Part 4 (1/2)
Such was then the state of civilization among the Tagalog-Bisayan tribes at the time when the Malay Mohammedans, and the Spanish conquistadores attempted, from opposite points, to introduce their religions into the archipelago. The Moros of the Sulu Islands were beginning to overrun the Philippines on the arrival of the Spanish, and would eventually have Mohammedanised the entire group. The Philippine natives at this time were in a singularly interesting stage of intellectual progress. They had lived through the crude fetis.h.i.+sm of savagedom, and were emerging from the second stage of religious feeling, during which they had evolved, out of the contemplation of Nature, one of those wonderful mythologies which are met with among so many nations. They were beginning to renounce the old Nature wors.h.i.+p, of which the central figure was a Supreme Maker.
It has been truly said that nothing requires such calm and impartial judgment as the inquiry into the moral and religious condition of uncivilized races. The co-evolution of religion and civilization is an extremely interesting subject to the student of anthropology, when he notes the gradual refinement of the national religion as the culture of the race improves, and the degradation of that religion when a race retrogrades in civilization. It is one of the many grand problems, based on the retributive laws of Nature, which confront the enquirer into that great and wonderful mystery--the development of the human race. Well it is for him who can learn from the savage Aieta, or the semi-civilized Tagalog, a lesson in the evolution of the human intellect; but, unfortunately, so many who have golden opportunities of studying the intellect and works of uncultured man are careless of those matters, and look with contempt upon the n.o.blest of studies. They cannot interest themselves in the struggling intellect of primitive man; they no longer understand the craving of youth for advancement; they disdain to look upon the dawn of intellectual day.
These are the most interesting points procured from the aforementioned works on the Philippine Islands, a land which we call new, but in which the events of the Tagalog-Bisayan migrations were but as of yesterday. Here, as elsewhere, the rude savage retreats before a superior race, but the receptive Tagalog attaches himself to the civilization of his conquerors. He had already advanced himself to the difficult highway that leads from barbarism to a higher culture, and was thus enabled to receive the teachings of his Iberian invaders; but he who would seek the indigenous Aieta must look for him in the distant recesses of the primeval forest, or in the dark and gloomy canons of the great ranges.
A THOUSAND YEARS OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY BEFORE THE COMING OF THE SPANIARDS
By Austin Craig
The Philippine History of which one is apt to think when that subject is mentioned covers hardly a fourth of the Islands' book-recorded history.
These records are not the romantic dream of a Paterno that under the name Ophir the Philippines with their gold enriched Solomon (10th century B. C.). There are solider grounds than any plausible explanations that Manila hemp (abaka) was Strabo's (A. D. 21) ”ta seerika,” the cloth made of ”a kind of flax combed from certain barks of trees.” The shadowy identification of the Manilas with Ptolemy's Maniolas (c. A. D. 130) is not in their cla.s.s. Nor, to accept them, is recourse needed to farfetched deductions like Zuniga's that the American Continent received Israel's ten lost tribes, and thence, through Easter Island, Magellan's archipelago was peopled. Their existence saves us from having to accept such references as how Simbad the sailorman (Burton: The Arabian Nights, Night 538 et seq.) evidently made some of his voyages in this region, though it would not be uninteresting to note that the great Roc is a bird used in Moro ornament, the ”ghoul” of the Thousand and One Nights is the Filipino Asuang and that the palm-covered island which was believed to be a colossal tortoise because it shook might well have been located where the Philippine maps indicate that earthquakes are most frequent.
The records hereinafter to be cited are for the most part of the prosaic kind, all the more reliable and valuable because they are inclined to be dry and matter-of-fact. They make no such demand upon imagination as Europe's pioneer traveller's tales, for instance the sixteenth century chart which depicted America as inhabited by headless people with eyes, nose and mouth located in the chest.
The British Museum's oriental scholar (Douglas: Europe and the Far East, Cambridge, 1904) states that by the beginning of the Chou dynasty (B. C. 1122-255) intercourse had been established at Canton with eight foreign nations. Duties as early as 990 B. C. were levied, and among the imports figure birds, pearls and tortoise sh.e.l.l, products of the Philippines, but the origin of these has not been investigated. ”Reliable history,” says Dr. Pott (A Sketch of Chinese History, Shanghai, 1908), ”does not extend further back than the middle of the Chou dynasty (B. C. 722). * * * After the time of the Chou dynasty we come to more solid ground, for at the beginning of the Han dynasty (B.C. 206) the custom originated of employing Court chroniclers to write a daily account of governmental proceedings. These diaries were kept secret and stored away in iron chests until the dynasty they chronicled had pa.s.sed away; then they were opened and published, and so form the basis of our knowledge of the events that had transpired while the dynasty was in existence.”
Philippine history, however, has attracted only incidental interest in the translating of these voluminous chronicles so that while the first three mentions hereafter to be cited are well within the reliable history period they have not been verified and are valuable only as suggesting more definitely where to investigate.
Dr. von Moellendorf, a sinologist, formerly German consul in Manila, states that the Philippines were once called ”Gold” in China, because of their considerable export thither of the precious yellow metal. This parallels the Malay province named ”Silver” (Perak or Pilak). Further he refers to Becker's Geology of the Philippines where (on page 90 of the reprint) F. Karusch gives a former German Consul in Manila as authority for gold having been exported to China during the third century. If the Chinese authority for this can be found it will destroy the value of Dr. Groeneveldt's observation (Notes on the Malay Archipelago and Malacca compiled from Chinese sources; Batavia, 1876, p. 4) on his quotation from the history of the Liang dynasty (Book 54, p. 1):
”In the time of Sun Ch'uean of the house of Wu (A. D. 222-251) two functionaries, called Chu-ying and K'antai, were ordered to go to the south; they went to or heard from a hundred or more countries and made an account of them.”
