Prosperity without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines

By Norman Owen

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520335820

Norman Owen

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Prosperity without Progress

This volume is sponsored by the

CENTER FOR SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA STUDIES

University of California, Berkeley

Prosperity without Progress

MANILA HEMP AND

MATERIAL LIFE IN THE

COLONIAL PHILIPPINES

Norman G. Owen

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

©1984 by The Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America 123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Owen, Norman G.

Prosperity without progress.

This volume is sponsored by the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley—Half-t.p.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Manila hemp industry—Philippines—History.

2. Philippines—Social conditions. I. University of California, Berkeley. Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies. II. Title.

HD9156.M352P66 338.173571'09599 82-2024

ISBN 0-520-04470-3 AACR2

TO ROBERTA

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

TEXT TABLES

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

PROLOGUE The End of the Eighteenth-Century World

CHAPTER ONE Setting the Stage

Kabikolan

Partidos, Missions, and Mountains

Moros

The Colonial Superstructure

Before the Boom

CHAPTER TWO Merchant Houses and Manila Hemp

The Global Fiber Market

Manila and the World Market

The Merchant Houses of Manila

Middlemen

CHAPTER THREE Abaca in Kabikolan

Production

Land

Labor

Transportation and Storage

Marketing

Profits

CHAPTER FOUR Subsistence and Survival

Material Life and Population

Rice Cultivation

Production, Consumption, and Exchange

Dietary Diversity

Private Buildings and Public Works

Handicrafts

The Persistence of Subsistence

CHAPTER FIVE Alternatives to Abaca

Pioneer Commercial Industries

Second-Generation Initiatives

American Rule and the Coconut Boom

CHAPTER SIX Services and Cities

Distributive and Producer Services

Social and Personal Services

Urbanization and Its Limits

CHAPTER SEVEN Development and Dependency

Relative Prosperity

Truncated Progress

Development and the Bikolano Ethic

Colonialism: Institutional Dependency

Capitalism: Commercial Dependency

Internalization: Structural Dependency?

Prosperity without Progress

APPENDIX A: ABACA PRICES AND EXPORTS, 1818-1940

APPENDIX B: ABACA PRICES IN PESOS AND DOLLARS, 1870-1902

APPENDIX C: ABACA PRODUCTION, 1850-1938

APPENDIX D: POPULATION BY DISTRICT (000), 1794-1938

APPENDIX E: ECONOMIC INDICATORS, 1845-1939

GLOSSARY

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscript Materials Cited by Author

Manuscript Materials Cited by Country

Published Materials and Theses

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. The Philippines 8

2. Kabikolan: Geographic Features 11

3. Kabikolan: Partidos and Major Towns 16

4. Bikol Municipalities, 1939 119

5. Central Kabikolan: 19th-Century Ports & Roads 131

FIGURES

1. Abaca Prices, Export Volume, and U.S. Business Cycles, 1830-1940 50

2. Abaca Prices in Pesos and Dollars, 1870-1902 53

3. Average Annual Population Increase by District 135

TEXT TABLES

1. Rainfall Regimes 13

2. Abaca Prices and Exports 52

3. Philippine Exports 60

4. Abaca Exporters 66

5. Average Annual Abaca Production, 1850—1938 79

6. Abaca Prices and Bikol Marriages 110

7. Population of Kabikolan 116

8. Baptisms by Month, Guinobatan, 1804—1899 128

9. Population Increase by District 132

10. Staple Crop Cultivation and Production 140

11. Estimated Distribution of Annual Carbohydrate Consumption 140

12. Comparative Economic Indicators 213

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

Kabikolan is hauntingly beautiful. Situated at the southeastern corner of the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, it is open to both monsoons and thus is perpetually green. Mount May on rises nearly 8,000 feet above the town of Legazpi like a tropical Fujiyama, and the blue waters of the Pacific lap the gulf nearby. The Bikolanos, indigenous inhabitants of the region, are a beautiful people, and the traveler is always refreshed by their courtesy and generosity.

Yet the history of Kabikolan, like any other regional or local history, must also justify itself to those who do not know the region or its people if it hopes to transcend its resemblance to a mere filiopietistic chronicle. For this potentially larger audience it must contribute to the understanding of some larger historical problem. Nineteenth-century Kabikolan lends itself particularly to a study of the transition from an overwhelmingly subsistence-oriented agrarian economy (material life, in Braudel’s term) to one characterized by a strong export sector based on the production of a single crop for sale to a global market.

