In addition to the vessels above mentioned, the Bureau of Navigation owns and operates a fleet of launches, some of which are seagoing, and a number of dredges which are employed in improving the harbours and rivers of the islands as funds permit. The bureau also owns and operates its own machine shop and marine railway, and repairs its own vessels.
A section of the machine shop is set aside for lighthouse work, and in it lighthouse apparatus of every description is fabricated and repaired. While lighthouses and buoys are not means of communication they are aids to it.
The thousand and ninety-five inhabited islands and approximately two hundred and fifty ports of varying importance, depending as they do entirely upon water transportation for communication with each other and with the outside world, had no wharfage whatever available for large vessels, and no publicly owned wharfage within ten yards of which even the larger inter-island steamers could be berthed. Manila had no protected anchorage, and during the season of southwest monsoons and typhoons vessels were sometimes compelled to lie in the harbour for weeks before they could unload, a fact which gave the port a deservedly bad name.
The Spaniards had commenced harbour work at Manila in 1892, twenty-five years after preliminary study began and sixteen years after prospective plans had been submitted. Their operations were stopped by the insurrection in 1896, at which time the present west breakwater had been about half completed, but as the completed portion was at the shore end and in shallow water it afforded no protection to ships. There had been constructed twenty-four hundred feet of masonry wall partly enclosing one of the basins provided for in the Spanish plans, and fourteen hundred eighty-five feet of wall lining canals connecting the proposed new harbour with the Pasig River. These also were temporarily useless, because there had been no dredging in front of them, or backfilling in their rear.
Outside of Manila practically nothing had been done to facilitate the loading and discharge of vessels, or to protect them from the elements.
We now have at Manila a deep-water harbour dredged to a uniform depth of thirty feet and enclosed by two breakwaters having a total length of nearly eleven thousand five hundred feet. Two hundred and sixty-one acres of land have been reclaimed with the dredged material. Two steel piers extend from the filled land into the deep-water harbour. One of these is six hundred fifty feet long and one hundred ten feet wide, the other six hundred feet long and seventy feet wide. Both are housed in, the sheds covering them having a total area of ninety-two thousand square feet. These piers and sheds are practically fireproof, and the largest ocean-going steamers on the Pacific can lie alongside them. Additional work planned, which should be undertaken when funds permit, includes two more piers; and bulkheads to connect the inner ends of the present piers, so as to give inter-island steamers opportunity to unload.
At Cebú the sea-wall has been completed to a length of two thousand sixty feet and the channel in front of it dredged in part to ten and a half and in part to twenty-three feet at low water. Some ten and a half acres of land have been reclaimed with the material removed. Streets and roadways have been built on the reclaimed area, and a wharf eight hundred twelve feet in length, designed as an extension to the wall, is now fifty per cent completed. The harbour at Cebú should ultimately be dredged so as to give thirty feet of water along the piers.
At Iloílo the dredging of a fifteen-foot channel up to the custom-house was completed in March, 1907. Seven hundred and eighty-three feet of river wall and twelve hundred ninety feet of reënforced concrete wharf, both to accommodate vessels of eighteen feet draft at low water, have been built along the south bank of the middle reach of the river. The lower reach has been dredged to twenty-four feet at low water, the middle reach to eighteen feet and the upper reach to fifteen feet, while two hundred ten thousand square metres of land have been reclaimed and two hundred six thousand improved with the dredged material. Wharves for ocean-going steamers should ultimately be constructed at this important port.
At Paracale, in Ambos Camarines, a reënforced concrete pier four hundred ninety feet in length has been built. It extends out to a depth of fifteen feet at low water.
At Bais, Negros, a timber pier for vessels of sixteen feet draft, with a stone causeway approach a mile and a half in length, and a warehouse for the temporary storage of sugar, have been constructed.