My Gold-Hunting Expedition
Word of an Abandoned Gold Mine near Manila—I Arise Before Three A.M. and Find the Town Asleep—Our Trip down the River—Scenery and Sights by the Way—Three Buffaloes Are Brought to Drag Us over the Mud—Digging for Gold—I Fail As an Overseer of Diggers—Results of the Digging Unsatisfactory—The Homeward Trip.
After Christmas we settled down to humdrum work, and barring my gold-hunting experience there was little to relieve the daily monotony of existence. I wrote an account of the gold-hunting expedition as one of a series of newspaper articles published in The Manila Times, With the consent of the editors, I now transcribe it bodily here, for, without any gleam of romance or adventure, the experience was one typical of the land and of our life here, which I believe the generous reader will be willing to accept without any attempt on my part to embellish it with excitement and lurid writing.
Our Supervisor had gotten hold of a legend of an abandoned mine in a mountain some four or five miles from town. According to the native story, half a century or more before this period the mine was worked, and considerable quantities of gold were taken out of it. But dissensions arose between the barrios that supplied the labor, and finally the native priests ordered the shaft to be filled and closed, and all work to cease, lest it bring a curse upon the people. They obeyed, and the mining interests thereabouts fell into oblivion.
The Supervisor had, with native assistance, located the spot, and made a few crude washings in which he found “color.” Then he came back to make a sluice box, and, together with a young lieutenant of constabulary, intended to pass the Sabbath day in further investigation of the mine’s possibilities.
The occasion was too tempting. I promptly laid siege to the Supervisor’s wife, pleading that she induce her liege to let us accompany him. As he was good-natured and the trip was short and easy, he consented. We were to leave town in a baroto at three A.M. to get the benefit of the tide. At half-past nine the night before, the lunch basket containing my contribution to the commissary department was packed and suspended from the ceiling by a rope, protected by a petroleum-soaked rag, and I went to bed to dream of gold mines, country houses, yachts, and European travel. It was ten minutes to three when I scrambled out in a great fright lest I should be late and keep the others waiting. I lighted the alcohol lamp to boil the coffee, and flew into my garments. But I dressed and ate and still they came not. So I poked my head out of the window into the sad radiance of a setting moon.
It was a town sleeping peacefully, and yet with every hint of warlike preparation that scattered itself along the river. In front of the officers’ quarters a sentry clanked up and down the pavement. From the military jail came a sound of voices and the creaking of benches, as the guard turned on the hard bamboo seats, mingled also with a steady tramp. More sentries could be seen across the river, where the troop barracks loomed up and almost hid the hills which gloomed over the town. The bridge was in shadow, but now and then a tall figure, gun on shoulder, emerged at its farthest end into a pale little dash of moonlight. The lanterns which the Filipinos hang out of their front windows in lieu of street lamps burned spectrally, because they were clogged with lamp black. And the brooding and hush of night were disturbed only by the rhythmic footfalls, or by the occasional slap of a wave against the bridge rests, or by a long shrill police whistle which told that the municipal police were awake and complying with the regulation to blow their whistles at stated intervals for the purpose of testifying to the same. It was all full of charm and suggestion, singularly like and singularly unlike an American village under the same conditions of light and temperature.
The moon sank so low that the mists caught it and turned its sheen into a surly red. Presently a sentry challenged up by the jail, and then the glint of white clothing grew distinct. I unhooked the lunch basket and prowled my way out of the house, seeking to disturb nobody and feeling quite adventurous.
Our baroto with six native oarsmen was waiting at the stone stairway in the shadow of the bridge, and as the tide was beginning to turn we lost no time in bestowing ourselves and our provisions. The middle of the baroto, for a distance of about six feet, was floored and canopied. Mr. L—— took the far corner, his wife pushed herself and a couple of pillows up against him; then I braced myself and my pillows against her; and the unfortunate lieutenant fell heir to the fate of an obliging young gentleman and was stowed away at the end, supported (or incommoded) by the lunch baskets and an unsympathetic soap-box filled with water bottles. The men unslung their revolvers, and we disposed ourselves so as to secure a proper equilibrium to our tippy craft, and were off.
