The Story of Magellan and The Discovery of the Philippines

SUPPLEMENTAL
THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. – LAGASPI. – THE STRUGGLE OF THE NATIVES WITH SPAIN. – STORY OF THE PATRIOT RIZAL. – AGUINALDO

The Philippine Islands, which promise to become a republic of the seas, and the first republic in Asiatic waters, were for generations held by Spain. These one thousand and more sea gardens, some eleven thousand miles from New York, number about as few islands of importance as there are American States. The government of the more populous islands has been so restrictive that, before the boom of Dewey's guns in the China Sea, little was known about them to the world.

The archipelago consists of some six hundred islands that might find marking on an ordinary map of the world.

Twenty-five of these have gained a commercial standing, from which are collected products for foreign trade. The chief of these is Luzon, and the principal ports of the larger islands are Iloilo, on the island of Panay; Zebu and Zamboango.

Luzon and the northern islands are inhabited by a partly civilized race, called the Tagals, who are supposed to be descended from immigrants from the Malay peninsula. They have had the reputation of a mild-mannered people, as they have long received, directly or indirectly, European influences. There are two thousand one hundred schools in Luzon and some six millions of the natives of the islands are claimed as Catholics.

A sultanate was formed on the Sulu archipelago nearly eight hundred years ago, and the Mohammedan populations are called Moros or Moors. The Visayas people are a lower race. Colonies of Chinese are to be found in many of the larger islands, and these constitute the centers of thrift and industry.

The official language of the islands is Spanish, but the natives speak in twenty or more dialects. The islands are supposed to contain about ten million people, but there are no correct censuses by which to compute the number. Even the islands themselves seem not to have been correctly counted.

The history of the islands since their discovery has been one of the most silent in the world. They have been governed by Spain in such a manner as to enrich the Crown of Spain. When the Pope apportioned the newly discovered world among the Kings of the Church, the Western Hemisphere was given to Spain, and by an error of division Spain received the Moluccas or Spice Islands. Magellan declared the King of Spain suzerain of the islands, and after many years Spain sent an expedition from one of her colonies to Zebu to begin the occupation of the Spicery. The leader of this expedition, Miguel de Legaspi, caused his men to marry native women, hoping thereby more easily to subdue a wild and untrained race.

In 1571 this colonizer brought Manila under his influence, and induced the native King to accept the suzerainty of the Spanish King. He proclaimed Manila the seat of Government, and made it an episcopal city.

Legaspi came to learn a very strange thing. It was that the Chinese had made themselves masters of navigation by monsoons. They came down from their coasts to Manila Bay on northwest monsoons, and when the monsoons changed they were carried back again. This power was akin to steam. Their boats were junks, but they filled the marts of Manila with silks and other Oriental luxuries.

Legaspi encouraged this trade. He was the founder of trade in the ports of the China Sea. He caused a market place to be built for the Chinese traders in Manila, in the form of a circus, and afterward opened a quarter for them within the walls. The Chinese still hold a large part of the retail trade of the port. Before the late Spanish war, they numbered about sixty thousand, and one hundred thousand in the port and provinces.

The monks came and sought to convert the people; their efforts were partly successful, but sometimes ended in tragedies.

The trade between Spain and the Philippines was for a long time carried on by the way of Mexico. The intercourse between the Crown and her dependencies here was infrequent. The Mohammedans waged frequent wars against the Catholic missionaries, whom they sought to exterminate.

The friars became the real rulers of the civilized parts of the islands. The will of the Spanish priest was absolute. He was independent of State authority. The rule of the Church was so severe that it brought religion into disfavor, and when the power of Aguinaldo arose, that chief insisted upon the expulsion of certain monastic orders, as detrimental to liberty, and demanded the restoration of the estates of the Church to the people.

Such is, in brief, the simple history of the islands discovered by Magellan before the archipelago was ceded by the treaty of Paris to the United States.

MANILA

Beautiful Manila, shining over the China Sea – so seductive to the white man when seen from a distance, so withering to all his energies when the same white man becomes a resident there!

