Duck hunting and hatching

ONE of the 19th-century travel accounts of the Philippines, translated from the original French by the late E. Aguilar Cruz for the National Historical Institute, is a work by J. de Man published in Antwerp in 1875. "Recollections of a Voyage to the Philippines" may not contain material that will figure significantly in a book on the Philippine Revolution or the Filipino-American War, but it does help us understand what the Philippines was like in those times.

Naturally, J. de Man is a tourist and sees what formed part of his tourist package. He must be a hunter or at least interested in wild game sport because he notes Filipino hunting techniques that I have never seen. For example he narrated:

"The [Filipinos] have a highly ingenious method for hunting wild duck and other web-footed birds which thrive by the thousands in the lakes and rivers.

"The hunter covers his head and part of his body with a light weave of bamboo furnished with leafy branches in such a way that head and torso are completely hidden; then he slips into the water and floats with the current to midstream. Thus, gently borne by the current, he looks exactly like a branch and his arrival amidst the ducks is not even noticed; at this point, the catching begins. The Indian slyly pushes his hand into the water, grabs a duck by its feet and quickly pulls it under before the bird can make a sound; once the duck is underwater, the [Filipino] twists its neck and attaches the victim to a belt equipped with hooks around his waist.

"The companions of the unlucky one which has already passed away do not notice anything amiss; they think their mate is diving for pleasure and do not trouble themselves; the Indian continues his tricky maneuver and within minutes his belt is full; then he executes his retreat noiselessly and leaves the water at the first turn he finds.

"This method of hunting duck has the great advantage of not frightening the birds, so that they are always found at the same spot, whereas hunting them with guns makes them disappear immediately from their habitual gathering places."

J. de Man's tourist account in the 19th century has since become but a historical or ethnographic text useful only for an academic. If I need to have duck for dinner, I can get one off a supermarket shelf or drive out of town and buy them live, dressed, or fried as the case may be--no need for swimming in costume. Life has definitely become easier.

Dressed duck also saves me the trouble of doing the traditional way of disposing of a duck. You are supposed to drown the poor thing in vinegar, just put the head in a cup of vinegar. Enough reason to turn vegetarian.

While we are on the subject of ducks, I was wondering whether Filipinos inflicted balut on visiting foreigners. J. de Man just describes hunting techniques and leaves out most of the details on cooking, which is a pity because food preparation is one area that needs research in order to counter "fast food" these days.

There is a group in Manila formed around the late Doreen Fernandez that is part of a larger international movement called "Slow food" that encourages traditional, healthier, and better ways of preparing and cooking food. One wonders though how traditional or organic one can go.

These days eggs are placed in makeshift incubators or the birds are put in cages warmed with electric light bulbs. During J. de Man's trip through Laguna, he made a stopover in Pateros which was swarming with ducks and asked if there was anything special the town had to show. Balut is not mentioned or described but the parish priest showed them people hatching duck eggs:

"...the priest tells us that in every house of a [Filipino] family there are always one or two members brooding some thirty duck eggs by lying against them. That is how the duck population multiplies.

"We ask to see how the [Filipinos] go about it; the priest takes us inside a cottage where we do see two girls nonchalantly lying on a reclining bamboo chair in the middle of which is a nest containing about thirty eggs. This method yields excellent results, the good people tell us... For the rest, the very name of the town has to do with ducks; the Spanish patos means ducks, and Pateros which comes from patos means: 'People who specialize in duck raising.'"

The above may sound strange to us these days, but there is another account by an Englishman that describes men sitting on baskets of duck eggs to warm them. This I find hard to believe unless there was a special way of packing the eggs so that they don't break when you sit on them. The account says grown men were the best human incubators in town. Now, this was clearly division of labor by gender.

Over the years I have been using foreigners' accounts of the Philippines to try and recreate the past. One of my projects has been to turn the tables and find 19th-century Filipino accounts of foreign lands. Perhaps we will find Filipino travel accounts 300 years ago? How did Filipinos describe London, Paris, Madrid or New York a century ago? What did they find odd? All this not only describes foreign places but provides us with a Filipino voice, a Filipino perspective on the past.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu