Chapter I

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A WOMAN'S JOURNEY

THROUGH

THE PHILIPPINES

Thanks are due Messrs. Harper and Brothers and the editors of

"The Criterion" and of "Everybody's Magazine" for permission

to republish parts of the chapters on Sulu, Zamboanga, and

Bongao, respectively.

A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH THE PHILIPPINES

ON A CABLE SHIP THAT LINKED TOGETHER THE STRANGE LANDS SEEN EN ROUTE.

By Florence Kimball Russel

Author of "Born to the Blue" Etc.

Boston, L. C. Page and Company--MDCCCCVII

Copyright, 1907

By L. C. Page & Company (Incorporated)

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

All rights reserved

First Impression, June, 1907

Colonial Press

Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, U. S. A.

TO

My Husband

WITHOUT WHOSE INSPIRATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT

THIS BOOK WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

CONTENTS

I. Introductory Statements

II. Dumaguete

III. Misamis

IV. Iligan

V. Cagavan

VI. Cebu

VII. Zamboanga

VIII. Sulu

IX. Bongao

X. Tampakan and the Home Stretch

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Belle of Bongao

Laying a Shore End in a Philippine Coast Town

"Until eventide the summer skies above us slept, as sid the

summer seas below us"

A Philippine Coast Town

Dumaguete

Diving for Articles Thrown from the Ship

"Hard at work establishing an office in the town"

"Two women beating clothes on the rocks of a little stream"

Church and convento, Dumaguete

The Old Fort at Misamis

"The native band serenaded us"

The Lintogup River

A Misamis Belle

Laying Cable from a Native Schooner

A Street in Iligan

Market-day at Iligan

"It was evident that he was a personage of no little importance"

St. Thomas Church, Cebu

Magellan's Chapel, Cebu

Unloading Hemp at Cebu

Grove of Palms near Cebu

Ormoc

Releasing the Buoy From the Cable in a Heavy Sea

Quarters of the Commanding Officer, Zamboanga

Officers' Quarters, Zamboanga

A Street in Zamboanga

Street Scene, Zamboanga--native Bathing-place, Zamboanga

The Pier at Sulu

Natives of Sulu

Moro Houses, Tuli

The Moro School for Boys, Sulu

Chinese, Moro, and Visayan Children, Sulu

Soldiers' Quarters, Bongao

Natives of Bongao

Toolawee

Market-day in a Moro Village

A Group of Moros

A Collection of Moro Weapons

Pasacao

A Woman's Journey Through the Philippines

Chapter I

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENTS

Life on a cable-ship would be a lotus-eating dream were it not for the

cable. But the cable, like the Commissariat cam-u-el in Mr. Kipling's

"Oonts," is--

"--a devil an' a ostrich an' a orphan child in one."

Whether we are picking it up, or paying it out; whether it is lying

inert, coil upon coil, in the tanks like some great gorged anaconda,

or gliding along the propelling machinery into some other tank, or

off into the sea at our bow or stern; whether the dynamometer shows

its tension to be great or small; whether we are grappling for it, or

underrunning it; whether it is a shore end to be landed, or a deep-sea

splice to be made, the cable is sure to develop most alarming symptoms,

and some learned doctor must constantly sit in the testing-room,

his finger on the cable's pulse, taking its temperature from time to

time as if it were a fractious child with a bad attack of measles,

the eruption in this case being faults or breaks or leakages or kinks.

The difficulty discovered, it must be localized. A hush falls over the

ship. Down to the testing room go the experts. Seconds, minutes, hours

crawl by. At last some one leaves the consultation for a brief space,

frowning heavily and apparently deep in thought. No one dares address

him, or ask the questions all are longing to have answered, and when

his lips move silently we know that he is muttering over galvanometer

readings to himself. During this time everyone talks in whispers,

and not always intelligently, of the electrostatic capacity of the

cable, absolute resistances, and the coefficients of correction, while

the youngest member of the expedition neglects her beloved poodle,

sonorously yclept "Snobbles," and no longer hangs him head downward

over the ship's rail.

At last the fault is discovered, cut out, and a splice made, the tests

showing the cable as good as new, whereupon the women return to their

chiffons, the child to her games, and the men, not on duty, to their

cigars, until the cessation of noise from the cable machinery, or the

engine-room bell signalling "full speed astern" warns us something

else may be amiss.

