In late April of this year, it will be 450th anniversary of the killing of Fray Diego de Herrera, OSA, and his companions in the hands of the natives of Batalay, Bato, Catanduanes. But that bloody incident in 1576 had a twin: the mass murder of the natives by Spanish soldiers to avenge the deaths of their compatriots. By and large, this second retaliatory massacre had never been openly spoken of. It disappeared from memory. Fifty years ago in April 1976, the Bishop of Virac Msgr. Jose C. Sorra spearheaded the 4th centenary of the first set of killings, framing it in a religious context as the moment of Christianization of the island of Catanduanes, rendered with uncommon drama because it was attended by the sowing of the blood of martyrs. To commemorate the event, there was mounted a theatrical staging by the drama company of the Catanduanes State Colleges (now university) the Hablon Dawani, from a script by Dr. Antonio Zantua titled The Long Shadow of the Cross. Understandably, the reenactment was limited only to the first massacre; the second one was simply ignored as if it did not happen.
The title of the performance apparently had reference to the Holy Cross of Batalay which is the object of a long-standing popular devotion. It is believed to contain the remains of the original cross that was planted on the grave of Fray Diego when it was supposed to have been identified at the instigation of the Bishop of Nueva Caceres during the Spanish regime. At present, there is active campaign for the cause of sainthood of Fray Diego and companion clerics being spearheaded by the Order of Saint Augustine, which administers the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows in Batalay based in the Shrine of the Holy Cross.
This two-part series aims to take account of three points-of-view on how the twin massacres in 16th century Batalay may be interpreted. These three are the 1) “martyrdom” narrative, 2) the “resistance to colonization” narrative, and 3) the folk narrative. The first one is the official stand of the institutional Catholic Church. The second is oppositional to the first but had hardly been spelled out on any occasion. The third falls somewhere in between the first and the second, and is propagated as folklore. The first two versions is tackled in this Part 1, and the third will be discussed in Part 2.
The double massacres
But first, let’s get at the “bare facts” of the two sets of mass killings. We get to know about them courtesy of Spanish primary documents that recorded the events. There are various sources on this matter, but most useful is a compendium of documents under the title Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas (Conquest of the Philippine Islands), 1565 – 1615 (1998 edition), by Gaspar de San Agustin, OSA. It is a chronicle of the relevant mission work of the Augustinians of the Philippines for the indicated period. Since Fray Diego was an Augustinian cleric, his work and fate was well represented in the chronicles.
Fray Diego was an important personality in the evangelization undertaking of the Spaniards at the point of conquest. He was with the expedition of the conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi that came in from Mexico in 1565 to colonize the Philippines. He saw the hardships of pioneering occupation of a strange and far-off territory west of the Pacific that for the most part was hostile. He was an indefatigable worker for the faith and was instrumental for the conversion of the Cebuano chief Rajah Tupas and his people. Seeing the need for more mission workers, he traveled back to Mexico to recruit missionaries. Eventually, he went to Spain and pleaded before King Philip II to send more clerics to the new colony. Convinced, the King granted him 40 missionaries. With his band of recruits, he proceeded to Mexico and prepared for the long haul across the Pacific. On November 18, 1575, they sailed towards the Philippines aboard the galleon Espiritu Santo. What else, it was said that Fray Diego was to be appointed as first bishop of Manila as soon as he arrived there.
After about four months on the high seas, they were about to reach their destination. Unfortunately in April 23, 1576, their ship floundered due to bad weather as it tried to enter the Embocadero at the south end of Sorsogon, and got shipwrecked in Nagngangang Buaya Point on the southeast of Catanduanes. The passengers were able to stagger to safety and reached what is now Batalay in Bato town. However, they were met with hostility by the natives of Batalay and were summarily killed. Bikol historian Mariano Goyena del Prado wrote that the the Spanish refugees were at first given aid by the native, However, when they started to preach a new religion, the Batalay folk retreated to the forests. The Spaniards then sought them in attempts to bring them back to the village. In the process, sporadic encounters ensued between the intruders and the natives. One rainy night, the folk swooped down on the Spaniards and killed them, including Fray Diego.