A two days' voyage from Hong Kong brings the traveler to Luzon to the river Pasig, where the grim old fortresses of Manila, earthquake rent, like a haze of green vegetation, break the view. Palms lift their green cool shadows in the burning air.

Manila is a walled city. The entrance is by drawbridges, which are raised at night.

The mediæval atmosphere does not disappear when one finds one's self within the walls. Exhaustion and decay are everywhere. The large open bay lies in the splendors of the sunlight when the day is calm, and the visitor would never dream of its turbulent condition when it is lashed by the typhoon.

Across the bay stands Cavite, the naval station, the scene of Dewey's victory over the Spanish fleet.

The city has some two hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants. The merchants, as we have said, are largely Chinese, and their quarters are picturesque with gay bazaars.

In the shadow land of trees and open dry marshes outside of the city are beautiful estates, and along the roadsides people go waving their fans slowly and listlessly. Here are the parks, the bull ring, and the lovely botanical gardens.

Commercial Manila is a city of coolies, who bare their backs to the sun, though little work can be done here in the noonday heat.

Some years ago a terrible cold came to Manila. It was on a late December night, near morning. The thermometer went down to 74°. Think of that, and of the poor coolies, and of the negritos, or the little black dwarfs, and of those who lived in the thousands of huts of bamboo or reeds! True, 74° would indicate a hot day in our American June or July, but in Manila it was a cold morning, and the people came shivering into the streets, to tell each other of their sufferings.

The best description of Manila before the war that we have seen was written by Crozet, and is contained in an English translated book entitled Crozet's Voyage to Tasmania, New Zealand, the Ladrone Islands, and the Philippines. From this beautifully illustrated work we present a view of the city and the surrounding island as it appeared seven years or more ago:

"The city of Manila is one of the most beautiful that Europeans have built in the East Indies; its houses are all of stone, with tile roofs and they are big, comfortable and well ventilated. The streets of Manila are broad and perfectly straight; there are five principal streets, which divide the city lengthwise, and about ten which divide it broadways. The form of the city is that of an oblong, surrounded by walls and ditches, and defended on the side of the river by a badly planned citadel, which is about to be pulled down and rebuilt. The city walls are flanked by a bastion at every one of the four angles. There are at Manila eight principal churches, with an open place in front of every one; they are all beautiful, large and very richly decorated. The Cathedral is a building which would grace any of our European cities, and has just been rebuilt by an Italian Theatin,⁷ who is an able architect. The two rows of columns which support the vaults of the nave and of the aisles are of magnificent marble; so also are the columns of the portal, the altars, the steps, and the pavement. These marbles are obtained from local quarries, are of great variety, and are of the greatest beauty. The space in front of the Cathedral is very large, and is the finest in the city.

"On one side the palace of the Governor is flanked by the Cathedral, on the other by the Town Hall. The Town Hall is very beautiful. At the extremity of the place in front of the Cathedral a large barracks is being constructed, which is to be capable of lodging eight thousand troops.

"Private houses, as well as public buildings, are all one story high. Spaniards never live on the ground floor, on account of the dampness, but they occupy the first floor instead. The heat of the climate has induced them to build very large apartments, with verandas running right round the outside, so as to keep out of the sun; the windows form part of the verandas, and the daylight only enters the rooms by means of the doors which open out on to these verandas. The ground floor serves as a storehouse, and to prevent the rising of moisture from the soil its surface is raised a foot, by means of a bed of charcoal; then sand or gravel is placed on top of this bed, which is finally paved with stone or brick laid with mortar.

"As the country is very subject to earthquakes, the houses, although built of stone, are strengthened with large posts of wood or iron fixed perpendicularly in the ground, rising to the top of the wall-plates, and built within the walls, so that they can not be seen, and then crossed on every floor by master girders, strongly bound together and bolted by wooden keys, which so consolidate the whole building.

