A Trip to the South—Contents of the “Puchero”—Romblon—Cebu, the Southern Hemp-Centre—Places Touched At—A Rich Indian at Camiguin—Tall Trees—Primitive Hemp-Cleaners—A New Volcano—Mindanao Island—Moro Trophies—Iligan—Iloilo—Back Again at Manila.
December 23, 1894.
I have just returned from the south, and feel able enough to begin the narrative. On Saturday, December 1, thick clouds obscured the sky, and gusty showers of rain continued to fall until evening, when they formed themselves into a respectable downpour. It was objectionable weather for the dry season just commencing, but the northwest monsoon was said to be heavy outside, and the rain on our east coast evidently slid over the mountains back of Manila, instead of staying where it belonged. Such was the day of starting, while, to cap the climax, just before the advertised leaving-time of the Uranus, word came from the Jesuit observatory that a typhoon was apparently getting ready to sail directly across the course we were to take, and up went signal No. 3 on the flag-staff at the mouth of the river. Philosophers, however, must not be bothered by [150]trifles, and although my friends predicted a miserable voyage, and told me to take all my water-proofs and sou’westers, I went aboard the steamer with a smiling countenance only, followed by three “boys” who deposited my traps in a state-room of lean proportions.
At half after seven in the evening the whistle blew, the visitors departed, and the Uranus slowly began to back down the narrow river into the black night. She is one of the largest and newest “province steamers” in the Philippines, and it took a great deal of manipulation to turn her around and get her headed toward the Bay. As large, perhaps, as one of our coasting boats that runs to the West Indies, she has a flush deck from stem to stern, and is ruled over by a very jolly, stubby, little Spanish captain who looks eminently well fed if not so well groomed.
We got out of the river at eight o’clock, saw the three warning, red, typhoon lanterns glaring at us, and started full speed ahead for Romblon, our first calling-port, eighteen hours away. Dinner was served on deck from a large table formed by closing down the huge skylights to the regular dining-saloon below, and the eaters took far more enjoyment in their Spanish bill of fare under the awnings than they would have done had the same victuals been dished up downstairs. I say “victuals,” for the word seems [151]to be the only invention for just such combinations as were set before us, and “dished up” suggests the scooped-out-of-a-kettle process far better than “served.” Spanish food is rather too mixy, too garlicky, too unfathomable for me, but as one can get used to anything I accommodated myself to the puchero (a mixture of meat, beans, sausages, cabbage, and pork), and was soon eating fish as a fifth course instead of a second. The feast began with soup and sundries, and was continued by the puchero which was merely an introduction to the fish course, the roast, and all the cheese and things that followed. Every dinner was practically the same, differing slightly in details, and the deck each time played its part as dining-room. Early breakfast came at six, late breakfast came at ten, and dinner poked along at five—a combination of meal hours which was enough to give one indigestion before touching a mouthful.
During the night we all waited in vain to hear the sizzling of the typhoon that came not, and got up next morning to find the scare had been for nothing. The clouds and rain were clearing away, and the prow of the Uranus was headed directly for a region of blue sky. By breakfast-time there was hardly a cloud in the heavens, the rooster up for’ard began to crow, the mooly-cow which we were soon to eat began to moo, the islands in front [152]drew nearer, and the scene became fairer each moment. At noon we steamed below a great mountainous island, crossed a sound between it and another group, entered a narrow channel, and at one o’clock dropped anchor in the small land-locked harbor of Romblon. Everywhere the hills fell abruptly into the water, and houses looked as if they had slid down off the steep slopes to hobnob with each other in a mass below. There was a public bath down beside a brook, where everybody came to wash, an old church, the market-place, and a prodigious long flight of steps leading up to the upper districts, where the view down back over the low nipa houses toward the bay was most extensive.
A Citizen from the Interior.
A Citizen from the Interior.
We stayed in this little Garden of Eden until after three o’clock, then pulled out to the steamer, and left again for the south, over a calm sea and beneath a glorious sky. Some of us slept on deck in the moonlight, but, finding it if anything too cool and breezy, were up betimes to see the island of Cebu looming on our right hand. Our early six-o’clock breakfast finished, we sat up on the bridge in easy-chairs, beneath the double awning, as the Uranus poked down along the mountainous coast toward the city of Cebu. At ten o’clock we passed through the narrow channel that leads between a small island and its big brother Cebu, and soon saw the white houses of the town lapping the harbor’s edge. Two American [153]ships were apparently taking in their cargoes of hemp, and beside them a small fleet of native craft and steamers smudged the little bay. Anchor was dropped again and those of us who cared to go ashore met some of our former friends from Manila on ’change and took a look over this great hemp-centre of the South.
