A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

While we were still talking of the storm, there came a shout from the tribunal next door, and the noise and rattle of the four-horse escort wagon starting down to Libas. That could mean but one thing—States mail, the which, as we had seen none of it for six weeks, was particularly welcome. But we wondered what boat had come in in such a storm, and, the unexpected always happening, were not wholly unprepared to learn that that disreputable old tub the General Blanco had made harbor safe and sound. It took till nearly midnight to get the mail up and distributed, but we stayed up for it. There were actually eight sacks of mail for our little colony, and we went over to the tribunal and watched the mail sacks opened, and seized on our share with avidity, while we alternately blessed and despised the skipper of the Blanco for getting caught out in the tempest.

This was not the last feat the Blanco was destined to achieve during my stay in Capiz. She had a habit of dropping into port in weather that it seemed no boat could live in. Once she came in about two P.M. in a tremendous sea, bringing a single American passenger—a girl of twenty-one, a Baptist missionary. As the Blanco had no cabins, the captain was forced to lock his native passengers in the engine room, where no doubt they contributed much to the enjoyment of the engineer and his aids. He had the deck chair of this girl carried up on his bridge and lashed, and she was lashed to the chair. There they two rode out the storm. The captain said that from eleven o’clock till two, when he made the shelter of Batan Bay, he expected his boat to be swamped any instant, and he expressed his unqualified admiration for the way in which this girl faced her possible doom. He concluded with a favorite Filipino ejaculation, “Abao las Americanas,” which in this case may be freely translated as “What women the Americans are!”

The Blanco is still skipping defiantly over the high seas between Iloilo and Capiz, though after all her hairbreadth escapes she came near ending herself in a typical way. She started out one night from Capiz for Iloilo, a heavenly calm night, bright moonlight, and a sea smooth as a floor. Two or three miles from the port, a large island called Olatayan lies off the coast—a single mountain rising out of the sea. Everybody on the Blanco, including the watch and the steersman, thought it a good night for sleep, and left the General to steer her own course. The General made straight for Olatayan, and ran her nose up on the beach. She stayed there two weeks, and was beaten up by bad weather, and assistance had to be sent to get her off. Then she had to be pretty well rebuilt, and repainted. At the time of all these happenings I was in Iloilo, whither I had gone for treatment of an abscess of the middle ear, and as I depended on the Blanco for getting back, felt personally injured by her antics. I went several times to the office of her agents, one of the big English trading firms, to inquire how the wreck was getting along, and what the prospect was for a return to Capiz before Christmas. The man at the desk did not look characteristically English, and on my first appearance I addressed him tentatively in Spanish. He answered in that language, and we continued to use it. On one of the later visits this gentleman was not visible, but in his place a red-headed, freckled youth, with the map of Scotland outlined on his rugged countenance, presided over the collection of inkstands and ledgers. Naturally, I accosted him in English, whereupon the shape of my former interlocutor rose up from behind a screen and remarked, “By Jove, I thought you were Spanish, don’t you know? and have been talking to you all this time in Spanish. What a sell!”

Failing the Blanco, I took passage for Capiz on the Fritz, a craft one or two degrees smaller and rustier than the old General. Of all the weird experiences I ever had, that twenty-four hours was the weirdest. They cleared out a sort of pantry or lazaretto just back of the deck engine-house for me to use as a stateroom, and I slept on the pantry shelf. Some kind of steam pipes must have passed under it, for it grew so hot that several times I had to vacate and get down on the floor. Then we met a little wind as we rounded the north coast, and I was sick. A family of Filipino aristocrats came on board at Estancia, and the ladies elected to share my retreat. They had several servants and one or two babies and other necessaries of life, and they left me only a corner of the pantry shelf, against which I propped my weary and seasick frame. We made Capiz just at dusk, and never was a wanderer more eager to see home. There on the bank were two of my friends, who said they were invited out to dinner and were to bring me if I arrived in time. So we went to that cheery American home with its spotless linen, its silver and china. For six weeks I had been living on Spanish “chow,” and the contrast made me serenely happy. It was almost worth enduring—the six weeks of chow and the Fritz, I mean—to enjoy the change.

