When a powerful and highly civilized community comes in contact with a barbaric and isolated commonwealth, who have til flat advanced many steps on the road of progress, it would of melodic line be thought that the superior and conquering race would endeavour to collect and place on record information concerning much(prenominal) people: their manners, customs, language, religion, and traditions. Unfortunately, in the case of the Spanish conquests of the XVI century, that nation appears neer to have considered it a duty to attain take to descendants any detailed description of the singularly evoke races they had vanquished. As it was with the Gaunches of the Canaries, the Aztecs of Mexico, and the Quichuas of Peru, so was it with the Chamorro of the Ladrones, and the Tagalog-Bisayan tribes of the Philippines. The same vandal spirit that prompted the conquistadores to destroy the Maya and Aztec writings excessively moved them to demolish the written records of the Phili ppine natives, and still if a some(prenominal) attempts were made to preserve relics or information concerning them.
The Spanish priests, as the lettered men of those times, were the persons we should look to for such a work, tho in their religious ardor they thought only of the oppressiveness and conversion of the natives, and so, with the sword in one hand and crucifix in the other, they marched through that fair land ignoring and destroying the evidences of a contrary semi-civilization which should have been to them a study of the deepest interest. Fortunately, however, there were a few in that period who were interested in such matters, and who wro! te accounts of the declare of culture of the islanders of that early date. Some of these MSS. have been preserve in the archives of Manila and have lately attracted the fear of Spanish scholars. Such is the article from which the greater part of these notes is taken. In the intensity level for 1891 of the Revista Ibero-Americana, published at Madrid, there appeared a serial of papers contributed by the...If you want to get a blanket(a) essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com
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