"Manila is built on the mouth of a beautiful river, which flows from a lake, called by the Spaniards Lagonne-de-bay, and which is situated five leagues inland. Forty streams flow into this lake, which is twenty leagues in circumference, and around which there are as many villages as streams. The Manila River is the only one which flows out of the lake. It is covered with boats, bringing to the city every sort of provision from the forty agricultural tribes established on the lake shores.

"The suburbs are bigger and more thickly populated than the city itself; they are separated from it by a river, across which a beautiful bridge has been thrown. The Minondo suburb is more especially inhabited by half-breeds, Chinese, and Indians, who are for the most part goldsmiths and silversmiths, and all of them work people.

"The Saint Croix suburb is inhabited by Spanish merchants, by foreigners of all nations, and by Chinese half-breeds. This quarter is the most agreeable one in the country, because the houses, which are quite as fine as those of the city, are built on the river bank, and thereby they enjoy all the conveniences and pleasantness due to such a position.

"In spite of such advantages, the city is badly situated, being placed between two intercommunicating volcanoes, and of which the interiors, being always active, are evidently preparing its ruin. The two volcanoes are those of the Lagonne-ed-Taal and of Monte Albay. When one burns, the other smokes. I shall speak later on of the former of these volcanoes, which, to me at least, appeared a most singular one.

"Until the shocks of the volcanoes shall decide its fate, Manila remains the capital of the Spanish establishments in the Philippines. Here reside the Governor, who is called the Captain General and President of the Royal Audience. Don Simon de Auda filled this office when I arrived at Manila. This Governor had previously been a member of the Royal Audience, and when the English, at the end of the last war, took Manila, he escaped from the city before the surrender, placed himself at the head of the Indians of the province of Pampague, and, without regard to the capitulation of the city, he is said to have succeeded in confining the English within their conquest, starving equally the conquerors and the conquered. Noticing that the Chinese established outside the city walls were furnishing provisions to English and Spaniards alike, he butchered them, putting more than ten thousand to the sword. It seemed to me, however, that the Spaniards in general considered the efforts of this councillor to be more harmful than advantageous to the welfare of the Spanish colony. The English, harassed by the Indians under Don Simon de Auda, had on their part armed and raised other provinces of Luzon, so as to oppose Indian to Indian, and this sort of civil war did more harm to the colony than even the capture of Manila by the English.

"However this may be, Don Simon de Auda returned to Spain after the peace, was rewarded for his zeal by being made Privy Councillor of Castile, and was sent back to Manila as Governor General of the Philippines. Since his arrival in his province he has started a number of important projects, but difficult to be carried out at one and the same time. He has started considerable fortifications in various parts of the city, very large barracks, dykes at the mouth of the river, a powder-mill, smelting furnaces and forges to work the iron mines, and a number of other useful works, which might have succeeded better had they been started in due succession.

"The Philippine Archipelago contains fourteen principal islands, the Government of which is divided into twenty-seven provinces, which are governed by alcaldes under the orders of the Governor Captain General. All these islands are thickly populated, being about three million. These islands extend from the tenth to the twenty-third degree north latitude, and vary in breadth from about forty leagues at the north end of Luzon up to two hundred leagues from the south of the southeast point of Mindanao to the southwest point of Paragoa.

"They are all fertile and rich in natural products. But although the Spaniards have been established here for more than two hundred years, they have not yet succeeded in making themselves masters of the islands. They have no foothold on Paragoa, which is almost eighty leagues long, nor on the adjacent small islands; they only possess a few acres on the big island of Mindanao, which is two hundred leagues in circumference, nor are they yet fully acquainted with the interior of the island of Luzon, where they have their chief settlement, namely, the city of Manila. Luzon is the largest of these islands, being a hundred and forty leagues long from Cape Bojador to Bulusan Point, which is the most northerly point, and about forty leagues broad. In the northern part of Luzon, near the province of Ilocos, there are some aborigines with whom the Spaniards have never been able to establish communication. It is believed that these people are the descendants of Chinese, who, having been shipwrecked on these shores, have established themselves in the mountains of this part of the island. It is said that some Indians know the routes by which access is gained to this people, and that they have been well received by them; but it is in the interest of these Indians to withhold the knowledge from the Spaniards, on account of their great trade profits with those people, who lack many things and have only provisions and gold."

