at risk, for another atonement.

They especially abhor theft, and they have assigned an ignominious
penalty for the thief, as a warning. This is to cut off the joints
of his fingers, more or fewer according to the crime. That perhaps
obliges them to pass from the hands to the toes, the penalty being
proportioned to the misdeeds of greater atrocity. But that penalty
can also be redeemed, as can the others, by money.

Notwithstanding that, some crimes they regard as so capital that they
do not respect petitions or allow bribes, and death is the necessary
punishment for them. The unnatural crime is one of them, and the
severity of the execution well shows their natural horror, for such
people are burned, and their houses; and nothing that they possessed
is allowed to escape from this rigor, as being contaminated. Or,
having caged the offenders, they throw them into the sea, and destroy
their houses and fields, by such punishment to make demonstration of
their abhorrence.

The most feared crime is that which they call sumban, which is incest
in the first degree; for they regard it as assured by long experience
and knowledge inherited in tradition from their ancestors, that
the land which allows that crime is bound down by wretchedness and
misfortunes until its infamy is purged by the rigorous chastisement
of the offender. There is no other means which can placate the wrath
of heaven. Consequently, when they suffer long droughts, or other
general plagues from heaven, they immediately attribute them to
this. A case of that nature came to my notice in the year fifty-one,
when the drought was general, and so great that even the water of
the rivers failed, and that river which had any water that found its
way to the sea was rare. The Indians of the village which was in my
care on the coast of Siocon came to tell me that it was a punishment
from the sky, and that it had been demanded by the awfulness of
such crime on the coast of Mindanao, where they said that a mother
was living in marriage with her son. They petitioned me to have
the offenders punished, and warned me that the punishment should be
death without remission, such being their custom, without admitting
satisfaction by any other penalty, however excessive it be. The same
report was current in the island of Basilan. However, it was without
other foundation than that the Indians are gossipy and suspicious,
ignorant of the secrets of the sky and ruled by the tradition