Note 36 — II. Industries at the Time of Discovery and Conquest

”* * * As already seen, we must reject so often reiterated of late years that the early missionaries found nomadic or half-fixed clans and taught them the ways of village life. Village life there was already, to some extent, and it was upon this that the friars built. Doubtless they modified it greatly until in time it approached in most ways as closely to European village life as might be expected in tropical islands whose agricultural resources are not as yet well developed. From the first there would be a tendency to greater concentration about the churches, beginning with the rude structures of cane and thatch, which are replaced before 1700 in all the older settlements by edifices of stone, frequently massive and imposing, especially, so as they tower over the acres of bamboo huts about them, from the inmates of which have come the forced labor which built them. From the first, too, it was to the interest of the Spanish conquerors, lay and priestly, to improve the methods of communication between the communities which formed their centers of conversion or of exploration and collection of tribute. Yet to represent either the friars or the soldiers as great pathfinders and reconstructors of wilderness is the work of ignorance. When Legaspi’s grandson, Juan de Salcedo, made his memorable marches through northern Luzon, bringing vast acres under the dominion of Spain with a mere handful of soldiers, he found the modern Bigan a settlement of several thousand people; his successors in the conquest of the Upper Kagayan Valley, one of the most backward portions of the archipelago to-day, reported a population of forty thousand in the region lying around the modern Tuguegarao, and so it was quite commonly everywhere on the seacoasts and on the largest rivers. Some very crude deductions have been made as to the conquest period by writers of recent years who assume that the natives were at the beginning mere bands of wandering savages, and that all the improvements visible in their external existence to-day were brought about in these early years.” (James A. LeRoy, The Americans in the Philippines, Vol. I, pp. 8–10.)

“The friar missionaries did not bring about the first settlement and conquests under Legaspi; they did not blaze the way in wildernesses and plant the flag of Spain in outlying posts long in advance of the soldiers, the latter profiting by their moral-suasion conquests to annex great territories for their own plunder; they did not find bloodthirsty savages, wholly sunk in degradation, and in the twinkling of an eye convert them to Christianity, sobriety, and decency, * * *; they did not teach wandering bands of huntsmen or fishermen how to live peacefully in orderly settlements, how to cultivate the soil, erect buildings (except the stone churches), and did not bind these villages together by the sort of roads and bridges which we have today, though they had considerable share in this work, especially in later time; they did not find a squalid population of 400,000 to 750,000 in the archipelago, and wholly by the revolution wrought by them in ways of life make it possible for that population to increase by ten or twenty times in three centuries.” (Ibid., pp. 10–11.)