Such a study may be useful in two complementary ways. First, it is one piece of an enormous mosaic depicting the epic expansion of the European-based world-economy to the remotest corners of the earth. The origins of that modern world-system have been analyzed in the controversial but stimulating works of Braudel and Wallerstein, among others. The end results we see around us today: all of Asia, all of Africa, all of Latin America have now been or are now being incorporated into this global system.¹ But the full history of this incorporation—the mosaic—still remains to be (re)constructed of a myriad of pieces, each unique. Even within the Philippines, the impact of capitalism on nineteenth-century Kabikolan must be distinguished from its impact on eighteenth-century Pampanga or twentieth-century Mindanao. This book, then, is one of the necessary building blocks that will someday help in the construction of a substantial edifice, not just for Philippine historiography, but for world history.2

The history of Kabikolan need not lie unused until all the other pieces of the mosaic or edifice are assembled, however. It may also serve as a case study of the process and results of incorporation into the worldsystem, suggesting—though certainly not dictating—what form the larger picture may eventually assume. No single case study will prove or disprove any general historical theory, but there are reasons to believe that the history of Kabikolan may be particularly suitable for comparative analysis. The region is geographically well defined, and this helps the writer to situate the historical actors in a specific physical context, so that they are not, in Michelet’s words, walking on air, as in those Chinese pictures where the ground is wanting.3 The indigenous population at the start of the nineteenth century was almost ethno-linguisti- cally homogeneous, so that outsiders to the region can often be distinguished even when their precise origins are unknown. Only one major export industry—the growing, processing, and transportation of abaca, or Manila hemp—emerged during the nineteenth century as a possible basis for regional economic development. Abaca was not exported until 1818; by 1918 it reached its peak as the major export of the Philippines and the mainstay of the regional economy; by the Great Depression it had collapsed again. Thus there is also a logical period to study, one great economic cycle (or intercycle) just over a century in length. A well-defined area, population, industry, and era may aid us in isolating the critical factors in economic continuity and change.4

Among the regions of the Third World incorporated into the modern world-system, Kabikolan was relatively fortunate. It was never subjected to extensive forced labor or to the intrusion of huge Western- owned plantations, two of the classic colonial modes of inducing export production. Thus it seems to be an exception to the general rule that the peripheries of the world-economy were characterized by coerced labor, as in sixteenth-century eastern Europe and the Americas.⁵ Instead, the commercialization of its agriculture came about through the response of indigenous landowners to economic incentives, a fact which challenges those theorists who posit cultural conservatism or some immaturity of values for the failure of Southeast Asia to develop economically. Colonialism, moreover, was generally less oppressive in the Philippines than in other areas, such as French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies. Both Spain and the United States were too preoccupied with other concerns and too ambivalent in their colonial aims to exploit this remote colony efficiently. Meanwhile, the global demand for the principal product of Kabikolan increased continually, if erratically, for more than a century— long enough to bring some material improvement to the region, in contrast to the pauperization suffered elsewhere in the world under the impact of colonialism and capitalism.

This, then, is a case study of almost optimum relations between the Third World and the Western world-system. Its theme is not degradation and oppression but real—if slight and short-lived—improvement in the material welfare of the Bikolanos. To this extent it would seem to refute those who argue that the Third World invariably suffers from contact with the West or with capitalism, and perhaps even to corroborate some claims of the putative blessings of imperialism. In the long run, however, this temporary prosperity failed to lead to real progress, as if it contained within itself its own limits and thus its own demise.6 Reflection on this may teach us more about the problem of persistent poverty and the relationship between underdevelopment and the position of a given economy on the periphery of the world-system than would a study of more blatant exploitation for which simple human cruelty and greed might be held responsible.

Most analyses of Third World poverty take as their basic unit of analysis the nation-state. A case study of a regional economy, therefore, can scarcely resolve all the controversies among various theorists of development and dependency.7 The history of Kabikolan may, however, help to discredit a simplistic Rostovian developmentalism which credits economic performance entirely to internal factors such as entrepreneurship, social values, and industrial discipline. The rises and falls of the abaca industry and, by extension, of the regional economy as a whole are inexplicable without reference to international economic forces over which neither the Bikolanos nor their rulers had any real control. Moreover, the capacity of Bikolanos to respond to these market forces was always constrained by the presence of colonialism, which set the local rules of the game.

This book is a study of how the rise and eventual decline of abaca in Kabikolan affected the development of that region. The first half of the book explores the rise of the export industry, showing how a strong market sector evolved from a traditional subsistence economy without either governmental coercion or substantial investment of foreign capital in plantations. In the second half of the book the rest of the regional economy is explored in an effort to analyze the failure of Kabikolan to capitalize on the rise of abaca or to transcend its decline. Through examination of the persistence of a strong subsistence sector, the vicissitudes of other commercial enterprises, and the uneven growth of the tertiary sector, we may begin to understand one often-ignored aspect of Third World history—the paradox of truncated development.

