Travel writing

FOR its sheer simplicity, and the fact that the cell-phone reception is quite uneven and choppy, the province of Romblon now tops my list as a leisure destination. On the 12-hour boat ride from Romblon to Pier 8 in Manila (about the same time it takes to go by plane to the United States), I started to plan the return trip in my head.

Transport to and from the Romblon town center to the San Pedro beach resort is a bit problematic. Tricycles are the basic transport and the half-hour, 200-peso ride is so bumpy and noisy one should bring a car by ferry from the pier in Batangas province to Romblon. The car should be loaded with luggage and coolers filled with all the liquor and goodies that complete any vacation.

One of the things I found odd during my trip was that a welcome lunch, courtesy of the provincial government, was held in a small restaurant called Jaks and run by an Englishman. I should not complain about the generous hospitality extended by Mina Mingoa, but when I ordered seafood, I expected fresh catch from the sea but I was served a good plate of Norwegian salmon and mashed potatoes. This was also fresh -- fresh from the freezer. The green peas were also fresh from a can.

How can a place like Romblon be near the sea and yet have a limited supply of fresh fish and shrimp? Perhaps deep-water fish are cornered by trawlers and big firms, leaving the scraps for the small Romblon fishermen? Maybe there is a need to define municipal and provincial boundaries beyond land to ensure supply and fill in local demand? There were so many questions that cropped up during my two-day stay and it now requires a return trip to get the answers.

The Romblon column elicited an unusually large volume of e-mail responses from Romblon people (many from overseas) who were so happy to read about their province in the Inquirer. Maybe after history, I could embark on a new career path and do some travel writing.

One of my long dormant projects is a compilation of travel writing by Filipinos. As a historian, I often read travel accounts of the Philippines and the Filipinos written by foreigners who visited the archipelago as early as the 10th century all the way to our times. That's a whole millennium of material, beginning with 10th-century records written by Chinese merchants all the way to the current Lonely Planet guide to the Philippines. A history will unfold through travel accounts.

Discussing Antonio Pigafetta's "First Voyage Around the World" with my undergraduate history classes this summer, we tried to go beyond the text and see how a 16th-century Italian chronicler made sense of the first Visayan people he met. We also read about Magellan's "slave," the man who acted as interpreter, the man whose original name is lost to history because he is simply known today as Enrique (or Heinrich, depending on which version or translation of Pigafetta you are using). Some would like to believe that the first to circumnavigate the globe was not the Portuguese Magellan but Enrique, a Filipino. Unfortunately, Enrique did not write his own account of the Magellan expedition.

Who knows, maybe the battle of Mactan Island was the result of some cultural misunderstanding? An innocent remark or gesture by Magellan that came through as rude and insulting to Mactan chieftain Lapu-lapu? The story is varied and endless. One is left to wonder how different our view of that world would be if Enrique had left us with his memoirs. Such are the blinders of history.

Filipino historians are left with documents by biased foreigners all the way till the late 19th century, when Filipinos left a written record of their lives and times.

My project will be to compile travel accounts of foreign lands by Filipinos. What did they think of London, Paris, Madrid and New York? Filipinos going abroad for the first time bringing their world view to a foreign land and writing down their impressions -- that's turning the tables on foreigners.

Perhaps someone can write about the Philippines, integrating history into the narrative. For example, Romblon surnames.

RG Gabuna from Canada e-mailed a correction to my last column about Romblon surnames:

"Romblon is peppered with surnames that commence with the letter M; while Sibuyan (not Tablas) has a surfeit of family names that begin with letter R. On Central Tablas (the biggest island among the group of islands that make up the province) and the Tres Islas (during my trip the people I talked to referred to these islands as 'Tres Marias') facing the island of Mindoro, the letter 'F' is plentiful. While in Southern Tablas, which includes the municipality of Looc, the town of my birth, the letter G is the most abundant.

"According to the oral history passed on to us by our great-grandparents and grandparents, there was a period during the colonial era when the district military governor, to identify the fugitives from the law that melded with the local populace, issued a decree that in each settlement family names must begin with the same letter. In Romblon proper, the letter M was assigned; in Sibuyan Island letter R was given, Odiongan and Tres Islas got the letter F and the contiguous town, Looc (Southern Tablas), had the letter G."

Sorry to disillusion people, but the distribution of surnames in the 19th-century Philippines was undertaken to make census and taxation easier. Surnames carry more history than we think.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu