A Family History in Cuyo 9

photo from Wikipedia
This essay originally appeared in Filipinas Magazine, Feb. 2008

by Jewel Punzalan Allen

I watched as the passenger batil, the 50-meter, wood-hull MV Catalyn-D, detached itself from the dock at Cuyo in the darkness of dawn. The island was waking up, lights from huts marking the outline of a coast. A sweet sadness washed over me. I just spent two glorious days in Cuyo, and now I was leaving. I wondered if that was how my Spanish ancestor Don Antonio Ponce de Leon felt when he left Cuyo in the late 18th century to sail back to Spain. Did he wonder, “Will I ever return? Will my children ever come to Cuyo?”

Several years ago, an elderly relative sent me a thick sheaf of papers documenting the family history of my paternal grandmother’s family in Cuyo, Palawan, Philippines. The pedigree chart harkened back to Don Antonio Ponce de Leon, a Spanish duke and an officer in the army of King Charles III. Don Antonio’s son, Pablo, allegedly returend to Cuyo decades later, marrying a local girl and donating the silver frontispiece of the church altar. There was, purportedly, an inscription to that effect.

“I’m descended from royalty,” I reminded my husband before I joined my brother for a two-week vacation in Palawan in April.

“Probably just the product of someone’s overactive imagination,” he teased.

“I’ll prove you wrong,” I promised.

Honorable Exile

Spain’s King Carlos III was an austere man, some would even say dull, passionate about hunting but caring little for the frivolities of his European cousins. What he lacked in social graces, he made up for as a ruler. He surrounded himself with forward-thinking men, the likes of Esquilache and Aranda. Historians refer to his reign as “the Age of Enlightenment” for he transformed Madrid to its former glory, with garbage collection and street lights. He believed in the free market and deregulated the price of staple foods.

In 1766, however, discontent erupted in the land. After a period of drought and hoarding, grain merchants began selling bread at astronomical prices. To add insult to injury, the king declared a ban on the national dress of slouch hat and cape, as a security measure.

On Palm Sunday, the people revolted, demanding price controls on grain, the expulsion of foreign ministers and the overturning of the clothing ban, among others. The king acquiesced from his balcony, then fled to Aranjuez. For a time, a military junta tried to maintain order in the capital. Don Antonio Ponce de Leon, the duke of Arcos and a member of the royal guards, played a key role in protecting the king from advancing rioters.

As a reward and to keep him safe from enemies, King Carlos sent Don Antonio to the Philippines, then a Spanish colony; to Cuyo, a remote island in southeast Palawan. The king charged Don Antonio with the task of reinforcing Cuyo’s fort and helping the natives ward off attacks by their southern neighbors who challenged Spanish sovereignty.

After the chaos of Madrid, and a long sea voyage without modern comforts, Don Antonio must have exulted at the sight of the tiny islands that form the Cuyo group, a string of stepping stones in the open sea. Most are uninhabited, remote. They sit in quiet desolation, white-sand beaches sloping up to mountains covered in thick foliage.

I imagine his arrival was greeted with as much pomp and circumstance as a little fishing village could muster: a feast of lato, seaweed which look like clusters of little grapes with a salty crunch eaten raw, the day’s catch, sauteed squid, and perhaps, boiled vegetables from nearby Bisucay Island. And rice, plenty of rice. He may have lodged at the convent, the guest of the friar.

Cuyo Today

Today, the fort stands as it did in Don Antonio’s time, just a few blocks from the wet market. A staircase leads up to a stone observation desk. I shivered as I looked from the deck down to the entryway, framed by a sturdy railing, where Cuyunons poured hot oil onto their attackers. The belfry stands silent, its bells coated with dust and cobwebs. In the olden days, they would have rang loud and clear when the watchtower guard spied enemy praos (vessel or boat) in the waters.

The church was empty when my brother and I stepped inside. It was a long walk to the altar, a raised platform covered in tile and a red carpet. I approached the silver frontispiece that also housed the Blessed Sacrament and looked for the inscription.

Nothing. Just elaborate etchings on the face, but nothing that alluded to the altar’s donor. “This is like ‘Da Vinci Code,’” my brother said as we inspected the altar inch-by-inch. And about as confounding, I thought glumly, as we came up empty-handed.

We returned to the municipal building, where a planning official – and fellow Ponce de Leon descendant – claimed to have shown the inscription to her children.

“Look down on the floor,” she said.

Returning to the church, we looked down on the floor, which was covered by carpet and new-looking tiles. We were just about to give up when my brother said, “There it is.”

On the very bottom of the silver frontispiece, where carpet met altar, I read the inscription in Spanish. There was the year, “1800,” and the name, “Don Pablo Ponce de Leon.” So it was true. Don Antonio and his son where not just the figment of someone’s imagination.

As I left Cuyo, my thoughts must have mirrored Don Antonio’s. I wondered if, someday, I would return. And if my children would ever go to Cuyo. I hope, like Don Antonio’s son Pablo, they do.

Jewel Punzalan Allen writes from Utah. She wishes to express her gratitude to the Cuyo and Coron stations of the Philippine Coast Guard for their generous assistance in the research of this article.

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