My home island of Biliran was known as Isla de Panamao (Panamao Island), according to early Spanish chronicles. Panamao Island was the site of the first large-scale Spanish shipyard in the Philippines. Its prominence and importance during the fledgling years of Spanish colonization was cited in a report written by the Jesuit priest-historian Pedro Chirino. He devoted a whole chapter (Chapter 76, "Of the Mission to Panamao") of his monumental work, Relacion de las Islas Filipinas (Rome: 1604), which described the shipbuilding activities and the Jesuit missionary activities in the island.

Fr. Chirino was candid enough to admit that he sailed from the Philippines in July 1602 on a galleon that was built in Panamao Island. His arrival in Europe (via Mexico) enabled him to report on the Jesuit missions in these islands to the Jesuit-General Claudius Acquaviva. His report later became a "classic" reference document of historians of the "end-of-1500s" Philippines. If by chance the Panamao-built galleon that Fr. Chirino rode on sank or got shipwrecked during its trans-Pacific voyage, the period that he wrote about may have remained a big void in our history.

Anyway, Panamao was renamed Biliran, and this fact puzzled me for years since I first came across Fr. Chirino’s work as part of my course readings in Philippine History in 1977. What caused the change of names from Panamao to Biliran? Why? The clues to the solution of this puzzle would come in trickles through years of serendipitous readings, patience, persistence, and keen association of history with recent events.

First I had to establish the dates. In 1989, while researching on the history of my hometown of Naval in the DWU Museum-Library, I came across a manuscript that mentioned 1712 as the earliest date that the name Biliran was used. The reference for the new name was a formal petition for recognition of Biliran (no longer Panamao) as a new pueblo. Then in 1990, I came across a translation of the 17th-century Alcina manuscript, which mentioned that my home island was still known as Panamao as of 1668. Thus, I was able to infer that the change of names from Panamao to Biliran probably occurred sometime between 1668 and 1712. But I could not yet understand the reason for the name change.

Then Mount Pinatubo in Zambales Province erupted in 1991. This cataclysmic event reminded me that Fr. Alcina described in 1668 the now-dormant Mt. Panamao, located northwest of Biliran Island, as an active volcano "...throwing out fire ... especially on very dark and stormy nights."

He further wrote: "... I noticed flames that the tallest peak ... was throwing with all the more astonishment because of my ignorance of such excesses. From this experience I concluded and even feared that the great quantity of stones and sulfur on the flames of this mountain will be found not in one place but in many ... God grant that it stops and does not burst forth to its own destruction and of the nearby inhabitants which are numerous ...." (From the translation of the Lenox Text of Alcina’s 1668 manuscript by Paul S. Leitz.)

Afterwards, I theorized that Mount Panamao erupted after 1668, but I was not sure when. I thought this eruption might have also been as disastrous as that of Mount Pinatubo, such that the event probably influenced the natives to change the name of the island (to waylay or confuse the angry ethnic gods?) and to restrict the Panamao name to the destructive mountain. (Did they also use Dalutan Island as altar of their offerings to appease the angry spirits in the volcano?).

This theory also enabled me to infer the origin of the random clusters of volcanic rocks in the mountainsides of Naval, my hometown, which I had wondered about since my childhood years.

Later, I was able to establish the eruption of Mount Panamao after 1668. A milestone in the history of Tacloban was a reported rain of ashes here in 1669. The ash-fall could only have come from Panamao Volcano since Mayon Volcano, the other volcano mentioned in the Alcina manuscript, was not yet eruptive in 1668. The fact that the ash-fall reached Tacloban suggests that the effect of the volcanic eruption on Panamao Island may have been really destructive and devastating. The Pinatubo disaster provided me this parallel insight.

The later name of the island (Biliran) could be associated with the eruption of Mt. Panamao. While the old name, Panamao, referred to an ethnic fishing net, the later name, Biliran, referred to a grass used for mat-weaving, which was probably the initial vegetation that flourished in the swampy and lahar-devastated portions of the island following the theorized 1669 eruption of the now-extinct Panamao Volcano.