Sir John Bowring, a former governor of Hong Kong, opens his 1859 work with a preface that frames the Philippines as an underknown territory ripe for commercial development. The excerpts available, however, do not dwell on the political or administrative subjects listed in the catalog. Instead, they offer a granular look at the Tagalog language, including its monosyllables, passive-voice preference, and gendered interjections. Bowring also reproduces a list of twenty-three native time expressions—such as “height of axe” and “children’s bed-time”—that predate Spanish clock culture. This linguistic focus, rather than the promised travelogue or governance analysis, shapes the surviving text.

Tagalog Grammar as Colonial Record

The excerpts devote considerable space to the structure of Tagalog, noting that nouns lack cases, numbers, and genders, and that verbs are not inflected for person. Bowring observes that the passive voice is preferred: “a Tagal will not say ‘Juan loves Maria,’ but ‘Maria is loved by Juan.’” He also records that no active verb can begin with the letter b and that interjections vary by the gender of the addressee—paetog for a man, paetag for a woman. These details are presented as objective linguistic facts, but they also reflect the colonial encounter: Bowring cites the friars’ religious books as evidence of passive constructions, and he notes that Spanish words are simplified by Tagalog speakers (e.g., zapato becomes pato). The catalog subject “Social life and customs” is thus addressed obliquely, through language rather than direct ethnographic description.

Time Without Clocks

A striking passage enumerates twenty-three native phrases for divisions of the day, from “darkness departs” to “midnight past.” Bowring credits the Spanish with introducing bell-ringing and clock-striking, implying that most of these terms predate colonization. The list includes “sun about to rise” (sisilang na ang arao), “height of spear,” and “Ave Maria time”—the last a hybrid of indigenous and Catholic markers. Bowring notes that “the phraseology varies in different localities,” but he does not explain how these expressions were used in daily life. The catalog subject “Description and travel” is present only in this indirect form: the reader learns how time was perceived, not what Bowring saw or did. The excerpt thus offers a fragment of cultural chronology rather than a travel narrative.

The Limits of the Excerpts

The available text does not support the catalog subjects of politics, government, or administration. Bowring’s preface mentions “constant intercourse with the various authorities,” but the excerpts contain no discussion of colonial governance, taxation, or the army. The chapter titles in the contents—such as “Government, Administration, etc.” and “Finance, Taxation, etc.”—promise such material, but the digitized sample ends before those sections. Similarly, the catalog subject “Bowring, John, 1792-1872 – Travel – Philippines” is barely evidenced: there is no description of a journey, a landscape, or an encounter. The reader must therefore treat the excerpts as a narrow window into a much larger work, one that likely balances linguistic curiosity with the imperial survey Bowring announces in his preface.

Readers approaching this text should be aware that the surviving excerpts concentrate on philology, not politics or travel. The catalog subjects may lead one to expect a colonial administrator’s report on governance and commerce; instead, the available pages offer a meticulous, if decontextualized, study of Tagalog. To understand Bowring’s full project, one would need to consult the complete work, particularly the chapters on history, government, and commerce that are listed but not included here.