The commentator admits that ”what these countries were is not stated,”
but believes the ”Malay islands were not amongst them, otherwise their name would have appeared at that time already in the annals of China.”
Since only a beginning has as yet been made in studying the voluminous records of China, a little further investigation may easily result in establis.h.i.+ng this early date.
The last of the early three possible references to the Philippines, cla.s.sed only as introductory because of their uncertain character, is from the narrative of Fahien, the details of whose home voyage seem to suggest that he pa.s.sed in the vicinity of, if not through, this group of islands. This Buddhist priest in A. D. 400 went overland to India (Groeneveldt, Notes, p. 6) in search of Buddhist books and fifteen years later came back by sea in Indian vessels via Ceylon and Java. Shortly after his death a book was published, written from his narratives, giving ”an account of Buddhist countries”
(Fo Kuo Chi). After staying five months in Java where ”heretics and Brahmans flourished but the law of Buddha hardly deserved mention,”
Fahien embarked in May, 414, on a large merchant vessel with a crew of over two hundred and provisioned for fifty days. Steering a north east course for Canton, when over a month out they struck a typhoon, ”a sudden dark squall accompanied by pelting rain.” The Brahmans felt that the priest of the rival religion was a Jonah and wanted to land him on one of the neighboring islands but were dissuaded by a trader representing the danger that would be to all on coming to China. The weather continued very dark and the pilots did not know their situation. Finally on the 78th day, with water almost gone and provisions short, they determined to change their course since they had already exceeded the usual fifty days for the run. So on a northwest route in twelve days more they reached not Canton but Shantung, nearly thirteen degrees farther north. Now this voyage on a map works out that they pa.s.sed the Philippines about the time that marooning the priest on an island was under discussion, and, as St. John notes (The Indian Archipelago, London 1853, Vol. I, p. 103), ”The Philippines * * * occupy the only part of the Archipelago liable to hurricanes.” Apparently the land was then unfamiliar to these early navigators.
No voyages of discovery were attempted by the Chinese but, creeping along the coast, they finally came to the Malay Peninsula and they worked from one island to another in the Indian Archipelago. (Groeneveldt, p. 1.) By this roundabout course in connection with the great island of Borneo, then called Polo and noted to have sent envoys to China in 518, 523 and 616, we find the Sulu islands suggested. The reference reads ”at the east of this country is situated the land of the Rakshas (or lawless persons, or pirates.)” These were stated to have the same customs as the Poli people, unerring in throwing a saw-edged (wooden) discus knife, but using other weapons like those in China, in ways resembling Cambodia and with products like Siam's. Murder and theft were punished by cutting off the hands and adultery by chaining together the legs for a year. In the dark of the moon came the sacrifices, bowls of wine and eatables set adrift on the surface of the water, as Bornean tribes supposed to be akin to the Bisayans and Tagalogs now are doing. The Polans collected coral and trained parrots to talk, and so probably did the men of Sulu. In their ears were the teeth of wild beasts and a piece of home-made cotton cloth was wrapped about their waists, sarong fas.h.i.+on. Their markets they held at night and they were accustomed to keep their faces covered.
Next in point of time is a reference through Southern Formosa, called by the Chinese P'i-sho-ye, which the author of ”China before the Chinese” (De Lacouperie) believes is only a miscalling of Bisaya, and former Consul Davidson of Formosa corroborates this both on Chinese authority (Ma Touan-lin) and from local traditions. (Davidson: The Island of Formosa Past and Present, New York, 1903).
”Bands of uncivilized Malays” from the south drove into the interior the Formosans with whom the Chinese earlier had been familiar. So on the next expedition from the mainland, in 605, the Chinese leader was surprised to find on the coast strange inhabitants with whom he could not communicate. His surmise that the newcomers were Malays led the next expedition to take with it interpreters from different southern Malayan islands, of whom at least one made himself understood. The immigrants kept up communication with Luzon and on their rafts raided coast towns of China, as will be later seen.
Pangasinan once extended much farther north in Luzon and Mr. Servillano de la Cruz, a University of the Philippines student specializing in the history of that province, describes rafts of bamboo bound together with vines, of a size which two men can lift, yet used on rivers and by people venturing as far as four miles from the coast upon them.
The chronological order takes us again to the south.
A ”Ka-ling” mentioned in the old Chinese history of the T'ang dynasty (618-906) has been, it seems to me, wrongly identified by the Dutch scholar Groeneveldt (Notes on the Malay Archipelago, p. 12) as Java on the a.s.sumption that Pali or Po-li was Sumatra. Since it is much more probable that Poli is only an older form of Poni, Brunei, our Borneo (Hose and McDougall: Pagan Tribes of Borneo, London, 1912, Vol. I), Kaling rather should be looked for as an island off the eastern side of Borneo, Cambodia to the north, the sea to the south, and on the western side of the island of Dva-pa-tan, which might have been the old, and more extensive, district of Dapitan on the northwest of Mindanao. Directions are so general that the fixing of the spot is only guess work, yet the probability puts it within the southern (Sulu) part of the Philippine Archipelago.
The walls of the city were of palisades as were those enclosing Fort Santiago's Moro predecessor. The king's palace was a two-story affair thatched with coir from the abundant coco palms and the throne of the monarch was an ivory couch. Using neither spoons nor chopsticks, food was handled with that manual dexterity of which the Tondo tribune has recently been complaining as contributory to cholera. The palm wine was obtained just as tuba is now prepared.