The attention of the first Europeans who visited the Philippines was attracted by people with frizzly hair and with a skin darker in color than that of the ruling tribes. Pigafetta, to whom we are indebted for an account of Magellan’s voyage of discovery in 1521, mentions Negritos as living in the Island of Panglao, southwest of Bohol and east of Cebu.[3] If we are to believe later historians the shores of some of the islands fairly swarmed with Negritos when the Spaniards arrived. Meyer gives an interesting extract from an old account by Galvano, The Discoveries of the World (ed. Bethune, Hakluyt Soc., 1862, p. 234):[4]
In the same yeere 1543, and in moneth of August, the generall Rui Lopez sent one Bartholomew de la torre in a smal ship into new Spaine to acquaint the vizeroy don Antonio de Mendoça, with all things. They went to the Islands of Siria, Gaonata, Bisaia and many others, standing in 11 and 12 degrees towards the north, where Magellan had beene. * * * They found also an Archepelagus of Islands well inhabited with people, lying in 15 or 16 degrees: * * * There came vnto them certaine barkes or boates handsomely decked, wherein the master and principall men sate on high, and vnderneath were very blacke moores with frizled haire * * *: and being demanded where they had these blacke moores, they answered, that they had them from certaine islands standing fast by Sebut, where there were many of them.
Zúñiga[5] quotes the Franciscan history[6] as follows:
The Negritos which our first conquerors found were, according to tradition, the first possessors of the islands of this Archipelago, and, having been conquered by the political nations of other kingdoms, they fled to the mountains and populated them, whence no one has been able to accomplish their extermination on account of the inaccessibility of the places where they live. In the past they were so proud of their primitive dominion that, although they did not have strength to resist the strangers in the open, in the woods and mountains and mouths of the rivers they were very powerful. They made sudden attacks on the pueblos and compelled their neighbors to pay tribute to them as to lords of the earth which they inhabited, and if these did not wish to pay them they killed right and left, collecting the tribute in heads. * * *
One of the islands of note in this Archipelago is that called Isla de Negros on account of the abundance of them [negroes]. In one point of this island—on the west side, called “Sojoton”—there is a great number of Negritos, and in the center of the island many more.
Chirino has the following to say of the Negritos of Panay at the end of the sixteenth century:[7]
Amongst these (Bisayas) there are also some negroes, the ancient inhabitants of the island of which they had taken possession before the Bisayas. They are somewhat less black and less ugly man those of Guinea, but are smaller and weaker, although as regards hair and beard they are similar. They are more barbarous and savage than the Bisayas and other Filipinos, for they do not, like them, have houses and fixed settlements. They neither sow nor reap, and they wander through the mountains with their women and children like animals, almost naked. * * * Their sole possessions are the bow and arrow.
Meyer,[8] who has given the subject much study and has conducted personal investigations on the field, states that “although at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards in the country, and probably long before, the Negritos were in process of being driven back by the Malays, yet it appears certain that their numbers were then larger, for they were feared by their neighbors, which is now only exceptionally the case.”
Of the vast amount of material that has been written during the past century on the Negritos of the Philippines a considerable portion can not be taken authoritatively. Exceptions should be made of the writings of Meyer, Montano, Marche, and Blumentritt. A large part of the writings on the Philippine Negritos have to do with their distribution and numbers, since no one has made an extended study of them on the spot, except Meyer, whose work (consisting of twelve chapters and published in Volume IX of the Publications of the Royal Ethnographical Museum of Dresden, 1893) I regret not to have seen. Two chapters of this work on the distribution of the Negritos, republished in 1899, form the most recent and most nearly correct exposition of this subject. Meyer summarizes as follows:
It may be regarded as proved with certainty that Negritos are found in Luzon, Alabat, Corregidor, Panay, Tablas, Negros, Cebu, northeast Mindanao, and Palawan. It is questionable whether they occur in Guimaras, Mindoro, and the Calamianes.