A prewar Pinoy Indiana Jones
On Dec. 31, 1936, Graphic magazine released the first in a series of features on interesting books and manuscripts in the National Library. NVM Gonzalez wrote about a “Rare Bonga Bark Manuscript” written in pre-Spanish Visayan that National Library Director James Alexander Robertson hailed in 1912 as “one of the most important literary finds ever made in the country.”
These mysterious manuscripts have intrigued me for a long time because all we have left of them are faded photographs, like that reproduced in the 1936 Graphic. The manuscripts were all destroyed, as collateral damage, during the Battle for Manila in 1945. They were significant as proof of pre-Spanish Filipino civilization, and were also unique because of the material used: Instead of paper our ancestors used the bark of the bonga tree, and for ink they used the colorfast black liquid from cuttlefish!
According to NVM Gonzalez, the manuscripts were framed and put on display in the National Library that gratefully received them from Jose E. Marco of Pontevedra, Negros Occidental, in 1912. Marco has different versions of how he acquired the manuscripts. One is that he bought them from a certain mountaineer named Ygo Syka for the magnificent sum of P18 and then exchanged them for rare Filipiniana in the National Library. The more complicated story sounds like a storyline from Indiana Jones. In a letter to National Library Director Robertson dated Nov. 9, 1912, Luther Parker narrated:
“[Marco] tells me that he secured this piece of hollow wood from a cave near La Castellana, Occidental Negros, in the territory of ‘Papa Isio.’ This cave is called Camesana, locally, and in it was found an idol of wood somewhat resembling the bull. It had six wooden legs and two horns. The horns were made of a single piece of wood that gives evidence of great age. The horns were hollow and contained the writings sent you, wrapped in a covering of wax a few pieces of which I have brought you with one of the horns.
“It seems the man who accompanied Mr. Marco to the cave was a cargador [he was a certain Rivera who served as a corporal in the Guardia Civil, fought Papa Isio, but is now imprisoned in Bilibid. He] chopped the piece of wood forming horns in two and started to burn it in order to cook some food. Mr. Marco rescued this horn and due to the weight of the rest of the idol left it there at the cave where it may possibly be yet. The idol is locally known as ‘Vaca-vaca sang catalonan.’”
To validate this fantastic story and possibly to retrieve the bull-head idol, a team of American researchers was sent to Negros in late 1912, resulting in this report to the Bureau of Science dated Jan. 6, 1913, from Merton Miller:
“On December 23rd when our guide [Jose E. Marco] had returned from Iloilo we started to visit the cave at a place called Kamansanai where the three [manuscripts] which had been sent to Manila were said to have been found but there were no caves there.
“We went on the same day to La Castellana. On December 24 I visited the cave about an hour’s travel from La Castellana. It was near the top of a steep, cogon-covered hill and was a small cleft in the rock, rather than a cave. I was just able to crawl through the entrance and could sit upright inside but could not stand up. The cleft extended into the mountain not more than five meters and contained nothing but broken rock.
“It was in this opening that the three old manuscripts written in Bisaya characters were said to have been found. [Marco] told us that when he first visited the cave there was in it a six-legged wooden animal to which was attached the wooden ‘horn’ now in the Museum. In this ‘horn’ the manuscripts were said to have been found. While the guide was away the man with him had cut up the wooden figure to make a fire for cooking rice and only the ‘horn’ remained.
“After visiting the cave and hearing our guide’s account of the animal and the manuscripts. I reached the conclusion that in all probability there was never any [idol with] this ‘horn’ and probably not in this cave at all. My distrust of the guide’s statements was due to several things, the principal of which was that his stories were not always the same. Furthermore, it seems extremely unlikely that the guide and men with him would have carried uncooked rice with them up this hill when there was a house near the foot that they could reach within an hour after leaving the cave.
“I think it much more likely that the manuscripts came into the hands of the man who sent them to Manila in some way which he prefers not to tell and so he has invented the account of their having been found in the ‘horn’ of the wooden animal in a cave.”
A separate report by Luther Parker also said: no cave, no idol. In 1919, Norberto Romualdez studied these bark manuscripts and concluded that based on the orthography and a reference to the “Ibong Adarna,” these were made in modern times. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the bark manuscripts remained on display in the National Library from 1912 until 1945, providing Jose E. Marco, the Pinoy Indiana Jones, a long career creating forgeries that have entered Philippine life and textbooks, like the Code of Kalantiaw and the novel “La Loba Negra” by Fr. Jose Burgos.
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