The traders’ ships anchored in front of the quarters of the chiefs, to whom they presented the white silk parasols which these dignitaries were accustomed to use. There the market was held, and the shore people at once went on board, mixing in friendly fashion with the newcomers. Nor was there fear of loss, for such then was the Manilans’ honesty that even when some one helped himself and took away goods without being seen he could be relied on in due season to faithfully account for them. The period was usually eight or nine months so that, though not travelling the greatest distance, those trading to Manila were among the latest in getting back to China.
The trade was without money, a barter of the country’s yellow wax (a medium grade), cotton, pearls, tortoise shell, medicinal betel nuts, and native cloth, for imported porcelain, trade gold, iron censers, leads, colored glassbeads and iron needles. Names of other settlements in this region may be what we now call the Babuyanes islands, Polillo island, off the East coast, Lingayen in Pangasinan, Luzon perhaps used of East Luzon and (according to Luther M. Parker, a graduate student in the University of the Philippines, 1913–14) Lian in Batangas.
For the group called “the three islands,” Calamianes, Palawan and Busuanga are the closest resemblances to the curious names of the Chinese narrative, though B. Laufer in his notes to Fay Cole’s Chinese pottery in the Philippines (Field Museum Bulletin) suggests another for Calamianes.
Local customs were said not to differ particularly from the ways of Mai. The country, grand in its scenery, had many ridges and ranges of cliffs rose from the shore, steep as the walls of a house.
Each tribe had about a thousand families (which seems to be only another way of saying that the tribes were large rather than an effort at statistics) and they lived in wattled huts in commanding situations difficult of access. The sight of women bringing water from the streams in jars gracefully and easily carried on the head, two or three being borne one above another, still amazes and interests us as it did the Chinese geographer’s informant.
In more remote valleys lurked the negritoes, nesting in the trees the author alleges. They were stunted in stature, with eyes round and yellow, curly hair, and teeth exposed by their parted lips. In groups of three or five they would ambuscade some unwary wayfarer and many fell victims to their cunning and deadly arrows. But throwing a porcelain bowl would make them forget their murderous purpose and off they would go, leaping and shouting in joy.
The country folk evidently did not inspire in the traders the same confidence these felt toward the Manilans. Their ships would anchor in midstream and none went ashore till there had been sent one or two hostages to be retained till the trading was over. Drum beating announced their arrival, when the local traders raced for the ship carrying, evidently as samples, cotton, yellow wax, and home made cloth, and coconut heart mats, whatever this last may have meant. In case of disagreement over prices the chiefs of the traders came in person, when, after a mutually satisfactory settlement had been reached, there would be presents given,—silk umbrellas, porcelain and rattan baskets, probably the first two from the visitors and the last from the people. Then the barter was concluded ashore. Three or four days was the usual stop in each place when the ships sailed to another anchorage, for each of the settlements was independent of its neighbors. The Chinese goods were porcelain, black damask, and other silks, beads of all colors leaden sinkers for nets, and tin.
Polillo, on the Pacific coast, was also, but less frequently, visited, to obtain two prized varieties of coral. There local customs and commercial usages were the same as on the other side of the archipelago, but though the settlements were more populous the coral was hard to get and so there was little trade. The coast, too, was dangerous, with the sea full of “bare ribs of rock with jagged tooth-like blasted trees, their points and edges sharper than swords and lances.” Ships tacked far out from shore in passing to avoid these perils, and besides the people were “of cruel disposition and given to robbery.”
Northern Formosa, during this period, was not visited by Chinese for there were no goods of special importance to be gotten there while the people were also given to robbery, but Formosan goods,—yellow wax, native gold, buffalo tails, and jerked leopard-meat, were brought to the Philippines for sale.
For 1349, in an unpublished translation by Mr. Rockhill of “A Description of the Barbarians of the Isles (Tao-i-chih-lio) by Wang Ta-yuan is mentioned the “three archipelagoes,” if that is the proper way to distinguish between Chao-ju-kua’s Sanhsu and the present San-tao. Islands were for the Chinese merely places distant by a sea route from each other rather than our “bodies of land completely surrounded by water.”