Volume 40 — Chapter IV

Of the origin of the nations and peoples who inhabit these islands

25. Although these are islands it will not be necessary to fatigue the mind by discussing (as do San Agustin and other authors in respect to other islands and to America) whence and how people and animals came to them. For if some of these islands have been, at any time since the flood, part of a continent, from that time men and animals could remain in them; while if they have always been islands, the nearness of some of them to others, and of some of them to the mainland of Asia, whence began the propagation of the human race and the settlements of the descendants of Noah, is sufficient reason why some of them could come to settle these regions. And that this was really so, and that the principal settler of these archipelagoes was Tharsis, son of Javan, together with his brothers, as were Ophir and Hevilath of India, we see in the tenth chapter of Genesis, which treats of the dispersion of peoples and the settlement of countries, as we establish in another place.

28. The nations of the Bisayas and Pintados, who inhabit the provinces of Camarines in this island of Luzon, and those of Leyte, Samar, Panay, and other neighborhoods, came, I have heard, from the districts of Macasar, where it is said that Indians live who make designs on and tattoo the body, in the manner of our Pintados. Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, in the relation which he wrote of the discovery of the Salomon Islands in 1595, says that an island called Madalena was found in ten degrees north latitude, at a distance from Pirù of one thousand eight hundred leguas (which is nearly the same latitude and distance as the Filipinas) where Indians of good proportion, but taller than the Spaniards, and all naked and bearing designs on their bodies, legs, arms, and hands (and some on their faces), in the manner of our Visayans, were found. Consequently, it is apparent that there are other nations of Pintados to be discovered. We have as yet not enough data, nor even a well founded conjecture, to say whether ours originated from the latter, or on the contrary both from some mainland. We know well that people who tattoo the body have been seen in Brasil and Florida. Then, too, this custom was formerly seen in some nations of Scythians in Asia and of Britons in Europa. But we cannot yet determine the legitimate origin of our Visayan Pintados. If some of the natives of Mindanao, Jolo, Bool, and part of Cebu, who are lighter-complexioned, braver, and of better proportions than the pure Visayans, are not Borneans, they might be Ternatans—as may be inferred from the neighborhood of the lands and the communication of one with another; and because in what concerns the worship and religion of the cursed Prophet, even today they are governed by Terrenate; and when they find themselves beset by the troops from Filipinas, they make an alliance and help one another.