We slipped down the river, aided by the tide, and in a few minutes were far away from the last house, the last gleam of light, and the least sound of human life. Save for the soft dip of oars, not a sound broke the night. Yet it was not silence so much as the sense of deep respiration, as if the earth slept and sent up an invocation to the watching heavens. The banks were thickly weeded at the water’s edge with nipa, and behind that were knolls of bamboo with here and there a gnarled and tortured tree shape silhouetted against the faint sky. Occasionally we came to a convention of fireflies in that tree which they so much affect, the name of which is unknown to me, but which in size and outline resembles a wild cherry. Millions of them starred its branches, and in the surrounding gloom it winked and sparkled like a fairy Christmas tree.
We talked little, and were content to drink in the silence and the strangeness, till by and by the wind fell cooler and we knew the dawn was at hand. It seemed to come suddenly, bursting out of the east in a white glare, without the pearly tints and soft gray lights that mark our northern day births. Then the white glare changed to red, to a crimson glow that painted the world with its glory, and dying, left little nebulous masses floating in the azure, tinted with pink, gold, and purple.
With the first touch of light we turned out of the main river, which was now a broad estuary as it neared the sea, and fled down a water lane not over fifteen or twenty feet wide, absolutely walled with impenetrable nipa growths. From this we emerged just as the day played its last spectacular effects, and found ourselves in a deep oval indentation, glassy as an inland lake, whose bosom caught the changing cloud tints like a mirror, and whose deep cool green borders were alive with myriads of delighted birds, skimming, chattering, calling. Half a mile away, at its farther end, the surf leaped frothily over a bar, and beyond that the open sea tumbled and flashed in the first sun-rays. It was idyllic—and on our left a mere stone’s throw, it seemed, behind the embowering forest, the mountain of our quest thrust a treeless, grassy shoulder into the blue.
Mr. L——, however, warned us that our way was still long and circuitous. We crossed the lagoon and went wandering off down a green, silent waterway which rejoiced in the appellation of “kut-i-kut” and proved itself unworthy of the same. The tide was going out rapidly, and the water mark oh the tree trunks was growing high. Sometimes we met a baroto on its way to market with a cargo of three chickens, five cocoanuts, two bunches of bananas, one head of the family, four children, and several women unaccounted for. The freight was heaped at one end, and the passengers all squatted in that perfect, uncommunicative equilibrium which a Filipino can maintain for hours at a time. Sometimes we came out where there were almost a hundred square yards of ground and two or three houses and the stir of morning life. Ladies with a single garment looped under their arm pits were pouring water over themselves from cocoanut shells, and whole colonies of game-cocks were tethered out on the end of three feet of twine, cursing each other and challenging each other to fights. The male population almost to a man was engaged in the process of stroking the legs of these jewels, to make them strong, and some of the children were helping.
As a rule, our advent generally disturbed these morning devotions, for American women were still comparatively new and few in the province at that time. A shout, “Americanas!” usually brought the whole village to the waterside, where they bowed and smiled and stared, proffering hospitality, and exchanging repartee with the lieutenant, who used the vernacular.
Meanwhile the tide went out and out, and we sank lower and lower in kut-i-kut till we were in a slimy ditch with four feet of bank on each side. The turns and twists grew narrower, and the difficulty of steering our long baroto around these grew greater. The men got but and waded, pushing the baroto lightly over the soft ooze. But finally this failed. It was eight o’clock, the sun climbing higher and burning fiercer, when we stuck ignominiously in the mud of kut-i-kut.
Filipino Children “Going Swimming” in the Rio Cagayan
After a short consultation the lieutenant sighed, cast a glance at the mud and his clean leather puttees, then went overboard, taking a man with him. They disappeared in the nipa swamps, but came back in half an hour with three carabaos, their owners, and an army of volunteers.
Our motive power, being hitched tandem, now extended round a couple of bends, and there ensued the wildest confusion in an endeavor to get them all started at the same time. Apparently it couldn’t be done, and we wasted a half-hour, in which every native in the swamp seemed to be giving orders, and the overwhelming desire of the carabaos was to swarm up the bank and get out, without regard to the effect on the baroto. The lieutenant had come aboard and was sitting on the high prow dangling his muddy leggins ahead. To him Mr. L—— in disgust suggested that the taos were making little real effort and that he “stir ’em up,” Soothe lieutenant drew his revolver and at a season of discord aimed it carefully in the high distance and fired.
