When in consequence of a long chronic illness the condition of the
patient is examined, the question may arise whether the weakening
of the fibers and the debility of the organs are the cause of the
malady's continuing or the effect of the bad treatment that prolongs
its action. The attending physician attributes the entire failure of
his skill to the poor constitution of the patient, to the climate, to
the surroundings, and so on. On the other hand, the patient attributes
the aggravation of the evil to the system of treatment followed. Only
the common crowd, the inquisitive populace, shakes its head and cannot
reach a decision.
Something like this happens in the case of the Philippines. Instead of
physician, read government, that is, friars, employees, etc. Instead
of patient, Philippines; instead of malady, indolence.
And, just as happens in similar cases then the patient gets worse,
everybody loses his head, each one dodges the responsibility to place
it upon somebody else, and instead of seeking the causes in order
to combat the evil in them, devotes himself at best to attacking
the symptoms: here a blood-letting, a tax; there a plaster, forced
labor; further on a sedative, a trifling reform. Every new arrival
proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint,
the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with
pretensions to modern ideas, a transfusion of blood. "It's nothing,
only the patient has eight million indolent red corpuscles: some few
white corpuscles in the form of an agricultural colony will get us
out of the trouble."
So, on all sides there are groans, gnawing of lips, clenching of fists,
many hollow words, great ignorance, a deal of talk, a lot of fear. The
patient is near his finish!
Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new
vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to
inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer
in another organism will withstand all the depravity of the system,
will withstand the blood-lettings that it suffers every day, will
have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will
cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all the trouble in the
principal organs. Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and
produce gangrene, be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer!
While the patient breathes, we must not lose hope, and however late we
be, a judicious examination is never superfluous; at least the cause
of death may be known. We are not trying to put all the blame on the
physician, and still less on the patient, for we have already spoken
of a predisposition due to the climate, a reasonable and natural
predisposition, in the absence of which the race would disappear,
sacrificed to excessive labor in a tropical country.
Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic malady, but not a hereditary
one. The Filipinos have not always been what they are, witnesses
whereto are all the historians of the first years after the discovery
of the Islands.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Malayan Filipinos carried
on an active trade, not only among themselves but also with all the
neighboring countries. A Chinese manuscript of the 13th century,
translated by Dr. Hirth (Globus, Sept. 1889), which we will take
up at another time, speaks of China's relations with the islands,
relations purely commercial, in which mention is made of the activity
and honesty of the traders of Luzon, who took the Chinese products
and distributed them throughout all the islands, traveling for nine
months, and then returned to pay religiously even for the merchandise
that the Chinamen did not remember to have given them. The products
which they in exchange exported from the islands were crude wax,
cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, dry-goods, etc. [5]
The first thing noticed by Pigafetta, who came with Magellan in 1521,
on arriving at the first island of the Philippines, Samar, was the
courtesy and kindness of the inhabitants and their commerce. "To honor
our captain," he says, "they conducted him to their boats where they
had their merchandise, which consisted of cloves, cinnamon, pepper,
nutmegs, mace, gold and other things; and they made us understand by
gestures that such articles were to be found in the islands to which
we were going." [6]
Further on he speaks of the vessels and utensils of solid gold that he
found in Butuan, where the people worked mines. He describes the silk
dresses, the daggers with long gold hilts and scabbards of carved wood,
the gold, sets of teeth, etc. Among cereals and fruits he mentions
rice, millet, oranges, lemons, panicum, etc.
That the islands maintained relations with neighboring countries and
even with distant ones is proven by the ships from Siam, laden with
gold and slaves, that Magellan found in Cebu. These ships paid certain
duties to the King of the island. In the same year, 1521, the survivors
of Magellan's expedition met the son of the Rajah of Luzon, who,
as captain-general of the Sultan of Borneo and admiral of his fleet,
had conquered for him the great city of Lave (Sarawak?). Might this
captain, who was greatly feared by all his foes, have been the Rajah
Matanda whom the Spaniards afterwards encountered in Tondo in 1570?
In 1539 the warriors of Luzon took part in the formidable contests
of Sumatra, and under the orders of Angi Siry Timor, Rajah of Batta,
conquered and overthrew the terrible Alzadin, Sultan of Atchin,
renowned in the historical annals of the Far East. (Marsden, Hist. of
Sumatra, Chap. XX.) (7)
At that time, that sea where float the islands like a set of emeralds
on a paten of bright glass, that sea was everywhere traversed by junks,
paraus, barangays, vintas, vessels swift as shuttles, so large that
they could maintain a hundred rowers on a side (Morga;) that sea
bore everywhere commerce, industry, agriculture, by the force of the
oars moved to the sound of warlike songs (8) of the genealogies and
achievements of the Philippine divinities. (Colin, Chap. XV.) (9)
Wealth abounded in the islands. Pigafetta tells us of the abundance
of foodstuffs in Paragua and of its inhabitants, who nearly all
tilled their own fields. At this island the survivors of Magellan's
expedition were well received and provisioned. A little later, these
same survivors captured a vessel, plundered and sacked it, add took
prisoner in it the chief of the Island of Paragua (!) with his son
and brother. (10)
In this same vessel they captured bronze lombards, and this is the
first mention of artillery of the Filipinos, for these lombards were
useful to the chief of Paragua against the savages of the interior.
