Cristina Juan

Material and Linguistic Obsessions: A Bilos Boat Model from the Visayas

In April 2023, I had the opportunity to visit  Mambacayao Daku, a small island off the coast of Northern Cebu. I went with people from Goodland, a local community organization that worked to empower fisherfolk around the area. Mostly reacting to an ongoing attempt by a Cebuano family to sell off the entire  island for 650 milllion Philippine pesos, we were all  trying to figure out ways of preventing this crass maneuver. Law firms were consulted. Martha Atienza, one of the founders of Goodland, produced a video installation [1] and showed it in Frieze London. Now on site, I was asked to help further build soft power capital by mapping out the island’s cultural and material heritage to make a case for ancestral domain.

We spoke with almost all the elders of the island, gathering genealogies of the island’s first five families, their distinctive fishing practices, myths and cosmologies, and even its ritual dances and songs. The standout interlocutor was Manong Peding. All of 80 years old, he carved wooden fish baits shaped like squid, and regaled us with old Visayan balak (poetry) in metered rhymes. He also showed us a kasco, a hull for a boat carved out from a single piece of wood and told us how he planned to add sheets of marine plywood to its sides. In passing, he mentioned that a long time ago, the traditional way was to use amakan instead of plywood.  Amakan (also called sawali in Tagalog) is split and flattened bamboo strips woven into matting. It is still used today as an inexpensive way to add walling to traditional local houses in the Philippines.

This was the first time that any of us heard of this unusual use of amakan. We were completely hooked and wanted to know more. Almost skeptical, we asked lots of questions. Would the boat sidings last? Could it be waterproofed? Manong Peding said they used to gather resin from the almasiga tree (Agathis philippinensis) and coated the matting, then added alkitran, or  black tar produced from coal, wood or peat to further seal any holes and gaps. Manong said the amakan boat was lightweight and easy to maneuver. Its sail and paddle would allow them to navigate along the coasts and between the many islands. Its increased freeboard space allowed for trading of bulkier, heavier materials.

We asked Manong Peding if he could recreate the boat if we gave him materials and paid for labor. He said he would try to sketch out the details from memory and see if he could still find the proper materials. We left the island with a sense of excitement over this rather rare “discovery.”  Born and growing up in the Visayas myself, I was intrigued by this whole new world of Indigenous knowledge and practice that I was now only being introduced to.

An Amakan Boat Model

While all this was going on, what a strange coincidence it was that only a few months later, I would be staring at a photograph of this miniature model of an amakan-sided boat. Having been invited to pick one belonging to respond to from the Peabody's Philippine collection of material culture, I narrowed my choices to the Visayan section and was immediately drawn to an object that looked exactly like what Manong Peding had described. The miniature boat model was acquired by the Peabody Museum from the American Museum of Natural History in 1906, and it had all the specifications that Manong Peding spoke about—all in meticulous detail, including a small beautifully made pulley at the top of the sail. 

Museum records indicate that the model was part of a boatload of objects sent for display at  the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri.  The practice of making miniatures of boats, sugar mills, or even local houses for display in expositions and world's fairs in the late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century Europe and America had been a longstanding tradition. Models of less portable objects in common use, and  specifically those that were “made by the natives,” were  of particular interest in the colonial quest for “ethnological representation.”

I wondered why of all the pre-1950 models of boats I have seen (there are for example,  30 models of Philippine boats aggregated in this visual inventory of Philippine Material Culture from collections all over the world), this was the only specimen which featured the amakan hull siding [2] . Could it be because it originated from the Visayas - a region often overlooked by collectors for being not exotic enough, or being too low-land, Christian or westernized? Or was the making of such boats, in the whole world of Philippine seacraft, just generally considered an outlier?

Thus began my rather obsessive descent into finding all types of evidence for the name and existence of this now almost mythical seacraft. I began with random searches online, putting together amakan and baroto (a general Visayan term for a dugout canoe) and only found an almost dismissive (and still unnamed) mention in W.H. Scott’s 1982 classic Boat-Building and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society:

“A barangay with only two or three planks on a side will satisfy most needs, or even a baroto with nothing more than woven sawali sides coated with beeswax or almaciga sap.”  [3]

A few more quick surveys online led me to the bigiw, a slim needle-nosed, amakan dugout in Bohol.[4] In 2023, I.D. Rios also documented the tradition of bigiw-making in Camotes Island.[5] The references were not quite the same however. The bigiw had a narrower girth, and did not have a sail, nor a canopy made of nipa (palm). But it was good to know that using amakan to build up the hull was a practice that was geographically dispersed in the Visayas.

Finding the Name

On a whim, I began to look at some of the earliest written dictionaries of Visayan languages for further clues. I could not believe what I found in Mentrida's 1637 Visayan Language Dictionary [6]. Under the entry "Baloto/Baroto," was a curious distinction between a damlog and a bilos, the latter clad in “falca” made up of some kind of  “la corteza de arbol.” Triangulating the term bilos with related terms, it yielded interesting terms like cumbar, which is to bend or shape the falca, or aforrar con falca (to line or cover with).

Only then did I realise that the word "Vilos"—which was handwritten on the Peabody’s accession ledger —along with entries of three other boat models from Cebu and Leyte —was in fact Mentrida’s more endemic spelling of "Bilos."

And indeed, in using the key word vilos and its variants, the term yielded more hits in the archival records. Just a year before the 1904 World’s Fair, the 1903 Census was published and recorded vilos three times. All this pointed to the fact that the amakan boat was a common enough type of baroto, plying the Visayan seas, to as far as Iloi-ilo in Panay Island and Leyte. [7]

I can only guess why using amakan for hull siding has been forgotten through time in these islands. Like Manong Peding, finding a big enough trunk to hollow out for a kasco is quite difficult to do these days, and using marine plywood for siding is much more efficient. The complex system of fishing, bartering and trading between the islands have become more commercially scaled, and the heavy cargoes of petrol, rice, and Royal True Orange stacked high on motorised outriggers (locally called pump boats) have worked against the use of a lightweight, almost ephemeral skiff.  And with this loss of the now impractical, there was also  probably a forgetting of that delicate connection between the baroto as a sea vessel that could home or carry an entire family-unit, and the forgotten bilos, emblematic of a floating house on the seas, making it harder to remember that both the land and the sea were once both home.