Something fishy in 17th-century Manila
In 1921, Epifanio de los Santos (the historian, not the traffic-choked avenue that bears his name) delivered a lecture mapping out the local fishing industry of his time. He listed scores of native species I do not recognize a century later: buteteng-saguing, biang-itim, biang-puti, and bunog. Mind you, those are just the ones beginning with the letter “b.”
Another revelation from De los Santos’ fish list is that modern staples like bangus (milkfish), tilapia, and imported galunggong were noticeably absent or unranked, while other species dominated: apahap, kanduli, dalag, and ayungin. It made me wonder, too, about the repeating syllables in local fish names: lapu-lapu, maya-maya, and sapsap.
Reading De los Santos reminded me of the late culinary historian Doreen Fernandez, who showed from the 1860 “Vocabulario de la lengua tagala” that fish was once the primary companion to rice. Now, the rediscovery and publication of the 1626 “Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum” (DHS) allows us to travel back four centuries into an even older aquatic world. Between the Chinese characters and their Spanish equivalents lies a vivid portrait of how our ancestors ate, fished, and traded during the era of the Manila Galleon.
Readers of my last column on rice terms in the DHS commented on the entry for “rice cooked in leaves,” correctly identifying it as what we know today as machang, while another entry pointed to steamed dumplings. Browsing through the DHS made me wish my parents had sent me to Xavier School instead of Ateneo. Both are Jesuit-run, but Xavier would have given me enough Chinese to fully appreciate my Tsinoy heritage and navigate DHS. Then again, friends who attended Xavier confess they hated Chinese language classes!
The DHS separates pescado (fish) from pescador (fisherman) and pescar (to fish). Under PESCADO, we find a varied menu: pescado fresco (fresh fish), pescado blanco (white fish), pescado que se come crudo (fish eaten raw, akin to sashimi or kinilaw), pescado sin espinas (boneless fish meat), pescado que es veneno (poisonous fish like butete or blowfish), pescado que se fuera al cielo (flying fish), and pescado de que hacen carey (fish with a shell—did they mean turtles?). If I could read the Chinese characters directly instead of relying solely on the Spanish translations, things might be clearer.
Fishermen (pescador), like their catch, were classified into distinct types. They were categorized by age: pescador viejo (old fisherman); by socioeconomic status: pescador que no tiene mas que el navio (in the manuscript, barco was crossed out and replaced by navio—a fisherman who has nothing but his boat, or who lives on it); and by their primary gear: from the pescador de anzuelo (hook-and-line fisherman) to the pescador de red (net fisherman) and the pescador de çalambao (one who uses a lift net or bamboo apparatus known in Tagalog as a salambao). They brought their catch to a pescaderia (fish market/stall), where transactions used a numeral de pescado (a specialized counting classifier for fish).
The verb pescar (to fish) provides even finer details. Not everything was about finned fish: there was pescar anguillas (catching eels) and pescar camarones (catching shrimp). The entry pescar en el mar (to fish in the sea) implies a clear distinction between saltwater catch (alat) and freshwater catch (tabang). Methods varied widely: pescar con red (with a net), pescar con cesto (with a basket), pescar con redes de balsas (with raft nets), and pescar con chinchorro (with a beach seine net).
From these entries, early culinary habits emerge, such as eating raw fish alongside processed boneless fish. Unaccounted for, however, are descriptions of salted, dried, smoked, or fermented fish. We also glimpse the social and commercial structure of the industry: specialized fishermen, diverse harvesting methods, and a structured market using dedicated counting units. Together, these terms reveal a highly organized maritime economy that we often take for granted today. Fishermen today may not be organized into corporate conglomerates, but despite being marginalized, they remain indispensable actors in the Filipino food chain.
On recent trips to Malabon, I heard about the relentless flooding residents endure and the death of the waterways extending all the way to Navotas due to pollution and the mindless dumping of garbage from the metropolis—waste that leaks into rivers, destroying aquatic life and livelihoods. Furthermore, the proposed Bulacan airport project threatens to disrupt even more waterways and ecosystems in ways planners and the public have barely contemplated.
Tracing this trajectory—from the 1626 DHS to De los Santos’ 1921 essay, down to 2026—reminds us that our seafood baseline is constantly shifting. So the next time you buy frozen galunggong or farmed tilapia at the supermarket, haggle over price and freshness with a fishmonger, or order local kinilaw or imported salmon in a restaurant, remember that you are participating in a historico-culinary dialogue that has quietly endured for over 400 years.
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The house that went to school