Note 44 — II. Industries at the Time of Discovery and Conquest
Reading edition
La Indolencia de los Filipinos:
“In order to make headway against so many calamities, to secure their sovereignty and take the offensive in these disastrous contests, to isolate the warlike Sulus from their neighbors in the south, to care for the needs of the empire of the Indies (for one of the reasons why the Philippines were kept, as contemporary documents prove, was their strategical position between New Spain and the Indies), to wrest from the Dutch their growing colonies of the Moluccas and get rid of some troublesome neighbors, to maintain, in short, the trade of China with New Spain, it was necessary to construct new and large ships which, as we have seen, costly as they were to the country for their equipment and the rowers they required, were not less so because of the manner in which they were constructed. Fernando de los Rios Coronel, who fought in these wars and later turned priest, speaking of these King’s ships, said: ‘As they were so large the timber needed was scarcely to be found in the forests (of the Philippines!), and thus it was necessary to seek it with great difficulty in the most remote of them, where, once found, in order to haul and convey it to the shipyard the towns of the surrounding country had to be depopulated of natives, who get it out with immense labor, damage, and cost to them. The natives furnished the masts for a galleon, according to the assertion of the Franciscans, and I heard the governor of the province where they were cut, which is Laguna de Bay, say that to haul them seven leagues over very broken mountains 6,000 natives were engaged three months, without furnishing them food, which the wretched native had to seek for himself.’
“And Gaspar de San Agustin says: ‘In these times (1690), Bacolor has not the people that it had in the past, because of the uprising in that province when Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lara was Governor of these islands and because of the continual labor of cutting limber for his Majesty’s shipyards, WHICH HINDERS THEM FROM CULTIVATING THE VERY FERTILE PLAIN THEY HAVE’.”