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- Title:
- Waiting It Out
- Date Created:
- 2021-04-10
- Description:
- Call him a pirate, a freebooter, a buccaneer. That was Captain Charles Swan whose expedition sheds insight into food at the start of the second Philippine colonial century. His arrival in Mindanao of 1686 coincided with the westerlies that bring rain and typhoons. The winds so rage that the biggest trees are torn up and are carried into the sea by rivers that overflow their banks. At the southeast end of Mindanao they took shelter in a deep bay on July 4. Again in need of food, the pirates were lucky. The adjacent savannah “abounds with long grass, and it is plentifully stock’d with deer,” wrote Dampier. “The deer live here pretty peacefully and unmolested, for there are no inhabitants on that side of the bay. We visited this Savannah every morning, and killed as many deer as we pleased, sometimes 16 or 18 in a day; and we did eat nothing but venison all the time we stayed.” They were anchored there for 12 days. Archaeological research suggests that deer was part of the prehistoric Philippine diet. Deer was suited to life in flat lands. Wild boar thrived in thick forests. Usa, deer in Tagalog, is now a rare local food.
- Subjects:
- Charles Swan William Dampier Typhoons Deer -- Philippines
- Exhibition:
- Dampier 1686
- Source:
- “Philippine Islands or otherwise Manila” by Pierre Du Val. 1663 From Philippine Cartography by Carlos Quirino (Vibal Foundation, 2018)
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Waiting It Out", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll202.html