Provenance: The estate of the esteemed scholar and director of the Philippine National Library, Epifanio delos Santos

Literature: Epifanio de los Santos, “Andrés Bonifacio” [English version], Philippine Review (Revista Filipina), III:1–2 (January–February 1918). Facsimile of the original letter in Adrian E. Cristobal, “The Tragedy of the Revolution” (Makati City: Studio 5 Publishing Inc., 1997), 146–7. Jim Richardson, “Light of Liberty: Documents and Studies on the Katipunan, 1892-1897”, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013.

ABOUT THE WORK

The scholar Jim Richardson describes this letter as “The first of four surviving letters that Bonifacio sent to Emilio Jacinto (popularly described as ‘The Brains of the Katipunan’) from Cavite”, just days before the notorious Tejeros Convention that would change the course of the Katipunan and the leadership of the Philippine Revolution. Richardson continues, “This brief note was sent together with a consignment of cartridges – a smaller consignment, Bonifacio says, than had been hoped, but no more could be spared. There is an ominous note, foreshadowing the violent events that would unfold in a matter of weeks: “Bonifacio asks Jacinto to use the “code of the 2nd degree” if he has to write anything in confidence because, he says, Jacinto’s letters are reaching him already opened. The code Bonifacio himself occasionally employs, however, here and in his other extant letters, is the simple substitution cipher that had been used within the Katipunan from the outset". -Lisa Guerrero Nakpil