Early in 1904 a Spanish planter of many yearsʼ standing, named Amechazurra, and his brother-in-law, Joaquin Guaso, were kidnapped and held for ransom. When the sum was carried to the brigandsʼ haunt, Guaso was found with his wrists broken and severely tortured with bowie-knife cuts and lance-thrusts. Having no power to use his hands, his black beard was full of white maggots. In this state he was delivered to his rescuers and died the next day. Since the close of the war up to the present day the provinces of Batangas and Cavite, less than a dayʼs journey from the capital, have not ceased to be in a deplorable condition of lawlessness. The principal leaders, Montalón and Felizardo,[2] were formerly officers under the command of the insurgent General Manuel Trias, who surrendered to the Americans and afterwards accepted office as Civil Governor of the Province of Cavite. In this capacity he made many unsuccessful attempts to capture his former colleagues, but owing to his failure to restore tranquillity to the province he resigned his governorship in 1903. The Montalón and Felizardo bands, well armed, constantly overran the two adjoining provinces to murder the people, pillage their homes, and set fire to the villages. They bore an inveterate hatred towards all who accepted American dominion, and specially detested their former chief Trias, who, since his return from the St. Louis Exhibition, has shown a very pro-American tendency. The history of their crimes covers a period of five years. Felizardo was remarkable for his audacity, his fine horsemanship, and his expert marksmanship. During an attack on Parañaque, mounted on a beautiful pony stolen from the race-track of Pasay, he rode swiftly past a constabulary sentinel, who shot at him and missed him, whilst Felizardo, from his seat in the saddle, shot the sentinel dead. The evening before the day Governor Taft intended to sail for the United States, on his retirement from the governorship, Montalón hanged two constabulary men at a place within sight of Manila. In December, 1904, all this district was so infested with cut-throats that Manuel Trias, although no longer an official, offered to organize and lead a party of 300 volunteers against them. On January 24, 1905, the same bandits, Felizardo and Montalón, at the head of about 300 of their class, including two American negroes, raided Triasʼs native town of San Francisco de Malabón, murdered an American surgeon and one constabulary private, and seriously wounded three more. They looted the municipal treasury of 2,000 pesos and 25 carbines, and carried off Triasʼs wife and two children, presumably to hold them for ransom. The chief object of the attack was to murder Trias, their arch-enemy, but he was away from home at the time. On his return he set out in pursuit of the band at the head of the native constabulary. The outlaws had about 160 small firearms, and during the chase several fierce fights took place. Being hunted from place to place incessantly, they eventually released Triasʼs wife and children so as to facilitate their own escape. Constabulary was insufficient to cope with the marauders, and regular troops had to be sent to these provinces. In February, 1905, a posse of 25 Moro fighting-men was brought up from Siassi (Tápul group) to hunt down the brigands. Launches patrolled the Bay of Manila with constabulary on board to intercept the passage of brigands from one province to another, for lawlessness was, more or less, constantly rife in several of the Luzon provinces and half a dozen other islands for years after the end of the war. From 1902 onwards, half the provinces of Albay, Bulacan, Bataán, Cavite, Ilocos Sur, and the islands of Camaguín, Sámar, Leyte, Negros, Cebú, etc., have been infested, at different times, with brigands, or latter-day insurgents, as the different parties choose to call them. The regular troops, the constabulary, and other armed forces combined were unable to exterminate brigandage. The system of “concentration” circuits, which had given such adverse results during the Rebellion (vide p. [392]), was revived in the provinces of Batangas and Cavite, obliging the waverers between submission and recalcitration to accept a defined legal or illegal status. Consequently many of the common people went to swell the roving bands of outlaws, whilst those who had a greater love for home, or property at stake, remained within the prescribed limits, in discontented, sullen compliance with the inevitable. The system interrupted the peopleʼs usual occupations, retarded agriculture, and produced general dissatisfaction. The Insular Government then had recourse to an extreme measure which practically implied the imposition of compulsory military service on every male American, foreign, or native inhabitant between the ages of eighteen to fifty years, with the exception of certain professions specified in the Philippine Commission Act No. 1309, dated March 22, 1905. Under this law the native mayor of a town can compel any able-bodied American (not exempted under the Act) to give five days a month service in hunting down brigands, under a maximum penalty of ₱100 fine and three monthsʼ imprisonment. And, subject to the same penalty for refusal, any proprietor or tenant (white, coloured, or native) residing in any municipality, or ward, must report, within 24 hours, to the municipal authority, the name, residence, and description of any person (not being a resident) to whom he gave assistance or lodging. In no colony where the value of the white manʼs prestige is appreciated would such a law have been promulgated.
