Chapter 6: Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas Flashcards
Rizal’s annotation is now considered as __________ source.
Secondary source
Like Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo, the Rizal edition of Morga was banned in the Philippines in the _______________ century.
late nineteenth
Rizal began the task of writing the first Philippine history from the viewpoint of a
___________
Filipino
Therefore, copies confiscated by Spanish customs in Manila and other ports of entry were destroyed. Due to the burning of one particularly large shipment of the Morga, the book attained “rare” and “out of print” status within a year of its publication. It did not have a second printing, and the few
copies in circulation were left hidden and unread by frightened ownersTherefore, copies confiscated by Spanish customs in Manila and other ports of entry were destroyed. Due to the burning of one particularly large shipment of the Morga, the book attained “rare” and “out of
print” status within a year of its publication. It did not have a second printing, and the few copies in circulation were left hidden and unread by frightened owners
READ
Rizal is often credited with “____________________.” The notion of “Philippine history” is ambiguous to begin with. It can mean either the history of the place or the history of the people of the place.
rewriting Philippine history
If Philippine history is taken to mean the history of the _________ , then Rizal was indeed rewriting history.
place
If we mean the history of the _________, then, being the first history and having nothing
to rewrite, Rizal was writing Philippine history.
Filipinos
The historiographical importance of this little-read scholarly work by Rizal is that it
was the first historical work on the Philippines by a Filipino.
RIZAL’S ANNOTATION OF SUCESOS DE LAS ISLAS FILIPINAS
Rizal admitted his inadequacy in a letter to the Austrian ethnographer, _______________, asking him to write a history of the Philippines.
Ferdinand Blumentritt
- Rizal seems to have been reflecting on his country’s history shortly after completing
Noli me tangere, in late February 1887, and obviously drawing on the popular Tagalog
proverb, ____________________
“ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan hindi makararating sa
pinaroroonan.”
In the middle of August 1888, resigned that _____________could not be persuaded to write
a history of the Philippines, Rizal set his literary labors aside and began to work on his country’s history.
Blumentritt
Armed with a letter of introduction from the Director of the India Office Library,
____________ , he applied for and was granted a reader’s pass to the British Museum, where he began to consult early printed materials on the Philippines.
Reinhold Rost
Close to 18 August 1888, Rizal was copying out and annotating the entire first edition
of Morga’s Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, confident that ___________ would publish the work when completed.
Antonio Regidor
He stated in a letter to Blumentritt that his aim was simply to “present a new edition to
the public, above all the Filipino public … I do this solely for my country, because this
work will bring me neither honor nor money”
READ
Regidor unexpectedly backed out of the venture without the courtesy of an explanation. One of Rizal’s friends hinted at _________ , as Regidor was of Spanish extraction.
racism
Rizal decided to publish the Morga himself. By the end of September 1889, he had
brought the manuscript to _________ and sent a letter to Blumentritt requesting him to write an introduction to the book
Paris
The concrete result of four months of 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 mejico en el año de 1609,
nuevamente sacada a luz y anotada por Jose Rizal, y 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).
READ
Full Spanish and English title of Annotation of Rizal of Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas
Sucesos de las islas Filipinas
por el Doctor Antonio de Morga. Obra publicada en mejico en el año de 1609,
nuevamente sacada a luz y anotada por Jose Rizal, y 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).
Morga’s fame (or infamy) came in 1600 when he was put in charge of the Spanish fleet against a Dutch invasion under Olivier van Noort. Morga’s reputation in the colony
sank, like his flagship, and in 1603 he was transferred to Mexico.
READ
Antonio de Morga was born in 1559 in Seville. He graduated from the ________________ in 1574 and in 1578 attained a doctorate in Canon Law. He taught briefly in Osuna, later returning to Salamanca to study Civil Law. In 1580 he joined the
government service and was appointed in 1593 to Manila as Lieutenant Governor. In
1598 he resigned this post to assume the office of oidor or judge in the Audiencia.
University of Salamanca
A particularly malicious biographical note on Morga is provided by ___________ in his
three-volume Aparato Bibliografico de la Historia General de Filipinas (Bibliographical
Apparatus for a General History of the Philippines) published in 1906.
W.E. Retana
Retana cites a domestic scandal to comment on Morga’s character involving ___________,
Morga’s eldest daughter.
Juliana
- From Mexico, Morga was moved to ___________in 1615 where he was president of the Audiencia and in 1625 was investigated for corruption and eventually found guilty.
- However, he escaped humiliation, and the gallows, by dying in 1636, before the case
was wound up.
Quito
Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas
The work consists of eight chapters;
1. Of the first discoveries of the Eastern islands.
2. Of the government of Dr. Francisco de Sande
3. Of the government of Don Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñalosa
4. Of the government of Dr. Santiago de Vera.
5. Of the government of Gomes Perez Dasmariñas.
6. Of the government of Don Francisco Tello
7. Of the government of Don Pedro de Acuña
8. An account of the Philippine Islands.
READ
The first seven chapters mainly concern the ____________ that occurred in the colony during the terms of the first _______ governor generals in the Philippines, beginning with _______________ in 1565 to _____________who died in June 1606.
political events
eleven
Miguel Lopez de Legaspi
Pedro de Acuña
In his preface to the Morga, Rizal states that he did not change a single word in the text, save those that required respelling in modern Spanish orthography or corrected punctuation.
Born and raised in the ignorance of our past, like most of you, without voice or authority to speak about what we did not see nor study, I considered it necessary to invoke the testimony of an illustrious Spaniard who governed the destiny of the Philippines at the beginning of her new era and witnessed the last moments of our ancient nationality. Therefore, it is the shadow of the civilization of our ancestors that the author now evokes before you. The high office, the nationality, and merits of Morga, together with the data and testimonies of his contemporaries,
mostly Spanish, recommend the work for your thoughtful consideration (Rizal 1890, preface).
READ
For present-day Filipinos, chapter __________ is the most interesting, because it describes the preHispanic Filipinos, or rather the Indios, at the Spanish contact. This same chapter was indispensable for Rizal, not only for its ethnographic value but more to help him reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Philippines which Rizal wanted to present to his countrymen.
eight
Why did Rizal choose Morga over other Spanish chronicles? Why does he recommend Morga to his countrymen?
Rizal’s choice of reprinting Morga rather than other contemporary historical accounts of the Philippines was due to the following reasons:
* The original book was rare;
* Morga was a layman, not a religious chronicler;
* Rizal felt Morga to be more “objective” than the religious writers whose accounts
included many miracle stories;
* Morga, compared to religious chroniclers, was more sympathetic to the Indios; and
* Morga was not only an eyewitness but a major actor in the events he narrates.
READ
Rizal’s First Consideration:
Rarity of Morga
Morga’s Sucesos was originally published in ___________ in 1609 and was therefore rare. In his introduction, Blumentritt notes 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”
Mexico
- In 1971, when___________________ of University College London translated, edited, and annotated the latest edition of Morga for the Hakluyt Society, he listed just _____________ extant copies of the Morga in libraries and other research institutions.
J.S. Cummins
twenty-five
Morga was disseminated 259 years after its original publication in a widely read English
translation by H.E.J. Stanley, published in London by the Hakluyt Society in 1868 under
the title The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China at the
close of the Sixteenth Century, which is misleading, since the book is basically on Spain in the Philippines, and describes, mainly, how the colony was used as a foothold in Asia, from which other Spanish expeditions were launched.
READ
- The original Spanish text of 1609 had never been reprinted in full until the annotated
Rizal edition came off the press of _____________ in Paris in 1889
Gamier Hermanos
After the Rizal edition, there was a magnificent edition by ____________________, which saw print in 1909.
- What makes Retana’s edition invaluable is the primary source material, by Morga
himself and other contemporaries, drawn from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville,
which amplifies and enriches the main text. Its only drawback is that it is inaccessible
to those who cannot read Spanish.
Wenceslao Emilio Retana
- In the Philippines, Rizal’s Morga was reissued in photo-offset reproduction only in
1958, by which time 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 has proven unsatisfactory compared with the most popular English edition of Morga at present - that by J.S. Cummins published by the Hakluyt Society in 1971. - These bibliographical notes not only stress the rarity of the original but also reveal that
Rizal was not satisfied with the Stanley edition, which he thought contained errors of fact and interpretation that required correction. The eighth chapter, for example, is a titillating description of the sexual habits of the pre-Hispanic Indios. - Although he was doing his research in London, it is strange that Rizal did not contact or correspond with Stanley regarding the Morga. Rizal felt, like Blumentritt who wrote the introduction, that the annotations to Morga should be made not by a foreigner but by an Indio.
READ
Rizal’s Second Consideration:
Provided a Civil Account of the Philippines during the Colonial Period
Rizal’s second consideration for the choice of Morga was that it was the only civil, as opposed to religious or ecclesiastical, history of the Philippines written during the colonial period. Chronicles by Spanish colonial officials (or non-religious) were rare, making ___________ , for over two centuries, the only secular general history of the Philippines in print. The main complaint against religious historians was that they dealt more with church history than the history of the
Philippines and its people.
Morga
- A general history of the Philippines was an ambitious undertaking considering the rarity
of secular and, more importantly, Indio historians. Until Rizal’s edition of Morga, there was no history of the Philippines written by an Indio or one written from the viewpoint of the Indio.
READ
In 1925, the American historian ___________ pointed out that as the Philippines had been a colony of Spain, the histories of the Philippines written during the colonial period were nothing but chapters in the larger history of Spain. In short, what was available was not a history of the
Philippines, but a history of Spain in the Philippines. This idea was acted upon by Teodoro A. Agoncillo in the 1960/s, who, like Rizal, espoused the writing of Philippine history from the Filipino point of view as opposed to that of the foreigner.
Austin Craig
The third consideration for the choice of Morga was Rizal’s opinion that this secular account was more ___________, more trustworthy, than those written by the religious missionaries which were liberally sprinkled with tales of miracles and apparitions:
All the histories written by the religious before and after Morga, up to our days, abound with stories of devils, miracles, apparitions, etc. These form the bulk of the voluminous histories of the Philippines.
objective
