ts. They rendered equal worship to five
less important idols who represented the divinities of the fields,
prosperity to their herds and harvests. They also believed that
Anitong sent them rains and favorable winds; Damalag preserved
the sown fields from hurricanes; Dumanga made the grain grow
abundantly; and finally Calascas ripened it, leaving to Calosocos
only the duty of harvesting the crops. They also had a kind of
baptism administered by the Bayoc with pure blood of the pig,
but this ceremony, very long and especially very expensive,
was seldom celebrated in grand style. The sacrifice which the
same priest offered to the idol Malyari consisted of ridiculous
ceremonies accompanied by savage cries and yells and was terminated
by repugnant debaucheries.

Of course it is impossible to tell how much of this is the product
of the writer's imagination, or at least of the imagination of those
earlier chroniclers from whom he got his information, but it can
very well be believed that the natives had a religion of their own
and that the work of the missionaries was exceedingly difficult. It
was necessary to get them into villages, to show them how to prepare
and till the soil and harvest the crops. And the writer concludes
that "little by little the apathetic and indolent natives began to
recognize the advantages of social life constituted under the shield
of authority and law, and the deplorable effects of savage life,
offering no guarantee of individual or collective security."

A fortress had been built at Paynaven, in what is now the Province of
Pangasinan, from which the work of the missionaries spread southward,
so that the northern towns were all organized before those in the
south. It is not likely that this had anything to do with causing
the Negritos to leave the northern part of the province, if indeed
they ever occupied it, but it is true that to-day they inhabit only
the mountainous region south of a line drawn through the middle of
the province from east to west.

The friar Martinez Zuniga, speaking of the fortress at Paynaven,
said that in that day, the beginning of the last century, there was
little need of it as a protection against the "infidel Indians" and
blacks who were very few in number, and against whom a stockade of
bamboo was sufficient.

It might serve against the Moros [he continues], but happily
the Zambales coast is but little exposed