Seeing the Philippines emerge from this beautiful book is like approaching a hill town from a great distance. A smudge turns into a shadowy outline and eventually to a detailed settlement.
Intriguingly, the opening chapter is called “Ptolemy and the Philippines,” which had me wondering whether I had made a terrible wrong turning somewhere in my notion of Philippine history. However, Carlos Quririno’s excellent text makes it clear that the islands identified by Ptolemy (90¬¬–168 AD) to the east of east of Malaysia (the Golden Chersonesus) were islands off Borneo. No smudge yet then.
Not surprisingly, the first foreigners to map the archipelago were the Chinese and the islands first appear, almost recognizably, in a map from 1402 by Koon Kun.
As for the Europeans, Quirino wonders whether it was the Portuguese rather than the Spanish who made the first landfall in the archipelago. It was a Portuguese, Tomé Pires in 1513, who was the first to mention an island in the Philippines (which he called the Luçoes), eight years before Magellan landed at Homonhon, near Leyte, and Quirino argues that it is reasonable to suppose that either Pires or his younger contemporary, Francisco Rodrigues, was the first European to land on an island that is part of the modern state known as the Philippines (a rather vague map “possibly the Philippines” by Rodrigues dating from 1513 is included).
Sadly, like Magellan, famously slain on a beach in Mactan by Lapu-Lapu, Tomé Pires had a distressing end. After serving as ambassador to Peking he was banished to northern China and “After terrible sufferings, anxieties, humiliations, and miseries, he died unknown, forgotten, and hopeless in some town of far-distant China,” according to his biographer.
I enjoyed the way Quirino surveys the evidence and balances the possible answers to the questions posed by over 500 years of maps of Philippines. He is good writer and maps offer an intriguing way of seeing the history of the archipelago, especially as it starts to come into focus. It is amazing how quickly the smudge in the map by Rodrigues (1513) became a beautiful and reasonably accurate map of Southeast by Mercator (1595), indicating that it was in the 16th century that the Southeast Asia crossed the border from myth to fact in the European consciousness.
Although the text is readable and informative; almost all those willing to shell out the hefty P3,200 for this book will do because of the maps themselves.
And what maps they are. One design feature that brightens up both Western and Chinese maps is the depiction of the sea. The islands of the Philippines often seems to be barely peaking over the churning seas that surround them, which is no doubt how the sailors who drew many of these maps perceived the unfriendly ocean. What a shame that we have to make do with bland expanses of flat blue in modern atlases.
Gorgeous swirling calligraphy adorn many of the maps, some of which also feature cute drawings of little sailing ships.
Another boundary, that between science and art, is also patrolled by these maps, some of which, such as “Baya de Manilha” (1647) and “Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas” (1734) are really works of art rather science. The latter map, which is one of my favourites, is bordered by beautiful vignettes of Philippine life, drawn and engraved by two Filipinos. Authorship of the map is credited to Father Pedro Murillo Velarde and Qurino describes it as “the best known map of the Philippines.”
The weirdest “map” is “Aspecto Geographico del Mundo Hispanico” (1761) which is essentially a drawing of a woman with the various Spanish colonies hanging off her naked frame. Spain is at the head and we, I am sorry to say, are at the feet. Still this hideous object does at least show that it was possible to be baduy in the 18th century as well as the 21st.
The reproductions are generally good although some maps appear out of focus, such as “Insulae Philippinae” (1605) on pp. 48¬¬–49 and “Les Isles Philippines” (1652) on pp. 78–79.
I should also mention that over half of the text is given over to a chronological listing of “charts, maps, plans, and views” that is likely to be of interest only to the specialist collector, although there are plenty of wonderful maps (including two foldout maps) reproduced in this section as well.
All in all, this a fantastic work that anyone with a Philippine book collection will want to own. The price tag may seem steep, but not when you consider that copies of the first edition (published in an edition of 100 copies in 1959) sell for P30,00–50,000. If you are interested in Philippine history and beautiful maps this will give you hours of pleasure. Give yourself a treat.