Basilan is an island province of the Philippines. It is the largest and northernmost of the major islands of the Sulu Archipelago and is located just off the southern coast of Zamboanga Peninsula. Its capital is Lamitan. Basilan is home to three main ethnic groups, the indigenous Yakans, and the later-arriving Tausugs and Zamboangueños. The Yakans and Tausugs are predominantly Muslim, while the Chavacanos are mainly Christian. There are also a number of smaller groups.
Etymology
Oral traditions of the local Yakan people include several names for pre-historic Basilan: "Uleyan", which is derived from the present-named Basilan Peak (Puno Mahaji), and later changed to "Matangal" after a mountain farther to the east of the island. These names were presumably used by the Maguindanao traders from mainland Mindanao, utilizing these mountains as navigational landmarks when sailing the Celebes Sea. Other names romantically given were "Puh Gulangan" or "island of forests", "Umus Tambun" or "fertile land", "Kumalarang" after the westward flowing river on the island's western half which is also otherwise called Baunuh Peggesan.
Taguima Pre-Hispanic texts from the royal archives of the Sulu Sultanate referred to the northernmost island of the Sulu Archipelago as Taguima, from the Yakan who were called "Tagihamas" (people of the interior or hinterlands) by the Tausug and Samal peoples who came and settled in numerous but scattered communities along Basilan's western and southwestern shores and outlying islets and island groups.
Later references mentioned "Bantilan", probably referring to Maluso, which was established as a major Tausug base by Sulu Sultan Muizz ud-Din (whose princely name was Datu Bantilan).
Imperial Chinese texts mention a "Kingdom of Kumalarang" (from the Yakan "kumalang" or "to sing", owing to the location being a place for celebrations and gatherings) during the Ming Dynasty, believed to be the island which now has a barangay of the same name on its northwestern shores.
The earliest map of the Philippines which made reference to an island labeled "Taguima" was produced by Giacomo Gastaldi, through woodblock prints in 1548 and subsequently included in the influential travel book of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the Della Navigatione e Viaggi, which was published between 1556 and 1583 in three volumes. This was followed by Abraham Ortelius's work Indiae Orientalis Insularumque Adiacientium Typus, published in 1573 in a German text edition of the atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp. As late as 1719, a map titled "Die philippinische Inseln - Isle Brneo" by Allain Manesson Mallet of Frankfurt, Germany featured an island still labeled "Tagyma I."
Basilan The process by which all these names became "Basilan" is almost certainly due to miscommunication between the natives and the Spanish, as well as the penchant to engage in editorial license by European map-makers of the era.
Basilan's name may also derive from its iron ore deposits. Tausug warriors and slave-traders from Sulu came to Taguima to purchase high-quality magnetic iron ores, which they used for swords, knives and other blades. This profitable trade, helped in large measure by the establishment of Maluso as a major military-naval base of the Sulu Sultanate, eventually gave the island the distinction of being the source of basih-balan, the Tausug word for magnetic iron. Roughly translated and abbreviated, however, basih-lan means "the iron (magnet) trail" or "the iron way".
When several Tausug warriors were caught by the Spanish in one of their numerous raids on the Zamboanga settlement, Spanish officials supposedly admired the artistry and skill that went into making the warriors' elaborately decorated swords, knives and blades, and asked where these weapons could be bought. From atop the ramparts of the Spanish commandery at the Fuerza del Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza (Fort Pilar), the warriors supposedly pointed to the island visible across today's Basilan Strait, and said, simply, "ha basih-lan".
Reports from the Jesuit reducciones in Zamboanga and Pasangen (Isabela) were relayed to Manila, where Spanish cartographer Pedro Murillo de Velarde published Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañia de Jesvs. Segvnda parte using the Jesuit printing press at Manila in 1749. It featured a map of the Philippines with the as yet unofficial "I. Basilan". The map was re-published by Leipzig map-maker Nicolaus Bellinn for general European circulation in 1752.
Finally, to represent a clear break from the Habsburg Dynasty (which had ruled Spain for 184 years from 1516 to 1700), the first officially sanctioned Spanish maps of its colonies, including "Las Islas de Mindanao", were commissioned by the Bourbons (1700–present). This particular map of Mindanao, apparently copied from the Nicolaus Bellinn map of 1752, was published by Nicolas Norton Nicols in 1757, featuring "Basilan" and bearing the royal stamp of Spanish Bourbon King Ferdinand VI. It has been called "Isla de Basilan" (Basilan Island) ever since.
Treasure Islands of the Southern Seas Basilan Island's reputation as a staging-ground for piracy against Zamboanga, the Visayas and even Luzon, and as a temporary repository of the plunder from these raids. gave the island a notoriety not unlike the "Treasure Islands", buccaneers' havens and pirate coves of the Caribbean.
Spanish and Tausug fleets engaged each other in sea battles and skirmishes not far from the western shores of the islands. Many of their ships were scuttled or sunk, sometimes with precious cargoes of traded goods and Mexican silver pieces meant for the fort in Zamboanga and the naval squadron at Isabela, as well as goods en route to Jolo from the Mindanao mainland.
