Lapu Lapu

Name

The historical name of Lapu-Lapu is debated. The earliest record of his name comes from Italian diarist Antonio Pigafetta who accompanied Magellan's expedition. Pigafetta notes the names of two chiefs of the island of "Matan", the chiefs "Zula" and "Çilapulapu" (note Ç). The honorific Çi or Si is a corruption of the Sanskrit title Sri. In an annotation of the 1890 edition of Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, José Rizal spells this name as "Si Lapulapu". The Aginid chronicle calls him "Lapulapu Dimantag".

The title Salip (and its variants Sarripada, Sipad, Paduka, Seri Paduka, and Salipada, etc.) is frequently used as an honorific for Lapu-lapu and other Visayan datus. Despite common misconception, it is not derived from the Islamic title Khalīfah (Caliph). Like the cognate Si, it was derived from the Sanskrit title Sri Paduka, denoting "His Highness". The title is still used today in Malaysia as Seri Paduka.

The 17th century mestizo de sangley poet Carlos Calao mentions Lapu-Lapu under the name of "Cali Pulaco" (perhaps a misreading of the Ç used in Pigafetta's spelling) in his poem Que Dios Le Perdone (That God May Forgive Him). The name, spelled "Kalipulako", was later adopted as one of the pseudonyms of the Philippine hero, Mariano Ponce, during the Philippine Revolution. The 1898 Philippine Declaration of Independence of Cavite II el Viejo, also mentions Lapu-Lapu under the name "Rey Kalipulako de Manktan [sic]" (King Kalipulako of Mactan).

Early life

There had been many folk accounts surrounding Lapu-lapu’s origin. One oral tradition is that the Sugbuanons of Opong was once ruled by datu named Mangal and later succeeded by his son named Lapu-lapu. Another is from oral chronicles from the reign of the last king of Cebu, Rajah Tupas (d. 1565). This was compiled and written in Baybayin in the book Aginid, Bayok sa Atong Tawarik ("Glide on, Odes to Our History") in 1952 by Jovito Abellana. The chronicle records the founding of the Rajahnate of Cebu by a certain Sri Lumay (also known as Rajamuda Lumaya), who was a prince from the Hindu Chola dynasty of Sumatra. His sons, Sri Alho and Sri Ukob, ruled the neighboring communities of Sialo and Nahalin, respectively. The islands they were in were collectively known as Pulua Kang Dayang or Kangdaya (literally "[the islands] of the lady"). Sri Lumay was noted for his strict policies in defending against Moro raiders and slavers from Mindanao. His use of scorched earth tactics to repel invaders gave rise to the name Kang Sri Lumayng Sugbo (literally "that of Sri Lumay's great fire") to the town, which was later shortened to Sugbo ("conflagration").

Upon his death in a battle against the raiders, Sri Lumay was succeeded by his youngest son, Sri Bantug, who ruled from the region of Singhapala (literally "lion city"), now Mabolo in modern Cebu City. Sri Bantug died of an epidemic and was succeeded by his son Rajah Humabon (also known as Sri Humabon or Rajah Humabara).

During Humabon's reign, the region had become an important trading center. The harbors of Sugbo became known colloquially as sinibuayng hingpit ("the place for trading"), shortened to sibu or sibo ("to trade"), from which the modern name "Cebu" originates.

According to the epic Aginid, this was the period in which Lapu-Lapu (as Lapulapu Dimantag) was first recorded as arriving from Borneo. He asked Humabon for a place to settle, and the king offered him the region of Mandawili (now Mandaue), including the island known as Opong (or Opon), hoping that Lapu-Lapu's people would cultivate the land. They were successful in this, and the influx of farm produce from Mandawili enriched the trade port of Sugbo further.

The relationship between Lapu-Lapu and Humabon later deteriorated when Lapu-Lapu turned to piracy. He began raiding merchant ships passing the island of Opong, affecting trade in Sugbo. The island thus earned the name Mangatang ("those who lie in wait"), later evolving to "Mactan".

Battle of Mactan

Lapu-lapu was one of the two datus of Mactan before the Spanish arrived in the archipelago, the other being a certain Zula, both of whom belong to the Maginoo class. When Portuguese conquistador Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in the service of Spain, Zula was one of those who gave tribute to the Spanish king while Lapu-Lapu refused.

In the midnight of April 27, 1521, Magellan led a force of around sixty Spaniards and twenty to thirty balangay (war boats) of Humabon's warriors from Cebu. They arrived in Mactan three hours before dawn. However, because of the presence of rock outcroppings and coral reefs, Magellan's ships could not land on the shores of Mactan. Their ships were forced to anchor "two crossbow flights" away from the beach. According to Antonio Pigafetta, they faced around 1,500 warriors of Lapu-Lapu armed with iron swords, bows, and "bamboo" spears.

