First, the continual wars and the insurrections that were provoked by Spanish cruelty. When there was no civil strife abroad in the Philippines, able-bodied men were drafted to fight for Spain in Borneo or Indo-China; or there were huge expeditions, usually failures, that took away thousands of the best young men and never returned them. He quotes the Spanish writer, Gaspar de San Agustin, showing how one formerly populous town had been greatly shorn of inhabitants because, being noted as sailors and oarsmen, the Government took them for foreign service. [132] In this way, the island of Panay, which had fifty thousand families when the Spaniards came, had been reduced to fifteen thousand. Ten years after the Legaspi expedition, that is to say, in 1581, sixty years after Magellan’s “discovery,” the islands had lost one third of the total population. [133] Of course, it was the young, the hardy, the capable, the industrious that went by this route to further the cold schemes of Spanish ambition. Under such a drain faded the moral and material resources of the people. Second, we are to remember the ravages of the pirates. Before the days of Magellan these audacious plunderers had with avidity pursued their calling in Philippine waters, but what is not generally known is that their activities greatly increased under the Spanish domination. The Spaniards encouraged the pirates, not to prey upon Spanish settlements, but to terrorize remote populations, to make them amenable to Spanish rule, in some instances to disclose what weapons the natives had that these might be snatched from them, and sometimes merely to be rid of objectionable communities. As the pirates did a thriving commerce in slaves, to eliminate, with their help, the undesirable was easy. De Morga says: The boldness of these people of Mindanao [pirates] did great damage to the Visayan Islands, as much by what they did in them as by the fear and fright that the natives acquired; because the natives were in the power of the Spaniards, who held them subject and tributary and unarmed, in such manner that they did not protect them from their enemies nor leave them means with which to defend themselves as they did when there were no Spaniards in the country. [134] Rizal lays the emphasis of capitals upon this last phrase, which indeed seems powerful evidence, coming from such a source. The pirates came every year, sometimes five times, sometimes ten, and an average visit cost the Islands more than eight hundred persons. Gaspar de San Agustin tells of an Island near Cebu that by 1608 the pirates had almost depopulated and points to the fact that the natives had no defense.