Part 3 (1/2)
Conclusion.
Why is it that writers attribute great significance to the coming of the foreign business men, especially the American and British? [163]
Why was it that the opening of the ports, and the coming of the foreigners, resulted in the material progress of the country? Two circ.u.mstances are of prime importance in considering the growth of new settlements, and the conditions determining their economic and social progress. The first is whether or not they possess markets for commodities which their natural resources enable the people to produce easily. This condition is important for, without markets in other communities new countries can possess no material advantage over old ones in the production of wealth. Now, the opening of Philippine ports to foreigners brought our products in contact with the world's market, without which it would have been useless to attempt to produce any more than what was required by the local demand. In other words, the world's demand for the commodities we produce easily, served as an effective stimulus to further production.
The second circ.u.mstance affecting the growth of a new country is the extent to which the people are able to secure the co-operation of capital from older communities to a.s.sist them. There are several ways by which capital may co-operate in the development of a new territory. The first is, where capital in the form of stocks of commodities of all kinds is advanced or sold upon credit by the commercial houses. This has been used in this country. The example of Mr. Nicholas Loney, an Englishman, agreeing to be paid for his sugar machineries with the increased earnings due to the use, by the Filipino planters, of such machines, is a good ill.u.s.tration of how foreign capital could be utilized to advantage by all parties concerned. On the one hand, the planter improved his method of cultivation, thereby increasing his produce, and, on the other, the foreign merchant sold more of his imported machineries, and exported more of the products of the Philippines to his country. [164] Furthermore, labor is not without some benefit, for the payment of higher wages is then possible. The second way by which capital may co-operate is by providing transportation facilities to connect a new country with the markets, and especially with those so necessary to its prosperity; for example, by organizing steamboat companies, building important roads, and, above all, constructing railroads. This also was done in this country; the building of the Manila-Dagupan railroad, for example, has had a remarkable influence upon the economic progress of the provinces through which it pa.s.sed.
Thus is explained why it is that the opening of the Philippines to the outside world caused great social changes.
II. THE FILIPINOS' PART IN THE PHILIPPINES' PAST
Pre-Spanish Philippine History A. D. 43-1565
Pre-Spanish Philippine History during the first years of the conversion-conquest was tabooed because of its pagan and infidel a.s.sociations. Whatever had to do with the past, the many records there must have been in a land where literacy is reported to have been general, was religiously destroyed by the missionaries. Likewise the converts, and it was almost an unanimous conversion, were exhorted to banish from their memories all traditions and recollections as they valued their immortal souls. Thus was repeated, on a much larger scale and more effectively, the Christianizing of England's Saxons.
The possibility of cla.s.sical references to the archipelago had at first to be generally ignored, even had the early European comers been educated men, which for the most part they were not. Spain's occupation was based on discovery from the New World and it would have been considered like championing Portugal's rival claims to circulate accounts of earlier Asiatic a.s.sociations.
The contempt in which the Chinese were held acted to prevent much mention of their former knowledge of the islands though scanty references, apparently unwittingly, have occasionally crept into some of the first chronicles.
Similarly a prejudice consequent upon the 1762-3 occupation of Manila banned English histories of the Indian Archipelago. Then during the last decades of Spain's final century of rule her apologists sought to minimize the lamentable lack of progress since the first few decades by ascribing savagery to the people Legaspi found.
A suggestion of the antagonism to historical research appears in the frequent a.s.sertions of Spanish writers from 1888 to 1898 that the only Philippine history was the chapter of Spanish history dealing with Spain in the Philippines. More emphatic proof is the bitter criticism of the early Spanish historian Morga whose 1609 ”Events in the Philippines” Doctor Rizal was blamed for republis.h.i.+ng. That Spaniards were not ignorant of the Philippines' past may be proved by Raimundo Geler, who, in a book issued in Madrid during the liberal regime of 1869, made a brief summary of what foreign writers had gleaned from Arabian sources about the early Filipinos, but with the return of the Bourbon dynasty to power he had to withdraw his work from circulation till the claim is made that only a single copy remains.
Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Austrian professor, seems to have pioneered in applying modern critical methods to extract the true narrative from conflicting early authorities, in the later 1880s. Isabelo de los Reyes, a Filipino born in the Ilocos provinces, tried to make deductions to fill out this narrative and supplemented it with materials from folk-lore. Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera, another Filipino, sought the aid of philology, dealing with the considerable Sanscrit element in the local dialects. To Juan Luna, also a Filipino, belongs the credit for the first essays in Philippine historical paintings, for he availed himself of European museums to depict his characters in the real costumes of their times. And Mariano Ponce, in the Filipino students' Madrid review La Solidaridad, popularized the chief events and prominent personalities of the conquest period.
Dr. Jose Rizal, greatest of all Filipinos, however, excelled all the rest. His is the first history from the Filipino view point (to be found in The Philippines a Century Hence, The Indolence of the Filipinos, and his annotations to Morga's History). His was the first systematic work by a Filipino in zoology, philology, and ethnology as aids to history; and as well his was the earliest Filipino interest in the Chinese records referring to these Islands. It was in 1887, in Dresden, Germany, that Rizal conferred with Dr. A. B. Meyer and Professor Blumentritt on the Chua Ju-Kua account of Manila in the middle of the thirteenth century which had just been translated by Dr. Friedrich Hirth, an extract from the work begun in 1885 and continuing over ten years.
PRE-HISTORIC CIVILIZATION IN THE PHILIPPINES
By Elsdon Best
(Polynesian Society, Journal, Vol. 1)
When a powerful and highly civilized nation comes in contact with a barbaric and isolated people, who have nevertheless advanced many steps on the road of progress, it would naturally be thought that the superior and conquering race would endeavor to collect and place on record information concerning such people: their manners, customs, language, religion, and traditions. Unfortunately, in the case of the Spanish conquests of the XVI century, that nation appears never to have considered it a duty to hand down to posterity any detailed description of the singularly interesting races they had vanquished. As it was with the Gaunches of the Canaries, the Aztecs of Mexico, and the Quichuas of Peru, so was it with the Chamorro of the Ladrones, and the Tagalog-Bisayan tribes of the Philippines. The same vandal spirit that prompted the conquistadores to destroy the Maya and Aztec literature also moved them to demolish the written records of the Philippine natives, and but few attempts were made to preserve relics or information concerning them. The Spanish priests, as the lettered men of those times, were the persons we should look to for such a work, but in their religious ardor they thought only of the subjugation and conversion of the natives, and so, with the sword in one hand and crucifix in the other, they marched through that fair land ignoring and destroying the evidences of a strange semi-civilization which should have been to them a study of the deepest interest. Fortunately, however, there were a few in that period who were interested in such matters, and who wrote accounts of the state of culture of the islanders of that early date. Some of these MSS. have been preserved in the archives of Manila and have lately attracted the attention of Spanish scholars.
Such is the article from which the greater part of these notes is taken. In the volume for 1891 of the Revista Ibero-Americana, published at Madrid, there appeared a series of papers contributed by the Bishop of Oviedo, and ent.i.tled La antigua civilizacion de las Islas Filipinas, in which he gives a very interesting description of the natives and their mode of life. The source of this information is an old folio ma.n.u.script written on rice-paper in the year 1610 from data collected at the period of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines by Legaspi. It is extended to the year 1606, and relates minutely the condition of the islanders prior to the arrival of the Spanish. The codex is divided into five books, and these again into 183 capitulos, or chapters. The writer lived in the group for twenty-nine years in order to complete his work, which is authorised by authentic signatures of responsible persons. Extracts have also been made from Miguel de Loarca's account of the Philippines written in 1583, Dampier's voyage in the Pinkerton collection, and Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas.
