What may be called the Batalay saga of 1576 was a most dramatic event at the start of the Spanish regime in Catanduanes. It was composed of two mass killings that happened after a Spanish galleon ship was shipwrecked off the coast of Batalay in what is now the town of Bato. The first one involved the deaths of the passengers of the ship led by Fray Diego de Herrera, OSA, in the hands of the natives. The second was where Spanish soldiers massacred the natives in retaliation of the first. Of these twin massacres, the first one is the more famous while the other is practically unheard of. In Part 1, we identified two opposing ways of making sense of the killings of Fray Diego and his company, namely a “martyrdom” narrative and a “resistance against colonization” narrative. These two interpretive lenses represent reversals of the bida-kontrabida roles in the story depending on which point-of-view it is told. However, the “resistance” version is not the one held by the ordinary folk. In this Part 2, we elaborate on a third manner of telling that situates somewhere in between the two versions, that took shape in word-of-mouth transmission through generations among the people.
The Batalay folklore
Many of us Catandunganons heard of the Batalay saga from stories told by the old folk. I heard of it as a child from my own mother. I was awed at the fantastic features of the narrative involving a multitude of flying duwall or swordfish brought in by a storm that pierced though walls, banana trunks and humans. It was supposedly God’s own wrath for the death of His missionaries. But the folk version offers much more to it than the mythical aspects. It is more expansive than the cryptic and black-and-white accounts in Spanish chronicles, with more nuances and depth. In 1952, the oral tradition of the Batalay saga was committed to written form in the Historical Data Papers (HDP), a compendium of historical and cultural information compiled through a mandate by the Bureau of Public Schools. Public school teachers were directed to gather the necessary information in respective localities all over the country, the results of which were submitted and now form part of the National Library collection. For the town of Bato, a wealth of oral accounts on the Batalay saga were recoded. In fact, there were four versions told of the same story in the HDP. But such is the nature of oral folklore: it is liable to vary as it is transmitted word-of-mouth through time. Even so, there is a basic plot line threading through the four varieties of telling that comes in three acts – 1) the initial friendly relations between the Spanish refugees and the natives, 2) the violent conflict that developed between the two, and 3) the punishment.
- The encounter between two peoples
By folk reckoning, it was clear that the people of Batalay treated the Spanish refugees with genuine hospitality. They provided them with basic provisions for survival: food, clothing, shelter, safety. The newcomers even mingled with the native freely and engaged with their various aspects of daily living. In fact, the Spaniards minded the people’s ways of seeing and doing things that they deemed backward, and introduced their own supposedly superior ways of thinking and practices. By and large, the locals were tolerant. The oral accounts did not mention that the clerics preached a new religion, but it can be assumed. However, it was specified that the foreigners introduced practices in the more practical aspects, matters of know-how and technology. The historian Mariano Goyena del Prado wrote that the Spaniards introduced “new methods of agriculture and better ways of community living.”
The particular aspect that the oral tradition zeroed in was on the way that a pregnant woman delivered a child. It said that the natives resorted to cutting up the belly of a woman, a practice called “bosbos” where the mother died. Fray Diego was said to have volunteered to assist delivery in such a situation, such that the life of the mother was saved. It earned the natives’ approval of their visitors and established goodwill between them.
- From amity to discord
The enmity started when Fray Diego failed to save the life of the Batalay chieftain’s wife (or daughter in another version). In one account, it said the cleric was still assisting in a case of difficult child delivery when the chieftain’s wife needed the same urgent ministration. Fray Diego came too late the hero. The loss of his beloved so enraged the chieftain. He punished the priest by enslaving him. He subjected him to hard labor such as fetching water and firewood throughout the day without giving him food. Finally, when too weak to work, he was made to dig his own grave and was buried alive. Then the rest of his companions either ran away in terror or were killed.
- The punishment
While the first two parts of the oral lore appeared thoroughly plausible, this third and final chapter crossed over to the mythical and make-believe realm. Shortly after the killing of Fray Diego and most of his companions, a particularly vicious storm battered Batalay. The surge from the sea carried with it a horde of duwall or flying fish that brought havoc, piercing through walls of homes and impaling many of the people. Those who survived tried to eat the fish but were poisoned. Others ran to the mountains only to be met by ferocious monkeys who clubbed them to death with rocks. It was seen as God’s punishment for the death of Fray Diego and the others. In one version, it said that the very few survivors left Batalay altogether and relocated to what is now the poblacion of Bato.
