan) sent a complaint to the Governor General against
a Balabac returnee by the name of Mariano Orencia for not having shown due respect to his
Vicar Forane during a service on January 18; but Orencia countered with a sworn statement of
his own in which he charged that:
On the morning of the 18th, while he was inside the church for the confirmation of his
child, his wife told him that his mother had been left outside the building due to the great
press of people and that when he went to look for her, he saw Father Mariano Garcia
pushing her brutally and threatening to hit her, and that Senor Chinchilla, the Civil
Governor’s Secretary, was about to strike her with a riding crop he was carrying; that in
view of such behavior, he went over to the Father and asked him to let them take the
child into the church to his wife’s breast and, while he was at it, not to hit his mother;
that when Father Mariano heard these remarks, he asked him what his name was and
upon learning it, said, “Insurgents do not enter the church but deserve to be beaten,” and
that Senor Chinchilla and the Sergeant of the Civil Guards who were present tried to hit
him, so he had no choice but to run away. 100
In February, increasing Katipunan recruitment around Lingayen Gulf attracted
government attention, and Governor Navas made a sweep through northern Zambales and
Pangasinan at the end of the month, examining men’s arms for fresh incisions, and arrested 50
of the local gentry. It was the attempt to march these prisoners to Dasul under death sentence
which, according to a contemporary Spanish account, “lit the fuse of the bomb already
prepared.” 101 Attacks were made on military posts from Agno to Anda, 15,000 insurgents fell in
Balincaguin (Mabini) alone, telegraph lines to the cable station at Bolinao were cut, and San
Nicolas forces entered the Caraballo Sur to strike a Volunteer outpost in Kayapa, Nueva
Vizcaya. Clearly, it was time for Ilocano leadership and organization. Katipunan chiefs Vicente
del Prado and Juan Quesada—soon to become Pangasinan Politico-Military Commandant in the
Makabulos underground and Second-in-Command, respectively—accordingly went to Manila
to provide it. There, in a house at No. 12 Mapa Street in Tondo, they executed an acta on March
16, 1898, which indicated that the Artacho incident had not produced any significant Ilocano-
Tagalog dissension:
The undersigned, having previously decided to take to the field of rebellion with
their numerous host composed of bolomen [talibones] to oppose the harrowing crimes,

100
Manuel Berand, Manila, Jan. 27, 1898, Philippine National Archives, Sediciones y Rebeliones, NA-31, Book 3
(1874-1898).
Father Mariano Garcia was killed in a small uprising in Santo Tomas (L.U.) on April 11, 1898, together
with Volunteer Lieutenant Enrique Lete, Father Redondo’s henchman and the chief torturer in San Fernando in
1896.
101
La Politica de Espana en Filipinas, April 3, 1898, p. 156.
 secret shootings, tortures, violation of honorable girls, etc., etc., directly and decisively,
which the friars, the armed forces of the Government, the Civil Guards, and cazadores
commit daily in the provinces of northern Luzon, have agreed with Don Faustino
Lichauco, industrialist and proprietor, and resident of this capital, that he shortly
undertake his voyage to Hong Kong in the first steamer to sail from this port, where the
worthy President of the Republic of Biyak-na-Bato will be found, Senor Emilio
Aguinaldo, together with various officials of the Revolution which was put down by
miserable tricks and false promises by the Government to implement liberal reforms,
and pray the said President, in the name of various northern provinces, that he deign to
authorize their unfortunate inhabitants to rise up against the Spanish Government so
that, upon his return from that colony with his valiant entourage, he will find the volcano
of Revolution already erupting there. 102
This was just a few days after Fernando Guirnalda and Isabelo Abaya told their Candon
followers they were going to Manila to get arms from Aguinaldo, and left for San Fernando.

* * *

Fernando Guirnalda and Isabelo Abaya had joined forces sometime in the second half of
January 1898. Meeting in a pasture east of the town, they swore a mutual oath “to give their
services, and even their lives, to seek the legitimate rights not only of their own townspeople,
but also of the whole Philippine Islands.” 103 They organized a Katipunan chapter called Estrella
del Sur sworn to the same cause, composed mostly of unmarried men from the leading families,
and drew up an Instituto revolucionario as a pledge and constitution. They bought a small
printing press, with which they presumably contributed to the condition a Madrid correspondent
reported in the following excited terms: “The two Ilocos provinces were flooded with
incendiary proclamations, rules, law codes, ordinances and constitutions of the ‘Great
Philippine Republic.’” 104 They usually held their meetings in the eastern barrios for security
reasons, and traveled up to Cervantes (Lepanto) in the Abra Valley to meet agents from Manila.
Elsewhere in the province, they established contacts in Narvacan, Santa Maria, Santa Lucia,
Tagudin, and Bangar, and in Ilocos Norte in Lapog, seat of the rich and influential Centeno
family. Centeno men were renowned for their personal courage and leadership, and they spread
their revolutionary gospel under cover of horse races and prayer meetings of the Guardia de
Honor. Faustino and Antonio Centeno had been among the first arrests in 1896, and Enrique
had been the Guirnaldas’ own cellmate.
Isabelo started organizing and drilling his forces with the classic weapons of a peasant
jacquerie—farm implements and sharpened sticks. It is probably a tribute to the efficiency of
the Spanish regime that they had not a single firearm among them, nor even a bolo without its
point rounded. However, there were only 28 Civil Guards in the whole province (who are
referred to in Candon folklore as Spaniards but were actually Filipinos under three or four

102
Philippine National Library, Philippine Insurgent Records, Selected Documents 157.
103
Guirnalda, op. cit., p. 34.
104
La Politica de Espana en Filipinas, May 15, 1898, p. 187.
Spanish officers), and an indeterminate number of civilian reserves called Voluntarios. The
seven Guards in Candon were soon won over, and Isabelo expected his allies to accomplish the
same with the ten in Narvacan and Tagudin. With their rifles and their commanders’ revolvers,
they would theoretically outgun the remaining eleven Guards in Vigan. If they could depend on
their allies and acted quickly enough, they could march to Vigan in eight hours and seize the
capital before reinforcements could arrive from Manila. Isabelo therefore went around buying
up iron and hired blacksmiths to manufacture bolos with sharp points for all his men.
Nonetheless when he and Fernando left for Manila to get orders in the middle of March, he told
his men reassuringly that they were going for the purpose of getting arms from Aguinaldo
himself.
The two Candon leaders were probably on their way to attend the Tondo meeting, but in
San Fernando were turned back by reports that the fighting had already begun. They therefore
returned to Candon empty-handed and announced that the uprising was set for Friday, April 1.
For the next week, Isabelo was hardly out of the saddle, and Fernando stayed in the barrios all
day and only sneaked in to his family at night. But as their enthusiasm mounted, men started
swaggering around with those pointed bolos in their belts, and it became impossible to maintain
security. On March 23, a certain Eugenio Mati Docena notified Spanish businessman Antonio
Bona about what was going on. The next day, a mixed patrol of Civil Guards and Volunteers
left Narvacan with search-and-arrest orders. Their sergeant reached Candon that afternoon.
Naturally, Fray Rafael had his own means of learning secrets, and his relations with the
people of Candon were worse than ever. Right after Biyak-na-Bato, his Civil Guard crony had
been replaced by a Lieutenant Abel Aparici, who turned out to be a very decent family man
with two children. Emboldened by this change, the town officials entered an official complaint
with the Governor against their parish priest. Soon afterwards, Father Rubio was released from
detention, and Father Redondo’s name disappeared from parish registers in favor of Fray
Antonio Blanco, professor of physics and chemistry in the Vigan Seminary. On the afternoon of
March 24, then, Fray Rafael had one of Isabelo’s key men arrested—Nazario Gray, who was
taken to the town hall, mauled, and beaten.
The next day would be the Feast of the Annunciation, and an official banquet was
scheduled that evening. Two young missionaries had arrived from Kapangan and Bokod in the
mountains of Benguet, Fathers Santiago Garcia and Ricardo Montes, and Father Anacleto
Fernandez of Cabacan was expected in the morning. One of the dinner guests happened to be a
Spanish mestizo by the name of Juan Gonzales Liquete who was sympathetic to the Filipino
cause. During the course of the evening, he learned that the authorities had a complete list of the
Katipunan membership, so he contrived to send his nephew, Arturo Liquete, to warn them.
Isabelo was in, the seaside barrio of Tamurong drilling his men, and had already heard about the
impending search for arms. This new information left him with no choice but to act. He decided
to attack that night.
A crescent moon set early that night, and it was pitch dark when Isabelo struck the Civil
Guard quarters with a handpicked band at three o’clock on Friday morning, March 25, 1898.
The Guards made no resistance and jumped out the windows, but Lieutenant Aparici leaped up
from bed, fought valiantly, and was seriously wounded. At the same time, the general signal
was given in the town plaza—prolonged rolling on the drum from the tribunal. The sergeant
from Narvacan was awakened by the noise in the house where he was spending the night with a
friend, leaped out the window in his underclothes, and took to his heels. He reached Santa Lucia
at dawn, and then waited impatiently when two sacristans refused to interrupt Fray Clemente
Hidalgo until he finished saying mass. Then the sergeant and the priest crossed the river to
Santa Cruz, got a boat, and set sail for San Fernando, the nearest telegraph station, to give the
alarm.
Back in Candon, a mob of 300 broke into the convento compound and sacked the
building, but the three friars had fled into the church to hide. There they were seized, Fray
Rafael praying at the foot of the high altar, and his two young visitors rather ridiculously trying
to hide behind the images of saints. They were taken to the municipal hall, where Fernando
Guirnalda gave them a lecture:
You, Friar Redondo, are the cause of all this trouble. When you had sated yourself
with tormenting the people of La Union, you came here to Candon to continue your
cruel practices. You know that all you friars were sent here to be the spiritual leaders of
the people, but when you acquired wealth and became powerful, you overstepped your
rights. Instead of teaching the people what is right, you taught them only how to serve
you like slaves. You ought to be the Father of Souls, but instead you have become the
fathers of numerous families. You have numerous sons who serve only to increase our
miseries, for you require us to serve and support them, too. You are not content with
only one wife, but tens of them. And now you want us only to suffer more, for you wish
that only the ignorant and servile should survive. Since the Government is not powerful
enough to check your excesses, the people have to assume their rights, and be your
judges. 105
The friars were then placed under guard in the house of Arturo Liquete, where perhaps
they did what Guirnalda suggested—“Wait for the verdict of the people and pray to God that
they may be lenient with you.” 106 Other Spanish residents were put under house arrest in their
own homes, and town officials like Mayor Guillermo Alviar and Justice of the Peace Candido
Abaya were taken under protective custody, both because of their pro-Spanish sentiments and to
protect them from popular vengeance. Then the revolutionaries gathered in the convento to
establish their government.
Fernando Guirnalda was named President and Isabelo Abaya Commander-in-Chief. The
armed forces were divided into three divisions totaling more than a thousand men, but with only
eight rifles and two revolvers among them. Isabelo himself took command of the First Division,
and his two nephews—Manuel, Jr., and Leon—of the Third; Francisco Guirnalda was appointed
to the Second Division with Alejandro Madarang and Francisco Gironella as adjutants. A doctor
and nurses were named for a military hospital, and a Filipino priest as chaplain. (This was
probably Father Pedro de la Vega, coadjutor since Father Cano’s day, since Father Rubio’s
commission, unfortunately for him as it turned out, was as Councilor of the Republic.) Placido
Guirnalda was named Secretary of the Interior, and commissions as chiefs (cabecillas) or
councilors were issued to Poseido Abaya, Modesto Dario, Manuel Leon, Arturo and Juan
Gonzales Liquete, Justo Madarang, Carlos Ruiz, and Pablo Valocis. All these appointments
were made on printed forms displaying the seal of the new republic, but administrative orders

105
Guirnalda, op, cit., p. 38.
106
lbid., p, 39.
were issued on ordinary parish stationary. (Spanish historian Manuel Sastron commented
indignantly, “The rebels did not even bother to erase that seal which was the symbol of a role so
contrary to that which the revolutionaries were assigning it.”) 107 President Guirnalda then
ceremoniously read the Program Constitution to the assembly, explained the goals of the
uprising, and inaugurated the convento as the capital of the republic. Then on the flagstaff in,
front of the building, they solemnly raised the red banner, not of the Republic of Candon, but of
the “Katipunan Republic of the Philippines.”
General Abaya immediately moved north with the First Division and three rifles. On the
outskirts, they encountered two of the Civil Guards sent to make the arrests the day before: one
was hacked to death and the other escaped. At the southern end of the Salaw Bridge between
Candon and Santiago they dug trenches, but when they reached Santiago, they found some 40
Volunteers and the remainder of the Civil Guards barricaded in the convento, and the Spanish
residents under the protection of Mayor Elias Mendoza. For 24 hours they besieged the
convento but did not have the firepower to take it, while they themselves were exposed to the
marksmanship of sharpshooters inside. On the 26th, Isabelo arranged a parley with the Mayor,
who agreed to let the municipal officers decide the issue. But the insurgents soon discovered
that all those officials had disappeared, so they retaliated by putting their houses, stores and
granaries to the torch. That evening the defenders withdrew, presumably for want of
ammunition, and headed for Vigan. At Santa Maria they discovered that Provincial Commander
Mariano Arques had arrived and fortified the church and convento which occupied a strategic
location overlooking the town and commanding the road.
The Second Division marched south for Tagudin with three rifles under the command of
Francisco Guirnalda. From the outskirts, they sent scouts in to contact the local chiefs and find
out if the Civil Guards had defected or not. They were told that they had all left town, so they
started off in pursuit of them. But as soon as they reached the plaza, they discovered they had
been betrayed: the Guards were actually fortified in the convento and they now opened fire. The
Second Division returned the fire as best they could, and tried to set fire to the building but
couldn’t find enough dry grass for tinder. So, after sustaining one death and many wounds, they
retreated in confusion to reform in the outskirts. But as soon as they had withdrawn, the Civil
Guards and Spanish families escaped to the south, leaving the town—and its treacherous
officers—to the republican forces.
The Third Division headed east to Coveta and Salcedo with two rifles, overran the
barrios and crisscrossed the countryside, and encountered no resistance. They happened to run
into Fray Anacleto Fernandez of Cabacan on his way in to the Feast of the Annunciation in
Candon, so they took him captive and marched him off to Salcedo. There, the gobernadorcillo’s
old father successfully pleaded for his life, so he survived to be rescued by Spanish troops. The
next day, they blocked a patrol from the Politico-Military Commandancy of Tiagan on the crest
of the Malaya Range which separates the Ilocos coast from the Abra Valley. Tiagan
Commandant Eduardo Fanen Moreno had received word of the uprising from the Narvacan
command that morning, and had sent that patrol out under a Spanish sergeant. It returned in the
afternoon with the report of having encountered a force of 600 insurgents with no firearms, and
having spent 200 rounds of ammunition to cover their retreat. Fanen thereupon called in the

107
La insurreccion en Filipinas y Guerra hispano-americana en el Archipielago (Madrid 1901), pp. 349-350.
small detachment from Ling-ey nearby and concentrated his forces and Spanish families in the
fort in Tiagan. The Abaya brothers then sacked the cuartel in Ling-ey and the mission station in
Concepcion—but spared the church ornaments—and headed back to Salcedo.
Back in Candon the same day, treacherous Eugenio Mati was unwisely commissioned to
spread the revolution to Tiagan because he had some brothers living there. He asked for
Santiago Abaya to accompany him. Santiago was the son of the Justice of the Peace who had
tried to send him through the insurgent lines to report the uprising to Vigan, but failed. Now the
two of them headed for Antonio Mati’s house in the Tiagan barrio of Paltoc, and as soon as they
got there, they went straight to the fort in Tiagan and handed over their commissions to
Commandant Fanen. Mati then listed all the appointments he could remember from the
establishment of the revolutionary government in the Candon convento on the 25th, and the
next day executed the following sworn statement:
The uprising had been set for the next week but was precipitated by receiving word
that the Guardia Civil was going to conduct a search for arms. Of these they had two
revolvers, six rifles from the Candon Civil Guards who had made common cause with
them, and the rest armed with bolos, spears, batons, headaxes, and sharpened bamboo.
He also heard that the first Friday in April had been set for an uprising in Manila. The
insurgents organized three columns—one for Narvacan, another for Bangar, and the
third for Tiagan. In addition to Candon, Santa Maria, Santa Cruz, Santa Lucia and
Bangar (Ilocos Sur), San Fernando in La Union, and Cervantes (Lepanto) were involved
in the rebellion. In Candon, they made prisoners of the officers of the Civil Guard, the
Friar and two others who were visiting and the Spanish residents. 108

* * *

Far away in the capital of Manila, Spanish authority was also being challenged. At 8:00
on the morning of March 25—at the very moment an independent government was being
inaugurated in Ilocos Sur—a patrol of Volunteers broke into a house on Camba Street and shot
up or arrested almost a hundred Visayan sailors and dock-workers for plotting rebellion. And
while the three divisions of that independent government’s armed forces were fanning out
across the southern Ilocos province, the entire 74th Filipino Regiment in Cavite was marching
out of their barracks, deserting with all their arms and equipment. What was frightening about
all this reinsurgency at that particular time was the possibility of support from abroad. During
the Zambales uprising just three weeks before, Feliciano Jhocson had circulated letters
purporting to be from Aguinaldo announcing his return, and in Hongkong Admiral Dewey was
openly preparing the U.S. Asiatic Squadron for war. And the Ilocos coast is closer to Hongkong
than to Cebu. When word of the Candon uprising was received, therefore, the Government took
urgent action, rushed shock troops north by sea, and called a meeting of religious superiors to
form patrols in coastal parishes to prevent the landing of Yankee arms.
The steamer with the cazadores aboard under Commander Jose Garcia Herreros
appeared off Candon Anchorage at 11:00 on the morning of the 28th, and then proceeded down

108
Comandancia Politico-Militar de Tiagan, Mar. 28, 1898, National Archives, Sediciones y Rebeliones, NA-.19
Book 1 (1874-1898).
the coast toward Santa Lucia, whether to attract defending forces away from the town or simply
because of adverse landing conditions. They finally landed at the barrio of Pating late in the
afternoon, and marched in to Candon unopposed, 150 strong and in full battle gear. They
quickly released all prisoners, and arrested Pio Madarang, Roberto and Placido Guirnalda, and
Father Rubio then they sent a patrol out to rescue Father Fernandez in Salcedo, but could find
no trace of Father Redondo or his two companions. The convento was deserted. It had been
abandoned so precipitously that incriminating documents like commissions, military orders, and
the constitution were left lying around on desks—and red flag flying. The Governor’s report
written three weeks later is revealing enough to be quoted at some length:
The unfortunate events in the town of Candon are due completely to the separatist
cause and not, as was mistakenly thought in the beginning, to acts of personal vengeance
against the more or less inflexible personality of the unfortunate parish priest of that
town. This may have been a minor contributory cause made use of by the separatist
elements, but the following details, your Excellency, are proven facts:
1. For a long time, frequent preparatory meetings were held in the town of
Cervantes in the house of Isidoro Aguilar, between agents direct from Manila and the
principal headmen of Candon, the Guirnaldas and Abayas by name.
2. These leaders met in the small hours of the night in remote places to hold secret
conferences with the traitorous Civil Guards of the Candon post.
3. They made hundreds of bolos, most of them pointed, employing new and used
iron from all the shops and stores.
4. Once the insurrection had broken out, supported by the Civil Guard post, and the
Lieutenant of the same been gravely wounded, they apprehended the parish priest, Fray
Rafael Redondo, and the missionary fathers Fray Ricardo Montes and Fray Santiago
Garcia, who operate their missions elsewhere but had the misfortune of sleeping in the
convento that night.
5. Once they had taken possession, the rebels appointed a council with a President
of a separatist Republic. They published their program Law of the Separatist Revolution
printed in Ilocano and Spanish, organized their forces in brigades, distributed printed
appointments to chiefs and officials, of provisional nature and in accordance with
Article 6 of the aforesaid program Law of the Separatist Revolution. 109
6. They arranged their forces in tactical disposition with regular bugle calls.
7. All these documents display a seal which says “Philippine Republic” around the
circumference, plus two stars with five points, with a sun in the middle, a mountain, and
the sea.

