timaguas, of the region about Manila, who are vassals of his Majesty.
Being asked where he learned the worship of Mahoma, and who declared it to him, he said that the ancestors of the Borneans were natives of Meca, as he, the present witness, had heard; for the natives of Balayan, Manila, Mindoro, Bonbon, and that region did not have knowledge of the said worship until the Borneans had explained it to them; they have done so with the natives of these islands, and therefore all these are Moros now, because their ancestors learned it from the said Moros of Borney.[1] Their language, both spoken and written, is derived from Meca; and the said Borneans and natives of Sian and Patan possess and observe their Alcorans—the law and worship of Mahoma. He said that in the book of the Alcoran, which the present witness has seen and has heard preached, they say and assert that they are the enemies of the Christians. Likewise in other books they say that the Borneans have always desired to make Moros of the Christians—a thing that he has also heard declared by the catip [caliph?] whom the said Borneans regard as a priest, and who preaches the said doctrine of Mahoma. This said catip, and others, with like expressions preach the
- ↑ The missionaries who effected the conversion [of the Malaysian tribes] were not, for the most part, genuine Arabs, but the mixed descendants of Arab and Persian traders from the Persian and Arabian gulfs—parties who, by their intimate acquaintance with the manners and languages of the islanders, were far more effectual instruments. The earliest recorded conversion was that of the people of Achin in Sumatra (A. D. 1206). The Malays of Malacca adopted Mahometanism in 1276; the Javanese, in 1478; the inhabitants of the Moluccas, about the middle of the fifteenth century. This doctrine has been received by all the more civilized peoples of the Indian archipelago. See Crawfurd's Dictionary, pp. 236, 237, 284.
