It has been truly said that nothing requires such calm and impartial judgment as the inquiry into the moral and religious condition of uncivilized races. The co-evolution of religion and civilization is an extremely interesting subject to the student of anthropology, when he notes the gradual refinement of the national religion as the culture of the race improves, and the degradation of that religion when a race retrogrades in civilization. It is one of the many grand problems, based on the retributive laws of Nature, which confront the enquirer into that great and wonderful mystery—the development of the human race. Well it is for him who can learn from the savage Aieta, or the semi-civilized Tagalog, a lesson in the evolution of the human intellect; but, unfortunately, so many who have golden opportunities of studying the intellect and works of uncultured man are careless of those matters, and look with contempt upon the noblest of studies. They cannot interest themselves in the struggling intellect of primitive man; they no longer understand the craving of youth for advancement; they disdain to look upon the dawn of intellectual day.
These are the most interesting points procured from the aforementioned works on the Philippine Islands, a land which we call new, but in which the events of the Tagalog-Bisayan migrations were but as of yesterday. Here, as elsewhere, the rude savage retreats before a superior race, but the receptive Tagalog attaches himself to the civilization of his conquerors. He had already advanced himself to the difficult highway that leads from barbarism to a higher culture, and was thus enabled to receive the teachings of his Iberian invaders; but he who would seek the indigenous Aieta must look for him in the distant recesses of the primeval forest, or in the dark and gloomy cañons of the great ranges.
A Thousand Years of Philippine History Before the Coming of the Spaniards
By Austin Craig
The Philippine History of which one is apt to think when that subject is mentioned covers hardly a fourth of the Islands’ book-recorded history.
These records are not the romantic dream of a Paterno that under the name Ophir the Philippines with their gold enriched Solomon (10th century B. C.). There are solider grounds than any plausible explanations that Manila hemp (abaká) was Strabo’s (A. D. 21) “ta seerika,” the cloth made of “a kind of flax combed from certain barks of trees.” The shadowy identification of the Manilas with Ptolemy’s Maniolas (c. A. D. 130) is not in their class. Nor, to accept them, is recourse needed to farfetched deductions like Zuñiga’s that the American Continent received Israel’s ten lost tribes, and thence, through Easter Island, Magellan’s archipelago was peopled. Their existence saves us from having to accept such references as how Simbad the sailorman (Burton: The Arabian Nights, Night 538 et seq.) evidently made some of his voyages in this region, though it would not be uninteresting to note that the great Roc is a bird used in Moro ornament, the “ghoul” of the Thousand and One Nights is the Filipino Asuang and that the palm-covered island which was believed to be a colossal tortoise because it shook might well have been located where the Philippine maps indicate that earthquakes are most frequent.
The records hereinafter to be cited are for the most part of the prosaic kind, all the more reliable and valuable because they are inclined to be dry and matter-of-fact. They make no such demand upon imagination as Europe’s pioneer traveller’s tales, for instance the sixteenth century chart which depicted America as inhabited by headless people with eyes, nose and mouth located in the chest.
The British Museum’s oriental scholar (Douglas: Europe and the Far East, Cambridge, 1904) states that by the beginning of the Chou dynasty (B. C. 1122–255) intercourse had been established at Canton with eight foreign nations. Duties as early as 990 B. C. were levied, and among the imports figure birds, pearls and tortoise shell, products of the Philippines, but the origin of these has not been investigated. “Reliable history,” says Dr. Pott (A Sketch of Chinese History, Shanghai, 1908), “does not extend further back than the middle of the Chou dynasty (B. C. 722). * * * After the time of the Chou dynasty we come to more solid ground, for at the beginning of the Han dynasty (B.C. 206) the custom originated of employing Court chroniclers to write a daily account of governmental proceedings. These diaries were kept secret and stored away in iron chests until the dynasty they chronicled had passed away; then they were opened and published, and so form the basis of our knowledge of the events that had transpired while the dynasty was in existence.”
Philippine history, however, has attracted only incidental interest in the translating of these voluminous chronicles so that while the first three mentions hereafter to be cited are well within the reliable history period they have not been verified and are valuable only as suggesting more definitely where to investigate.