109
If this Article 6 happened to be the same as the sixth article of the Makabulos “Constitution of the General
Executive Committee for Central Luzon” signed on April 17, 1898, the Governor’s concern would have been quite
understandable: “Article 6. When it is necessary to appoint a Secretary of Foreign Affairs [emphasis added], he
will have in his charge all correspondence with foreign nations, treaties of all kinds, appointment of representatives
to foreign nations…etc.”—John M. Taylor, The Phi1ippine insurrection against the United States, Vol. 1 (Pasay
City 1971), p. 469.
 8. At the entrance to the living quarters of the convento, signs read, “Presidencia,”
“Secretary of the Interior”—and of Foreign Affairs [i.e., Exterior]—and “Entrance
prohibited.”
9. They made appointments for their civil organization.
10. They occupied the convento property, making it into a building of the Republic
with a flagstaff with a red flag which displayed a white sun in the center with the legend,
“Republica Filipina Katipunan.”
11. They sent three columns to incite the towns of Tagudin, Santa Cruz and, Santa
Lucia to the south, Santiago and San Esteban to the north, and Coveta and Salcedo to the
east.
It is these circumstances which truly appear to confront the whole province of
Ilocos Sur with a grave danger. 110
The three friars had been moved to San Esteban the morning on March 28. But the
provincial commander had sent Captain Antonio Almaraz south that same morning with all the
Civil Guards at his command, and the rebel forces abandoned San Esteban on their approach,
taking the friars with them in a cart. In Santiago, their pursuers overtook them and killed 34 in
the fighting which ensued. Isabelo himself put up a desperate fight with four Civil Guards in
which he killed one, wounded another, and drove the other two off still in possession of their
rifles. He then fell back to the trenches below Salaw Bridge with his depleted forces, and there,
near barrio Bucong, Fray Rafael Redondo finally met his fit end. In the words of Isabelo
Abaya’s service record under the Malolos Republic:
Before the company of Cazadores reached the town, he ordered this friar and two others
who were with him taken to the forest where, making him understand his iniquity and
the frightful deeds which had caused the death of good and learned Filipinos and so
many innocent, he ordered them beheaded on the afternoon of March 28, to give an
account of their misdeeds to their Creator.111
On the 29th, provincial forces broke through the line of trenches, and Isabelo took to the
hills. The Civil Guards, accompanied by the Santiago leaders whose property had, been put to
the torch on the 26th, burned their way from the Candon boundary into the town itself.
Commander Herreros then sent the Manila forces out to put a stop to their revenge, and declared
a general amnesty for all who would surrender their arms, and in this way recovered all the
missing rifles. In the hills, the Guirnalda brothers agreed that Fernando should take his family
and flee, and that Francisco should surrender with the story that none of the other Guirnaldas
had been involved in the uprising. But Herreros gave him three days to bring in both his brother

110
“Estado de las Provincias de ambos llocos en Abril de 1898,” National Archives, Sediciones y Rebeliones, NA-
19 Book I (1874-1898).
111
“Hechos biograficos,” Kandon, Jan. 23, 1899, Philippine Insurgent Records, Selected Documents 682.
Mena Crisologo used the same expression in filing a case with the Malolos Government in November
1898 against the perpetrators of the La Union and Ilocos “conspiracies”; he named both Fathers Redondo and
Garcia, “who, fortunately for mankind, have already gone to give God an account of their misdeeds” (Philippine
Insurgent Records, Selected Documents 794.3)
and Isabelo under promise of full pardon. So Francisco sadly bade farewell to his own family
and went back to his brother in the hills. The two of them went south to Tagudin with
Fernando’s wife and children, but on April 10 both of them were captured in La Union and
jailed in Tubao. There, however, they managed to escape—and Mayor Miguel Alalog and his
police, chief were jailed in their stead. Francisco was last seen jumping out the jailhouse
window, but Fernando survived to write an account in 1912 of “The Republic of Candon” with
the unimpeachable credential, “All but one of these heroes of the past are gone: the author of
this history alone lives to the present day.” 112
On April 10, too, a new Governor General arrived in the Philippines—Basilio
Augustin—and his most urgent business was to pacify revolt and win Filipino loyalty before an
American declaration of war. (In Washington, the Spanish Embassy had cracked the U.S. Naval
code and read Theodore Roosevelt’s famous orders to Dewey, and in Madrid “loyal” Filipinos
like Isabelo de los Reyes were offering to return to the Philippines and organize resistance
against Yankee invasion.) The man assigned to accomplish this rather ambitious task in Ilocos
was Enrique Polo de Lara, an officer with a reputation for sympathy for Filipinos. He was given
charge of both provinces, and arrived in Candon in the middle of the month. After a quick
personal investigation, he left Commander Felipe Mediavilla there with 40 men, and proceeded
to Vigan, taking Commander Herreros with him. There on April 19 he wrote up the report
already cited, stationed a detachment of 40 men, and headed north. He left 20 troops in Lapog,
30 in Batac, and another 20 in Badoc. Lapog and Cabugao, he noted meaningfully, “have
magnificent bays for any sort of landing.” Batac was the home town of Artemio Ricarte, who
was still sending revolutionary propaganda from Laguna to his fellow schoolteachers, and
Badoc was the seat of Father Rubio’s prominent and suspect family. Then he picked up Dingras
Mayor Gregorio Puruganan, close associate of the Lapog Centenos and dissident leaders in
Bacarra, and shrewdly included him in his personal entourage on his trip through the rest of the
province.
Eleven Ilocanos were executed for their connection with the Candon uprising. Chief
among them were the original Katipuneros like Roberto and Placido Guirnalda, Manuel and
Toribio Abaya, and Pio Madarang, and Father Rubio, who had been under suspicion even
before the uprising. 113 Manuel Abaya, Jr., co-commander of the Third Division, was pardoned,
but his 15-yearold brother Leon was shot in Salcedo, probably without court proceedings. The
role of four others is unknown—Desiderio Agbulus, Victorino Gadut, Urbano Galac and Severo
Paredes. Fernando Guirnalda claimed that some innocent townsmen were victimized by
vengeful Spanish residents giving false testimonies: perhaps these four were among their
debtors or creditors. Or perhaps Guirnalda’s own story is to be connected with another Candon

112
Guirnalda, op. cit., p. 48.
113
Fathers Jose M. Chanco and Mariano Sevilla in a letter to the Papal Delegate on Jan. 29, 1900, published in
Achategui and Bernad, Religious Revolution in the Philippines, Vol. 4 (Manila 1972), p. 44, say that Father Rubio
was shot in Aparri. This is probably an error. Francisco Gray, writing in 1911 (“Pacakitaan cadagiti Sres. a
nagcapcapitan ditoy ili a Candon nanipud idi 1780,” Ayer MS 1713b, Newberry Library), says he was captured by
Herreros; Governor Polo refers to his guilt but not to any escape though he does report the Guirnaldas’ escape; and
an unpublished autobiography of Tagudin schoolteacher Sabas Gaerlan in the possession of the Rev. John
Flameygh, CICM, says of the uprising, “Those of Candon paid deary for it; the lives of several people were taken
in exchange, and also of one Filipino priest who was not from Candon but was a coadjutor there.”
legend which says that a number of local businessmen were rounded up, marched out to the
northern suburbs where the friars had been killed, and massacred under that bridge which had
formed part of the insurgent defense lines. It must be admitted that the discovery of the
mutilated, decomposing bodies of the three Spanish priests on April 5 would certainly have put
their compatriots in the mood for massacre. The reaction of their official biographer three years
later was probably representative and predictable:
There are no words strong enough to anathematize so horrendous a crime,
perpetrated—as always in the Philippines—by base outlaws who, to satiate their
shameless and savage instincts, will stop at nothing to attain their bastardly goals. Thus,
off in that hidden thicket a pathetic and harrowing tragedy was presented on that fateful
day: its actors were three humble priests and their hangmen (their number does not
matter) who, dagger in hand, attacked, wounded, and killed their defenseless victims
while they were begging for mercy and compassion. What a brilliant history, that of the
Philippine Revolution! Its deeds, its vandal excesses, and its pretended liberties serve
today to bring into sharper relief the details of the horrible picture traced by the black
hand of the nefarious Katipunan. 114
Of the six condemned leaders, at least the Guirnaldas and Manuel Abaya were executed
on April 19, and probably the others also. This was the day after Governor Polo left for Vigan,
and he included in his report a succinct explanation of the technique by which their guilt was
established: “By showing practical leniency for the lesser leaders, I made use of them to
denounce the more important ones.” 115 Whatever his methods, from the Spanish standpoint,
Enrique Polo de Lara turned in a commendable performance. When Aguinaldo’s forces entered
Ilocos four months later, they found no underground governors in command like Makabulos in
Tarlac or Prado in Pangasinan. Quite the opposite, when Commander Herreros surrendered his
forces in San Fernando at the end of July, Spanish friars were still at their altars and Spanish
officers at their desks from Bangar to Bangui.

* * *

The ease with which the revolution was put down is not surprising. The military
imbalance once the cazadorres had landed is obvious. Yet Ilocanos fought against much greater
odds for more than two years during the American invasion. A more significant cause may
therefore be found in the divided leadership—even treachery—which the Candon forces
suffered. No Filipino holding office in the colonial government took part in the uprising, and
many actively aided their Spanish superiors. Telegrapher Elias Abaya did not warn the plotters
that he had sent a message about the discovery of their plot, and Justice of the Peace Candido
Abaya tried to get word through to Vigan after the Republic had taken possession of the
telegraph office. The mayor and petty officers of Santiago prevented the First Division from
marching north, exposed it to two days of enemy fire, and gave Vigan forces time to form an
expedition. And those of Tagudin actually led their Ilocano brothers into ambush by
government forces.

114
Elviro Jorde Perez, Catalago bio-bibliognifico de los Reliosos agustinianos (Manila 1901), p. 525.
115
“Estado de las Provincias de ambos Ilocos…”
 Men like the Guirnaldas, on the other hand, were out-of-office members of the
principalia with personal grudges against the regime. Yet the same arrest, torture and
imprisonment which had persuaded them to act, cowed others into inaction. Three of the
primary victims of the “conspiracy” of 1896 withdrew from the Tondo meeting of March 16
with the frank explanation that they were now in the government’s good graces—“muy bien
miradas en su provincia por los autoridades espanoles.” 116 Few men so cautious and conscious
of the risks would throw themselves into battle armed only with kitchen bolos and sharpened
sticks. Indeed, Fernando Guirnalda’s “The Republic of Candon” is a minor classic of
compradore-class ambivalence: full of noble little speeches to surrendering Spaniards like,
“Don’t be afraid, for the animal that is taught by the lion is not as cruel as his master,” 117 it
refers to Filipino fighters as “poor ignorant people [who] did not know what revolution
meant…and were ignorant of the bitterness of the consequences if it failed.” 118
Isabelo Abaya was a man cut from different cloth. Whether deserted by his men as
Guirnalda claimed, or by Guirnalda as seems more likely, he never surrendered. Instead, he put
on a G-string like his ancestors and disappeared into the anonymity of the Igorot mountains.
Perhaps he returned to his old recruits in Sagada, for the last Spanish commander of Bontoc
raided that town on July 11 as a punishment for Katipunan sympathies. But when Colonel
Manuel Tinio arrived in Candon at the head of Republican troops in August, Isabelo reported
for duty and was sent to serve as Lieutenant Colonel Joaquin Alejandrino’s guide for the
capture of Bontoc. After the Treaty of Paris made America’s aggressive intentions clear in
December, he was ordered to recruit Igorots in Bontoc, and he led 225 of them to Malolos in
time for the opening engagement of the Philippine-American War on February 5, 1899. After
the Battle of Caloocan, he joined Antonio Luna’s forces until that general was murdered in
June, when he returned to Ilocos. (Two of his Abaya clansmen, however, crossed the mountains
to join General Malvar and found Tagalog-speaking branches of the family in Laguna and
Batangas.) Finally, when President Aguinaldo disbanded the Philippine Army and declared
guerrilla warfare, Isabelo was commissioned by Colonel Juan Villamor of the Tinio Brigade to
organize and command the Southern Zone of Ilocos. It was while discharging this duty that he
was killed in action on May 3, 1900.
The present generation of Filipino students and teachers has spilled much ink—and no
less adrenalin—in the search for genuine Filipino heroes. Isabelo Abaya should rank high on
any list of candidates. Here was a Filipino who fought for national independence against two
imperialist aggressors, and never gave up the struggle even in the face of betrayal by
countrymen or blandishments by the enemy, but died fighting for the ideals for which he lived.
Isabelo Abaya was a comfortable businessman when he left his home to become a soldier on the
battlefield and a guerrilla in the hills. He fought in the Revolutionary Army during the
insurrection of 1896-1897 and in the Republican Army during the war of national defense in
1899-1901. He was present at the Pact of Biyak-na-Bato and the Battle of Caloocan, and he
organized his own underground unit in a national liberation movement. He was a bourgeoise
ilustrado willing to wear a G-string and eat camotes to live like an Igorot in the mountains. And

116
Philippine Insurgent Records, Selected Documents 157.
117
Guirnalda, op. cit., p. 42.
118
Ibid., p. 36.
he died in action defending the Philippine state against foreign invasion. If nothing else, a man
must be held in some awe and respect who could take to the hills and live off the land, attract
lowland peasants and highland tribesmen, and still write such soaring prose as the following
appeal to his countrymen:
Ilocanos:
Having been undeservedly invested by our august Government with full authority to
organize troops and direct the war against the Americans in this Southern Zone of
Ilocos, I wish to address these humble words to you, not to excite your patriotism, which
you have always held high in times of trial, but to determine the kind of warfare we
should adopt so as to produce the desired results which our Government proposes to
achieve.
For you, the fight commences today, the true fight for which Providence has favored
us with the shield of our beloved mountains which, filled as they are with herbage and
luxuriant with edible fruits and roots, appear to be made just for the purpose of mountain
warfare; we undertake it today with the certainty that we shall always defeat the enemy
there by wearing him out and exterminating him through fatigue and hunger. The War of
the Vendee which pitted 5,000 Vendeens against 80,000 Frenchmen, the War of Spanish
Independence with raw troops and amateur generals against the brilliant and ever-
victorious army of Napoleon, and our own triumphant revolution against the theocratic
power of Spain in these islands—these present vivid pictures to my mind which, given
the justice of our radiant and resplendent cause, inspire my due confidence in that
certainty.
Let us fight, then, from those mountains, with neither hesitation nor rashness, and
without predicting the outcome by considering the imbalance of resources but rather the
beauty and sacredness of the ideal which we are pursuing against the oppressive
imperialist designs of North America, who, concerned only with her wicked desire to
dominate and degrade us unjustly—we with whom she once joined hands to defeat the
Spanish army in these islands—would now impose her sovereignty on us by the brute
force of her cannons, a sovereignty as evil as it is ridiculous.
Enemy of those liberties won for you at the cost of a thousand lives and anxieties
and of streams of your own blood, the invading American army daily insults you by
despising your most venerated instincts and dearest convictions.
For it is an insult to you, and a great one, to call the Filipino Army insurgent, that is
to say, something despicable, and without honor to your sons, spouses, and parents who,
obedient to the rallying cry of that Government which you recognized, revered, and
extolled with song and acclamation, they who, submissive to your will and counsels,
took to the field of battle to seal with their blood and their lives the affectionate love
they professed for you, as well as the inalienable right which is yours to be free and
independent.
It is also a deliberate slap that brings the blood rushing to the face not to recognize.
that Government which the Philippines’ most illustrious sons formed in the enemy’s full
view and with their aid in the beginning, and to deny with utter lack of shame the
validity and efficacy of the Constitution and decrees which that Government
 promulgated with your applause for consolidating your present well-being, as well as for
initiating the future greatness and prosperity of our beloved country.
And finally, it is an offense to you in your Catholic sentiments not to respect those
objects your fathers taught you to hold sacred, to profane your temples, and to mutilate
and rob your venerated images. Eloquent witness and examples of such profanations and
usurpations are the churches of Pangasinan, La Union, Ilocos and Abra.
Now, having called on you to consider these injuries, as well as the future vexations
and unforeseen degradations which pertain to total lack of sovereignty and dominion, I
invite the good Ilocanos, the honorable Ilocanos, but not despicable perjurers, to the war
which I am undertaking in the mountains today with my faithful comrades, calling on
the youth especially to swell their ranks, and authorizing everybody to cause the enemy
all possible damage permitted by the rules of war.
The Commander-in-Chief of the
Southern Zone of Ilocos
YSABELO ABAYA 119

119
Philippine Insurgent Records, Selected Documents 521.
 Amor Patrio
in the Philippine Insurgent Records120

When the armed forces of the United States of America invaded this archipelago and destroyed
the first Philippine Republic, they seized one of the most unusual prizes in military history—
almost three tons of documents taken from surrendering forces, looted from public buildings, or
removed from the bodies of dead Filipinos. This priceless hoard was shipped to Washington,
D.C., where it was labeled “Philippine Insurrection Records” to disinfect any telltale odor of
imperialism clinging to it. A half century later, when the goals of imperialism had long since
been attained and the national conscience assuaged, they were returned to their rightful owners
and placed in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the National Library in 1958. Since
their restoration, careful scholars have referred to them as the “Philippine Revolutionary
Records”—or PRR—though in actual fact, the bulk of them pertain neither to revolution nor
insurrection, but to a war of self-defense against foreign aggression. In any case, the staff and
catalogue of the National Library still refer to them as the Philippine Insurgent Records—PIR.
But under either name, they constitute one of the most concentrated displays of amor patrio—
love of country—in the world today.
Back at the turn of the century, the American Army assigned an intelligence officer by
the name of John R. M. Taylor to survey and analyze these records, and translate such of them
as he considered conducive to an understanding—or justification—of the American presence in
the Philippines. Working with a small staff, he completed the manuscript of a five-volume book
by 1906, which he called The Philippine insurrection against the United States of America. One
and a half volumes were Taylor’s own history of the conflict, and the other three and a half,
translations of almost 1500 documents—about one eighth of the total—to illustrate his
conclusions. American President William Howard Taft, however, disapproved the publication
of the book for reasons of political expediency, so it remained in galley proofs for 65 years.
Then in 1971, the Eugenio Lopez Foundation magnanimously published it as a public service
with an introduction and editing by Renato Constantino.
Although a few scholars, both Filipino and foreign, had managed to make use of both
the book and the collection in microscopy in the U.S. National Archives, the publication of the
whole five volumes was hailed by historians as a major event in Philippine historiography. Here
at last was the “true” story of the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902—“true” because of
the unimpeachable authority of the source materials, all being written, as they are, in the hand of
the protagonists themselves. What do these documents sound like which Taylor calls
“exhibits”? What story do these 1,430 witnesses tell?
To answer this question in preparing this paper, I held Volume I on edge by the spine
and let the pages fall open at random. They opened to pages 322-323, which translate the May
4, 1897, testimony of one Gregorio de Jesus against Andres Bonifacio, which reads in part,
“Question: Did you know that there were five men imprisoned, and that their hair, eyebrows
and eyelashes were ordered to be shaved?” Vol. III, subjected to the same treatment, fell open to