The proceedings of the constabulary in the disturbed provinces having been publicly impugned in a long series of articles and reports published in the Manila newspaper El Renacimiento, the editors of that public organ were brought to trial on a charge of libel in July, 1905. The substance of the published allegations was that peaceable citizens were molested in their homes and were coerced into performing constabulary and military duties by becoming unwilling brigand-hunters. Among other witnesses who appeared at the trial was Emilio Aguinaldo, who testified that he had been forced to leave his home and present himself to a constabulary officer, who, he affirmed, bullied and insulted him because he refused to leave his daily occupations and risk his life in brigand-hunting. In view of the peculiar position of Aguinaldo as a fallen foe, perhaps it would have been better not to have disturbed him in his peaceful life as a law-abiding citizen, lest the world should misconstrue the intention.
Confined to Pangasinán and La Union provinces, there is an organization known as the “Guards of Honour.” Its recruits are very numerous, their chief vocation being cattle-stealing and filching other peopleʼs goods without unnecessary violence. It is feared they may extend their operations to other branches of perversity. The society is said to be a continuation of the Guardia de Honor created by the Spaniards and stimulated by the friars in Pangasinán as a check on the rebels during the events of 1896–98. At the American advent they continued to operate independently against the insurgents, whom they harassed very considerably during the flight northwards from Tárlac. It was to escape the vengeance of this party that Aguinaldoʼs Secretary of State (according to his verbal statement to me) allowed himself to fall prisoner to the Americans.
The Pulajanes of Sámar seem to be as much in possession of that Island as the Americans themselves, and its history, from the revolution up to date, is a lugubrious repetition of bloodshed, pillage, and incendiarism. The deeds of the notorious Vicente Lucban were condoned under the Amnesty of 1902, but the marauding organization is maintained and revived by brigands of the first water. Every move of the government troops is known to the pulajanes. The spy, stationed at a pass, after shouting the news of the enemyʼs approach to the next spy, darts into the jungle, and so on all along the line, in most orderly fashion, until the main column is advised. In July, 1904, they slaughtered half the inhabitants of the little coast village of Taviran, mutilated their corpses, and then set out for the town of Santa Elena, which was burnt to the ground. In December of that year over a thousand pulajanes besieged the town of Taft (formerly Tubig), held by a detachment of native scouts, whilst another party, hidden in the mountains, fell like an avalanche upon a squad of 43 scouts, led by an American lieutenant, on their way to the town of Dolores, and in ten minutes killed the officer and 37 of his men. After this mournful victory the brigands went to reinforce their comrades at Taft, swelling their forces en route, so that the besiegers of Taft amounted to a total of about 2,000 men. About the same time some 400 pulajanes were met by a few hundred so-called native volunteers, who, instead of fighting, joined forces and attacked a scout detachment whilst crossing a river. Twenty of the scouts were cut to pieces and mutilated, whilst thirteen more died of their wounds.
