to haul and convey it to the shipyard the towns of the surrounding
country had to be depopulated of natives, who get it out with immense
labor, damage, and cost to them. The natives furnished the masts for
a galleon, according to the assertion of the Franciscans, and I heard
the governor of the province where they were cut, which is Lacuna de
Bay, say that to haul them seven leagues over very broken mountains
6,000 natives were engaged three months, without furnishing them food,
which the wretched native had to seek for himself!"

And Gaspar de San Agustin says: "In those times (1690), Bacolor has
not the people that it had in the past, because of the uprising in
that province when Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lava was Governor of
these islands and because of the continual labor of cutting timber
for his Majesty's shipyards, WHICH HINDERS THEM FROM CULTIVATING THE
VERY FERTILE PLAIN THEY HAVE." (17)

If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands
and the abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then
add "the natives who wore executed, those who loft their wives and
children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold
into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them," as Fernando de los
Rios Coronel says; add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding
Bishos Salazar about "natives sold by some encomendoros to others,
those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their
heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse
their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are
executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs
............ and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them,"
and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population
of the Philippines was reduced one-third. We are not saying this: