The Boys of '98

APPENDIX A.

THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

The number of islands in the Philippine group are believed to be upwards of fourteen hundred, with an aggregate land area (estimated on Domann’s map) of not less than 114,356 miles, situate in the southeast of Asia, extending from 40° 40′ to 20° north latitude, and from 116° 40′ to 126° 30′ east longitude.

The archipelago was discovered by Magellan on March 12, 1521, and named by him the St. Lazarus Islands. The discoverer was a Portuguese, who had sought service under Charles V. of Spain because he was ignored by the court of his own country.

By the bull of Pope Alexander VI., of May 4, 1493, which was then universally recognised as law, the earth was divided into two hemispheres. All lands thereafter discovered in the Eastern Hemisphere were decreed to belong to Portugal; all the Western to Spain.

The St. Lazarus Islands were well within Portugal’s rights, but as the use of the log and the variation of the compass were unknown, an error of fifty-two degrees in longitude was made, and to Spain the islands were given on the basis of that error.

By whom the name of Philippines was given to the archipelago it is impossible to say. In 1567 it appears to have been used for the first time.

The manufactures of the islands consist of silk, cotton, and piña fibres cloth, hats, mats, baskets, ropes, coarse pottery, and musical instruments.

The northern islands of the archipelago lie in the region of the typhoon, and have three seasons, – the cold, the hot, and the wet. The first extends from November to February or March, when the atmosphere is bracing rather than cold. The hot season lasts from March to June, and the heat becomes very oppressive before the beginning of the southerly monsoon. Thunder-storms of terrific violence occur during May and June. The wet season begins with heavy rains, known by the natives as “collas,” and until the end of October the downpour is excessive.

“Earthquakes are sufficiently frequent and violent in the Philippines to affect the style adopted in the erection of buildings; in 1874, for instance, they were very numerous throughout the archipelago, and in Manila and the adjacent provinces shocks were felt daily for several weeks. The most violent earthquakes on record in the Philippines occurred in July, 1880, when the destruction of property was immense, both in the capital and in other important towns of central Luzon.”

Though situated in the equatorial region, the elevations of the mountains give a range of climate that allows the production of a great variety of valuable crops. Tobacco, sugar, hemp, and rice are the chief staples produced. The swamps and rivers are infested with crocodiles, and the dense woods with monkeys and serpents of many species. Rich deposits of gold are known to exist, but have been little developed.

To quote from the Revue des Deux Mondes of Paris:

In the same district are found Indians, Negritos, Manthras, Malays, Bicols, half-breed Indians and Spaniards, Tagalas, Visayas, Sulus, and other tribes. The Negritos (little negroes) are real negroes, blacker than a great many of their African conquerors, with woolly hair growing in isolated tufts. They are very diminutive, rarely attaining four feet nine inches in height, and with small, retreating skulls. This race forms a branch equal in importance to the Papuan. It is believed to be the first race inhabiting the Philippines, but, as well as everywhere else, except in the Andaman Islands, it has been more or less absorbed by the stronger races, and the result in the archipelago has been the formation of several tribes of half-breeds numbering considerably more than half a million. Side by side with them, and equally poor and wretched, are the Manthras, a cross between the Negritos and Malays and the degenerate descendants of the Saletes, a warlike tribe conquered by the Malayan Rajah Permicuri in 1411. Then come the Malay Sulus, all Mohammedans and still governed by their Sultan and their datos, feudal lords who, under the suzerainty of the Spaniards, have possessed considerable power.

The soil is fully sufficient – indeed, more than sufficient – to support this population, whose wants are of the most limited character. The land is exceedingly fertile and bears in abundance all tropical products, particularly rice, sugar, and the abaca, a variety of the banana-tree. The fibres of the abaca are employed in making the finest and most delicate fabrics, of which from three to four million dollars’ worth are exported annually. The exports of sugar amount to about four millions and a half, of gold to two millions and a half, and of coffee and tobacco close on to a million and a quarter each. The rice is consumed at home. It forms the staple food of the people, and nearly three million dollars’ worth is imported yearly. The husbandman cannot complain that his toil is inadequately rewarded. A rice plantation will yield a return of at least fifteen per cent.; if he plant his farm with sugar-cane he will realise thirty per cent., if not more. On the other hand, the price of labour is very low. An adult who gains a real fuerte (about thirteen cents) a day, thinks he is doing well.

