The Bontoc Igorot by Albert Ernest Jenks
page 8 of 483 (01%)
page 8 of 483 (01%)
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There are and long have been daring Malayan pirates, and there is to-day among the southern islands a numerous class -- the Samal -- living most of the time on the sea, yet they all keep close to land, except in time of calm, and when a storm is brewing they strike out straight for the nearest shore like scared children. The ocean currents and the monsoons have been greatly instrumental in driving different people through the seas into the Philippine net.[2] The Tagakola on the west coast of the Gulf of Davao, Mindanao, have a tradition that they are descendants of men cast on their present shores from a distant land and of the Manobo women of the territory. The Bagobo, also in the Gulf of Davao, claim they came to their present home in a few boats generations ago. They purposely left their former land to flee from head-hunting, a practice in their earlier home, but one they do not follow in Mindanao. What per cent of the people coming originally to the Archipelago was castaway, nomadic, or immigrant it is impossible to judge, but there have doubtless also been many systematic and prolonged migrations from nearby lands, as from Borneo, Celebes, Sangir, etc. Primitive man is represented in the Philippines to-day not alone by one of the lowest natural types of savage man the historic world has looked upon -- the small, dark-brown, bearded, "crisp-woolly"-haired Negritos -- but by some thirty distinct primitive Malayan tribes or dialect groups, among which are believed to be some of the lowest of the stock in existence. In northern Luzon is the Igorot, a typical primitive Malayan. He is a muscular, smooth-faced, brown man of a type between the delicate and the coarse. In Mindoro the Mangiyan is found, an especially lowly |
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