We have the sailors, but where are the ships?

In the Fifties when he was director of the National Library, the historian Carlos Quirino talked with me about the origins of Philippine cartography. He himself had collected a lot of old maps showing our country as it was then perceived by the early seafarers. In the course of our conversation, he convinced me that the first man to sail around the globe was Filipino – a Cebuano named Enrique, who was the slave of Magellan. He was named after Henry, the navigator, the Portuguese ruler who was the patron of the adventurous seafarers of the time.

I know that the Malaysians claim him as theirs because he was supposed to have been picked up from Malacca by Magellan in his first trip to our part of the world, following the old route from Spain, down the coast of Africa to the Indian Ocean then to Southeast Asia. But according to Pigafetta who chronicled Magellan’s voyage, when they reached the archipelago, Enrique spoke Cebuano, which truly revealed his origins.

Enrique’s story fascinated me. In the Fifties I was traveling all over the islands, sometimes with the assistance of the Philippine Navy on whose patrol boats I sailed to the farthest point in the North, the Batanes group. And all the way to Sabtang island. The sea was rough and Sabtang had no harbor, surrounded as it is by high cliffs. A boat that was not maneuvered right could be smashed by the waves against those rocks. To get to the island, lines were thrown to the boats so that cargo and humans could then swing on these lines to the shore.

Then down to the Tawi-Tawi islands and all the way to Sitangkai and its Samal house boats, the water so clear, the bottom with its corals and its marine life were visible. No visa was needed to go to North Borneo (now Sabah) – after all it is the property of the Sultan of Sulu, merely leased to the British North Borneo Company. That lease is still in effect and the Malaysian government still pays lease fee to the heirs of the Sultan. It brought to mind how Rizal had considered populating North Borneo with Filipinos. I was very fortunate to have known the first officers of our post-war Navy, Commodore Jose Francisco, Captain Carlos Albert and Commander Ramon Alcaraz. Once, I went around the Sulu sea for a couple of weeks as guest of then Lt. (j.g.) Alex Melchor who had just returned from Annapolis, the US Naval Academy,

I was in my twenties and working in the old Manila Times, I believed with our Navy leaders then that we should build a strong navy and a modern maritime industry. This was so obvious; we are an archipelago, like Japan and Britain which were maritime powers.

We have a tradition in seamanship, in ship building as well. When the Portuguese came here before Magellan, they were surprised to see the wooden ships of the natives bigger and better that theirs. Those Manila galleons that dared the Pacific for two hundred years, they were built in Cavite, Bataan, Bicol and Pangasinan. Their hulls were made of our hardest wood, molave, and the canon balls of the British buccaneers merely bounced off them.

Our Navy, then and now, had hand-me-down tubs from the US Navy. Interisland shipping was with those World War II FS ships – there were no cabins for passengers who slept on deck on canvas cots.

Even today, the cost of shipping from Manila to Davao is higher than shipping from Manila to Oakland in California.

The late "Admiral" Tomas Cloma took me to Freedom Land – the Spratleys. We could have claimed and settled all those islands then. I talked with the late Carlos Fernandez of Compana Maritima, with Mike Magsaysay of Magsaysay Shipping Lines, and because we were only 25 million then, it was easy to talk with President Quirino. They all agreed, we needed a powerful navy, a ship building industry. To achieve these, we needed metallurgists, ship designers, a maritime academy, a naval academy. And at its base – a steel industry. So in my first novel, The Pretenders, written in late fifties, a major character is an industrialist who sets up a steel mill. But nothing happened.

I was watching on TV the other evening a documentary on the shipbuilding facility in Pusan, South Korea, and how this ship building giant is now building the biggest tankers, the biggest cruise ships and that Korea had wrested from Japan and other European shipbuilding nations the supremacy in the maritime industry.

For those of us who saw Korea shortly after the Korean war, we are impressed by such a development for Korea in the fifties was prostrate, its cities destroyed. Seoul in those days was a warren of blackened buildings, the bridge over the Han river was in shambles, Kimpo airport was a collection of ramshackle buildings surrounded by mud huts . All those mountains that run all the way down to Pusan were bare–the shale shining through. Indeed, Korean recovery is one of the miracles of the 21st century.

I haven’t travelled by ship in to any part of the archipelago during the last 40 years, having done this by plane. I have retained memories of those days when I travelled to the South on these FS ships and we the passengers had to sleep on deck. Last year, I took the ferry from Ormoc to Cebu in a very sleek, modern craft which navigated that distance in just two hours. I was simply amazed. And recently, too, Endika Aboitiz told me that ferry was built at the Aboitiz shipyard in Cebu, that their new super ferries boast of the latest facilities, and that most of all, they are building similar boats for export. At long last, we have the real beginnings of a maritime industry. The administration’s roll on roll off ferries are now in place, and are being improved. It won’t be far off then when most probably, we will have those giant ferry boats like they have in Scandinavia which can carry even railroads in their belly, cargo trucks that will cut shipping time from Mindanao to Manila.

Eventually I hope that we will be building our own patrol boats to watch our coastline which is much longer than that of the United States.

Today, some 200,000 Filipinos are seamen; there is no ship on international waters without a Filipino on board, from deck hand to ship captain. In the cruise ships, if they are not crew members, they are musicians and entertainers. The US Navy now has officers who are of Filipino ancestry.

I hope that eventually we will have our own maritime school and naval academy, preferably in Davao. Eventually, we will not rely on the Philippine Military Academy alone to produce our military elites – the Naval Academy and the Police Academy will see to it that, that kind of elitism which is responsible for the rash of coup attempts will be banished.

Recently, too, Doris Magsaysay Ho who now heads the Magsaysay Shipping Company sent me an outline for the modernization of the maritime industry. I hope that such plans will be realized soonest. As the Aboitizes have already shown, those ships can be built here. We have the men, the technology – now we must have the will to lift this country from its banca mentality.

But to go back to that tired, old question, why did we not build a maritime industry fifty years ago? Why were we left behind by Korea, Taiwan, and all of Southeast Asia when we were so far ahead of these countries. Whose fault is it?

Even today, our rich Chinese ship their profits from their shopping malls and businesses to develop Saipan, Guam; they continue to funnel their dollars to San Francisco, to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Don’t they have any sense of gratitude at all to this country which had bloated them with wealth, no sense of shame?

When will our very rich mestizos and recalcitrant Indios become Filipinos?