On the beach and near the mouth of the Súmlug River, lies an excuse for a Moro village, which consists of about twenty houses which were built by order, and under the general conditions of the Moro villages of this gulf.
Your Reverence knows already that there is not a single Moro family in all the peninsula of San Agustin. It remains for me, then, to tell your Reverence of the last and most numerous Moro ranchería of this district of Dávao. It is the ranchería of Mayo, so called because it took its name from the bay of Mayo, the point where its most principal datos live. However, in appearance all those Moros owe homage to Dato Tumárus of Súmlug. Including all the Moros of the harbor of Mati, the bay of Mayo, and the Baguan River to the other side of Point Tagóbon, there are about one hundred and fifty families. They have never formed a village. Some years back a governor ordered all those Moros to form a village in Súmlug, but they had sufficient cunning to frustrate that just and wise order, in order that they might continue to live in the manner in which they had lived thitherto.
The Moros who live about this large gulf, Father, are the remains of those powerful and warlike Moros who in the not distant past collected tribute from the Mandayas and other heathens as far as those living on the Caraga River, and who extended their piratical raids to the villages of the Pacific. But they were completely conquered by worthy Don José Oyangúren in the year 1848.
Two classes in the manner of two races must be distinguished among these Moros: that of the datos which is, as it were, the aristocracy; and that of the plebeians who obey the datos. The panditas (for so do they call the priests of their false religion) are included among both classes, although it is more general for them to belong to the first. They form, as it were, an hereditary priesthood.
In general, the datos and their families do not work. At the most they fish and hunt for sport, and to stifle the pangs of hunger. Their chief and most honorable receipts are from the tributes which they collect from their subjects and from the heathens whom they have subdued. That tribute is called the pagdato. Although that source of wealth is the chief, it is not the only source. Although the Moros of this gulf are conquered and subdued, they have not completely forgotten their former customs of piracy. Slavery and captivity with their awful accompaniment of murders, thefts, poisons, and violence of every sort, and further, the human sacrifices which accompany them at times, form a very productive source of wealth for the ever exhausted chests of their treasuries. I could write a very thick volume of the deeds of this particular people which are very well known to me.