Magellan repeated his offer not to attack them if Lapu-Lapu swore fealty to Rajah Humabon, obeyed the Spanish king, and paid tribute, which Lapu-Lapu again rejected. At the taunting request of Lapu-Lapu, the battle did not begin until morning. Magellan, perhaps hoping to impress Humabon's warriors with the superiority of European armor and weapons, told Humabon's warriors to remain in their balangay. Magellan and forty-nine of the heavily armored Spaniards (armed with lances, swords, crossbows, and muskets) waded ashore to meet Lapu-Lapu's forces. They set fire to a few houses on the shore in an attempt to scare them. Instead, Lapu-Lapu's warriors became infuriated and charged. Two Spaniards were killed immediately in the fighting, and Magellan was wounded in the leg with a poisoned arrow. He ordered a retreat, which most of his men followed except for a few who remained to protect him. However, he was recognized as the captain by the natives, whereupon he became the focus of the attack. Outnumbered and encumbered by their armor, Magellan's forces were quickly overwhelmed. Magellan and several of his men were killed, and the rest escaped to the waiting ships.

The historian William Henry Scott believes that Lapu-Lapu's hostility may have been the result of a mistaken assumption by Magellan. Magellan assumed that ancient Filipino society was structured in the same way as European society (i.e. with royalty ruling over a region). While this may have been true in the Islamic sultanates in Mindanao, the Visayan societies were structured along a loose federation of city-states (more accurately, a chiefdom). The most powerful datu in such a federation has limited power over other member datu, but no direct control over the subjects or lands of the other datu.

Thus Magellan believed that since Rajah Humabon was the "king" of Cebu, he was the king of Mactan as well. But the island of Mactan, the dominion of Lapu-Lapu and Zula, was in a location that enabled them to intercept trade ships entering the harbor of Cebu, Humabon's domain. Thus it was more likely that Lapu-Lapu was actually more powerful than Humabon, or at least was the undisputed ruler of Mactan. Humabon was married to Lapu-Lapu's niece. When Magellan demanded that Lapu-Lapu submit as his "king" Humabon had done, Lapu-Lapu purportedly replied that: "he was unwilling to come and do reverence to one whom he had been commanding for so long a time".

The Aginid chronicle also records that Humabon had actually purposefully goaded the Spaniards into fighting Lapu-Lapu, who was his enemy at that time. However, the men of Humabon who accompanied Magellan did not engage in battle with Lapu-Lapu, though they helped with recovering the wounded Spaniards. Humabon later poisoned and killed twenty-seven Spanish sailors during a feast. According to the Aginid, this was because they had started raping the local women. It was also possibly to aid Magellan's Malay slave interpreter, Enrique of Malacca, in gaining his freedom. The Spanish were refusing to release him, even though Magellan explicitly willed that he be set free upon his death. A discourse by Giovanni Battista Ramusio also claims that Enrique warned the Chief of "Subuth" that the Spaniards were plotting to capture the king and that this led to the murder of the Spaniards at the banquet. Enrique stayed in Cebu with Humabon while the Spanish escaped to Bohol.

The battle left the expedition with too few men to crew three ships, so they abandoned the "Concepción". The remaining ships - "Trinidad" and "Victoria" - sailed to the Spice Islands in present-day Indonesia. From there, the expedition split into two groups. The Trinidad, commanded by Gonzalo Gómez de Espinoza tried to sail eastward across the Pacific Ocean to the Isthmus of Panama. Disease and shipwreck disrupted Espinoza's voyage and most of the crew died. Survivors of the Trinidad returned to the Spice Islands, where the Portuguese imprisoned them. The Victoria continued sailing westward, commanded by Juan Sebastián Elcano, and managed to return to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain in 1522. In 1529, Charles I of Spain relinquished all claim over the Spice Islands to Portugal in the treaty of Zaragoza. However, the treaty did not stop the colonization of the Philippine archipelago from New Spain.

According to Aginid, Lapu-Lapu and Humabon restored friendly relations after the Battle of Mactan. Lapu-Lapu later decided to return to Borneo with eleven of his children, three of his wives, and seventeen of his men. Nothing more is known of him after this.

After Magellan's voyage, subsequent expeditions were dispatched to the islands. Five expeditions were sent: Loaisa (1525), Cabot (1526), Saavedra (1527), Villalobos (1542), and Legazpi (1564). The Legazpi expedition was the most successful, resulting in the colonization of the islands.

Religion

Lapu-Lapu's religion and beliefs are another subject of debate. The inhabitants of the Sulu archipelago believe that Lapu-Lapu was a Muslim of the Tausūg or the Sama-Bajau people. Some also believe that Lapu-Lapu and Rajah Humabon were the founders of a Muslim Rajahnate of Cebu (as the "Sultanate of Cebu"); or at least that Lapu-Lapu had founded a colony of the Sultanate of Sulu in Cebu Island, existing alongside the Rajahnate of Cebu with the consent of Humabon. However, as discussed in the previous section, the Sugbuanon epic otherwise records the founder of the Rajahnate of Cebu as Sri Lumay, who was the grandfather of Rajah Humabon, and a prince of the Indianized Chola dynasty.

