Reprinted from the Popular Science Monthly, December, 1910.
The grewsome practise of taking human heads is particularly associated with the Igorot peoples of the Cordillera of Luzon. These all engage in it or have done so until recently. But to-day the most persistent and dreaded headhunters are neither Igorot nor inhabitants of the Cordillera; they are a wild, forest-dwelling people in the broken and almost impenetrable mountain region formed by the junction of the Sierra Madre range with the Caraballo Sur. They have been called by different names by the peoples contiguous to them on the north, west and south, “Italon,” “Ibilao,” “Ilongot” or “Ilūngūt.” The last designation would for some reasons be the preferred, but “Ibilao,” or as it is quite commonly pronounced locally through northern Nueva Ecija, “Abilao,” has perhaps the widest use.[1]
An Ilongot at Oyao, Nueva Vizcaya.
Photograph taken in 1904. Tobacco is drying underneath the house. Behind the house stand the bare trees of the forest clearing.
There are no early records of these people and until late in his rule the Spaniard knew almost nothing of them. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the valley of the Magat was occupied and the mission of Ituy founded, out of which came the province of Nueva Vizcaya, with its converted population of Gaddang and Isinay. To reach Ituy from the south the trail followed up the valley of the Rio Pampanga almost to its sources and then climbed over the Caraballo Sur to the headwaters of the Magat. On this trail along the upper waters of the Pampanga grew up several small mission stations, Pantabangan and Karanglan, with a population of Pampanga and Tagalog people drawn from the provinces to the south. After more than a hundred years these small towns are still almost the only Christian settlements in northern Nueva Ecija. From the time of their establishment we find references to the “Ilongotes” who inhabited the mountains to the east and were spoken of as “savages,” “treacherous murderers,” “cannibals,” and wholly untamable. Much as described a hundred years ago they have continued to the present day. Their homes are in thick mountain jungle where it is difficult to follow them, but, from time to time they steal out of the forests to fall upon the wayfarer or resident of the valley and leave him a beheaded and dismembered corpse.
Here are a few instances occurring in recent years which came under my own notice or investigation. In 1902, the presidente of Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya, informed me that four women had been killed while fishing a short distance from the town. In March of the same year, a party of Ilongot crossed the upper part of Nueva Ecija and in a barrio of San Quentin, Pangasinan, killed five people and took the heads of four. In November, 1901, near the barrio of Kita Kita, Nueva Ecija, an old man and two boys were killed, while a little earlier two men were attacked on the road above Karanglan, one killed and his head taken. In January, 1902, Mr. Thomson, the superintendent of schools, saw the bodies of two men and a woman on the road, six miles south of Karanglan, who had been killed only a few moments before. The heads of these victims had been taken and their breasts completely opened by a triangular excision, the apex at the collar bone and the lower points at the nipples, through which the heart and lungs had been removed and carried away. As late as a year ago (1909), on the trail to San José and Punkan, I saw the spot where shortly before four men were murdered by Ilongot from the “Biruk district.” These men were carrying two large cans of “bino” or native distilled liquor, from which the Ilongot imbibed, with the result that three of their party were found drunk on the trail and were captured. These are only a few out of numerous instances, but they explain why the great fertile plains of northern Nueva Ecija are undeveloped and why the few inhabitants dwell uneasy and apprehensive.
Ilongot Hunting Party.
Photograph taken near Delapin in Nueva Vizcaya in August. The large nets carried are stretched in the jungle across the game trails and the game are driven into them. The spears and bows and arrows represent their typical weapons. The curly headed man represents the mixed Malayan and Negrito type common in these people.