Almost an Embarrassment of Riches

Spaniards came to the Philippines as elsewhere in the New World (and Old) in search of “god, gold and glory.” God they found aplenty in the number of indigenous souls ready for conversion to the “true faith.” The glory was less certain; there were few opportunities for gallant feats of arms and no mighty empires to topple. As for gold, that was an entirely different matter: There did not seem to be any worth mentioning.2 Instead, there was a lot of wood: forests full of timber that nobody really seemed to value or wanted to have. Spanish forester Sebastian Vidal y Soler, summing up public sentiment in 1874, comments that “there is no lack of those [here] who see the tree as the enemy of man” (1874, 37). In fact, there is an accepted notion that the exploitation of Philippine tropical forests commenced with the establishment of American colonialism in 1898. Prior to that date, the forests were seen as so much timber, the properties of which made them suited for a particular purpose, such as ship building or church construction; after that date, as so much lumber that could be gainfully cut for profit and export. Thus George Ahern, reflecting back on his career as chief of the Insular Bureau of Forestry, wrote of the “vast stretches of unmapped and sparsely inhabited forests” that he had encountered in 1900 and lamented that “no effort has been employed to make use of [them]” (1917: III, 492). Dean Worcester even went so far as to compare Philippine forests to so much “money in the bank” (1914, 847).