An Englishwoman in the Philippines

by Mrs. Campbell Dauncey

In the early morning a fleet of paraos (native sailing boats) goes across to Iloilo to the market with fowls, mangoes, maize, pine-apples, etc., and our cook took passage in one of these vessels to go and do his marketing, for it is impossible to buy a single thing in Nagaba, where the people only just keep enough for their own scanty consumption. He returned about nine o’clock, and I went into the kitchen to inspect the result of his shopping. The kitchen was in the regular native fashion, just a prolongation of the living-room, with the same split-bamboo floor, through which could be seen the fowls and pigs wandering about under the house. There was no ceiling below the thatch and rafters, and everything seemed very nice and trim—the fireplace being a high table of concrete with holes in the top. In each hole they light little pieces of charcoal, so that each pot has its own fire, which seems a cumbersome method, but it saves fuel, and must be quite enough trouble for a Filipino, who has probably one pot of rice to boil and no more. From the roof hang all sorts of dried fruits or vegetables, and queer little bundles of herbs for flavourings and for medicines as well. I noticed that amongst the things the cook had brought he had not forgotten the day’s supply of buyo. When first I used to go into the kitchen here to look at the day’s supplies, I saw this little packet, not unlike a lily-leaf, tied up with a wisp of twine, and classed it amongst the mysterious little odds and ends intended for flavourings. But one day I had the curiosity to ask, and the cook, with much shyness and shrugging up of his shoulders, told me it was buyo (betel-nut). I could quite believe it when I looked at his crimson teeth, and was thankful the supply was only for himself and not the other servants, for I could not stand being waited on at table by a person with a mouth as if he had been drinking fresh blood. The betel-chewers expectorate a great deal, though they can’t possibly do so more than their compatriots and the Spaniards and Americans, but the red expectoration is horrible, somehow, and I’ve often seen all the pavement outside a house or shop quite crimson with the great splashes of betel-juice ejected by the inmates.

We spent all the morning pottering about and reading, and regretting that we could not carry out our plan of bathing again when the tide was up and deep below the house, as we were expecting a party of English and American friends from Iloilo, who had announced that they would visit us on Sunday morning. But the party never landed after all, which was rather a disappointment, as we were done out of our bathe, besides having no use for a dozen or two of sodas which we had brought over with infinite trouble.

After the siesta, we thought we would make use of the boat for a little trip, so we sent into the village for two men who could row; and they fetched her to the beach and rowed us up the little estuary, past the village and up the river. Unfortunately, the tide had gone out again—very far out—and the river was too low to go as far as we had intended, which was to a convent and church, the corrugated roofs of which we had seen from a height. So we just went a little way up the narrow, muddy river, but we could not see much as we were below the level of the thick bushes that fringed the banks. At last we stuck and could get no further, so we turned back and went up a little back-water, and landed by a queer sort of lime-kiln in a palm-grove.

We scrambled ashore, and walked up a track through the woods of mangoes and palms, till we got up a good height, with a map view of the river winding far below and a glimpse of the roofs of the convent. Down in the valley the land was all cultivated, chiefly in maize-fields and bananas, which looked green enough though uninteresting, but the hills were pretty, and wooded with trees of all tones of green, and the distances exquisite in gradations of mauves and blues. From where we stood, the sea was quite hidden, for we had our backs to it, and the hill between us and it; and the view spread out below was like some tropical version of the valley of the Doons. We went on up through the wood, still big dark mango trees with leaves like laurels—dark and shiny—and feathery, graceful cocoanut-palms in between. The ground was all covered with straggling plants, wild mint, and dead palm-branches, while wild pine-apples grew in quantities, each fruit sitting in a flat bush of spiky yellowish leaves, and looking delicious!

By a very primitive hut in a clearing we came upon some natives, clad only in short white drawers, who were very nice and cheerful; very different from the people in the towns. They knew very little Spanish, but we made out that their chief occupations were gathering the fruit of the pine-apples for food and the leaves to make into the thread to weave the piña muslin. They made charcoal too, and all this information C—— elicited in Visayan and a few words of Spanish. I don’t suppose they trouble themselves much about even those simple occupations, and I should think the less thought they gave to the blessings of civilisation the happier they would be. What good on earth can education, whisky, votes, appendicitis, electric light, a free press, frozen meat, clothes, and pianos do to such happy simple souls? It seems so odd to think that in one part of the world cultivated, thinking men are trying their level best to destroy for others an ideally happy, simple life, while at home their one profession is a wish to return to it themselves, and their only idea of a holiday is to go off and camp in the Rockies, where they can approach as nearly as possible to the conditions one sees here in the country places. Indeed, as I told you, far from encouraging a simple, agricultural life, the land and other taxes, and the education they go to maintain, are having the effect of choking agriculture and hurrying the half-taught countrymen into the towns.

But even with the elect, with the Filipinos, the sums of money raised should be spent on roads, on remitting the poll-tax, on reducing the export duties—and then, when a generation or two has been peaceful and well fed, it would be time enough to educate the masses—if such universal education is necessary or beneficial to such a people, or any people at all. In the white countries, with all their thousands of years of progress through Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, one can’t be sure, judging from the tone of literature that appeals to the masses, whether education has been an unmitigated boon; but hastily to apply the same methods to this infinitely lower development of the human race, is an absurdity that would be laughable if it were not pitiful and dangerous. And it seems so strange to think of a country being governed against its inclinations, not by legislators trained in its problems, but by a body of electors on the other side of the world, not one of whom knows more of its conditions and needs than the first cabman one would hail in London or Paris. Strange, is it not, when you come to think of it?

Well, to get back to our trip up the river in Guimaras, we came down through the woods again, and got into our boat about sunset, rowing back to the beach opposite the house in a pale crimson sunset glow, with long dark shadows of trees and houses falling on the sand, and when we got out at the house, we walked up over the rocks and pools, and saw the little bright metallic-looking crabs running into their holes again. We tried very hard to catch one, but it was impossible, for they run sideways at a great pace, simply vanishing like so many harlequins of crab-land.

A Three-Man Breeze off Guimaras.