120
Paper read at the Third National Conference on Local History, Bacolod City, 3-5 November 1980.
pages 402-403, a letter from Wenceslao Viniegra from Iba (Zambales), dated November 13,
1898, to President Aguinaldo, complaining about military abuses in terms such as the following:
Various wealthy and educated persons of Botolan are the object of their persecutions for
the purpose, no doubt, of forcing them to leave the town, their object being to secure
their real property and distribute it among their followers.
Vol. IV exposed—on pages 446-447—a March 15, 1899, order to operate friar estates
for the benefit of the government—“As the new law on revenues for the present year is soon to
go into effect, and as among the revenues of the state appear the income which may be derived
from the property of the religious communities transferred to the State by virtue of the
provisions of the Constitution…etc.” And Volume V revealed a November 16, 1900, order
about unruly soldiers beginning, “Advise all officers of this brigade that he who allows his
soldiers to load their rifles without being before the enemy shall be liable to capital punishment”
(pp. 270-271).
These examples are all trivial in comparison to many important military commands and
state documents appearing in the same volumes. Yet their manner of selection testifies to their
being typical of the overall content. And they do not make for very pleasant reading—nor does
the entire collection. It smacks too often of drumhead justice and treacherous jealousies, of
exploitation and abuse. Indeed, it might even cast doubt on the original correspondents’
competence to operate a civilized modern government. And that, in fact, was pretty much what
it was Captain Taylor’s job to do. As he himself puts it, “I was ordered to report to the Adjutant
General to act really as a channel of communications between the War Department and certain
Senators who were defending on the floor of the Senate, the conduct of the administration with
respect to the Philippines.” That is to say, he was to provide an excuse for American aggression
by demonstrating that the Filipino people were incompetent to govern themselves.
There is little doubt that this was Taylor’s own view of the Filipino people. His
assessment of the President of the Republic is candid, unambiguous, and sanguine:
It is known that the family from which Aguinaldo came had for many years dominated
the town of Cavite Viejo…dominated it, perhaps, according to some immemorial
tradition reaching back to a day when one of the “Orang Laut,” the sea robbers of the
south, drove his war canoe home on the beach and seized the land by the right of his
sword and spear. It is known that later there came an infusion of Chinese blood, which
gave to Aguinaldo the subtlety and perseverance of that race. Such was probably the
stock from which sprang this Malay chieftain, who, of little education but a natural ruler
of men, imposed his will upon his people and dreamed of founding, under the name of
republic…a government of the sword.
And Captain Taylor is just as candid about his exhibits: “It seems to me that the measure
of his fitness to establish a republic is given by these papers…”
Yet, on even a casual reading of the five volumes, Taylor’s argument seems to break
down under its own weight: the sheer bulk of the documentation speaks of competence, not
incompetence. These documents were produced under wartime conditions, most of them by a
government hounded from one capital to another, many of them only hours before they fell into
enemy hands. Under the circumstances, they reveal a dedication to duty and legality which is
nothing less than poignant. Their content testifies to an ability to conceive and construct a
constitutional republic, and their mere existence to a willingness to wage a war—and die—to
defend it. And they are only a fraction of the quarter million documents which must themselves
be only a fraction in comparison to those that were written and lost. Among their hundreds of
appointments and commissions, their thousands of implementing orders and instructions, their
tens of thousands of pages of payrolls, budgets, and enlistment and census figures, there are
those which might be selected to give a fuller and fairer picture of the total scene. One might
exhibit, for example, some of those pertaining to church property.
The Church in the Philippines was one of the wealthiest proprietors in the archipelago,
and it would be naive—perhaps even unpatriotic—to suggest that the State would ignore its
resources in the struggle for national survival. Unlike European revolutionary governments in
the 19th century, however, the Philippine government did not confiscate church property
outright. But it did attach friars’ personal property, to which it referred with nice irony as
“abandoned.” To illustrate the Philippine methodology, one exhibit will be presented which
somehow escaped seizure by the invader and so survived in a thin folder of “insurgent” records
in the National Archives.
On May 1, 1899, the household furnishings of the parish priest of Candon (Ilocos Sur),
Fray Rafael Redondo, were sold at public auction in accordance with Order No. 1420 of April
27 from the Provincial President, for a total of P237.90. The sale was conducted in the presence
of Local Presidente Pedro Legazpi Gonzales and Commissioner Ildefonso Laurel of the
Republic, and the latter took receipt of the cash proceeds in an official document countersigned
by six local officials and bearing an official seal which says, “Ylocos Sur Presidencia Local de
Kandon.” Attached documents, signed and sealed in the same manner, list the items of furniture
sold, the price of each, and the names of the purchasers, together with the original room-by-
room inventory made on the preceding August 21st. Similarly, the personal possessions of Fray
Jose Vazquez of Magsingal were auctioned off on August 15, 1899, for P50.00, having
consisted mainly of books, perhaps because of the presence of Filipino Coadjutor Father Lucas
Albano. Fray Angel Corugedo’s furnishings in Narvacan could not all be disposed of during an
April 28th auction, and so netted only P51.75. And the documents from the May 16th auction in
Kabugao include a note which indicates that even the most highly placed were not exempt from
the fiscalizing scrutiny of subordinate compatriots. It reads: “The three first-class narra beds
included in the inventory were sent to Vigan on order of the Senor Provincial Presidente.”
It is also worthy of note that these records, from inventory to sale, cover a time span
during which the capital of the Republic transferred from Malolos to San Isidro to Cabanatuan
to Tarlac. As a matter of fact, the Magsingal auction took place two days after enemy naval
units had bombarded the provincial capital of Vigan only 15 kilometers away.
To the local historian, these dry documents are enlivened with the names of men who
made Candon history. Fray Rafael Redondo himself, an absolute caricature of the ruthless,
oppressive friar, “abandoned” his convento under rather different circumstances from his
brothers of the cloth: he was executed during the uprising of March 25-28, 1898. Among those
who successfully bid for his furniture was one of his first victims, Don Lino Abaya who
survived torture and deportation to be commissioned by President Aguinaldo and rearrested by
U.S. military forces for the possession of anti-American literature. And former Justice of the
Peace Nazario Gray, who had been tortured into revealing the names of some of his Katipunan
comrades, was able to get a bejuco bookcase for 25 centavos and a marble washstand for P7.00.
But even more important for Candon historiography is a document Taylor separated as
“Selected Documents Folder No. 682” which is so illustrative of Filipino patriotism that it is
worth presenting here in full:
In the Town of Kandon of the Province
of Ilokos Sur on the twenty-third day of
January of the year one thousand eight
hundred and ninety-nine.
WHEREAS, the townsman Senor Isabelo Abaya has arrived from the mountains of
Bontok with 225 Igorots of those heights recruited by him on orders of General Manuel
Tinio, for delivery as soldiers to the immediate orders of the Honorable President of our
Philippines, we, the Citizen Pedro Legazpi y Gonzales, local Presidente, the Vice
Presidente, the Representatives of the Police, Justice, and Revenue, together with all the
Headmen and members of the Peoples Committee attending, and other distinguished
persons of this locality, having seen and observed the submission of the said Igorots,
who were called fugitives in the days of the late Spanish government, as well as their
manifest adhesion to our Revolutionary Government, they bursting out into thunderous
Vivas for the Philippines and the most excellent Head of State;
THEREFORE, of our own spontaneous, unanimous, and free will, do declare by
means of the present certification, which we desire to be presented to the Captain
General in Chief and Honorable President of the Philippines, the following

BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS
The citizen Isabelo Abaya y Abaya, native of this town of Kandon of the Province
of Ilokos Sur, bachelor of 35 years of age, upon seeing that the attitude of the friars and
Spaniards after the signing of the Peace at Biak-na-Bato was more deprecatory of the
Filipinos than ever, and that, by means of the authorities and Civil Guards, they were
trying to see that they should not have a moment’s peace, worked silently but effectively
to have the residents armed with bolos and swords. Given the peaceful nature of the
majority of the Ilocanos of those times, who always took the Spanish side both for the
sake of convenience and to avoid molestation, it is noteworthy that nobody ventured to
denounce Isabelo Abaya’s preparations.
Within only a few hours on the night of March 24 last year in 1898, he gathered the
few members of the barrios he had spoken with about throwing off the yoke of the
tyrannous Spaniards and assembled them in the town plaza, had himself recognized as
their sole commander, and attacked the quarters of the Civil Guards to seize its
commanding officer, who, resisting, suffered many serious wounds and was taken to the
Town Hall. He ordered the Spaniards bound, and the others who were frightened
indicated their willingness to support his claims; begging for their lives tearfully and
handing over their arms, they were left in detention in their own houses. He apprehended
Fray Rafael Redondo, parish priest (he was the parish priest of San Fernando, La Union,
who had invented the imaginary rebellion of that province and Ilokos for which the
priests and prominent persons were imprisoned and tortured), and, before the company
of Rangers [Cazadores] reached the town, ordered this friar and two others who were
with him taken to the forest where, making him understand his iniquity and frightful
deeds which had caused the death of good and learned Filipinos and so many innocent,
 he ordered them beheaded on the afternoon of March 28 to give an account of their
misdeeds to their Creator, after having had an encounter with four members of the Civil
Guards in the neighboring town of Santiago in which he killed one, wounded another,
and made the other two run off still in possession of their rifles, without any other arms
himself than his sword.
After the Spanish military took possession of the town, not being able to confront
them alone since those who were with him were beginning to retire and hide their arms
so the residents would not become objects of abuses and murders, the said Isabelo took
refuge in the mountains, living off camotes with the Igorots for more than five months,
dressed only in a bahaque or G-string to avoid being recognized, until Senor Manuel
Tinio, then Colonel, arrived in Kandon on August 15, when he presented himself and
offered to place himself under his command as a soldier of the Fatherland.
He took part in the Bontok and Lepanto operations as a guide, and when his good
performance became known through reports, he was appointed an officer of the
Philippine Army by Senor Joaquin Alejandrino, Chief of the Column which fought in
those mountains so they would never again come under Spanish dominion.
No other motive induces the informants to execute this declaration than their desire
to make the loyalty and patriotism of the good Filipino citizen Isabelo Abaya known to
the Supreme Command, and all those here assembled do sign it in honor of the truth
after having read and understood its contents.
(61 signatures follow)
These references to Igorot-Katipunan contact and military action in Bontoc and Lepanto
raise the important question of whether or not the Malolos government really reached the
impregnable heights of the Gran Cordillera Central. Whatever influence the first Republic may
have had in the mountains of northern Luzon is almost unknown outside the Philippine
Insurgent Records. From Spanish sources we know that Colonel Alejandrino captured Bontoc
from its last Spanish commander on September 3, 1898, and saved him and his family from
Igorot vengeance; and a diary of Aguinaldo’s five-month odyssey across the mountains during
his flight to Palanan has been published more than once. Oral tradition indicates that Isabelo
Abaya recruited Igorot forces not only in 1898 but also in 1897, and that the last Spanish
commandant made a raid on Sagada (Mountain Province) because of reported Katipunan
activities there. One Spanish account alludes to Igorot enmity with the “insurgents,” and it is
probably true that Igorots welcomed a Filipino military presence no more warmly than they had
welcomed any other. At least, Ifugaos speared Spanish, Filipino and American soldiers with
fine impartiality when they had the chance.
After this rather negative glimpse of insurrectionary tactics and fullscale retreat, the
quantity of official correspondence still surviving from the Republic’s politico-military districts
of Benguet and Bontoc comes almost as a shock. For here are literal reams of letters, receipts,
budgets, inventories, census reports—even judiciary proceedings complete with exhibits
presented in court. Since these records were compiled on the most remote frontier of the
country, where morale might have been low and temptation to sloth or disobedience high, they
bear particularly eloquent witness to the vitality of the Philippine government, and give the lie
to any thesis that that government’s performance was a mere charade play-acted to impress
foreign observers. The ability and will to keep clerical machinery functioning under such
conditions must rank as one of history’s bravest examples of dogged devotion to duty. Such
records are worth looking into.
One of them is a general inventory from the military command of Bontoc. On August
20, 1899, First Lieutenant Alberto de Jesus, interim chief of the Province of Bontoc, turned over
his command to his successor, Second Lieutenant Crispin Atienza, together with this seven-part
inventory of the materiel in his charge. The office records include such items as one book of
copies of correspondence addressed to the Honorable Senor President of the Nation, another to
various authorities in adjoining commands, and a third to addressees within the District.
Another book is a register of passports issued. Four letter files contain-actual correspondence
received—from the President and his Secretaries, for example. The complete list of buildings
and furnishings naturally occupies the main part of the inventory—or, rather, six parts.
The tribunal occupies a wooden building in very bad condition, 9.5 x 7.12 meters, with a
37 x 31 meter coffee plantation, and contains two bugles and one drum. The convento is a
wooden building in very good condition 9 x 14 meters, with a porch, entrance hall and three
rooms, containing 13 European chairs, some aparadors, one table, one desk, two beds, one
clock, six pictures of saints and 25 different books, while the church is a 10 x 30 wooden
building in good condition containing two bells, two chalices, one silver crucifix, two images
with clothes, two banners, eight vestments, two copes, three altars with images, one
confessional, one baptismal font, three kneelers, one censer, six candlesticks, two missals, etc.
Outpost garrisons run to such things as the Sagada detachment’s wooden building in fairly good
condition, with one bedroom for soldiers, two rooms for officers and commander, eleven
windows without panes, four double doors, three beds, three chairs, and two tables with
drawers. The Bontoc medical dispensary shows little furniture and no equipment other than
balances and a mortar, but does list several pages of pharmaceuticals measured out in grams,
while the schoolhouse—in bad condition—contains nothing more than a blackboard, four pupils
desks, another with drawer for the teacher, and no teaching materials. Attached to the completed
inventory is an additional receipt signed by one Fruto Galpo for three wooden chairs with cane
bottoms, one round table, and four benches from the Sagada convento.
From Igorotland, too, comes an impressive sample of the Revolutionary Army’s ability
to maintain judiciary continuity in even forlorn boondocks. It is Case No. 4, a libel suit by
Commandant Vicente Quesada of the Military District of P. Burgos (i.e., Benguet) against a
certain Calixto Soriano for “grave calumny against authority,” filed on October 4, 1898, and
still sub judice when the President of the Republic disbanded the Army 13 months later and
took to the hills.
On September 30, 1898, Calixto Soriano wrote a letter in Ilocano from San Fernando
(La Union) to Benguet revenue collector Juan Carino—“Igorot, new Christian, native and
resident of the town of Lamora, married, of adult age, farmer and proprietor by profession.” The
letter was forwarded through Naguilian revenue collector Cenon Soriano, and delivered to
Carino in Trinidad on December 3. It accused Commandant Quesada of extorting gold,
livestock, coffee and market vegetables from Igorots, and recommended that local people stick
together against lowland intrusion. The following day, Carino turned over the letter to Quesada,
who promptly filed suit by ordering Captain Carlos Maglaya to convene a court to try the case.
By the 18th, sworn statements in the Commandant’s favor had been received from the
presidentes of the recently renamed towns of Aguinaldo, Emilio, Lamora, Llanura, Mizal and
Tirona, most of whom were illiterate Igorot chieftains who signed their testimonies with a mark.
On the 21st, Calixto was found guilty and jailed, and the Presidente and local council of
Naguilian were notified that his goods were to be confiscated. But on the 30th, word was
received from Naguilian that those goods had already been confiscated in an earlier conviction
for falsification of documents. Meanwhile, Calixto appealed.
Under appeal, he testified in a statement sworn on November 9 that he knew nothing
about the letter and that the handwriting was not his. Subpoenas were accordingly sent to La
Union for witnesses who could identify his penmanship. On the 16th, Martin Carreon of
Aringay testified that Calixto’s signed statements and the penmanship of the letter were
identical, and on the 17th, Benito Zambrano, sometime schoolmaster in Zamora (i.e., Tublay),
identified the handwriting with the statement that he was very familiar with it, “because the said
Soriano had been the local presidente of that capital while the witness was vice-presidente.” On
the 19th, Cenon Soriano testified that he had forwarded the letter in the first place and that the
penmanship on the envelope was his own. The appeal therefore failed, and orders were issued
on December 27 to transfer the prisoner to Malolos. There he was turned over to the Chief of
the Section on Military Justice in the Secretariat of War of the Revolutionary Government of
the Philippines on January 21, 1899. On the 27th, however, he was released with provisional
liberty on condition that he not leave the jurisdiction of Naguilian without permission. Copies of
the court proceedings were then forwarded to the office of the Captain General and Commander
in Chief of the Republican Army of the Philippines, and investigation of the case ground
inexorably on.
When Malolos fell to the enemy in March, all these copies accompanied the
withdrawing capital to San Fernando (Pampanga) and then to San Isidro. On April 14, the
Auditor General of the Department of War requested a report on the status of the prior case of
falsification of documents, and on the 24th, the entire expediente from the Benguet court was
forwarded to San Isidro, complete with the original letter and envelope, and such exquisite
details as Cenon Soriano’s November 19th receipt of his summons to appear in court. From San
Isidro the file was carried in the Republic’s baggage to Cabanatuan, and in June to Tarlac,
where, for the next three months, it grew bulkier still as copies, extracts, endorsements, and
referrals were added from one desk to another. Finally, on October 20, 1899, it was elevated to
the President of the Permanent Commission on Justice—and fell into enemy hands three weeks
later. As it survives today, it weighs slightly more than two kilograms.
These, then, are the exhibits for the defense. They are presented here as evidence of the
Filipino people’s competence to govern themselves in 1898. Bound with rotting red tape and
crumbling to the touch, they appear to be the dry bones of a dead past. Yet they come alive in
the hands of any scholar willing to enter into their world not with objectivity but with sympathy.
To those of us who live in what Renato Constantino has so aptly called a society without
purpose, it is a humbling experience to handle these intimate testimonies to amor patrio,
covered as they are with the invisible fingerprints of men of a better breed. One foreign scholar
who was privileged to have this experience has written of the “grave formality” of the first
election returns in the Republic of the Philippines in the following words:
Most of the Acts of Election have decoratively lettered titles, are written in impressive
scripts, and are signed with flourishes by all the electors in at least two copies, Spanish
and Tagalog. To skim even a few of the hundreds submitted for approval in 1898 is to
hear the towns of Luzon singing in solemn chorus of the pleasure of taking over their
 local governments. 121
It is a song no Filipino historian should fail to hear.

121
Jane Slichter Ragsdale, “Coping with the Yankees: the Filipino elite, 1898-1903.” Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974, p. 54.
 Isabelo de los Reyes,
Father of Philippine Folklore*

I
It was Pedro Paterno who first called Isabelo de los Reyes the “Father of Philippine Folklore” in
1886. 122 Isabelo was a 21-year-old graduate student in the University of Santo Tomas at the
time, but already an experienced journalist, a correspondent of eminent scholars in Europe, and
the battle-scarred veteran of a publicity campaign to create a Folk-lore filipino. 123
Yet the title, “Father of Philippine Folklore,” seems strangely inappropriate for a man
who did not raise up a family of younger folklorists to follow in his footsteps. Of course, it is
true that half a dozen other Filipinos were inspired enough by his enthusiasm to start collecting
and publishing local legends, superstitions and customs themselves, and it is also true that the
literary genius of a Jose Rizal turned momentarily to translating a few Filipino tales. But no
other Filipino mastered the European literature on the subject or approached it in an orderly,
analytic fashion. No other Filipino covered the full folkloric spectrum from field research
among mountain tribes, through linguistic analysis of indigenous poetry, to the unearthing of

*
This article was originally given as a paper at the Fourth National Folklore Congress July 4-6, 1980, at the
University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.
122
Diario de Manila, 24 October 1886.
123
Isabelo de los Reyes y Florentino was born in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, on July 6, 1864. He studied in the Vigan
Seminary and graduated from the University of Santo Tomas with the Bachelor’s Degree in 1883 and the Notarial
in 1887. He started writing for the press at the age of 16, founded El Ilocano in 1889 and El Municipio Filipino in
1894, became editor of La Lectura Popular in 1890, and regularly wrote for many other papers. Some of his
collected articles appeared in book form as Ilocanadas; Articulos varios sobre Etnologia, Historia y Costumbres
del Pais; Las Islas visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista; Historia de Filipinas, Vol. I (Prehistoria); Historia de
Ilocos; and El Folk-lore Filipino. He was also a businessman, commercial agent, exporter, publisher and printer,
and owned property in Manila, Tarlac, and Pangasinan.
He was arrested on suspicion of subversion in December 1896, deported to Spain, and released in 1898.
He was then employed by the Overseas Ministry in Madrid, continued his business endeavors, wrote for the
Spanish press, translated the Gospels of Luke and John into Ilocano for the British Bible Society; and published La
sensacional Memoria sobre la Revolucion filipina en 1896-1897, La Religion del “Katipunan,” Filipinas:
Independencia y Revolucion! and the fortnightly Filipinas ante Europe.
He returned to the Philippines in October 1901, went back to journalism, and soon joined Pascual
Poblete’s El Grito del Pueblo. In 1902 he founded the Union Obrera Democratica, co-founded the Iglesia Filipina
Independiente, and was jailed for labor agitating. He published the fortnightlies, La Iglesia Filipinas
Independiente: Revista Catolica and La Redencion del Obrero in 1903-1904, and was one of the founders of the
Republican Party of the Philippines in 1905.
He went back to Spain in 1906, engaged in business and scholarly research, and wrote the major liturgical,
theological and constitutional works of the I.F.I.—its Oficio Divino, for example. He returned to the Philippines in
1909 and published La Religion antigua de los Filipinos. He served as Councilor in Manila from 1912 to 1919,
was elected Senator from Ilocos in 1922, and. retired from politics following a stroke in 1929. He died on Oct. 10,
1938, thrice widowed and the father of 27 legitimate children, one of whom, Isabelo, Jr., was Obispo Maximo of
the I.F.I. for 25 years.
unpublished documents from the Spanish Conquest. Nor did any other journalist pour out such a
stream of essays and short stories sprinkled with native terms and customs that were the fruits
of folkloristic research. Probably the title, “First Filipino Folklorist” would be more appropriate
for the young Isabelo. And, as a matter of fact, the further- point may be made that no “Second
Filipino Folklorist” had appeared up to the time of his death in 1938.
But perhaps a still more appropriate title for Isabelo de los Reyes would be “First
Filipinologist,” for his interest and expertise in things Philippine were not limited to even the
broad boundaries of folklore. From the living customs he recorded around him, he turned to
Spanish accounts of the past to look for more: as he himself described the writing of his
Historia de Ilocos, “I read more than a hundred historical and non-historical works just to cull
two or three items from each of them for that History, and then oral traditions for more recent
events.” 124 In this way he moved on to draw conclusions about Philippine palaeography,
prehistory and anthropology which still stand today—that all indigenous alphabets have a
common origin, for example, or that there is no evidence for real Chinese settlements prior to
the Spanish advent, and that “Indonesian” is a synthetic term for a group of languages, not a
race. He tracked down the history of a sword Legazpi had given Lakandula which remained in
that family until the 1850’s, and his opinion was sought in the popular press when a cache of
little gold coins was unearthed in a Manila suburb. All this study and research was to produce
an unstanchable flow of creative, scholarly works with such disparate titles as Los Regulos de
Manila, La Esclavitud ilocana, El Tinguian, Las Islas visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista,
Origen de las Razas filipinas, and Mitologia filipina.
Indeed, when it came to Filipiniana, Isabelo was into everything. During the last decade
before the Revolution, his name appears in print more frequently than that of any other Filipino.
In 1885 the Manila Alegre published a poem twitting him as “professor of savages,” 125 and in
1888 El Comercio translated an article from Germany which agreed with his analysis of those
little gold coins. 126 And when he suggested that the coins should be sent to the Philippine
Exposition in Madrid, the Manila Alegre commented mischievously, “We agree—so long as the
numismatist takes them there himself.” 127 In 1887 a new censorship decree was promulgated to
prevent him from bypassing the Manila censor by publishing in the Iloilo El Eco de Panay. In
1890 he published two anti-friar articles in La Solidaridad based on knowledge gained as
amanuensis to his Uncle Mena Crisologo, who had drawn up a watertight case of
excommunication against two Augustinians. In 1891 La Lectura Popular announced his
membership in a musical society called La Euterpe; and in 1892 he locked horns with Madrid
Academician Vicente Barrantes over having made a hero out of that “arch-traitor,” Diego
Silang. In 1889 he became the only native Filipino ever licensed to publish a newspaper in the
colony with his vernacular El Ilocano, a journal which showed such a profit he was able to buy
his own press three years later. He became editor of a Tagalog bi-weekly called La Lectura
Popular in 1890, and quickly surrounded himself with such a radical Filipino staff that the
Revista Catolica grumpily announced, “We have withdrawn exchanges with this periodical

