Joseph Earle Stevens

“ Although we miss the view of the mountains, and even the paddy-fields, we now get the salt air first hand, look out over the waters of the Bay, and are lulled to sleep by the rhythmic beating of the waves on the beach. Our view seaward leads the eye across a beautiful garden belonging to one of the rich house-owners living directly on the shore front, and the green of the trees, with the scent of somebody else’s flowers, temper both the excess of glare and the brackish qualities of the sea-breeze. ”

“ A drizzling rain was falling and the weather did not look propitious, but we pushed on, left the mouth of the river where the lake empties into it, and sallied out on the broad waters of the Laguna de Bay. Numerous serving-boys, boxes of china, food, ice, and bedding ballasted the stern of our little steamer, and as it grew dark a feast was prepared for us on deck. In going up the lake, the pilot, who was accustomed only to navigating the launch along the quays of Manila itself, got quite at sea and lost his way in the evening mist. ”

“ In days gone by, when cholera decimated Manila’s numbers, when people died faster than they could be buried, when business was at a standstill and the city one great death-house, were the times that tried men’s souls. ”

“ Pasig, and shakes hands with itself in the several bridges that bind one side to the other. On the right bank of the river, coming in from the bay and passing up by the breakwater, lies the old walled town of Manila proper, whose weedy moats, ponderous drawbridges, and heavy gates suggest a troubled past. Old Manila may be figured as a triangle, a mile on a side, and the dingy walls seem, as it were, to herd in a drove of church-steeples, schools, houses, and streets. ”

“ After the music is over the carriages rush off in every direction, behind smart-stepping little ponies that get over the ground at a tremendous pace, and the dinner-hour is late enough not to rob one of those pleasant hours at just about sunset. There are no horses in Manila—all ponies, and some of them are so small as to be actually insignificant. They are tremendously tough little beasts, however, and stand more heat, work, and beating than most horses of twice their size. ”

“ The club-house is long, low, and rambling. The reading, writing, and music rooms front on the river, and the glossy hard-wood floors, hand-hewn out of solid trees, seem to suggest music and coolness. It is possible to reach the city by jumping into a native boat at the portico on the river bank, or to go by one of the two-wheel gigs, called carromatas, waiting at the front gate, or to walk a block and take the tram-car which jogs down through the busy highroad. ”

“ Our house by the sea continues to prove very pleasant, and, peculiarly enough, the surf seems to beat on the beach with the same sound that it has on the New England coast. The southwest breeze blows strong from the Bay each afternoon, and the cumulus clouds are becoming heavier and more numerous day by day. The artillery-band still favors us with music at the Luneta, but before long it looks as if the rains would interrupt the afternoon promenade.
The black plague at Hong Kong does not seem to diminish, as was expected, and it is said that many people are leaving the city. ”

“ In fact, there is a certain charm in Manila about many specimens of hand-work that one encounters everywhere. The stilted regularities—as our good professor used to say—of machine-made articles are frequently conspicuous by their absence, and instead one sees the inequalities, the lack of exact repetition, the informality of lines that are not just perpendicular or horizontal, all of which make up the charm of work that is handmade, that reflects the movements of a living arm and mind rather than those of a wheel or a lever. ”

“ The Philippines are not an El Dorado simply because for the first time they have been brought to our notice. They should not yield more than the ordinary return to labor, and the question is, does the average American want to live in a distant land, cut off from friends and a civilized climate, only to get the ordinary return for his efforts? To which, even though of course there is much to be said on the other side, I would answer, No. We have gone to war, remembering the Maine, to free Cuba, and at the first blow have taken another group of islands—a Cuba in the East—to deal with. ”

“ It is indeed curious that a city of a third of a million people—capital of a group of islands as large as New England, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, which have long furnished the whole world with its entire supply of Manila hemp, which have exported some 160,000 tons of sugar in a single year and which to-day produce as excellent tobacco as that coming from the West Indies—it is curious, I say, that a city of this size should have gone so long unnoticed and misspelt. ”

