In 1844, the Philippines Skipped a Day, And It Took Decades for the Rest of the World to Notice.
European explorers who approached the Pacific Ocean by sailing to the east such as the Portuguese, and in their wake the Dutch, the English, and the French, naturally kept their ship’s journals and diaries according to the day count of their homeland and this was of course also adopted by the colonists who settled along the Asian perimeter of the Pacific Ocean.
However, the colonization of the Pacific Ocean by the Spanish occurred from the opposite direction and more specifically from the Spanish possessions in America. Ferdinand Magellan landed at the Philippine archipelago in March 1521 and Spanish dominion over the islands was first firmly established in 1565 by Miguel López de Legazpi (c. 1510 – 1572), the conquistador and first Spanish governor-general of the Philippines….
Most of the shipping from the Philippines to Spain went over the Pacific Ocean to the Mexican port of Acapulco, was transported overland to the port of Veracruz, and then shipped to Spain. In order that the Spanish ships crossing the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and the Spanish Americas would not have to adjust the dates in their journals whenever they sighted land, the Philippines observed the same day count as that of the Spanish Americas….
During the early 1840s, the commercial interests of the Philippine Islands turned more and more away from the Spanish Americas (which for a large part had severed their relations with the motherland Spain) and trading with the Chinese mainland (engendered by the ignominious but lucrative ‘Opium Wars’), the Malay peninsula, the Dutch East Indies and Australia became increasingly important.
In order to facilitate communication and trading with its western and southern Neighbours, the secular and religious authorities of the Philippines agreed that it would be advantageous to abolish the American day reckoning and adopt the Asian day reckoning.
This was achieved in 1844 when Narciso Claveria, the governor-general of the Philippines, issued a proclamation announcing that Monday, 30 December 1844, was to be immediately followed by Wednesday, 1 January 1845.
To catch up, the Philippines had to skip a day. This was well before the International Date Line was officially established, and some cartographers had no idea the islands had made the switch. For decades, they put the Philippines on the wrong date.
Countries have shifted over the International Date Line only a few times since the it was established in 1884. In 1993, one atoll of the Marshall Islands flipped to the Asian side of the date line, skipping a Saturday in August. And, most recently, in 2011, Samoa and Tokelau made the same switch.
Samoa had actually switched once before. In 1892, American trading partners convinced the king to flip to their side of the date line, and the country lived through July 4, 1892 twice. But 119 years later, the economic geography of the island had changed, and most businesses was being done with Australia and New Zealand. To make the jump back to the Asian date Samoa and Tokelau skipped Dec. 30, 2011.
REFERENCES
Philippine News Agency. Philippine Canadian Inquirer. January 5, 2018. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
R. H. van Gent. "A History of the International Date Line". Webspace.science.uu.nl. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
"Missing date in Philippines history". wordpress.com. August 27, 2007. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
* * *
Affordable Wordpress website host at
www.greengeeks.com Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=124128.0
