Yesterdays in the Philippines

by Joseph Earle Stevens

On the fatal day, my colleague and I drove to the scene shortly after sunrise, and crowds of people had already begun to come together from the adjoining districts. Carriages of all classes rolled in from all directions. Chinamen with cues, natives with their wives, women with their infants, young girls and children, old men and maidens, were all there, dressed in their best clothes.

I knew it would be useless to stand in the crowd, so I pushed over toward a nipa hut, whose windows, which were filled with natives, looked fairly out on the scaffold itself. In the name of my camera I asked admittance, which was cordially accorded, since we were “Ingleses,” and on going to the upper floor we had a free view over the crowd below toward the fatal platform, with its two posts to which were attached two narrow seats. The crowd increased; they climbed into bamboo-trees, which bent to the ground; they tried to surge up on the lower framework of the house in which we were standing, and only desisted as the proprietress slashed the encroachers right and left with a bamboo-cane. The roofs of neighboring houses were black with people, the windows swarmed, and the street below heaved. Our hostess was pleasant, though fiery, and all she wanted in return for our admission was a photograph of herself. The favor was granted, and she gave us two chairs to sit in. The crowd increased, and the guards had hard work keeping back the struggling mass. Every available square inch of space was filled, and a sea of heads pulsated before us.

At last, cries of “aquí vienen” (here they come) arose, and the solemn procession came into view after its long journey from the central jail, over a mile away. First came the cavalry, then a group of priests, among whom marched a man wearing an apron, carrying the sacred banner of the Church, embroidered in black and gold. Next marched the prison officials, and behind them came two small, open tip-carts, drawn by ponies, in which travelled the condemned men, each supported by a couple of priests who held crucifixes before their eyes, exhorting them to confess and believe.

Following the carts, which were surrounded by a square of soldiers, walked the executioner himself, a condemned criminal, but spared from being executed by his choosing to accept the office of public executioner. Last of all came a small company of soldiers, with bayonetted guns, and the whole procession advanced to the foot of the steps leading to the platform.

The garroting instrument seems to consist of a collar of brass, whose front-piece opens on a hinge, and part of whose rear portion is susceptible to being suddenly pushed forward by the impulse of a big fourth-rate screw working through the post, something after the system of a letter-press. The criminal sentenced to death is seated on a small board attached to the upright, his neck is placed in the brass collar, the front-piece is snapped to, and when all is ready, the executioner merely gives the handle of the screw a complete turn. The small moving back-piece in the collar is by this means suddenly pushed forward against the top of the spine of the unfortunate, and death comes instantaneously from the snapping of the spinal cord.

The executioners in Manila have always been themselves criminals, and in breaking the spinal cords of their fellow-criminals, they certainly pay a price for keeping their own vertebræ intact. Like most men in their profession, however, they are well paid, and this operator got sixteen dollars besides his regular monthly salary of twenty, for each man on whom he turned the screw.

The sight of the unfortunate prisoners in the little carts, supported by the priests, was pitiable in the extreme, and their faces bore marks of unforgetable anguish. The priests ascended the platform, and the man with the embroidered banner was careful to stand far away at the side, for, according to the religious custom of the epoch, a condemned man who merely happens to touch the standard of the Church on his way to the scaffold cannot thereafter be executed, but suffers only life imprisonment.

The Fourth of July, ’95. Execution by the Garrote.

“My watch stopped and the cord-pull to my camera broke just as the screw was turned on the first man to be executed.”