Mortuary Chapel in Paco Cemetery, Manila
The lorcha was a dismasted hull, no more, with a Filipino family and one or two men aboard to steer. We had a Scotch engineer who might have been the original of Kipling’s McFee. I spoke to him about the rumor as he leaned over the side staring at the lorcha, and he gave vent to his feelings in a description of the general appearance of the lorcha in language too technically nautical for me to transcribe. At the end he waxed mildly profane, and threatened to “pull the dom nose out of her” when once he got her outside of Corregidor.
The rumor proved a canard, however, and we lined up at eleven o’clock, while the doctor counted us to see that we were all alive and well. Then up anchor and away, with the breeze born of motion cooling off the ship.
The engineer was not able to keep his dire threat about the lorcha’s nose, but it is only just to say that he tried to. We met a heavy sea outside of Corregidor, and never have I seen anything more dizzy and drunken and pathetic than the rolls and heaves of the lorcha.
At Iloilo we met the army transport McClellan, and continued our voyage upon her to Capiz. We bade farewell to her with regret, and consumed in an anticipatory passion of renunciation our last meal with ice water, fresh butter, and fresh beef. The McClellan took away the troops of the Sixth Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry, and left us, in their stead, a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry, which remained perhaps two months, and was then stationed at Iloilo, leaving us with nothing but a troop of native voluntarios, or scouts, officered by Americans, and a small detachment of native constabulary. We had barely accustomed ourselves to this, and ceased to predict insurrection and massacre, when the cholera, which we had hoped to avoid, descended upon us.
I am sorry that I can relate no deeds of personal heroism or of self-sacrifice in the epidemic. There didn’t seem to be any place for them, and I am not certain that I knew how to be heroic and self-sacrificing. I was not, however, so nervous about the cholera as some Americans were, and I like to convince myself that if any of my friends had sickened with it and needed me, I should have gone unhesitatingly and nursed them. Fortunately (or unfortunately for the proof of my valor) this was not the case. The scourge stayed with us between two and three months. The highest mortality was between a hundred and a hundred and fifty deaths a day, and by its ravages Capiz was reduced from a first-class city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants to a second-class city of less than twenty thousand. I kept a brief record, however, of our experiences during that time, and once again, by permission of The Times, insert them here.
September 8. Miss P——, Dr. B——, and I were out for a long walk this afternoon. They left me at my door just as Mrs. L—— and Mrs. T—— drove up in the latter’s victoria. Both ladies were much excited by the news that a parao had landed at the playa with one dead man and a case of cholera still living. The other people of the parao had scattered before the health officers got hold of the matter.
September 9. The story about the parao has been confirmed. We had hoped to escape the epidemic, but are in for it now, for certain.
September 10. It is rumored that two cases of cholera developed yesterday. Dr. B—— denies it, says they are nothing but acute dysentery. Dr. S—— thinks they are cholera.