124
La Ilustracion Filipino, 7 March 1892.
125
Cited in Articulos sobre Etnografia, Historia. V Costumbres del Pais (Manila 1887), p. 155.
126
Op. cit., 24 May 1888.
127
Op. cit., 1 March 1887.
because for some time now it has appeared that it serves more to corrupt people’s customs than
to enlighten them.” 128 And one month after the law journal, La Legislacion, appeared in 1894,
he came out with El Municipio Filipino, which was little more than a do-it-yourself course in
understanding a citizen’s rights under the law.
The common ingredient of all this literary activity, from folk-lore to politics, was a sheer
rejoicing in things Filipino. Unlike his Propagandist compatriots trying to persuade the people
of Madrid that Filipinos were just as competent as Spaniards, it never occurred to Isabelo that
they weren’t. During fifteen years of recalcitrant journalism which ultimately led to Bilibid
Prison and exile to Montjuich Castle in Barcelona, he never wrote an apologetic word about
anything in the Philippines. He unblushingly filled his fiction with Filipino customs and
superstitions that embarrassed his ilustrado countrymen. He used Filipino terms so often that he
once translated Morga’s “principales” with Ilocano “agturay (one who governs),” moving Jose
Rizal to comment pettishly: “I have read Morga some seven times and do not recall that he ever
spoke of any agturay; I do not know whether Don Isabelo, in his laudable desire to ilocanize the
Filipinos, believes it profitable to make Morga speak Ilocano.” 129 Moreover, Isabelo rejected all
racist theories of Filipino origins, and boldly concluded:
The insignificant differences which exist between the partly civilized Ilocano, the
Tinguian who wears pants and jacket, the pacified Igorot who though still naked has lost
his unsociable and cruel nature, and the runaway fugitives with their savage customs—
these differences are simply the effects of the places where they live, and they appear
civilized or savage according to their being near or far from places frequented by
Spaniards or civilized Ilocanos. 130
He drove the point home with statements like, “At the time of the Conquest, Filipinos
had long hair like Igorots,” 131 or citing Fray Martin de Rada in 1577 to the effect that “Visayan
pirates were more terrible than even the Mohammedans of Jolo and Mindanao.” 132 But
Spaniards and Filipinos alike were outraged when he wrote, “There are Aetas who surpass the
Tagalogs in intelligence, and it is recognized that the Tagalogs are at the same intellectual level
as the Europeans.” 133 Wenceslao Retana could not contain himself, and spewed forth a vicious
diatribe which concluded with the following words:
I end with one little question: Who is the greater idiot, Don Isabelo or those who
pay attention to him? I say the latter, since Don Isabelo, poor fellow, was born that way.
And how can he be blamed for that? 134

128
Quoted in Manililla, 14 March 1891.
129
La Solidaridad, 31 October 1890.
130
Historia de Ilocos (Manila 1890), Vol. I, p. 37.
131
La Ilustracion Fi1ipina, 21 August 1892.
132
Las Islas Visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista (Iloilo 1887), p. 36.
133
Quoted in Wenceslao E. Retana, “Isabelo de los Reyes (alias Platanos),” Sinapismos: Folletos Filipinos—III
(Madrid/Manila 1890), p. 43.
134
Ibid.
 II
A half century later, when Isabelo de los Reyes was an elderly Senator fondly known as
Don Belong, he used to say—with forgivable understatement—“I was by nature a fighter.” 135 A
fighter he certainly was, and his first real fight was probably the Philippine Folklore Battle of
1884-85. The clarion had been sounded by Director Jose Felipe Del Pan of La Oceania
Espanola in an article entitled, “Folklore of the Philippines,” in the March 21, 1884, issue,
which invited readers to submit contributions on that subject. Spanish folklore had really only
been born four years before when a small group of enthusiasts met in Seville and published the
Bases del Folklore Espanol. In 1884, with the first issue of El Folklore Espanol, they turned to
their Far Eastern colony as a natural font of living folklore, and the Director of La Oceania was
responding to their appeal. Del Pan himself was one of the most attractive colonials Spain ever
sent to the Philippines. Dean of Manila journalists and a fatherly figure who surrounded himself
with Filipino youth, he raised up a whole generation of Filipino journalists well versed in their
profession and imbued with the proud traditions of the Fourth Estate. One of these proteges was
the 19-year-old Ilocano. Isabelo himself tells us what happened next:
When I read this [article], there came to my mind the memory of Senor don
Mariano Espiritu, who was my professor in the Vigan [Minor] Seminary, who one time
had his students write down all the superstitions we could learn in order to demonstrate
in class how incredible they were.
I was still carrying my collection of Ilocano popular notions in my memory then;
but although I had plenty of enthusiasm for contributing to the realization of the happy
proposal of the illustrious daily of Calle Real, I considered the thing above my abilities
and so refrained from writing.
But then I could not evade the personal invitation of a valued friend from the
Oceania, and so began my Ilocano, Malabon, Zambales, and Filipino folklore, including
in the last such folkloric materials as had general application to the whole archipelago.
When El Eco de Vigan (may it rest in peace!) saw Ilocano superstitions in my
Folklore, they gave me to understand in a little lecture that superstitions should not be
included in folklore because this English word means “popular knowledge.”
I recommended to them that they read the discourse on folklore by the eminent
writer, Donor Emilia Pardo Bazan, President of the Galician Folklore, to discover their
error, and also asked them what, then, superstitions were if not one kind of popular
knowledge?
We can say that since El Eco simply couldn’t wiggle out, they took another tack to
sink me, as if I were an enemy of theirs, asserting that the superstitions of the
panagtutuyo that I had written about, were nothing but creations of my own sick
imagination, “just to show off as a know-it-all,” they said.
If only El Eco had not assumed ‘such pretensions! and how sad that the Vigan

135
Cited by Jose L. Llanes, Isabelo de los Reyes (Manila 1949), from a manuscript notebook in the Filipiniana
Division of the University of the Philippines Main Library.
 weekly did not accede to my desire of answering them in their own columns, for simply
copying a few lines from page 61 of the Diccionario geografico estadistico historico of
Fathers Buzeta and Bravo would have left no doubt that El Eco had committed a superb
boner. 136
But, strangely enough, El Eco de Vigan was not able to inflict any damage, on me—
as mariners say—with its sinister diatribes. Quite the opposite, it was they who gave the
Ilocano Folklore an importance it had neither enjoyed nor deserved. 137
The reaction in Spain to Isabelo’s joust with El Eco was flattering in the extreme. In
October he received the princely gift of all three volumes of the Biblioteca de las Tradiciones
espanoles from the authors themselves. This was followed by the latest Spanish books from Dr.
Machado y Alvarez, founder of El Folklore Espanol, and Director Alejandro Guichot y Sierra
of the Boletin Folklorico de Sevilla. More dazzling still were an invitation to write up his views
on proper folkloristic terminology, and a request to make a public appeal for the organization of
a Philippine Folklore. Isabelo’s response to the first was the “Terminologia del Folk-lore”
which appeared in the next issue of the Boletin de la Institution Libre de Ensenanza. Typically,
he referred to himself in it as “brother of the wild Aetas, Igorots and Tinguianes,” 138 a
confession—or boast—for which the Philippine press was to lampoon him for years afterwards.
His response to the second was made after a slight pause to pass his final exams in
“Principles of Civil, Commercial and Penal Law” with a grade of 1.0 (Sobresaliente). It was an
open letter which Jaime de Veyra called the “Liamamiento al folklorismo—Call to folklore
studies. 139 It appealed to readers for the collection of Philippine folklore and the establishment
of a folklore society complete with regional branches in each province. Appearing in the sober
El Comercio on March 21, 1885, it passed largely unnoticed except for two readers with very
different reactions. The first was “Mario”—artist-journalist Miguel Zaragoza—who responded
with a slightly tongue-in-cheek account of Visayan funeral customs in five installments in the
Iloilo Porvenir de Visayas called “Al rededor de un cadaver—Around the corpse.” The other
respondent was “Astoll.”
“Astoll” was Jose de Lacalle y Sanchez, a physician in the Army Medical, Corps and
professor of anatomy in the U.S.T., who for years wrote a sardonic—but often very funny—
column called “Manila” in which he pilloried metropolitan society as a zoofull of pretentious
status-seekers of lazy intellect and shallow culture. In this vein, he predicted in the June 27
issue of El Comercio that nothing would come of the noble dream of a Philippine folklore.
Isabelo replied with a lively expansion of his ideas, to which Lacalle responded with one of the
best columns he ever wrote—a ringing endorsement which displayed familiarity with the new

136
Panagtutuyo, called sibrong in Andres Caro’s 1849 Vocabulario de la Lengua ilocana, trabajado por varios
Religiosos del Orden de N.P.S. Agustin, was a killing committed after the death of a prominent man and U.S.T. law
professor Don Jose Moreno Lacalle assured Isabelo that such criminal cases had been brought before him during
his tenure as Governor of Ilocos Norte. The reference cited in Buzeta and Bravo reads: “When a man dies, they
consider it a duty to appease his spirit by sacrificing as many victims as the number of his fingers that were
extended at the moment of exhaling his last breath.”
137
El Commercio, 3 July 1885.
138
Cited in El Folklore Filipino (Manila 1889), Vol. I, p. 19.
139
Jaime C. de Veyra and Mariano Ponce, Efemerides filipinas (Manila 1914), p. 278.
discipline and admiration for Isabelo’s energy and idealism, but nonetheless maintained his
pessimistic prognosis. Naturally, the young Ilocano over-achiever would not let the matter rest
there, and so came back with still more propaganda. The good-natured Lacalle then closed the
exchange with quiet dignity by saying that he saw no profit in prolonging a debate he
considered completely sterile. And, of course, the worldly wise “Astoll” was correct. Not for
another 75 years was a Philippine Folklore Society to come into existence, long after Isabelo’s
death. Spaniards in Manila were not interested in such an esoteric intellectual exercise, and the
last thing in the world Spanish-speaking Filipinos wanted was to call attention to the quaint
customs which set them apart from those Peninsular gentlemen they were trying to emulate.
Isabelo himself said:
Indios think it is shocking and shameful to write The Philippine Folklore because,
they say, this is to publicize our own simplicity. I am an indio and an Ilocano—why
should I not say it?—and when my beloved brothers learned about my modest articles
on Ilocano Folklore which were published in La Oceania, they rose up against me,
saying that I had disgraced my own people. 140
Thus was the Philippine Folklore Battle of 1884-85 lost.
But though Isabelo may have lost the Battle, his-forays had not been “completely
sterile.” His newfound friend, Miguel (“Mario”) Zaragoza, adopted his literary style in La
Ilustracion Filipina by larding feature articles and fiction alike with Filipino terms and customs.
Mariano Ponce published a series called “Folklore bulaqueno” in La Oceania, and Pedro
Serrano and Pio Mondragon contributed folklore from Pampanga and Tayabas respectively.
Even Pedro Groizard of the satirical Manila Alegre came out with a wedding song he had
recorded in a remote barrio about “el guerrero Mapalad,” which he considered a “15th-century
Tagalog tradition” because it preserved the memory of a day when you could tell how many
men a hero had killed by the color of his potong, and live slaves were interred with him when
he died. But without doubt the richest prize of all Isabelo’s efforts was his own two-volume El
Folklore Filipino. It was Isabelo’s old mentor and benefactor, Felipe Del Pan, who collected his
separate articles in a single volume the year he graduated with the Notarial Degree, and sent it
off to the Philippine Exposition in Madrid, where it won a silver medal on Sept. 18, 1887. Two
years later it was reprinted with a second volume which contained the articles by Ponce, Serrano
Laktaw and Mondragon, as well as the text and translation of the Ilocano ethno-epic, “Biag ni
Lam-ang.”
El Folklore Filipino is not only one of Isabelo de los Reyes’s most significant
contributions to our knowledge of the Filipino people, but stands unrivaled even today for the
variety and detail of its contents. Unfortunately, it has not only been completely forgotten, but
has almost disappeared. So far as I know, no library contains both volumes, except the Rare
Books Section of the Philippine National Library, and its copy of Volume Two—the only one I
have ever seen—is imperfect. For this reason, it may be useful here to review El Folklore
Filipino’s contents.

140
El Comercio, 21 March 1885.
 III
Volume One of El Folklore Filipino opens with an introduction which gives some of the
details of Isabelo’s embattled excursion into the field of Philippine folklore—the date, for
example, when he began collecting Ilocano samples for Del Pan, May 24, 1884. He refers
gratefully to Miguel Zaragosa’s contribution, and cites Lacalle’s accurate predictions of doom.
He ends with a little apologia which reveals just how bitter the battle had been:
And such is my impartiality that I have sacrificed the affection of the Ilocanos for
the sake of science, since I did not refrain from bringing even their less pleasant
practices to light.
But I should inform them that I have received enthusiastic congratulations from
various scholars in Europe, who say that with the Ilocano Folklore (leaving
misconstrued patriotism aside), I have rendered a signal service to Ilocos, my adored
fatherland, since I have thus provided abundant materials to enable them to study its
prehistory and other scientific problems pertaining to that province; and my articles
published in La Oceania Espanola were translated into German by the very important
European scientific journals, Globus and Ausland, which proves that they have a more
serious purpose than to ridicule my countrymen, as they will realize themselves as soon
as they see how they were portrayed.
And speaking of patriotism, how many times has it been said in the newspapers that
to me only Ilocos and the Ilocanos are any good? Those articles and supplements in the
Philippine press which revealed their merits, defended them and sought reforms on their
behalf—who is to be credited with those? … Everyone serves his people as he thinks
best, and I believe I am contributing to the understanding of my people’s past with the
Ilocano Folklore. All this I bring up because to me the worst man is that unhappy wretch
who is not endowed with that noble and sacred sentiment they call patritiotism. 141
The introduction is followed by the complete text of the “Terminologia del Folk-lore”
from the Aug. 31, 1885, Boletin de la Institucion Libre de Ensenanza and Dec. 19 El Comercio.
Then, the first three chapters, which make up the bulk of the volume, are essentially the
collected “Folk-lore Ilocano” articles, of which chapter one, “Folkloric materials about religion,
mythology and psychology” originally appeared as the “prehistoric epoch” of the Historia de
Ilocos and was translated into German by Ferdinand Blumentritt as “Die religiosen
Anschauungen der Ilocanen—The religious world-view of the Ilocanos.” A few details from its
81 pages will illustrate the author’s technique and competence.
He considers the Ilocos Sur corpse-eating katatao-an to be what the early Spanish
accounts call anitos, and notes that they arrive in the middle of the night in pirate ships that sail
through the sky—an interesting detail since it parallels Mindanao and Palawan beliefs. The litao
is the anito of the sea, not the sirena, which he recognizes as a Spanish introduction. The pugot
he describes as a poltergeist, and gives an example recorded in Vigan sometime in 1865-1867
when stones kept falling on the roof of a house despite its being surrounded by the police but
which did not hurt anybody they struck. He gives credit to the late Filipino priest Pastor

141
Op. cit., pp. 17-18.
Velazquez for ridding Vigan of many superstitions which persist elsewhere in Ilocos, and
mentions an anting-anting booklet he received from a criminal called. “Prayer of the Testament
which was found in the Holy Sepulcher of our Savior Jesus.” A section on “Folklore of the sea,”
originally written in response to a questionnaire from Paul Sebillot, author of Les contes des
marins, includes a kind of Tagalog compass rose which distinguishes the four cardinal points
and four intermediary ones plus North-northwest and South-southeast. The following
description of the sangkabagi may be quoted at length as a fair sample of the author’s style:
In Ilocos Norte, the katatao-an is not known. Instead, they have those called
sangkabagi (pronounced “sangkabagui”) which are similar to the former, and I believe
that katatao-an and sangkabagi refer to the same anito, which is not strange because
there are words in Ilocos Norte which are not found in Ilocos Sur—like salaysay, kain,
buybuy, etc. There are quack doctors in Ilocos Norte who claim to be the friends of the
sangkabagi and they say that it costs them nothing to gain the said sangkabagi’s
friendship. These appear to their chosen in the middle of the night in the windows and
holes, from where they wake them with scarcely audible voices, and have them embark
on a flying barangay or boat, like those of the katatao-an, in which they travel through
space, leaving at one in the morning and going all around the world in half an hour. The
common Ilocanos say that the sangkabagi appear to many but that some people do not
accept their friendship because these anitos forbid their friends to use rosaries, hear
mass, make the sign of the cross, or comply with their Christian religious duties, for the
sangkabagi admit that they cannot come near their friends if these practice such pious
acts. (Compare this with what Conception says about the Tigbalan.)
The sangkabagi take revenge on those who disdain their friendship by dragging
them on the ground when they are sleeping, or carrying them off to other places, or
removing their liver and filling the empty space with grass. And it is recounted that the
sangkabagi have eyesight so penetrating they can see living men’s entrails right through
the skin. And other times they cause the anay (termes monoceros) or the weevils to
destroy the clothes, palay, corn, and seeds of anybody who causes them any displeasure.
On the other hand, they give their most esteemed friends a so-called “Company Book”
[Libro de Compania, the Compania being the Society of Jesus], and this book transports
them with inconceivable speed wherever they wish even if it is many leagues away,
simply by indicating the place they want to go. (This belief was undoubtedly added to
purely Ilocano beliefs by the Spaniards: it is a common belief that the Jesuits possess
miraculous little books.) They say that an old native of Sarrat (I.N.) went from his town
to Laoag, a distance of one league, to buy things and returned with his purchases in four
minutes. And he did this every day, morning, noon, and night. And, the commoners say,
the sangkabagi also teach their friends to make clocks, and give them roots to cure any
kind of illness instantaneously just by bringing these miraculous roots near their
patients. 142
Section xx of chapter one is “Ilocano superstitions which are found in Europe,” a list
based on considerable research in Portuguese and Spanish sources, whose coincidence Isabelo
explains as being more logically the result—of Spanish introductions into the Philippines than

142
Ibid., pp. 30-32.
Filipino introductions into Spain. And to press the point, he refers the readers to an earlier
essay, “The Devil in the Philippines.” El Diablo en Filipinas was a hilarious piece in which a
pious provinciano defends his belief in ghosts—and evil spirits by quoting examples of Spanish
friars who saw and heard apparitions of the Devil, citing volume, chapter and page number from
their Orders’ official chronicles as evidence—from which Isabelo wickedly concludes that it
must have been the friars who introduced the Devil into the archipelago. And if any friar reader
failed to detect a scent of mischief in section xx, he must certainly have noticed it in the next
one, “Christian folklore. Here, hard on the heels of quack doctors, poltergeists, and body-
snatching katatao-an, comes a fine ethnographic description of Christian fiestas, games played,
Church calendars, popular beliefs, and “the voyage of the soul.”
Chapter two is “Folkloric materials about class habits and customs.” Isabelo presents a
three-class division of Ilocano society—babaknang (the rich) or amaen ti ili (town fathers);
kailian (lower class town dwellers): and katalonan (those living among the fields). He describes
their clothes, food and occupations, and customs during pregnancy, delivery and baptism—as
well as “rebaptism,” buniag ti sirok ti latok (literally, “naming under the winnowing basket”), a
ceremony in which a sick child is given another name to deceive the spirit causing the illness.
Ten sections cover music, songs, dances, houses, furniture, utensils, and personal greeting
cards—“illuminated or gilded, or with drawings, gothic letters, colored ink, or acrostic poems.”
“Fiestas de las autoridades” describes formal receptions during which newly appointed
government officials are regaled, eulogized, and crowned with floral wreaths. With dogged
professionalism, Isabelo includes the custom of cencerradas even though, “strictly speaking, it
is not found in Ilocos,” but since he had heard of one case in Abra, he will report it.
(Cencerradas are raucous peasant serenades called charivari, shivaree, or callithumpi in
English, intended to invade the privacy of newlyweds on their wedding night.) And, as usual,
his wide reading enlivens the text with colorful trivia: he comments, “In the ports of China, the
deeds of Ilocano sailors who valiantly drove off pirates are still remembered,” 143 and cites an
act from the little-known 1773 Synod of Calasiao which proscribes the use of the Ilocano term
agbuniag for bautizar because of its prehispanic—and therefore non-Christian—connotation.
Chapter three is called “Folkloric materials about literature: poems of Dona Leona
Florentino.” Leona Florentino was Isabelo’s mother, and the 22 samples of her work presented
here had been sent to Madame Andrezia Volska for inclusion in a collection called Biblioteque
Internationale de Oeuvres des Femmes presented to the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris.
Some of them had also been published in his 1887 Ilocanadas in Iloilo, and one, dedicated to
Pope Leo XIII on the occasion of his Golden Jubilee, had been included in an album presented
to Manila Archbishop Pedro Payo. An introductory essay on Filipina womanhood reviews her
condition today and in the past, and her education under the Spaniards. This is followed by an
excellent discussion of Philippine poesy—rhyme schemes, strophes, confusion of e with i and o
with u “because Philippine dialects only had three vowels at the time of the Conquest” 144—and
its place in Ilocano society for felicitations, love songs, eulogies, and satires. He deplores the
fact that Filipinos do not preserve their poems once they have served these social functions, and
says the present specimens of his mother’s work—which he is saving like precious gold—are