In the testing room, that Holy of Holies on board a cable-ship, the

fate of the _Burnside_ hangs upon a tiny, quivering spark of light

thrown upon the scale by the galvanometer's mirror. If this light

jumps from side to side, or trembles nervously, or perhaps disappears

entirely from the scale, our experts know the cable needs attention,

and perhaps the ship will have to stop for hours at a time until the

fault is located. If the trouble is not in the tanks, the paying-out

machinery must be metamorphosed into a picking-up apparatus, and

the cable already laid will be coiled back into the hold until the

fault appears, when it will be cut out and the two ends of cable

spliced. After this splice grows quite cool, tests are taken, and

if they prove satisfactory, we again resume our paying out, knowing

that while the spot of light on the galvanometer remains quietly in

one position, the cable being laid is electrically sound, and we can

proceed without interruption.

As may be imagined everyone on the ship got to think in megohms,

and scientific terms clung to our conversation just as the tar from

the cable tanks clung to our wearing apparel, while few among us but

had wild nightmares wherein the cable became a sentient thing, and

made faces at us as it leapt overboard in a continuous suicidal frenzy.

The cable-ship _Burnside_, as some may remember, was one of the first

prizes captured in the Spanish War. She had been a Spanish merchant

ship, the _Rita_, trading between Spain and all Spanish ports in the

West Indies, and when captured by the _Yale_, early in April, 1898,

was on her way to Havana with a cargo of goods. There is little about

her now, however, to suggest a Spanish coaster, save the old bell

marked "Rita" in front of the captain's cabin. The sight of this

bell always brings to mind the wild patriotism of those early days

of our war with Spain, when love of country was grown to an absorbing

passion which made one eager to surrender all for the nation's honour,

and stifled dread of impending separation--a separation that might

be forever--despite the rebel heart's fierce protest. The _Rita's_

bell reminds one also of a country less fortunate than our own,

and sometimes when looking at it, one can almost fancy the terror

and excitement of those aboard the Spanish coaster when the _Yale_

swept down upon her on that memorable April afternoon. But it is a

far cry from that day to this, and the _Burnside_, manned by American

sailors, flying Old Glory where once waved the red and yellow of

Spain's insignia, and laying American cable in American waters, is a

very different ship from the _Rita_, fleeing before her pursuers in

the West Indies.

When the _Burnside_ left Manila on December 23, 1900, for the cable

laying expedition in the far South Seas, there were eight army officers

aboard, six of whom belonged to the Signal Corps, the seventh being

a young doctor, and the eighth a major and quartermaster in charge

of the transport. Besides these there were civilian cable experts,

Signal Corps soldiers, Hospital Corps men, Signal Corps natives,

and the ship's officers, crew, and servants. The only passengers on

the trip were women, two and a half of us, the fraction standing for

a young person of nine summers, the quartermaster's little daughter,

whom we shall dub Half-a-Woman, letting eighteen represent the unit

of grown-up value.

Half-a-Woman was the queen of the ship, and held her court quite

royally from the Powers-that-Be, our commanding officer, down to the

roughest old salt in the forecastle. Having a child aboard gave the

only real touch of Christmas to our tropical pretence of it. Everything

else was lacking--the snow, the tree, the holly and wreaths, the

Christmas carol, the dear ones so far away--but the little child

was with us, and wherever children are there also will the Christmas

spirit come, even though the thermometer registers ninety in the shade,

and at the close of that long summer-hot day we all felt more than

"richer by one mocking Christmas past."

Half-a-Woman was also obliging enough to have a birthday on the trip,

which we celebrated by a dinner in her honour, a very fine dinner

which opened with clear turtle soup and ended with her favourite

ice and a birthday cake of gigantic proportions, decorated with

ornate chocolate roses and tiny incandescent lamps in place of the

conventional age-enumerating candles, cable-ship birthday cakes

being eminently scientific and up-to-date. Other people may have

had birthdays _en route_, for we were away from Manila many weeks,

but none were acknowledged; modesty doubtless constraining those

older than Half-a-Woman from making a too ostentatious display of

tell-tale incandescent lights.

