Note 1 — Chapter XVIII

[Gaspar de San Agustin, O.S.A., wrote the following letter regarding the Filipinos. This letter has been widely discussed pro and con by various writers, because of the views expressed therein. Many manuscript copies of it exist in various collections, archives, and libraries. The present translation is made from an early manuscript copy, belonging to Mr. E. E. Ayer, of Chicago. In footnotes we give the variant readings of the MS. conserved in the Museo-Biblioteca de Ultramar, Madrid (pressmark “6–5a; caja 17; 21–4a”), that MS. being indicated in our notes by the letter M.; and of the letter as published in Delgado’s1 Historia (pp. 273–296, where it shows marks of having been edited by either Delgado or his editor), that publication being indicated by the letter D. Sinibaldo de Mas presents many of the essential parts of the letter in his Informe de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, i, “Poblacion,” pp. 63–132. He says: “In order to give an idea of their physical and moral qualities, I am going to insert some paragraphs from a letter of Father Gaspar de San Augustin of the year 1725,2 suppressing many Latin citations from the holy fathers which weigh that letter down, and adding some observations from my own harvest, when I think them opportune.” We shall use most of these observations in the annotations herewith presented. Sir John Bowring gives, on pp. 125–139 of his Visit to the Philippine Isles (London, 1859) some excerpts taken from Mas’s Informe, but he has sadly mixed San Agustin’s and Mas’s matter, and has ascribed some of the latter’s observations to San Agustin, besides making other errors.3]