All of this analysis of the significance of the history of Kabikolan is in a sense incidental to the history itself. Whatever the historian’s original aims, history comes to have its own life and demands to tell its own tale. Even for the Annales school this is true, and beneath their efforts to write an histoire totale can be seen an appreciation of the particularities of, for example, the peasants of Languedoc as well as of the generalities and conjonctures which their history supports. The Bikolanos—600,000 of them at the turn of the century; 3,000,000 by now—deserve their own history, and if this is not their histoire totale it is at the least a contribution toward it: the repeated movements, the silent and half-forgotten story of men and enduring realities.⁸

The sources available for the study of nineteenth-century Kabikolan are limited almost entirely to travelers’ accounts and bureaucratic archives.⁹ The former, even when perceptive, are necessarily superficial. In the latter, though the Bikolanos sometimes speak, it is not with their own voice. The words are in Spanish and spoken to Spaniards, shaped to fit themselves to a colonial ear. It is possible to write from these sources a history of the Bikolanos, yet such a history has its limitations. It will necessarily be more behavioral than phenomenological, stronger on the material facts of ecology, technology, and economics than on culture, religion, or local perceptions of events.

8. Braudel, Capitalism, p. xv; cf. Hexter, pp. 522-29.

9. Norman Goodner Owen, Kabikolan in the Nineteenth Century: Socio-economic Change in the Provincial Philippines (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1976), pp. xii-xvii, 577-629.

It is unjust, of course, to limit the history of Kabikolan to economic continuity and change. The people of that age, Ladurie reminds us, had other things on their mind besides the gross product.¹⁰ Bikolanos were poets, musicians, priests, and tale-tellers; many of them were inveterate gamblers, and some were wine-bibbers. They also were and are devout Christians, perhaps more solidly Roman Catholic than any other Philippine people.¹¹ Regrettably, however, in attempting to analyze the integration of Kabikolan into the modern world-system we can hardly hope to do justice to these other truths. Often, instead, we wind up reducing the romance of Bikol history to its bare socioeconomic bones. The devout and colorful fiesta of Our Lady of Peñafrancia, the songs and the plays (most now forgotten), the piety and the family life, the customs, costumes, and cuisine all seem to slip away from us. They are at this time insufficiently known to be combined with economic history in a true histoire totale. It will take new sources—perhaps even a native’s familiarity with the subtleties of a largely unwritten culture—to reintegrate the Bikolanos fully into their own history.¹²

The culture of Kabikolan was so vital that even though it was not considered important by colonial authorities, it kept spilling over into bureaucratic documents as well as travelers’ tales. The historian is constantly reminded that his conclusions are merely arbitrary abstractions from the lives of real and vibrant people, people whose lives embraced more than the maximizing of economic opportunity or the search for avenues of social mobility. If this fact does not shine through this study, the fault is not the Bikolanos’, but mine.

10. Le Roy Ladurie, p. 291.

11. The implications (for the Weber thesis, etc.) of such staunch Catholicism associated with responsiveness to capitalist incentives are beyond the scope of this study. A pioneering debate on religion and economics in the Philippines may be found in Philippine Economic Journal, vols. 1-3 (1962-64).

12. Contributions toward a cultural history of Kabikolan include James J. O'Brien, S. J., ed., The Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Bicol People (City of Naga, 1968); Luis General, Jr., Lydia SD. San Jose, and Rosalio Al. Parrone, eds., Readings on Bikol Culture (City of Naga, 1972); Francis X. Lynch, S. J., An Mga Asuwang: A Bicol Belief, PSSHR14 (Dec. 1949): 401 — 27; Cecilia M. Carpio, A Study of Bikol Metrical Romances (M. A. thesis, University of the Philippines, 1959); Lilia Ma. Fuentebella Realubit, A Study of Popular Drama in Bikol (M. A. thesis, University of the Philippines, 1961); and Merito B. Espinas, A Critical Study of the Ibálong, the Bikol Folk Epic-Fragment, Unitas 41 (June 1968): 173-250.

1 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York, 1973); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York, 1974).

2 John A. Larkin, The Place of Local History in Philippine Historiography, J SE AH 8 (Sept. 1967): 317; cf. J. H. Hexter, "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellian …," Journal of Modern History 44 (Dec. 1972): 510-11, 532-33.

