The sea & me

It’s gloomy outside as I mull over the deserted islands of the south recalling the similarity between South Pacific’s Bali Hai and Sitangkai. I remember nights sitting on deserted beaches catching the moon sneaking in and out of the cumulus clouds, casting a row of light and illuminating the tiniest fishing boats that literally sink into the sea and are hoisted upward to the moon by the waves. 

Could I live on these islands? Yes, but also depending on with whom. Depending on who’d carry the buckets of water up and down my nipa house on stilts. Would I get sunburned? Oh yes, unless I bought sunscreen from Sabah. Could I wear a malong the whole day? Yes, I could. Would I sail? Yes, I would… and wash my clothes? I’d wear my clothes when I wash them. Once upon a time when I arrived in South Ubian, I took a bath on the catwalk with my clothes on using ivory soap and scooped water from a huge Sabahan jar. I was dry in 20 minutes — my clothes and me.

I love the water. White-blue, blue-blue, or dark-blue — however God blessed this element with different colors to be demarcation lines to guide seamen on the depths of the sea. I love boats on the water. They challenge man’s supremacy until the wrath of nature comes along or man’s folly causes accidents on the waters. In the meantime, navigation goes on. I love my defiant pirates who battle horrendous waves or skim through the waters regardless of whether it’s habagat, which is the southwest monsoon that once led them upward to Zamboanga, Masbate, Samar, Sorsogon and Mindoro and downwards during the amihan, or the northeast monsoon with Christian slaves to kidnap and sell or barter in Jolo, Indonesia and Moluccas.

We have reason to be attached to water. Before we were born we floated in our mother’s tummy. Our bodies contain 99 percent water at birth and 70 percent as time goes by. The older we get the less water in our bodies until 50 percent is all that’s left. 

I love riding on boats, but once Beng Matba warned me as it drizzled, “Don’t sing on a boat, the sea spirits will be disturbed.” There went my Broadway repertoire to protect my six Tausug fellow passengers over the Sulu Sea. 

Fr. Ignacio Alcina of 1668 accepted the Filipino belief that if a tree was cut in the dark under the moon after the 22nd of the month, the wood’s soft fibers would cause the wood to crumble to dust three days after. If the tree was cut at midnight the boat would be durable. I was becoming an animist, too, making tiny boats with the Samals to sail as an offering down the river with chicken rice and a hard-boiled egg on it for the powerful deities to cure a disease.

Speedboats are exciting to be on. They splash water on my face. They make me keep close watch over the weather so that I see figures in the sky as the clouds race along with us. First it’s a girl and then it’s a duck and then a snowman. I appreciate God’s power as I count the tiniest flying fish jumping beside our boat. When we had a little sailboat Dad would get just a little angry when I couldn’t shift the sail fast enough to the opposite direction to fight the wind which is why we’d fall into the water. 

In Tawi Tawi we sped by a dugout canoe where two children jumped into the sea and that really scared me. A teacher beside me crouched under a canvas not because it had been storming with waves six feet taller than our boat but because she had eaten all my See’s Chocolates that I brought for Beng Matba. I once owned a lepa from Sitangkai. What joy it was imagining its sailors throw the rope overboard to tie to the dock amid a cacophony of orders. It arrived in Zamboanga towed from Bongao by my favorite agar-agar trader, Islamic. Two years later it disintegrated under the Zamboanga sun and Islamic drowned at sea. Its design was inspired 200 years ago and built in Sibutu for commerce to ply from Sitangkai to Palawan and Sabah from Bongao. What’s left is its rudder and nothing of its beautiful carvings on its bow. Its panday was but a Samal child who eventually became a carpenter taught by his grandfather to make toy boats.

I bet you didn’t know we were valued as carpenters and were carried on Spanish fleets. Of the 700 Filipinos lost in the Singapore expedition in 1616, 200 were carpenters. Their presence in shipyards was not ignored by the Moros tasked to destroy Spanish galleons. Four hundred boat carpenters were carried off in one raid alone in 1617 to work for the Moros from the Christian provinces. 

My notorious but lovable brothers needed assistance to build boats for personal transportation, to attend weddings or wakes, or carry garbage. For the most part my Moros navigated following island chains. Not just in Mindanao was that method practiced — the farmers of Bantayan Island sailed to farm their fields in Cebu, and the miners of Camarines went to work on gold deposits in Masbate. But mainly, Philippine boats were used for four purposes — fishing, trade, warfare and a combination of the last two, which the Spaniards called piracy. 

The human trade was to keep up barter practices, due to the economic disruption of the Spaniards over the Moros. The Moros therefore plundered villages to capture Christians and make them their workhorses to compete with Spanish sealanes, irritating the Spaniards to the point of war because they disrupted the peace in the Visayas and far-off Luzon with Christian captivity.

I used Mao Omar’s boat Darussalem to follow the 18th-century Sulu piratical routes. I remember this advice from Wilson Siao: “You cannot leave without Moner Dumama if you insist to go by boat to Solon.” So in Maguindanao I won the argument as usual and got on the four-seater boat from Cotabato City to cross to Sultan Kudarat when Wilson could have driven me across via the bridge. 

Boat rides electrify my soul and I feel some freedom. Yet I dislike the horrible salt air or wind charging at my hair, which causes a terrible mess. But attaching boat rides with true history has given me the greatest high. Just imagine sailing the route of the royal preacher of Islam Sharif Kabungsuan. 

He landed in this breakwater where I stand now. He encountered cocoa plants, the purest water in Solon River, a tributary of the Pulangi River in Maguindanao where numerous crocodiles lived. 

Today I landed in murky waters after I jumped over the breakwater. 

Having gone by boat to Tongkil several times, a backbreaking 10 to 12 hours expedition on a launch from Zamboanga, I decided to sail to Bongo Island off Cotabato to look for coconut shells that are placed into a pit and burned. Its ashes, I was told by dear friend Herman Montenegro, Angela Arroyo’s dad, could be exported by him as cigarette filters. 

The whole island smelled wonderfully — like women beautifying their hair with coconut oil.

If you want to be like Robinson Crusoe give me a call, I’ll go to Lanao Sur again but on a sturdier ship to sail over its deep blue black water whose depth is 112 meters and the lake is the only outlet for the Agus River. Its swift currents cascade to the famous Ma. Cristina Falls.

Once after jumping over the Lake’s rocks I called in a fisherman in his lone banca as I sat on a rock. He maneuvered his tiny boat between the boulders to fetch Ayub and myself. Very carefully I got into it not noticing the absence of outriggers. The banca kept still because it was squeezed in by two enormous volcanic rocks. On the lake, devoid of embarrassment filled with fear, I swore every time we swayed over the dark lake. 

Ayub Marohomsar was saying, “Relax lang, relax lang Ma’am.” 

I prayed away the minutes as the land got bigger and bigger. Never again will I do that in Lanao Sur except in Pikong’s private port in Sultan Gommander. It’s a private deserted water entry from Cotabato City by pump boat or a commercial ship. Since the 17th century, pirates found safety and sympathy in the nearby Ibus Island just across. 

The motivation for piracy was mainly economic, the enjoyment and profit of the goods acquired, and the sale of slaves. Human acts must truly be judged within the circumstances under which they were committed. Perhaps “our” Abu Sayyaf need economic development in Muslim Mindanao. Evil for us may be good for them. Our Christian expansionism may sell in Luzon but perhaps not in Basilan. Did we Christians create their “violence” on their homeland like the European colonials? 

Time to think harder again.