The history of this is that while still working with Windoze I found I needed two wireless modems, one, a ZTE MF626 for Smart bro and a Huawei E160E with Globe, to cover the patchy coverage. I then got the Huawei unlocked so I could use both SIMs in the same modem.

Fast forward, I switched to Ubuntu on my laptop to discover that it recognised the ZTE modem but not the Huawei. That locked me into Smart Bro, which is unusable in Upper Cubi, SBFZ where I spend a lot of time with a client.

I did discover that if I started up my laptop with both modems plugged in, both would show under network manager. A bit inconvenient but it worked.

I then decided to install Wammu so that I could send and received texts like a cellphone. Having installed Wammu and configured it to recognise the Huawei E160E I found, whoopee, Ubuntu now recognised the modem under network manager without a problem.

So, if you don’t want to mess around with usb_modeswitch files installing Wammu might be the answer.

Here’s the review. with some updating:

Not since the Piltdown Man hoax in England have so many solid reputations been destroyed by a scientific issue as the Tasaday controversy in the Philippines. Invented Eden is an effective antidote for those who believe the gentle people discovered in a South Cotabato backwater in 1971 were a Stone Age tribe isolated from mainstream humanity for millennia. It is also an effective antidote to those who want to believe that the whole sorry affair was simply a confidence trick.

Hemley, an English professor at the University of Utah when he wrote the book and currently a professor at Iowa University is better known as a fiction writer, which may be why so much of Invented Eden reads like a particularly complex detective story, one that takes the reader on a twisting journey in which each firm foothold seems to crumble to dust the moment it is touched. He captures the flavour of the Philippines and its cultures with exactitude, a country and people of enormous extremes in which a multitude of greys stand bodyguard to every truth.

Writing with passion and fondness, Hemley begins with the initial reports of the discovery of the Tasaday in 1971. They attracted the attention of Manda Elizalde, a complex, wealthy Forbes Park brat with a bad attitude, a squad of goons, and possibly a touch of insanity, who ran PANAMIN, at first a private foundation and later an agency under the Marcos government charged with helping the country’s tribal minorities. It also caught the attention of John Nance, an Associated Press photographer whose experiences amid the horrors of Vietnam led him to a desk job at AP’s Manila office.

For Nance, the Tasaday were the antithesis of the hatred of Vietnam, it became an article of faith, a hope for mankind. It would also become the cross upon which his integrity and honesty would be crucified. As for Manda Elizalde, his agenda was, and remains, far from clear.

The Tasaday seemed to be too good to be true. Sure enough, claims that the whole thing was a hoax quickly surfaced, followed again by a media feeding frenzy that largely ignored the agendas of the hoax proponents. For many of them, the Tasaday were not an undiscovered Eden but a symbol of the corrupt and murderous Marcos regime. For others, the presence of a real Tasaday tribe blocked their ambitions to log out the Tasaday reserve, so the Tasaday must be a hoax.

Hemley digs through the mass of documents, reports, interviews and artifacts like an enthusiastic terrier seeking out an elusive ferret. The ferret in this case being the truth about the Tasaday. He also explores the language we use to describe ourselves and others and how that language is coloured by preconceptions and agendas and the desire on one hand to believe that truth is a fixed value and on the other that truth is a variable as liquid as mercury.

Hemley sets off to meet the Tasaday himself and gathers evidence that they are, indeed, suspect, but the pendulum begins to swing the other way on a return visit years later, as the truth again plays hide-and-seek.

The Tasaday became a mirror, a mirage, and a metaphor that demand a more than casual examination of their complex truths and the false Eden they inhabited. So does Hemley’s Invented Eden.

I remember the early reports on television of the discovery of a ‘stone-age’ tribe living in the forests of Mindanao and the subsequent documentary about them. Somehow, it didn’t feel ‘right’. Sure enough, soon came a documewentary claiming it was a hoax, The Tribe That Never Was. Over the years I dipped in and out of the story until I read Hemley’s book and realised that there was more to the story than the often-polemical tracts about the Tasaday.

Elizalde died in 1997. Posthumously, a myth was created that he “…died in Costa Rica addicted to drugs and impoverished”. He actually died in Manila of leukemia.

Whatever the psychology of the participants, the questions remains: Were the Tasaday manufactured out of whole cloth or did they pre-exist their ‘discovery’ in the 1960s?

What do the Tasaday say of their own history?

They say they went into isolation to escape a disease they called ‘fugu’. The symptoms they describe fit smallpox. Faced with a similar situation 14th century Great Plague in Europe, which killed 75 million people, many small communities did much the same.

They say they separated themselves some six generations before the 1970s. That would work out at around 150 years.

They used stone tools, were able to make them, and wore leaf clothing (And more modern clothing at times). Stone tools require quite a sophisticate knowledge and experience, as indeed, does making leaf ‘breech-cloths’. Archaeological digs elsewhere show that different technologies were use by different groups at the same time. Archaeological digs show the ‘bronze’ culture co-existed with a ‘stone’ culture almost side-by-side in the Philippines. Significantly, leaf-clothes were seen in Sarangani Bay in the 1800s.