“ The natives opposite began hastily to sling ropes over the thatch of their light shanties, and one of the Englishmen who lived not far back of us had already stretched good solid cables over the steep-sloping roof of his domicile. A sort of hush prevailed, and then sudden gusts began to blow in off the bay. The scud-clouds increased and appeared to be in a fearful hurry. The roar of the surf loudened, and one after the other of our sliding sea-shell windows had to be shut and bolstered up for precaution. The typhoon seemed to be advancing slowly, as they often do, but its course was sure. ”

“ Do we want a group of 1,400 islands, nearly 8,000 miles from our Western shores, sweltering in the tropics, swept with typhoons and shaken with earthquakes? Do we want to undertake the responsibility of protecting those islands from the powers in Europe or the East, and of standing sponsor for the nearly 8,000,000 native inhabitants that speak a score of different tongues and live on anything from rice to stewed grasshoppers? ”

“ The Luneta is still a close rival to the opera, and each afternoon a dozen of us will generally meet there to refresh ourselves with the music and the passing show. Toward sundown, in the afternoons, of late, the big guns in the batteries up along the walls of Old Manila, hard by, have been used in long-distance sea target-practice, and it has been interesting, on the way from the office to the promenade, to walk along the beach and see the cannon-balls zip over the water and slump into it miles from their destination. ”

“ At breakfast and dinner in the club-house I no longer have to whistle to be waited on, for my slave is always behind the chair, ready to spill the soup on my coat or pass the plum-pudding. These serving-boys all belong to the Tagalog race, which seems to include in its numbers most of the native inhabitants in Manila and the adjacent towns. They all have straight, thick black hair, speak their peculiar Tagalog language, and only pick up enough Spanish to carry them through the performance of their simple duties. ”

“ But that is just what the Manila bill-collector does at Christmas-tide. Then all of the native fruit-girls, who each day climb the stairs with baskets of oranges on their heads, come in with little printed blessings and hold out their hands for fifty cents.
Once out of the office, you go home to find the ice-man, the ashman, the coachman, and the cook all looking for tips, and you are compelled to feel most religiously holy, as you remember that it is more blessed to give than to receive. ”

“ Hong Kong rather feels as if it were the “central exchange” for the Far East, and from the looks of things I judge it is. The great bay is full of deep-water ships, the quays teem with life, and the streets [5] are full of quiet bustle. It is quite enough to give one heart disease to shin up the hills to the residence part of the town, and it took me some time to find breath enough to tell the Spanish Consul I wanted him to visé my passport to Manila. ”

“ From six to ten on any morning the native and Chinese cooks from many families may be seen bargaining for the day’s supply among the nest of stalls in the big market. After filling their baskets numbers of them mount the little tram-car for the return trips to their kitchens and proceed to pluck the feathers off the live chickens or birds as they jog along on the front or rear platform. By the time they have arrived home the poor creatures are stripped of foliage, and, keenly suffering, are pegged down to the floor of the kitchen to await their fate. ”

“ To take a chair, watch the people walking to and fro, and see the endless stream of smart turn-outs passing in slow procession; to hear a band of fifty pieces render popular and classic music with the spirit of a Sousa or a Reeves, is to doubt that you are in a capital 8,000 miles from Paris and 11,000 miles from New York. ”

“ Now and then some of the Britons living in the neighborhood will issue a summons for a sunrise swimming-party, and one of them will perhaps punctuate the ceremonies by supplying a typical breakfast of fresh fish and boiled rice, on the veranda of a house that perhaps overlooks the Bay. These seaside houses are particularly cool and fresh now that the winds of the southwest monsoon come blowing into the front windows directly off the water, but later on, when typhoons become epidemic, it looks as if we should have the wind in more than wholesale doses. ”

