That is all there is of this laconic narrative. Under the conditions it can hardly be equaled for philosophical phlegm. “The beach seemed very gloomy”; “As no one came to get me, I went to sleep.” It sounds like casual notes on a holiday jaunt. In point of fact, he was in danger at all times of assassination and knew it well. He must have rather wondered at his fortune [[253]]when he saw the beach at Dapitan and realized that he had arrived without being murdered.[7]
It was a little town on the border of a savage country, known to be unhealthful, and at that time so difficult of access from Manila that he might have been nearer at Yokohama. It is charitable but hardly necessary to believe that the men that consigned him to such a place were unaware of its repute. With so little concealment they had sought in other ways for his life, we have no reason to think now of a sudden they had acquired mercy. To a thousand places more salubrious he might as easily have been sent; none would satisfy them but this.
At Dapitan were a military station, a convento, and several priests. Rizal was informed that if he would make a declaration of sympathy and admiration for Spain he could reside at the convento with the priests. Even for that privilege, dear to an intellectual man, hungry for the company of his educated fellows, he would not lay perjury on his soul.[8] Strange as the temptation seems to us in these days, the tempters knew well what they had in view. With such a declaration they could nullify much of Rizal’s influence upon his countrymen and possibly allay something of the spirit of revolt that on all sides was rising in the colony.
To the commandant’s house, accordingly, he was assigned. It was but rude commons and a primitive environment. The sudden and cold plunge from the place of respect he had held in Europe and his profitable [[254]]position in Hong-Kong would have overwhelmed a weaker spirit. Rizal accepted the stern mutations with the unruffled composure that was always his strong anchor in whatsoever difficulties. “No man bears sorrow better,” says the antique Roman of himself; but you would not look for a recrudescence of Marcus Brutus in a Malay of the nineteenth century.
In the same spirit he now arranged his time upon a schedule after his invariable custom, and resumed cheerfully a life of study and work. Under the parole he had given that he would make no attempt to escape, he was allowed to go about as he pleased and without observation, for it is singular that this traitor and dangerous character was implicitly trusted even by his enemies so far as any question of personal honor was concerned. He had never a guard in Dapitan. Not only so, but the commandants, one after another, and all the soldiery, from private to highest officers, fell under the potent charm of his manner and became his friends and admirers. The commandants were frequently changed. Each in turn came to Dapitan warned against the perilous prisoner there and therefore bristling with dislike; each went away swearing he was the prince of good fellows and sorry for his fate.
At all times he was the most industrious of exiles; he must have had a spirit akin to the genius of perpetual motion. Day after day he plunged into the woods to study the animal life of the region, collect specimens and write elaborate notes about shells, bugs, crawling things, trees, and flowers. He explored the coasts of Mindanao and visited the native villages. [[255]]With evident enthusiasm he revived his ethnological pleasures and collected native implements, weapons and manufactures, many of which from his hands are now in the museum of Dresden, for instance.[9] True to his natural inclinings, one of his first employments had been to look about him at the chances the children of that region had to gain even the rudiments of education. Finding they had next to nothing, he gathered them about him and began to teach. He was also busy at times with his professional ministrations. Patients began to seek him from Manila, from Hong-Kong, and even from more distant places, so great was his reputation as an oculist. With the fees they paid him he embarked upon beneficent enterprises that revealed another reserve in his resourceful mind.
The first of these was a lighting system for Dapitan; the next, waterworks, which he devised, planned, and superintended in person, going back to the engineering lore he had learned at the Ateneo and then laid aside. Much of the construction was difficult, and engineers still wonder at the skill and courage he showed in meeting its problems. He and his workmen were without the proper tools; they must improvise their own materials, and bring the water a long distance over valleys and around hills; but they conquered every obstacle.[10] [[256]]
When this task was done he bought him a tract of land close by the town, built a house on it, and established there adequate quarters for his school.
This may be a good place to say what this singular person was in some of the sciences to which he gave so much of himself. As a physician, while still a student at Madrid University, he had made commentaries of remarkable merit, “Apuntes de Obstetricia” and “Apuntes Clinicos.” As an ophthalmologist he seemed to win at once to distinction as soon as he left the university. This Dr. de Weckert of Paris, to whom he went first, was of too great repute and too well supplied with candidates to have selected him for chief laboratory assistant if he had not been of unusual attainments. It appears that de Weckert was so much impressed with this brown man from Malaya that they began a warm friendship that lasted until Rizal’s death, and so long as he remained in Paris he was the great oculist’s favorite companion and collaborateur. In Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin he was the associate and assistant of men like Galezowsky and Schulzer. In the few months that elapsed between his first return to the Philippines and his departure thence at the veiled order of Terrero, he received in fees more than five thousand pesos, a sum equivalent to about fifteen thousand pesos of the present day. At Hong-Kong, for the short time he was there, his office [[257]]was overrun with patients from all that part of the world. As we have seen, they followed him even to far Dapitan. One of them was an Englishman that made him a present of five hundred pesos, brown man and Malay as he was.
