The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803; explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commericial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century; [Vol. 1, no. 40]

I690-I69I] NATIVES OF SOUTHERN ISLANDS

I5I

they immediately attribute them to this. A case of
that nature came to my notice in the year fifty-one,
when the drought was general, and so great that
even the water of the rivers failed, and that river
which had any water that found its way to the sea
was rare. The Indians of the village which was in
my care on the coast of Siocon came to tell me that
it was a punishment from the sky, and that it had
been demanded by the awfulness of such crime on
the coast of Mindanao, where they said that a
mother was living in marriage with her son. They
petitioned me to have the offenders punished, and
warned me that the punishment should be death
without remission, such being their custom, without
admitting satisfaction by any other penalty, however
excessive it be. The same report was current in the
island of Basilan. However, it was without other
foundation than that the Indians are gossipy and
suspicious, ignorant of the secrets of the sky and
ruled by the traditions of the past. They are ruled
in that island by greater fear, as they retained more
accurately in their memory certain cases that served
them as examples and warnings. For, at a certain
time, the sky was so leaden that for two years not a
drop of rain fell. There was an Indian who violated the respect that he owed to his blood and to
nature, with regard to a daughter of his. Although
he tried to bury the crime in the depths of his silence, it cried out to the sky as an offense, and was
heard distinctly as a sin; for the effect, as ungrateful as evil, always turns against its cause. He was
a person of influence, and respect for him did not
allow any investigation to be made; but, the villages
grieving over the public calamity, and unable to en