Yesterdays in the Philippines

by Joseph Earle Stevens

The local excitement was limited, and, except that a Chinaman had been beheaded by some enemy the night before as he was walking home through the street, news was scarce. Numerous people, however, were gathered together outside the police-station, looking at the remains, and several sailors from the American ships, who had swum ashore during the night to get drunk, were being returned to their vessels in charge of the civil guard.

The Uranus was not to stop long, and most of the through passengers returned early to the steamer to enjoy a view tempered by rather more breeze and less smell than that which the narrow streets afforded. Cebu, from the deck, was worthy of a sonnet; the white houses and church spires were set off against the dark-green background of mountains, and as the sun got lower the place did not have the broiled-alive aspect that it bore during the middle of the day. At four the stubby little Captain came aboard, and soon we turned northeast for our next stopping-place, Ormoc. Another colored sunset, another dinner in the golden light, another moonrise, another sail up among the islands, and at eleven on the evening of Monday we entered the harbor of Ormoc. Here two or three ponies were hoisted overboard to be taken landward, a can of kerosene was loaded into the purser’s boat as he went ashore with the papers, and a little chorus of shoutings concluded our midnight visit to the second stop of the day.

Tuesday morning the sun rose over the lofty mountains on the island of Leyte, and the Uranus shaped her course for Catbalogan, another of the larger hemp-ports. The steam up the bay blotched with islands was perfection, and by ten o’clock the anchor hunted round for a soft bed in the ooze, some eight hundred yards off a sandy beach, above which lay the town. Those of us who had energy enough to bolt our hearty breakfast were taken by the jolly-boat onto the mud flats, and were carried through the shallow water on oars to dry land. On the slopes of the higher mountains, behind the town, the hemp-plants (looking exactly like banana-trees), grew luxuriously, and in front of many of the houses in Catbalogan the white fibre was out drying on clothes-lines. A short taste of the hot sun easily satisfied our curiosity as to Catbalogan, and we were off to the ship again for more breakfast, just as several hungry-looking Spanish guests, including the Governor’s family, came aboard from the town to partake of a meal hearty enough to last them till the arrival of the next steamer.

From Catbalogan to its sister town, Tacloban, four hours to the south, the course leads among the narrow straits between high, richly wooded islands, and the scenery was most picturesque. Here and there little white beaches gleamed along the shore, and in front of the nipa shanties that now and then looked out from among the trees hung rows of hemp drying in the sun. Off and on the big waves, kicked up by the forward movement of the Uranus in the land-locked waters, woke up the stillness resting on the banks, and nearly upset small banca loads of the white fibre which was perhaps being paddled down to some larger centre from more remote stamping-grounds. From the bridge our view was most comprehensive, and it wasn’t long before the steamer actually entered the river like strait that separates the islands of Samar and Leyte. We twisted around like a snake through the narrow channel, on each side of which were high hills and mountains, richly treed with cocoanuts and hemp-plants, and, just as the sun was getting low, hauled into Tacloban, situated inside an arm of land that protects it from the dashing surges of the Apostles’ Bay beyond.

At Tacloban there was little to see. A high range of hills rose behind the town, and in the evening half-light everything looked more or less attractive. We climbed a small knoll that looked off over the Bay of St. Peter and St. Paul to the south and down over the village. The strait through which we came stretched up back among the hills like a river, and in the foreground lay the Uranus. A number of hemp store-houses lined the water-front, and as usual the ever-present Chinese were the central figures of the commercial part of the community. At eight the anchor came up once more, and we left Tacloban to steam religiously down the bay of St. Peter and St. Paul for Cabalian, eight hours to the south.

Cabalian is another little hemp-town, at the foot of a huge mountain; but in the starlight of the very early morning we stopped there only long enough to leave the mail and drop a pony overboard. Sunrise caught us still steering to the south, but nine o’clock tied our steamer to a little wharf in Surigao, directly in front of a large hemp-press and store-house belonging to the owners of the ship on which we were journeying. Some of the best hemp that comes to the Manila market is pressed at Surigao, and all around were stacks of loose fibre drying in the sun or being separated into different grades by native coolies. Several of us left the ship and walked to the main village, but, as before, found little to note except the intense heat of a boiling sun.

There was the customary hill behind the town, and at the risk of going entirely into solution during the effort, two of us climbed to the top for a breath of air and a panoramic view.

Dinner came along as usual at five; but I must say that the more I ate of those curiously timed meals the less I could accommodate my mental powers to the comprehension of what I was doing. Everybody knows what a difficult psychological problem it is to determine the exact numerical nature of the feeling in the second and third toes of his feet, as compared with that in the fingers of his hands. On your hands you can distinctly feel the first finger, the middle finger, and the fourth finger; but on your feet your second toe doesn’t feel like your first finger nor as a second toe should naturally feel. The great toe corresponds in sensation to one’s first finger, and all the other toes save the last seem to be muddled up without that differentiated sensation which the fingers have. And so with these meals aboard ship. A ten o’clock breakfast was neither breakfast nor luncheon, and it bothered me considerably to know what in the dickens I was really eating. In fact, it affected my mind to such a degree that somehow the food tasted as if it did not belong to any particular meal, but came from another order of things; and I spent long, serious moments between the courses in trying to locate the repast in my library of prehistoric sensations, just as I have often tried to locate the digit which my second toe corresponds to in feeling.

We left Surigao an hour before midnight, sailed away over moonlit seas toward the island of Camiguin, and when I stuck my head out of the port-hole at half after five next morning, the two very lofty mountain-peaks which formed this sky-scraper of the Philippines were just ridding themselves of the garb of darkness. Three of us went ashore at seven, and were introduced to a rich Indian, who, although the possessor of four hundred thousand dollars, lived in a common little nipa house. He invited us to see the country, fitted us out with three horses and a mounted servant, and sent us up into the mountains, where his men were working on the hemp-plantations.

We started up the sharp slopes, and were soon getting a wider and wider view back over the town and blue bay below. First the path was bounded with rice-fields, but, as we rose, the hemp plants which, as before said, look just like their relatives, the banana-trees, began to hem us in. Now and again we came to a little hut where long strings of fibre were out drying in the sun, but our boy kept going upward until we were rising at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. Everywhere the tall twenty-five-foot hemp-trees extended toward the mountain summit as far as the eye could carry, and we were much interested in seeing so much future rope in its primogenital state. Up we went across brooks, over rocks, beneath tall, tropical hardwood trees, nearly two hundred feet high, that here and there lifted themselves up toward heaven and at last came to the place where the natives were actually separating the hemp from strippings by pulling them under a knife pressed down on a block of wood. The whole little machine was so absurdly simple, with its rough carving-knife and rude levers, that it hardly seemed to correspond with the elaborate transformation that took place from the tall trees to the slender white fibre separated by the rusty blade. One man could clean only twenty-five pounds of hemp a day, and when it is remembered the whole harvest consists of about 800,000 bales, or 200,000,000 pounds per year, it seems the more remarkable that so rude an instrument should have so star a part to play. We each tried pulling the long, tough strippings under the knife that seemed glued to the block, but there was a certain knack which we did not seem to possess, and the thing stuck fast. All in all this visit to the hemp-cleaners will supply us with strong answers to letters from manufacturers who have written us to make efforts in introducing heavy machines for separating hemp from the parent tree, but who have failed to understand that a couple of levers and a carving knife are far easier to carry up a steep mountain-slope than a steam engine, and an arrangement as big as a modern reaper. We lingered about all the morning on these up-in-the-air plantations, and at noon picked our way slowly back again over the stony path to the village, glad that we didn’t have to earn fifty cents a day by so laborious a method.