Yesterdays in the Philippines

by Joseph Earle Stevens

“Them you cannot have till Monday,” replied the hireling in charge.

“Then I shall have to sail without them,” answered the Captain, and he stormed out of the office to find our consul, whom he hoped would straighten matters out. But the efforts of the consul were of no avail. The king-pin of the harbor office refused to be interviewed, and the Captain of the yacht returned aboard with fire in his eye. After a council of war had been held, it was decided to sail, papers or no papers, and the two soldiers who were pacing up and down the deck were told the vessel was going to sea.

“But we won’t let you go without your papers,” said they.

“Papers or no papers, we are going to sea to-night,” roared the Captain. “And if you fellows don’t git aboard into that boat mighty quick, we’ll be feeding you to the sharks.”

The Gatling guns and show of rifles in the companion-way looked eloquent, and the two carabineros, murmuring that they would surely be killed for neglect of duty when they got ashore, were pushed down the gangway into a row-boat as the Eleanor got her anchor up, and steamed out of the Bay in the face of Providence and the southwest wind, almost across the bows of the Spanish flagship Reina Cristina. A tremendous diplomatic hullabaloo resulted. The consul was summoned, the guards were blown up by the discharge of verbal powder, and it almost looked as if our representative would have to send for war-ships. But the matter has finally been straightened out, and the passengers on the Eleanor have probably had their Easter Sunday at Hong Kong.

Curiously enough, for April, another typhoon has recently sailed through the gap in the mountains to the north of our capital, and gone swirling over to China, leaving in its wake a sunken steamer, which foundered with her living freight of close to three hundred souls. Out in front of the big steamship office across the way hundreds of natives are inquiring for their brothers or husbands or children. It seems the Gravina, a ship of the best part of a thousand tons, was coming down from the north, heavily loaded with rice, tobacco, and native boys, who, for not paying their tax bills, had been drafted into service for the purpose of being sent against the savages in Mindanao. She had only fifty more miles to go before reaching the entrance to Manila Bay, when the barometer fell, the wind hauled to the northwest, and the typhoon struck her. Her after-hatchway was washed overboard, and, deep in the water as she was, the seas washed over into the opening. As fast as fresh coverings were substituted they were ripped off and carried away. The engines became disabled, the water rushed into the boiler-room, putting out the fires, and the passengers, who were locked into the cabins, were panic-stricken. The steamer began to settle, and under the onslaught of a big sea, accompanied with terrific wind, suddenly heeled over and foundered with all on board, save three, the Captain standing on the bridge as she went down, crying “Viva España.” Two natives and a Spanish woman got clear of the ship before she sucked them under, and floated about on an awning-pole and a deck-table. Scarcely had the survivors got clear of one danger before a shark swooped down on the Spanish woman, and, attracted by her lighter color, bit off a limb. He paid no attention to the two natives kicking out their feet near by, and, though neither of them could swim a stroke, they managed to paddle ashore on their supports, after being in the water two nights and a day.

These two men, the only survivors of the large passenger-list of the Gravina, came into our office yesterday, and, after giving a graphic description of the catastrophe, easily got us to loosen our purse-strings. The accident is the worst that has occurred for many a day, and there is a gloom over the whole city. The newspapers came out with black borders, and many families are bereaved.

May 20th.

The more I see of these native servants, the more I appreciate that they are great fabricators and excuse-makers. Your boy, for example, every now and then wants an advance of five or ten dollars on his salary. His father has just died, he tells you, and he needs the money to pay for the saying of a mass for the repose of his soul. Then comes another boy, who says that by his sister’s marrying somebody or other his aunt has become his grandmother, and he wants cinco pesos, to buy her a present of a fighting-cock or something else. This matter of relationship here in the Philippines is a most delicate one to keep control of, and in the matter of deaths, births, and marriages among your servants’ relations it is very essential that you keep an accurate list of the family tree, so that you may check up any tendency on their part to kill off their fathers and mothers more than twice or three times during the year for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. As an example of this, my own boy actually had the cheek to ask me for the loan of a dozen dollars to arrange for the repose of the soul of one of his relatives I had once before assisted him to bury.

I seem to have gone a long way in my chronicles without speaking much of the native “ladies” in Manila, and I owe them an apology. But one of them the other day so swished her long pink calico train in front of a pony that was cantering up to the club with a carromata in which two of us were seated, that we were dumped out into a muddy rice-field by the wayside. So the apology should be mutual. The costumes worn by the women are far from simple and are made up of that brilliant skirt with long train that is swished around and tucked into the belt in front, the short white waist that, at times divorced from the skirt below, has huge flaring sleeves of piña fibre which show the arms, and the costly piña handkerchief which, folded on the diagonal, encircles the neck. They wear no hats, often go without stockings, and invariably walk as if they were carrying a pail of water on their heads. They generally chew betelnuts, which color the mouth an ugly red, smoke cigars, and put so much cocoanut-oil on their straight, black hair that it is not pleasant to get to leeward of them in an open tram-car. Otherwise they are generally the mothers of many children and often play well on the harp.