When my students go to the library to dig up the newspaper on the day they were born, they get a first-hand experience of historical research. Almost everyone is enthusiastic to know what the Philippines was like when they came into the world, but many come away disappointed that their birthday was not heralded by angels with blaring trumpets or marked by cataclysmic disasters.

For many students confronted with their past, the 20-year-old newspaper they consult reads very much like the newspapers of today. The challenges we face remain unchanged. Many faces in the political landscape have aged, but with the aid of cosmetic surgery or Viagra they remain. The newspaper exercise underscores the sad fact that we have not changed very much in two decades. Worse, after a semester of Philippine history, students realize that we have not changed much in the past century or even the past millennium.

While history classes begin with the great philosophical question, ?Why history?? my students learn about the day they were born and ask the more relevant question: ?Do we liberate ourselves from history? Can we liberate ourselves from the past??

These questions came to mind when I went through the Philippine references in the journal of Nathaniel Bowditch who traveled all the way from Salem, Massachusetts, to Manila in 1796 to trade. I don?t normally read works on economic history because I get bored by the stale data on 19th-century shipping schedules or the prices of sugar, Manila hemp, salt, live hogs and dried tanned carabao hide. Most historians are familiar with the 19th-century American trading houses in the Philippines, like Peale, Hubbell & Co. or Russell & Sturgis, but not much else. Not much earlier. The Manila references in the Bowditch journal were transcribed from the original manuscript in the Boston Public Library and annotated by Thomas and Mary McHale, and their slim but important work was published by the Yale University Southeast Asia Studies program in 1962.

Kept indoors in the wake of ?Ondoy,? I finally read the Bowditch journal to get reacquainted with old Manila. There were the usual descriptions of the city and its people and details on the Chinese and trade. Since Bowditch arrived on a named ?Astrea,? there were references to navigation of Manila Bay, crocodiles in the Pasig River, as well as the inconveniences of port, customs and police regulations. He experienced mild earthquakes while in Manila and was surprised that these came silently, without the rumbling of the earth he knew from quakes in the US.

Their cargo of hats were sold out. They also brought wine, brandy and rum. When they were informed that alcohol distilled from cane was prohibited in the Philippines, they declared their rum as brandy.

As I was about to close the pamphlet halfway unread, I came across an account of akyat bahay:

?On Friday evening December 2, [1796] was stolen from our house a bag containing 1,000 dollars. It was a daring robbery but the authors of it have been detected and chief of the money recovered. The circumstances were these: There were five bags of money lying on top of the other boxes containing money. A black man who brought here a muster of some indigo for them conceived the process of breaking into the house. He was accompanied by four or five black people who lived a little way back into the country. By means of a bamboo they climbed into a window of the chamber where the money was deposited and which was not 10 feet from the bed where Capt. Prince and myself were asleep. In the adjoining chamber, parted from ours by a thin partition, there was Mr. Collins and the boat?s crew, in all seven persons, asleep. They took but one bag of the money when it was probable that something startled them and they went off undiscovered.?

Next morning the boat crew went off without noticing anything unusual. The captain saw the open window and asked Bowditch if he had left it open during the night. Bowditch replied in the negative and closed the window. Then they discovered one bag of money missing and despaired that they would never know what happened. But by 8 a.m. the police had the culprits. The thieves were aboard a banca making their escape when they were stopped and questioned by river police. Instead of making excuses, fear got the better of them and they ran off and money bags fell into the river, but everyone was later caught.

Only $868 of the $1,000 was recovered from the river and the thieves. Bowditch did not speculate where the remainder went. Perhaps the police pocketed a few souvenirs for their effort?

Bowditch recorded two other thefts. First, a cask of wine was stolen in broad daylight during siesta. Second, cargadores loading numbered boxes on the ship set aside two and altered the shipping marks on the rest to confuse the person receiving and logging inventory. Everything went undetected, but the cargadores were eventually caught when they attempted to bring the stolen boxes ashore.

Customs and river police were everywhere and quite vigilant, too. While there is not much on crime and punishment in old travel accounts, these are still worth reading today not just to remind us how little we have changed, but to make us more careful of our possessions.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu