The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-08-25
LIFE IN THE PHILIPPINES.
The Easy-Going Natives and Their Large
Families.

The Easy-Golng Natives and Their Large
Families.
The seekers of strange modes of life and
the student of the habits of people who
have had little contact with civilization
and have primitive homes can be satisfied
by visit to almost any of the other larger
islands than Luzon in the Philippine
archipelago, as, for instance, Negros, Pala-
wan, Mindanao and Samas. In any of
these islands there can be found tens of
thousands of natives who. like generations
of their ancestors, have never left their
little island homes and have not the
faintest idea that there is any world be-
yond their islands. Here the race is mixed
and the residents are almost of as light
compilations as the residents of Manila.
The young men and women are comedy,
and great many of the women between
the ages of 16 and 20 are of striking beauty.
On many islands there live the Booals, who
are supposed to be the aborigines of the
archipelago, and to be of Malay origin.
They are an interesting race for any an
thropologist to study.
Travellers who have trotted about the
globe say that the Bocals in the Philip
pine Islands and the Panays in Borneo are
about the LATEST people that live. They
do absolutely nothing that is unnece ssary
for living and dreaming. They have i'm
mense families-often twenty children in a
house-and there are multitude of cases
of parents having fifteen and eighteen
boys and girls Every family has its own
house, but $5 will build large and supe-
rior bamboo hut and 81 will make better
domicile than thousands of the Bocals
own. The whole family, no matter how
numerous, is crowded into one room at
night, the sleepers reclining on heaps of
dried banana leaves. Strange to say, the
women are q cleanly people. They battle
every day and are expert swimmers. They
are proud of their teeth and take pains to
frequently polish them with rude brushes
made OF the areca tree. The poorer people
have no other cooking utensils than an
earthen pot and the aristocrats have few
castiron pans and big, rough earthen
dishes, says writer in the New York
Times.
The substitute for cotton and wooden
goods is called mouffla cloth and it is made
from the mouffla plant, which is species
of hemp. The fiber of this plant is coarse,
stiff and not at all pliable. 1t is the white
inner surface of the long, thin shoots that
is used. The natives pull the fiber out. wet
the finger and twist the thread, which, as
consequence, is uneven ana Iull Oh lltUie
punches. Very little meuff1a cloth is ex-
ported from the island, as it has an extern
slve domestic use. It takes an industrious
woman several weeks to make strip of
mouftia cloth ten feet long, and three feet
wide. Flax being almost unknown on the
islands the only other material for cloth is
silk. The Philippine forests are full of
mulberries and silk was woven long before
white men came to the islands.
Some OF the Philippine silk is as fine as
the finest China silk. Much of it is elab-
orately brocaded, although the process re-
guires an immense amount of time, as the
threads which form the pattern have to be
tied up each time separately. The nam
billa. square piece of brocaded silk, forms
the principal garment of the richer natives
on the smaller islands. This is six feet
wide by seven feet long and requires about
seventeen months for its manufacture. A
Philippine weaver takes her child on her
back and weayes for half an hour, then she
goes down to the stream and draws jug
OF water, or down to the seashore for a
swim in the surf. After weaving a few
minutes more she again goes to the brook
or to the shore and washes out some sin
gle article OF clothing, never washing more
than one garment at time, so that during
the day she probably puts in about six
hours at the loom.