The Start for the Land of Corn Stalks.
Spain Clings to the Ghost of Her Colonies--The Scene of War Interest
Shifts from Manila--The Typhoon Season--General Merritt on the Way
to Paris--German Target Practice by Permission of Dewey--Poultney
Bigelow with Canoe, Typewriter and Kodak--Hongkong as a Bigger and
Brighter Gibraltar.
When Spain gave up the ghosts of her American colonies, and the war
situation was unfolded to signify that the fate of the Philippines was
referred to a conference, and Aguinaldo announced the removal of his
seat of government to Molones, one hour and a half from Manila, the
scene of greatest interest was certainly not in the city and immediate
surroundings. Then it was plain the American army must remain for
some time, and would have only guard duty to perform. The Spaniards
had succumbed and were submissive, having laid down their arms and
surrendered all places and phases of authority. The insurgents'
removal of their headquarters declared that they had abandoned all
claim to sharing in the occupation of the conquered city, and their
opposition to the United States, if continued in theory, was not to be
that in a practical way. Between the American, Spanish and Philippine
forces there was no probability of disputed facts or forms that could
be productive of contention of a serious nature. There was but one
question left in this quarter of the world that concerned the people
of the United States, and that whether they would hold their grip,
snatched by Dewey with his fleet, and confirmed by his government in
sending an army, making our country possessors of the physical force
to sustain our policy, whatever it might be, on the land as well as
on the sea. Whether we should stay or go was not even to be argued in
Manila, except in general and fruitless conversation. Then came the
intelligence that General Merritt had been called to Paris and General
Greene to Washington, and there was a deepened impression that the
war was over. It was true that the army was in an attitude and having
experiences that were such as travelers appreciate as enjoyable,
and that no other body of soldiers had surroundings so curious and
fascinating. The most agreeable time of the year was coming on, and the
sanitary conditions of the city, under the American administration,
would surely improve constantly, and so would! the fare of the men,
for the machinery in all departments was working smoothly. The boys
were feeling pretty well, because they found their half dollars
dollars--the Mexican fifty-cent piece, bigger and with more silver
in it than the American standard dollar, was a bird. A dollar goes
further if it is gold in Manila than in an American city, and if our
soldiers are not paid in actual gold they get its equivalent, and the
only money question unsettled is whether the Mexican silver dollar
is worth in American money fifty cents or less. One of the sources of
anxieties and disappointment and depression of the American soldiers
in Manila has been the irregularity and infrequency with which they get
letters. If one got a letter or newspaper from home of a date not more
than six weeks old he had reason to be congratulated. The transports
trusted with the mails were slow, and communications through the old
lines between Hongkong and San Francisco, Yokohama and Vancouver,
were not reliably organized. There were painful cases of masses of
mail on matter precious beyond all valuation waiting at Hongkong for
a boat, and an issue whether the shorter road home was not by way of
Europe. This is all in course of rapid reformation. There will be no
more mystery as to routes or failures to connect. The soldiers, some of
whom are ten thousand miles from home, should have shiploads of letters
and papers. They need reading matter almost as much as they do tobacco,
and the charming enthusiasm of the ladies who entertained the soldier
boys when they were going away with feasting and flattery, praise and
glorification, should take up the good work of sending them letters,
papers, magazines and books. There is no reason why soldiers should be
more subject to homesickness than sailors, except that they are not so
well or ill accustomed to absence. The fact that the soldiers are fond
