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An important, though numerically small, element in the population of the larger cities are the mestizos, or half-breeds, the result of admixture either between the Chinese or the Spanish and the natives. These mestizos occupy about the same social position as the mulattos of the United States. But they are the richest and most enterprising among the native population.
It would astonish most people to see some of these poor-looking Indians, or Mestizos, wearing a jewel of the value of four or five hundred dollars in the breast of their shirts, or in a ring on their fingers.
The Chinese or Mestizos who are engaged in the purifying of sugar are the purchasers of these lots, and most of them are in the habit of sending an agent through the country, with orders to buy up as much of such sugar as they require to keep their establishments at work.
The lawyer's father, of the same name, had been municipal captain of Lingayan, and an uncle was leader of the Chinese mestizos in a protest they had made against the arbitrariness of their provincial governor.
The Caribs, however, who live on the rivers, and use them as highways, have names for them all; but to the agricultural Indians and Mestizos of the interior, they are but reservoirs of water, crossed at distant points by their roads, and everywhere amongst them I found the greatest ignorance prevailing as to the connection of the different streams, and their outflow to the ocean.
Nearly the whole of the coasting trade is in the hands of the Indians, or Mestizos of Chinese descent, called Sangleys, although several Spaniards and European Mestizos at Manilla also own a better class of ships than those described, constantly engaged in going and returning from the provinces.
Very few of the native Indians or Mestizos are possessed of much wealth, according to British ideas of the term, although there are some of the latter class who are considered among themselves as very well off, if their savings amount to from five to twenty thousand dollars; and when they reach fifty thousand dollars, they are looked upon as rich capitalists.
There the people were pure Indians, and other circumstances made me conclude that the Indians were not so hospitable as the Mestizos. We finally started about nine o'clock and rode over dry savannahs, where, although there was little grass, I was told that cattle did well browsing on the small brushwood with which the hills were covered.
Men, women and children are all occupied in the manufacture, and as they sit in their houses or at the door of an evening, or as they walk through the village on errands, their hands are ever busily occupied with the plaiting. There is absolutely nothing characteristic in dress, both men and women dressing like mestizos in the important cities of the Republic.
And although they vsed all the meanes they could to keepe him there, yet he would not stay, but hired an house without the Cloister, and opened shoppe, where he had good store of worke: and in the end married a Mestizos daughter of the towne, so that he made his account to stay there while he liued.
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