Article

Philippines

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Philippines

The Philippines, as documented in the Society’s journal literature, appears not as a unified political entity but as a constellation of maritime spaces, diplomatic flashpoints, and commercial corridors that intersected with British, Spanish, Dutch, and Malay-world interests across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The archipelago’s strategic position as a gateway between the Pacific and the China Seas, combined with the ambiguous sovereignty of the Sulu Sultanate over portions of Mindanao and the northern Borneo coast, made it a persistent subject of hydrographic, diplomatic, and legal inquiry for scholars and officials whose work found publication in the Society’s pages [1, pp. 92–136], [2, pp. 258–273]. The records span from the earliest English surveying of the Sulu waters in the 1760s through the territorial disputes of the 1960s, revealing a continuous thread of engagement with the archipelago’s peripheries rather than its interior [3, p. 184], [1, pp. 92–136], [2, pp. 258–273], [4, pp. 161–170].

Maritime Survey and the Sulu Waters

The earliest English hydrographic account of the waters connecting the Philippines and Borneo derives from the journal of James Rennell, who in 1762–63, at the age of twenty, served as assistant surveyor on the East Indiaman London under the direction of Alexander Dalrymple [1, pp. 92–136]. The voyage constituted the first English survey of the west Borneo coastline, predating James Brooke’s arrival by seventy-seven years, and its primary purpose was to deliver the first English cargo to the Sulu Islands—a consignment valued at £6,000, comprising Indian and European piece goods, iron, and forty tons of cowries [1, p. 98]. The expedition was the fulfilment of a treaty Dalrymple had negotiated with the Sultan of Sulu during a preliminary visit in 1759 [1, pp. 92–136].

Rennell’s manuscript, edited and annotated by Tom Harrisson in 1966, records the passage from Timoan Island through Sulu Road, the anchorage at Abbai harbour, the difficult transit of Balambangan Bay and the Balabar Strait, and the arrival at Sulu itself [1, pp. 92–136]. The account includes the first English observations of the northwest Borneo coastline and a general description of the Sulu Islands, their inhabitants, dress, weapons, food, currency, and political condition under the Sultan [1, pp. 92–136]. Harrisson’s commentary cross-references these observations with Dalrymple’s later publications, particularly the 1769 Plan for Extending the Commerce and the 1792 Essay towards an Account of Sooloo, as well as with subsequent European accounts by Marryat, Mundy, Brooke, Pretyman, and Spenser St. John [1, pp. 92–136].

A recurring theme in the manuscript is the professional dynamic between Rennell and Dalrymple, whose marginal pencil annotations reveal a relationship of correction, rivalry, and mutual dependence [1, pp. 92–136]. The most notable disagreement concerns poisoned weapons: Dalrymple emphatically inscribed “NEVER” in the margin, contradicting Rennell’s observations, yet other contemporary sources support the existence of such weapons in the region [1, pp. 92–136]. Harrisson’s own re-tracing of the route by launch and aircraft in 1965–66 allowed him to verify several geographical observations and to identify the first Borneo landfall as Pulau Tiga, a small island of volcanic origin that Rennell had misidentified as “Mangallom” [1, pp. 111].

The economic observations in the manuscript are of particular interest. The Sulu currency system employed small pieces of coarse Chinese cloth called “Congons,” each passing for a Spanish dollar, with rice in the husk (“Padda”) serving as smaller change; a “Gauton” measure held approximately five wine pints, and a “Ragga” comprised ten Gautons [1, p. 108]. The birds’ nest trade, documented as still active in the 1960s, had generated 965 katis of white nests sold for $20,534 in the first six months of 1964 alone, collected by Dato Galpan’s people at Gomanton, making it the single most valuable commodity still in native hands [1, p. 134].

Diplomatic Contest and the Sulu Sultanate

The Philippines’ significance in British diplomatic history is inseparable from the question of the Sulu Sultanate, which occupied an “ambiguous area” spanning Mindanao, the Sulu archipelago, and the northern coast of Borneo [2, pp. 258–273]. Spain had held nominal sovereignty over Sulu for two and a half centuries without ever establishing effective control, and the loosely structured archipelagic empires of the earlier period collided with nineteenth-century imperialism and evolving notions of sovereignty [2, pp. 258–273].

