Note 17 — Chapter VIII · The Philippines Three Hundred Years Ago.

The Spanish Population.—The Spanish population of the Islands was always small,—at the beginning of the seventeenth century certainly not more than two thousand, and probably less later in the century. Morga divides them into five classes: the prelates and ecclesiastics; the encomenderos, colonizers, and conquerors; soldiers and officers of war and marine; merchants and men of business; and the officers of his Majesty’s government. “Very few are living now,” he says, “of those first conquistadores who won the land and effected the conquest with the Adelantado Miguel Lopez de Legaspi.”17