Note: This piece is based on Scott, William Henry. 1994. Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. The specific text is drawn from Chapter 14, "Northern Luzon", pp. 263-264.
The Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon was one of the most fertile regions of the Philippines in the sixteenth century. Protected by the Sierra Madre mountains on the east, the Cordillera Central on the west, it enjoyed a mild climate. Its soil was deep and rich, and the Cagayan River, fed by the Chico and Magat Rivers rising on the Cordillera, carried a volume of water greater than any other river system in the archipelago.
It produced rice that was considered the best in the land, millet, tubers, sugarcane, cotton, and hemp, wax, palm wine, hogs, goats, and fowl. Its forests abounded in timber, deer, wild boar, birds, and carabaos, and its upper tributaries gave access to Igorot gold mines.
All this wealth quickly attracted Spanish attention, despite its distance from the colonial capital. A 1586 memorial reported that 2,000 casks of meat could be collected in a few days, and recommended the construction of a granary to hold 100,000 cavans of rice. Five years later, Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas sent out an expedition from Pampanga, headed by his son Luis and guided by the prominent Dionisio Kapolong and a native woman of Tuy (in what is now Nueva Vizcaya).
Don Luis followed the Pampanga River up to its source on the Caraballo Sur, crossed over into the Magat headwaters through Balete (Dalton) Pass, and then followed a trade route down the Magat to its junction with the Cagayan River at Gamu (in what is now Isabela).
Settlements averaged sixty to eighty households loyal to a single chief--Tuy itself had seventy-two houses and forty-two granaries--though there was a community of some five hundred houses near the present site of Aritao with two chiefs, one of whom, Ibarat, was Kapolong's friend. Blood compacts were made, or a ceremony in which each party threw an egg to the ground and swore that "just as those eggs were broken, so might they be broken if they did not keep their word" (Anon. 1591, 467)
Well-made wooden houses with four large images as the corners, three of them in human form, were surrounded by earthen fences, and some communities were protected by bamboo-backed trenches.
Hillside swiddens were planted to rise, vegetables, and root crops the Spanish called camotes or batatas--probably yams. Tribute was collected in gold chains, earrings, and bracelets, necklaces of blue-and-white or various colored beads, or carnelians that had been handed down as heirlooms, in exchange for cheap trade goods and what the Filipinos called Chinese blankets. #
