Balangay
Balangay , also known as Balanghai , is a longboat that was used as a war, merchant and passenger ship in the Philippines during the Middle Ages . Eleven ocean-going ships were recovered from excavations in Butuan City on Mindanao Island . These have become known as Butuan boats and are considered to be of particular archaeological and historical value, as the Balangay is the only known type of boat that was only used in Southeast Asia for a period of 1,300 years. The word Balangay comes from the Austronesian language family and means sailing boat .
Balangay boat types
The well-known Balangay boat types include both rowing and pure sailing ships . The Tau people (also called Yami ) on the island of Lan Yu , which belongs to Taiwan, still use the balangays as rowing boats for short-haul traffic at sea. The inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago , Indonesia and Malaysia also use a similar boat shape .
The ships unearthed during the archaeological excavations in Butuan City , on the other hand, were pure ocean-going sailing ships. They were around 15 meters long, up to four meters wide and could carry up to 90 people. The planking of the ships is similar to the Kraweel construction developed in Europe . The boats had no high superstructures, but a shallow, house-like shelter, which corresponded to a third of the boat's length, could be detected. The type of sail corresponded to that of a Latin sail , which enabled the ships to cross against the wind. The construction of the oldest Balangay could be determined around the year 320 AD, the other ten ships date from the 10th to 12th centuries AD. An excavated boat is in the Balangay Shrine Museum in Butuan City, a other in the National Museum of the Philippines in Manila . Three replicas of the Balangay have been on the high seas again since 2009 and have already covered several thousand nautical miles. These boats were named Masawa Hong Butuan, Diwata ng Lahi and Sama Tawi Tawi.
Historical importance of the balangays
The finds in Butuan could confirm Chinese reports that merchants of the Philippines in the China of the Song Dynasty sailed to drive trade. Typical commercial products of the Filipinos included beeswax , betel nuts , fabrics and pearls . The oldest of these reports come from a chronicler and are dated to the year 982 AD from Canton . The merchants came from the island of Ma-i, which according to the sources corresponds to Mindoro . Other accounts of Filipino merchants come from chroniclers of the Yuan Dynasty and Ming Dynasty . The Chinese sources unanimously report that the Filipino merchants came to China with their own ships, the Balangays. Two other ships of this type were found on Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula . This suggests that this type of boat was in use on trade routes across Southeast Asia.
Historical reports on balangays
The first historical reports on the type of ship on the Balangay come from Spanish chroniclers without exception. The first is from 1521 by the chronicler Antonio Pigafetta , who belonged to Ferdinand Magellan's expedition . He wrote: “We met two ships called Balanghai that were full of men. A king and his retinue resided on one of the two ”. Another was created in 1542 by Ruy López de Villalobos . Other Spanish documents suggest that balangays from the Philippines also sailed to Borneo , Thailand, and Japan in the 16th century . In the 17th century, however, the boat type died out because Filipinos were no longer allowed to own their own ocean-going ships. The Spanish caravels were also more efficient and could take more cargo.
Sociological importance
In the pre-colonial times, the word Balangay was not just a name for boats and sailing ships in the Philippines. The word also referred to a village or a family clan that settled on the coast and could include around 30 to 100 families. This was presided over by a date . The Spaniards derived the term Cabeza de Barangay from the term, before the short form Barangay , which is still used today, developed from it.
Web links
- R. Stead, E. Dizon: A National Cultural Treasure Revisited - Re-assessing the 'Balangay' Boat Discoveries PDF file (English)
- The Voyage of the Balangay website