Calle Real, Manila

But to return to typhoons. We had several more that year, and I began to feel that typhoons were terribly exaggerated in books. But in 1903 we had an object lesson that I do not care to repeat. We went through all the usual preliminaries of typhoon signals, drizzle and gust. It was, I believe, the tenth of June. I stayed up late that night, working, and noticed that the gusts were increasing. Just at midnight I laid down my pen and started to go to bed, when there came a blast that shook the house like an earthquake and made me decide to wait a while. For the next three hours the storm raged in a very orgy of gladness. It slapped over nipa shacks with a single roar. It ripped up iron roofing and sent it hurtling about the air. The nipa of my roof was torn off bit by bit, and the rain came in torrents. I used my mackintosh to cover up the books, and put a heavy woollen blanket over the piano. Then I held an umbrella over the lamp to keep the rain from breaking the chimney, and sat huddling my pet monkey, which was crazed with fear. The houses on either side were taller than mine, and for this little hollow it seemed as if all the iron roofing of the town had steered a direct course. The pieces came down, borne by the shrieking wind, and landed with rattle and bang. My house swayed at every gust. It seemed that the cross-beams in the roof moved at least a foot each way. The little lanterns that burn in front of the houses were blown out by the wind, and when I peered out there was nothing but the inky darkness, the howling of the wind, the thrashing of the cocoanut trees, and the thud of falling nuts. From my side window I could see the native family next door to me all on their knees in front of an image of the Virgin, and once, in a lull, caught the sound of their prayers.

The storm reached its greatest violence by half past one and subsided by about three, at which time I went to bed and slept till morning. In spite of my fear I could not help laughing at my two Filipino girl servants. They slept undisturbed through the earlier gusts, but when the roof went and the water came in, they awoke—disgusted. The oldest one said, “Mucho aguacero” (a heavy shower) and cast about for a dry spot. She didn’t find any at first, but she finally concluded that the corner where my bed stood was highest; lifting the valence, they disappeared.

Next morning Capiz presented a pitiful sight. Many of the great almond trees on the plaza were uprooted and the others dismembered. The little nipa houses were flat on the ground or drunkenly sprawling at every slant and angle. Even the best houses had suffered. The constabulary cuartel was absolutely wrecked. The Supervisor’s kitchen was gone, and his wife mourned for her dishes, which were scattered up and down the length of the street. The home of the scout officer was jruined. He and his wife had taken shelter under a stone wall, and been drenched for three or four hours. The young mangoes had been strewn on the ground, and there was no hope of that crop. Many of the cocoanut trees were broken off, and where this was not the case, the nuts had been whipped off. The banana trees were entirely destroyed. Altogether it was a sorry sight, and we all got out and walked about and viewed the ruins, just as we do for a cyclone at home.

The storm had an aftermath in the rescue of an Englishman, Captain B——, a pearl fisher. He was anchored under the lee of a small island in the sea between Panay and Masbate. He was in a small lorcha, or sailing vessel, with no barometer, his glass having been left on a lorcha of larger tonnage, which was at another point. The heavy wind caught them without warning almost, and its impact soon pressed the lorcha over. Captain B—— found himself struggling in the water—able to swim, but drowning, as he expressed it, with the spindrift which was hurtling into his face. He kept one arm going, and partially protected his face with the other. Then in the inky dark he touched a human body. It was the leg of one of his crew, four of whom were clinging to one of the lorcha’s boats. It kept turning over and over, and they had to go with it each time. Captain B—— hung to the prow, so his circuit was not so wide as that of the others, but his body—arms, legs, and chest—was literally ploughed by the rough usage. Once he let go and lost the prow as it came up, and the fright of this was enough to strengthen his hold. They were in the water clinging to this all the rest of the night, the next day, and the next night. One man died of exhaustion, and one went mad and let go. On the second morning they succeeded in bailing it out by means of an undershirt, which Captain B—— had been wearing, and which, though torn to ribbons across the front, was whole in the back. They remained in the boat all day, beaten on by the tropical sun, having been thirty hours in the water without food or drink.