What for Filipinos and many other peoples of the Western Pacific Ocean was their daily means of transportation, the Parao or Paraw,  for the Western voyagers and discoverers, the tiny outrigger boats, with what looked like make-shift sails were frail and hardly capable of going anywhere into the open ocean. So with great astonishment and often ridicule, these watercraft were considered creations of lowly races inept for overseas travel. Little did they know that not only did the Natives cross from island to island, but they travelled hundreds of kilometers to reach different shores, often involuntarily due to strong or bad winds but to this day with a survival capability beyond belief.

European travellers depicted these boats of various sizes with those of the French Admiral Paris (first half the 19th Century) and Discoverer La Perouse (towards the end of the 18th Century)  providing particularly artistic examples of what we in the Philippines consider ordinary but which – by now worldwide – is a masterpiece of design, manufacturing knowledge of which has been handed from generation to generation over more than a thousand years…. The GALLERY OF PRINTS exhibits 44 chosen representative original engravings – the earliest from the turn of the 16th Century by Theodor de Bry.

Exhibit Period: 25 November – 19 December 2010