3 Préface de l’histoire de France (1869), quoted in Lucien Febvre, in collaboration with Lionel Bataillon, A Geographical Introduction to History, trans. E. G. Mountford and J. H. Paxton (1924; reprint ed., New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), pp. 9-10.

4 Fernand Braudel, Time, History, and the Social Sciences, trans. Sian France, in The Varieties of History: from Voltaire to the Present, ed. Fritz Stern, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 403-29; Hexter, pp. 502-6; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana, 1974), pp. 289-311.

5 Wallerstein, pp. 99-105,300-44; cf. Karl J. Pelzer, The Resource Pattern of Southeast Asia, in South Asia in the World Today, ed. Phillips Talbot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 109, who states that colonial powers increased agricultural production either through the application of pressure on the peasantry or through large-scale plantation agriculture.

6 Cf. Le Roy Lad urie, p. 293, The tragedy of Languedoc, in the third phase, was not… the decline [of agricultural production], but its failure to grow significantly.

7 Susanne Bodenheimer, Dependency and Imperialism: The Roots of Latin American Underdevelopment, in Readings in U.S. Imperialism, ed. K. T. Fann and Donald C. Hodges (Boston, 1971), pp. 155-81; Aidan Foster-Carter, From Rostow to Gunder Frank, World Development 4 (Mar. 1976): 167-80; Charles W. Bergquist, Alternative Approaches to the Problem of Development (Durham, N. C., 1979).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ten years of research and writing (on a project which also represents the culmination of nearly ten prior years of college) create personal obligations which are manifold and profound. As the reader will see, the direction, assistance, and cooperation that I have received around the world have been so extensive that if there is any fault in the work, it must be mine alone. I can in no way complain of lack of guidance or of opportunity.

The principal overseas research for this study was undertaken in 1971-73 on a trip funded primarily by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, supplemented by support from the Department of History of the University of Michigan. Later, the Henry Luce Fund for Asian Studies not only subsidized the Harvard Seminar on Philippine-American History but also paid for my research in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts en route. A Grant-in-Aid from the American Council of Learned Societies financed cartographic and typing assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript. Finally, the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies of the University of Michigan provided a generous subvention which partially defrayed the considerable expense of publishing a lengthy study of a topic for which the prospective market was, to say the least, unproven.

Throughout the world, wherever I attempted to pursue this topic, from great national libraries to the smallest parish archives, I was gratified to receive full cooperation. Whatever I requested was willingly searched for and supplied to me if found. I should like to thank the staffs of the British Museum (now the British Library) and the British Museum Newspaper Library, Cambridge University Library, the Foreign Office Library, and the Public Record Office in Great Britain; the American Historical Collection, Ateneo de Manila University (Rizal Library and the Institute of Philippine Culture), the Lopez Memorial Museum, the National Archives (Bureau of Records Management), the National Library, the University of Nueva Caceres, and the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines; the Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, the Archivo General de Indias, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, the Biblioteca-Museo Balaguer (Villanueva y Geltrú), and the Museo Naval in Spain; and the Essex Library (Salem), Harvard University (Baker Library and University Library), the Library of Congress, Michigan State University, the National Archives, the Newberry Library, the Peabody Museum (Salem), the Stanford University Libraries, and the University of Michigan (Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library and Michigan Historical Collections) in the United States. If I single out for special appreciation the late Dr. Domingo Abella, Lena Concepcion, and Evelyn Dizon of the Philippine National Archives, it is because that collection was most central to this study.

Permission to quote from restricted manuscripts was supplied by Carolyn Brown and Elizabeth P. Kincade (Peirce Family Papers), the Lopez Memorial Museum (Foster Papers), and the Peabody Museum (Tucker Papers). I was given access to certain of the private papers of Dr. Abella, the late Atty. Juan T. Ataviado, Atty. Luis General, Jr., LTC Fausto O. Ola, Carlos Quirino, and Warner, Barnes & Co. as well as to those of Jardine-Matheson (now Matheson & Co.) in the Cambridge University Library; all these I also thank. In the parishes of Kabikolan I benefited from the cooperation of Msgr. Teopisto Alberto (Archbishop of Caceres), Msgr. Teotimo Pacis (Bishop of Legazpi), Msgr. Jose Belleza, Msgr. Teodulo Borrero, and Fr. Hermenegildo Rosalvo, O.F.M. I was offered similar courtesy by several other priests whose archives I did not have time to explore. While in the Philippines I was affiliated with the Institute of Philippine Culture, Ateneo de Manila University, as a Visiting Research Associate, which proved to be a pleasant as well as a valuable connection.

