“Ships in the southern trade, both going and coming, must run through the Triple-joint currents. If they have the wind, in a moment they are through it. But if on getting into the dangerous place there is no wind, the ship cannot get out and is wrecked in the three currents. * * * It is said that, in the Great Eastern Ocean Sea there is a long bank of sand and rocks some myriads of li (705 yards or 2–5 mile) in length. It marks the gulf leading to Hades (Wei-lu). In olden times there was an ocean-going junk which was driven by a great westerly wind to within hearing distance of the roar of the waves falling into Wei-lu of the Great Eastern Ocean. No land was to be seen. Suddenly there arose a strong easterly wind and the junk escaped its doom. (Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-Kua, note 3, p. 185.)
Such superstition, like that of the Pillars of Hercules, in the Strait of Gibraltar, naturally restrained explorations so that the first voyages across the China sea came from Manila.
The earliest account of Filipino traders comes through a brief mention in a French ethnologist’s notes on foreigners in China (Henry St. Denis, Ethnographie, II, 502, according to Rockhill) that in 982 merchants from Manila visited Canton for trade. They probably were not pioneers as it is related that they came with valuable merchandise. This was about the time (between 976 and 983) when the Canton trade was declared a state monopoly. Over two centuries a maritime customs service had existed in that port, reorganized in 971 because of the greatly increased foreign trade.
From 1174 to 1190 (Chau Ju-Kua’s account, Hirth and Rockhill, p. 165) the Formosan Bisayan chiefs were in the habit of assembling parties of several hundreds to make sudden raids on villages of the neighboring Chinese coast. There murders innumerable and even cannibalism were charged against them, though perhaps there should be some discount upon these unfavorable statements as even today enemies are not always reliable authorities upon their adversaries.
They placed great value upon iron, even to the extent of attaching ropes, of over a hundred feet in length, to their spears so that these might be recovered after each throw.
Such was their fondness for all forms of iron that those surprised by them would throw away spoons or chopsticks of that metal so while the pursuers were stopping to pick these up they could gain a start. Once in the house the door had only to be closed and they would be distracted from the attack by sight of an iron knocker which they would wrench off and then immediately depart with it.
The soldiers decoyed them with mail-covered horsemen and in their mad struggle to strip off the armor they would meet their death without being sensible of their danger. Bamboo lashed into rafts conveyed them over the waters and when hard pressed facilitated their escape for these, folded up like screens, were easy to lift and swim off with.
A collector of customs (the Chau Ju-Kua before quoted) of Chinchew, the port in the Amoy district later made famous by Marco Polo, from personal investigation obtained data as to the Philippines which he published in a geography written between 1209 and 1214 (B. Laufer, Relations of Chinese to the Philippines, Washington, 1907, p. 24).
Under “Mai,” an island north of Borneo, he is supposed to include Western Luzon, and the Island of Mindoro, which Blumentritt thinks (Versuch einer Ethnographie der Philippinen, 65) had the name “Mait,” or black, from the former negrito population. The opening description, now held to be of Manila, tells of about a thousand families who occupied both banks of a water-course. Some people wore only waist-cloths while others draped themselves in a sort of cotton sheet, getting presumably much the same effect as may be seen among the feminine bathers on the Tondo beach any Sunday morning.
Little bronze idols of unknown origin were to be found in the grassy region outside the village, for Mr. Rockhill is careful to translate “idols” instead of “Buddhas,” holding that the word has the more general meaning often. Yet because the later idols of the country were of wood and clay one wonders where bronze idols would be made at that time if not in a Buddhist land. Manila was a peaceable community then, and peaceful too, for the fierce pirates of the south had not yet gotten into the habit of coming there, still less had settled, as they were to do two centuries later.