ROTTEN BEEF AND STINKING FISH: Rizal and the Writing of Philippine History

I. Introduction (PALENCIA)

The Rotten Beef and Stinking Fish: Rizal and the Writing of Philippine History is
an analytical essay written by Ambeth R. Ocampo. It tackles about Rizal’s linear
conception of history, and how he uses the arrival of Spain as the turning point that
stunted the pre-Hispanic Philippine Civilization. Furthermore, the essay discusses Rizal’s
stance on the opinions of Antonio de Morga after he insulted the traditional cuisines of
Filipinos.
As a child, Jose Rizal heard from his uncle, Jose 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 Musuem 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.
Rizal’s work consists of eight chapters:
1. of the first discoveries of the eastern islands
2. of the government of dr. Francisco de sanded
3. of the government of Don Galo Ronquillo de Pebalosa
4. of the government of Dr. Santiago de Vera
5. of the government of Gomes Perez Dasmarinas
6. of the government of Francisco tello
7. of the government of don pedro de acuna
8. an account of the Philippine islands
 Three main propositions in Rizal’s new Edition of Morga.
1. The people of the Philippines had a culture on their own, before the
coming of the Spaniards
2. Filipinos were decimated, demoralized, exploited and ruined by the
Spanish colonization
3. The present state of the Philippines was not necessarily superior to
its past

II. Significance of Rizal’s Annotations to Antonio de Morga (ARCEGA)

 The importance of Rizal’s annotations to Morga was that he tried to use history
and historical revision not just to express his personal views on the historiography,
but to create a sense of national consciousness or identity.
 Historical revision is always met with varying degrees of opposition, and Rizal's
first attempt at writing Philippine history was no exception. Rizal knew that the
Spaniards would object but Rizal is more than prepared for objections.
 However, the first criticism of Rizal's historical work was not by a Spaniard or by
one of Rizal's enemies, but by Blumentritt in the introduction to the book itself.
 Rizal’s Morga may not have been read widely, but its significance lies in the fact
that with this edition, Rizal began the task of writing the first Philippine history from
the viewpoint of a Filipino.

Why should Rizal write the history of the Philippines? (ARCEGA)

 The historiographical scholarly work of Rizal is that it was the first historical work
in the Philippines by a Filipino and it is the first history written from the point of view
of the colonized not the colonizer.
 Rizal is reflecting on his country’s history and realized the importance of the past
as a tool to understand the present and eventually confront the future. Obviously
 drawing on the popular Tagalog proverb “Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinang
galingan ay hindi nakakarating sa paroroonan”
 Rizal wanted Ferdinand Blumentritt to write the history but if foreigners wrote the
history of the Philippines then it would be biased. If Rizal would be the one to write
the history of the Philippines, he will be able to write the same in the perspective
of the colonized (Filipinos) and not the colonizers.
 Lastly, Rizal is a well-educated Filipino and is educated in history. His high-quality
education makes him more qualified to write our history because he is the one
more knowledgeable in our history than other Filipinos.

Antonio De Morga Sanchez Garay (ARCEGA)

 Born in 1559 in Seville

 In 1593 he was appointed as Lieutenant Governor in Manila, which is the second
most powerful position in the colony next only to the Governor General of the
Philippines
 Historian, Anthropologist, and Explorer
 Author of Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas

5 considerations of Rizal in choosing Morga as reference in writing history

(ARCEGA)

Rizal’s choice of reprinting Morga rather than other contemporary historical accounts of
the Philippines was due to the following reasons:

1) The original book was rare;

- Morga’s Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas was originally published in
Mexico and is therefore rare. Blumentritt stated that the book is “so rare
that the few libraries that have a copy guard it with the same care as
they would an Inca treasure”.
 - He listed just 25 copies of the Morga in libraries and other research
institutions.

2) Morga was a layman and not a religious chronicler;

- Chroniclers by Spanish colonial officials were rare, making Morga for
over two centuries the only secular general history of the Philippines in
print.
- The main complaint against religious historians was that they deal more
with church history than the history of the Philippines and its people.

3) Rizal felt Morga to be more “objective” than the religious writers whose accounts
included many miracle stories;
- Rizal’s opinion was this secular account was more objective and
trustworthy than those written by the religious missionaries which were
liberally sprinkled with tales of miracles and apparitions
- Rizal utilized Morga to discredit the work of Diego de Aduarte, a
Dominican chronicler, whose work was published in Manila and was
considered so authoritative it was often cited and repeated by later
historians. Rizal stated that although the work of Diego de Aduarte was
pleasant and written in picturesque style, it was marred by gaps,
contradictions, and distortions. Unlike Morga, who was more “faithful as
a chronicler of his time… he never distorts events.”

