Letter XLIII Homeward Bound
S.S. Kai-Fong, August 25, 10 A.M.
Iloilo is now far away below the horizon astern, and if I look over the side, I am afforded the delightful spectacle of one Philippine Island slipping past after the other into pale blue fluff, and I hope they will stay down under my horizon for ever.
We scraped out through a network of taxes, like fish trying to get out of a fish-corral. Our two large cases had to get a Customs permit before they could be put on board, for which they got from us a peso in the form of a stamp upon the Export Entry, and another peso and a half for what they call wharfage. This means that they did not examine the contents of the cases, but gave C—— a paper to sign and an export permit. Another item is an Internal Revenue tax of a peso on each passenger ticket. Fancy if we at home had to pay 10 shillings in taxes before we could go across the Channel!
It is so nice to be in such a clean and comfortable steamer, and to have fresh vegetables and fruit, brought on ice from Hong Kong; and one wonders how the Americans can tolerate the contrast between this and those dreadful Spanish cockroach-traps which they dignify by the name of the Mail.
All the crew are Chinese, of course, looking so straight and tall and intelligent after the stumpy, stupid, little Filipinos. With them too, as with the Filipino horses, the eye has been thrown out of focus, for the Chinese simply look colossal. I keep on thinking to myself what a very tall man that is, and he is only the usual height of ordinary men.
Most of the second-class passengers are Chinese, and they have queer meals on the lower deck, all squatting round a wooden tray on which are one or two big bowls of rice and bits of meat and vegetables. Round these are piled little bowls, into which the mixture is served out, and the Chinamen all set to work with chop-sticks, which is so like a conjuring-trick that one can watch them as long as they will go on with it! Amongst these people is a Chinaman with his Filipino wife, a little ugly woman, with her lips jutting out beyond the end of her nose, dressed in a gay camisa, and for ever smoking a huge, ragged cigar. Some children of theirs cling to them most of the time, and a very gaudily-dressed little chap of a more purely Filipino type, whom the Chinaman is exporting to a friend in Amoy who has bought the child for 10 dollars. You can buy children very cheaply in the Philippines; and away from the big towns, and very often in them, they are openly offered for sale; and most of the rich native and Mestizo families have servants which have been bought as children. I daresay, though I have never inquired about it, that the Americans strenuously deny this officially, but unofficially it is a perfectly well-known custom. This small slave was a very native little chap of three or four, got up in purple cotton coat and a crimson jockey cap, and radiantly happy in his new clothes, and we could not really feel very sorry for him. The Chinamen all take the greatest care of their hair, combing it out every day, and some of them have magnificent, glossy, black locks, right down to their knees; but others, whose hair is thin and scanty, eke out their pigtails with long cords of black silk gimp.
Talking of servants, when we came down to the Muelle Loney (to think I shall never see that place again!) this morning, we found Domingo waiting, in his smartest clothes, spotlessly white, and his skin shining with soap, to see us off. Poor fellow, he hung round, blubbering quietly, and carrying anything he could catch hold of, and when he said good-bye his face was quite pathetic. I think he felt he was losing the only people in the world who had ever treated him well, and he was one of the best specimens of a typical, unspoilt Filipino, stolid, obedient, humble, and faithful as a dog, and C—— said he would have given anything to have been able to take him with us, as the poor creature implored us to do. At the last, when the launch was pushing off, Domingo made a wild rush to spring on board, but was too late; and the last we saw of him was standing on the quay with his hat off and the tears streaming down his big, brown face.
We discussed this rush of Domingo’s, but can arrive at no satisfactory solution of what he wanted to do, for I think he only wanted to come out to the Kai-Fong, but C—— says he is certain he meant to follow us to Hong Kong and compel us to take him with us. Well, we can’t do that, but we have done our best for him in making him from a rough coolie into a clean, smart servant, who can get double the wages he received from us; and we found him a good place before we left, though, as I said before, I am not at all sure how either he or the other will do with the impatience and curses with which the average white man thinks he impresses his dignity upon the coloured person. It is not to be done in the Anglo-Indian method; no, nor in the American extreme of familiarity. Of that I was persuaded before I came here, and am still more convinced now that I have more experience.
The only way to impress anyone, black, brown, or white, with the idea of your dignity, is to be dignified yourself. But I suppose this is too much of an obvious truism for anyone to attempt to think over or act up to. Well, it served me in very good stead; and all I know is that, though every soul I spoke to had endless complaints about the impudence, laziness, or dishonesty of their servants, whether they were of the nation who kicked them, or those who allowed them to wear a vest in the house and not say señor, we never had any trouble once we got rid of our first Americanised cook—my house went as on oiled axles, and we never missed one single thing from start to finish. So what am I to say of the Filipinos? Those with whom I came in contact, as well as my own servants, were a narrow, cunning, good-humoured people, vain, superstitious, stupid, great gamblers, kind to their children, and bitterly cruel to animals—oh, the poor hens hung up by the heels in the sun! and the wretched pigs with their four feet lashed together that used to lie all day scorching in the Plaza at Molo! the awful open sores under the harness of the starving ponies! the brutal, sickening, cock-fighting! For those horrors alone, I should be thankful to leave this country, even were it the paradise which it is not. No, no terrestrial paradise, for one has the laziness, the heat, the apathy, and cruelty of the East, without the compensations of artistic beauty, cheapness, plenty, and luxury, which make up for those drawbacks in other hot countries. A shuffling, drab, discontented, thick-headed, costly East—with all the worst traditions of four hundred years of the off-scourings of the Spanish monkish orders, overlaid by a veneer of shallow cock-sureness hastily assimilated from a totally incongruous alien civilisation.
We carry a cargo of sugar, and from the ventilators come up gusts of that peculiar, heavy, nauseous odour, which carries one back instantly to the camarins of Iloilo. I can’t believe that the Philippines are really a thing of the past for me—it is not that I was there so long; but there was so little variety, and we saw and did and heard the same things so often, that I am left with an impression of as many years as we have been there months.
The End
Footnotes
1 England is 50,823 square miles in extent, and Luzon is 40,885.
2 Fivepence. The amount of bread this sum will buy in the Philippines is equal to half the English 2d. loaf.
3 Another method is to tie a rope round the carabao’s horns, and it is so tight that it cuts into the flesh, so that the carabaos frequently go mad with pain and “run amok.”
4 The actual numbers of the Commission have been changed several times, but the proportion of American to Filipino remains practically unaltered, as does the method of their election.
5 In the Spanish days, no Filipino was allowed to carry a walking-stick, except the Presidente of a town, which distinction was jealously preserved.
6 The Government owns 60,000,000 acres; but no non-Filipino can obtain more than 40 acres, and no corporation may hold more than 2500 acres. Five years after the passing of this law, that is in 1907, all corporate lands owned in excess of this amount and under cultivation must be disposed of or forfeited.
7 A corruption of tubig, Visayan for water.
8 The fighting bolo, the more deadly and elaborate weapon is always kept concealed in the hut.
9 This breach of Oriental decorum is one of the most fatal and irreparable mistakes the Americans have made in the Philippines. It is a subject on which the Filipino or Mestizo is not slow to speak his mind. Alas for misunderstandings!
10 The Tagalos are a much more industrious race than the Visayans, and are always in demand as clerks, workmen, or servants, in preference to the Southerners.
11 I have before me a cutting from The Manila Times, containing an account of the arrival in Manila, by the Transport Dix from San Francisco, of “eleven strong-limbed, square-jawed bloodhounds”... “for the work of trailing the Ladrones of Cavite and the Pulajanes of Samar.”