Communication in the Island is extremely difficult; the maintenance of telegraph-lines is impossible through a hostile country, and messages sent by natives are often intercepted, or, as sometimes happens, the messengers, to save their lives, naturally make common cause with the bandits whom they meet on the way. The hemp-growers and coast-trading population, who have no sympathy with the brigands, are indeed obliged, for their own security, to give them passive support. Hundreds in the coast villages who are too poor to give, have to flee into hiding and live like animals in dread of constabulary and pulajanes alike. Between “insurgency” and “brigandage,” in this Island, there was never a very wide difference, and when General Allen, the Chief of the Constabulary, took the field in person in December, 1904, he had reason to believe that the notorious ex-insurgent Colonel Guevara was the moving spirit in the lawlessness. Guevara, who had been disappointed at not securing the civil governorship of the Island, was suddenly seized and confined at Catbalogan jail to await his trial. The Sámar pulajanes are organized like regular troops, with their generals and officers, but they are deluded by a sort of mystic religious teaching under the guidance of a native pope. In January, 1905, the town of Balangiga (vide p. [536]), so sadly famous in the history of Sámar on account of the massacre of American troops during the war, became a pulaján recruiting station. A raid upon the place resulted in the capture of twenty chiefs, gorgeously uniformed, with gaudy anting-anting amulets on their breasts to protect them from American bullets. At this time the regimental Camp Connell, at Calbáyoc, was so depleted of troops that less than a hundred men were left to defend it. Situated on a pretty site, the camp consists of two lines of wooden buildings running along the shore for about a mile. At one extremity is the hospital and at the other the quartermasterʼs dépôt. It has no defences whatever, and as I rode along the central avenue of beautiful palms, after meeting the ladies at a ball, I pictured to myself the chapter of horror which a determined attack might one day add to the doleful annals of dark Sámar.
Matters became so serious that in March, 1905, the divisional commander, General Corbin, joined General Allen in the operations in this Island. Full of tragedy is the record of this region, and amongst its numerous heroes was a Captain Hendryx. In 1902, whilst out with a detachment of constabulary, he was attacked, defeated, and reported killed. He was seen to drop and roll into a gully. But four days later there wandered back to the camp a man half dead with hunger and covered with festering wounds, some so infected that, but for the application of tobacco, gangrene would have set in. It was Captain Hendryx. Delirious for a while, he finally recovered and resumed his duties. A couple of years afterwards he was shipwrecked going round the coast on the Masbate. For days he and the ship-master alone battled with the stormy waves, a howling wind ahead, and a murderous rabble on the coast waiting for their blood. On the verge of death they reached a desolate spot whence the poor captain saved his body from destruction, but with prostrate nerves, rendering him quite unfit for further service. And the carnage in the Sámar jungles, which has caused many a sorrow in the homeland, continues to the present day with unabated ferocity. By nature a lovely island, picturesque in the extreme, there is a gloom in its loveliness. The friendly native has fled for his life; the patches of lowland once planted with sweet potatoes or rows of hemp-trees, are merging into jungle for want of the tillerʼs hand. The voice of an unseen man gives one a shudder, lest it be that of a fanatic lurking in the cogon grass to seek his fellowʼs blood. Near the coast, half-burnt bamboos show where villages once stood; bleached human bones mark the sites of human conflict, whilst decay and mournful silence impress one with the desolation of this fertile land. The narrow navigable channel separating Sámar from Leyte Island is one of the most delightful bits of tropical scenery.
The Constabulary Service Reports for 1903 and 1904 show that in the former period there were 357 engagements between brigand bands and the constabulary (exclusive of the army operations), and in the latter period 235 similar engagements. More than 5,000 expeditions were undertaken against the outlaws in each year; 1,185 outlaws were killed in 1903, and 431 in 1904, 2,722 were wounded or captured in 1903, and 1,503 in 1904; 3,446 arms of all sorts were seized in 1903, and 994 in 1904. The constabulary losses in killed, wounded, died of wounds and disease, and deserted were 223 in 1904. In Cavite Province alone, with a population of 134,779, there were, in 1903, over 400 expeditions, resulting in 20 brigands killed, 23 wounded, and 253 captured. At this date brigandage is one of the greatest deterrents to the prosperous development of the Islands.
The Adjutant-Generalʼs Report issued in Washington in December, 1901, gives some interesting figures relating to the Army, for the War of Independence period, i.e., from February 4, 1899, to June 30, 1901. The total number of troops sent to the Islands was as follows, viz.:—
| Officers. | Men. | |
| Regular Army | 1,342 | 60,933 |
| Volunteers | 2,135 | 47,867 |
| 3,477 | 108,800 |
Some were returning from, whilst others were going to the Islands; the largest number in the Islands at any one time (year 1900) was about 70,000 men.