Outside the realm of institutional obligations I was helped by so many scholars, friends, and previous strangers that I can name only a few: Dr. Manuel I. Abella; Dr. Barbara Anderson; the late Atty. Juan T. Ataviado and Josefina Ataviado Llamas; Dr. and Mrs. Floro V. Dabu; Leonor R. Dy-Liacco; Dr. Salvador P. Escoto; Mauro Garcia; Atty. Luis General, Jr., and Honesto C. General; Fr. Cantius Kobak, O.F.M.; Dr. Benito Le- garda, Jr.; Julian J. Locsin; the late Fr. Frank Lynch, S.J.; Mercedes Meli- ton Vda. de Teague; Julian Napal; Fr. James J. O'Brien, S.J.; LTC Fausto O. Ola; Rosalio Al. Parrone; Fr. Apolinar Pastrana Riol, O.F.M.; Carlos and Liesel Quirino; Fr. Cayetano Sánchez, O.F.M.; Floyd and Ligia Cea Sanchez; Marcelo C. and Ricardo Sanchez; Atty. Domingo Sisón and Lazara Duran Sisón.

My intellectual debts to predecessors and colleagues in the study of Philippine history are legion. The notes indicate many of these, yet may not do justice to the unique contributions of Dr. Bruce Cruikshank, Michael Cullinane, and the late Dale Miyagi. For many years, each of these friends both shared with me specific information on Kabikolan and debated with me the larger questions of Philippine history. The dissertation from which parts of this book are derived was completed under the able and amiable co-chairmanship of Drs. David Joel Steinberg and John K. Whitmore. Various drafts of all or part of the manuscript of this book were read and commented upon by Drs. John Broomfield, Daniel Doeppers, Liam Hunt, Joel Sarnoff, Peter C. Smith, Thomas Trautmann, and two anonymous readers for the University of California Press. Though I grumbled at first at all criticism, I almost always found, once the hurt to my pride was assuaged, that I profited from it—though my revisions may not satisfy any of these readers.

I should also like to pay tribute here to two of my early mentors, Drs. Poon-Kan Mok and Malcolm Caldwell, neither of whom lived to see me complete this. Each helped, in very different ways, to make me the scholar I am today, and I hope this book is worthy of their memory.

Finally, I must thank those who worked directly for and with me on this project. Akil A. Pawaki and Rafael G. Roque, my two research assistants in the Philippines, were capable, dedicated, and good- humored beyond the call of duty or the wages I was able to pay them. Marge Wilson typed the dissertation and Dorothy Foster the manuscript of the book; both were conscientious, competent, and uncomplaining. Dr. Judith Siegel drew most of the maps and figures and helped me decide what they should include and how the data might best be presented.

Above and beyond all I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Roberta. Not only did she sustain me through the long years of research and writing, coping with the world when I could not, and coping with me when no one else could, but she also undertook the tedious but essential tasks of editing my final draft and proofreading the final copy. To her I owe utang na loób, a debt of the inside, a debt that can never be repaid.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Throughout this book the careful reader will notice what appear to be inconsistencies with regard to Hispanic names and terms. These stem from the fact that although most of the documentation employed is in Spanish, and most Filipinos today have Hispanized names, the Philippines is not a Spanish-speaking country and has adapted Spanish usages according to its own customs. In this volume accents are given as they appear in the original in direct quotations, such as the titles of documents. Otherwise the names of Spaniards and Spanish institutions are generally spelled in accordance with current Iberian usage, including accents; thus José Ma. Peñaranda, Sección de Ultramar. Names of Filipinos and Philippinized institutions, on the other hand, are recorded in accordance with local usage, so most accents are omitted; thus Jose Rizal, Elección de Gobernadorcillos. Similarly, as Filipinos tend to incorporate the Hispanic prefixes de and de la into their surnames, they are cited in this form; thus Horacio de la Costa (Filipino) is cited as de la Costa, whereas Félix de Huerta (Spaniard) is simply cited as Huerta. For ease of reference, however, both are alphabetized under the (capitalized) surname proper.

A different kind of inconsistency may appear with regard to dates. A single fiscal year that does not coincide with the calendar year is indicated by two dates separated by a slash (e.g., 1796/97). The use of a hyphen (e.g., 1796-97), on the other hand, refers to the entire two-year period or to events or data located sometime within it.