of their homes and long for them can have ways of expression other
than going home. A few days after the news of peace reached Manila,
the transports were inspected for closing up the contracts with them
under which they were detained, and soon they began to move. When
the China was ordered to San Francisco, I improved the opportunity to
return to the great republic. There was no chance to explore the many
islands of the group of which Manila is the Spanish Capital. General
Merritt changed the course of this fine ship and added to the variety
of the voyage by taking her to Hongkong to sail thence by way of the
China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Suez
Canal and the Mediterranean, to Paris. Our route to San Francisco,
by way of Hongkong, Nagasaki, Sunanaski, Kobe and the Yokohama light,
was 6,905 knots, about seven thousand seven hundred statute miles,
and gave us glimpses of the Asia shore, the west coast of Formosa
and the great ports of Hongkong and Nagasaki. The first thing on
the Sea of China, in the month of September, is whether we shall
find ourselves in the wild embrace of a typhoon. It was the season
for those terrible tempests and when we left Manila the information
that one was about due was not spared us. We heard later on that the
transport ahead of us four days, the Zealandia, was twenty-eight hours
in a cyclone and much damaged--wrung and hammered and shocked until
she had to put into Nagasaki for extensive repairs. The rainfall was
so heavy during the storm that one could not see a hundred yards from
the ship, and she was wrung in so furious a style in a giddy waltz,
that the Captain was for a time in grave doubt whether she would not
founder. The rule is when one is in the grasp of the oriental whirl
to run through it, judging from the way of the wind, the shortest
way out. There is a comparatively quiet spot in the center, and if
the beset navigator can find the correct line of flight, no matter
which way as relates to the line of his journey, he does well to take
it. Often in this sea, as in this case, there were uncertainties as to
directions. The rain narrowed observation like a dense fog, and there
was danger of running upon some of the islands and snags of rocks. The
battered vessel pulled through a cripple, with her boats shattered,
her deck cracked across by a roller, and her crew were happy to find
a quiet place to be put in order. "To be or not to be" an American
instead of a Spanish or Asiatic city was the parting thought as the
China left Manila Bay, and the dark rocks of Corrigedor faded behind
us, and the rugged rocks that confront the stormy sea loomed on our
right, and the violet peaks of volcanic mountains bounded our eastern
horizon. The last view we had of the historic bay, a big German warship
was close to the sentinel rock, that the Spaniards thought they had
fortified, until Dewey came and saw and conquered, swifter than Caesar,
and the Germans, venturing some target practice, by permission of
Dewey, who relaxes no vigilance of authority. Hongkong is 628 miles
from Manila, and the waters so often stirred in monstrous wrath,
welcomed us with a spread of dazzling silk. The clumsy junks that
appeared to have come down from the days of Confucius, were languid
on the gentle ripples. The outstanding Asian islands, small and grim,
are singularly desolate, barren as if splintered by fire, gaunt and
forbidding. Hongkong is an island that prospers under the paws of
the British lion, and it is a city displayed on a mountain side,
that by day is not much more imposing than the town of Gibraltar,
which it resembles, but at night the lights glitter in a sweeping
circle, the steep ascent of the streets revealed by many lamps, and
here and there the illumination climbs to the tops of the mountains
that are revealed with magical efforts of color and form. The harbor
is entered by an ample, but crooked channel, and is land-locked,
fenced with gigantic bumps that sketch the horizon, and with their
heads and shoulders are familiar with the sky. Here General Merritt,
with his personal staff, left us, and between those bound from this
port east and west, we circumnavigated the earth.
