Third, forced labor. This was a grievous matter: again and again it drove the Filipinos to revolt, but the Spaniards would learn nothing and to the last clung to a thing certain to wreck them. Its evils were first manifest in the ship-building enterprises the Spaniards undertook. They found the Filipinos among the best natural ship-builders in the world, having constructed, as before noted, some of the largest vessels then afloat. Other great vessels were planned by the Spaniards, and to get out quickly the needed timbers they compelled thousands of natives to work without pay and to provide their own food; a viler than ordinary form of slavery. To get out the masts for one galleon, six thousand natives were employed for three months, finding their own subsistence. Trees large enough to furnish these masts grew only in the interior; the labor of moving them through jungle and over mountains was enormous. Fernando de los Rios Coronel says that “the surrounding country had to be depopulated” in the ship-building work and that the natives furnished the timbers “with immense labor, damage, and cost to themselves.” San Agustin says that “the continual labor of cutting timber for his Majesty’s shipyards” was a great cause of the decline in population because it hindered people “from cultivating the very fertile plain they have.” Fourth, taxes and the cruelty of the Government. De los Rios Coronel cites “the natives that were executed, those that left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those that were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” among the elements disappearing from the population. There were also, it appears from San Agustin, to be added “those flogged to death, women crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those that sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many that are executed or left to die of hunger, those that eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers that kill their children in bearing them.” [135] It is not an exhilarating picture; to believe it we must remind ourselves that it is limned by Spaniards: it can have no impulse to a hostile exaggeration. The fields once cleared ceased to be cultivated; the towns once flourishing lost population and trade. The Filipino was launched on a backward career. Because, Fifth, there was the psychological or spiritual fruitage of all this lethargy.