Ultimately, it is undoubtedly suggested that the Cebuanos were predominantly animist (not unlike the Mindanao Lumad) or Indianized (like the contemporary Kingdom of Butuan) on the arrival of the Spanish, a school of thought suggests that Lapu-Lapu may have been Tausūg or Sama-Bajau, since he, according to one account, is recorded in the Aginid as being an orang laut ("man of the sea") and an outsider who settled in Cebu from "Borneo". Although Oponganon-Cebuano oral tradition effectively disputed the claim saying his father was Datu Mangal, the ruler of Mactan before him indicated that Lapu-lapu a native of Opong.

The Visayans were noted for their widespread practice of tattooing; Spaniards referred to them as the Pintados. Pigafetta, who recorded Magellan's encounter with the Cebuanos, explicitly described Rajah Humabon as tattooed. He also records the consumption of pork, dog meat, and palm wine (arak) by the Cebuanos, as well as the common custom of penile piercings (tugbuk or sakra). Tattooing, body modification, pork, dog meat, and alcohol are haram (forbidden) in Islam. Lapu-Lapu was not described wearing tattoos.

The supreme god of the religion of the Visayans, when explicitly recorded by contemporary historians, was identified as "Abba" by Pigafetta and "Kan-Laon" (also spelled "Laon") by the Jesuit historian Pedro Chirino in 1604, comparable to the Tagalog "Bathala". There is no mention of Islam. This is in contrast to the other locations visited by the Magellan expedition where Pigafetta readily identifies the Muslims whom they encountered; he would call them Moros after the Muslim Moors of medieval Spain and northern Africa, to distinguish them from the polytheistic "heathens". In fact, during the mass baptism of the Cebuanos to Christianity, he clearly identifies them as "heathens," not Moros:

We set up the cross there for those people were heathen. Had they been Moros, we would have erected a column there as a token of greater hardness, for the Moros are much harder to convert than the heathen.

Indeed, the Visayans were noted for their resistance to conversion to Islam in the epic poem Diyandi of the Aginid chronicle. The name of the capital city of the island (Sugbo, "conflagration" or "blaze") was derived from the method of defense used by the natives against Moro raiders from Mindanao, which was to burn their settlements to the ground to prevent looting. They referred to the raiders as Magalos ("destroyers of peace"). Furthemore, direct evidences such as accounts of Pigafetta and the native oral tradition did not indicate Lapu-lapu as a Muslim but a Visayan animist and a Sugbuanon native.

Legacy

Lapu-Lapu is regarded, retroactively, as the first Filipino hero. The government erected a statue in his honor on Mactan Island and renamed the town of Opon in Cebu to Lapu-Lapu City. A large statue of him, donated by South Korea, stands in the middle of Agrifina Circle in Rizal Park in Manila, replacing a fountain and rollerskating rink. Lapu-Lapu appears on the official seal of the Philippine National Police. His face was used as the main design on the 1-centavo coin that was circulated in the Philippines from 1967 to 1974.

According to local legend, Lapu-Lapu never died but was turned into stone, and has since then been guarding the seas of Mactan. Fishermen in the island city would throw coins at a stone shaped like a man as a way of asking for permission to fish in the monarch’s territory. Another urban legend concerns the statue of Lapu-Lapu erected at the center of the town plaza. The statue faced the old city hall, where mayors used to hold office; Lapu-Lapu was shown with a crossbow in the stance of shooting an enemy. Superstitious citizens proposed to replace this crossbow with a sword, after three consecutive mayors of the city each died of heart attack.

In the United States, a street in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, California is named after Lapu-Lapu. That street and others in the immediate neighborhood were renamed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors with names derived from historical Filipino heroes on August 31, 1979.

During the First Regular Season of the 14th Congress of the Philippines, Senator Richard Gordon introduced a bill proposing to declare April 27 as an official Philippine national holiday to be known as Adlaw ni Lapu-Lapu, (Cebuano, "Day of Lapu-Lapu").

In April 27, 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte declared April 27 (the date when Battle of Mactan happened) as Lapu-Lapu Day for honoring as the first hero in the country who defeated foreign rule. Duterte also signed the creation of "Order of Lapu-Lapu" earlier in April 7, to recognize the government workers and private citizens on supporting his advocacies.

In popular culture

Shrine

The Lapu-Lapu shrine is a 20 metres (66 ft) bronze statue in Punta Engaño, Lapu-Lapu, Cebu, Philippines.