Mr. Poultney Bigelow, of Harper's Weekly, who dropped in by the way
just to make a few calls at Manila, and has a commission to explore
the rivers and lagoons of China with his canoe, left us, in that
surprising craft, plying his paddle in the fashion of the Esquimaux,
pulling right and left, hand over hand, balancing to a nicety on the
waves and going ashore dry and unruffled, with his fieldglass and
portfolio, his haversack and typewriter machine that he folds in a
small box as if it was a pocket comb, and his kodak, with which he
is an expert. He has not only ransacked with his canoe the rivers of
America, but has descended the Danube and the Volga. He puts out in
his canoe and crosses arms of the sea, as a pastime, makes a tent of
his boat if it rains, fighting the desperadoes of all climes with the
superstition, for which he is indebted to their imagination for his
safety in running phenomenal hazards, that he is a magician. Marco Polo
was not so great a traveler or so rare an adventurer as Bigelow, and,
having left Florida under a thunder cloud of the scowl of an angry
army for untimely criticisms, he has invaded the celestial empire
in his quaint canoe, and he can beat the Chinese boatmen on their
own rivers, and sleep like a sea bird on the swells of green water,
floating like a feather, and safe in his slumbers as a solon goose
with his head under his wing. However, he has not a winged boat, a
bird afloat sailing round the purple peaks remote, as Buchanan Reed
put it in his "Drifting" picture of the Vesuvian bay, for Bigelow
uses a paddle. There has been a good deal of curiosity as well as
indignation about his papers on the handling of our Cuban expedition
before it sailed, and it is possible he was guilty of the common fault
of firing into the wrong people. He was in Washington in June, and
he and I meeting on the Bridge of Spain over the Pesang in Manila in
August, we had, between us, put a girdle about the earth. Some say such
experiences are good to show how small the earth is, but I am more than
ever persuaded that it is big enough to find mankind in occupation and
subsistence until time shall be no more. In the dock at Hongkong was
Admiral Dewey's flagship Olympia, and while she had the grass scratched
from her bottom, the gallant crew were having a holiday with the zest
that rewards those who for four months were steadily on shipboard
with arduous cares and labors. H.B.M.S. Powerful, of 12,000 tons
displacement, with four huge flues and two immense military masts,
presided at Hongkong under orders to visit Manila. The mingling
of the English and Chinese in Hongkong is a lively object lesson,
showing the extent of the British capacity to utilize Asiatic labor,
and get the profit of European capital and discipline, an accumulation
that requires an established sense of safety--a justified confidence
in permanency.
The contrast between the city of Hongkong and that of Manila is one
that Americans should study now, to be instructed in the respective
colonial systems of England and Spain. Hongkong is clean and solid,
with business blocks of the best style of construction, the pavements
excellent in material and keeping, shops full of goods, all the
appliances of modern times--a city up to date. There are English
enough to manage and Chinese enough to toil. There are two British
regiments, one of them from India, the rank and file recruited from
the fighting tribes of northern mountaineers. There are dark, tall
men, with turbans, embodiment of mystery, and Parsees who have a
strange spirituality of their own, and in material matters maintain
a lofty code of honor, while their pastime is that of striving while
they march to push their heads into the clouds. There are no horses in
Hongkong, the coolies carrying chairs on bamboo poles, or trotting with
two-wheelers, an untiring substitute for quadrupeds, and locomotion
on the streets or in the boats is swift and sure. I had an address to
find in the city, on a tip at Manila of the presence, of a literary
treasure, and my chairmen carried me, in a few minutes, to a tall
house on a tall terrace, and the works of a martyr to liberty in the
Philippines were located. The penalty for the possession of these books
in Manila was that of the author executed by shooting in the back in
the presence of a crowd of spectators. The cost of the carriers was
thirty cents in silver--fifteen cents in United States money--and the
men were as keen-eyed as they were sure-footed, and the strength of
their tawny limbs called for admiration. They were not burdened with
clothes, and the play of the muscles of their legs was like a mechanism
of steel, oiled, precise, easy and ample in force. The China took on a
few hundred tons of coal, which was delivered aboard from heavy boats
by the basketful, the men forming a line, and so expert were they at
each delivery, the baskets were passed, each containing about half a
bushel--perhaps there were sixty baskets to the ton--at the rate of
thirty-five baskets in a minute. Make due allowances and one gang
would deliver twenty tons of coal an hour. The China was anchored
three-quarters of a mile from the landing, and a boat ride was ten
cents, or fifteen if you were a tipster. The boats are, as a rule,
managed by a man and his wife; and, as it is their own, they keep the
children at home. The average families on the boats--and I made several
counts--were nine, the seven children varying from one to twelve years
of age. The vitality of the Chinese is not exhausted, or even impaired.