PROLOGUE

The End of the Eighteenth-Century World

Repeated tremors came first, the night before, followed on the morning of the first by a strong shock. … Instantly from its mouth it ejected a cloud which rose like a pyramid and formed the shape of a very fancy plume. As the sun was bright, the desolating phenomenon presented diverse views: the black base went up like a shadow, the middle was of various colors, and the top was of an ashy shade. Hardly had this been observed when a great earthquake was felt, followed by great claps of thunder. It continued thus ejecting lava with violence when, shortly after, the cloud which was forming grew; the earth darkened, the atmosphere was on fire, and from out of the ground came rays of light and flashes of lightning, which were crossing each other and creating a horrendous storm. This was instantly followed by a most terrible rain of great rocks, inflamed and burning, which destroyed and burned whatever they encountered. Shortly after [came] smaller rocks, sand and ash; this lasted more than three hours, and the darkness about five.

It set on fire and entirely destroyed the towns of Camalig, Cagsaua, and Budiao, with half that of Albay and the same of Guinobatan, and less of Bu[bu]lusan. … The darkness reached places as distant as Manila and Ilokos; the ashes, some have vouched, went even to China; and the thunderclaps were heard in many parts of the Archipelago.¹

Thus on 1 February 1814, Mount Mayon, the fiery focus of Kabikolan (the Bikol region) exploded with a violence that devastated the heart- 1 land of the region and brought terror to its inhabitants. This was neither the first nor the last great natural disaster to strike this fertile and vulnerable peninsula of southeastern Luzon, but in its suddenness and destructiveness it was probably the greatest.² To the Bikolanos who lived in the Iraya valley towns, it must have seemed like the end of the world; for many of them it was. Over 1,200 were killed in the eruption, including hundreds in the town of Cagsaua who had fled for refuge to the parish church, where they were buried under the tons of suffocating volcanic ash and sand that covered all but the bell tower. The tower still stands, amid the green fields that cover the buried church and town. With the majestic mountain in the background, it is the best-known view in Kabikolan, and one of the most picturesque—a mute memorial to the uncertainty of human life under the will of God and the face of mysterious Mayon.

The impact of the fateful eruption on the demography, economy, and psychology of the Bikolanos was considerable. Over 20,000 refugees were created in the devastation of the Iraya towns, having lost their houses, much of their crops, and all the rest of their possessions—tools, animals, clothes, furniture—which they had not been able to carry with them to the hills. The survivors of the towns of Guinobatan and Camalig re-formed their communities in sites more distant from the volcano, although they moved back to the original sites in 1816 and 1837, respectively. Cagsaua relocated permanently in a site called Daraga, retaining the old name for most of the nineteenth century. Budiao and Bubulusan never did reemerge as civic units; their survivors were absorbed back into Cagsaua, Guinobatan, and Ligao, from which they had separated not long before.³

The average annual collection of direct taxes in Camarines province had risen steadily in each gubernatorial administration from 1772-75 to 1808-13; yet in the triennium after the eruption it fell 16 percent.⁴ Ten

2. Among other major disasters were the 1766 eruption of Mayon (described in Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière, A Voyage to the Indian Seas [Manila, 1964], pp. 9-10) and Typhoon Deling (Kelly), which killed over 200 Bikolanos in the Iraya Valley in July 1981.

3. Francisco Aragoneses, O.F.M., Suceso espantoso acaecido en la erupción del volcan de Albay en la isla de Luzon, uno de las llamadas Filipinas (Madrid: lmp. de Nuñez, 1815); Percy A. Hill, Bikolandia: Philippines Future Playground, ACCJ 7 (June 1927): 6-7; Huerta, passim; PNA, EPA, V, Camarines. Año de 1814. Espediente … sobre los perjuicios que resultan de establecer este en la Visita de Daraga, and Albay 1845. Dn Miguel de San Andres solicita autorización para formar un pueblo en el puerto de Putiao. Sixty years later the descendants of the Budiao survivors were still feebly petitioning to regain the town’s independent status; PNA, EPA, VI, untitled expediente on Malabog.

4. AGI, F, 875. In 1814 all of the affected towns except Albay and Bacacay were in Camarines; later they were transferred to the province of Albay. The direct taxes involved were tributos, sanctorum, and the donativo de Zamboanga.

years after the eruption, a Franciscan priest blamed the great poverty that afflicted the region on the tragic lavas of the Volcano, which have rendered useless many fertile fields; the almost total destruction which they have caused of the important plant Abaca [Manila hemp]; the repeated fires, the forced transfer of towns, the bad harvests, the dispersion of the natives. At the end of the century another Franciscan recorded having heard a blind bard, the Homer of Ibalon, recite a song he had written on the theme of the 1814 explosion, poetry worthy of being read for the sweetness of the expression and the elevation of the Christian sentiments with which it abounded.⁵ No other single event ever so fixed itself in the imagination of the Bikolanos or so immediately affected their welfare; it seems to mark a pivotal date in Bikol history.

