Part 8

Cavité is a fortified town, on a small peninsula, in the bay of Manila, about ten miles from the capital. To it a steamboat runs twice daily. The Government arsenal and the only shipyard in the colony are located here, and it is, therefore, the chief naval station in the islands. Cavité is also the residence of most of the Spanish naval officers and of many foreigners: their handsome bungalows are on the outskirts of the town. Some fine shops, a theatre, a few cafés, and the old Cathedral are the most noteworthy objects of interest in the town itself. The Cathedral is large and imposing, and its architecture is characteristic of most of the churches of the colony. The houses in Cavité were formerly of wood, but since a fire, in 1754, which destroyed the town, most of them are built of stone or brick. But even this did not save the town; for the earthquake of 1880 again laid it waste.

Cavité was taken by the British in 1763, and has always been deemed the key to the capital. It was the seat of the rebellion of 1872, when the rebels seized and plundered the arsenal. This insurrection, however, was put down, and the leaders executed or deported. Cavité, on account of its strategic value, was the first place taken by Admiral Dewey after the battle. As elsewhere described, it then became the headquarters for Aguinaldo and the insurgents. Under a humane and an advanced government of the islands, Cavité should become a large city.

Majajay is a picturesque mountain-town, in Luzon; it contains several fine streets and many charming residences. The church and the convent are striking; the scenery in the vicinity is magnificent. The waterfall of Botócan is well worth a visit. It is about 600 feet high, and 60 feet wide. The view is impressive.

Lúgbang, near Majajay, is a thousand feet higher. Around it are extensive rice-fields. In the town are several fine canals, some good streets, and many commodious residences. A stone church and a convent front the little plaza. On the other side is the Tribunal, an imposing government building.

Tayabas is the capital of Tayabas province. In some of the streets are canals. Besides the houses of the wealthy planters, there are the usual church and convent. In the vicinity of Tayabas are extensive timber-yards.

Laguimanoc, a small town on the coast of Luzon, is also a port. The mail steamers stop there. The chief trade is in building-timber; for around the town are magnificent forests. The harbor is an excellent one, and, with increase of trade, the place should have a great future.

Lipa is the capital of the Batangas province, Luzon. It is a centre of the coffee-trade. Besides, the temperature there is cooler than that of most of the Philippine towns. It is noted for its large church and its convent--among the most remarkable in the colony. Most of the houses are three stories high, and many wealthy planters live in the vicinity.

Taal is one of the principal towns of Luzon. It is situated on a hill upon the left bank of the Pansipit river. On the opposite side is the town of Lemeri. A bridge connects the two.

Taal was formerly on the shore of the Lake of Taal, near the volcano, but the old town was destroyed by the earthquake of 1754. The new town is hilly, and is surrounded by sugar-cane plantations and great forests. The streets are lined with modern shops and spacious residences. Many of the inhabitants are of Japanese origin; but the Chinese, strange to say, are not tolerated. As there is considerable trade in sugar, in coffee, and cotton stuffs, trading-steamers ply between Taal and Manila. The population of the town and its suburbs is about 50,000.

Batangas, another town in Luzon, is the capital of the province of that name. It is near the sea, and is the residence of the Governor and the other chief officials of the province. There is a beautiful park in the centre of the town, and a fine drive, where the European residents are wont to meet. In and around the town are many pretty bungalows and some large sugar-factories.

Santa Cruz de Malabon is a town in the rice-district of Luzon. It is a charming little place, and some wealthy natives live there. Near the town are several water-power rice-husking mills, that give employment to hundreds of natives. The country all around is low and flat, but not lacking in beauty.

Silan is also in Luzon, and is a good-sized town. It is noted for its religious feasts and fairs. The church and the convent are celebrated, and are among the handsomest in the colony.

Carmona, Perez Dasmariñas, and Viñan, are flourishing towns in the vicinity of Silan. All are well worthy of a visit.

