Part 5 (1/2)
Each tribe had about a thousand families (which seems to be only another way of saying that the tribes were large rather than an effort at statistics) and they lived in wattled huts in commanding situations difficult of access. The sight of women bringing water from the streams in jars gracefully and easily carried on the head, two or three being borne one above another, still amazes and interests us as it did the Chinese geographer's informant.
In more remote valleys lurked the negritoes, nesting in the trees the author alleges. They were stunted in stature, with eyes round and yellow, curly hair, and teeth exposed by their parted lips. In groups of three or five they would ambuscade some unwary wayfarer and many fell victims to their cunning and deadly arrows. But throwing a porcelain bowl would make them forget their murderous purpose and off they would go, leaping and shouting in joy.
The country folk evidently did not inspire in the traders the same confidence these felt toward the Manilans. Their s.h.i.+ps would anchor in midstream and none went ash.o.r.e till there had been sent one or two hostages to be retained till the trading was over. Drum beating announced their arrival, when the local traders raced for the s.h.i.+p carrying, evidently as samples, cotton, yellow wax, and home made cloth, and coconut heart mats, whatever this last may have meant. In case of disagreement over prices the chiefs of the traders came in person, when, after a mutually satisfactory settlement had been reached, there would be presents given,--silk umbrellas, porcelain and rattan baskets, probably the first two from the visitors and the last from the people. Then the barter was concluded ash.o.r.e. Three or four days was the usual stop in each place when the s.h.i.+ps sailed to another anchorage, for each of the settlements was independent of its neighbors. The Chinese goods were porcelain, black damask, and other silks, beads of all colors leaden sinkers for nets, and tin.
Polillo, on the Pacific coast, was also, but less frequently, visited, to obtain two prized varieties of coral. There local customs and commercial usages were the same as on the other side of the archipelago, but though the settlements were more populous the coral was hard to get and so there was little trade. The coast, too, was dangerous, with the sea full of ”bare ribs of rock with jagged tooth-like blasted trees, their points and edges sharper than swords and lances.” s.h.i.+ps tacked far out from sh.o.r.e in pa.s.sing to avoid these perils, and besides the people were ”of cruel disposition and given to robbery.”
Northern Formosa, during this period, was not visited by Chinese for there were no goods of special importance to be gotten there while the people were also given to robbery, but Formosan goods,--yellow wax, native gold, buffalo tails, and jerked leopard-meat, were brought to the Philippines for sale.
For 1349, in an unpublished translation by Mr. Rockhill of ”A Description of the Barbarians of the Isles (Tao-i-chih-lio) by w.a.n.g Ta-yuan is mentioned the ”three archipelagoes,” if that is the proper way to distinguish between Chao-ju-kua's Sanhsu and the present San-tao. Islands were for the Chinese merely places distant by a sea route from each other rather than our ”bodies of land completely surrounded by water.”
This author's region was to the east of a very curious range of mountains if one may translate the name ”taki-shan.” It was divided by a triple peak and there was range upon range of mountains which suggests to Mr. Rockhill the Pacific coast of Luzon south of Cape Engano.
As now, the soil was poor and the crops spa.r.s.e, while the heated climate was variable.
The old question of a lost white tribe, attributed so often to Mindoro, is raised by mention of ”some males and females,” being ”white.” Perhaps the breeding principle that a second cross sometimes reverts to the original type may be the explanation. Chinese mestizos have seemed to me whiter here than European blends with Filipinas where no Chinese strain was present. Their delicate beauty suggests the Caucasians from whom the earliest Chinese may have taken wives in the remote past before they came to the ”eighteen provinces.” The first Spaniards comment also on exceedingly fair Filipinas and as the Caucasian type is the European ideal of beauty it probably resulted that such mixed marriages as occurred were with these Chinese mestizas. The prejudice of new converts against pagans, linked with the humiliation to which the Chinese residents in the Philippines were subject during Spain's rule here, led to covering up and ignoring all Chinese relations and is a very good reason why even where known there is today reluctance to admit descent from the oldest of civilized races. Yet before the Spaniards came both in the Philippines and in the lands from which successive immigrations of Filipinos have come, the Chinese traders ranked with the aristocracy and Chinese wives were sought by royalty.
A trait by no means died out was a fondness for jewelry shown by stowaways on board junks for Chinchew. When their money was all expended on personal adornments they returned home, there to be honored as travelled personages, the distinction of having visited China raising them above even their own fathers and the older men.