The Spanish Pigafetta expedition landed on a group of islets west of the main island of Basilan, where they found precious pearls; subsequent Spanish cartographers aptly named these the "Isletas de Perlas" (Pearl Islets). Native Samal and Bajao folk called this group of islets and reefs "Pilas" (Perlas), a name still used to this day. More recently, there have been local rumors about gold bars and other trinkets hidden among the many islets by retreating Japanese troops at the end of World War II. To date, treasure hunters of various nationalities, among them Japanese and Europeans, have scoured the area.
All these tales of treasures hidden in Basilan's many remote, unpopulated islets gave it the nickname "Treasure Islands of the Southern Seas", immortalized in the official anthem of the Province of Basilan, "Fair Basilan", composed by Basilan lyricist and composer Tranquilino Gregorio.
Pre-Hispanic Taguima Basilan's earliest settlers was traditionally believed to be the Orang Dampuans originating from the islands of Eastern Indonesia, who are supposed to be the ancestors of the native Yakans. They are variously called the Orang Dyaks or the Tagihamas.
The Yakans, an inland pagan tribe, inhabited the Sulu Archipelago together with the indigenous Sama and Bajau before the ethnically Visayan Tausug, originally from northeastern Mindanao, started migrating into the region from around the 11th to 13th century.
Historians have scant knowledge of the pre-Spanish history of the indigenous Yakans simply because they have had little contact with other ethnic groups. Basilan's nearness to Borneo led to the theory that the Yakan originated from the Dyak. Although it is fairly safe to say that Basilan's history is related to that of the Sulu archipelago, it is by no means right to suppose that Basilan's first inhabitants came from Indonesia.
Recent anthropological and archaeological findings actually point to a reverse pattern of human migration and subsequent habitation. Originating from the region we know now as Southern China, some of the earliest human communities constituting the northernmost dark-skinned branches of the first or "southern" wave of human migrations from Africa, ancestors of modern-day Aetas and Negritos, were forced to leave the area in the wake of the arrival of the second wave of human migrants out of Africa, the "northern" wave or the ancestors of present-day Chinese aboriginal tribes. These short, dark-skinned and kinky-haired humans first found a home in the relatively isolated island of Taiwan.
At about 5,000BCE, just as Earth was about to exit its most recent ice age, a virtual explosion of human migration again ensued, this time from Taiwan, traveling via land-bridges to Luzon in the Philippines, and farther south. The first wave of these Austronesian migrants proceeded to populate the greater and lesser Sunda islands of Borneo, Sulawesi, the Moluccas, Java and Sumatra in Maritime Southeast Asia and make up the Malayo-Austronesian branch of this population grouping. A more recent sub-branch traveled across the Indian Ocean and populated the previously uninhabited island of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. The second wave of Austronesians traveled eastwards from the Philippines, populating the Western Pacific islands of New Guinea (Papua), Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
Most of these negrito populations were eventually assimilated through inter-racial mingling with Thai-Khmer populations moving southwards from the Thai-Indochinese peninsula, the result being the Malayan race that now inhabit Malaysia, Indonesia (Nusantara), and the Philippines. The negrito populations of the western Pacific however, far removed from racial inter-mingling from the Asian mainland, eventually evolved into the present populations of New Guinea, Fiji, Hawaii and other Pacific island groups.
If Basilan itself was previously inhabited by these ancient Negrito peoples, they were eventually driven farther south by the arrival at around 1500BCE-500BCE of the same ancient Chinese-Annamese aboriginals who drove away the Negritos from Southern China in the first place. Philippine historians from the Spanish-era mistakenly called these new arrivals "Indones" (Indian islanders) exhibiting physical features closer to the ancient Chinese and Annamese. The lighter-skinned and relatively slimmer and taller "Indones" communities eventually became the ancestors of modern-day indigenous Philippine tribes populating nearly the entire Philippine archipelago, the modern-day Lumads of the Philippines, and it is likewise believed that the Yakans were descended from this same population grouping.
The general migratory pattern therefore of the original inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago follows a north–south path, contrary to widely held beliefs based primarily on the more recent cultural counter-migration which started from 300–200BCE.
This third and final wave of human migration came from the general direction of Maritime Southeast Asia, albeit this time by full-fledged Malays (from Borneo) who then promptly displaced indigenous tribes from their coastal communities, driving the Indones or the Lumads farther inland, or south and east into the eastern Indonesian islands. This particular migratory pattern is seen in the pre-Hispanic legends of the 10 Datus from Borneo colonizing the island of Panay, where a much older "Ati" (Aeta or Negrito) kingdom graciously met them at their arrival. The migration of Malays into the Philippines was accelerated by the development of the ancient thalassocratic empires of the Malayo-Indian Sri Vijaya (from whom the name of the Visayas islands are derived) and the Javanese Majapahit in the 12th–14th centuries.