That incident was big deal for the Spanish mandate that was just trying to make foothold in the new colony. It was such a loss, considering that converting the natives to their faith was a central strategy in gaining control. About a year after the event, the Spaniards exacted revenge meant to demonstrate to the natives their power. The task was executed by Pedro de Chavez who was in-charge of establishing the province of Camarines. He led a contingent of soldiers to Batalay and brutally murdered the natives. The deed was casually mentioned in San Agustin’s work, in a chapter intended to describe the various islands of the archipelago (“A little Philippine geography”). In describing Catanduanes, it made mention of the punishment meted the natives of Batalay. The quote was intended to demonstrate the “cruel” disposition of the people of Catanduanes in “ancient time” and how their population was decimated by the punishment meted on them. It said:
“In ancient times, they were a cruel people as the men of the galleon Espiritu Santo realized when they lost their galleon to them in 1576. However, the punishment levied on them by Pedro de Chavez taught them a lesson and left them meek. At one time they had two thousand families as inhabitants, but at present they are very few in number” (Conquistas p. 69).
Martyrdom vs. resistance narratives
How do we make sense of this bloody chain of events four and a half centuries ago? Fundamentally, there are two ways of seeing, depending upon whose point of view one looked at it. Firstly, in the eyes of the Catholic Church (and the colonial power), it was about the waging of the blood of martyrs. This was the explicit position the San Gaspar chronicles took, and expectedly so. Martyrdom for the faith is such a central aspect in the life of the Catholic Church. Tradition says that the propagation of the good news of salvation had prospered only by the sacrifice of martyrs. A martyr is one who by bearing witness to the faith, accepts whole-heartedly the supreme sacrifice of one’s own life, in emulation of Jesus himself.
The martyrdom narrative therefore had been emphatically expressed in the chronicles. In one typical passage, the Batalay natives were liable to have:
“watered the earth with the blood of the religious, recording on the sands the cruelty of the tyrants, and the constancy by which the religious tolerated such cruel death at their hands.”
Furthermore,
“Some consider these apostolic religious as martyrs, because of the circumstances of their deaths and by their having suffered at the hand of the enemies of our holy faith.”
To impute martyrdom, there had to be opposing attitudes between victims and perpetrators. The former were singular in their efforts to preach the faith but with utmost humility and vulnerability, while the latter were fierce in their rejection to the point of inflicting violence.
But wittingly or unwittingly, the very same chronicling by the Spaniards hinted on the contrary “resistance to colonization” narrative. While displaying colonialist bias with clearly derisive characterization of the natives, the accounts managed to represent the uncommon courage and determination of the folk of Batalay to protect their way of life. What they showed was a strong sense of independence. Consider the following quote from the account of the cleric Alonzo Jimenez de Carmona who became pastor in the town of Bato and who supposedly extracted a confession from a native witness of the events in 1576:
“The old man recounted how the religious, having landed, went with the rest of those who were saved to a rock jutting out to the sea where they set up a cross. The islanders were hidden, and recognized them as religious because of the habits they wore. They decided to kill the religious before murdering the others since the religious were viewed as enemies of their laws, who had come to teach them a new religion contrary to theirs” (underscoring mine).”
So in the eyes of the natives, the Spaniards were seen as enemies, making particular target of the religious who they knew were out to change their laws, customs and beliefs. Presumably, these natives must have heard of the predatory deeds of the foreigners in the neighboring islands, and of the implications brought earlier in 1573 by the expedition of Juan de Salcedo in his initial forays in the island of Catanduanes. Face to face now with the enemy, the natives made decisive move to prevent their inroads. If anything, it was an early anti-colonial enterprise by the people of Batalay.
Sisay ang bida, sisay ang kontrabida?
If the Batalay saga was a movie, the martyrdom narrative will assign the protagonist role to the proselytizers and the antagonists being the hostile natives. But this is reversed when seen in the point of view of a freedom-loving Batalay folk. The foreigners become kontrabida to the aspirations for independence of the bida, the natives. But this alternative telling has never been thought out loud: after three centuries the folk converted to Catholicism and seemed to have adopted the lens of the Church. Even so, the ordinary folk refused to demonize their forefathers, as will be demonstrated in a third strand of narrative that will be discussed in Part 2.
One last point to call attention to in this Part 1. The double massacres in Batalay neatly summarize the very strategy of the Spaniards in subduing the natives: a combination of soft and hard tactics, contradictory but complementary. The former is a cultural means, which was the preaching of the Christian faith based on love; the second was a political means that used brute force. These integrated approaches were applied on the people of Batalay which brought the extreme outcome of two mass killings, one each for the soft and hard applications. Santong dasalan-santong paspasan rolled into one. What else, the centrality of the Cross in the Batalay saga lends poetic symbolism. Some analysts before had used the metaphor of the cross/sword to describe the double-sided scheme, pointing out that the sword is none but the inverted cross.
The experience of colonization is one most traumatic but complex. Part 2 tackles the third narrative spawned by the folk and will explore on this complexity.
(to be continued)