[Entrance to Manila Bay]
You enter Manila Bay thru a narrow passage in the middle of which is
the famous Island of Corregidor, the "Rock," the "Gibraltar of the Far
East," the "Home of the Big Guns," that guards the harbor. It is also
a hydroplane station of the United States. The island is a stalwart
sentinel, as it were, at the harbor's mouth. Nearby are two other
"watch dogs" of Uncle Sam, known as "El Fraile" and "El Carabao,"
two other well fortified islands holding many a surprise for any
invading fleet.
Down the bay your steamer glides amid the shipping of many nations
and the launches of the customs and quarantine soon appear to "look
the stranger over."
MANILA.--After the quarantine and customs inspection you get off
your steamer and you are in Manila, the capital of the Philippine
Archipelago. Your first impressions are of the tourist sort. Your
interest is immediately arrested by the dress and habits of the
Filipinos, of the Chinese, and of the various residents from every
quarter of the globe. The water buffalo or the carabao, the one horse
carriage, or the carromata, and the slippers, or "chinelas," worn in
the streets by the poor will startle you to the realization that you
are in a world other than your own. The every-day clothes worn by the
people give you an ensemble of all the colors imaginable, more so when
there is a procession, parade or similar festivities--royal purple,
plum, heliotrope, magenta, psolferino, scarlet, geranium, salmon,
pinks, greens, vivid and tender, all the blues, yellow, orange,
champaca, in short every hue, shade, and tint that art has borrowed
from nature or has invented.
You stroll around the City and one of the first things you notice
is the various means of transportation. There is the automobile,
from the popular Ford Lizzie to the Packard Limousine; there is the
one-horse carriage, in shape and looks unique in the world; and there
is the street car propelled by the familiar electricity.
The Walled City.--Near the pier you see a cluster of buildings
enclosed by solid stone walls about twenty feet high. This is the
famous Walled City or Intramuros, a remnant of Spanish days. It is
something less than a mile long and half a mile wide. The walls used to
be fortresses with which the Spaniards used to repel the many attacks
and invasions. To go into this Walled City is to remind you of Madrid,
Spain, with all its narrow streets and typical Spanish buildings. The
walls had been begun prior to the end of the sixteenth century;
before the next was far advanced, the place boasted of a cathedral,
hospitals, and a university; walled Manila had grown into quite a city.
The Walled City is the original Manila, of which every other part of
the modern city is, historically speaking, a suburb. Its battlemented
wall is a little over 2 1/2 miles in circuit, and is still for the
most part in an excellent state of preservation. The age of the walls
is hard to state; its oldest existing portions were undoubtedly built
before the end of the sixteenth century, but it has been continuously
patched and added to, almost up to the present generation. Parts of it
are from twenty to thirty feet in height and thickness. Considering
everything, it makes this district one of the best examples of a
mediæval walled town in existence.
[Fort Santiago]
While in this Walled City, do not fail to visit Fort Santiago, the
oldest part of Spanish Manila, long the citadel of the city, and now
the headquarters of the United States Army in the Philippines. It
probably stands very nearly on the site of the native fort which the
Spanish reconnoitering expedition carried by assault in 1570. It
has undergone comparatively little external change in three
centuries. There are plenty of traditions connected with the old
place--stories of cells below the river level for the "unintentional"
execution of inconvenient persons, and of chambers found filled with
dislocated skeletons. Though none of these places are now identifiable,
it is a historical fact that one cell, either in the fort or in the
wall to the east of it (since removed), was the scene, as late as the
night of the 31st of August, 1896, of a tragedy much resembling that of
the Black Hole of Calcutta. Fifty-six out of sixty Filipinos who had
been crowded into it, on being arrested on suspicion of complicity
in the insurrection then raging, were the victims of the poisoned
atmosphere or of the desperate struggle that took place within.
Pursuing your travels around Manila you see an admixture of the
quaintly native, of the mediæval, and of the strictly modern. In
architecture, you see splendid examples of Grecian, Moorish, Spanish,
Renaissance, Gothic, and Byzantine. Likewise you see many native nipa
houses, small yet cool and cozy, and exceedingly appropriate for the
needs of the climate.
[Three Manilas]
For in reality there are three Manilas, which are still
noticeable. First, there is the Manila of the original Malay, which,
with its nipa shacks, its carabaos, and its quaint fishing boats,
exists much as it did in the days of Raja Lacandola. Secondly,
there is the Manila of the sixteenth and seventeenth century
Spaniard--adventurer, merchant, and crusader in equal parts--who, in
the churches and convents, the walls and gates, and the half-Moorish
domestic architecture, has left ineffaceable memorials of the fact
that this, the oldest of the European settlements in the East, was in
its day among the chief glories of the "once imperial race." Finally,
there is the Americanized Manila of to-day, the town of electricity,
motor cars, macadamized roads and sewers and steel bridges, well on
its way to become one of the beautiful cities of the world.
[Costumes]
The costumes of the women are admittedly unique and attractive. Old
Spain gave the peasant's neckerchief that has evolved into the pañuelo;
the court train of her damas gave the saya; her priests gave the
tapis; the ground plan is Malayan, the sleeves swelled to suit the
climate. This, which has changed but little in over three centuries,
is the predominating model; but America, Paris, half Asia, and the
South Pacific contribute also to the revue des modes: georgette crèpe
and coconut fiber rain cape and skirt, white duck and rengue, all in
the same rain shower on the same block.
[The Shops]
Modern shops with plate-glass fronts, office buildings with their
elevators, elbow in between the open-fronted Chino shops of the
Rosario. And the carabao snails by, and the "little gray hawk" that
"hangs aloft in the air," happens to be an aëroplane.
[The Pasig]
Down by the entrance to the Pasig River modern steamers are warped
to the river wall, and farther up dumpy river launches shuffle about
their work of conveying to the big household of Manila chickens,
pigs, fruits, and vegetables; a string of bamboo-roofed cascoes lie
in wait by the market; sturdy bargemen with thirty-foot bamboo poles
shove the unwieldy lorchas about, and the tiny bancas now toddle
bravely along, now reel and wobble from the cuffs of their elders. The
river is navigable for miles, and a trip upstream reveals successive
combinations of meadows, high banks fringed with feathery bamboo,
and here and there a village with its nipa houses and its gray stone
church embowered in groves of coconuts and mangoes.