While I paddled across a creek to get a photograph of some friendly savages on the other bank, one of my steamer friends went up to the Government house to make a formal visit. It seems he found no one at home except the wife of one of the high department officials, and she was reading the latest letters just fresh from the mail-bag of the Uranus. As I got back from across the river I heard a tremendous pandemonium going on in the upper story of the building in question, and soon my fellow-passenger came bolting down the stairs and out into the street below. The poor woman, on reading in her freshly opened letter that her husband, who had but recently gone up to Manila for a week’s stay, was an absconder to the extent of some three hundred thousand dollars, suddenly lost her mind. He had tried to get across to China, so it seemed, but was taken on the sailing-day of the steamer, and the wife now first heard the news. So, as chairs and flower-pots came sailing out the windows or down the stairs, we wisely decided to get out of harm’s way, and together walked back to the steamer-landing, musing on Spanish methods of pocket-lining.
The Moros themselves are sturdy beggars, though most picturesque ones, and the tame specimens that came into Iligan were curious in the extreme. Dressed in native-made cloths of all colors, their heads were ornamented with turbans of red and white and blue, while gaudy sashes gave them an air of aristocratic distinction which few of their northern brothers possessed. Some of them black all their teeth, others only put war-paint on their two front pairs of ivories, and while some looked as if they had no chewing machinery at all, others appeared as if they might only have played centre rush on a modern foot-ball team.
For years now Spain has sent men and gun-boats down to Mindanao to wipe out the savages and bring the island under complete subjection, but without avail. Young boys from the north have been drafted into native regiments to go south on this fatal errand. The prisons of Manila have been emptied and the convicts, armed with bolos or meat-choppers, have followed their more righteous brethren to the front. Well-trained native troops have gone there; Spanish troops have gone; officers have tried it, but to no end. If, in the storming of some Moro stronghold, a dozen miles back inland from the beach, the convicts in the front rank were cut to pieces by the enemy, it was of no importance. If the drafted youths were slaughtered, there were more at home. If the native troops failed to carry the charge, things began to look serious. But if the Spanish companies were touched, it was time to flee. Such have been the tactics in this great grave-yard, and where the Moros lost the day, fever stepped in and won. The towns along the coast are Spain’s, but the interior still swarms with savages, who are there to dispute her advance and are daily tramping over the graves of many of her soldiers.
Moro Chiefs from Mindanao.
See page [167].
We left Moro land at eight o’clock in the evening, after dining various officials who came aboard to see what they could get to eat, and by Sunday morning at sunrise had crossed northward to the island of Bohol, dropping anchor in Maribojoc, a small uninteresting place with an old church, a Spanish padre who had not been out of town in thirty years long enough ever to see a railroad or a telephone, and the usual collection of thick-lipped natives. We stayed here to unload a lot of bulky school-desks and chairs destined to be used by the semi-naked youth of the vicinity, and a few of our company went ashore merely to walk lazily about the village.
Next, a second stop at Cebu for the mails bound Manilaward, a good-by for the second time to our friends, and the Uranus now kept back down the coast toward Dumaguete, a prosperous town on the rich sugar-island of Negros. At ten o’clock that night we were off again, and Tuesday noon ushered us in to Iloilo, the second city of the Philippines. A lot of “go-downs” (store-houses) and dwellings on the swampy peninsula made a fearfully stupid-looking place, and the glare off the sheet-iron roofs was blinding. Scarcely a foot above tide-water, Iloilo was far less prepossessing than Manila, but everyone seemed cordial, and friends were so glad to see us that we appeared to confer a favor in stopping off to see them. The surroundings of Iloilo are far more picturesque than those of Manila, and just across the bay a wooded island, whose high altitude stands out in bold contrast to the marshes over which the city steeps, gave an outlook from the town that compensated for the inlook over dusty streets and dirty quays. The English club occupied its usually central position in the commercial section of the city, and formed an oasis of refreshment in the midst of the thirsty desert of iron roofs surrounding it. And if any single stanza of verse could have been quoted to describe the feelings of a newly arrived guest, sitting in a long chair on the club piazza and looking off at the bubbling volumes of hot air rising from those roofs, it would have been that in which the poet says:
“Where the latitude’s mean and the longitude’s low,
Where the hot winds of summer perennially blow,