Rizal on Annotations of Antonio Morga’s Sucesos las Islas Filipinas

YYesterday I received an email from Veronica Pedrosa who now lives in London. She said that she was writing a book and was at the British Museum for her research.

I texted her back that one of the less known books of Jose Rizal, “Annotations on Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Pilipinas” was researched and written there.

It was by way of reply on just who and what Filipinos were before the Spanish colonialists came. I have excerpted from a translation by Austin Craig of the introduction to the book.

“As a child José Rizal heard from his uncle, José Alberto, about an ancient history of the Philippines written by a Spaniard named Antonio de Morga. The knowledge of this book came from the English Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Browning, who had once paid his uncle a visit. While in London, Rizal immediately acquainted himself with the British Museum where he found one of the few remaining copies of that work. At his own expense, he had the work republished with annotations that showed the Philippines was an advanced civilization prior to the Spanish conquest. Austin Craig, an early biographer of Rizal, translated into English some of the more important of these annotations.

Here are excerpts from Rizal’s annotations to inspire young Filipinos of today.

“To the Filipinos: In Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer) I started to sketch the present state of our native land. But the effect which my effort produced made me realize that, before attempting to unroll before your eyes the other pictures which were to follow, it was necessary first to post you on the past. So only can you fairly judge the present and estimate how much progress has been made during the three centuries (of Spanish rule). Like almost all of you, I was born and brought up in ignorance of our country’s past and so, without knowledge or authority to speak of what I neither saw nor have studied, I deem it necessary to quote the testimony of an illustrious Spaniard who in the beginning of the new era controlled the destinies of the Philippines and had personal knowledge of our ancient nationality in its last days.

It is then the shade of our ancestor’s civilization which the author will call before you. If the work serves to awaken in you a consciousness of our past, and to blot from your memory or to rectify what has been falsified or is calumny, then I shall not have labored in vain. With this preparation, slight though it may be, we can all pass to the study of the future, wrote Rizal in Europe in 1889.

“Governor Morga was not only the first to write but also the first to publish a Philippine history. This statement has regard to the concise and concrete form in which our author has treated the matter. Father Chirino’s work, printed in Rome in 1604, is rather a chronicle of the Missions than a history of the Philippines; still it contains a great deal of valuable material on usages and customs. The worthy Jesuit in fact admits that he abandoned writing a political history because Morga had already done so, so one must infer that he had seen the work in manuscript before leaving the Islands.” Here are items I have chosen from the annotations. “By the Christian religion, Dr. Morga appears to mean the Roman Catholic which by fire and sword he would preserve in its purity in the Philippines. Nevertheless in other lands, notably in Flanders, these means were ineffective to keep the church unchanged, or to maintain its supremacy, or even to hold its subjects.

These centuries ago it was the custom to write as intolerantly as Morga does, but nowadays it would be called a bit presumptuous. No one has a monopoly of the true God nor is there any nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that to it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator of all things or sole knowledge of His real being.

The civilization of the Pre-Spanish Filipinos in regard to the duties of life for that age was well advanced, as the Morga history shows in its eighth chapter.

Morga shows that the ancient Filipinos had army and navy with artillery and other implements of warfare. Their prized krises and kampilans for their magnificent temper are worthy of admiration and some of them are richly damascened. Their coats of mail and helmets, of which there are specimens in various European museums, attest their great advancement in this industry.

Of the native Manila rulers at the coming of the Spaniards, Raja Soliman was called “Rahang mura,” or young king, in distinction from the old king, “Rahang matanda.” Historians have confused these personages.

The artillery cast for the new stone fort in Manila, says Morga, was by the hand of an ancient Filipino. That is, he knew how to cast cannon even before the coming of the Spaniards, hence he was distinguished as “ancient.” In this difficult art of ironworking, as in so many others, the modern or present-day Filipinos are not so far advanced as were their ancestors.

From the earliest Spanish days ships were built in the islands, which might be considered evidence of native culture. Nowadays this industry is reduced to small craft, scows and coasters.

In Morga’s time, the Philippines exported silk to Japan whence now comes the best quality of that merchandise. Morga’s views upon the failure of Governor Pedro de Acuña’s ambitious expedition against the Moros unhappily still apply for the same conditions yet exist.

Ancient traditions ascribe the origin of the Malay Filipinos to the island of Sumatra. These traditions were almost completely lost as well as the mythology and the genealogies of which the early historians tell, thanks to the zeal of the missionaries in eradicating all national remembrances as heathen or idolatrous. The study of ethnology is restring this somewhat.

Filipinos had had minstrels who had memorized songs telling their genealogies and of the deeds ascribed to their deities. These were chanted on voyages in cadence with the rowing, or at festivals, or funerals, or wherever there happened to be any considerable gatherings. It is regrettable that these chants have not been preserved as from them it would have been possible to learn much of the Filipinos’ past and possibly of the history of neighboring islands.”