J.W. Farren, appointed Britain’s first Consul in the Philippines in 1844, was tasked with certifying the origin of sugar imports under the new British tariff regime that reduced duties on non-slave-grown sugar [2, p. 258]. His dispatches, drawn from the Foreign Office archives by Nicholas Tarling in 1965, reveal a diplomat who grasped the strategic geometry of the region—its position as a maritime corridor between Australia and China, its vulnerability to foreign encroachment, and the ambiguous legal status of Sulu under the 1837 treaty with Spain [2, pp. 258–273]. Farren warned that Spanish authority rested more on moral prestige than physical power, and that the introduction of a rival European presence could destabilise the entire archipelago [2, pp. 258–273].

The diplomatic contest intensified through the 1840s and 1850s. The French arrangement with the Sultan of Sulu over Basilan in 1845 was structured as a one-hundred-year “governance” lease for 100,000 dollars rather than a full cession, and was ultimately abandoned by Guizot’s government to preserve the Spanish marriage alliance [2, pp. 263–264]. The Dutch expedition against Sulu in 1848 and the French Basilan affair together spurred Spanish military action, culminating in Urbiztondo’s 1851 expedition, which destroyed Sulu’s fortifications and town but left no garrison [2, pp. 270–271]. A deputation from the Sultan and Datus subsequently offered submission to Spanish sovereignty in April 1851 [2, pp. 270–271].

The pirate trade compounded the instability. Up to 1,500 people were carried off annually from the coasts of Luzon and the Visayas by Moro pirates, with Sulu serving as the centre of correspondence and combination for these expeditions [2, p. 267]. During Rennell’s voyage in 1762–63, three of the crew’s Lascars were attacked by Gimboes (mountaineers) near Sulu; one was killed on the spot and another died after a fortnight from three wounds, and although the Sultan issued a proclamation for the murderers, they were never apprehended [1, p. 129].

The diplomatic tangle created by these events—Brooke’s 1849 treaty with Sulu, the Spanish confirmation of sovereignty in 1851, and the Foreign Office’s eventual abandonment of the Brooke treaty in 1852 following confidential communications from Madrid that cited France’s abandonment of its Basilan challenge as precedent—set the stage for the later Sulu-Sabah boundary dispute [2, pp. 270–273]. Farren himself was increasingly marginalised by the Foreign Office, which preferred to work through Sir James Brooke and the Colonial Office rather than through the Manila consulate; he died in August 1864 in the suburb of Santa Ana, his papers in confusion and debts unpaid [2, p. 273].

The Philippine Claim to Sabah

The question of Philippine sovereignty over Sabah, which had simmered since the nineteenth-century cessions, erupted into a formal diplomatic dispute in September 1968 when President Marcos signed Senate Bill 954, declaring Philippine sovereignty over the territory [4, pp. 161–170]. H.G. Tregonning, a historian of Sabah and author of A History of Modern Sabah (1960) and North Borneo (1966), published a systematic rebuttal in 1970, tracing the chain of cessions from Brunei and Sulu to the British North Borneo Company and demonstrating that every subsequent international agreement from 1885 to 1967 confirmed the boundary as nine miles off the Borneo coast [4, pp. 161–170].

The Philippine claim rested on a single disputed word—padjak—in the 1878 Overbeck-Sulu agreement, which the English version rendered as “cede” but which Filipino nationalists insisted meant “lease” [4, pp. 161–170]. Tregonning rejected this reinterpretation on the grounds that the Sultan’s own subsequent conduct treated the agreement as a cession, and that no international body or government had questioned this reading for nearly a century [4, pp. 161–170]. The 1878 agreement, dated 22 January 1878 (19 Moharam A.H. 1295), ceded “all the rights and powers” over specified east-coast rivers for an annual payment of $5,000; the Brunei cession of 29 December 1877 covered four grants from Gaya Bay to the Sibuco River for $15,000 per year [4, pp. 163–164].

The legal architecture that locked in the boundary was extensive. The Madrid Convention of March 1885, between Spain, Germany, and Great Britain, saw Spain renounce all claims to Sulu’s mainland possessions in North Borneo in exchange for recognition of Spanish sovereignty over Sulu itself [4, p. 167]. The Treaty of Paris of 1898 and the Boundary Convention of 1930 both fixed the Philippine boundary at nine miles off the Borneo coast; the 1967 Philippine Constitution (Article 1) ratified this same boundary by plebiscite on 11 March 1967 [4, pp. 167–168]. Tregonning further noted that the west coast of Sabah—comprising the Pangalat, Tempasuk, Putatan, Papas, Klias, Kawang, Inanam, Mengkabong, Menggatal, Api Api, Simbulan, Natas Tambalang, Kinarut, and Membaku Rivers—had been ceded by Brunei between 1877 and 1902 and had no connection to Sulu whatsoever [4, p. 165]. The Sibuco River, named as the southern limit of the Sulu cession, lay in present-day Indonesian Kalimantan, and Labuan, ceded by Brunei in 1846, had never been part of Sulu [4, pp. 161–170].

