I was back in Palm Grass, tagged as Cebu’s only heritage hotel, last Saturday and as usual was offered doses of Cebu’s history. The main activity was the celebration of the second year of operation of the hotel’s Hardin Dagami Roofdeck Bar and with it the unveiling of Radel Paredes’s wood sculpture on the Battle of Mactan. Paredes, Palm Gras’s art consultant, is a fellow newspaper columnist and teaches at the University of San Carlos.
Hardin Dagami can be accessed through the seventh floor of the hotel and offers a good view of Cebu City’s northern side, including a top view of Barangay Kamagayan, the former red light district that is now bustling with economic activity. When you are at the roofdeck, especially at night, you forget that you are right smack in the city’s chaotic downtown area. By the way, Hardin Dagami features a pool where you can cool yourself if you want to.
Lapulapu and Dagami. Those two names alone already conjure a big chunk of Cebu’s pre-Spanish period when our archipelago was still a place of separate independent communities not yet subjugated by western powers.
Those names also bring us back to one of the proud moments of our history, when we battled attempts to make us bow to a foreign power.
Radel’s wood sculpture is displayed at the lobby of the seventh floor and could be seen if one goes to Hardin Dagami. From one Mactan island chief to another. Dagami is the lesser-known chieftain, considering how Lapulapu figured in history as the leader of the band of natives that killed Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer working for the Spanish crown.
Radel purposely sculpted the Battle of Mactan the way that event is seen by many historians now: vague and mysterious. The main source of the Battle of Mactan narrative was the chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, but his narration was personal and lacked details; it was enough that he mentioned that Magellan died in that skirmish. Who delivered the death blow we will never know, so too the role Lapulapu actually played in that death.
As for Dagami, Palm Grass’s main source about him was the writing of historian William Henry Scott, one that he based on his research that included materials from archives in Madrid, Spain. Dagami was the chief of Gabi, now known as Cordova, the other local government unit now in Mactan Island, aside from Lapu-Lapu City.
Dagami was said to have conspired with other chieftains to battle a foreigner with more sinister intentions than Magellan, the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, who came to the Philippines four decades after Magellan’s death in Mactan. Legazpi’s intention was conquest, not exploration, and he did so with brute force. This made the resistance by Dagami and the other chieftains a more daring enterprise.
One of the natives and Dagami’s exploits was the capture near Fort San Pedro of Legazpi’s aide Pedro Arana, whose head they displayed on a bamboo pole. It proved our ancestors were daring, a trait tamed by decades of Spanish domination. Two years after, Legazpi captured Dagami and displayed his head on a bamboo pole also near Fort San Pedro.