Philippine Islands – Discover the beauty of its 7,107 islands

WHEN men first went to the moon, they planned with mathematical precision where they were going and how they were going to get there. And they could communicate with home. But when Ferdinand Magellan’s five little wooden ships most of them about 70 feet [21 m] long, comparable in length to a modern semitrailer left Spain in 1519, they sailed into the unknown. And they were utterly alone.

Among the boldest, most courageous navigational feats of all time, Magellan’s voyages are a monument to the Great Age of Exploration an age of courage and fear, elation and tragedy, God and Mammon. Let’s go back, then, to about 1480, when Ferdinand Magellan was born in northern Portugal, and take a look at the remarkable man who unlocked the world and at his epic journeys.

From Court Page to Fearless Mariner

The Magellan family are members of the nobility, so,

LOVERS of wildlife are pained at its wanton destruction by thoughtless individuals. Here in the Philippines we may be nearing the point of saying good-bye to another bird. Sadly, it is a rare species, found nowhere else in the world.

People who study birds call the endangered creature Pithecophaga jefferyi. The first of these terms means ‘ape eating,’ referring to the peculiar diet of this bird. Live monkeys are a frequent item on its menu. This flying creature is known popularly as “the monkey-eating eagle.”

A closeup view of this bird is impressive. When adult, it measures three and a half feet (one meter) from bill to tail, with a wingspread of ten feet (three meters). Many view the ‘monkey eater’ as the largest of the eagle family (though the harpy eagle of America may be heavier). The male of this species features rich-brown feathers on

“A MODERN relic of the Stone Age”; “The most primitive human beings so far discovered”; “The first known living ‘cavemen.’” Through such newspaper reports, worldwide attention was focused on a twenty-five-member tribe living in the dense jungle of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Their discovery led to the forming of several expeditions composed of Filipino and American anthropologists, news correspondents, television crews of the National Geographic Society, a cabinet minister of the Philippine government, and an American conservationist, the late Charles A. Lindbergh.

Why should such a small group of people as the Tasaday attract such unprecedented interest and attention? What makes them so special? Can modern, civilized society learn anything from this tiny primitive band?

Discovering the Forest People

Discovery of the Tasaday was quite accidental. Sometime in 1966, a hunter from a town at the forest’s edge stumbled upon them while laying his wild-pig traps deep in the mountains of South

IN THESE days of gigantic supermarkets and sprawling department stores, where can you go to buy just one piece of candy, one stick of chewing gum, one tomato, a cent’s worth of salt or a thimbleful of soy sauce? If you were living in the Philippines, you would probably go to a sarisari (variety) store, one of many thousands of minimarkets in the country.

The sarisari store sells a multitude of assorted small items. Business is conducted within a cramped cubicle on the ground floor of someone’s home. Items sold may include soap, petroleum, candies, dried fish, soft drinks, rice, corn, beans, canned goods, bread, salt, sugar, aspirin, iodine and school supplies. The bigger the store, the greater the variety of goods to be found there.

The minimarket is the busiest in the early morning hours, at noonday and in the evenings. Children, housewives, office workers, jeepney drivers all kinds of people

AT ONE time, there was a lot of publicity about the population bomb and the population explosion. Now scientists are telling us that the earth is far from overcrowded and could support many times its present population. What is the true situation?

Recently, in the Philippine capital of Manila, the fourth International Population Conference was sponsored by the World Population Society and the Philippines’ Population Center Foundation. We heard specialists from Asia, Africa and America discuss this problem. We believe that you will find what they said to be interesting.

Is There a Problem?

Someone once calculated that if all the available land and water were evenly distributed among today’s population, each person would have five acres (2.02 hectares) of land and 17 acres (6.9 hectares) of water half a mile (0.8 km) deep! That does not sound like a problem of accommodations space, does it? However, this same person calculated that, by

IT HAPPENED in the year 1838 on the island of Bohol in the Philippines. The event nearly caused a British gentleman to faint with excitement. The man was Hugh Cumming, a conchologist, that is, a naturalist dealing with shells. On that occasion, Cumming found three shells known as Conus gloria-maris, meaning “Glory of the Sea.”

All that excitement over three seashells? Yes, indeed! Hugh Cumming had fulfilled a collector’s dream. Glory of the Sea is a rare, exquisite, and valuable variety of shell. Until 1965 only 25 of them had been found. A collection in the Philippines contains the largest one. Though fossilized, it can be worth, it is said, more than $1,000 (U.S.).

The Philippines is a shell collector’s paradise. Three of the 13 most valuable shells in the world come from this country. The publication Shells and the Philippines states: “By far the most fabulous for the diversity of its shell-bearing animals is