THERE ARE FOUR SAMARS IN EUROPE AND ASIA, COULD THEY ALSO HAVE ORIGINATED FROM THE WARAY-WARAY WORD ‘SAMAD’?

Samar Was Never Wounded

By CHITO DELORIA DELA TORRE
Vice-Chairman, Board of Directors
Catbalogan Cable Television Media Advocates Nucleus (CCATMAN)
August 7, 2006

Samar, it seems, used to be the official name of the third largest island of what in 1946 came to be known as the Republic of the Philippines. It also used to be the name of the province that bore the name of that island during Spain’s colonial rule in the Philippines.

The island (with a combined population of 1,517,585 in year 2000, 41 per cent of the Eastern Visayas [Region VIII] population of 3,730,765 or 2% of the Philippine population of 76,498,735) is 5,058 square miles or 13,100 square kilometers in total area, second to Mindanao in size, while Luzon is the largest of the Philippines’ 7,100 islands.

Yet, just how it was named, local historians have not found a very clear and acceptable answer even up to this day when it appears that more of the island’s inhabitants are engaged in a research that has got to do with the beginnings of Samar.

This should not, however, be construed to mean that a search into how Samar came to being as the name of the island that become an island province and that was divided into three provinces - Eastern Samar, Northern Samar, and Western Samar - by Republic Act 4221 (also known as the Samar Division Act) on June 19, 1965 would now be useless and irrelevant. The effort may in the end be rewarding, for then it may break a myth that stays on until today in the minds of many Samarnons, and Filipinos - to speak of a bigger community - that Samar was taken from the word samad, although that term, which in Waray-Waray, the local dialect in Samar means in English “wound” (for the noun function) or “wounded” (for the adjective function), could give a good historical value to the culture of the people that inhabited the early years of the island before they played host to Portuguese circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan who rested in Suluan (south of now Guiuan, Eastern Samar and about 1.13 kilometers east of Homonhon island) waters between March 16, 1521 and the afternoon of March 25, 1521. Perhaps a scarcely supported literature ventured to claim that the word “samad” also aptly described the island’s rugged shape.

A cursory look into some available sources of information would show that four other places in the world and outside the Philippines have been named Samar. These are Samar in Sichuan, China, Samar in Izmir, Turkey, Samar in Chad, and Samar in Jordan. Apart from the place-name Samar, there are places named Samara (which in Waray-Waray dais a verb form signifying a command “to cause a wound or cut”) and these are found in Russia (where another administrative division and a river are also named Samara) and in Ukraine which is bordered by Belarus, Poland, Romania and the Black Sea. Could the Samar in Sichuan, Izmir, Chad and Jordan have existed and named long before the Samar in the Philippines during the Spanish time?

This fact is interesting. It might have been possible that the person who named the island “Samar” could have come from any of those four Samars, if they predated the Spaniards in Samar. Or, he could have been familiar with any of those foreign lands.

This brings up the questions: Who named Samar island “Samar”? and Where could he have come from?  Being able to trace that person might yet help in discovering the origin of the name of Samar the island. If he was with the early Spanish rulers, he could have persuaded the Spanish government in the Philippines to give the island that name. He could have existed much earlier than when manuscripts or books were written (some translated to the English language in much later years) about Samar, like that of Miguel de Loarca which came out in 1582, or by Fr. Cantius Kobak who referred to the arrival of the Jesuits in Tinago (also reported as Tinagon, it was the early settlement of present-day Tarangnan, a coastal town next to Catbalogan, the capital town of the province of Western Samar) on October 15, 1596 (also reported as October 22, 15 or 12 days after the Jesuits mission left Manila which they reached overland from Sorsogon on first on June 14, 1596 after sailing from Mexico as among 70 missionaries comprising an expedition led by Francisco Tello de Guzman).

There is no question about the name “Samar” that applies to the province that was christened by RA 4221 in 1965 as “Western Samar”. The provisions of the law are crystal clear. The law provided that Western Samar shall retain the name “Samar”.

The map produced by Antonio de Pigafetta showed the islands of “ZZamal”, “Zuluam” and “Humunu” or “Aguada ly boni Segnaly” (“the Watering-place of good Signs”). From this, it could be assumed that the name of Samar then was Zzamal and not “Samad” as later literature wrote. (Pigafetta was Magellan’s chief chronicler. He wrote Primo viaggio intorno al mondo, a full account of his day-to-day voyage with Magellan which was first translated in French and published in Paris in 1523 which turn was translated in Italian in 1536. Pigafetta’s diary did not interest Charles V of Spain.) A later translation of Pigafetta’s account used “Zamal” instead of Zzamal as used by Pigafetta. Based on this map and translation, it could safely be said that “Samar” was an improvement of the word “Zamal” and therefore the island named Samar was originally named Zamal.

But again, it might have been asked, why was the island named “Zzamal” or “Zamal”? Did Pigafetta hear it from the natives themselves of Zuluam (Suluan island in later years)?

It was in the afternoon of March 18 that Magellan and his voyagers first had a talk with the first nine men that approached them via a baloto (boat) from Zuluam. In the next friendly talks that unfolded at the Humunu (Homonhon) shore, Pigafetta recorded the natives having named the island where they (the Spanish voyagers) anchored as Humunu, but called it Acquada da li bouni Segnialli (the “Watering-place of good Signs”). Never in those talks did the natives of Zuluam explain how Zzamal got its name. It was not even suggested that the natives had any samad on their bodies or that they were a breed of men who loved getting wounded in bloody wars of spears, bladed weapons, and bows and arrows. From what Pigafetta wrote, it was even clearer to one’s imagination that the first people of Samar were friendly, hospitable and loved very much to talk about themselves, their culture, their land, and the things around them. They could have been the first tour guides of the Philippines! With a background of friendly people, it would be too hard to imagine that they could be sporting wounds and name their land after them.