Ancient maps and the rise of a nation

Geography used to be required, or part of social science subjects, in elementary and high school until it was pulled out long ago. Nobody noticed nor howled to ask for its return.

Geography, where one memorizes the names of countries and their capital city, is probably considered a useless subject but it does make a young Filipino more cosmopolitan, more marketable in a global world.

I guess geography has been merged with other subjects and is tucked away in the new K-to-12 and college general education curricula.

“Intermediate Geography” by Miller and Polley was the last textbook used in Philippine schools in the 1950s that probably became extinct when people realized that except for Mayon volcano on the cover, the content was exactly the same as the 1918 edition!

My appreciation of how the physical shape of the Philippines came to be took root outside of a classroom while browsing the Lopez Museum map collection, fascinated first by its antiquity, and later by the way it told the story of how the nation came to be.

It included the earliest nautical charts made in the 15th and 16th centuries, jealously guarded by the Portuguese and Spanish that both claimed rights to the islands following the 1493 Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” issued by Pope Alexander VI that cut the world in half like an orange and granted rights to discover the unknown world to the competing crowns of Portugal and Spain.

It is not well-known that the Philippines fell on the Portuguese side. Dutch mapmakers entered the game in the 17th century charting the known world and carving out what we know as Indonesia that, in some maps, included the Philippines. Then came Jesuit Father Pedro Murillo Velarde and his 18th-century map that spawned many copies by French and German mapmakers.

Maps show us that Filipinas was under Spain from 1565 to 1898, with a short British interlude of 20 months between 1762 and 1764, followed by the United States from 1898 to 1946, with a Japanese interlude between 1942 and 1945.

Maps, like history, include and exclude depending on the person who made them, and the person reading them. E. Aguilar Cruz introduced me to the Velarde map, guiding me through its cartouche, in French, that stated it was a hydrographic and chorographic map depicting both bodies of water in relation to land arranged by regions.

It was dedicated by governor-general Fernando Valdes Tamon, drawn by Velarde, and printed by Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay in 1734. Cruz’s map was a reduced version made in 1750 in Nuremberg by George Maurice Lowitz and republished in 1760.

He asked me to translate the long text at the bottom of the map, this being a short history from Magellan to Legazpi followed by a detailed listing of the agricultural and mineral products of the islands by region.

Reading it meant going beyond the placenames to looking at the mountains and hills and tracing the path of waterways where people built early settlements that developed into today’s barangays, towns, cities, and provinces that altogether formed el pais (the country).

In the late 19th century, Jose Rizal and his generation saw themselves as hijos del pais (sons of the country), one step into taking Filipinas not as an overseas territory of Spain, but as a nation.

Antique maps of the Philippines are valuable as singles but, when seen in a series, depict in their detailed differences the emergence of a nation.

Velarde’s map may be three centuries old but it gained contemporary relevance when China drew a “nine-dash line” on the map, literally changing the face of the earth. From their point of view, parts of the Philippines are theirs by traditional and “historic” rights, but the South China Sea to them is the West Philippine Sea to us.

Historical rights are irrelevant following agreements in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea but the Philippines has proven that China cannot produce a map older than the 1734 Velarde map showing Panacot (Scarborough Shoal) and Los Bajos de Paragua (Spratlys) in their territory.

It is significant that the three shoals indicated in the map bear the names: Galit (Anger), Panacot (Threat) and Lumbay (Sorrow), ancient names that can be emoticons that express how Filipinos feel about our territorial dispute with China.

Maps teach us more than geography, they teach us nationhood and identity.

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