Of the cruelty of Chinese punishments I have already had something to say, but there is at least one thing that should be said for the Chinese officials in this connection: No matter how heinous his crime, they have never sent a criminal from Hong Kong to Manila in an Indo-China boat in the monsoon and typhoon season.
Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself, only to yield again to the wrath and fury of mountain-like waves hurled thundering against it and over it. The crack where the door fitted over the sill furnished opening enough to flood my cabin. In spite of the heat not even a crack could be opened at the top of the window until Monday morning. A bigger ship a few hours ahead of us found the sea in an even more furious mood. The captain stayed on the bridge practically without sleep three days and nights, going to bed, spent with fatigue and watching, as soon as he came at last into sight of Manila. Two weeks ago the captain of another ship came into port so much used up that he resigned and gave his first mate command of the vessel, while still another vessel has just limped into Manila disabled after buffeting the storm for a brief period.
{154}
At any rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila, with its tropical heat and vegetation, its historic associations, its strange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences. The Pasig River, made famous in the war days of '98, flows past my hotel, and beautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy. But the moss-green walls about the old Spanish city remind us of days of romance and tragedy more fascinating than any of the events of our own generation. In the days when Spain made conquest of the world these streets were laid out, and the statues of her sovereigns, imperious and imperial, still stand here to remind us that nations, like men, are mortal, and that for follies or mistakes a people no less surely than an individual must pay the price.
Nor let our own proud America, boasting of her greater area and richer resources, think she may ignore the lessons the history of her predecessors here may teach. The statue of Bourbon Don Carlos in his royal robe that stands amid the perennial green of the Cathedral Park--it may well bring our American officers who look out daily upon it, and the other Americans who come here, a feeling not of pride but of profound and reverent humility:
"God of Our Fathers, known of old.
Lord of our far-flung battle-line.
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine.
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!"
In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I left Manila Thursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban, travelling through the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Pangasinan. The first four of these are known as Tagalog provinces; the fifth is inhabited by Ilocanos and Pampangans. Three dialects or languages are spoken by the {155} tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyond Daguban are savage dog-eating, head-hunting tribes; taos, or peasants, buy dogs around Daguban and sell to these savages at good profits.
The provinces I travelled through are typical of Filipinoland generally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high tigbao or Tampa grass, or covered with small forest trees. Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle unlike anything we see at home. About Daguban especially many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by the Agno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River Nile in the time of Pharaoh--especially when I looked at the plowing going on around them. For the Filipino's plow is modelled closely on the old Egyptian implement, and hasn't been much changed. A properly crooked small tree or limb serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes the beam, and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some of the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A piece of wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another piece like U with the prongs pulled wide apart serves as a singletree. Then, with two pieces of rope connecting primitive hame and single-tree, the Filipino's harness is complete.
Before going into any further description of the plows, however, let us get our picture of the typical country on the Island of Luzon as I saw it on this hot December day. Great fields of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring little brown men and women cutting the crop with old-fashioned knives and sickles; the general appearance not unlike an American wheat or oat harvest in early summer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of {156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freight boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out of single logs.
Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live, clustered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part of the world except in America. Surrounded in most cases by the massive luxuriance of a banana grove, the Filipino's hut stands on stilts as high as his head, and often higher. One always enters by a ladder. In most instances there are two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12 feet, and a sort of lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes. A one-horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger Filipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, but of bamboo--the ever-serviceable bamboo--which, as my readers probably know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor; the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs; the roofing is of nipal, which looks much like very long corn shucks.