In other words, there is nothing unlikely about the existence of a stone-tool using, leaf-wearing culture, being in Cotabato around the time the Tasaday say they separated themselves.

In 1993 Thomas Headland wrote: “Today anthropologists agree that the widely-hailed story that these people were Stone Age cavemen living in isolation for hundreds of years is patently false. In that sense, it was a hoax. On the other hand, however, the non-hoax element is that there was a small community of people called Tasaday that really exists and who were living as a separate–but not isolated–group of hunters and food gatherers in the rain forest of the southern Philippines. While there are still some uncertainties about just how the Tasaday lived before they were ‘discovered’ in 1971, we may at least conclude today that these 26 people were neither uncontacted Stone-Age cave dwellers nor farmers brought into the forest and paid to imitate a crude lifestyle of archaic prehistoric Man.

The evidence we have [in 1993] suggests that the Tasaday were a group of hunter-gatherers. But rather than being ultra-primitives, they lived during the first half of the twentieth century much like other hunter-gatherer groups in Southeast Asia. They thus had iron tools and did not use stone axes; they wore cotton cloth; and they lived in simple thatch huts, although they may have slept in caves occasionally when on overnight trips, just as do other Asian hunter-gatherers. They certainly ate wild foods, but also cultivated foods such as rice and root crops that they got through trading.

The Tasaday did live separate–but neither alone nor isolated–from Manobo farming groups. They visited and traded with outsiders, and especially with the farmers living in the village just two-and-a-half miles from the Tasaday cave. And they were once farmers themselves, a century ago, descendants of Manobo farmers who separated from an agricultural village sometime in the 19th century, and moved deeper into the rain forest near where they live today”.

That is a pretty fair assessment, and finding a date for that separation would certainly help cap the controversy and solve much of the mystery of the Tasaday.

And there is a date – 1871. That year, according to Spanish health records, smallpox swept through Cotabato, the same disease the Tasaday said they were escaping with the the time period they said they had separated themselves.

However, it’s been a year or so since Chew The Bones was published and time to look under the hood of history for the next meander through the centuries.

So, this site will, if you like, become the draft manuscript for the next book.

So bear with me as I chew another bone.

Introduction

Somewhere along the line the book you hold in your hand or the electronic text you’re reading on screen came to you aboard ship. Wood pulp and clay were transported to the papermill which took those ingredients in a one end to be transformed into great, heavy rolls of paper at the other which themselves were transported by ship to a print works filled with machinery which also reached their destination countries by ship.

The dyes that make up the ink printed on the paper, the solvents that carry them on to the paper, and the oils and greases that keep the printing machines pounding out page after page, all travelled by sea.

As for your computer and the monitor you may be reading these words on, everything they’re made of travelled by sea, by ship, during their making.

Sure, aircraft can carry goods, too, but even a modest sized cargo ship can carry a hundred times more than an aircraft and at less than one hundredth the cost. And how do you think all that aviation fuel gets transported around the world? By ship.

When you hold a book, or switch on a computer, you’re looking at an infinitesimal part of a complex webwork of business, a global trade that began when the first Spanish galleon left Cebu, Philippines in the late 16th century and found a way to get to Acapulco, Mexico. Once that ship dropped anchor at its destination all continents, with the exception of yet-to-be discovered Australia, were joined for the first time in a regular trading process, the galleon trade.

The process that has resulted in this book, whether you’re reading it in hard back or on a computer screen.

It’s a story of the days when, it was said, ships were made of wood and men were made of iron. Sometimes the ships were called the Manila Galleon, sometimes the Acapulco Galleon, just as often they were called the China Ships.

This is the story of those ships, the men who rode on them, and the successes and failures of what was for a time the world’s biggest international business.

Bob Couttie
Subic Bay

Plans to remove Aquino began almost immediately after the overthrow of Marcos, and might even have started before. In mid-1986, just months after the world had watched the Peoples Power Revolt in the Philippines that inspired similar revolts around the world, I was told by Manila businessmen: “We got rid of Marcos, now we have to get rid of Aquino”.

There had been coup attempts against Cory Aquino before, but the 1989 attempt, led by Gregorio Honasan and financed by a politician known as ’777′, a powerful man still beyond the reach of justice, came closest to overthrowing Aquino and instigating a military junta. Disaffected and disappointed junior military officers under the Reform Armed Movement – disappointed that change had not come quickly enough after the overthrow of Marcos, were scammed by power-hungry politicians and Marcos remnants into supporting the attempted coup. They were led to believe that they had the support of the US.

It came so close to success that, according to a former US Foreign Service officer who was in the US Embassy crisis management room at the time, she asked for armed intervention by the United States. Preparations were made at the then-US naval base at Subic Bay with enough materiel to invade a small country. US politicians favoured intervention but the proposal was opposed by military officials with more of an idea of ‘ground truth’- shooting Filipino soldiers was not an option, it would turn the entire country against both the Americans and Cory Aquino. The military won the discourse.

Instead, a small number of US fighter aircraft would take off from USAF Clark and carry out high-level flybys while backchannels reached the coup leaders, advised them whose side the US was on and bluffed that there was a real likelihood of armed intervention.