The 1349 account of Mai, or Manila, credits the people with ”customs chaste and good.” Both men and women wore their hair done up in a knot and clothed themselves in blue cotton s.h.i.+rts. Since the earlier notice, within the century and a quarter interval, Hindu influence had become manifest for a sort of suttee is related. New widows with shaven heads would lie fasting beside their husband's corpses for seven days. Then if still alive they could eat but were never permitted to remarry and many when the husband's body was placed on the funeral pyre accompanied it into the flames. The region must have been populous for on the burial of a chief of renown two or three thousand slaves would be buried in his tomb. The imports show more luxuries; red taffetas, ivory and trade silver figuring in the later list.
Sulu comes in for mention with fields losing their fertility in the third year of cultivation. Sago, fish, shrimps and sh.e.l.l fish made up the diet and the people, with cut hair, wore black turbans as may now be seen in parts of Borneo, and dressed in sarongs. Boiling seawater for salt, making rum and weaving were their occupations ash.o.r.e, and dyewoods of middling quality, beeswax, tortoise-sh.e.l.l and pearls, surpa.s.sing in roundness and whiteness, were their exports.
Laufer (Relations of Chinese to the Philippines, p. 251) gives 1372 as the date of the first tribute emba.s.sy to China from the Philippine peoples under their present name of ”Luzon-men,” then designating princ.i.p.ally Manilans (Ming Chronicles chap. 323, p. 110 according to his reference). Luzon was then stated to be situated in the South Sea very close to Chinchew, f.u.kien province.
The ruler of the great Middle Kingdom in return sent an official to the king of Luzon with gifts of silk gauze embroidered in gold and colors. The commentator adds a well founded caution against accepting the word ”first” as meaning anything other than that the chronicler was unfamiliar with previous notices.
Laufer quotes from the Ming Chronicles of the Malayan tribe F'ing-ka-s.h.i.+-lau whom he concludes are the Pangasinanes, inhabitants of the western and southern sh.o.r.es of Lingayen Bay, Luzon, but in earlier days apparently extending further north. Early in the XV century they had a small realm of their own, sending an emba.s.sy to China in 1406 and presenting the emperor as gifts ”with excellent horses, silver and other objects” and receiving in return paper money and silks. In 1408 the chief was accompanied by an imposing retinue of two headmen from each village subject to his authority and these in turn each accompanied by some of his retainers. This time the imperial gifts were paper money for the sub-chiefs and for each hundred men six pieces of an open-work variegated silk, for making coats, and linings.
Besides a 1410 emba.s.sy from Pangasinan there was another tribute party from Luzon headed by one Ko-Ch'a-lao who brought products of his country, among which gold was most prominent. This last party came because in 1405 the Emperor Yung-lo had sent a high Chinese officer to Luzon to govern that country. Here is definite political identification with the Chinese empire. In 1407 it is probable this moral force of respect for the superior culture of what was the Rome of the Orient witnessed also a physical demonstration, for in that year the eunuch Cheng-ho set sail, with his 62 large s.h.i.+ps bearing 27,800 soldiers, on the expedition which explored as far as the Arabian Gulf and required the nominal allegiance of the numerous countries visited during repeated voyages extending over thirty years.
Ian C. Hannah states in his ”Eastern Asia: A History” that outside the North of Toh Chow, in Shantung province, by a little mosque, is yet marked the burial place of a former sultan of Sulu who died on a visit to the Emperor Yung-lo in 1417.
In the same year, Sulu's eastern, western and village rajahs with their wives, children and headmen all came to the Chinese court with tribute, and another tribute mission from Sulu arrived in 1420.
About the middle of the XV century, Doctors Hose and McDougall in their history of Borneo (Pagan Tribes of Borneo, London, 1912, chap. 1) a.s.sert, a Bisayan was king of Brunei. This Alakber Tala, later to be called Sultan Mohammed, introduced Arabic doctrines into his kingdom and the use of Arabic writing made his reign the beginning of Brunei's local recorded history. His great grandnephew, Makoda Ragan, had Arab and Chinese as well as Bisayan blood, a fact remembered to this day by having representatives of these three races officiating at the king's coronation, and the fourth official on these occasions is dressed in ancient Bisayan costume. Makoda Ragah, also called Sultan Bulkiah, is spoken of as the most heroic character in Bornean history and conquered the Sulu islands, and sent expeditions to Manila, the second time seizing the place. His wife, the first queen of the Philippines of whom we know, was a Javan princess. This great king was accidentally killed by his wife's bodkin. It was this monarch or his son who died in 1575 that so impressed the chronicler of Magellan's expedition.
Corroboration for this considerable historic a.s.sociation comes in the Chinese jars found in the oldest burial caves as well as prized among the more remote hill tribes as ancestral possessions, handed down from so remote an antiquity that their origin has long been forgotten and they are now venerated as objects that came from heaven (Fay Cole: Chinese Pottery in the Philippines). The four-toed dragon claw designs place them among the Chinese manufacture of not later than the last of the XIV century.