ince 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.[1]
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."[2]
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
