Yesterdays in the Philippines

by Joseph Earle Stevens

After the typhoon came the floods, and the old Pasig covered the adjacent country. The water concealed the road to the uptown club at Nagtajan under a depth of several feet, and one could without difficulty row into the billiard-room or play water-polo in the bowling-alley. Two of my friends were nearly drowned by trying to drive when they should have swum or gone by boat. The pony walked off with their carriage into a rice-field, in the darkness, and was drowned in more than eight feet of water. The boys only crawled out with difficulty, and just managed to reach “dry land” (that with three feet of water over it) in the nick of time. As it was, one of them practically saved the other’s life, and has since been presented with a gold watch, which does not run.

One of the bank-managers was to give a dinner-dance at his house next evening, to which everyone was invited, when word came that his bungalow could only be reached by boats, and that the festivities would have to be put off until the parlor floor appeared. To the north, where the actual centre of the typhoon passed, the railway was swept away, the telegraph line that connects with the cable to Hong Kong torn down, and the country in general laid under water. But the show is now concluded, and business, which had been paralyzed for a week, once more starts up with the coming of the cablegrams.

Manila life goes on as ever, and it is curious to note how fast the days and weeks slip backward. Everyone agrees that the most rapid thing in town, except the winds of the typhoons, is the speed with which the Philippine to-day becomes yesterday. The secret seems to lie in the fact that there are no landmarks by which to remember the weeks that are gone. The trees are green all the year round, and there are no snow-storms to mark the contrast between winter and summer. There are no class-days, no ball-games, and no coming out in spring fashions to break the orderly procession of the sun, moon, and stars. We wear our white starched suits every day in the year, and one’s wardrobe is not replete with various checks, plaids, and stripes that mark an epoch in one’s appearance. We cannot, like Teufelsdröch, in “Sartor Resartus,” speculate much on the “clothes philosophy,” though we may do so on the centres of indifference; for our garments are not complex enough to invite transcendental theorizing. Manila food is alike from Christmas morn to the following Christmas eve, and so, take it all in all, the past is practically without milestones, and seems far shorter than one in which many events make the measured steps more clearly differentiated.

At present everybody dates his ideas from the typhoon, and that will remain a landmark for some time, if the fire which took place the other evening on the banks of the river does not usurp its position. Ten thousand bales of hemp, and a lot of copra, sugar, and cocoanut-oil were sent aloft in less earthly form. Æsthetically the sight was beautiful, and the eye was charmed by the mingling of vast tongues of blue, green, red, and yellow flames, some of which burst forth from the very waters of the river itself on which the inflammable materials had excursioned. Our new fire-engine was on hand for the first time, in actual service, and, together with the small English engine brought out from London, did its duty. America, as usual, was in the lead, and everybody stood aghast to see the big five-inch stream mow down the brick walls of the burning houses like grain before the reaper. One native in particular, whose frail hut was washed to splinters by that big cataract played upon it to save it from the flames, said he’d rather lose his property by fire than to stand by and see the blooming bomba (fire-engine) blow it all to bits. The local department, as usual, lost their heads, and while some began to chop the tiles off the roofs of neighboring houses, others directed the streams from the hand-pumps onto the choppers. Even our gallant friend the American broker, who helps swell the number of Yankee business men in Manila to four, almost got roasted alive by being shut into an iron vault as he tried to rescue some valuable papers belonging to a customer and had to be soused with water, after his miraculous escape, to lower his temperature. But at length Providence and water prevailed, and the damage did not come to more than half a million dollars.

VII

A Series of Typhoons—A Chinese Feast-day—A Bank-holiday Excursion—Lost in the Mist—Los Baños—The “Enchanted Lake”—Six Dollars for a Human Life—A Religious Procession—Celebration of the Expulsion of the Chinese—Bicycle Races and Fireworks.

October 5th.

Phew! We have hardly had time to breathe since the last mail, for we have been in the midst of typhoon after typhoon, shipwrecks, house-wrecks, and telegraph-wrecks, both simplex and duplex. Manila had scarcely gotten over talking of the war of the elements, above spoken of, before another cyclone was announced to the south, and soon we were going through an experience similar to that related the other day. When that was over, everybody began to draw breath again, but before the lungs of the populace were fully expanded, the wind suddenly went into that dangerous quarter, the northwest, and up went signal No. 5 again. The blow came on more suddenly than the former one, and all hands left the business offices to go home and sit on their roofs. The tin was again stripped like paper from our portico, and great masses of metal banged around outside with the clash of cymbals. It was a terrific night. The ships in the Bay dragged their anchors nearly to the breakwater, and in the morning four Spanish brigs were a total wreck. One in particular went ashore on the bar at the river’s mouth, and at daylight was being swept fore and aft by the great seas. Eight men were hanging on for dear life, and it looked as if they would be swallowed up in the great drink, but two big lifeboats were got out, and as the sea moderated somewhat, the sailors were at length rescued, just as their ship went all to smash. A thousand houses were blown down, many of the streets in Manila were flooded, telegraph lines prostrated, and tram-car service interrupted.