143
Ibid., p. 116.
144
Ibid., p. 176.
the only survivors of the thousands she is known to have written.
The first poem, “Greetings to Vicente and Severina on their wedding day,” is presented
in a surprisingly modern format. The Ilocano text is followed, first by a literal line-by-line
Spanish equivalent, and then by a “free but faithful translation” for the readers’ easier
comprehension. It is accompanied by copious footnotes containing grammatical, rhetorical, and
cultural explanations. “No ubingda pay a maladaga—when their daughters were still pullets,”
for example, is glossed with the comment, “This comparison with pullets is frequent in Ilocano,
and indicates the great care with which we must tend them because of their weakness and
delicacy.” 145
Chapter three is followed by an appendix which states frankly that the author now sees
he has neither the time nor space to complete the seven chapters he had intended—he has
deadlines to meet for three newspapers—so four of them will have to remain in the inkwell—
Leechcraft, Folk-wit, Folk-tradition and Folkscience. He will therefore plan to publish a second
volume, but meanwhile will add a few more items about Ilocos and then try to justify the title,
Folk-lore Filipino, with two items on Malabon and Zambales.
The additional Ilocos items are unrelated articles—a piece on medicine and flora, a few
traditions (like the Pantok ni Silang hill outside Vigan where Diego Silang was betrayed), and
“The goal of the Folk-lore Ilocano.” Three short articles in the style of personal interviews are
called “Filipino quack doctors and their abominable practices,” though the word “abominable”
is used ironically. A list of Spanish filipinisms such as the Manila use of escuchar (to listen) to
mean mirar por un agujero (to peep through a hole) is followed by a short collection of Filipino
proverbs. Then comes “Dios-diosan,” an informative review of popular religious sects all over
the archipelago, including such local samples as the following:
In 1881 or 1882, an old woman was apprehended in Ilocos Sur because she made
believe she was the Most Holy Virgin Mary. When she arrived in Vigan, capital city of
the Ilocano regions, it was observed that credulous people kissed her tresses with avid
veneration. 146
“The folklore of Zambales” contains two items—“The day of the dead” and “Country
weddings”—and the “Folklore of Malabon” five—Popular superstitions, Fortune-telling, Folk-
medicine, Lovemaking, and Rumors—which are followed by a guidebook-style monograph on
Malabon itself, where Isabelo was living with his father-in-law at the time.
The last section in Volume One is called “Administrative folklore?”—a title which, even
with its question mark, must have been even more provocative than “Christian folklore.” At
first glance, it seems completely out of place because it is a short story, an amusing bit of
fiction. But a perceptive reader will understand why it is there after reading just a few pages.
The hero, a local boy called Isio, makes good in the indigo business by dint of hard work and
thrift and is therefore appointed gobernadorcillo, an office he considers an honorable
opportunity to serve his people. But he quickly learns that such appointments are simply the
means by which higher officials mulct lower ones: one of his predecessors lost an arm chasing

145
Ibid., p. 180.
146
Ibid., p. 260.
bandits, some were imprisoned, and all were ruined. For a while, he struggles idealistically—
and naively—against a corrupt system in which the functions of office have no correlation to
their definitions. When he finally takes to the hills and becomes a kind of Robin Hood among
the Igorots, the message is clear: pretensions of law and justice in the colony are just as unreal
as those miracle-working Libros de Compania or sangkabagi dying boats. The tale is a naughty
expose but one rendered so subtle by its comic dialogue that the reactionary Diario de Manila
published it under another title without realizing its implications. And it qualifies Isabelo de los
Reyes as the first Filipino to catalogue political myths right where they belong—in a collection
of folklore.

IV
Volume Two of El Folklore Filipino contains a prologue, eight articles or documents
neither pertaining to Ilocos nor written by Isabelo, and the long Ilocano ethno-epic “The life of
Lam-ang.” The prologue opens by explaining that Miguel “Mario” Zaragoza’s five articles in
the Porvenir de Visayas called “Around the corpse” are not folklore in the strict sense.
These letters are, however, humorous articles about Visayan customs, models of
their genre. There are excellent pictures in them, and great depth of truth: the characters
which the distinguished author portrays actually exist and are genuinely folkloric
although he has heightened the real colors to provoke the readers’ laughter.
It used to be the style, and is still the style in the Philippines, to ridicule the customs
of the country, always exaggerating them to amuse the readers and not to inform them of
what they don’t know; but Folklore pursues a more lofty, scientific goal. 147
The first four selections are all reprints—with the authors’ permission—from the
popular press. The first is the Zaragoza “Al rededor de un cadaver.” This is followed by
Mariano Ponce’s “El Folk-lore bulaqueno,” which is straightforward, basic folklore—customs,
traditions, superstitions, folktales, proverbs, etc. Pedro Serrano Laktaw’s “Folk-lore pampango”
is actually two separate articles—one about Mount Sinukuan, Arayat, and the invincible suku
who inhabits it, and a fine summary of agricultural rites reported in sequence. Pio Mondragon’s
“Folk-lore tayabeno,” sent from Guinayangan on Jan. 17, 1887, is similar to Ponce’s work but
rather better. Then comes a “Folkloric miscellany” introduced as follows:
Among other scattered materials collected for this miscellany are some very curious
unpublished documents about the Rulers of the Philippines and Moluccas at the time of
the Conquest, which assume an official form. The copies which a fairly well educated
old man supplied me are on unofficial paper and unauthenticated by official seals.
As of the present writing, I assign them no more value than that of folkloric material
for the history of the Philippines; that is to say, I consider them raw material which some
artist must polish, who in this case will have to be somebody who possesses a deep
knowledge of the history of this archipelago and the Mollucas, to ascertain if they are
apochryphal or, if genuine, to explain certain facts which contradict those which are
accepted as historic truths.

147
Ibid., P. 6
 I confess that I have not had time to examine these documents carefully in the light
of history, and simply transcribe them here literally and without amendation, but with a
few annotations. 148
The “most curious unpublished documents” presented are two wills—that of Fernando
Malang Balagtas dated March 25, 1539, and that of his descendant, Andres Mangaya, dated Oct
3, 1563. The testator of the former claims to be related by blood or marriage to royal families of
Ternate; Borneo, Cebu, and Manila, and to have been baptized by a bishop in Cebu in 1524.
Two of these dates are glaringly anachronous, of course: the only Spaniards in the Philippines
in 1524 or 1539 were captive survivors of Magellan’s fleet, and none of them were either priests
or bishops. They may be simple mistakes on the part of a senile illiterate on his deathbed, but
similar details in an official death certificate appended to the will cannot be dismissed so
lightly. The death certificate purports to have been sworn, in the first-person singular, by
Augustinian Procurator Fray Juan de Jesus in the Mission of San Carlos on March 21 of the
year “mill quinientos treinta y nueve.” Aside from the curious date and the even more curious
circumstance of the testator’s death having preceded the execution of his will by four days, both
Isabelo and others who examined the documents were aware that there had been no Augustinian
friar by the name of Juan de Jesus in the Philippines in the 16th century, nor had there been any
mission or town of San Carlos at that time. As a topnotcher in graduate courses in
palaeography, and the theory and practice of editing public documents, Isabelo wisely refrained
from attributing authenticity to either document.
The next item, “Lakandula, the Ruler of Tondo,” is presented not as a “curious
unpublished document,” but as an “unpublished document.” The original from which Isabelo
copied it was written on official stamped paper, bore the seal of the Alcaldia of Pampanga, and
was dated in Bacolor on Oct. 31, 1883. It forwarded to Don Pedro Macapagal Mallari
Lakandula the favorable reply of the Spanish Government through the Direccion general de la
Administracion civil in Manila on Sept. 22 of the same year, to his request for tax exemption on
the grounds of a 17th-century grant to his ancestor, Juan Makapagal, great-grandson of
Lakandula. The government correspondence quotes all the pertinent documents necessary to
substantiate the claim across two centuries, each one notarially authenticated, back to the
original which is dated Manila, 24 November 1660. Isabelo accepted the document as genuine
on its own internal evidence, and probably never knew that the Archives of the Indies contained
corroborating evidence—Juan Makapagal’s curriculum vitae of May 23, 1665, for example, or
the Queen Regent’s Royal Decree of June 1, 1667, granting his request. It is ironic that modern
historians, prehistorians, and quasi-historians have paid so much attention to the dubious “Will
of Fernando Malang Balagtas” that details contained in the authentic 1660 document have never
appeared in our history texts. For that reason, it may be useful here to present the passages
pertaining to Juan Makapagal’s great-grandfather, Lakandula:
Don Carlos Lacandola, his great-grandfather, was Lord and most principal of the
town of Tondo, and of the other surrounding towns, whose natives paid him tribute and
vassalage and other recognition as their natural lord, and when ships from China came to
this bay, they similarly paid him duties and anchorage fees, he removing their sails and
rudder for this purpose, and taking their merchandise by paying half its value at the time

148
Ibid., p. 173.
 and the other half the next year, without any other natives being able to buy anything
from the Sangleyes but only from the said Lacandola, from which he had much profit,
which he ceded at the coming of the Spaniards to these Islands, they collecting the said
tributes and duties for His Majesty.
And at the time when Adelantado Miguel Lopez Legazpi came on the conquest and
colonization of these Islands, the said Don Carlos Lacandola went out to receive him in
this bay, taking the other lords who were his relatives—with him, and his vassals, and
rendered obedience to His Majesty, making the others do the same, and he helped make
a house for the accommodation of the said Adelantado, and a fort with his men, for
which he gave fourteen pieces of artillery and twelve jars of gunpowder, which at that
time were of much importance for the Royal service, for which he showed such fidelity
and desire to serve His Majesty that he then had Don Dionisio Capulong and his other
sons baptized, as the said Lacandola was afterwards himself, at which baptism the said
Lord Governor showed him great honor by ordering the artillery and arquebuses which
are now in the City discharged.
And when Maestro-de-Campo Martin de Goiti went on the conquest of the province
of Pampanga, the said Adelantado called the said Lacandola and asked him to join His
Majesty’s service for if so great a chief should go with him, when the Pampangos saw
that he had given obedience to His Majesty, they would give it also; and the said
Lacandola agreed to go, and served with two ships provided at his own cost, and
distinguished himself by performing much service for His Majesty, and went along so
the said Pampangos would give him obedience, as in fact they did.
In the same way, when the enemy Limahon came to sack and seize the City with a
great number of Chinese, the said Lacandola helped resist them with his sons, relatives,
and vassals, and when the said enemy withdrew to the Province of Pangasinan with the
loss of his men and fortified himself there, his said great-grandfather went in pursuit,
and his brothers, taking ships and men at their own cost, and distinguishing himself by
spending much of his wealth. 149
The last item in El Folklore Filipino is the longest and probably the most important—the
text of that Ilocano epic called “The life of Lam-ang” and Isabelo’s translation of it. This fine
example of folk literature is nowadays so well-known and esteemed by Filipino folklorists that
it comes as a surprise to realize that less than a century ago even an authority on the Ilocos like
Isabelo de los Reyes had to “discover” and translate it for the first time. His introductory note is
as follows:
On page 16 of the first volume of this book, I mention a curious poem which the
Ilocanos sing to genuine music of the country, that of the dal-lot. Thanks to the
amiability of the learned parish priest of Bangar, the Reverend Fray Gerardo Blanco, I
am able to insert it here and correct certain mistaken details I had received, among
others that the hero was a woman.
I once heard a balitao or popular song of the Visayas in the same traditional style,
which seemed to me more epic in tone.

149
Ibid., pp. 219-221.
 We will interpolate the literal translation in the stanzas, by which readers will notice
some omissions, which I attribute to lapses of memory on the part of the singer, which
would not be strange considering the length of the poem. As I received it, it appeared to
be completely in six-line strophes, but the sense turns out to be better if it is presented in
quatrains, especially since I have found nothing but strophes of four lines in Ilocos,
except for the Pasion, which is foreign. 150

V
It is Philippine folklore’s loss that Isabelo de los Reyes never completed those missing
four chapters of El Folklore Filipino, nor ever produced another formal collection of Philippine
customs and traditions. Instead, he made use of his knowledge for the setting of many of the
short stories he published during a long journalistic career in which he owned and edited six
newspapers and wrote for dozens of others. “Una leyenda prehistorica,” for example, is a
romance which appeared under various titles in Spanish, Ilocano, and Tagalog versions in 1890-
1893. Its hero, Aglal-lalaki, is a slave who rises to become a respected agturay wearing a red
potong, dancing the tadek and kinnotan, and regaling his beloved Sabong with “piles of gold”
for her sab-ong. More typical is his 1892 “Un idilio,” which portrays Ilocano customs under
Spanish domination. It opens with a prose style as characteristic of Isabelo as a trademark:
A burning love had fused the two hearts of Intay and Pinchong into one, poor and
simple pastores of Magsingal, Ilocos Sur. One serene night, they were sitting on the
bank of a crystal stream in the field called Paspaslep…
Then comes a dialogue of coy courtship, in the course of which the rustic young hero quotes a
school teacher’s definition of “Love.” Isabelo explains this unexpected erudition with the
following footnote: “The pastor had been a student, but since only Latin was taught in Vigan
and it’s obvious you can’t make a living off Latin, he had to become a pastor.” 151
Long after Ilocano customs under Spanish domination had become a dead issue, the
“well-known Filipino folklorist” could still produce such tales if the spirit moved him. I am
indebted to Dr. Resil Mojares for the pleasant evidence that a quarter of a century after the
Folklore Battle of 1884-85, when Don Belong was a mellowed, middle-aged municipal
councilor, he had not lost his touch. On July 9, 1918, he sent a Cebuano legend called “La Besa
de Carcar” to the Cebu Nueva Fuerza which closes with a passage that is pure, vintage Isabelo
de los Reyes:
And when the friar’s sonorous kiss shattered the majestic silence of those woods,
God was so horrified at the sacrilege he hurled down a thunderbolt and turned him to
stone, together with his horse. The lovers thus had no need to stain their hands with friar
blood, and after all their misfortunes, God sanctified their love with every sort of
Blessing. 152
Looking back at Isabelo’s brief career as the “Father of Philippine Folklore,” it is

150
Ibid., p. 235.
151
La Ilustracion Filiprina, 28 October 1892.
152
Op. cit., loc cit.
tempting to dismiss his efforts as a passing phase in the busy life of a literary gadfly. But this
would not be an adequate explanation for a struggle so dynamic. Rather, the Folklore Battle
must be seen as the first of a long line of windmills at which the Ilocano Quixote was to tilt.
He started propagandizing for Filipino representation in the Spanish Cortes at a time
when Retana could say, “My dear fellow, neither Rizal nor anybody on La Solidaridad has
dared to tackle that subject here.” 153 Ten years later, upon his release from political detention in
Barcelona, he wrote a series of friar attacks in El Progreso so acrid Bishop Martinez Vigil of
Oviedo wrote him, “Lopez Jaena, Rizal, and Marcelo H. del Pilar themselves would have been
frightened had they read them.” 154 He waged a kind of one-man war against the Vatican which
resulted in a libel suit in Spain and the founding of a brand new church in the Philippines. Six
months after he founded the Union Obrera Democratica, he was jailed for labor agitating, but
was no sooner released than he defiantly started publishing La Redencion del Obrero. His
fortnightly Filipinas ante Europa was so virulently anti-American that men were arrested for
circulating it, and his Defensor de Filipinas soon afterwards took America to task for her
broken promises to the Filipino people. Not until 1912 was the rebel journalist ready to quit
struggling, make his peace with a colonial regime he couldn’t change, and run for public office.
A favorite figure of Isabelo de los Reyes’s fiction is the hero who is loco de amor—mad
with love. Many people thought Isabelo was more than a little touched with madness himself.
Perhaps he was. Perhaps he was mad with love for the Filipino people. It would not be strange
for a man called the “Father of Philippine Folklore” to be so afflicted, for the formal study of
folklore has historically been connected with pride of nation. The rash of folklore societies
which appeared in Europe in the 1880’s coincided with an outbreak of feverish nationalism that
avidly shouldered White Man’s Burdens and produced today’s Third World. Conversely, no
folklore societies appeared in the Philippines during the 1880’s when the native elite was far too
interested in the culture of a non-Filipino nation to heed the Llamamiento al folklorismo of a
Filipino prophet crying in the wilderness. It is probably no coincidence that the first Philippine
Folklore Society had to await the rise of a new generation of self-conscious Filipino nation-
builders before it could be born in 1958. And it is no coincidence, either, that when it was, a
Filipino citizen was presiding over the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization.

153
Quoted in a letter to Retana, 14 September 1897, in Achutegui and Bernard, Religious Revolution in the
Philippines, Vol. 4 (Manila 1972), p. 97.
154
Quoted in La sensacional Memoria sobre la Revolucion filipina en 1896-1897 (Madrid 1899), pp. 118-119.
 Isabelo de los Reyes:
Provinciano and Nationalist*

Spanish Manila used to celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day on November 30 with public prayers and
festivities in memory of the salvation of the young colony in 1576 from capture by Chinese
corsair Limahong. Newspapers took note of the occasion with headings like “The Fiesta of San
Andres and the Banner of Castile,” and articles which celebrated a hairbreadth escape from
slavery, barbarity, bloodshed, and the pernicious sect of Confucius. In 1881, however, the sober
El Comercio published an article with the strange title, “The loyalty of the Ilocanos to Spain.”
A glorious page was recorded in history when the heroism of the Spanish soldiers
and the loyalty of the Ilocanos defended Manila against the evil designs of Lima Hong.
Don Juan Salcedo was in Vigan (capital of Ilocos Sur) when he learned that many
ships were crossing those waters in the direction of Manila, and he managed to raise
men for the defense of the threatened city for, since he had quickly won the esteem of
the Ilocanos of Ilocos Sur, it had not taken him long to subdue them. Now the brave
conquistador of Ilocos Sur put himself at the head of a multitude of valiant Ilocanos and
a handful of Spaniards and started for Manila, which he hardly reached before a bloody
battle broke out in which the Spaniards and Ilocanos together triumphed like the 300
Spartans at Thermopylae, defeating the numerous invaders and driving them out of
Manila with their blood staining the waters of the sea. So the banner of Castile waved
majestically over that region of pearly clouds to the sound of a thousand acclamations of
victory.
Manila once erected a nice monument to the illustrious Anda: why have her
celebrated sculptors not taken up their sharp chisels to render homage to the resolute
Salcedo? Why have her chosen musicians not entoned a hymn of glory to the proud
Spaniards? Why have her famous painters not taken canvas to perpetuate the deeds of
the loyal Ilocanos? Ah, noble sons of Manila, return the favor which you received from
the generous hands of others, for the blood poured out on your behalf deserves its
prize. 155
Appearing in the staid and censured Manila press, the article must have come as a bit of
a shock. Colonial newspapers and schoolbooks habitually referred to Filipinos, not as actors in
their own destiny, but as passive recipients of Spain’s civilizing benevolence. Yet this
impertinent article not only paired Filipinos and Spaniards in the field of battle, but seemed to
suggest that Spaniards wouldn’t have been able to retain Manila without Filipino assistance.
And not merely Filipino assistance, but Ilocano assistance—Ilocanos from the remote provinces
of the northern Luzon boondocks. The implications must also have annoyed the capital’s
Tagalog reading public, which tended to regard Ilocanos as tight-fisted provincianos at best,
household menials at worst. But what was downright irritating about the article was that it had

*
Paper read at the Second International Philippine Studies Conference, Ala Moana Americana Hotel, Honolulu,
Hawaii, June 29-30, 1981.
155
El Comercio, March 29, 1881.
been written by a 17-year-old schoolboy.
That schoolboy was Isabelo de los Reyes, a fourth-year student in Letran. He had been
born in Vigan in 1864, and he came early to an articulate awareness of his Ilocano heritage. His
mother was a famous poet in the vernacular, and one of his teachers used to send his pupils out
to collect local customs and superstitions. He went to Manila in 1880 to complete his
Bachelor’s Degree, breezed through Letran and the University of Santo Tomas with a straight-A
average (i.e., sobresaliente), and spent most of his time in the library digging out such obscure
facts about Ilocos as those that appeared in the Saint Andrew’s Day piece. At the age of 16 he
was already publishing Ilocano folklore in the popular press, and soon attracted the attention of
European scholars like Austrian Filipinologist Ferdinand Blumentritt and Spanish
ethnographers who were just then founding Spain’s first folklore societies. By the time he
obtained the Notarial Degree in 1887, he was a full-time journalist, and had won the praise,
bemusement, or scorn of his readers by his constant allusions to his home province.
Isabelo’s output on Ilocos was remarkable both for its size and its scope. If it did not
actually run from the sublime to the ridiculous, it at least ran from serious studies to light
fiction. His casual little articles on folklore were published again and again, translated into
European languages, and collected into a corpus which became the basis for the two-volume El
Folklore Filipino. He spent years culling references from published sources and tapping oral
traditions to produce his Historia de Ilocos. A series of articles he wrote for Visayan papers
appeared in book form as Ilocanadas, and many of his “Narraciones ilocanas” were reprinted
for their moralizing or didactic content—or the subtle colonial criticisms which that content
disguised.
For years, Ilocos received better and more affectionate news coverage than any other
province in the colony. An exposition of commercial products which accompanied the Candon
town fiesta of 1892 was reported exhibit by exhibit and medal by medal. Vigan was constantly
in the news: the Rector of the Seminary is opening a museo-biblioteca with cultural artifacts
from the neighboring Tinguian tribe; Governor General Weyler will inaugurate the new
Ayuntamiento (town council) which is being restored after a lapse of three centuries; the Vigan
calesa invented by Senor German Quiles, and called by his name, wins first prize in the Madrid
Exposition of 1887 for its “elegance, comfort, economy, and privacy.” Nor could any reader
miss Isabelo’s touch: a new hat-making industry is said to be due to the Ilocano “habit of hard
work, little encountered in these latitudes where the climate so dissipates one’s energy.” And it
is being operated by children of nine or ten because “Ilocano children do not spend their time in
childish games but in pasturing cows, tending gardens, and other useful pastimes.” 156
In June 1889, Isabelo became the only indio ever licensed to own and operate a paper in
the colony—El Ilocano, which Retana called “the first genuinely Filipino periodical.” 157
Published in both Spanish and Ilocano, it has sometimes been called the first vernacular
newspaper in the Philippines, but the Diariong Tagalog actually preceded it by seven years. The
Diariong, however, only survived five months, while El Ilocano was so popular that within four
years it was able to purchase a printing press out of its profits. Isabelo’s editorial on that

