We replied that we did not think blows would make them any brighter, on which he laughed and said perhaps we were right, as we certainly had remarkably good servants.
Another guest, Mr M——, was talking about Philippine food, and observed that tomatoes grew so well here. I said I thought they were miserable failures, as they are about the size of walnuts, and quite green. But he maintained that that was because the Filipino just sticks his tomato plants in the ground and goes off to sit in the shade or to a cock-fight, and when he sees any sign of fruit on the plants, he picks it and takes it to market. Any notion of tilling the soil—weeding or manuring—is absolutely unknown to these people, or if known, carefully avoided. Mr M—— said he had seen tomatoes, grown by Chinamen, as good as the very best out of a hothouse at home. There are several Chinese potagères in the town where rows of trim little beds may be seen thick with extraordinarily luxuriant crops of vegetables of every sort, but out here no one will eat anything grown by the Chinamen, as those enterprising people employ some dreadful and unmentionable methods of agriculture. Besides this, there are many germs in the teeming, prolific air which invest vegetables such as cabbages, lettuce, etc., and make them very unsafe experiments, even if one can procure any. When I was in Manila, there was a good deal of talk at dinner tables, and much writing in the papers about some American scientist who professed to have found out a way to “treat” the Philippine green lettuces before eating them, so as to destroy some dreadful germ which causes horrible complaints. But it seemed to me less trouble and a great deal safer to give up lettuce as a bad job!
The great and terrible fear in the Philippines is the germ of a disease called “sprue”—a sort of wasting away—which is very difficult to remedy, and almost ineradicable.
Melons would grow well here, for in the wet season anything in the nature of a gourd springs up like a weed—a habit which suits the Filipino agriculturist to perfection. Some of the more energetic spirits fasten a piece of bejuco from the marrow plant up to a window, and gourd vines may often be seen obligingly toiling up a string to hand fruit in to the weary dwellers in a nipa hut. Nevertheless, melons are only to be got from Hong Kong, and even then they are a costly delicacy. Some friends sent us half a watermelon a few days ago, as a present, but we did not like to accept anything so valuable, and insisted on paying for it. What a treat it was!
With the rainy season we also have a tiny hard native fruit that looks like a damson outside, but has white flesh with a stone like a date-stone, and is entirely devoid of any flavour of any sort. I tried having this fruit stewed, but it was even nastier than when raw. When we were at Nagaba for the day, in the spring, we got some fruit like knobs of rose-coloured wax, pink all through, with black pips, and rather tart, but also tasteless. I suppose all these insipid, nasty little native fruits could be cultivated into something nice, in the way that cherries have been developed, and apples and everything else, from the tasteless wild fruit. At present, however, they are tolerable only to the native palate. The best of them is a tiny brown fruit called lazones, which has a fluffy thin brown skin, and grey brown flesh in divisions like an orange, each division containing a large green seed. The flavour of the lazones is sharp, rather nice, and very refreshing, but this fruit only comes from Luzon, and is very expensive, besides being half-rotten by the time it gets here. Bananas, pine-apples, and mangoes—that is all. Bananas one gets unutterably sick of, and pine-apples too—and mangoes, even if one likes them (which we do not), give one prickly heat. In fact tinned strawberries and raspberries are about the best Philippine fruits.
We have received an invitation to the banquet in honour of Mr Taft and his party on the 15th—on the payment of 12 pesos each. But we may have to sail before that date if our Hong Kong steamer comes in. I shall be very sorry if we miss that event, for I think the Taft utterances would be well worth 25 shillings a head, though that does seem a pretty stiff sum for an Iloilo banquet!
LETTER XXXIX.
A LAST DAY AT NAGABA—THE “SECWAR”
Iloilo, August 11, 1905.