IN DEPTH
HISTORY OF CEBU
It lies in the navel of an archipelago. Located I in the Visayas,
the country’s central group of island of Cebu and a few
small offshore islands, the most prominent of which are Mactan,
Bantayan and Camotes. The island of Cebu is stark and simple.
Long and narrow (its area 1,707 square miles, its length 122
miles, and nowhere does its width exceed 20 miles), it is spanned
by a saw-toothed Central Cordillera, running north-south, arching
a height of almost 3,400-feet at its center and gradually decreasing
at both ends of the island. The island’s coastline is
very regular, without embayment, and consists of a series of
alternating valleys and ridges reaching down from the central
uplands. Narrow and with very little level land, Cebu’s
distinct settlement pattern consists of elongated towns and
villages hugging the coast.
It is an island turned outwards, defined by its relations to
the outside world. Its principal settlement called Sugbo, which
came to designate the island itself, is blessed by and excellent
harbor, and was a prosperous, modestly sized port in pre-colonial
times. Archaeological evidence indicates that it was already
a settlement site as early as the tenth century and had, by
he early sixteenth century, grown into a fairly complex colony
of some 30 hectares, supported by fishing, agriculture, crafts
and trade. Trade was the main driving force in the local economy
ad Cebu was linked not only to other places in the archipelago
but to China and other economies in Southeast Asia. So significant
was the trade that coursed through the port of Cebu (in which
commodities like rice, millet, gold, cotton, silk, iron implements,
and china ware were exchanged) that, in the early 1900’s,
the anthropologist H. Otley Beyer remarked that Cebu was “truly
a mine of ancient porcelains and other artifacts of pre-Spanish
times.”
The name Sugbo means “to walk in the water,” a reference
to how those who came to the settlement by sea craft had to
wade ashore as the shallow waters prevented boats form reaching
dry land. The name is evocative of arrivals, of the island as
destination, connected to points beyond its shores.
Many had walked in the waters to reach these shores but none
more consequential than the white men who waded ashore on 7
April 1521. These were the men of the Spanish expedition that,
a year and a half earlier, had set sail from Sanlucar de Barrameda
in Spain as a complement of five ships and 237 men in search
of the fabled wealth of the east.
In Cebu, it was not the world of medieval fable they stumbled
into. Yet, they were not wholly unimpressed. They found –as
the expedition’s Italian chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta,
reported – a well-populated port where much gold and large
supplies of rice and millet were in evidence, with richly dressed
inhabitants already quite confident of themselves, unfazed by
strangers, and open o new cultures even as they prized their
own independence.
It was this character that partly explains the events that took
place in the days that followed. Cebuanos under Rajah Humabon,
the leading chieftain of the Cebu port area, played gracious
host to the visitors. They wined and dined them and, in a ceremony
that took place on April 14, “more than 800 Cebuanos”
participated in a rite of baptism in the Catholic faith which
the Spaniards had introduced by the symbolic act of planting
a large wooden cross on the public square of the settlement.
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