At the foot of the Maquiling mountain is Calamba, a market-town. Nearly all the land thereabouts is owned by the Dominicans, who rent it to the native rice and sugar-planters.

Below the Maquiling mountain, which is a crater, are hot springs. Near them is the town of Los Baños, or the Baths. These springs are beneficial in curing rheumatism and other ills. A hospital, therefore, has been erected there, which is dedicated to our Lady of the Holy Waters.

Other objects of interest are a vapor bath-house and the remains of several large public buildings. Los Baños was once a popular resort, and was under the administration of the Franciscans. The Government, however, desiring a share of the profits, gradually, by onerous exactions, caused the ruin of the place. If some enterprising American would get hold of it, Los Baños could be made a great resort.

A few miles from Los Baños, on the Malanin river, about 1200 feet above the sea, is the boiling lake of Natungos. This, too, possesses wonderful medicinal properties.

Santa Cruz is the capital of the Laguna province. It is a market-town of considerable size and importance, and contains a fine church and one or two impressive government buildings. The principal street is also called the Escolta. Santa Cruz is the centre of the cocoanut trade, and is a meeting-place for stock-dealers.

Pagsanjan, a small old town near Santa Cruz, contains some elegant residences. It has, however, an air of fallen grandeur. And well it may! for it was once an important place. Around it are extensive forests of cocoanut palms.

Puerta is on Palaúan Island, and has an excellent harbor. Near it is a lighthouse and a naval station. It is a penal settlement, and is surrounded by large sugar-estates, worked by the convicts. The town is pretty, and the suburbs are delightful.

The principal port of Mindanao is Zamboanga, a small but interesting town. Sulu is the principal port of Sulu, and is the centre of the pearl trade.

The capital of Negros is Bacólod. It contains, besides a church and a government house, some handsome residences belonging to the chief traders and to the government officials. The town is on the coast, but, as the water is very shallow, steamers are obliged to anchor a half-mile from the shore. Bacólod is a good field for investors, as it is in the very heart of the sugar and rice-district of Negros, and its trade is constantly growing.

Mataban, Talisay, Silay, Sarávia and Victoria are rising towns in the same province. Cádiz Nuevo, a small town just beyond Victoria, has some fine streets, and many large shops owned by the irrepressible Chinamen. The new stone church and convent of the town are the handsomest on the island. In the country round about live many wealthy native-planters, famed for their hospitality.

Cebú: a Mecca for Many Filipinos.

Cebú is the capital of the island of Cebú, and ranks next to Iloilo among the ports of the Philippines. The town is well-constructed, and is surrounded by fine roads. The people are conservative, and lack thrift and enterprise. The principal exports are hemp and sugar, most of which comes from the large plantations of the neighboring islands of Leyte, Camaguin, and Mindanao. The cathedral of Cebú is one of the most celebrated in the islands. It contains the shrine of the Holy Child of Cebú, which thousands of pilgrims visit yearly.

General Topography of the Islands.

The Philippines, with the Sulu Protectorate, number about 600 habitable islands, that lie all the way from 4° 45' to 21° N. latitude.

The area of the eleven largest islands is variously computed to be somewhere between 55,000 and 150,000 square miles. It is probably not far from the latter sum. All the islands together are about as large as the combined area of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware.

The eleven largest islands are: Luzon, Mindanao, Sámar, Panay, Negros, Palaúan, Mindoro, Leyte, Cebú, Masbate, and Bojol. Luzon and Mindanao are probably as large as all the others combined.

All the islands are mountainous and of volcanic formation.

Here is a list of the principal peaks:

Halcon, (Mindoro) 8,868 feet above sea. Apo, (Mindanao) 8,804 feet above sea. Mayon: active volcano, (Luzon) 8,283 feet above sea. San Cristobal, (Luzon) 7,375 feet above sea. Isarog, (Luzon) 6,443 feet above sea. Banájao (Luzon) 6,097 feet above sea. Labo (Luzon) 5,090 feet above sea. South Caraballo, (Luzon) 4,720 feet above sea. Caraballo del Baler (Luzon) 3,933 feet above sea. Maquiling, (Luzon) 3,720 feet above sea.