4) Morga was more sympathetic to the indios;

- It appeared to be more sympathetic, at least in parts, to the indios,
compared to the friar accounts, many of which are biased or downright
racist in tone and interpretation.
- Rizal expressed his preference for Morga:

“The Morga is an excellent book; it can be said that Morga is a modern

learned explorer. He has nothing of the superficiality and exaggeration
 so typical of present-day Spaniard; he writes very simply, but in reading
him there is much between the lines because he was governor general
in the Philippines and after, head (Alcalde) of the Inquisition.”

5) Morga was not only an eyewitness but a major actor in the events he narrates.
- Morga was an eyewitness, and therefore a primary source, on the
Philippines and its people at the point of first contact with Spain.
- Rizal’s often humorless rebuttals of biased Spanish accounts of his
country and his people emphasized, the need for an indio interpretation
of history, while on another recreating the glories of the lost pre-Hispanic
Philippines.

III. Struggles (DIMAGUILA)

In the annotation of Dr. Jose Rizal on Morga’s work showed the first Philippine
history made in a viewpoint of a colonized and not of the colonizer but before the said
annotation was published it faced many problems to the point that Rizal’s work was
ignored and forgotten. Those enumerated below are the instances on why Rizal’s
annotation was largely ignored and seldom read:
1.) Rizal’s Annotations are largely disregarded because of the recent advances in
historical, archeological, and ethnographic research
2.) Rizal’s Annotations are considered a secondary source, as of today scholars and
many of us prefer using and concentrating on the primary source than in a secondary
source
3.) It was banned in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century due to the
censorship during the Spanish colonial period like his novels Noli me Tangere and El
Flibusterismo
4.) Since it was banned in the Phillipines, copies were confiscated by Spanish Consul
in Manila
5.) Not only it was confiscated, Rizal’s work were destroyed in other ports of entry
6.) Since the copies of Rizal’s work was confiscated, destroyed and particularly a
large shipment of Morga was burned, the status that was attained of the book within the
year of its publication is rare and out of print
7.) Because of what happened with the copies, it did not see second printing thus the
few copies in circulation were left hidden and unread by frightened owners
8.) There is a problem of language and that restricted the impact of the Morga to a
small, educated, Spanish-reading elite in Manila and only seldom can read the historical
work like Morga than other novels of Rizal. Also, Rizal’s Morga was not read by the
masses although they have heard the deal on this controversial work it does not mean
that it was read and thoroughly understood making it almost forgotten.

Rizal’s Morga was re-issued in photo-offset reproduction in 1958, but in that time only few
Filipinos knew or cared for books in Spanish. An English translation of Rizal’s Morga was
commissioned and published by the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission in 1961
but it has proven unsatisfactory compared to with the most popular English edition of
Morga presented by J.S. Cummins
Before encountering the struggles after publishing here are his other struggles before the
publication of Rizal’s Morga
- Close to August 18, 1888, Rizal was copying out, by hand, the entire first edition
of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas de Filipinas, annotating it along the way, confident that
Antonio Regidor, a wealthy countryman, in exile in London following the Cavite Mutiny of
1872, would publish the work when completed.7 As an added incentive, Regidor
promised Rizal that as soon as he had recovered his investment in the book, all profits
would be divided equally between author and publisher. He did not earn anything from
the Morga. In fact, Regidor unexpectedly backed out of the venture without the courtesy
of an explanation. One of Rizal’s friends hinted at racism, as Regidor was of Spanish
extraction.
· After all his work in the copying, editing, and annotation of the Sucesos, Rizal had
a finished manuscript but no publisher. Undaunted by the initial frustration, Rizal decided
to publish the Morga himself. By the end of September 1889, he had brought the
manuscript to Paris, where printing costs were lower than in London.
· It took 4 months to have a concrete result of the intense historical research in
Bloomsbury was Rizal's second book with a typically long Spanish title, Sucesos de las
Islas Filipinas por el Doctor Antonio de Morga. Obra publicada en Mejco en el ano dr
1609, nue vamente sacada a luz y anotada por Jose Rizal, precedida de un prologo del
prof. Fernando Blumentritt (Events in the Philippine Islands by Dr. Antonio de Morga. A
work published in Mexico in the year 1609, reprinted and annotated by Jose Rizal and
preceded by an introduction by Professor Ferdinand Blumentritt).