Armed intervention was not unexpected. Indeed, a British diplomat saw a US fighter jet pass the British embassy building on Paseo de Roxas and immediately called the US ambassador to get assurances that there would be no shooting by US forces.

It was a close-run contest that, not unnaturally shook Aquino. Not because her own life might have been at stake – she was a woman of considerable bravery – but because of betrayal by people whom she believed to be her friends yet who financed and organised the coup, which was intended to bring back to power those who had given force to the Marcos regime.

After the coup attempt was stifled, Aquino went into purda. There were no triumphant interviews with the Filipino or foreign press for weeks afterwards. Then, I forget how, I was invited to a pool press conference at Malacanang. I was just a stringer, but I was the only foreigner to be a full member of the National Press Club at the time, which may be why I got the opportunity.

My notes have long disappeared but I recall there were six of us, mainly from places like Indonesia and a correspondent for a Spanish agency, including three women. Each of us were allowed just two questions.

I had the feeling that she was uncomfortable, that she had developed an invisible shield around her. There wasn’t the sense of presence or charisma that I expected, and I suspected that it was due to the after-effects of the coup attempt.

Each of us was allowed to ask one question, then each of us in turn until our own turn came again. It was difficult to develop a line so I knew I had to ask two key questions and hope that if anything remarkable was said one of the other journalists would pick it up – it was a pool interview to be shared with the world’s press, not an exclusive.

“Do you still want to be President?” I asked.

“Frankly, no,” she responded.

I waited impatiently, hoping the others would pick up the lead, they didn’t. “what’s it like being a woman president?” asked the Indonesian journalist. There was hardy a mention of the coup in the other questions either.

My turn came once more: “You said you don’t want to be president any more. Why is that?”

“Because I have been betrayed by people I thought were my friends” she said.

She did not resign, she could not resign – the coup plotters would have won, and she finished her presidency in 1992.

It is not yet time to determine how history will view Corazon Aquino, she had her strengths and her weaknesses and many of the changes she wanted to introduce were forcefully stifled in Congress and Senate, she could never entirely overcome family loyalties, but let us correct one common judgement:

Corazon Aquino did not restore democracy to the Philippines. Democracy can only come from the Filipino people exercising their right to a democracy.

She restored the opportunity for democracy.

It is up to the Filipino people to determine how to do the rest.

During World War 2 the Japanese rounded up vast numbers of prisoners of war of all nationalities, stuffed them into the crowded, sweltering holds of a variety of ships, and transported them to Japan as slave labour. Not knowing the valuable, suffering cargo these ships carried many were attacked and sunk by the allies in the belief that they were merchant vessels carrying war materiel.

Thousands died, others went mad, still others suffered mining for the glory of the inhumane Imperial Japan.

No nation, including the US, Britain and Australia, had ever set up a memorial to remember that sacrifice. A small team decided that wasn’t good enough and set about putting that right and I was asked to help put together a fund raising DVD for the project.

It presented an interesting challenge because I felt there was a need to set the scene, to emphasise the rational for the monument at the outset. Two dozen nationalities died on the Hellships so waving the Star and Stripes was not an option.

I decided to use an extract, sometimes called the Ode Of Remembrance, from Laurence Binyan’s poem For The Fallen, which is spoken on Remembrance Day, November 11, at the Cenotaph in London, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Although apparently unknown in the US and the Philippines, its haunting words were just as appropriate.

Then there was the issue of music. A bugle call was almost mandatory but which to choose? The US Taps or the more widely used Last Post? After a lot of deep thought I decided to use both and created and arrangement in which the two became a call and response, a concept that seemed entirely appropriate for those who had answered the call and responded.

I was asked to read the Binyan poem at the inauguration of the Hellships memorial and a surprisingly large number of people asked me for copies afterwards, including Filipino veterans.

So, you can hear it here

You can watch the inauguration of the memorial on YouTube here.

Says the blurb: “Take a time-travelling journey of a thousand years of adventure and romance as you explore the unknown highways, byways and strange ways of an almost forgotten world. Dip into a unique, eye-opening collection of true stories they didn’t tell you at school. In this world slaves get benefits worthy of a corporate highflier. A redhaired hard-to-handle Hong Kong-born Irish teenager marries a man determined to change his country’s destiny. England’s Queen Victoria is given the world’s most expensive wedding dress, made by Filipinos. The last cavalry charge in American history begins with a hangover as the first Japanese bombs drop on the Philippines. A Scots-American widow find a new purpose protecting and building lives for the indigenous Aeta people of the Zambales Mountains.”

A review says: “Bob Couttie writes with an absorbing, lively sense of fun, fascination and scrupulous research. You come away from this book with a feeling for the romance and adventure that made, and is making, the Philippines what it is today.”

It is available immediately from Amazon here

If you live in the Philippines, a special low-cost edition is available and you can get a personalised signed copy for just 300 pesos

To order one, email bcouttie@gmail.com

A ship with 1,500 souls aboard, some of the most dangerous waters around the US coast and a GPS that tells lies. Guess what happens next…