In this archipelago of the Philippines, where races, manners, and traditions are so often in collision, the religious fanaticism of the Spaniards has, more than once, come into conflict with a fanaticism fully as fierce as that of the Mussulman. At a distance of six thousand leagues from Toledo and Granada, the same ancient hatreds have brought European Spaniards and Asiatic Saracens into the same relentless antagonism that swayed them in the days of the Cid and Ferdinand the Catholic. The island of Sulu, on account of its position between Mindanao and Borneo, was the commercial, political, and religious centre of the followers of the Prophet, the Mecca of the extreme Orient. From this centre they spread over the neighbouring archipelago. Dreaded as merciless pirates and unflinching fanatics, they scattered everywhere terror, ruin, and death, sailing in their light proas up the narrow channels and animated with implacable hatred for those conquering invaders, to whom they never gave quarter and from whom they never expected it; constantly beaten in pitched battle, they as constantly took again to the sea, eluding pursuit of the heavy Spanish vessels, taking refuge in bays and creeks where no one could follow them, pillaging isolated ships, surprising the villages, massacring the old men, leading away the women and the adults into slavery, pushing the audacious prows of their skiffs even up to within three hundred miles of Manila, and seizing every year nearly four thousand captives.

Between the Malay creese and the Castilian carronade the struggle was unequal, but it did not last the less long on that account, nor, obscure though it was, was it the less bloody. On both sides there was the same bravery, the same cruelty. It required all the tenacity of Spain to purge these seas of the pirates who infested them, and it was not until after a conflict of several years, in 1876, that the Spanish squadron was able to bring its broadside to bear on Tianggi, that nest of the Suluan pirates, land a division of troops, invest all the outlets, and burn up the town and its inhabitants as well as its harbour and all the craft within it. The soldiers planted their flag and the engineers built a new city on the smoking ruins. This city is protected by a strong garrison. For a time, at least, it was all over with piracy, but not with Moslem fanaticism, which was exasperated rather than crushed by its defeat. To the rovers of the seas succeeded the organisation known as juramentados.

One of the characteristic qualities of the Malays is their contempt of death. They have transmitted it with their blood to the Polynesians, who see in it only one of the multiple phenomena and not the supreme act of existence, and witness it or submit to it with profound indifference. Travellers have often seen a Canaque stretch his body on a mat, while in perfect health, and without any symptom of disease whatever, and there wait patiently for the end, convinced that it is near, and refuse all nourishment and die without any apparent suffering. His relatives say of him, “He feels he is going to die,” and the imaginary patient dies, his mind possessed by some illusion, some superstitious idea, some invisible wound through which life escapes. When to this absolute indifference to death is united Mussulman fanaticism, which gives to the believer a glimpse of the gates of a paradise where the abnormally excited senses revel in endless and numberless enjoyments, a longing for extinction takes hold of him and throws him like a wild beast on his enemies; he stabs them and gladly invites their daggers in return. The juramentado kills for the sake of killing, and being killed, and so winning, in exchange for a life of privation and suffering, the voluptuous existence promised by Mahomet to his followers.

The laws of Sulu make the bankrupt debtor the slave of his creditor, and not only the man himself, but his family also are enslaved. To free them there is only one means left to the husband, the sacrifice of his life. Reduced to this extremity he does not hesitate, he takes the formidable oath. From that time forward he is enrolled in the ranks of the juramentados, and has nothing to do but await the hour when the will of his superior shall let him loose upon the Christians. Meanwhile the panditas, or priests, subject him to a system of enthusiastic excitement that will turn him into a wild beast of the most formidable kind. They madden his already disordered brain, they make still more supple his oily limbs, until they have the strength of steel and the nervous force of the tiger or panther. They sing to him their rhythmic impassioned chants, which show to his entranced vision the radiant smiles of intoxicating houris. In the shadow of the lofty forests, broken by the gleam of the moonlight, they evoke the burning and sensual energies of the eternally young and beautiful companions who are calling him, opening their arms to receive him. Thus prepared, the juramentado is ready for everything. Nothing can stop him, nothing can make him recoil. He will accomplish prodigies of valour. Though stricken ten times he will remain on his feet, will strike back, borne along by a buoyancy that is irresistible, until the moment when death seizes him. He will creep with his companions into the city that has been assigned to him; he knows that he will never leave it, but he knows also that he will not die alone, and he has but one aim, – to butcher as many Christians as he can.