Making sense of the Batalay oral lore
The more “scientifically” minded will readily dismiss folklore as figment of imagination that at best provide amusement. But we know better than that. Myths, for example, are told to convey deep meanings. Think of the creation myth, which we are told is not to be taken literally. The idea is that the telling of stories by the folk has both 1) basis in experience and 2) functions to make sense of reality. The Batalay saga as told by ordinary people has to be taken not as straight-forward representation of historical facts. It is best understood as “social memory” or a collective way of remembering and retelling the past to make sense of it in the present. It is a repackaging to suit particular purposes, albeit mostly in the subconscious.
As reconstructed above, the first two acts of the folk narrative are thoroughly plausible and can be treated as recollection of actual historical turn of events as experienced by the natives involved. The third, however, is more of the extraordinarily fantastic and may be seen as more symbolic than factual. Symbolic or metaphoric rendering is resorted to when something is particularly of compelling and intense meaning.
Let us then look at the first two acts. What do they tell us? At the outset, it dispels the Spanish chroniclers’ version of representing the Batalay natives as “cruel” and outrightly bereft of empathy to the misfortunes of the refugees. They were in fact extra hospitable who shared their resources to needy victims of tragedy. What more, the natives were tolerant of the visitors in introducing their own culture, who it must be pointed out had strong motivations to get the upper hand: they were a conquering people. The discord only came about when their promise of a better way failed when it mattered most, which is the life of the native chief’s loved ones. The resulting violence was about the rage of utter grief and frustration.
Even if the third and final act of the Batalay drama might look dissonant with the first two, it can still appear realistic and natural to the Catandunganon because it is about a very familiar phenomenon: the fierce battery of a typhoon that had always been viewed as God-sent and purposive. Basically, this part of the story is a tacit recognition that the Batalay folk of 1576 committed a serious violation of moral principles and deserved to be punished. What is remarkable is the uncanny parallel of imageries with the cold but factual accounts of the Spanish chronicles. The punishing force came in from the sea: as a flotilla of Pedro de Chavez’s soldiers all intent for the kill, or a tempest of a storm that brought an army of seething swordfish. The deadly swords of the soldiers became the long and sharp beaks of the fish. Finally, the anger of the Spanish mandate was reimagined into the very wrath of God.
It can be reasonably speculated that this third act is a transposition of historical fact into metaphoric rendering. It was not intentionally done; it would have evolved through generations of tellers of the story. But what could be the reason for it? Fundamentally, the narrative transformation of the third act is about the framing of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines as God’s own will, the colonizer’s wielding of authority as being divinely ordained. In terms of the psychology of the natives, this literary repackaging could have functioned to dissipate the trauma of colonization. It must be noted that the Catandunganons eventually embraced Spain’s colonial enterprise and influences, particularly the new religion which they came to love and embrace as their very own. The harsh manner by which the Spaniards have imposed themselves on the natives was somehow devolved and remembered in more palatable terms by camouflaging its bluntness with transcendental framing. .
To be sure, the folk version of the story has never been recognized by the institutional Church in any of its official accounts, having limited its view by the martyrdom narrative. But it remained as the dominant aspect of popular religiosity that the Church neither accepted nor denied. It was some incredulous tale of supernatural wonder that would be difficult to prove, even as it is tolerated for its pro-faith value. Meanwhile, the Pedro de Chavez retaliatory response to the killings of Fray Diego and company remained buried and obscure in the chronicles, never acknowledged; it would suggest an “eye-for-an-eye” scheme that would cancel out the selfless sacrifice of martyrs. It may well b argued that the second massacre is irrelevant to the martyrdom issue, but then it must be pointed out that the sacrifice of the propagators of the faith happened in the context of colonization.
To sum up, what are the basic points being conveyed by folk wisdom as regards the Batalay saga? What did they choose to remember of that traumatic event in 1576? First is that the pre-colonial natives of Batalay were not the cold-hearted and cruel people represented in the Spanish chronicles. They were genuinely hospitable and caring for the needs of strangers, especially victims of misfortune at sea. They were seafarers themselves after all. Secondly, while they had their virtues, they had weaknesses. Their tragic flaw as that they were disposed to rage in the face of unbearable loss. This last point somehow humanized the Batalay forebears. It also goes to show that the following generations refused to demonize and disown them as patently bad. In effect, the folk tradition does not assign the Batalay natives of 1576 the role of martyr-makers. Even so, they were guilty of a wrong-doing and deserved punishment meted by the Almighty, as the final episode of the story had it.
As such, the folk’s remembrance served to maintain continuity of the distant past with the present. The Batalay folk (and by extension the Catandunganons), by telling the story in their own terms have rendered the trauma of colonization amenable to what they eventually made of themselves. When contemporary Catandunganons characterize themselves as “deeply religious and peace-loving” it is not about disconnecting themselves from their forebears but an affirmation of their basic humanity that is both constant and evolving.