The local excitement was limited, and, except that a Chinaman had been beheaded by some enemy the night before as he was walking home through the street, news was scarce. Numerous people, however, were gathered together outside the police-station, looking at the remains, and several sailors from the American ships, who had swum ashore during the night to get drunk, were being returned to their vessels in charge of the civil guard.
The Uranus was not to stop long, and most of the through passengers returned early to the steamer to enjoy a view tempered by rather more breeze and less smell than that which the narrow streets afforded. Cebu, from the deck, was worthy of a sonnet; the white houses and church spires were set off against the dark-green background of mountains, and as the sun got lower the place did not have the broiled-alive aspect that it bore during the middle of the day. At four the stubby little Captain came aboard, and soon we turned northeast for our next stopping-place, [154]Ormoc. Another colored sunset, another dinner in the golden light, another moonrise, another sail up among the islands, and at eleven on the evening of Monday we entered the harbor of Ormoc. Here two or three ponies were hoisted overboard to be taken landward, a can of kerosene was loaded into the purser’s boat as he went ashore with the papers, and a little chorus of shoutings concluded our midnight visit to the second stop of the day.
Tuesday morning the sun rose over the lofty mountains on the island of Leyte, and the Uranus shaped her course for Catbalogan, another of the larger hemp-ports. The steam up the bay blotched with islands was perfection, and by ten o’clock the anchor hunted round for a soft bed in the ooze, some eight hundred yards off a sandy beach, above which lay the town. Those of us who had energy enough to bolt our hearty breakfast were taken by the jolly-boat onto the mud flats, and were carried through the shallow water on oars to dry land. On the slopes of the higher mountains, behind the town, the hemp-plants (looking exactly like banana-trees), grew luxuriously, and in front of many of the houses in Catbalogan the white fibre was out drying on clothes-lines. A short taste of the hot sun easily satisfied our curiosity as to Catbalogan, and we were off to the ship again for more breakfast, just as several hungry-looking [155]Spanish guests, including the Governor’s family, came aboard from the town to partake of a meal hearty enough to last them till the arrival of the next steamer.
From Catbalogan to its sister town, Tacloban, four hours to the south, the course leads among the narrow straits between high, richly wooded islands, and the scenery was most picturesque. Here and there little white beaches gleamed along the shore, and in front of the nipa shanties that now and then looked out from among the trees hung rows of hemp drying in the sun. Off and on the big waves, kicked up by the forward movement of the Uranus in the land-locked waters, woke up the stillness resting on the banks, and nearly upset small banca loads of the white fibre which was perhaps being paddled down to some larger centre from more remote stamping-grounds. From the bridge our view was most comprehensive, and it wasn’t long before the steamer actually entered the river like strait that separates the islands of Samar and Leyte. We twisted around like a snake through the narrow channel, on each side of which were high hills and mountains, richly treed with cocoanuts and hemp-plants, and, just as the sun was getting low, hauled into Tacloban, situated inside an arm of land that protects it from the dashing surges of the Apostles’ Bay beyond. [156]
At Tacloban there was little to see. A high range of hills rose behind the town, and in the evening half-light everything looked more or less attractive. We climbed a small knoll that looked off over the Bay of St. Peter and St. Paul to the south and down over the village. The strait through which we came stretched up back among the hills like a river, and in the foreground lay the Uranus. A number of hemp store-houses lined the water-front, and as usual the ever-present Chinese were the central figures of the commercial part of the community. At eight the anchor came up once more, and we left Tacloban to steam religiously down the bay of St. Peter and St. Paul for Cabalian, eight hours to the south.
Cabalian is another little hemp-town, at the foot of a huge mountain; but in the starlight of the very early morning we stopped there only long enough to leave the mail and drop a pony overboard. Sunrise caught us still steering to the south, but nine o’clock tied our steamer to a little wharf in Surigao, directly in front of a large hemp-press and store-house belonging to the owners of the ship on which we were journeying. Some of the best hemp that comes to the Manila market is pressed at Surigao, and all around were stacks of loose fibre drying in the sun or being separated into different grades by native coolies. Several of us left the ship and walked to the main [157]village, but, as before, found little to note except the intense heat of a boiling sun.