An eminent scientist, Doctor Montano, sent on a mission to the Philippines by the French government, describes the entry of eleven juramentados into Tianggi. Divided into three or four bands, they managed to get through the gates of the town bending under loads of fodder for cattle which they pretended to have for sale, and in which they had hidden their creeses. Quick as lightning they stabbed the guards, then, in their frenzied course, they struck all whom they met.

Hearing the cry of “Los juramentados!” the soldiers seized their arms. The juramentados rushed on them fearlessly, their creeses clutched in their hands. The bullets fell like hail among them. They bent, crept, glided, and struck. One of them, whose breast was pierced through and through by a bullet, rose and flung himself on the troops. He was again transfixed by a bayonet; he remained erect, vainly trying to reach his enemy, who held him impaled on the weapon. Another soldier had to run up and blow the man’s brains out before he let go his prey. When the last of the juramentados had fallen, and the corpses were picked up from the street which consternation had rendered empty, it was found that these eleven men had, with their creeses, hacked fifteen soldiers to pieces, not to reckon the wounded.

“And what wounds!” exclaims Doctor Montano; “the head of one corpse is cut off as clean as if it had been done with the sharpest razor; another soldier is almost cut in two! The first of the wounded to come under my hands was a soldier of the Third Regiment, who was mounting guard at the gate through which some of the assassins entered. His left arm was fractured in three places; his shoulder and breast were literally cut up like mince-meat; amputation appeared to be the only chance for him; but in that lacerated flesh there was no longer a spot from which could be cut a shred.”

It is easily seen how precarious and nominal has been Spanish rule on most of the islands of this vast archipelago. In the interior of the great island of Mindanao there is no system of control, no pretence even of maintaining order. It is a land of terror, the realm of anarchy and cruelty. There murder is a regular institution. A bagani, or man of might, is a gallant warrior who has cut off sixty heads. The number is carefully verified by the tribal authorities, and the bagani alone possesses the right to wear a scarlet turban. All the batos, or chiefs, are baganis. It is carnage organised, honoured, and consecrated; and so the depopulation is frightful, the wretchedness unspeakable.

The Mandayas are forced to seek a refuge from would-be baganis by perching on the tops of trees like birds, but their aerial abodes do not always shelter them from their enemies. They build a hut on a trunk from forty to fifty feet in height, and huddle together in it to pass the night, and to be in sufficient numbers to repulse their assailants. The baganis generally try to take their victims by surprise, and begin their attack with burning arrows, with which they endeavour to set on fire the bamboo roof. Sometimes the besiegers form a testudo, like the ancient Romans, with their locked shields, and advance under cover up to the posts, which they attack with their axes, while the besieged hurl down showers of stones upon their heads. But, once their ammunition is exhausted, the hapless Mandayas have nothing to do but witness, as impotent spectators, the work of destruction, until the moment comes when their habitation topples over and falls. Then the captives are divided among the assailants. The heads of the old men and of the wounded are cut off, and the women and children are led away as slaves.

The genius of destructiveness seems incarnate in this Malay race. The missionaries alone venture to travel among these ferocious tribes. They, too, have made the sacrifice of their lives, and, holding life worth nothing, they have succeeded in winning the respect of these savages in evangelising and converting them. They work for God and for their country, and the poorest and most wretched among the natives are not unwilling to accept the faith and to submit to Spain; but the missionaries insist on their leaving their homes and going to another district, to which, for many reasons, the neophytes gladly consent. After several days’ journey a pueblo is founded. These villages have multiplied for many years past, forming oases of comparative peace and civilisation amid the barbarism by which they are surrounded, and are open to all who choose to seek a shelter in them. The more neophytes the pueblo holds, the less exposed it is to hostile incursions. Doctor Montano gives a very striking account of one of these daring missionaries, Father Saturnino Urios, of the Society of Jesus, who, in a single year, converted and baptised fifty-two hundred people.