The first historical existence of the Malay proper is traced to Menangkabau in the Island of Sumatra, from whence they have spread over the islands of the East India Archipelago, and by their vigor, energy and skill have made themselves masters of the original inhabitants. At an early period they probably received instruction from Hindoo immigrants in the arts of working metals, spinning, weaving, etc. As to the whence of the various Malayan tribes of the Philippines, it is most probable that they originally reached the Archipelago from Borneo, or the Malay Peninsula. From northern Borneo the Sulu islands form a series of stepping stones across to Mindanao. As the Tagalog language is looked upon as one of the purest of Malay dialects, and contains the least number of Sanscrit words, it may be inferred from this that the race has occupied the islands from an early date. It is possible that the first settlers were carried thither by ocean currents, and that the Kuro Siwo, or Black Current, which sweeps up past Luzon, is also responsible for the existence of the Kabaran (a Malay tribe) in Formosa. From ancient times boats and men have drifted up from the Malay Islands to j.a.pan, and W. E. F. Griffis, in his ”Mikado's Empire,” states that s.h.i.+koku and Kius.h.i.+u were inhabited by a mixed race descended from a people who had come from Malaysia and southeast Asia. It is most probable that Micronesia was settled from the Philippine Group, which thus became the meeting ground of the northern migration of Polynesians from Samoa, and the Micronesians proper. The Spanish codex before mentioned states that the Tagalog-Bisayan tribes were thought to be derived from the coast of Malabar and Malacca, and that, according to tradition, they arrived at the islands in small vessels called barangayan under the direction of dato or maguinoo (chiefs or leaders), who retained their chieftains.h.i.+p after the landing as the basis of a social organization of a tribal kind, and that every barangay (district or tribal division) was composed of about fifty families. Nothing definite appears to have been obtained from their traditions as to the original habitat of the race, and this may be accounted for by the supposition that the migration occurred at a remote period, and that all knowledge of their former home was lost. When a migratory race takes possession of new regions it maintains little or no correspondence with those left behind; thus in time they forget their old habitations, and their geographical knowledge is reduced to obscure and fading traditions.
On arriving at their new home the invaders must have ejected the indigenous Aieta from the low-lying country, and driven them back into the mountains. Juan de Salcedo, the Cortes of the Philippines, in his triumphal march round the island of Luzon, was unable to conquer many of the hill tribes, both Aieta and Tagalog, some of whom have remained independent until the present time. The Spanish Government forbade all intercourse with these mountaineers, on pain of one hundred lashes and two years' imprisonment, and this edict had the effect of preserving the ruder, non-agricultural hill-races.
This invading race of Malays was divided into many different tribes, the princ.i.p.al ones being the Tagalog of Luzon and the Bisayan of the southern isles. The Tagalog, or Ta-Galoc, were the most numerous, and were endowed with all the valor and politeness which can be expected in a semi-civilized people. The Pampangan and Camarine tribes were noted for their generosity. The Cagayans were a brave people, but easily civilized. The Bisayans were also called Pintados, or ”painted ones,” by the Spanish, from their custom of tattooing the body. Within this community of tribes there are numerous differences of dialects and customs, clothing, character, and physical structure, which in many cases indicate obvious traces of foreign mixture.
As a race, the Philippine natives of the Malayan tribes are of moderate stature, well-formed, and of a coppery-red color, or, as Morga quaintly describes them, ”They were of the color of boiled quinces, having a clever disposition for anything they undertook: sharp, choleric, and resolute.” Both men and women were in the habit of anointing and perfuming their long black hair, which they wore gathered in a knot or roll on the back of the head. The women, who were of pleasing appearance, adorned their hair with jewels, and also wore ear-pendants and finger-rings of gold. The men had little or no beard, and both s.e.xes were distinguished for their large, black eyes. The Zambales, or Beheaders, shaved the front part of the head, and wore on the skull a great lock of loose hair, which custom also obtained among the ancient Chamorro of the Ladrones. Most of the tribes filed their teeth, and stained them black with burnt coconut sh.e.l.l; while among the Bisayans the upper teeth were bored, and the perforations filled with gold, a singular custom observed by Marco Polo in China, and which was also practised in ancient Peru and Egypt. Many of the tribes are spoken of by the early Spanish navigators as being endowed with fair intellectual capacities, possessing great powers of imitation, sober, brave, and determined. The Tagalog character, according to some later writers, is difficult to define: the craniologist and physiognomist may often find themselves at fault. They are great children, their nature being a singular combination of vices and virtues.