156
Ibid., February 23, 1888.
157
occasion gives a good idea of the paper, the man, and his ideals.
As this publication enters its fifth year of existence, we cherish a plan of
inaugurating a modest press of our own.
We have already received all the crates from Europe containing the types and
presses, and only lack the cases, galleys, and chevalets which are being finished in the
reputable shop of Don Primitivo Formoso of Vigan, since, inasmuch as this whole
printshop is being established exclusively from the proceeds of El Ilocano sales, we
wanted all the materials made in Ilocos which could be made there, and we intend,
moreover, that all the personnel should be Ilocanos, too.
We founded El Ilocano with no other object than that of rendering service to our
beloved Ilocano people, defending their interests, and contributing to the enlightment of
their children; never did any sort of business motive enter into our plans on founding
this humble fortnightly: thus whatever we wrote and all we have done has been without
hope of gain. We therefore left our annual profits on the books in our account until we
had saved up the sum needed to acquire a press of our own, however modest…
And if we have achieved this in matters of finance, which is almost incredible, what
might be said of the effects of our propaganda on behalf of civilization, progress, and
different kinds of useful knowledge?
And our campaigns on behalf of Ilocano interests: have they proved to be
completely sterile? Examine the back issues of El Ilocano and see whether or not
everything that was requested has been approved by our zealous authorities.
But enough. Our whole aspiration is simply the intellectual, moral, and material
advancement of the Philippines in general and the Ilocos in particular, and we will
dedicate all our energies to attaining it. 158
It was quite a success story. Isabelo himself ascribed it to the loyalty of his Ilocano
subscribers. And their loyalty he explained by one word-“patriotismo.” 159

* * *

In 1884, Jose A Ramos invited Isabelo de los Reyes to become a Mason. Ramoa had
returned from England two years earlier with an English education and bride, and opened a
store, La Gran Bretana, which became the gathering place of Filipino critics of the colonial
regime and a distribution center for radical pamphlets. He had come to know Isabelo through
the press, and what attracted him to the young author was not Isabelo’s loyalty to one particular
province, but his patriotism. Masons in Spain were dedicatedly anti-clerical and in the
Philippines quickly became agents of reformist or revolutionary activism. Such men noticed the
revisionist implications of Isabelo’s articles about the historic relations between Spaniards and
Filipinos. Indeed, perceptive nationalists all over the colony recognized the larger significance

158
Ibid., p. 1654.
159
Cited in Retana, Sinapismos: bromitas y critiquillas Folletas filipiuos—III (Madrid/Manila 1890), p. 42.
of Isabelo’s “my-beloved-Ilocos” stance: his proposal to rename two Ilocos towns after local
heroes Lorenzo Peding and Pedro Lopez was applauded by La Opinion in Manila and El Eco de
Panay in Iloilo as a patriotic move “not just for Ilocos, but for the patria.” 160
When Isabelo printed Ilocano almanacs, they opened with a unique feature—a pageful
of “Dates Ilocanos should know.” 161 Here, along with such events as the introduction of the
semaphore telegraph in 1797 and the birth of painter Juan Luna in 1858, are the Ilocos uprisings
of 1589, 1661, 1762, 1807, 1811, 1815 and 1817—a list sweetened, perhaps, by the names of
those Ilocano capitanes Peding and Lopez who took the Spanish side in 1661. His treatment of
Diego Silang in the Historia de Ilocos—that “arch traitor” who not only revolted against Spain
but allied himself with her English enemies in the process—drew the wrath of Madrid
academician Victor Barrantes, and his account of friar responsibility for Silang’s assassination
roused indio-baiting “Quioquiap” Feced to anguished cries of “Libel”! (Isabelo replied with
innocent logic, “If they advised Vicos to assassinate Silang, they believed they were complying
with a patriotic duty.”) 162 And his analysis of the 1807 revolt made use of terminology which
must have slipped through censorship in a momentary lapse of vigilance: “Revolutions are
caused by concentrated grievances: when the atmosphere gets heavy enough, any little pretext
can set off the explosion of the storm; but the pretext is not the real cause.” 163
But Isabelo did not need such provocative incidents as uprisings and revolts to insert his
patriotismo between the lines. He could refer to the plight of oppressed tenants with outbursts
like “Oh, it is cruel, truly inhuman, the treatment that some rich people give our tenants—who
are their own brothers and fellow countrymen !” 164 and he often included items in the Ilocano
columns of his paper which did not appear in Spanish, like “The white priests are going to ask
for a salary of 400 pesos more than their [Filipino] assistants.” 165 Indeed, it is hard to find an
article of his which does not contain some subtle barb. The hero of a short story called “Un
idillo” is a humble pastor who is able to quote philosophy because “he had been a student, but
since only Latin was taught in Vigan and it’s obvious you can’t make a living off Latin, he had
to become a pastor.” 166 He was capable of carrying this deviousness to such extremes as an
Easter Sunday citation of Christ’s statement, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness to the evil ; but
if well, why smitest thou me?” as a condemnation of the judiciary use of torture.
Among the more advanced nations of Europe, the odious system is not followed in
which admission of guilt is drawn from the criminal’s own mouth by the use of extreme
coercion. In England, judges and police agents investigate the suspect by means of
testimonies and other proofs that he has committed the crime of which he is accused; but
they do not attempt to wring a confession out of him by force; while Russia is

160
El Ilocano, February 21, 1980.
161
“Taotao-en a nasayaat nga ammoen dagiti ilocano,” Calendario ti “El Ilocano” iti 1893.
162
La Lectura Popular, October 22, 1890.
163
La Ilustracion Filipina, August 14, 1892.
164
La Lectura Popular, December 4, 1890.
165
El Ilocano, May 16, 1890.
166
La Ilustracion Filipino, October 28, 1892.
 considered a semi-barbaric nation for practicing the contrary. There are many who
actually confess crimes they have not committed simply out of fear of violence. But here
we see that the Redeemer himself laid it down that the accused is not obliged to
denounce his own crime. 167
Naturally Isabelo’s journalistic career was, a controversial one, and, in fact, he got into
trouble even before he was an accredited reporter. While working in the Oceania Espanola’s
shop, he attended a meeting of the Sculptors Guild to which the editor had refrained from
sending a reporter because of the meeting’s political implications; there Isabelo gave a talk as
representative of the Oceania—and was made to publish a public retraction the next day. El Eco
de Panay published many of his literary pieces, but when he became their Manila
correspondent, his news reports sounded so radical they had to dispense with his services and
replace him with a Peninsular Spaniard. And when La Opinion began publication in 1887 as a
frankly political daily, they hired anti-Filipino reactionary Camilo Millan on the one hand and
Isabelo on the other to give balanced coverage.
Naturally, too, Isabelo attracted rather more attention from the censors than other
writers. Retana’s history of the Philippine press always refers to him with terms like laborante
(conspirator) and his goals as redentorista (liberating), and comments on his editorship of La
Lectura Popular:
He wasn’t slow in making it a seedbed and propagator of “useful information,”
among which his writers, almost all native Filipinos, inserted plenty of little items of
questionable intent. 168
When Spain dispatched troops to the Caroline Islands in 1885 to put down a native
uprising, Isabelo covered the event in a release for a Visayan paper which described the Spanish
soldiers as having ridden out to the troopship anchored in the Bay in comfortable steam
launches while Filipino troops were delivered on lighters in the broiling sun “like cargo.” The
fact was that the Spaniards in the steam launches were officers, while the barges carried not
only Filipino troops but Spanish soldiers as well. The uproar which this inaccurate reporting
caused in Manila resulted in a new censorship decree requiring all provincial releases to be
cleared in Manila first. Isabelo was probably the only person to have had a censorship decree
promulgated on his behalf alone. It is a distinction any nationalist might be proud of.
It was all this attention from the Board of Censors that taught Isabelo to write between
the lines with his tongue in his cheek, and honed both his sarcasm and his subtlety. His
“Triunfos del Rosario” pleased the Dominicans enough to reprint in Spain, though careful
reading makes it clear the author doesn’t believe in the miracle he is celebrating. “El Diablo en
Filipinas” presents a simple-minded but pious provinciano who defends his belief in ghosts and
evil spirits by quoting examples of Spanish friars who saw and heard apparitions of the Devil,
and cites volume, chapter, and page number from their own, chronicles as evidence—from
which Isabelo wickedly concludes that it must have been the friars who introduced the Devil
into the Philippines. Perhaps the prize of this genre is an amusing story he himself called “pure
filibusterismo (subversion)” but managed to place in several papers under different titles. It is

167
Ibid., April 14, 1892.
168
Retana, Aparato, vol. 3, p. 1678.
the story of Isio.
Isio is a local boy who makes good in the indigo business by dint of hard work and thrift
and is therefore appointed gobernadorcillo, an office he considers an honorable opportunity to
serve his people. But he quickly learns that such appointments are only means by which higher
officials mulct lower ones: one of his predecessors lost an arm chasing bandits, some were
imprisoned, and all were ruined. For a while he struggles idealistically against a corrupt system,
but when he finally takes to the hills and becomes a kind of Robin Hood among the Igorots, the
message is clear: pretensions to law and justice in the colony are simply “administrative
folklore.” The tale is a naughty expose but was rendered so subtle by its comic dialogue that the
reactionary Diario de Manila published it without realizing its implications.
When the Revolution broke out in 1896, Isabelo’s name had been appearing in the
Philippine press more frequently than that of any other Filipino. It was therefore not
surprising—though Isabelo claimed to be—that he was arrested a few weeks before Jose Rizal’s
execution. If the highest accolade a nationalist can win from an oppressive regime is execution,
the next best must be deportation. Isabelo de los Reyes was lucky to have placed second.

* * *

When Isabelo de los Reyes was a college student, Europe entered its final surge of
colonial aggression in Africa and Asia, and her savants struggled to produce a “scientific”
explanation for the phenomenon—or at least one that would be morally acceptable. Most of
them agreed on a frankly racist answer: some peoples were simply predestined by nature, or
Divine Providence, to conquer, and others to be conquered. Conversely, cultural inequalities in
modern societies were explained by racial differences. Thus the reason some Filipinos wore G-
strings and others did not was that their ancestors were genetically different from one another.
Against this background, Blumentritt hypothecized in his 1882 Versuch einer Ethnographie der
Philippinen (Attempt at a Philippine ethnography) that Filipino tribal traits arose from three
separate migrations into the archipelago. First came the pygmy Negritos, and then two waves of
brown-skinned types, the earlier of which practiced head-hunting but not the latter. It was to
find out where the Tinguians belonged that he first wrote the young Ilocano, and Isabelo had
responded with an article based, on observations made during a trip to Abra in the summer
vacation of 1881.
But Isabelo himself would have none of these racist theories. To him the Filipino people
were one people. He thought so intuitively, by historic study of their similarities, and because
none of the European theories could produce supporting evidence. In his first article to be
published in Spain, he called himself “brother of the wild Aetas, Igorots, and Tinguians,” 169 and
later facetiously asked Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, “You say you are my countryman; were you
perhaps born in the mountains of Abra?” 170 And in the Historia de Ilocos, he stated boldly:
The insignificant differences which exist between the partly civilized Ilocano, the
Tinguian who wears pants and jacket, the pacified Igorot who though still naked has lost

169
Cited in El Folklore Filipino (Manila 1889), vol. 1, p. 8.
170
La Oceania Espanola, March 21, 1886.
 his unsociable and cruel nature, and the runaway fugitives with their savage customs—
these differences are simply the effects of the places where they live, and they appear
civilized or savage according to their being near or far from places frequented by
Spaniards or civilized Ilocanos. 171
Isabelo was the only Filipino to involve himself in the scientific debate, and he
published his views in Las Islas Visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista, Historia de Ilocos, and
the first volume (“Prehistoria”) of his uncompleted Historia de Filipinas, and serialized them
as “Origen de las Razas filipinas” in La Ilustracion Filipina. While his Propagandist
compatriots in Spain were trying to reconstruct—or invent—a prehispanic Philippines which
would make their ancestors acceptable by European standards, Isabelo was bringing to light
precisely those customs which distinguished Filipinos from Europeans. He infuriated Rizal by
suggesting that patriotic enthusiasm may have moved him to picture an ancient Filipino culture
more advanced than the facts warranted, and he frankly called Pedro Paterno’s La antigua
Civilizacion de Filipinas (with its American, Armenian, Chinese, Egyptian, European, Indian,
Japanese, and Persian origins) just what it was—“fiction”. He himself wrote that at the time of
the Conquest, “Visayan pirates were even more terrible than the Mohammedans of Jolo and
Mindanao: every year after harvest they would set sail for nearby parts to hunt slaves,” 172 and
discussed the price they paid for slaves—Was it ten pesos as Martin de Rada said, or ten taes
(i.e., 80 pesos) as Morga said? One can only imagine the reaction of his province-mates when
he claimed that human sacrifices were still being performed in Ilocos Norte.
Isabelo’s “Origin of the Filipino races” begins with a review of earlier theories—e.g.,
that Visayans came from Macassar, Tagalogs from Ternate, Pampanguenos from Sumatra, and
Igorots, Tinguians, and Zambals from Malabar and Coromandel in the Dekkan of the Indian
sub-continent. Then he attacks modern ones like Zuniga’s that they all came from the American
continents, Raymundo Geler’s that they are descended from Arabs, and, finally, the Darwinians’
that Filipino Negritos are the descendants of Haeckel’s Homo Pithecoides, who, in turn, was the
descendant of an ape. Then he responds to Montano’s three-zone theory which was
Blumentritt’s starting point—(1) the remote interior of the islands inhabited by Negritos driven
there by (2) Malays now inhabiting the foothills, where they were driven by (3) Indonesians
now occupying the coastal plains. Isabelo points out that it is a simple fact that the interior
heights of the Philippine Islands are inhabited mainly by non-Negrito tribes, that Negritos are
found both in the foothills and on the seacoasts, and that no zone is monopolized by any one
physical type. Besides, he adds:
What does “Indonesian” mean? Where do they live? Is there a country called
Indonesia? No: Indonesia or Indonesian is a name recently invented to classify the
numerous [language] branches of the Malay race, similar to terms like Germanic, Slavic,
Latin, etc. The majority of ethnographers have not adopted this classification, and even
among those who have, there is no unanimous opinion about which races belong to it. 173
The “Origin of the Filipino races” was an impressive performance: after almost a

171
Historia de Ilocos (Manila 1890),vol. 1, p. 37.
172
Las Islas Visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista (Iloilo 1887), p. 36.
173
Historia de Filipinas (Manila 1889), vol. 1, P. 8.
century of further speculation by scholars, its final conclusions still stand—to his credit and our
embarrassment:
We will conclude this chapter by saying in resume: first, that there is no definite
proof that the Aetas were the aborigines of the Archipelago, though it is possible that
they were; second, that the lighter-colored natives of the Philippines are undoubtedly
Malays, but that the Malays in general, both in this country and in Sumatra and
elsewhere, have an unknown origin, like the Aetas, and that the date when they reached
these shores is also unknown; and third, regarding Chinese mestizos, Spanish mestizos,
etc., their very names tell their origins, but these admixtures did not take place before the
Spanish conquest. 174
But Montano and Blumentritt won out in the end. A new colonial regime not only
revived their racist theory but expanded it into a full dozen waves washing migrants up on
Philippine shores, each one superior to the one that preceded it. Accepted as comforting fact by
the American authorities, it was incorporated into the Philippine school system where it has
been lovingly preserved by Filipino educators who are persuaded their own ancestors came in
the last wave. Thus, ironically, Isabelo’s children and grandchildren grew up believing that
neither they nor he were brother to wild Aetas, Igorots, or Tinguians, but, rather, that their
ancestors all came in different boatloads.

* * *

Isabelo de los Reyes never joined any revolutionary society. He contributed financially
to the Liga Filipina but did not become a member, and although he claimed he did not even
know of the existence of the Katipunan, he sold types from his shop to its organ, Kalayaan. But
with his reputation, his arrest was inevitable, and he was caught up in a Vigan witch hunt in
which a 60-year-old Filipino priest was beaten into testifying that he had been inducted into
Masonry by Isabelo de los Reyes. Incarcerated in Bilibid Prison, he luckily escaped both torture
and execution, and made good use of his time. His 300 cellmates were revolutionaries of every
stripe—innocent and guilty, ranking officers of the Liga and the Katipunan soon to be executed,
bourgeoise Masons and ordinary peasants. From interviews with such prisoners, he wrote a
series of articles which he edited as a Memoria sobre la Revolucion filipina or newly arrived
Governor General Ferdinand Primo de Rivera. It was widely read and widely circulated. Miguel
Morayta thought it influenced Primo de Rivera’s acceptance of reforms at Biyak-na-Bato, and
Overseas Minister Segismundo Moret accepted it as credentials for employing Isabelo in the
Ministry the next year. It appeared in the Spanish press, was published in book form with the
word sensacional added to its title, and remains to this day a valuable and largely unexploited
source for the study of the Philippine Revolution. 175

174
Ibid., p. 16.
175
Several copies of the original Memoria were made in Bilibid, one of which was given to Chaplain Luis Viza,
S.J., and wound up in the Jesuit archives in San Cugat, Barcelona, Spain: a microfilm copy appears in Reel 46 of
the “St. Louis Collection,” Item E-II-e, Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University; and Governor Primo de Rivera
sent a copy to the Overseas Ministry where was set in type but evidently never printed. It was serialized in El
Republicano in 1898, and reprinted in such diverse papers as the Madrid El Nuevo Regimen, Cadiz La Republica,
 What immediately attracts the attention about the Memoria is the personal nature of its
sources and the boldness of its examples. Its description of the organization and initiation rites
of the Katipunan, for example, comes from men like founder Ladislao Diwa, and an incident at
Balintawak is provided by eyewitness Pedro Nicodemus. Liga founder Domingo Franco is
quoted as predicting, “It’s going to be a long and bloody madness, and I don’t approve of it;
nonetheless, it’s sure to be a magnificent page in Philippine history, a very useful lesson for all
in its unexpected results.” 176 Agricultural tenancy abuses are illustrated with actual examples
and figures, and so much attention is paid to friar misdeeds that they have to be covered by
separate orders—Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, and Recollect. Tortures suffered by men
able to display the results are listed in detail, and include what may well be the earliest record of
electricity being applied to male genitals. The role of the Spanish press in inciting revolt
through innuendo and insult is surveyed as only a practicing journalist could. Comparisons with
Cuba and Puerto Rico are suggestively raised, and reforms are demanded with ominous
quotations like Victor Hugo’s “Whom Providence executes, she herself blindfolds.” 177 The
Memoria richly deserves the adjective sensacional.
Considering the circumstances under which it was written, the Memoria often sounds
suicidally bold, its audacity but thinly veiled by a cloak of “loyal opposition.” Rizal’s final
poem, for example—which was circulating inside Bilibid a week after it was written—is
presented with the statement, “I insert it here so that the author’s political ideals may be seen,
which were always clothed in poetic garb like the politics of Victor Hugo, the greatest poet of
the century, who with his lyre overturned the throne of the Bonapartes and Orleanes.” 178 And
just ten days after his fellow alumnus had been shot as a traitor, his funeral forbidden and his
remains disposed of like a common criminal’s, Isabelo asked:
Did Spain gain anything by shooting him? The injustice of his death is still being
whispered; undoubtedly the Spaniards would have gained more by sparing his life, for
then his great popularity would have been contrasted with Spanish magnanimity. At
least, I do not believe that they gained anything with his death. On the contrary, to the
impartial observer, his sympathetic and gallant figure rises above his tribunal’s shortness
of vision and smallness of spirit, and will soon arise in the legends of his country—a
young man who sacrificed on the altar of his country his great talent, his mind and valor,
his career and the fortunes of his family, his youth and his life, even, in short, his natural
passions. 179
The main purpose of the Memoria is to persuade its readers that the whole debacle of the
Revolution was caused by the iniquity of the friar orders. According to this scenario, a few

Huelva La Marsellesa, Tarragona El Francoli, and Segovia La Democracia. The definitive edition appeared in
1899 (Tip. Lit. de J. Corrales, Madrid) with an introduction by Miguel Morayta, profuse annotation and
autobiographical appendix, and such new data as a history of Philippine Masonry based on information from
Antonio Maria Regidor.
176
Mentoria, p. 42.
177
Ibid., p. 45.
178
Ibid., p. 65.
179
Ibid., pp. 67-68.
Tagalog peasants revolted against oppressive friar landlords, and then the friars themselves
spread the action to the surrounding provinces by witch hunts which drove innocent farmers and
ilustrados alike into the rebel camp to escape torture, deportation, or musketry. The solution is
therefore to get rid of the friars and institute a series of administrative, economic, educational,
and judiciary reforms which are spelled out in orderly sequence, not omitting even such details
as prices and salaries. (Its list of popular complaints was included in a footnote to Retana’s Vida
y Escritos del Dr. Jose Rizal, and is probably the “Memoria de agravios de los Filipinos”
Isabelo’s ten-year-old son Jose sneaked out of Bilibid in his shoe and mailed to the Governor.)
The argument concludes with a bald threat of violence:
General Polavieja himself knew that in this second phase of the campaign, the
insurgents will adopt the Cuban system of guerrilla warfare, their object being to force
Spain to maintain a large army in this country with garrisons in all the towns and barrios
of the archipelago, and to defeat her by economic exhaustion. And even if the
insurrection is defeated this time, it will quickly break out again in more formidable
proportions and perhaps with the necessary sectors of the population which it now lacks,
because it is impossible that the richer elements, the bourgeoisie and ilustrados, who
were falsely implicated and imprisoned in the present revolt, will quickly forget their
grievances unless they are given justice by expelling their tormentors and granting them
their political rights as true Spanish citizens. 180
It was a rather breathtaking ultimatum to come from a prisoner to the very state that was
his jailor. It formed the conclusion of Part One of the Memoria which was sent to the Governor
on April 25, 1897. On May 17, the King’s birthday, Isabelo was released, and took his six small
children to his father-in-law’s in Malabon, his wife having died while he was incarcerated.
There he rewrote his ultimatum as a subversive document in Tagalog urging “the valiant sons of
the Philippines” to take to the hills for guerrilla warfare. Soon afterwards, it was given
clandestine circulation over the signature of Emilio Aguinaldo—to Isabelo’s surprise, delight,
and lasting pride. 181 Then he reworked a series of articles he had originally written in Bilibid
with hopes for publication in Spain, and personally delivered them to the Governor on May 31
as Part Two. He was rearrested the following day and deported.