They let him ransom himself within seven days, demanding 400 measures
(cavanes?) of rice, 20 pigs, 20 goats, and 450 chickens. This is the
first act of piracy recorded in Philippine history. The chief of
Paragua paid everything, and moreover voluntarily added coconuts,
bananas, and sugar-cane jars filled with palm-wine. When Caesar
was taken prisoner by the corsairs and required to pay twenty five
talents ransom, he replied; "I'll give you fifty, but later I'll
have you all crucified!" The chief of Paragua was more generous: he
forgot. His conduct, while it may reveal weakness, also demonstrates
that the islands were abundantly provisioned. This chief was named
Tuan Mahamud; his brother, Guantil, and his son, Tuan Mahamed. (Martin
Mendez, Purser of the ship Victoria: Archivos de Indias.)
A very extraordinary thing, and one that shows the facility with
which the natives learned Spanish, is that fifty years before the
arrival of the Spaniards in Luzon, in that very year 1521 when they
first came to the islands, there were already natives of Luzon who
understood Castilian. In the treaties of peace that the survivors
of Magellan's expedition made with the chief of Paragua, when the
servant-interpreter died they communicated with one another through
a Moro who had been captured in the island of the King of Luzon and
who understood some Spanish. (Martin Mendez, op, cit ) Where did
this extemporaneous interpreter learn Castilian? In the Moluccas? In
Malacca, with the Portuguese? Spaniards did not reach Luzon until 1571.
Legazpi's expedition met in Butuan various traders of Luzon with
their boats laden with iron, wax cloths, porcelain, etc. (Gaspar de
San Agustin,) plenty of provisions, activity, trade, movement in all
the southern islands. (11)
They arrived at the Island of Cebu, "abounding in provisions, with
mines and washings of gold, and peopled with natives," as Morga says;
"very populous, and at a port frequented by many ships that came
from the islands and kingdoms near India," as Colin says; and even
though they were peacefully received discord soon arose. The city was
taken by force and burned. The fire destroyed the food supplies and
naturally famine broke out in that town of a hundred thousand people,
(12) as the historians say, and among the members of the expedition,
but the neighboring islands quickly relieved the need, thanks to the
abundance they enjoyed.
All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long
accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives: mines,
gold-washings, looms, farms, barter, naval construction, raising
of poultry and stock, weaving of silk and cotton, distilleries,
manufactures of arms, pearl fisheries, the civet industry, the horn
and hide industry, etc., are things encountered at every step, and,
considering the time and the conditions in the islands, prove that
there was life, there was activity, there was movement.
And if this, which is deduction, does not convince any minds imbued
with unfair prejudices, perhaps of some avail may be the testimony of
the oft-quoted Dr. Morga, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Manila for
seven years and after rendering great service in the Archipelago was
appointed criminal judge of the Audiencia of Mexico and Counsellor
of the Inquisition. His testimony, we say, is highly credible, not
only because all his contemporaries have spoken of him in terms that
border on veneration but also because his work, from which we take
these citations, is written with great circumspection and care, as well
with reference to the authorities in the Philippines as to the errors
they committed. "The natives," says Morga, in chapter VII, speaking of
the occupations of the Chinese, "are very far from exercising those
trades and have even forgotten much about farming, raising poultry,
stock and cotton, and weaving cloth AS THEY USED TO DO IN THEIR
PAGANISM AND FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THE COUNTRY WAS CONQUERED." (13)
The whole of chapter VIII of his work deals with this moribund
activity, this much-forgotten industry, and yet in spite of that,
how long is his eighth chapter!
And not only Morga, not only Chirino, Colin, Argensola, Gaspar de San
Agustin and others agree in this matter, but modern travelers, after
two hundred and fifty years, examining the decadence and misery,
assert the same thing. Dr. Hans Meyer, when he saw the unsubdued
tribes cultivating beautiful fields and working energetically, asked
if they would not become indolent when they in turn should accept
Christianity and a paternal government.
Accordingly, the Filipinos, in spite of the climate, in spite of
their few needs (they were less then than now), were not the indolent
creatures of our time, and, as we shall see later on, their ethics
and their mode of life were not what is now complacently attributed
to them.
How then, and in what way, was that active and enterprising infidel
native of ancient times converted into the lazy and indolent Christian,
as our contemporary writer's say?
We have already spoken of the more or less latent predisposition
which exists in the Philippines toward indolence, and which must
exist everywhere, in the whole world, in all men, because we all
hate work more or less, as it may be more or less hard, more or less
unproductive. The dolce far niente of the Italian, the rascarse la
barriga of the Spaniard, the supreme aspiration of the bourgeois to
live on his income in peace and tranquility, attest this.
What causes operated to awake this terrible predisposition from its
lethargy? How is it that the Filipino people, so fond of its customs
as to border on routine, has given up its ancient habits of work,
of trade, of navigation, etc., even to the extent of completely
forgetting its past?