The Indolence of the Filipino | Page 8

Jose Rizal
these people
of Mindanao did great damage to the Visayan Islands, as much by what
they did in them as by the fear and fright which the native acquired,
because the latter were in the power of the Spaniards, who held them
subject and tributary and unarmed, in such manner that they did not
protect them from their enemies or leave them means with which to
defend themselves, AS THEY DID WHEN THERE WERE NO
SPANIARDS IN THE COUNTRY." These piratical attacks continually
reduced the number of the inhabitants of the Philippines, since the
independent Malays were especially notorious for their atrocities and
murders, sometimes because they believed that to preserve their
independence it was necessary to weaken the Spaniard by reducing the
number of his subjects, sometimes because a greater hatred and a
deeper resentment inspired them against the Christian Filipinos who,
being of the their own race, served the stranger in order to deprive them
of their precious liberty. These expeditions lasted about three centuries,
being repeated five and ten times a year, and each expedition cost the
islands over eight hundred prisoners.
"With the invasions of the pirates from Sulu and Mindanao," says
Padre Gaspar de San Agustin, [the island of Bantayan, near Cebu] "has
been greatly reduced, because they easily captured the people there,
since the latter had no place to fortify themselves and were far from

help from Cebu. The hostile Sulu did great damage in this island in
1608, leaving it almost depopulated." (Page 380).
These rough attacks, coming from without, produced a counter effect,
in the interior, which, carrying out medical comparisons, was like a
purge or diet in an individual who has just lost a great deal of blood. In
order to make headway against so many calamities, to secure their
sovereignty and take the offensive in these disastrous contests, to
isolate the warlike Sulus from their neighbors in the south, to care for
the needs of the empire of the Indies (for one of the reasons why the
Philippines were kept, as contemporary documents prove, was their
strategic position between New Spain and the Indies), to wrest from the
Dutch their growing colonies of the Moluccas and get rid of some
troublesome neighbors, to maintain, in short, the trade of China with
New Spain. it was necessary to construct new and large ships which, as
we have seen, costly as they were to the country for their equipment
and the rowers they required, were not less so because of the manner in
which they were constructed. (16) Fernando de los Rios Coronel, who
fought in these wars and later turned priest, speaking of these King's
ships, said: "As they were so large, the timber needed was scarcely to
be found in the forests (of the Philippines!), and thus it was necessary
to seek it with great difficulty in the most remote of them, where, once
found, in order to haul and convey it to the shipyard the towns of the
surrounding country had to be depopulated of natives, who get it out
with immense labor, damage, and cost to them. The natives furnished
the masts for a galleon, according to the assertion of the Franciscans,
and I heard the governor of the province where they were cut, which is
Lacuna de Bay, say that to haul them seven leagues over very broken
mountains 6,000 natives were engaged three months, without
furnishing them food, which the wretched native had to seek for
himself!"
And Gaspar de San Agustin says: "In those times (1690), Bacolor has
not the people that it had in the past, because of the uprising in that
province when Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lava was Governor of
these islands and because of the continual labor of cutting timber for
his Majesty's shipyards, WHICH HINDERS THEM FROM

CULTIVATING THE VERY FERTILE PLAIN THEY HAVE." (17)
If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands and the
abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then add "the
natives who wore executed, those who loft their wives and children and
fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold into slavery to
pay the taxes levied upon them," as Fernando de los Rios Coronel says;
add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding Bishos Salazar about
"natives sold by some encomendoros to others, those flogged to death,
the women who are crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those who
sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten
by poisonous vermin, the many who are executed and left to die of
hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs ............ and the mothers
who kill their children in bearing them," and you will understand how
in less than thirty years the population of the
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