A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route

Florence Kimball Russel

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• Publié par: chiwyag
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 14
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Woman's Journey through the Philippines, by Florence Kimball Russel This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A Woman's Journey through the Philippines On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route Author: Florence Kimball Russel Release Date: March 26, 2007 [EBook #20913] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WOMAN'S JOURNEY *** Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net/ (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan State University Libraries.) [Contents] A WOMAN’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE PHILIPPINES [Contents] 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 [Contents] 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. [Contents] TO My Husband WITHOUT WHOSE INSPIRATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT THIS BOOK WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN [ix] [Contents] Contents I. INTRODUCTORY STATEMENTS 11 II. D UMAGUETE 27 III. MISAMIS 53 IV. ILIGAN 92 V. CAGAVAN 105 VI. CEBU 115 VII. ZAMBOANGA 145 VIII. SULU 183 IX. BONGAO 208 X. TAMPAKAN AND THE H OME STRETCH 234 [xi] [Contents] List of Illustrations THE BELLE OF BONGAO (See page 222) Frontispiece LAYING A SHORE END IN A PHILIPPINE COAST TOWN 12 “U NTIL EVENTIDE THE SUMMER SKIES ABOVE US SLEPT, AS SID THE SUMMER SEAS BELOW US” 19 A PHILIPPINE COAST TOWN 24 D UMAGUETE 27 D IVING FOR A RTICLES THROWN FROM THE SHIP 28 “H ARD AT WORK ESTABLISHING AN OFFICE IN THE TOWN” 30 “TWO WOMEN BEATING CLOTHES ON THE ROCKS OF A LITTLE STREAM” 41 CHURCH AND CONVENTO, D UMAGUETE 42 THE O LD FORT AT MISAMIS 53 “THE NATIVE BAND SERENADED US” 56 THE LINTOGUP RIVER 60 A MISAMIS BELLE 70 LAYING CABLE FROM A N ATIVE SCHOONER 90 A STREET IN ILIGAN 94 MARKET-DAY AT ILIGAN 96 “IT WAS EVIDENT THAT HE WAS A PERSONAGE OF NO LITTLE IMPORTANCE” 99 ST. THOMAS CHURCH, CEBU 117 MAGELLAN’S CHAPEL, CEBU 118 U NLOADING H EMP AT CEBU 124 G ROVE OF PALMS NEAR CEBU 133 O RMOC 137 RELEASING THE BUOY FROM THE CABLE IN A H EAVY SEA 143 Q UARTERS OF THE COMMANDING O FFICER, ZAMBOANGA 147 O FFICERS’ Q UARTERS, ZAMBOANGA 162 A STREET IN ZAMBOANGA 170 STREET SCENE, ZAMBOANGA—NATIVE BATHING-PLACE, ZAMBOANGA 176 THE PIER AT SULU 183 N ATIVES OF SULU 185 MORO H OUSES, TULI 187 THE MORO SCHOOL FOR BOYS, SULU 197 CHINESE, MORO, AND V ISAYAN CHILDREN, SULU 203 SOLDIERS’ Q UARTERS, BONGAO 208 N ATIVES OF BONGAO 221 TOOLAWEE 224 MARKET-DAY IN A MORO V ILLAGE 234 A G ROUP OF MOROS 236 A COLLECTION OF MORO WEAPONS 247 PASACAO 256 [11] [xii] [Contents] 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 [12] [13] [14] 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 conventio