Mortality among the Spaniards.--Mortality in the Philippines in these years of conquest was frightfully high. The waste of life in her colonial adventures, indeed, drained Spain of her best and most vigorous manhood. In the famous old English collection of voyages, published by Hakluyt in 1598, there is printed a captured Spanish letter of the famous sea-captain, Sebastian Biscaino, on the Philippine trade. Biscaino grieves over the loss of life which had accompanied the conquest of the Philippines, and the treacherous climate of the tropics. "The country is very unwholesome for us Spaniards. For within these 20 years, of 14,000 which have gone to the Philippines, there are 13,000 of them dead, and not past 1,000 of them left alive." [50]
The Spanish Population.--The Spanish population of the Islands was always small,--at the beginning of the seventeenth century certainly not more than two thousand, and probably less later in the century. Morga divides them into five classes: the prelates and ecclesiastics; the encomenderos, colonizers, and conquerors; soldiers and officers of war and marine; merchants and men of business; and the officers of his Majesty's government. "Very few are living now," he says, "of those first conquistadores who won the land and effected the conquest with the Adelantado Miguel Lopez de Legaspi." [51]
The Largest Cities.--Most of this Spanish population dwelt in Manila or in the five other cities which the Spaniards had founded in the first three decades of their occupation. Those were as follows:--
The City of Nueva Segovia, at the mouth of the Cagayan, was founded in the governorship of Ronquillo, when the valley of the Cagayan was first occupied and the Japanese colonists, who had settled there, were expelled. It had at the beginning of the seventeenth century two hundred Spaniards, living in houses of wood. There was a fort of stone, where some artillery was mounted. Besides the two hundred Spanish inhabitants there were one hundred regular Spanish soldiers, with their officers and the alcalde mayor of the province. Nueva Segovia was also the seat of a bishopric which included all northern Luzon. The importance of the then promising city has long ago disappeared, and the pueblo of Lallo, which marks its site, is an insignificant native town.