The effect on the humans was just what he desired, but he did not allow for the nervousness of the carabaos on hearing a revolver shot in a locality where it is distinctly not native. The unanimity thait had so long been sought swept like an epidemic into our lumbering steeds, and our baroto started ahead with a firmness of purpose that sent the author of this book flying into the mud, and bumped us all up most gloriously as we lunged round the corner. The good work once begun was not allowed to fall slack, however. The lieutenant caught up and climbed aboard, and we swept through the three miles of kut-i-kut in a wild cavalcade, rolling like a ship in a storm. At its end we struck upon water, and parted from our long-horned ayudantes.
A short row up a narrowing stream brought us to the place of disembarkation, an open grassy field which swept down from a cleft between the mountains. We walked across this till we came to a brook purling out of cool green shadows, and after following it in a rather stiff climb for about forty-five minutes, came to the scene of investigation.
There, the week before, the men had built a dam, and had thrown a rough framework and shelter across the bed of the stream. This they now covered with freshly cut boughs and leaves, and Mrs. L—— and I were only too glad to spread our pillows and lie down for a few minutes in the cool shade with the water bubbling and murmuring underneath. I was pretty well done with the heat and the unaccustomed exercise, but was soon rested and helped to make the coffee. That was a good meal, spiced with waiting, and immediately after we went at the business at hand.
The men set up the sluice box, which the taos had brought along with labor and disgust, and giving me a revolver, commissioned me to see that the excavating department kept busy. So I sat on the edge of a twenty-foot bank clasping the Colt, and hanging my feet into vacancy. I hadn’t felt so close to childhood for many a long year.
For an hour or so all went well, and the cheerful tao dug and delved and carried without murmur. Then his diligence subsided and there was a talk of “siesta.” Somebody down at the sluice box shouted, “Keep busy up there”; so, after one or two efforts to hurry up our minions, I pointed the pistol carefully into the ground and fired. They all jumped prodigiously and looked around. But I couldn’t play the part. I didn’t look stern, and I simply sat there grinning fatuously with the sense of my own valor, whereupon the taos burst into a shout of laughter and seemed to think a bond of friendship had been established between us. They got lazier and lazier and smiled at me more and more openly, and made what I judged to be remarks about my personal appearance. So at another convenient opportunity I let off another shot, which was a worse fizzle than the first. One old fellow whose back was glistening with sweat turned and winked at me, and another pretended to hunt for imaginary wounds.
Recognizing that I was an ignominious failure in the public works department, I left it to manage itself and strolled over to add my inexperience and ignorance to the sluicing agency.
Mrs. L—— had anticipated me and was already advising the willing workers when I appeared. On the whole, they were pretty patient about it all, and let us ask innumerable questions and make suggestions (which, however, they never observed) ad libitum.
But however little I knew about gold-mining, I have shared one thing with the real prospector—the eager, fascinated, breathless suspense of staring into a fold of blanket for “color.” When we really saw a vagrant glint here and there, what delight!—delight easily quenched by Mr. L——, however, who declared the yield too small for a paying basis.
All that hot summer day, we dug and washed and watched, but with unsatisfactory results. In the long-shadowed afternoon we packed traps and set off down the valley. The egrets, camping by dozens on feeding carabao, flapped away as we approached; we found our baroto as we had left it, rising gently on the incoming tide in the shade of a clump of bamboo.
The homeward journey, if not one of resignation to the will of Providence, had its compensation in the loveliness of afternoon lights and the cool, peaceful silence of the forests. We avoided the insidious snares of kut-i-kut, but found our lagoon just bestowed for the night, snug, glassy, with the dusk creeping on and on. Thence we passed into the open sea, were cradled gently into our own bay, and saw the coastguard station at the inlet send ruddy gleams across the water, beneath the lowering form of the hill. Once in the river, we fairly flew along, bathed in moonlight. We neared home, heard bands playing in the distance, and, with sudden remembrance that it was a native fiesta, turned the bend and saw a fairy city aglow with lanterns, where eighteen hours before had been silence and stealth. All the craft in the river were hung with multicolored lights, and the people were out promenading, while a crowd of school children, sitting on the river bank, were singing “Old Kentucky Home” in four parts.
It was a happy day, one of those photographic experiences to be treasured forever, but the dream of yachts and country houses never has become a reality. If an energetic prospector wishes to try, he will find in a cleft between two tall mountains an abandoned shaft and the remains of a dam spanning a mountain stream. But let him not taste of the babbling water. I did, and put in six weeks of illness therefor.