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But the negroes of Soudan are not pirates; and it is easier to conceive that Esquimaux, in their boats of skins, may have gone to Europe, than the Africans to Darien. Those learned speculators who believe in a mixture of the Polynesians with the Americans rather consider the Quarecas as of the race of Papuans, similar to the negritos of the Philippines.
We are therefore justified when we see in the Negritos a truly primitive people. As they are now, they were more than three hundred and fifty years ago when the first European navigators visited these islands. About older relationships nothing is known.
These insurgents, who for brevity are called Filipinos, belong, as I have remarked, to the light-colored race of so-called Indios, who are sharply differentiated from the Negritos.
As long as these islands have been known, more than three centuries, the skin of the Negritos has been dark brown, almost black, their hair short and spirally twisted, and just as long has the skin of the Indios been brownish, in various shades, relatively clear, and the hair has been long and arranged in wavy locks.
But the bows and arrows, the perched houses, the outrigger canoes, the habits of betel-chewing and of kawa-drinking, which abound more or less among the northern Negritos, are probably to be regarded not as the products of an indigenous civilization, but merely as indications of the extent to which foreign influences have modified the primitive social state of these people.
The Negritos shot several fish and large prawns with a special kind of long pointed arrow; these we ate with our rice by the river side before returning. The night I stayed with my old friend, the comic chief, I found him actually in tears and much cut up at the idea of his two sons having to take part in the fight.
Great Britain made a penal settlement of these islands after the mutiny in India, and as a consequence the Mincopies, as their native inhabitants are called, have begun to disappear. These islanders are rather taller than the Philippine Negritos, ranging from four and a half to five feet in height, but otherwise there is a somewhat close resemblance between them.
A series of connecting links is afforded by the small negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos.
It is probable, and almost incontestible, that the Philippine Islands were primitively peopled by aborigines, a small race of negroes still inhabiting the interior of the forests in pretty large numbers, called Ajetas by the Tagalocs, and Négritos by the Spaniards.
At first I thought they might be hostile Negritos who resented our intrusion, but they belonged to the tribe of the chief who was with me, and they were soon talking to him in loud, excited voices. Our own party soon got excited, too, and, as may be imagined, I was longing to find out the cause of all this excitement. Vic soon told me the reason.