In the interior of the islands are magnificent forests of stately trees, splendid with luxuriant foliage and the glorious flora of the tropics. Here are gigantic creepers and gorgeous festoons,--the splendid parasites of this opulent clime. Luscious fruits in rich clusters hang from pendent boughs of myriad trees, inviting the passer-by to pluck.

One that has never seen it, can form no idea of the splendor of such a tropical forest--teeming with all that is brilliant and grand in nature. It would seem as if the Creator had emptied the cornucopia of his gifts over this garden-spot of the world, making it a veritable Eden.

There are many rivers throughout the islands,--some navigable. The Pasig river, in Luzon, empties into Manila Bay. Vessels drawing thirteen feet of water enter the Pasig river. In the same island, the Rio Grande de Cagayan is also navigable and runs through the Cagayan valley northward. It yearly overflows its banks. On them are the richest tobacco-districts in the colony. The Rio Grande de la Pampanga flows southward through the glorious valley of Pampanga, emptying by twenty mouths into Manila Bay. On the banks of this river are extensive rice-fields and sugar-cane plantations, and great forests; among them gleam numerous towns and villages, full of a thriving population. The Rio Agno, which flows southward, past the port of Dagupan and the Bicol river--which flows from Bato lake to the bay of San Miguel--is also in Luzon, and navigable.

In Mindanao, the Rio Agusan cuts the island almost in two. It is navigable only a few miles. In Negros Island, the Danao is navigable.

The Bay lake (Luzon)--Laguna de Bay,--is 25 miles long and 12 miles broad. It is higher than Manila, and its overflow is the Pasig river.

In the centre of Bombon lake is an active volcano called Taal, which is no less famed in the history of the colony than is Vesuvius in the history of Naples. It has had many celebrated eruptions, some very destructive. In 1754 several towns were overwhelmed by a flood of burning lava, which was thrown as far as fifteen miles from the crater, causing great damage, even at that distance. It is said that cinders fell in Manila, 34 miles away. There was a smell of sulphur in the air for months; the lake was full of dead fish; and the earth, for miles, was heaped with burning lava and ashes. This eruption lasted nearly six months. The town of Taal was entirely destroyed, and most of the inhabitants perished. On that day darkness hung over the whole sky, and the air was full of cries and lamentations. It seemed as if the end of the world had come.

The Mayon volcano, in Albay, has also had several destructive eruptions. Its crest is always fiery. In 1814, 2,500 natives were killed and wounded. During the last eruption, in 1888, fifteen lives were lost, and many cattle.

Near the volcano of Mayon are the sulphur springs of Albay, noted for their wonderful medicinal properties. Here, no doubt, some enterprising American will soon build a resort, or a sanitarium. And a most splendid location indeed it would be!

Though in the heart of the tropics, the Philippines are by no means unhealthy. The year is divided into the wet and the dry monsoons; the west coast being dry, the eastern coast wet, and vice-versa. The annual rainfall is about 90 inches. Mosquitoes and white ants are the most troublesome pests. Terrific tornados are common, and earthquakes are as plentiful as blackberries in an Alabama cemetery. In 1875 a typhoon destroyed 4000 houses and killed about 300 people. In 1863 an earthquake destroyed the greater part of Manila--3000 people were killed and injured. The earthquake of 1880 was also very destructive.

That of '63 occurred at night, and I remember it well. I was then a little boy, but the horrors of that night I can never forget. The earth trembled and seemed to rise and fall; huge fissures opened in the ground, and dull rumblings were heard everywhere, while the shrieks of tens of thousands arose on every hand. Many were buried in the ruins of their houses.

For weeks afterward, the people slept in the streets; for the greater part of the city was destroyed.

The earthquake of 1880 occurred while the people were at tiffin, or lunch. Hence the number of casualties was not so great; for most of the people were able to leave their houses before they were shaken down.