“ I see by the papers that there are at least two cases of small-pox in Boston, that everybody is alarmed and hundreds are getting vaccinated. Curious state of affairs—isn’t it?—when every day out here you see small children running around in the streets, covered [75] with evidences of this disease. Nobody thinks anything about small-pox in Manila, and one ceases to notice it if a Philippine mamma sits opposite you in the tram-car, holding in her lap a scantily clothed child whose swarthy hide is illuminated with those unmistakable markings. ”

“ The Uranus was not to stop long, and most of the through passengers returned early to the steamer to enjoy a view tempered by rather more breeze and less smell than that which the narrow streets afforded. Cebu, from the deck, was worthy of a sonnet; the white houses and church spires were set off against the dark-green background of mountains, and as the sun got lower the place did not have the broiled-alive aspect that it bore during the middle of the day. ”

“ All in all, it is extremely curious that out of all the peoples of the Far East the Filipinos are the only ones possessing a natural talent for music, and that the islands to-day stand out unique from among all the surrounding territory as being the home of a musical race, who do not make the night as hideous with weird beatings of tom-toms as they do poetic with soft waltzes coaxed from gruff trombones. ”

“ Manila is pretty well, thanks. The weather has been cool and comfortable. Showers have come every day or two to lay the dust, and one could not want a more salubrious condition of things. The sunsets from the Luneta have been more than pyrotechnic, and I now believe that nowhere do you see such displays of color as in the Orient, Land of the Sunrise. During these three weeks of my stay, so far there have been five holidays, and we have had ample time to take afternoon walks up the beach, or play tennis at the club, or indulge in moonlight rows on the Pasig. ”

“ The curious windows that are everywhere are likewise instructive. Like the blinds, they slide in grooves on the railings of the balconies, and serve to shut out the weather from the interior. They consist of frames containing a multitude of small lattice-work squares, into which are placed thin, flat, translucent sea-shells which admit light, but are not look-throughable. We have all heard of shell-roads, but never of shell-windows, and one misses the presence of glass until he has got accustomed to a Manila house, [27] whose sliding sides are one vast window that is rarely closed. ”

“ Such of the native houses as are too frail to support pianos shelter harps, violins, and other stringed instruments, while some of the more expensive structures contain the whole selection. Of an evening—in the suburbs—it is no uncommon thing to hear the strains of a well-played Spanish march issuing from under the thatch of a rickety hut, or to find an impromptu concert going on in the little tram-car which is bringing home a handful of native youth with their guitars or mandolins. ”

“ Clearings out of furniture, selling one’s ponies and carriages, closing up of books, shipping of one’s cases and curios on those hemp-ships that are to start on the long 20,000-mile voyage to Boston, and trying to think of the things that have been left undone, or [223] ought to be done, have all gone to make the season a busy one.
Now that it has come down to actually leaving Manila, I begin to feel the home sickness that comes from tearing one’s self away from the midst of friends and a congenial life. ”

“ Far away at the edge of the Bay could be seen the glistening white houses and steeples of Manila. Away to the northwest and southwest were the great fertile stretches of country that produce tons and tons of rice and sugar, reaching to the sky or distant mountains. ”

“ Opposite Old Manila, on the other bank, lies the business section, with the big quays lined with steamers and alive with movement. The custom-house and the foreign business community are close by the river-side, while in back are hundreds of narrow streets, store-houses, and shops that go to make up the stamping ground of the Chinese who control so large a part of the provincial trade. ”

“ So it goes, many of the shop-keepers being swindled out of their dues by debtors who choose to skip off rather than to pay, and waking up at the end of the month to find their supposed profits existing only in the chits whose signers have skedaddled to Hong Kong or Singapore.
New Year’s Eve was celebrated with due hilarity and elaborate provisions. The club bill of fare was remarkable, and when it is realized there are no stoves in Manila, the wonder is that the cooking is so complex. A Manila stove is no more nor less than a good-sized earthen jar, shaped something like an old shoe. ”