[42] ”* * * Many islands and villages are devastated and almost wiped out, partly by the Spaniards or because of them, and partly by famines of which, or at the beginning of them, the Spaniards were the reason; for either by fear or to get rid of the Spaniards the natives NEGLECTED THEIR SOWING, and when they wished to sow then anguish came to them, and consequently many people have died of hunger.” (Augustinian Memoranda, 1373.—Bl. and Rb., Vol. 34, p. 279.)
“After the end of the war the need of the city began, for, because of not having Sangleys who worked at the trades, and brought in all the provisions, there was no food, nor any shoes to wear, not even at excessive prices. The native Indians are very far from exercising those trades, and have even forgotten much of farming, and the raising of fowls, cattle, and cotton, and the weaving of cloth, which they used to do in the days of their paganism and for a long time after the conquest of the country. In addition to this, people thought that Chinese vessels would not come to the islands with food and merchandise, on account of the late revolution. * * *” (Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos, 1601.—Bl. and Rb., Vol. 16, pp. 42–43).
[43] In La Indolencia, Rizal further says:
“It was necessary to subject the people either by cajolery or force; there were fights, there was slaughter; those who had submitted peacefully seemed to repent of it; insurrections were suspected, and some occurred; naturally there were executions, and many capable laborers perished. Add to this condition of disorder the invasion of Limahong, add the continual wars into which the inhabitants of the Philippines were plunged to maintain the honor of Spain, to extend the sway of her flag in Borneo, in the Moluccas and in Indo-China; to repel the Dutch foe: costly wars, fruitless expeditions, in which each time thousands and thousands of native archers and rowers were recorded to have embarked, but whether they returned to their homes was never stated. Like the tribute that once upon a time Greece sent to the Minotaur of Crete, the Philippine youth embarked for the expedition, saying good-by to their country forever: on their horizon were the stormy sea, the interminable wars, the rash expeditions. Wherefore, Gaspar de San Agustin says: ‘Although anciently there were in this town of Dumangas many people, in the course of time they have very greatly diminished because the natives are the best sailors and most skillful rowers on the whole coast, and so the governors in the port of Iloilo take most of the people from this town for the ships that they send abroad. * * * When the Spaniards reached this island (Panay) it is said that there were on it more than fifty thousand families; but these diminished greatly; * * * and at present they may amount to some fourteen thousand tributaries.’ From fifty thousand families to fourteen thousand tributaries in little over half a century!
We would never get through, had we to quote all the evidence of the authors regarding the frightful diminution of the inhabitants of the Philippines in the first years after the discovery. In the time of their first bishop, that is, ten years after Legaspi, Philip II said that they had been reduced to less than two-thirds.”
[44] 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’.”
[45] “The Indians, upon seeing that wealth excited the rapacity of the encomenderos and soldiers, abandoned the working of the mines, and the religious historians assert that they counseled them to a similar action in order to free them from annoyances. Nevertheless, according to Colin (who was ‘informed by well-disposed natives’), more than 100,000 pesos of gold annually, conservatively stated, was taken from the mines during his time, after eighty years of abandonment. According to a ‘manuscript of a grave person who had lived long in these islands,’ the first tribute of the two provinces of Ilocos and Pangasinan alone amounted to 109,500 pesos. A single encomendero, in 1587, sent 3,000 taheles of gold in the ‘Santa Ana,’ which was captured by Cavendish.” (Rizal’s Notes to Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos, 1609, Bl. and Rb., Vol. 16, p. 101.)
“If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands and the abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then add ‘the natives who were executed, those who left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,’ as Fernando de los Rios Coronel says; add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding Bishop Salazar about ‘natives sold by some encomenderos to others, those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs * * * and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them,’ and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population of the Philippines was reduced one-third. We are not saying this: it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work by speaking every moment of the state of neglect in which lay the farms and fields once so flourishing and so well cultivated, the towns thinned that had formerly been inhabited by many leading families!