Note 3 — Relation of the Filipinas Islands

Before the conquest of those islands by the Spaniards, the natives of the country were subject to the chiefs among them, who were recognized as nobles, and all the others obeyed them. Those chiefs possessed a great amount of gold, and slaves in proportion to their nobility. I knew two chiefs, one in Bohol, and the other at Dapitan, a village of Mindanao, who had more than one hundred slaves apiece. They are not foreign slaves, as those of Angola who are in Europa, but of the same nation. It was a lamentable thing to see with what violence and for how little a thing, these chiefs made slaves. For, however small a sum one owed to another, the interest, for lack of payment, amounted to so great a sum that it was impossible to pay it; and consequently, the person of the debtor being pledged for the debt, he became the slave of his creditor, together with all his posterity. They also made slaves, with unusual tyranny and cruelty, for crimes of slight importance, such as not keeping silent at the graves of the dead, and for passing in front of the chief’s wife when she was in her bath. Those captured in war were also all made slaves. Now with baptism, all those acts of violence and tyranny have been suppressed—although there still remains one very peculiar custom among them, which does not follow that general rule, namely, Partus sequitur ventrem;3 for there are some who are wholly slaves, and others who are only half slaves. The former are those born of a slave father and mother; the others who are born of a slave father and a free mother, or vice versa. In some villages it is the custom that, if the father is slave and the mother free, one of the children is free and the other slave. The privilege of those half slaves is that if they pay a certain sum of money to their master, they may oblige him to grant them their liberty—an advantage that is not possessed by those who are wholly slaves.