(Chinese merchants). In Manila and the adjacent region nine thousand
four hundred and ten tributes were collected, indicating a total of
some thirty thousand six hundred and forty souls under the religious
instruction of thirteen missionaries (_ministros de doctrina_), besides
the friars in the monasteries. In the old province of La Pampanga
the estimated population was 74,700 with twenty-eight missionaries;
in Pangasinán 2,400 souls with eight missionaries; in Ilocos 78,520
with twenty missionaries; in Cagayán and the Babuyan islands 96,000
souls but no missionaries; in La Laguna 48,400 souls with twenty-seven
missionaries; in Vicol and Camarines with the island of Catanduanes
86,640 souls with fifteen missionaries, etc., making a total for the
islands of 166,903 tributes or 667,612 souls under one hundred and
forty missionaries, of which seventy-nine were Augustinians, nine
Dominicans, forty-two Franciscans. The King's _encomiendas_ numbered
thirty-one and the private ones two hundred and thirty-six. [34]

Friar Martin Ignacio in his _Itinerario_, the earliest printed
description of the islands (1585), says: "According unto the common
opinion at this day there is converted and baptised more than foure
hundred thousand soules." [35]

This system of _encomiendas_ had been productive of much hardship and
oppression in Spanish America, nor was it altogether divested of these
evils in the Philippines. The payment of tributes, too, was irksome
to the natives and in the earlier days the Indians were frequently
drafted for forced labor, but during this transition period, and later,
the clergy were the constant advocates of humane treatment and stood
between the natives and the military authorities. This solicitude of
the missionaries for their spiritual children and the wrongs from which
they sought to protect them are clearly displayed in the _Relacion de