There was the customary hill behind the town, and at the risk of going entirely into solution during the effort, two of us climbed to the top for a breath of air and a panoramic view.
Dinner came along as usual at five; but I must say that the more I ate of those curiously timed meals the less I could accommodate my mental powers to the comprehension of what I was doing. Everybody knows what a difficult psychological problem it is to determine the exact numerical nature of the feeling in the second and third toes of his feet, as compared with that in the fingers of his hands. On your hands you can distinctly feel the first finger, the middle finger, and the fourth finger; but on your feet your second toe doesn’t feel like your first finger nor as a second toe should naturally feel. The great toe corresponds in sensation to one’s first finger, and all the other toes save the last seem to be muddled up without that differentiated sensation which the fingers have. And so with these meals aboard ship. A ten o’clock breakfast was neither breakfast nor luncheon, and it bothered me considerably to know what in the dickens I was really eating. In fact, it affected my mind to such a degree that somehow the food tasted as if it did not belong to any particular meal, but came from [158]another order of things; and I spent long, serious moments between the courses in trying to locate the repast in my library of prehistoric sensations, just as I have often tried to locate the digit which my second toe corresponds to in feeling.
We left Surigao an hour before midnight, sailed away over moonlit seas toward the island of Camiguin, and when I stuck my head out of the port-hole at half after five next morning, the two very lofty mountain-peaks which formed this sky-scraper of the Philippines were just ridding themselves of the garb of darkness. Three of us went ashore at seven, and were introduced to a rich Indian, who, although the possessor of four hundred thousand dollars, lived in a common little nipa house. He invited us to see the country, fitted us out with three horses and a mounted servant, and sent us up into the mountains, where his men were working on the hemp-plantations.
We started up the sharp slopes, and were soon getting a wider and wider view back over the town and blue bay below. First the path was bounded with rice-fields, but, as we rose, the hemp plants which, as before said, look just like their relatives, the banana-trees, began to hem us in. Now and again we came to a little hut where long strings of fibre were out drying in the sun, but our boy kept going upward until we were rising at an angle of almost forty-five [159]degrees. Everywhere the tall twenty-five-foot hemp-trees extended toward the mountain summit as far as the eye could carry, and we were much interested in seeing so much future rope in its primogenital state. Up we went across brooks, over rocks, beneath tall, tropical hardwood trees, nearly two hundred feet high, that here and there lifted themselves up toward heaven and at last came to the place where the natives were actually separating the hemp from strippings by pulling them under a knife pressed down on a block of wood. The whole little machine was so absurdly simple, with its rough carving-knife and rude levers, that it hardly seemed to correspond with the elaborate transformation that took place from the tall trees to the slender white fibre separated by the rusty blade. One man could clean only twenty-five pounds of hemp a day, and when it is remembered the whole harvest consists of about 800,000 bales, or 200,000,000 pounds per year, it seems the more remarkable that so rude an instrument should have so star a part to play. We each tried pulling the long, tough strippings under the knife that seemed glued to the block, but there was a certain knack which we did not seem to possess, and the thing stuck fast. All in all this visit to the hemp-cleaners will supply us with strong answers to letters from manufacturers who have written us to make efforts in introducing heavy machines for separating [160]hemp from the parent tree, but who have failed to understand that a couple of levers and a carving knife are far easier to carry up a steep mountain-slope than a steam engine, and an arrangement as big as a modern reaper. We lingered about all the morning on these up-in-the-air plantations, and at noon picked our way slowly back again over the stony path to the village, glad that we didn’t have to earn fifty cents a day by so laborious a method.
How the World’s Supply of Manila Hemp is Cleaned. Capacity, Twenty-five Pounds per Diem.
How the World’s Supply of Manila Hemp is Cleaned. Capacity, Twenty-five Pounds per Diem.
See page 159.
Leaving our host with a promise to come ashore again and use his horses in the afternoon, we went down to the long pier and rowed off to the Uranus in one of the big ship’s boats that was feeding her empty forehold with instalments of hemp. In the early afternoon we again went ashore, took other ponies and started off up the coast toward a remarkable volcano, which, though not existing in 1871, has ............