MODULE 3

SUCESOS de las ISLAS FILIPINAS

INTRODUCTION

Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, With the English title, Events in the Philippine Islands, is a book written
and published by Antonio de Morga. It is considered one of the most important works on the early history
of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. It was published in 1609 after he was reassigned
to Mexico in two volumes by Casa de Geronymo Balli, in Mexico City. The first English translation was
published in London in 1868 and another English translation by Blair and Robertson was published in
Cleveland in 1907.

The work greatly impressed the Philippine national hero José Rizal and decided to annotate it and publish
a new edition and began working on it in London and completing it in Paris in 1890.

OBJECTIVE:

This module’s objective is to justify Jose Rizal’s choice to annotate Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas
Filipina. It also explains how Rizal’s annotations conform to the Propaganda Movement’s objectives, and
for us to create our own annotations of a sample text.

Lesson 1

ANTONIO MORGA AND HIS SUCESOS de las ISLAS FILIPINAS

In the late 16th century, Antonio Morga served in the Philippines as a Spanish administrator. He started
working for the Spanish government in 1580 and served as the Lieutenant-Governor which was the
second most powerful post in colonial Philippines in 1593 and eventually in 1598 as an  Audiencia or
Spanish court judge.  

He was, however, subjected to a corruption inquiry that found him guilty and would have sent him to the
gallows if he did not die in 1636.

Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas which was published in Mexico in 1609 is made up of eight
chapters. The first seven of which documented the tenures of the governor-generals that served in the
Philippines from Miguel Lopez de Legazpi’s term in 1565 to Pedro de Acuña in 1606. Its chapter 8 called
“An Account of the Philippine Islands” offered substantial depictions of the natives during the Spaniards
arrival in the Philippines in the 16th century.
Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas Selections (Morga, Antonio de, 1559-1636)

Unsigned nineteenth-century copy of Chapter 8 of Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas
(1609), containing descriptions of the islands in the Philippine archipelago, and notes on the nature and
customs of the native inhabitants, both before and after the colonization of the islands by the Spanish,
beginning in 1564 -- After a brief geographical introduction, Morga describes the native inhabitants of the
islands, their physical appearance, homes, clothing, food, customs, weapons, boats, religion, burial
practices, languages, and writing. He discusses the terrain and soil of the islands, the fruit and timber trees
native to the area, and the animals, birds, fish, minerals and shells found there. He also includes brief
descriptions of the various islands, with notes on navigating their rivers, coastlines, and straits. There is a
section on the founding of Manila in 1571 by the first governor, Miguel López de Legaspi, as well as the
establishment of other important cities of Segovia, Cáceres, and Santísimo Nombre de Jesús. Morga
concludes with a description of the colonial organization imposed by Spain, discussing aspects such as
political and ecclesiastical organization of the islands, the evangelization of the natives by the religious
orders, the system of taxation, the encomienda, and trade with merchant ships from China, Japan, India,
Maluco, Siam, and other eastern countries. He emphasizes the importance of the trade route between the
Philippines and New Spain, and includes an explanation of the sailing schedule and a detailed description
of the route between the ports of Cavite and Acapulco.

Lesson 2

RIZAL’S ANNOTATIONS OF MORGA’S SUCESOS de las ISLAS FILIPINAS

 In late 1889, Rizal obtained a first edition copy of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas which he
annotated thereby spawning a critical account of Philippine history which was published in the same year
by a Paris-based printing press, Garnier Hermanos.
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.

Among all the other early Spanish accounts of the Philippines, Rizal opted to annotate Morga’s Sucesos
de las Islas Filipinas for five reasons according to Ambeth Ocampo:

1. Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas was rare.

2. Morga was a government officer.
3. A secular version is more credible.
4. Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas was more sympathetic towards the natives.
5. Morga was an eyewitness to historical events.

Rizal offered an outline of a linear conception of Philippine historical accounts when he published his
annotations of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere tackled the 19th century,
which was Rizal’s present; his El Filibusterismo and his essay, “The Philippines: A Century Hence” dealt
with the future; whereas his annotations of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas covered the past.

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.

José Rizal
Europe, 1889

The following are excerpts from Rizal’s annotations of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas.

Excerpt 1

Morga:
Their regular daily food is rice…together with boiled fish of which there is an abundance, and pork or
venison, likewise meat of wild buffalo or carabao. They prefer meat and fish, saltfish which begin to
decompose and smell.

Rizal’s Annotation:

This is another preoccupation  of the Spaniards who, like any other nation, in the matter of food, loathe
that to which they are not accustomed or is unknown to them, The English, for example, is horrified on
seeing a Spaniard eating snails; to the Spaniard, beefsteak is repugnant and he can’t understand how raw
beefsteak can be eaten; The Chinese who eat tahuri and shark cannot stand Roquefort cheese, etc. etc. 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 eaten it and tasted it know that it is not or ought not to be rotten.

Excerpt 2

Morga:

In the rivers and streams, there are very large and small scorpions and a great number of very fierce and
cruel crocodiles which frequently get the natives from their bancas on which they ride… However, much
the people trap, catch, and kill them, these reptiles hardly seem to diminish in number. For this reason, the
natives build on the border of their rivers and streams in their settlements where they bathe, traps and
fences with thick enclosures and bars of bamboo and timber within which they do their bathing and
washing, secure from these monsters which they fear and respect to the degree of veneration as if they
were somehow superior to them.

Rizal’s Annotation:

Perhaps for the same reason, other nations have great esteem for the lion and bear, putting them on their
shields and giving them honourable epithets. The mysterious life of a crocodile. The enormous size that it
sometimes reaches, its fatidical aspect, without counting anymore its voraciousness, must have influenced
greatly the imagination of the Malayan Filipinos.

References:

 de MORGA, Antonio (1890) [1609]. Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas

Ocampo, Ambeth R. "The indolence of the Filipino". [Link]. Retrieved 29 September 2019.

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