Gintong Pamana – The Surigao Treasure
Last June 8, 2008, ABS-CBN televised a well-researched documentary about our ancestral gold or better yet – ancestry.
The title is “Gintong Pamana” literally pointing to the gold jewelry pieces, which were buried in Surigao. Well, I don’t exactly remember the places where it was dug but the person who lucky to find this gold jewelry named Berto Morales. He was the one who first discovered the Surigao gold treasures.
Berto Morales was a bulldozer (scraper) operator for flattening a dug ground for an irrigation project of a government agency – NIA (National Irrigation Administration). It was then when he realized that there was a shiny stuff on the ground that he went down from his truck and inspected it. It was a belt that he first saw. At first, he did not know that it was gold but since pinoy have an innovative way to check things, he went to his truck and got some muriatic acid – placed some on a cloth – wiped the belt and wa-lah there it is, GOLD.
He took the rest of the afternoon off while inspecting the perimeter for some more gold. And to no surprise, he could find more. Amazing, fantastic is the first word I thought. After he had gathered everything he can find, he broke his truck so that he won’t go on overtime, and so he can go home cleverly disguising the sack of gold with “saba” (small bananas) on top of it. All the gold pieces that he found were interesting and well crafted. I must say that Mang Berto is a poor fellah and since – the first thing that came into his mind is “wow, since I found all this gold, my family, and I won’t have to suffer this life anymore.”
So being the human that he is, his first instinct was to sell something that is valuable to get money in return. And so he did that, not knowing what the true value of the gold pieces were. After all the conspiracies and the selling that happened all the gold pieces were sold to private individuals, to private collectors and all that; Furthermore, have been passed/sold around, been divided into pieces and all the horrific things that can be done to a gold. Maybe most of the pieces were bought by the Ayala group of companies because they have a lot of it in their museum. Alternatively, maybe most of the private owners and collectors thought that it should be displayed to the public since it is a heritage that our ancestors left for us. The gold pieces were from the 10th to 13th century? Well, it is; proven by scientists and all. It was dated before the Spaniards took over us. Amazing isn’t it? Check the video how Berto Morales got the gold jewelry below:
Wow! Imagine the gold pieces like the 4kg gold sash (commonly known as the “golden thread”) were molded into perfection without using the technology that we have now in shaping gold accessories. I mean it is astonishing to see those gold pieces because they were as if professionally made. And believe it or not, professionals think that one of the gold pieces that’s in the exhibit is actually a Hindu god. It is the Kinnari – a kind of god in the Hindu religion showing that our early religion could have really been Hinduism or Buddhism.
According to the documentary, Antonio Pigafetta, who was the assistant of Magellan during his travel to the Maluku islands and later the Philippines, said in his journal that you can find gold by the size of walnuts and eggs in the region and by the riverbanks. He also described the lifestyle of the Filipinos back in the 1500’s as sophisticated. Putting this into account it means that our lands were very rich then. It is also said that the Boxer codex, (a journal of a Governor General, was bought and renamed as such) described and ILLUSTRATED how Filipinos looked like on their initial contact with the Spaniards. The book also contains more descriptions and illustration about the Spanish contact with various Far East countries. The way I see it, I say, it is a big chunk of our early history which we Filipinos never get to see because it is in the Lilly Library in Indiana University.
It is with these facts that opened questions in my mind. Did the Spaniards colonize us so that they can utilize the gold reserves of our country and were the Yamashita gold originally belonged to the Filipinos? Was it found here and molded into gold bars? There could be possibilities that the answers are YES but there could be no assurance at all since we were deprived of this information from the Spaniards and the Japanese.
