When I went to Manila last October 2005, I decided to indulge myself by going on a book-buying spree. Although I do most of my reading thru the internet nowadays, there’s nothing compared to reading a book by a lampshade, so to speak.
A book brings pleasure to the mind uniquely different from browsing or surfing in cyberspace. There is the added comfort in going back to what you are reading without putting on so many lights and pressing on buttons and waiting for windows to pop up.
Anyway, there’s this book by William Henry Scott, Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino which I bought for P 234.00.
The book was published in 1992 by New Day Publishers and it turned out to be a very fascinating read. Because so many data in the book were hardly mentioned in history books published before the 1990’s, it was a virtual pioneer in the field of Filipino prehistory and ethnography.
The author gave new insights into how the Filipinos lived before the Spanish advent. All through out you feel his meticulous scholarship lending credence to newly discovered facts and tidbits of data.
There’s this chapter on “The Conquerors As Seen by the Conquered” which offers us an interesting glimpse of how a Bikolano, writing from Gumaca to his brother living in Manila in the 1590’s, explained why he would not want to become a Christian.
This Bikolano, Panpanga, a chieftain living in Gumaca, wrote to his brother Antonio Simaon (already a Christian) that the Spaniards themselves behave so unChristian as he had observed when he was in Manila. Their uncouth behavior and greed, he said, hardly recommend their religion to him.
The book also treats of preSpanish Tagalog techonology, Visayan literature, food and farming and debunks the Kalantiaw Code’s authencity. All in all, it gives one a delectable dish of prehistory hardly known to many students of Philippine history.
When I went back to Naga, I also found a book at the Naga City Public Library under his authorship and printed by the Ateneo de Manila University Press in 1994. The book, titled Barangay, apparently is a compilation of previous works he published in various scholarly magazines and journals. This might well be a fitting posthumous tribute to man who dedicated his whole life to Philippine studies for he died a year before the book was put out.
This book should be of special interest to Bikolanos because he devoted an entire chapter on prehispanic Bikolandia. The topics he discussed therein were: agriculture, drinking, social structure, religion, the alphabet and warfare.
He drew much from the entries of Lisboa’s Diccionario y vocabulario de el idioma Español y Bicol to reconstruct the prehispanic life and customs of the old Bikol.
I was expecting to find a more substantial comment on the ancient goldwork and abaca weaving of Bicol for I suspect such preoccupations were highly developed in this region before Spanish advent but I found none.
What captured my attention was his observation that prehispanic bikol engaged not only in swiddening (upland riceplanting) but also in irrigated rice planting in lowlands which the old Visayans and Tagalogs did not do.
There is also the author’s comment about the Bikol’s being the “best-armed” among the fighters during the Spanish conquest. He pooh-poohed it as a confusion on the part of Salcedo’s forays into Ilocos where he met Japanese warriors using iron armor. Let me quote him (p. 187):
“…… But the arquebuses, artillery, helmets, and full body armor of iron which were
reported from the Salcedo expedition of 1573 were no doubt a confusion with Japanese
weapons which that conquistador encountered the year before in a naval engagement on
the Ilocos coast.”
Well, anyway, if the old Bikols had them and were making them, they should have the words for such and Scott could have chanced upon them in Lisboa’s or other friars’ vocabularios.
I made a perfunctory look at Lisboa’s vocabulario and what I came upon was the bikol word “barote” which Lisboa defined as “cuerpo de armas, peto, y espallar como jubon, que solian hacer, para pelear en sus guerras.” But whether this body armor was made of iron was not particularly indicated by Lisboa altho Scott remarked the old bikols went to war wearing a carabao-hide armor.
In sum, Scott’s deep researches on sixteenth-century Philippine ethnography give us much challenge to stretch further the limits of our knowledge of regional history.