* * *

Montjuich Castle in Barcelona was a notorious bastille whose torture chambers had
made it the object of a scurrilous press campaign all over Europe. Isabelo de los Reyes arrived
early in August 1897, and was placed in solitary confinement. He had hardly been locked in his
cell, however, when another prisoner sneaked in to see him. He was radical journalist Ignacio

180
Ibid., pp. 33-34.
181
It actually appeared first over the signature “Malabar,” but had Aguinaldo’s name attached in an English
version which appeared in the Yokohama Anunciador diario del Japan (The Daily Advertiser of Japan) on August
10, 1897, which then circulated in a Spanish translation in Spain (e.g., La Politica de Espana en Filipinas, October
31, 1897) and which, in turn, was retranslated into English by John R.M. Taylor (The Philippine Insurrection
against the United States, vol. 1, pp. 372-373) with the addition of a date which appears in none of the earlier
versions—September 6, 1897.
Bo y Singla, held without charge but suspected of anarchy, and he welcomed Isabelo’s case as
ammunition in the anti-government cause. (“Thus is justice administered in the Philippines!”
cried El Republicano.) 182 The radical press had means of smuggling Isabelo’s own exposes out
of Montjuich and into print, so his ideas about colonial reforms were quickly broadcast with the
romantic aura about them of a victim of political persecution. By the time the Treaty of Biyak-
na-Bato was signed, Overseas Minister Moret was persuaded that the colony could only be
retained by major concessions, and when Isabelo was released on January 9, 1898, he was given
a minor position in the Ministry.
Isabelo’s appointment elicited lively response from a different segment of the press. The
Manila Kon Leche sneered, “Moret converted the good Filipino typesetter into his courtier and
intimate councilor,” 183 but the Diario de Barcelona more soberly commented, “Moret, advised
by Isabelo, is preparing another shameful defeat for Spain in her colonies.” 184 And that, as a
matter of fact, was just what Isabelo had in mind. For, if it was obvious that Spain was still
threatened with revolution in the Philippines, it was also obvious that the United States of
America was headed for war with Spain. It was against these political realities that Isabelo
developed his campaign.
If we Filipinos and Spaniards were united, it would be impossible for the North
Americans to land in the Philippines, and after the war, as compensation for our loyal
service, they would grant us autonomy with a Filipino militia. [And] if the friars
managed to prevent these concessions, that would provide more than enough reason for
us to revolt against Spain, and since we would already have the rifles, our independence
would be assured and relatively easy, exhausted as Spain would be after so many
wars. 185
At the end of February, Isabelo managed to get newly appointed Governor Basilio
Augustin to accede to concessions in a predeparture interview which he then rushed into print
“so that the Governor-elect would not forget his promises.” A month later, after fighting had
broken out again in Luzon, Isabelo and a few other Filipinos offered to return to organize militia
against Yankee invasion. And when Admiral Dewey began to outfit the U.S. Asiatic Squadron
for action, Blumentritt joined him in writing to enlist Mariano Ponce and Faustino Lichauco in
Hongkong in the campaign. The plan itself was well-conceived and probably militarily sound,
and contact was actually established with the Spanish consulate—but Emilio Aguinaldo had
other plans of his own.
Nothing daunted, Isabelo constituted himself a one-man propaganda bureau to win
international sympathy for the Filipino cause, and the “news” he released during the next two
years probably contained more fiction than the Noli and Fili combined. (Sample: “The Filipinos
are armed to the teeth [and] already have 100,000 rifles from Japan, China, Hongkong, and
Austria secretly landed in Pangasinan, Zambales, Batangas, and Camarines.”) 186 By October of

182
Cited in Memoria, p. 12, n. 1.
183
The Kon Leche, May 6, 1899.
184
Cited in Memoria, pp. 120-21.
185
Ibid., p. 122.
186
Correspondencia de Espana, December 20, [23?], 1898.
1899, however, it was obvious that President Aguinaldo would have to disband the Philippine
Army and take to the hills, so Isabelo intensified his campaign by opening a new paper,
Filipinas ante Europa. (Blumentritt wrote approvingly, “Now we must redouble the power of
our pens.”) 187 For the Filipino nationalist, Filipinas ante Europa must have been one of the
most interesting papers ever published.
Military news was smuggled out of the Philippines on flimsy paper, forwarded through
Hongkong, and published with Isabelo’s political analyses. Aguinaldo’s Resena Veridica was
serialized, and short biographies of Filipino heroes were accompanied by portraits and vignettes
based on Isabelo’s personal recollections. Feature articles stressed educational innovations,
social amelioration, and political consciousness. One series continued the anti-friar campaign,
called Jesus Christ “the greatest revolutionary the world has even known,” 188 and attacked the
Papacy so viciously the Editor was sentenced to jail and fined by the state Fiscal, but pardoned
by the Queen. Another series on the techniques of guerrilla warfare was later cited by General
Arthur MacArthur as evidence that the Philippine campaign was being directed from Spain.
Appeals to faint-hearted ilustrados warned that “the cowardice of the intellectuals will get them
nothing more than their own perdition, as was proved when the Katipunan triumphed
everywhere while the intellectuals died without glory, shot on the field of Bagong Bayan.” 189
Those who accepted positions in the American occupation he flayed with rhetoric like, “How
can you understand a monstrosity of nature who would assassinate his own mother and father,
and ally himself with their hangmen?” 190
Isabelo’s slashing attacks on American aggression were a far cry from that Saint
Andrew’s Day article which gently pricked the tender skin of Spanish imperialism. Indeed, not
for another 60 years were Americans to read such chilling Filipino sentiments. An essay
entitled, “Is it legitimate to kill a tyrant?” for example, answered in the affirmative, and then
went on to say:
Mr. McKinley, taking advantage of his powerful army, his formidable fleet, and his
immense resources, has declared iniquitous war on a defenseless people such as the
Filipinos are, and simply for a criminal ambition which tramples all justice, all rights,
and all reason under foot, has killed and continues to kill thousands, not only of
Filipinos, but of his own countrymen…
What recourse, then, remains to his poor victims if it is impossible to defeat his
well-equipped armies?
Recently a plot was discovered to assassinate Mr. McKinley, contrived by some
Cubans who say that this is the cheapest and surest way. We do not agree with them and
cannot under any circumstances approve of violent death for any man, however criminal
he may be.
But we consider it our duty to advise Mr. McKinley not to persist in his most

187
Letter dated December 27, 1899, cited in Filipinas ante Europa, October 1, 1901.
188
Ibid., June 10, 1900.
189
Ibid., February 25, 1901.
190
Ibid., February 10, 1900.
 dangerous undertaking of abusing the poor Filipinos by his immense power, because
they in their desperation could cause him some very serious unpleasantness…[The
Katipunan has already written], “Tell Mr. McKinley, that he will be held personally
responsible for the blood of the Filipinos if his abuse of power should go so far as to
impose his ominous yoke on our archipelago.” 191
The house of cards which Isabelo was struggling to support collapsed with Aguinaldo’s
oath of allegiance to the United States on April 1, 1901, and Isabelo soon found he could no
longer get Filipinas ante Europa through American censorship. He therefore shifted his target
back to colonial reforms and launched a new paper, Defensor de Filipinas. Its opening editorial
was full of quotations like the Schurman Commission’s “We have not come to dominate a
people but to teach you to govern yourselves and to help you to be independent,” and
announced, “Very well, then, the object of this periodical is to demand compliance by the
United States with these and other solemn promises of theirs.” 192 Then, with the first four
numbers in his luggage and strangely misplaced confidence in American press freedom in his
heart, he sailed for the Philippines. He was quickly disabused when he reached Manila on
October 17 and his application for a permit to publish was rejected on the ground of subversion.
If Isabelo was surprised, he should not have been. President McKinley had succumbed
to an assassin’s bullet on September 13.

* * *

Conclusion
Jose Rizal published an essay entitled “Amor Patrio” in the Diariong Tagalog the year
after Isabelo de los Reyes published “La lealtad de los ilocanos a Espana” in El Comercio.
When Rizal wrote to Blumentritt for the first time, the Austrian savant was already a
correspondent of Isabelo’s, and when Rizal returned to the Philippines in 1892, he was carrying
a letter from Blumentritt for Isabelo. El Ilocano was founded the same year as La Solidaridad
and Rizal and Isabelo were the only Filipino propagandists to occupy cells in Montjuich Castle.
If these details seem like gratuitous comparisons between a great literary genius and a mere
newspaper hack, they at least call attention to the fact that both men were members of the
Filipino Propaganda Movement. For it is as a Propagandist that the full measure can be taken of
Isabelo’s nationalism, and it is as a Propagandist that his career differed significantly from his
colleagues’ in Spain.
In the first place, Isabelo was a professional journalist who got paid for his labors, yet
managed to plant his propaganda not only in La Solidaridad but in a dozen Manila periodicals
under colonial censorship. He earned his living by his trade, and even set type for his own paper
as a member of the Typesetters Guild. He met his deadlines year after year, lived frugally and
invested his savings shrewdly, and so was able to make monthly contributions to the Liga
Filipina to support La Solidaridad. He argued in print with scholars and publishers, criticized

191
Ibid., August 10, 1900.
192
Defensor de Filipinas, July 1, 1901.
the powerful and the pious, and antagonized governors, bishops, and archbishops. He wrote
under constant threat of censure, dismissal, or imprisonment, and was finally exiled, as Retana
said, “for having spoken his mind and feelings to General Primo de Rivera.” 193
Isabelo had a unique view of the Filipino people as one people, Igorot and ilustrado
alike. Where his townmate Father Burgos and his schoolmate Dr. Rizal had cited
anthropological opinion to show that Filipinos were not racially inferior to Europeans, Isabelo
wrote, “There are Aetas who surpass the Tagalogs in intelligence, and it is recognized that the
Tagalogs are at the same intellectual level as the Europeans.” 194 More of his propaganda was
directed to Filipinos than to Spaniards: what he called “useful information” included details like
penal and cadastral codes, and administrative expenditures and extravagances. He founded El
Municipio Filipino one month after the appearance of the law journal, La Legislacion, to enable
the ordinary reader to understand his rights under the law.
In Spain, Isabelo was politically conscious enough to identify the depressed conditions
of the Spanish masses with the oppression of the Filipino people and peasantry. Though he
married an Army officer’s daughter and worked in a government office, he read Marx and
Malatesta and wrote for the leftist press, hobnobbed with anarchists and labor leaders, and
participated in rallies and public protests. He carried a revolver, got his nose bloodied in a
demonstration, and marched in the streets of Madrid alongside a future Prime Minister of Spain.
And he came home with new ideas about union organizing and social legislation, and the
Spanish workers’ cry ringing in his ears, “Guerra al hambre y analfabetismo! (War on hunger
and illiteracy!)”
And, finally, Isabelo survived the Revolution to continue the campaign against a
colonial antagonist even more powerful and canny than Spain. When his dream of a Filipino-
Spanish anti-American alliance was aborted by the Treaty of Paris, he agilely shifted to another
goal—independence in exchange for commercial concessions. (As he said in a press interview
when Filipino-American hostilities broke out in February 1899, “The United States is very
much mistaken if she sends soldiers instead of industrial and trade unions.”) 195 And when this
goal could not be obtained by armed struggle, he came home to pursue it by political means,
carrying with him the blueprint for a Nacionalista party complete with organization plans,
publicity campaigns, fund-raising schemes, and centers for politicizing Filipino voters.
But, of course, it was not to be Isabelo never lived to see the bargain struck, and 1901
was no year for nationalists in the Philippines. By that time, national destiny was already being
shaped by a gentlemanly class of Filipino realists, opportunists and sycophants—to use less
colorful language than Isabelo did. The great Propagandists like Rizal did not survive to be
measured against such standards of temptation, compromise, and self-service. Yet it was
precisely the presence of those coopted colonial subjects, and the uninspired and uninspiring
example of their behavior, which most clearly illuminates the stubborn nationalism of that
young provinciano who broke into print 20 years before as a one-man Chamber of Commerce
for his beloved Ilocos.

193
Retana, Aparato, vol. 3, p. 1418.
194
Quoted in Retana, Sinapismos, p. 43.
195
La Correspondencia de Espana, February 7, 1899.
 Jose Rizal has been called “The First Filipino.” A good case could be made for calling
Isabelo de los Reyes “The First Filipino Nationalist.”
 A Minority Reaction to American
Imperialism: Isabelo de los Reyes

A few days after Spanish Manila surrendered to American forces on 13 August 1898, Dr.
Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera presented himself to French-speaking General Francis V. Greene.
From that moment on, he later told President William McKinley,
I have completely and most actively occupied myself in politics, employing all my
energies for the establishment of American sovereignty in this country for the good of
these ignorant and uncivilized people. 196
As soon as war broke out between Filipino and American forces, others of Pardo de
Tavera’s social class and intellectual accomplishments followed his lead, and gradually Filipino
leaders of lesser standing took the same course. Eventually their movement became a landslide
which carried a leaderless Filipino people into acquiescence or cooperation with a new colonial
master. Their descendants today are acquiring academic degrees in American universities at
Filipino taxpayers’ expense, laboring at depressed wages in American agribusinesses, or
standing in line in front of the American Embassy in hopes of renouncing their citizenship and
claim to a patrimony they never enjoyed. Thus Pardo de Tavera would appear to have been a
distinguished harbinger of what would eventually become the majority Filipino reaction to
American occupation.
But during this process, was there no public expression of any minority reaction to
American imperialism? In fact, there was. It was voiced by a small group of stubborn patriot-
journalists who never broke the English language barrier but kept chipping away in Spanish at
the alien monolith being erected on their soil. Too individualistic to unite but not virtuoso
enough to be called prima donnas, they neither presented a threat to the majority trend nor got
their names in history books as literary protagonists of a lost cause. Chief among them was
Isabelo de los Reyes, Sr.—not chief in the sense of being their leader, for they were men by
nature disinclined to follow leadership, but as being the most prolific, visible, and audible
among them, and the longest lasting. Before the Spanish-American War even began, he was
predicting that America would be a worse colonial master than Spain, and forty years later, his
speech impaired by old age and his hand unsteady, he was advising members of the
Constitutional Convention to resist American blandishments. Hardly a day passed in between in
which he did not criticize the American regime or its Filipino supporters.
Isabelo de los Reyes was not in the Philippines at the time of the American invasion. He
had been deported to Spain during the Revolution of 1896-1897 and incarcerated in Montjuich
Castle. Following the Pact of Biyak-na-Bato, however, he was released, and after the Battle of
Manila Bay he began a modest campaign in the Spanish press against American occupation of
the archipelago. He played up the difficulty of occupying a whole archipelago by armed force,
exaggerated Filipino unity behind “idol of the Revolution” Emilio Aguinaldo, and virtually
hammered on the theme of America’s democratic and non-colonial traditions. He was hoping to

196
Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Malolos, the Crisis of the Republic (Manila 1960), p. 375, citing letter of 30 July 1899,
McKinley Papers, 1899, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
gain European sympathy for Spain at the peace table in Paris, reasoning quite correctly that it
would be easier to win independence from a moribund empire than from an expanding
industrial giant. Ironically, the radical press which supported him in Spain had the opposite goal
of discrediting that regime, and their efforts helped deprive Spain of French, English, and
German support in Paris.
Once the Treaty of Paris was signed, Isabelo joined the Filipino Republican Committee
of Madrid, intensified his propaganda, and expanded his correspondence with the leading
Filipino patriots in Paris and Hongkong. Ferdinand Blumentritt joined him in trying to persuade
the Filipino exiles in Hongkong not to cooperate with the Americans, and Mariano Ponce and
Faustino Lichauco later informed him that they had tried to dissuade Aguinaldo from doing so
on the grounds that the Americans would not put their promises in writing. Many of his favorite
themes about American leadership came from this correspondence. Felipe Agoncillo, for
example, wrote him from Paris:
If that bandit McKinley had not committed the crime—it can be called nothing less—of
secretly ordering his lackey Otis to start hostilities between Filipinos and Americans on
the fourth of last February, day of eternal bitterness for our country, my diplomatic
triumph in the United States would have been an indisputable fact. 197
And from Louvain, Jose Luzuriaga sent a quotation from one of McKinley’s speeches which
Isabelo was never to let his readers forget:
This Treaty places the Filipinos in experienced hands, under the liberal ideas and higher
education which they will receive from the Americans, not as their masters but as their
liberators. 198
Isabelo was sick in bed when he received the mistaken report that Filipino forces had
attacked the American lines on 4 February 1899. Like the creative propagandist he was, he got
right up and dashed off an article for the Correspondencia de Espana which began as follows:
WAR IN THE PHILIPPINES. Yankees are wrong, too. We have just spoken with a
reliable Filipino who apparently receives news directly from his countrymen, and he
says that the surprise attack by the Filipinos against the Yankee lines can be understood
as the result of the atrocities and crimes committed over there every day by Yankee
soldiers, simple adventurers recruited on the waterfronts of San Francisco and
neighboring ports.199
As the year wore on and Filipino reverses increased, Isabelo’s anti-American propaganda grew
more shrill. Finally, he decided to publish a paper for clandestine circulation in the Philippines,
to represent the overseas Filipino committees.
The paper was called Filipinas ante Europa and it was more sensational than any of the
Philippine government publications, and much more interesting. It appeared in the same month

197
Letter dated 7 October 1899. Archives of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, St. Andrew’s Theological
Seminary, Quezon City, OM 15 (1897-1931), Box 50, Folder 129.
198
Letter dated 30 September 1899, IFI Archives, OM 18.1 (1899-1948), Box 61, Folder 124.
199
La Correspondencia de Espana, 7 February 1899.
President Aguinaldo decided to disband the Philippine army and take to the hills, and its maiden
issue was said to have brought tears to the eyes of men returning from the field of battle with its
quotations from Rizal. It featured serious works like Aguinaldo’s Resena Veridica serialized
and Antonio Maria Regidor’s account of the Cavite Uprising, as well as battle reports from
commanders in the field which were probably no more inaccurate than those issued by their
opponents. News of military abuses in Manila was smuggled out from agents with code names
like “Pasig” and “Captain Crame,” and editorials called for liquidation of traitors, labeled
Filipino employees of the enemy “monstrosities of nature,” and baldly warned the American
President against assassination. And lest the message be lost, he published a collection, of its
choicest items as Filipinas Independencia y Revolution! with a covering letter to President
McKinley ending with the words, “Cesar, morituri te salutant (Caesar, we who are about to die,
salute you.)” 200
As editor, publisher and staff of the propaganda arm of a guerrilla movement, Isabelo
was in his element. Since the time of his own incarceration in 1896, he had been recommending
Cuban-style guerrilla action as the best means for bringing Spain to her knees, and in May 1897
wrote a Tagalog appeal to “The Brave Sons of the Philippines” which was widely circulated
over Aguinaldo’s signature. 201 Now he filled Filipinas ante Europa with so many articles on
guerrilla techniques, including several from Cuban practitioners, that General Arthur MacArthur
suspected the Philippine campaign was being directed from Madrid. He also published a
second, enlarged edition of his La Religion del Katipunan when that brotherhood revived in
early 1900, printed in Madrid but filled with advertisements for business houses in the
Philippines. Copies were seized in bundles by American forces in the Ilocos, together with
sheafs of Katipunan oaths signed in blood. It is small wonder that Isabelo’s Manila residence
was raided, men were arrested for possessing his publications, and postal clerks could recognize
his handwriting on mail from Madrid. Nor is it surprising that few copies have survived: as
Retana said of Filipinas ante Europa, “The American authorities persecuted this biweekly even
more than the Spaniards had persecuted La Solidaridad.” 202
But once Aguinaldo surrendered to the enemy in April 1901, Filipinas ante Europa
found itself with little government to support. The Filipino Committees in Hongkong and
Europe held on to their sad dreams of independence for some time, and finally on 20
September, attempted to form a government in exile in London with Isabelo as Minister of the
Interior. But Isabelo was already on board the steamer Montevideo bound for the Philippines.
He had sailed from Barcelona two days before, determined to continue the struggle in the
colonial capital itself.

