Relapse into savagery—Moros the great danger—Visayas the mainstay—Confederation of Lake Lanao—Recall of the Missionaries—Murder and pillage in Davao—Eastern Mindanao—Western Mindanao—The three courses—Orphanage of Tamontaca—Fugitive slaves—Polygamy an impediment to conversion—Labours of the Jesuits—American Roman Catholics should send them help.
The present condition of the island is most lamentable. Nothing could be more dreadful; robbery, outrage and murder are rampant. Every evil passion is let loose, and the labour of years has been lost. Mindanao, which promised so well, has relapsed into savagery, as the direct consequence of the Spanish-American war, and the cession of the Archipelago to the United States.
It should be understood that Spain, far from drawing any profit from Mindanao, has, on the contrary, expended annually considerable sums, derived from the revenues of Luzon and Visayas, in maintaining a squadron of gunboats to police the seas, and keep down piracy, in building and garrisoning forts to suppress the slave-trade, and in assisting the missionaries to attract the heathen, by providing them with seeds, implements of husbandry, and with clothing, also in giving them fire-arms and ammunition to protect themselves from the Moros.
Annuities were paid to friendly Moro dattos as rewards for services rendered, or as compensation for the cession of some of their rights.
The Moros have always been the great danger to the peace of the island, as the Visayas have always been the mainstay of Spanish authority.
Had it not been for the war with America, the Moros would have been, by this time, completely subdued.
Lake Lanao: Seat of the Moro Power, according to Nieto.
[To face p. 377.
Even as it was, half the island was practically free from danger from them. If you draw a line on the map from Cagayan de Misamis to the head of the Bay of Sarangani, it will roughly divide the island into halves. The Moros who lived to the eastward of this line were pacific, and some thousands of them had been baptized, and had given up polygamy and slave-trading.