IV. Rizal’s annotations (PALENCIA)

In his historical essay, which includes the narration of Philippine colonial history,
punctuated as it was with incidences of agony, tensions, tragedies, and prolonged periods
of suffering that many people had been subjected to. He correctly observed that as a
colony of Spain, “The Philippines was depopulated, impoverished and retarded,
astounded by metamorphosis, with no confidence in her past, still without faith in her
present and without faltering hope in the future.”
The sucesos as annotated by Rizal, appeared for the first time in the Philippines
68 years later when a publisher in Manila, published the new work in 1958, to contribute
his bit to the national effort to honor Rizal. The present work is the sixth volume of the
Series of Writings of Jose Rizal which the Jose Rizal national Centennial Commission
has not published in commemoration of his birth.
There are two defects of Rizal’s scholarship which have been condemned by later
historians
-straightforward historical annotation
-strong anti-clerical bias
Hindsight and anti-clericalism are fatal defects in a purely scholarly work but as
mentioned earlier, Rizal used history as a propaganda weapon against the abuses of the
colonial Spaniards. Rizal commits the error of many historians in appraising the events of
the past in the light of present standards. Rizal’s attacks on the church were unfair and
unjustified because the abuses of the friars should not be construed to mean the
Catholicism is bad.
o His extensive annotations of Morga’s work number “no less than 639 items
or almost two annotations for every page”.
o Rizal also annotated Morga’s typographical errors
o He commented on every statement that could be nuanced in Filipino cultural
practices
For example: page 248
Morga describes the culinary art of the ancient Filipinos by
recording: “…they prefer to eat salt fish which begin to decompose
and smell”
Rizal’s footnotes: “this is another preoccupation of the
Spaniards who, like any other nation in that matter of food, loathe
that which they are not accustomed or is unknown to them… the fish
that Morga mentions does not taste better when it is beginning to rot;
all on the contrary” it is bagoong and all those who have eating it and
tasted it know it is not or ought not to be rotten.

V. History as part of propaganda effort (GONZALES)

Some exaggerated footnotes of Rizal.

 Generations of Filipino schoolchildren from the American colonial period to
the present have been raised to accept that the pre-Hispanic Filipinos had
a system of writing and accompanying written literature.
 The view that the pre-Hispanic Filipinos had an advanced knowledge of
metallurgy, the evidence being the fine cannons made by an indio named
Panday Pira.
 The existence of a pre-Hispanic shipbuilding industry.
This interpretation of history makes rizal both a boon and bane to Philippines
nationalism basically , boon and bane means mabuti at Masama. Rizal made historical
 assertions necessary for his time and purposes but there are some flaws in his
reconstruction of pre-Hispanic Philippine civilization. Pre-hispanic is the time bago tayo
sakupin ng mga spaniards. Yung tatlong example na binigay ko ay sinira ito ng mga
spaniards. Syempre ngayon yung mga historians nireconsider nila yung mga assertions
ni Jose Rizal a century ago gamit kung ano na yung mga research ngayon.

As stated above, eto yung itsura ni Panday Pira.

 Panday Pira (1488–1576) was a Muslim Pampango blacksmith who is
acknowledged as "The First Filipino Cannon-maker". His name literally translates
as "Blacksmith Pira", panday being the Filipino word for "blacksmith".
 The word “panday” in Java and Borneo means "metalworker" or "iron-smith."
Commentaries:
Although Morga made only a passing reference to this indio artillery-maker,Rizal
elaborated in his annotation, stressing that:
That is, an indio who already knew how to found cannons even before the arrival of the
Spaniards, hence the epithet "old." In this difficult branch ofmetallurgy, as in others, the
present-day Filipinos or the new indios are very much behind the old indios.

