Adventures in the Philippine Islands

by Paul P. de La Gironière

“You are going, for no good purpose, to expose yourselves to very great dangers, against which you have no means of defence, for before you have gone far you will see thousands of caymans rising out of the deep water; they will come to attack you, and what can you oppose to those ferocious and invulnerable monsters? Your guns and bullets cannot wound them. And as for escape by rowing quickly, that is not possible. In their own element they swim much faster than your canoes, and when they come up to you they will turn your boats up-side-down with far more ease than you can drive it along; and then the frightful scene will begin, from which you cannot escape.”

There was much good sense in what they said, and there can be no doubt that it was most imprudent of us to embark in a little frail canoe, and to make a trip over a lake inhabited by such numbers of caymans, and especially since it was to be feared that the lake did not supply fish enough to satisfy their voracity; and of course when enraged by hunger they were more to be dreaded.

But we were never deterred by dangers or difficulties; so, taking no account of the prognostics of my prudent Indians, we, while they were delivering their long speeches, had lashed together two canoes for greater security.

We had not proceeded many yards from the bank, when we all experienced feelings of alarm, attributable, no doubt, to the expectation of danger being immediate, as well as to the aspect of the place which presented itself to our view.

We were down in the deepest part of a gulf, surrounded by lofty and precipitous mountains, which were externally covered with very thick vegetation. They, on all sides, presented a barrier, through which it was impossible to pass. The shadows which they cast over the water, at the extreme point of the lake, produced the effect of half darkness, which, in conjunction with the silence prevailing in that dismal solitude, gave it an aspect so dreary and saddening, as to produce in us most painful feelings; each of us as it were, struck with terror, kept his thoughts to himself, and no one spoke.

Our canoes went on, moving farther and farther from the brink from which we had embarked; and it glided easily over the glassy sheet of water, which is never agitated by even the roughest gales, and does not receive the rays of the sun except when that luminary is at the zenith.

The silence in which we were absorbed was suddenly broken by the appearance of a cayman, which raised its hideous head, and opened its enormous jaws, as if about to swallow the canoes, as it darted after us.

The moment was come; the grand drama announced by the Indians was about to be realised, or all our fears would be dissipated without any delay. There was not one instant to be spared, and we had no choice but to try and escape as fast as we could, for the enemy was gaining on us, and it would be madness to await his attack. I was steering, and I exerted myself to the utmost to get away from the danger and to escape to the shore. But the amphibious beast was approaching so fast that he could almost seize us, when Lindsay, running all risks, fired his gun direct at the brute.

The effect produced by the detonation was prodigious, for, as it were by enchantment, it dispelled all our apprehensions. The awful silence was broken in the most striking manner; the cayman was frightened, and sank abruptly to the bottom of the lake; hundreds of echoes resounded from all sides, like the discharges of a rifle corps, and these were repeated to the tops of the mountains, while clouds of cormorants, starting from all the trees around, uttered their screaming and piercing cries, in which they were joined by the Indians, who shouted with joy on seeing from the bank the flight of the hostile beast, of which they are always so much afraid.

All then became tranquil, and we proceeded at our leisure. From time to time a cayman made his appearance; but the explosions caused by our firing soon drove the monsters down into the deepest parts of the lake, more frightened than hurt, for even when we struck them our balls rebounded from their scales without piercing them.