The entire valley of the Cagayan had been divided among the soldiers of the command which had effected the conquest. In the list of encomiendas a few can be recognized, such as Yguig and Tuguegarao, but most of the names are not to be found on maps of to-day. Most of the inhabitants were reported to be "rebellious" (alçados), and some were apparently the same wild tribes which still occupy all of this water-shed, except the very banks of the river; but none the less had the Spaniards divided them off into "repartimientos." One soldier had even taken as an encomienda the inhabitants of the upper waters of the river, a region which is called in the Relacion "Pugao," with little doubt the habitat of the same Igorrote tribe as the Ipugao, who still dwell in these mountains. The upper valley of the Magat, or Nueva Vizcaya, does not appear to have been occupied and probably was not until the missions of the eighteenth century.
The population among the Bisayan islands was quite surprisingly small, considering its present proportions. Masbate, for example, had but 1,600 souls; Burias, a like number; the whole central group, leaving out Panay, only 15,833 tributes, or about 35,000 souls. There was a single encomienda in Butúan, Mindanao, and another on the Caraga coast. There were a thousand tributes collected in the encomienda of Cuyo, and fifteen hundred in Calamianes, which, says the Relacion, included "los negrillos," probably the mixed Negrito population of northern Palawan.
The entire population under encomiendas is set down as 166,903 tributes, or 667,612 souls. This is, so far as known, the earliest enumeration of the population of the Philippines. Barring the Igorrotes of northern Luzon and the Moros and other tribes of Mindanao, it is a fair estimate of the number of the Filipino people three hundred years ago.
It will be noticed that the numbers assigned to single encomenderos in the Philippines were large. In America the number was limited. As early as 1512, King Ferdinand had forbidden any single person, of whatever rank or grade, to hold more than three hundred Indians on one island. [37] But in the Philippines, a thousand or twelve hundred "tributantes" were frequently held by a single Spaniard.