Note 2 — Description of Filipinas Islands

The following statement by Dr. David P. Barrows—who is chief of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, Manila, and is probably our best authority on this subject—presents the latest view regarding the origin of the Filipinos, adopted after much patient and enthusiastic research in that field by him and other American ethnologists. It may be found in the recently-published Census of the Philippine Islands, i, pp. 411–417.

“Ethnologically, no less than geographically, the Philippines belong to the Malay archipelago. With the exception of the aboriginal dwarf blacks, the Negritos, who are still found inhabiting the forests in a great number of localities, all the tribes of the islands, whether Christian, Mohammedan, or Pagan, are, in my belief, derived from the Malayan race. We probably have in these tribes two types which represent an earlier and a later wave of immigration; but all came from the south, all speak languages belonging to one common stock, and all are closely related in physical type and qualities of mind. As representative of the first migratory movement may be named the Igorot, the mountain head-hunter of Northern Luzón; and of the latter almost any of the present Christian or Mohammedan tribes. The migratory period of this latter type, which constitutes the great bulk of the present population of the islands, is almost covered by the early historical accounts of the exploration and settlement of the Far East.

“Four hundred years ago, when the Portuguese discoverers and conquerors reached southeastern Asia, they found the long peninsula in which the continent ends, and the islands stretching south and east in this greatest and most famous of archipelagoes, inhabited by a race which called itself Malayu. On the island of Java this race had some ten centuries before been conquered by Brahmin Hindus from India, whose great monuments and temples still exist in the ruins of Boro Budor. Through the influence and power of the Hindus the Malay culture made a considerable advance, and a Sanskrit element, amounting in some cases to twenty per cent of the words, entered the Malayan languages. How far the Hindu actually extended his conquests and settlements is a most interesting study, but can hardly yet be settled. He may have colonized the shores of Manila Bay and the coast of Luzón, where the names of numerous ancient places show a Sanskrit origin. The Sanskrit element is most pronounced in the Tagálog and Moro tongues. (Pardo de Tavera, El Sanscrito en la lengua Tagala.)

“Following the Hindus into the Malay archipelago came the Arabs. They came first as voyagers and merchants, and here as always the Arab was a proselyter, and his faith spread rapidly. Long before the Portuguese arrival Islamism had succeeded Brahminism and the Arab had supplanted the Hindu.... Mohammedanism gradually made its way until, on the arrival of the Europeans, its frontiers were almost the same as those of the Malay race itself.

“The people who carried this faith, and who still rank as the type of the race, were the seafaring population, living in boats as well us on the shore, who control the islands of the straits between Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. These people received from the Portuguese the name of Cellates, a corruption of Orang Salat (Sea Folk). Under the influence of Mohammedanism this race, which seems to have originated in Sumatra, improved in culture, formed many settlements and principalities, and because of their seagoing habits, their enjoyment of trade, and their lust for piracy, carried their name (Malayu), their language, and their adopted Mohammedan religion throughout the Malay archipelago. Probably as early as 1300 these adventurers established a colony on northwest Borneo, opposite the island of Labuan, which colony received the name of Brunei, from which has been derived the name of the whole island, Borneo. The island was already inhabited by Malayan tribes of more primitive culture, of which the Dyak is the best known. From this settlement of Borneo the Mohammedanized Malay extended his influence and his settlements to the Sulu archipelago, to Mindanao, to Mindoro, and to Manila Bay.” The people of Sulúan, whom Magellan encountered near Sámar, “were almost certainly of the same stock from which the present great Visayan people are in the main descended. Many things incline me to believe that these natives had come, in successively extending settlements, up the west coast of Mindanao from the Sulu archipelago.... To the present day the physical type and the language, persisting unchanged in spite of changes of culture, closely relate the Visayan to the Moro. In addition to these arrivals from the archipelago of Sulu there was probably a more primitive Malayan population, whom the later arrivals already had more or less in subjection, as the Moros even now control the pagans on the mainland of Mindanao.... Thus we may infer that at the time of the discovery there were on these central islands of the archipelago, a primitive, tattooed Malayan people, related on the one hand to the still primitive and pagan tribes of the Philippines, and on the other hand to the wild head-hunting tribes of Borneo; and in addition intruding and dominating later arrivals, who were the seafaring Malays.”

Interesting in this connection is the following remark on the Negritos by Taw Sein Ko, in his “Origin of the Burmese Race,” published in the magazine Buddhism, (Rangoon, Burma), in March, 1904: “There remains the question as to the autochthonous races which were displaced by the Burmese, Talaings, Shans, Chins, and Karens in Burma. Before the advent of these nations, the Negrito race appears to have occupied southeastern Asia, including Burma. Remnants of it are still found in the Andaman Islands, Philippines, Borneo, and Malaya.”