NATURAL BEAUTY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO.

A Botanist's Paradise.

The preceding chapters give but a faint idea of the great wealth of plant-life in the Philippine Islands, of the richness and abundance of the fruits, the variety and usefulness of the trees, the multitude of growths that add to the comfort and convenience of human life. Yet, after all is said, every description of the plant-life there gives but an inadequate idea of the real luxuriance and beauty of the group, and its value from a botanical point of view. These rich and multitudinous islands, seated in the midst of a tropical sea, form, in reality, a botanist's paradise, a region in which an ardent naturalist might browse for years, and still have new treasures to find.

I am no scientist. Indeed, I have often wished I were, when journeying through these lush tropical forests with their interminable variety of forms of plant-life; many of them of the greatest beauty, some odd and bizarre in appearance, numbers of them unknown to science; the whole presenting the appearance of a virgin wilderness, keeping its treasures intact for the one that can appreciate them. The Spaniard looks upon nature with a lazy eye, troubling himself little about anything that cannot be put to some immediate use. And he has jealously guarded the islands against alien footsteps, putting annoying obstacles in the way of all that sought to explore their interior. In consequence, the Philippines may be said to be in a large measure unexplored, waiting for the botanist to discover their treasures, the poet to sing their beauties, the practical man to develop their resources.

Energy and enterprise are sadly needed, and it will require the go-ahead American spirit to bring about the possibilities of those fertile tropical lands.

A Diadem of Island Gems.

And the earth possesses no scenes more beautiful than those to be found in this verdant and blooming Archipelago,--from its northern to its southern verge, this magnificent rosary of glowing islands, that Nature has hung above the heaving bosom of the warm Pacific. Of them all, none is more beautiful than Luzon. the largest and the richest of the whole, with its vast variety of attractive scenery, mountain and plain, lake and stream, everywhere rich with glossy leafage, clustered growths of bamboo and palm, fields of yellow cane, and verdant coffee-groves. Everywhere is wealth of trees, clothing the mountains to their summits, and bordering the long green miles of ocean-shore.

On a smaller scale, but not less beautiful than lordly Luzon, are the many minor islands, such as Panay, Negros, Cebú, Sámar, and others of names that would be strange to foreign ears. Here there are no stretches of barren lands, no drought-stricken shores, as in some of the isles of the West, no flat and chalky fields like those of Barbadoes; and even the loveliest of the Antilles must yield the palm of beauty to these charming isles of the eastern ocean. Here an abundant rainfall, an equable climate, a rich soil, and the warm influences of the equatorial waters combine to yield a luxuriant beauty and variety of scenery that must be observed to be appreciated.

The Magnificence of Tropical Scenery.

Tropical scenery cannot be pictured in words. It must be seen to be comprehended. One need not, too, go beyond the environs of Manila--that Venice of the East, with its labyrinth of canals and estuaries,--through which the tides of the broad bay daily ebb and flow,--and with its wealth of brilliant flowers and tropic verdure--to imagine oneself in a new world. Its surroundings are a dream of beauty.

Take any of the roads that run outward from the city. Say, starting from the Malecon promenade: one passes through stretches of country verdant with groves of graceful bamboos, lofty cocoanut palms, flowing-leaved plantains, and all the wonderful variety and luxuriance of tropical vegetation. Upon it the eye gazes unsated, the leaves and flowers alike being rich and gorgeous in tint and form. Often have I wandered, entranced, up the eddying Pasig, enraptured by the beauty of its scenery and the charm of its coloring, viewing, also from its leafy banks the splendors of sunset skies, grand and glowing to a degree seldom seen in temperate zones.

Further inland the mountain scenery never fails to charm, with the varied pictures presented by its forest-growth. A grotesqueness of form is often assumed by the trunks and limbs of tropical trees, and this, with the glossy green foliage, the rich hues and attractive shapes of the blossoms, the novel forms and colors of the fruits, the dash and sparkle of mountain streams, here and there breaking into lovely cascades, all co-ordinated to the eye, compose a spectacle of beauty seldom excelled.