The Philippine Government had abolished the political powers of the Sultanate of Sulu on 22 March 1915, though the Sultan retained a pension and spiritual authority; the cession money continued to be paid annually by the North Borneo and Sabah governments without default [4, pp. 168–169]. Tregonning invoked the principle of effective occupation and the 1963 United Nations Malaysia Mission, which reported that “the great majority of the people of North Borneo have strongly supported the proposed Federation of Malaysia” [4, p. 169]. He closed with a warning that the claim was politically self-destructive for the Philippines, noting that no other Southeast Asian state could accept such a precedent without its own borders being called into question [4, pp. 161–170].

Nomenclature and Historical Usage

A brief but instructive note by C.A. Gibson-Hill in 1956 addressed the historical usage of the obsolete variant “Magindano” for the Philippine island Mindanao [3, p. 184]. The standard form Mindanao (or Mindano) had been used by early writers including Combes (1667), Dampier (1686), and all eighteenth-century authors up to Dalrymple [3, p. 184]. The variant Magindano was introduced by Captain Thomas Forrest in 1775–1776, who offered an etymological gloss deriving it from Mag (related to), in (country), and dano (lake) [3, p. 184]. Forrest’s form was adopted by Milburn (1813) and John Hunt (1812), and persisted in Singapore newspapers for roughly fifty years, though Crawfurd and Wallace used the older form [3, p. 184]. Gibson-Hill concluded that subsequent writers reverted to the original Mindanao, and that the variant was almost certainly launched by Forrest, whose terminology showed other personal variations [3, p. 184].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on the Philippines reveals a distinctive pattern of engagement focused on the archipelago’s peripheries—its maritime approaches, its diplomatic interfaces with the Malay world, and its territorial boundaries—rather than on its interior political or cultural history. The earliest contribution, Harrisson’s 1966 edition of the Rennell manuscript, established a primary-source foundation for understanding the hydrography of the Sulu waters and the economic and political conditions of the Sulu Sultanate in the mid-eighteenth century [1, pp. 92–136]. Its methodology—comparing the original holograph against the British Museum fair copy, and using Dalrymple’s marginalia as a window into professional rivalry—set a standard for the critical editing of maritime manuscripts.

Tarling’s 1965 study of Consul Farren shifted the focus from hydrography to diplomacy, using Foreign Office and Colonial Office records to reconstruct the strategic calculus behind British policy in the Philippines and Sulu [2, pp. 258–273]. The article’s historiographical contribution lay in its demonstration that British policy in the region was shaped less by commercial interest than by the desire to maintain a balance of power among European rivals, and that the consul’s marginalisation reflected a broader institutional preference for indirect rule through local agents such as Brooke [2, pp. 258–273].

Tregonning’s 1970 article represented a different mode of engagement entirely: a piece of diplomatic advocacy written in the immediate aftermath of the Marcos declaration, drawing on treaty texts and international agreements to construct a legal case for Malaysian territorial integrity [4, pp. 161–170]. Its publication in the Society’s journal reflected the institution’s role as a forum for the scholarly management of contemporary territorial disputes in the region.

Gibson-Hill’s 1956 note, though brief, illustrates the Society’s continuing interest in the philology of regional nomenclature and the transmission of geographical names through successive generations of European writers [3, p. 184]. Taken together, these contributions trace a trajectory from empirical survey and diplomatic reporting to legal-historical argument, reflecting the shifting priorities of the region’s scholarly community as the Philippines moved from a periphery of British imperial concern to a sovereign state with its own territorial claims.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. Tom Harrisson and J. Rennell (1966). The unpublished Rennell Ms: a Borneo-Philippine journey, 1762–1763. J. Rennell. . Harrisson JMBRAS 39(1): 92–136. Read on JSTOR
  2. N. Tarling (1965). Consul Farren and the Philippines JMBRAS 38(2): 258–273. Read on JSTOR
  3. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1956). Magindano JMBRAS 29(1): 184. Read on JSTOR
  4. K.G. Tregonning (1970). The Philippine claim to Sabah JMBRAS 43(1): 161–170.