To the historian, however, who looks back at the growth of the Bikol economy and the transformation of Bikol society during the late colonial period, there are other events of the decade 1810-19 which, though less conspicuous at the time, were emblems of more profound changes that were to occur. On 26 October 1818, in Tabogon Bay (off the Caramoan Peninsula), the provincial fleet of the province of Albay, under the command of eighty-year-old Pedro Esteban, met and rousingly defeated a fleet of Muslim raiders, including Prince Nune, son of the Sultan of Mindanao. For many decades, such marauders from the southern Philippines had devastated the coasts of Kabikolan, but this battle, in which the Albay fleet sank fourteen Moro vessels, captured nine more, rescued over thirty Christian captives, and forced over five hundred Moros to take refuge in the mountains of Caramoan, seems to mark a turning point in the long struggle to eliminate this threat, a struggle which was a necessary precondition of growth.⁶

Meanwhile, on 16 September 1810, in far-off Mexico, the War of Independence had begun with the grito de Dolores, and on 19 March 1812, in far-off Spain, the Constitution of Cadiz brought to an end an era in the history of the metropolitan power. These two events, along with many others in the years 1808-24, marked the end of the old Spanish empire in the New World (though Cuba and Puerto Rico remained, vestigially) and the beginnings of a new age of political turmoil in the Iberian peninsula. Such distant developments would induce a radical change in both

5. Jacinto de Corrias, O.F.M., report of 12 July 1824, AHN, U, L502, E99; José Castaño, O.F.M., Breve noticia acerca del origen, religión, creencias y supersticiones de los antiguos indios del Bicol, in W[enceslao] E[milio] Retana [y Gamboa], Archivo del bibliófilo filipino (Madrid, 1895-1905), 1:32—33. Ibalón is one of the earliest recorded names for Kabikolan.

6. PNA, EPA, III, "Albay. 1818 á 19. Espediente… acerca del combate que tuvieron los Moros con las armadillas de aquella provincia." In my dissertation I incorrectly referred to Esteban as a retired Spanish naval officer; although he had been honored by the Spanish government for his earlier exploits, there is no reason to assume he was anything other than a Bikolano.

the quantity and the quality of Spanish presence in the Philippines. The end of the Mexican trade (adumbrated in an 1813 decree of the Cortes ending the galleon monopoly, consummated in the 1820 seizure by General Agustin Iturbide of the shipload of Mexican silver destined for Manila) forced the Spaniards to explore new directions for the Philippine economy, which could no longer depend on the imperial subsidy.⁷ The loss of the American colonies and the political chaos at home vastly increased the number of Spaniards who went to the Philippines, a previously neglected backwater of the empire, now almost all that was left of opportunity (or refuge) outside Spain itself. The Bikolanos may have been little aware of these events at the time, but they would certainly come to feel their consequences.⁸

The appointment of Andrew Stuart as first United States consul in Manila in 1817 would not have appeared to most contemporary observers to be as significant as volcanic eruptions, naval battles, or political revolutions.⁹ In itself it did not signal great change. Despite formal restrictions on alien trade and residence, foreign merchants had regularly been trading in Manila since the late eighteenth century, and apparently some were even living there.¹⁰ Nor did Stuart’s appointment mark the final culmination of the Spanish liberalization of commerce. The port of Manila would not be officially opened to foreign trade until 1834, and many other restrictions would remain in effect until the re-

7. William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York, 1939); Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1960); Benito Fernandez Legarda, Jr., Foreign Trade, Economie Change and Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1955), pp. 22-103; idem, The Philippine Economy under Spanish Rule, Solidarity 2 (Nov.-Dec. 1967): 3-10; AGI, U, 660-61; Nicolas Zaira, ed., Philippine History through Selected Sources (Quezon City: Ale- mar-Phoenix Publishing House, 1967), p. 120; H[oracio] de la Costa, S.J., ed., Readings in Philippine History (Manila, 1965), p. 143. The last galleon actually sailed from Acapulco to Manila in 1815.

8. Beyond the general policy of Spanish colonialism to keep the Filipinos isolated from world developments, there was a particular concern to prevent the spread of any news or rumors of the revolutions in the Americas. PNA, EPCS, I, "Año de 1832. Provincia de Camarines Sur. Diligencias practicadas … con motivo de haber algunos malvados esparcidos la voz."