200
Filipinas Independencia y Revolucion! (Madrid 1900), p. 190.
201
It actually appeared first over the signature “Malabar” (John Foreman, The Philippine Islands [New York
1899], pp. 542-543), but had Aguinaldo’s name attached in an English version which appeared in the Yokohama
Japan Times Daily Advertiser (Anunciador diario del Japon) on 10 August 1897, which then circulated in a
Spanish translation in Spain (e.g., La Politica de Espana en Filipinas, 31 October 1897) which, in turn, was
retranslated into English by John R. M. Taylor (The Philippine Insurrection against the United States [Pasay City
1971], vol. 1, pp. 372-373) with the addition of a date which appears in none of the earlier versions—6 September
1897.
202
Wenceslao E. Retana, Aparato bibliografico de la Historia general de Filipinas (Madrid 1906), vol. 3, p. 1415.
 Isabelo’s quixotic plan was to unite all Filipino leaders in one nationalist party and then
demand independence directly from the American government in Washington in exchange for
commercial concessions. It was a plan flawed by three basic misconceptions on Isabelo’s part.
First, he did not realize that the leading Filipinos had already taken the American side so firmly
that Governor Taft could safely disregard him as little more than a harmless nuisance. Second,
he did not notice that the Filipinos had no concessions to offer Washington: the American
government in international law was already the proprietor of the archipelago and its resources.
And third and most important, he had no concept of the tenacity with which American business
interests were determined to control the Philippine economy. He might have been better
informed had he been reading the American press in Manila.
Back in 1898, for example, before the Treaty of Paris was even signed, the November 5
issue of the strangely misnamed Freedom carried an article called “Cheap living in Manila,”
which remarked, “It is always easier to get up from one’s chair, ring a bell on the center table,
and let a boy come to fetch you a book from the next room than it is to step across the
threshhold yourself.” 203 It also quoted McClure’s Magazine: “Under a tropical sun, nature
yields a wonderful wealth of good things, and by properly directed effort, the Malay and
Chinese population can be made to reap golden harvests for their American masters.” 204 And a
front-page feature entitled, “The Philippines and trade” spelled out the rationale behind the
Battle of Manila Bay and the occupation of the Philippines:
Our commercial development, following the course of our territorial expansion,
logically and inevitably, has expanded the vigor of our growth function internally,
between the two oceans rather than externally upon either; but this inter-oceanic process
having completed the subjugation of the obstacles to it, the energies of national growth
became freed to operate upon new fields of activity…The extremities of the hardships to
be endured, or the terrors or dangers to be confronted, do not enter into the national
question of expansion at all [but rather] the outflow of national energy obeyed the laws
implanted in the national organization as blindly and instinctively as do the swallows the
laws of their migrations. 205
It took Isabelo a little while to realize the difference between an American colony and a
Spanish colony. Only a few years before, he had received a public hearing in Spain, General
Aguinaldo had been feted after Biyak-na-Bato, and holdout rebel Francisco Makabulos had
been offered a commission to organize militia. But now when Isabelo suggested such treatment
for remnants of armed resistance, Police Superintendent Curry told him—jovially, one hopes—
“You’re more of an enemy than Malvar.” 206 He had to abandon his dream of having heroes like
Aguinaldo and Mabini appear in Washington when he realized that the Americans, far from
regarding Aguinaldo as the former president of a republic, considered him a wily Malay
chieftain who had hoodwinked the Filipino people for purposes of tribal gain. The Manila
Times reported that McKinley was deluged with requests from carnival operators for permission

203
The Freedom., 5 November 1898.
204
Ibid.
205
Ibid.
206
El Tiempo, 21 October 1901.
to exhibit Aguinaldo in the United States (e.g., $50,000 for a hundred nights, plus a bond to
guarantee his safe return), 207 and the Manila American carried items like “Aguinaldo wants a
guard to keep off the ghost of Luna,” 208 and “It was only by granting amnesty to the Filipinos
that the government could force Aguinaldo to go out and work for a living.” 209 Nor was Isabelo
any more successful in opposing the passage of the sedition law. Speaking in an open hearing of
the Civil Commission, he argued that political crimes were not really crimes, backing himself
into a corner from which he was forced to say that the recent assassination of King Umberto of
Italy was no crime. After a moment of stunned silence, Dean C. Worcester told him to take his
seat, and Commissioner Ide added, “And keep it, too.” 210
It was as obvious to Isabelo as it was to everybody else who hadn’t been exposed to
American textbooks that the Filipino people didn’t want to be ruled by Americans. He tried to
unleash the energy behind that sentiment by campaigning for a jury system, universal suffrage,
and labor laws to liberate workers from their economic dependence and docility. In February
1902 he founded a labor union with social centers to politicize members, and filled the press
with scolding articles about the mindless applause Filipinos gave to public speeches, and
extolling Madrid street demonstrations in which working-class rowdies knocked fancy hats off
the pompadoured heads of upper-class ladies. In August he founded the Philippine Independent
Church, an organization whose very name included a word forbidden to all political bodies,
which quickly gathered the momentum of a people’s movement and attracted one-fifth of the
total population. Its existence alone would have been enough to make the American regime
wary of universal suffrage.
But even without a true electorate, Isabelo founded the Republican Party of the
Philippines in 1905, just in time for the visit of a congressional committee come to assess
Filipino competence for self-rule, which included former Governor Taft, now Secretary of War,
and President Roosevelt’s daughter Alice. The Republican Party had a nice name, an Aglipayan
bishop for president, and nothing significant in the way of a platform. But it was an effective
means for demonstrating that the dominant Federal Party’s subservience to American designs
did not represent the Filipino majority. Isabelo opened the attack in El Grito del Pueblo on 23
June 1905. “Autonomy?” he cried, referring to the Federalists’ “three-period” plan for obtaining
eventual independence. “Another impossibility!”
The Americans, or anybody else in their position, will never voluntarily let go of the
frying pan once they have it by the handle…They will only grant us real autonomy
when, due to our improvidence and poverty, the country practically belongs to American
builders, merchants, industrialists, landlords and proprietors. Only then will we have real
autonomy. But it will not be for Filipinos but for the Americans naturalized here or their
children, as happened in Australia and Canada, where they have autonomy because the
population is white, while in India they do not, despite the fact that all three belong to

207
Cited by Libertas, 23 May 1901.
208
The Manila American, 19 August 1902.
209
Ibid.
210
U.S. Commission Minutes of Proceedings, 2 November 1901 Public Session, Subject: Treason Sedition Bill
(typescript, unpag.).
 the same sovereignty, for the simple reason that in the last case the population is
indios. 211
Then on 8 July, El Grito threw out a challenge. Let both parties hold public rallies on the
Luneta when the Americans arrived, and if the Federalists could attract even half the number of
followers the Republicans fielded, the Republican Party would dissolve itself; but if not, the
Federal Party must ask the Americans for independence in ten years, lower taxes, a true
legislature and jury system, and universal suffrage! The Federalists’ La Democracia replied
haughtily:
We willingly concede the field to El Grito del Pueblo. There are parties and then there
are other parties. Superiority does not consist in numbers but in quality, and the power
of opinion does not rest on the insolence of an irresponsible mob but on the discrete
direction of the federal elements which are the foundation and guarantee of social,
political, and, if you will, religious order. 212
Isabelo responded the same afternoon. Pausing only to comment, “This word
irresponsible was invented by Taft to immobilize all true independents; how well the
Federalists have learned their papa’s lesson,” he struck the following telling blow:
We agree that there are parties and then other parties…[One, for example,] has no more
power than that which its own master gives it, and we would like to see them defend him
in the trenches in case he really needs them, for those who belong to him have already
willingly belonged to Spain, the Philippine Government, and America according to
convenience, just as they will join the ranks of the Japanese, Germans, or English if
these should come to power in our land. 213
Thus the congressional visit did not produce a colorful contest on the Luneta, but it did
at least afford the chairman of the Republican Party an opportunity to pour Filipino grievances
directly into the ears of American law-makers. It also provided invitations to dances and
receptions in which he could pin little medals on senators’ lapels with slogans like “The
Philippines asks America’s help for immediate independence,” 214 and present Taft himself with
an Ilocano fan which unfolded to display the forbidden Filipino flag. The first document
received by the visiting dignitaries, as a matter of fact, had been a position paper by the
Republican Party—a manifesto El Grito published with the following introduction:
SWALLOW THIS, PAPA TAFT! We all know that our beloved Papa Taft doesn’t like
to hear—if it doesn’t actually give him indigestion—that word “independence”…Be that
as it may, our dear uncle had hardly reached the Bay when he boarded the press launch,
and the first gift he received as a token of welcome was the following little bonbon, not
of Alpine Swiss chocolate but of genuine Makiling.215

211
Llueven Palos! (Manila 1905), p. 23.
212
Ibid., p. 31.
213
Ibid.
214
Ibid., pp. 67-68.
215
Ibid., p. 5.
 A true Filipino electorate was still wanting when the first Philippine Assembly was
inaugurated in 1907. Isabelo thought such a body was ludicrous, hypocritical and treacherous—
ludicrous because it had no power, hypocritical because its members spent their time dividing
spoils, and treacherous because such an elitist body would never liberate the working class on
which true independence would depend. If some political or social scientist were to study this
legislative quadrille—or Pandanggo sa Ilaw—he could start no better place than Isabelo’s
contemporaneous articles in El Renacimiento. For the same reason, they are worth quoting at
length here.
The Assembly opened on 16 October 1907 with Taft out from the United States to
officiate. Naturally it was an occasion of many speeches—condescending, obsequious or
pompous as the case might be—not excluding one by aristocratic luminary Pedro Paterno,
oratorical veteran of Madrid, Biyak-na-Bato and Malolos. Isabelo was in Barcelona at the time,
and their texts did not reach him until 7 December. His reactions were published in Manila on
14 January 1908.
Ah, Papa Taft, you are always intimidating us and taking us by the hair like naughty
children! You give us the Philippine Assembly and at the same time threaten to suppress
it if we make any opposition to the extravagances of the government, because, you said,
Mr. Root was opposed to granting it and it is only to you that we owe our nice, new
Assembly.
But how can Mr. Root be opposed to it when it was he who offered us through the
first Commission a full autonomy which still cannot be found even with the lantern of
Diogenes?
You yourself, dear Mr. Taft, admit in your speech that without those promises of
political concessions it would have been “impossible” to pacify the country.
Therefore, the Philippine Assembly is no favor which you are granting us, but only
the niggardly compliance, by sleight-of-hand and very tardy, of the solemn promises of
full autonomy which Schurman Commission even had posted on the trunks of trees in
our forests…
You even announce that you are going to indemnify the friars for the occupation of
the churches by the American army. All right: we will oppose it, because those churches
belonged to the State, and if you are now going to hand out groundless indemnifications,
sooner or later the Philippine Treasury will have to repay those superfluous expenses to
the United States.
And with a frankness that takes our breath away, you state that you will accept the
assembly only so long as it gives you gain, for simply by the Commission’s disagreeing
with it, the ruinous budgets will be continued.
But what kind of an assembly is it which lacks the indispensable right of regulating
its own revenues and tariffs, of defending our poor workers from Asiatic immigration, of
controlling public debts, the budgets of Manila, the franchise of railroads, concession of
mines, customs duties and factories, and the sale of commodities?
And still you have to threaten us that if we raise our voices a little to defend our
interests, you will deprive us of this simulacro of an assembly? Look, Mr. Taft, I will
tell you: it might just as well be taken back if you are not willing to increase its
 insignificant authority: for musical comedies, the opera “Magdapio” of composer
Paterno is enough for us.
And I will say to Senor Paterno that instead of applauding the military for having
caused our banner to be outlawed, it would have served him better to have recalled his
epic bursts of passion in the Malolos Assembly and asked for a rifle—or, better yet, a
water-pistol—to fight them with. But what hurts me more then anything else is that on
so solemn an occasion he could not even pronounce a single word of affectionate regard
for that Malolos Assembly of imperishable memory, nor of poor Andres Bonifacio, nor
Rizal, nor Marcelo H. del Pilar, nor Lopez Jaena, nor Senor Emilio Aguinaldo and his
embattled hosts to whom, in fact, we owe our present liberty. 216
Isabelo had already written, “The Constitution of the Assembly was born defective the
moment it was elected not by universal suffrage but by the wealthy classes,” 217 when he learned
that the American government had increased the Assembly’s per diem allowances. More in
anguish than in anger, he branded the increment “thirty pieces of silver” and began a 25-year
war on legislative venality, opportunism and timidity. He published a series of popular
almanacs called Kalendariong Maanghang with advice to assemblymen which reached such
pungent heights—or depths—as “If you can’t stand up to the Civil Commission, what are you
wearing pants for? Better put on a skirt,” 218 and “It’s about time you stop paglalangis sa
americano and defend the rights of our people.” 219
And when he became a senator himself, he kept telling his colleagues that they had been
elected to debate laws not dispense favors, and he once proposed a “Resolution to deprive
committee members of salary and per diem who excessively delayed taking action on matters
submitted to them.” 220
But Isabelo’s attacks on Filipino sycophancy did not mean that his American targets
were forgotten. Nothing brought him quicker to the fray than the suspicion that taxes were
being deployed for their business interests. In 1912, he crossed swords with an expert in city
planning who happened also to be the President of the Businessmen’s Association.
Thanks to the firecrackers I lit off, we have now learned that the hundred thousand
pesos, for which we are so grateful to Mr. Gilbert and Mr. McDonnel, supposedly for
improving the poorer barrios and creating hygienic conditions, as was announced, we
now learn, I repeat, will be used to convert those uninhabited foreshore swamps into
urban districts and the inhabited barrios will be left in their present shameful
neglect…Would you, as a real estate agent, care to tell us who are the real owners of
those swamps? 221

216
El Renacimiento, 14 January 1908.
217
Ibid., 24 March 1908.
218
Kalendariong Maanghang sa Taon 1911 (Manila 1911), unpag., “Sa mga Kinatawang Bayan.”
219
Ibid.
220
Aetas del Senado de Filipinas, Sexta Legislatura Filipina (Manila 1924), p. 19.
221
El Comercio, 16 August 1912.
 And he could scent collusion with the sure nose of a bloodhound. Once when he was
municipal councilor, the city engineer and city electrician submitted a bill from a fellow
American for the installation of 181 street lights despite the fact that some of them had not been
installed due to “pilferage.” Isabelo went out and counted them himself, and then gave his
verdict: the Council would gladly pay for the 45 that had been installed, but by what earthly
logic should it pay for the other 136? And, by the way, why had the contract been let out to Mr.
McCoulough at P9.00 per lamp in the first place when Meralco had submitted a bid at P5.00
each? 222
Nor could American officials escape the heat of Isabelo’s scrutiny by taking to the cool
heights of Benguet: if they read Spanish, they could open their papers to headlines like
“Veraneando en Baguio mientras el pueblo padece de hambre! (Vacationing in Baguio while
the people hunger!)” One day in 1918, he telephoned Police Chief Hohman to ask him to do the
favor of arresting the Chinese dealers who were selling rice at illegal prices. When the chief
said he could do nothing because all the authorities were out of town, he threatened to air the
matter in the press. “Please don’t get violent,” the chief said: he would consult the Mayor and
see what could be done. “Very well,” Isabelo replied, “and you can ask the Mayor for me what
happened to the P50,000 the Municipal Council placed at his disposal to purchase rice from
producers in the provinces for resale in Manila at cost.” 223
By the time Isabelo was a senior citizen fondly called Don Belong, the laughter
generated by such quixotic antics had drowned out the seriousness of his message. Yet his
attempts to stem a tide which history would disingenuously call inevitable may have been either
bullheaded or noble but they were not comic. The windmills at which he tilted were not the
hallucinations of some latter-day Man of La Mancha, but the hard cold facts of colonial life.
Many of the lessons he taught his contemporaries were so thoroughly—and eagerly—forgotten
that they had to be learned all over again in our own time. Claro M. Recto was still in kneepants
when Isabelo wrote:
The imperialists need to open new railroads, bridges and highways for their military
plans (Mr. Taft says explicitly that they will be constructed for “military purposes”); and
to cure their numerous ailments like dysentery and an anemia due to the poor Philippine
climate, they need to establish a summer resort in the mountainous region of Benguet;
naturally many thousands are needed for these projects…[and] the Filipino people will
be the ones to pay for it all; and as soon as the cow gives more milk, they will have to
cover the cost of the Army and Yankee employees, too.224
Renato Constantino was not yet born when Isabelo said of Filipino politicians, “Now we
will witness how, because of their negligence, the Americans will take possession of our means
of livelihood until in the end we will find ourselves foreigners in our own land. And what need
will we have of independence then?” 225 Thirty years later, when those same politicians could
make a living simply by repeating the word “independence” often and loudly enough, he

222
Ibid., 26 July 1913.
223
Vanguardia, 18 March 1918.
224
Filipinas ante Europa, 10 November 1900.
225
El Crito del Pueblo, 21 July 1905.
warned:
America isn’t granting us independence for the sake of altruism, but to get rid of the
competition of our products and our few immigrants who look for work there to earn a living,
but, on the other hand, it will keep our capital and our best ports, and permanently deprive us of
the best lands we inherited from our forefathers and recaptured from Spain at the cost of many
lives, instead of having come to liberate us as America made us believe. 226
Looking back across Don Belong’s long career as a begrudging American subject, it is
possible to see one personal experience which encapsulated the colonial experience of an entire
people. It happened in 1902 when, for four short months, he acted out the role of tragic hero in a
drama the American community considered a farce but which was really a kind of allegory like
those “seditious plays” like Walang Sugat and Hindi Ako Patay.
In August of that year, as president of the Union Obrera Democratica, Belong was
arrested on the testimony of paid witnesses that he had threatened the lives of three scabs during
a strike against a German tobacco factory in Malabon. Probably nobody doubted the truth: the
Manila Freedom unblushingly commented, “The tobacco firms have made up their mind there
is more than one way to fight a strike.” 227 Isabelo was sentenced to four months; he appealed
the case, lost the appeal, and was jailed. In the process, three Filipinos were caught in the
dilemma that confronts all men, however good and decent, who accept employment from the
enemy of their people: duty makes them accessory to dishonorable acts. The three men were
Malabon Justice of the Peace Cipriano Rivera, Don Felix Roxas of the Fifth Judiciary District,
and Governor Arturo Dancel of Rizal Province.
Rivera at least had the decency to be embarrassed: neither he nor his clerks could be
found when American marshalls first delivered Isabelo to Malabon from the Parian Street
Police Station. Dancel, a former patriot who had spread the Revolution of ‘96 to Nueva Ecija
and was Isabelo’s UST classmate, consigned him to Malabon jail instead of Bilibid and then
quietly housed him in one of the salons of the presidencia. Roxas, who had been contributing to
Isabelo’s anti-American campaign from Paris only three years earlier, was called to the
Ayuntamiento the day after Christmas and given instructions. The government had decided to
hear the case “immediately,” he recalled in his memoirs thirty years later, and so ordered a
special session. 228 It is not difficult to conceive of a reason for the urgency: Isabelo was
consigned to Bilibid on 29 December—just in time to prevent him from delivering a Rizal Day
speech in Malabon.
But the speech was delivered anyway. Isabelo sent it out to be read in his place, and a
crowd of laborers and sympathizers paid it rapt attention. The emotion-charged circumstances
no doubt made it even more effective than it would have been had the author delivered it
himself. It was in Tagalog and was, in fact, one of the best speeches Isabelo ever wrote. There
was probably not a dry eye in the crowd when the following lines were read:
Cowardice is our greatest stumbling block. What are you afraid of if you are

226
Union, 11 April 1932.
227
The Manila Freedom, 19 August 1902.
228
The World of Felix Roxas (Manila 1970), p: 240, translating from his column, “De Ayer a Hoy” in El Dabate.
 innocent? Ah, my brothers, Montesquieu said that the reason we are slaves is that we
refuse to say No to unjustified and illegitimate claims and desires.
I repeat, my beloved countrymen, the best wreath we can offer Dr. Rizal is our
collective effort to achieve what he himself died for—the liberation, progress, and well-
being of our land. My brothers, let us unite. Let us not betray one another. Let us not
destroy one another. Let us not feign praise for our superiors in hope of gain. Rather, let
us be lovers of peace and righteousness. Let us transform ourselves into a community of
people who can offer honor, dignity, and joy to our Motherland. In other words, let us all
be true followers of Dr. Rizal. And we may then rest assured that in a not too distant
future, the day of freedom and happiness will break forth upon our unfortunate land. 229
Whether they knew it or not, that Malabon audience had just heard the third-act aria of a
real-life zarzuela about four Filipino reactions to American imperialism. It was an aria whose
melody would not even linger on as another generation learned to dance to a new tune with
lyrics imported from abroad.

229
Muling Pagsilang, 2 January 1903. I am indebted to the Rev. Father Generoso Rosales for the translation.