Excerpt from Souvenir Visayan Village

Magellan discovered the Philippines in 1521, and in less than fifty years the Augustinian Friars came among the Visayan people. They continued among them with their teachings of Roman Catholicism and the culture of Spain until the insurrection of31896. The Jesuits arrived in 1581, and for nearly a hundred years they labored among them spreading Christianity and such secular knowledge as they had to impart, until they were expelled from the Archipelago in 1768. It is to the white-robed Augustinian and the black-robed Jesuit that the Visayan owes practically all of his advancement in modern culture, until the arrival of the American in the Islands. During those earlier years these missionaries not only studied the Visayan language and wrote books in the native tongue, but they taught the lessons of more modern agriculture, and, what is more, they stood with great courage and valor between the helpless, panic-stricken people and the dreaded pirates of the southern seas the Moros who with gun and cannon harrassed and whip-lashed the coasts. During the first quarter century after the Catholic missionaries went into the Visayan islands fleets of Moro battle proas from Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago overran the shores, until the Bishop of Cebu, Senor Cimeno, petitioned the Spanish Government to occupy southern Mindanao in order to put a stop to Moro piracy. Each year he sent in a record of the people captured from his diocese by the pirates, and some years his record was more than For 300 long years the relentless and fanatical Sea Devils, the Moros of Mindanao, continued to lay waste the Visayan villages, to rob the churches and homes, and to carry away into captivity the Visayan people. The spread of the Visayan popa lation around the Mindanao and Sulu coasts is due almost entirely to the piracy of the Moros. The Christian Vis ayan helped to make up the native tr00ps which Spain organized to combat the Moro in his own territory, and these people together with liberated captives formed the various clusters of Visayan which have now increased to numerous villages of considerable size in a territory otherwise dominated by the Mohammedan Moro.

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