Of all those plants, the tall and graceful bamboo ranks among the most beautiful. Everywhere it is found, growing in groups and clusters, scattered with great profusion and variety over hill and plain, along the streams, and around the native huts and villages. At the slightest breeze its fleecy tops and supple branches wave gracefully in the air, giving to the foliage the charm of perpetual motion. In addition, too, to its almost endless variety of uses, it has a mission beyond that of utility,--the mission of beauty, and it may justly be viewed as one of the choicest decorations of the island scenery.

The bamboo never grows monotonous. It presents forms and colors of wonderful attractiveness and variety, and so fully dealt with has it been by the brush of the painter and the pen of the poet, that it might well be given a fine-art gallery and a library of its own.

In the depths of the forest, and along the streams, beautiful orchids abound; here clustered on stately trees so dense of growth that the sun's rays scarcely penetrate their foliage; there giving life and color to the ground, and of such odd and amazing forms, that one often seems looking rather upon flowering birds and insects than upon plants. Here and there one finds oneself amid the spreading roots of the balete tree (Ficus Indica), from whose broad buttresses rises the mighty trunk, of such girth and even rotundity, that the natives make cart-wheels from sections of it. Down from the boughs, sixty feet in air, hang the rope-like lianes, descending, like nature's cordage, to the ground, while to the limbs cling orchids and other foreign growths, until the entire great tree seems a botanical world in itself.

I have passed hours wandering spellbound in the forest, or gazing with eyes of wonder and delight into its silent depths. Yes, little of the poet as I have in my make-up, I, too, have been taken prisoner by a beauty and a grandeur that I found it difficult to tear myself away from.

And these scenes are not merely local. Indeed, wherever one goes into the rural regions of the islands he finds the same amazing prodigality of tropic growth. There are thousands of square miles of dense forest within which the foot of the white man has rarely ever set; thousands perhaps upon which none but the natives have ever gazed; costly woods, whose value can be reckoned only in millions of dollars. Valuable herbs, medicinal plants, and hot springs abound; and the naturalist and the economic botanist alike are sadly needed to open up this luxuriant land to the world.

The Promise of the Future.

Under new control I expect to see, in the twentieth century, a new destiny for this noble group of islands. Whether the people be given their freedom under the protection and influence of the United States, or the islands become a direct appanage of that or of some other enterprising nation of the West, a turn in the tide of Philippine affairs can hardly fail to set in, and the possibilities of the land be developed to an extent undreamed of under the effete rule of Spain.

I expect to see an invasion of this island-realm by three classes of modern enterprise. The scientist is sure to find his way there, and tell the world of the new and the strange in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. With him will come the engineer, opening up roads right and left, laying a network of iron rails, where now only the buffalo-cart drags along, introducing the latest machinery for mining and farming-industries, and starting a hum of activity in every quarter of the long-slumbering land. With these also will enter the practical economist, in search, not of the new, but of the useful, prospecting the forests for plants of economic value, seeking for new mines of coal and iron, tracing the gold placer-beds up to their mother-veins, seeking everywhere for what the Philippines have to add to the useful productions of the world.

These will be the twentieth century pioneers of this promising Archipelago, the results of their labors being exploited by the merchant and the manufacturer. The seas shall teem with ships carrying the products of the islands to foreign shores, and bringing back full cargoes to supply the demands of the islanders, commerce steadily growing in amount as civilization awakens the natives to the perception of new wants.

Examples of a similar rejuvenation could easily be pointed out, and there is no conceivable reason why the Philippines should not be added to the list. These islands have been lavishly dealt with by nature; they have an industrious population; yet they have been allowed to remain for centuries in a semi-savage industrial condition; they still await the touch of the magic hand of modern enterprise to arouse them from their state of decadence, and swing them into the tide of human progress. Under this influence prosperity and activity must come to them, as it has come to other lands, and those long-neglected and abused islands be made to "bud and blossom like the rose."