The Bisayan group is mostly inhabited by a race resembling, in all essential characteristics, the Tagálog, and other Malayan races of Luzon. Their language may be called a dialect of the Tagálog, though rather harsher in sound, and neither so copious, so refined, nor so subjected to grammatical rules, as this latter idiom. The Bisayan has more Malay words than have the dialects spoken in Luzon. The natives of these islands and those of Luzon imperfectly comprehend each other, though their languages are evidently derived from the same parent stock.
The Bisayas furnish a hardy, seafaring race; but, as a rule, the general tendency to indolence, attributed to the Philippine “Indian,” applies, in a perhaps greater degree, to the inhabitants of the whole southern group, and constitutes at present, in the absence of any available means of coercion, one of the principal obstacles to a more rapid extension of agriculture by the introduction of European capital.
The christianized population of the Bisayas may be estimated as follows:—
| Samar | 118,000 | |
| Leyte | 115,000 | |
| Romblon | 16,600 | |
| Panay:— | ||
| Capiz | 135,000 | |
| Iloilo | 450,000 | |
| Antique | 80,000 | |
| Cebu and Bohol | 385,200 | |
| Negros | 108,000 | |
| Calamianes | 18,000 | |
| Mindanao:— | ||
| Misamis | 44,500 | |
| Caraga (Surigao) | 15,300 | |
| New Guipuzcoa (Bislig and Davao) | 11,200 | |
| Zamboanga | 12,000 | |
| Total | 1,508,800 | |
This estimate does not include the unsubdued tribes inhabiting the mountains in the interior, some idea of the number of which may be formed from a note of those ascertained to have existed in 1849, in the undernoted provinces:—
| Misamis | 66,000 |
| Samar | 25,964 |
| Leyte (not ascertained). | |
| Negros | 8,545 |
| Panay | 13,900 |
| Cebu | 4,903 |
| Total | 119,312 |
The largest number of unsubjected tribes (principally Mahomedan) inhabit Mindanao, the total population of which is generally asserted to amount to nearly one million souls.
The island of Panay, advantageously placed towards the centre of the Bisayas group, is distant at its nearest point—that of Potol, in lat. 11° 48´ N., long. 122° W. of Greenwich—180 miles in a right line from Manila. Its shape is nearly triangular, and it has a circumference of about 300 miles. It is the fifth in size of the Philippine Islands, coming in this respect after Luzon, which has a circumference of 1,059 miles; Mindanao, 900; Paragua, 420; and Samar, 390; but, though smaller than the islands just named, it is, next to Luzon, the most populous of the archipelago, if Mindanao, with the doubtful population of independent tribes above-mentioned, be left out of the question.
Panay is divided into the three provinces of Capiz, Antique, and Iloilo, which together contain a population of about 665,000.
Capiz occupies the whole of the northern portion of the coast of Panay, for a distance of seventy-seven miles.