The diet of the Philippines has something to do, undoubtedly, with their gentle and non-aggressive qualities. They eschew opium and spirituous liquors. Their chief sustenance, morning, noon, and eve, is rice. The rice crop seldom fails, not merely to support the population, but to leave a large margin for export. Famine, that hideous shadow which broods over so many a rice-subsisting population, is unknown here. Even scarcity is of rare occurrence. In the worst of years hardly a sack of grain has to be imported. It is this very abundance which stands in the way of what the world calls progress. The Malay, like other children of the tropics, limits his labour by the measure of his requirements, and that measure is narrow indeed. Hence it is often difficult to obtain his services in the development of the tobacco, coffee, hemp, and sugar industries, which might make the archipelago one of the wealthiest and most prosperous portions of the earth’s face.
Manila has been once before captured from Spain. The English were its captors, although they held it only a few months. It was in 1762, a few weeks after the English capture of Havana. Spain had been rash enough to side with France in the war usually known in this country as the French and Indian war. She was speedily punished for it.
The expedition against Manila was the plan of Colonel William Draper; he was made a brigadier-general for the expedition and put in command, with Admiral Cornish as [pg 369]his naval ally. There were nine ships of the line and frigates, several troop-ships, and a land force of twenty-three hundred including one English regiment, with Sepoys and marines.
On September 24, 1762, these forces were disembarked just south of Manila. The Archbishop of Manila, who was also governor-general of the island, collected and armed some ten thousand natives, as a reinforcement to the Spanish garrison of eight hundred. During the progress of the siege some daring attempts were made by the British to prevent the further construction of defences, but the assailants were repulsed with great slaughter.
A desperate sally was made by a strong body of natives, who “ran furiously on the ranks of the besiegers and fought with almost incredible ferocity, and many of them died, like wild beasts, gnawing with their teeth the bayonets by which they were transfixed.”
On October 6th a breach was effected in the Spanish works, the English carried the city by storm, and gave it up for several hours to the ravages of a merciless soldiery. The Archbishop and his officers had retired to the citadel, but this could not be defended, and a capitulation was agreed upon, by which the city and port of Manila, with several ships and the military stores, were surrendered, while for their private property the Spanish agreed to pay as a ransom $2,000,000 in coin, and the same in bills on the treasury at Madrid. This last obligation was never paid.