It was a very busy trip, everyone on the ship being occupied, with the

exception of the women who spent most of their time under the cool blue

awning of the quarter-deck, where many a letter was written, and many

a book read aloud and discussed, though more often we accomplished

little, preferring to lie back in our long steamer chairs and watch

the wooded islands with cloud shadows on their shaggy breasts drift

slowly by and fade into the purple distance.

Now we would pass close to some luxuriantly overgrown shore where

tall cocoanut-palms marched in endless procession along the white

beach; now past hills where groups of bamboos swung back and forth

in the warm breeze, and feathery palms and plantains, the sunlight

flickering through their leaves, showed myriad tints of green and gold

and misty gray; these in turn giving place to some volcanic mountain,

bare and desolate. Then for hours there would be no land at all,

only the wonderful horizonless blue of water and sky, the sunlight

on the waves so dazzlingly bright as to hurt the eyes.

But nearly always in this thickly islanded sea there was land, either

on one side or the other, land bearing strange names redolent of tropic

richness, over whose pronunciation we would lazily disagree. Perhaps

it would be but a cliff-bound coast or a group of barren islands

in the distance, bluer even than the skies above them; perhaps some

lofty mountain on whose ridges the white clouds lay like drifted snow;

or perhaps a tier of forest-grown hills, rising one above the other,

those nearest the water clothed in countless shades of green, verging

from deepest olive to the tender tint of newly awakened buds in the

springtime, those farthest away blue or violet against the horizon.

Golden days these were when Time himself grew young again, and,

resting on his scythe, dreamed the sunlit hours away. Until eventide

the summer skies above us slept, as did the summer seas below us, when

both awakened from their slumbers flushed and rosy. On some evenings

the heavy white clouds piled high in the west seemed to catch fire,

the red blaze spreading over the heavens, to be reflected later

in the mirror-like water of the sea. Then the crimson light would

gradually change to amethyst and gold, with the sun hanging like

a ball of flame between heaven and earth, while every conceivable

colour, or combination of colours, played riotously over all in the

kaleidoscopic shifting of the clouds. At last the sun would touch the

horizon, sinking lower and lower into the sea, while the heavens lost

their glory, taking on pale tints of purple and violet. A moment more

and the swift darkness of the tropics would blot out every vestige

of colour, for there is no twilight in the Philippines, no half-tones

between the dazzling tropic sunset and the dusky tropic night.

Then there were other evenings when the colours lying in distinct

strata looked not unlike celestial _pousse-cafés_, or perhaps some

delicately blended shades of pink and blue and mauve, suggested to

a feminine mind creations of millinery art; or yet again, when a sky

that had been gray and sober all day suddenly blazed out into crimson

and gold at sunset, one was irresistibly reminded of a "Quakeress

grown worldly."

And then would come the night and the wonderful starlit heavens of

the tropics--

"--unfathom'd, untrod,

Save by even' and morn and the angels of God."

Every star sent a trail of light to the still water, seeming to fasten

the sky to the sea with long silver skewers; wonderful phosphorescence

played about beneath us like wraiths of drowned men luring one to

destruction; while in the musical lap of the water against the ship's

side one almost fancied the sound of Lorelei's singing. And then there

were starless nights with only a red moon to shine through cloudy

skies; and nights no less beautiful when all the world seemed shrouded

in black velvet, when the dusky sea parted silently to let the boat

pass through, and then closed behind it with no laugh or ripple of

water to speed it onward, breathlessly still nights of fathomless

darkness. The ship's master, burdened with visions of coral reefs

on a chartless coast, failed to appreciate the æsthetic beauty of

sailing unknown seas in limitless darkness, and either anchored on

such nights, or paced back and forth upon his bridge, longing for

electric lighted heavens that would not play him such scurvy tricks.

And there were gray days, too, which only served to make more golden

the sun-kissed ones; days when no observations could be taken with the

sextant, to the huge disgust of the officer in charge of such work;

days when the distant mountains loomed spectre-like through the mist,

their sharp outlines vignetted into the sky. Occasionally the fog would

lift a bit, just enough to reveal the rain-drenched islands around us,

and then suddenly wipe them out of existence again, leaving the ship

alone on a gray and shoreless sea.