9. DUSCM.

10. Besides the sources cited in note 7, above, see Serafin D. Quiason, English Country Trade with the Philippines, 1644-1765 (Quezon City, 1965), pp. 165-201; Elisa Atayde Julian, British Projects and Activities in the Philippines, 1759-1805 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1963); W[eng] E[ang] Cheong, Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese Clandestine Trade Between the Ports of British India and Manila, 1785-1790, PHR 1 (1965): 80-94; idem, Changing the Rules of the Game (The India-Manila Trade: 1785-1809), JSEAS 1 (Sept. 1970): 1-19; idem, The Decline of Manila as the Spanish Entrepot in the Far East, 1785-1826, JSEAS 2 (Sept. 1971): 142-58; Nathaniel Bowditch, Early American-Philippine Trade (New Haven, 1962); Frank Hodsoil, Britain in the Philippines (Manila, 1954?); John Foreman, The Philippine Islands, (London, 1899), pp. 287-88.

forms of the 1870s. But as an act symbolizing the establishment of an ongoing commercial relationship with the Anglo-American trading empire, this appointment introduced the dominant theme in the modern economic history of the Philippines.

This relationship was given meaning for Kabikolan when the appointment of Stuart was followed the next year by the exportation of some fourteen tons of abaca to Salem, Massachusetts.¹¹ The plant was native to the Philippines, and the Filipinos had been extracting the fiber for local uses from time immemorial. The Spanish had employed it in marine cordage for centuries. Small quantities of this cordage were exported in the late eighteenth century; in 1796/97 it accounted for nearly 1 percent (P15,000) of Philippine products exported. But the raw fiber does not seem to have been exported until a parcel of two tons was sent to the British colony of Penang in 1812.¹² It was the direct shipment of abaca to the manufacturing centers of the industrializing West that was to affect Kabikolan more profoundly than any development since the conquest and Christianization of the region two and a half centuries before.

11. There is some confusion over the first shipment of abaca to the United States. The date 1818 is given in [Yldefonso A. de Aragon], Yslas Filipinas: Manila: Año de MDCCCXVIII (Manila, 1819); A[ntonio] de Keyser y Muñoz, Medios que el Gobierno y la Sociedad Económica del Amigos de País de Filipinas pueden emplear para obtener el desarrollo de la agricultura en el país (Manila, 1869), p. 7; and the later merchant circulars of Peele, Hubbell & Co. (PHC). Other sources claim that the first shipment was made by Lt. John White of the U.S. Navy. White, however, was in Manila only in the summer of 1819, and in his own account of his travels, although he refers to abaca as one of the products suitable for export, he gives no indication that he actually took any back to the United States; John White, A Voyage to Cochin China (Kuala Lumpur, 1972), p. 133 and passim; cf. Robert Huke et al., Shadows on the Land (Manila, 1963), p. 324. Whatever the date of its departure from Manila, the first shipment apparently did not reach Salem until 1820; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Ropemakers of Plymouth (Boston, 1950), p. 34n.

12. AGI, U, 658; AGI, F, 979, Filipinas 1813. Consulado de Manila. Remite Testimonios de las cuentas de derecho de subvención de los años de 1811, y 1812. The shipment of abaca is found in the manifest of the goleta Golondrina, signed by Captain Antonio Morgado.

1 Francisco Tubino, O.F.M., opúsculo of 1816, as quoted in Félix de Huerta, O.F.M., Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso, de la Santa y Apostólica Provinda de S. Gregorio Magno … desde su fundación en el año de 1577 hasta el de 1865 (Binondo, 1865), p. 255 (translation mine). Another English version may be found in U.S., Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands … 1903 (Washington, D.C., 1905), 1:223 (hereafter cited as Census of 1903).

CHAPTER ONE

Setting the Stage

Kabikolan

Except for the accident of a few mountainous miles separating the Ragay Gulf (and the Sibuyan Sea) from Calauag Bay (and the Pacific Ocean), Kabikolan would be an island itself rather than the tail of the island of Luzon.¹ Historically, the region has been, in fact, as separate and distinctive as any of the major islands of the Philippines. In area, peninsular Kabikolan (the present-day provinces of Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Albay, and Sorsogon) is almost the size of the island of Samar, and the addition of Catanduanes and the smaller offshore islands to the north and east increase its total area to about 5,245 square miles, nearly 5 percent of the total area of the Philippines.1 2 Kabikolan is the home of the Bikolanos (or Bikolnon, as they call themselves), lowland Filipinos whose mother tongue is the language known as Bikol.3 In the 1903 cen-