Pavilions were erected by different clubs or bodies, and a profuse hospitality characterised each day. Winners of large silver cups usually filled them with champagne and passed them round. Bets were made with the ladies as an excuse for giving them presents. Dinner-parties were given in the evenings at private houses, and there were dinners at the clubs. There were two race-meetings in the year. No doubt this sport, temporarily interrupted by insurrection and war, will again flourish when tranquillity prevails.
There was a boating-club in connection with the British Club at Nagtajan, now removed to Ermita, and some very good skiffs and boats were available. There was a regatta and illuminated procession of boats each year.
Polo clubs and rifle clubs had a rather precarious existence, except that the Swiss Rifle Club was well kept up, and there were some excellent shots in it. There was a lawn tennis club, which had ladies and gentlemen as members, and some very good games were played there and valuable prizes given.
Shooting was a favourite sport with many Englishmen and a few mestizos.
Excellent snipe-shooting is to be had in all the paddy-fields around Manila and the lake. But at San Pedro on the Pasig, there is a wide expanse of rough ground with clumps of bushes, and it was here that the most exciting sport was to be had, and it took some shooting to get the birds as they flew across the openings between the bushes. Snipe-shooting began in September, when the paddy was high enough to give cover, and lasted to the end of November. The birds, when they first arrived, were thin, but they soon put on flesh, and by November were fat and in splendid condition for the table. There is no better bird to be eaten anywhere than a Manila snipe. Bags of eighty were sometimes made in a morning by two guns.
Excellent wild-duck and teal-shooting was to be got on and around the lake and on the Pinag de Candaba, and wherever there was a sheet of water. When crossing the lake I have seen wild fowl resting on the surface in such enormous numbers that they looked like sandbanks. They are not easy to approach, but I have killed some by firing a rifle into the flock. The crested-lapwing and the golden-plover are in plenty, and on the seashores widgeon and curlew abound. Inland, on the stubbles, there are plenty of quail. Pigeons of all sorts, sizes, and colours, abound at all times, especially when the dap-dap tree opens its large crimson blossoms. Some kinds of brush-turkeys, such as the tabon, a bird (Megapodius cuningi) the size of a partridge, that lays an egg as large as a goose egg and buries it in a mound of gravel by the shore, are found.
The labuyao, or jungle cock, is rare and not easy to shoot in a sportsmanlike way, although a poacher could easily shoot them on a moonlight night.
In the Southern Islands some remarkable pheasants of most brilliant plumage are to be found, and whilst in Palawan I obtained two good specimens of the pavito real (Polyplectron Napoleonis), a very handsome game bird with two sharp spurs on each leg. They are rather larger than a partridge, but their fan-shaped tails have two rows of eyes like a peacock’s tail, there being four eyes in each feather.
Deer and wild-pig abound, and can be shot within four hours’ journey of Manila by road. Round about Montalban is a good place for them. They are plentiful at Jala-jala, on the lake at Porac in Pampanga, and round about the Puerto Jamelo and Pico de Loro, at the mouth of Manila Bay. In fact, they are found wherever there is cover and pasture for them. The season is from December to April.
The usual way is to go with a party of five or six guns and employ some thirty native beaters, each bringing one or two dogs.