As for amusements, these were not lacking, what with reading, writing,

bag-punching, and playing games with the small girl while under way;

and when at anchor there was always shooting, hunting, and fishing

for the men, and for us all swimming off the ship's side. This last

was often done in shark-ridden waters, to the great disapproval of the

ship's officers, some of whom would stand on the well-deck, revolver

in hand, while more than once a swift bullet was sent shrilling over

our heads at some great fin rising out of the sea beyond. On our

trip to and from Bongao, one of the Tawi Tawi Islands, on a wrecking

expedition to save the launch _Maud_, stranded there on a coral reef,

all the Signal Corps officers were at liberty, too, which made life

on the ship even more agreeable, the delightful experience being

again repeated on our return trip to Manila from Pasacao, Luzon.

When one considers that the ship laid approximately five hundred

knots of cable, and travelled over three thousand knots on the trip,

which does not include the Bongao wrecking expedition, it will be

seen how difficult the work was, in that in every instance, save from

Zamboanga, Mindanao, to Sulu, on the island of Sulu, we had to make a

preliminary trip, sounding and taking observations, before the cable

could be laid, the Spanish charts being worse than unreliable. Then,

too, a government transport dragged our cable with her anchor at one

place, a fierce tropical storm wrecked it at another, while careless

Moro trench diggers bruised it with stones at a third, which meant

many extra days of work for the Signal Corps at each of these places,

and for us idle ones a continuation of pleasant experiences, the

whole trip taking in all three and a half months.

Three and a half months of ideal summer weather from the last of

December to the middle of April, and real summer weather at that,

not the sham midwinter summer of the tourist who has his photograph

taken attired in flannels and standing under a palm-tree in California,

Florida, or the Mediterranean, only to shiveringly resume his normal

attire as soon as possible. The Philippine winter climate is quite

different, what some one has defined as the climate of heaven, warmth

without heat and coolness without cold, when men sport linen or khaki

continuously, and women wear lawns and organdies throughout the season,

with a light wrap added thereto at night--if it chances to be becoming.

In a few years it will be to these southern seas that the millionaire

brings his yacht for a winter cruise; it will be in these forests

that he hunts for wild boar and deer, or shoots woodcock, duck,

snipe, pigeons, and pheasants; in these waters that he fishes

for the iridescent silver beauties that here abound. It will be

on these sunlit shores invalids seeking health will find it, and

here that huge sanitariums should be built, for despite the tales of

pessimistic travellers, no lovelier climate exists than can be found

in Philippine coast towns from the middle of November until the last

of March. After that it becomes unbearably hot, and then one is in

danger of all kinds of fevers or digestive troubles, and should,

if possible, go to Japan to get cooled off.

Of course, even during the Garden-of-Eden months, one must take the

same care of himself that he would in any country, and most of the

travellers who write against the Philippine climate have, according

to their own statements, lived most unhealthfully as regarded diet,

shelter, exposure, and the like. During the hot season itself one

can get along very comfortably in the Philippines, if he makes it a

rule to live just as he would at home, only at half speed, if I may

so express it.

But aside from its possibilities for the leisure class, what a world

of interest the Philippines has in store for us from a governmental

and commercial standpoint! What a treasure-trove it will prove to

the historian, geographer, antiquarian, naturalist, geologist and

ethnologist. At every stopping-place my little note-book was filled

with statistics as to trade in hemp, cane-sugar, cocao, rice, copra,

tobacco, and the like. I even had a hint here and there as to the

geology of the group, but ruthlessly blue-pencilled out such bits of

useful information, and while it may not be at all utilitarian, rejoice

that I have been privileged to see these islands in a state of nature,

before the engineer has honeycombed the virgin forest with iron rails;

before the great heart of the hills is torn open for the gold, or coal,

or iron to be found there; before the primitive plough, buffalo, and

half-dressed native give way to the latest type of steam or electric

apparatus for farming; before the picturesque girls pounding rice in

wooden mortars step aside for noisy mills; before the electric light

frightens away the tropic stars, and dims the lantern hanging from

the gable of every nipa shack; before banking houses do away with the

cocoanut into which thrifty natives drop their money, coin by coin,

through a slit in the top; before the sunlit stillness of these

coast towns is marred by the jar and grind of factory machinery;

before the child country is grown too old and too worldly-wise.