In the next chapter, the fifth, on the term of Governor General Gomez Perez Dasmarinas,
there is another reference by Morga to the foundry:
· [Perez-Dasmarinas] established a foundry for artillery in Manila where, owing to the
lack of expert or master founders, few large pieces were made.
Dito ginamit ni rizal yung opportunity na yung pagawaan ng bakal ni Panday Pira
ay nawala nung nag settle na yung spain sa Manila. Eto lang nag papatunay na nung
namatay si Panday Pira, wala ng spaniards or ang mga anak niya ang nakakagawa ng
kasing husay ng kay Panday pira
Today Panday Pira, the cannon-founder, joins the Pantheon of Heroes and other
"great" Filipinos who are immortalized in school textbooks, despite historical and
archeological evidence to the contrary.
 Ngunit sabi ni Rentana na di sumasangayon kay rizal na sinasabi ang cannon-making ay
isang maunlad na bagay na sa pilipinas bago pa dumating ang spaniards ngunit hindi
naman talaga ito totoo. Halimbawa na lang ang nakitang dokyumento from the colonial
government na nag rerequest tayo ng cannon-makers dahil hindi natin magaya o
magawa ang cannon nga kasing lakas at parehas ng cannon ng europa.
Historical Evidence that would provide that cannon making is not flourishing
indigenous industry in the Philippine during pre hispanic era by Retana:
· His research showed that the indios were a metal- using people, but did not
possess the metallurgical knowledge attributed to them by Rizal
· it is possible that the indios were capable of forging the small cannons, or
lantakas, which are still manufactured by the Muslims in the southern island of
Mindanao,
· He cites an ethnographic articleby Blumentritt (whose opinion was held in high
esteem by Rizal and other Filipino writers) which stated that the pre-Hispanic
foundry the Spaniards encountered in Manila was run by a Portugese cannon-
maker!
The cannon made by the indios is not used for warfare but as ornaments for interior
decoration.
Siguro nga masasabi natin na si Rizal ay medyo binabago ang storya para mapaganda
ang pre-hispanic philippine civilization. Minsan ay napupuno na ito ng imahinasyon at
wala itong ebidensya. Ganito dapat kasi eto ay parte ng propaganda.
Another example of Rizal’s exaggeration. Morga describes boats large enough
to carry “one hundred rowers on the border and thirty soldiers on top. On which Rizal
elaborates to mourn the extinction of the indigenous boat making industry:
· The Filipinos... [were] celebrated and skilled navigation, but far from progressing, have
become backward. Although boats are still built in the islands now, we can say that they
are almost all of the European model. The ships that carried one hundred rowers and
thirty fighting soldiers disappeared. The country that at one time, with primitive means,
built ships of around 2,000 tons, now has to resort to foreign ports like Hong Kong...for
unserviceable
 I think, Rizal exaggerated things only to prove that we’re unique in our own way
even during the pre-hispanic period. Rizal just wanted to prove that Filipinos are intelligent
and creatoive without the colonizers. The importance of Rizal’s annotations to Morga was
that he tried to use history and historical revision not just to express his personal views
on the historiography, but to create a sense of national consciousness or identity.
Historical revision is always met with varying degrees of opposition, and Rizal's first
attempt at writing Philippine history was no exception.

VI. Blumentritt (PALENCIA)

Ferdinand Blumentritt also wrote a preface emphasizing some salient points:
· The Spaniards must correct their erroneous conception of the Filipinos as children of
limited intelligence
· That there existed three kinds of Spanish delusions about the Philippines:
- Filipinos were an inferior race
- Filipinos were not ready for parliamentary representation and other
reforms
- Denial of equal rights can be compensated by strict dispensation of justice
Blumentritt’s prologue
· Writing in Spanish, instead of his native language: German
· Praised Rizal’s work as “scholarly and well-thought out”
· He noted that Morga’s Sucesos was so rare that “the very few libraries that have it
guard it with the same solicitude as if it were the treasure of the Incas”
· Criticized rizal’s annotations on two counts:
- He first observed that Rizal had committed the mistake of many modern
historians who judged events in the past in the context of contemporary ideas
and more
- He perceived as the overreach of Rizal’s denunciations of Catholicism that
Rizal should confine his critique to the religious orders in the Philippines who
spared no effort to suppress calls for reform
VII. Conclusion (PALENCIA)
Colonization, according to Rizal’s view of history, led to the loss of both Philippine
autonomy and its distinct character. Rizal’s study of the Philippine past showed that all
the chronicles on his county and people were written by Spaniards and thus reflected
their biases. Rizal was then continually irritated by the racist viewpoints of Spanish
historians, who often highlighted the “uncivilized” nature of the indios, vis-à-vis the
“civilized” Spaniards, who brought both the Roman Catholic faith and Hispanization to the
archipelago. Consequently, gave himself the difficult task of rebutting the biased
chronicles, and in doing so, brought into existence an indio viewpoint on the history of the
Philippines.
Rizal’s Morga recreated the pre-Hispanic Philippine past, which he wanted to
present to his sleeping countrymen to awaken in them a sense of pride in their race. The
search for a national identity goes on, and the view of history that Filipinos carry is
generally that bequeathed to them by the propagandists of the late nineteenth century
and most articulately by Rizal in his edition of Morga.
Rizal’s view of Philippine history is that its influence is still felt and, taken in the
context of Philippine historiography, it remains the key to an understanding of the
reconstruction of the Philippine past as a mean to forge a national identity.
“to foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open the books that tell of her
past”