THE STORY OF THE PATRIOT RIZAL

Dr. José Rizal, a virtuous Catholic reformer, was the Samuel Adams of the awakening of moral feeling against the tyranny of Spain. He sought to reform the Government and to correct corruption in the Church.

He belonged to the province of Cavite. He was a small man, of a clear, sensitive conscience, and great intellectual penetration and force. It became the one purpose of his life to free his countrymen. "He organized the Revolution," says a monument to Samuel Adams, and Dr. Rizal sought to organize a revolution in a like manner as the "last of the Puritans" in New England, by the collecting of facts for correspondence with patriots at Manila and Hong Kong.

In his school life he beheld the universal corruption going on around him. His heart was moved to pity the people.

He wrote a letter in which he urged reform by the expulsion of corrupt officers of the Government and of certain immoral priests. This awakened the Government and made him secret enemies. He was accused by the Government of treason and by the decadent priests of the Church of blasphemy. He held to his convictions against all opposition, knowing that right was right and truth was truth.

He sought to unite the worthy representatives of the State and Church in an effort to bring about a change which should honor morals and give justice to the people. Among men of conscience his influence secretly grew. He hoped to gain such force as to make an appeal to the court at Madrid.

He organized a moral revolution.

Conscience is power, but its progress is slow.

In 1890 Dr. Rizal published a pamphlet that stirred the island world. He pictured the sufferings of the natives under the Spanish rule. He appealed to the enlightened Church, conscience and humanity.

The patriot's friends saw that the reform movement was about to be crushed, and said to Rizal:

"Escape to Hong Kong!"

There was a patriotic club in Hong Kong that sought the emancipation of the natives of Luzon and the Philippines from the extortions of Spain. It would be well for him now to go there.

"How shall I leave the city?" was the one question that suddenly haunted his mind.

He must go by sea. He could not go on board a ship without being detected and detained.

"Get into a perforated box," said a fellow patriot, "and I will ship you with the merchandise."

Dr. Rizal secreted himself in the perforated box, and was shipped from Luzon to Hong Kong.

He was received with great enthusiasm by the Philippine patriots in Hong Kong.

But he was more dangerous to the officials of Luzon in Hong Kong than at Cavite. It became a problem with the latter how to get him once more in their power.

The Governor General Weyler caused a dispatch to be sent to him which stated that he "was too valuable a man for the State to lose his services," that his past conduct would be overlooked, and that he could safely return to his own island.

Honest himself, he could not believe that the dispatch was insincere.

He went back to Manila. His foes were bent on his destruction.

He was one day absent from his rooms attending probably to his medical duties, when some soldiers led by a spy entered his apartments and searched his trunks and pretended to find there seditious books.

Dr. Rizal was arrested. His enemies formed the court to try him for treason.

The books were put out as evidence against him.

"I imported no books," said he.

"But the books are here."

"The customhouse officers found no books in my trunks," said Dr. Rizal.

"But here are the books that witness against you."

"There were no books in my room when I left it," said he.

"But we found them there."

"Let me call the customhouse officers."

The court refused the request.

"Let me summon the owner of my room."

The court refused the request.

"The witness against me is a convict, a spy, and a perjurer."

The court found him guilty.

He was sent into exile. The injustice of the trial was a flame of liberty; the British consul protested against it, and riots broke out in Cavite against the officials that countenanced such a mockery of justice.

He went again to Hong Kong. Weyler had left Luzon, and had been succeeded by Despajol.

His case aroused the Patriot Club. The patriots resolved to go to Spain and lay their cause before the throne. They were mobbed in Spain and sent to Manila for trial.

The trial was a farce; Dr. Rizal was again condemned.

On December 6, 1896, he was led out of the Manila prison into the courtyard. A file of soldiers awaited the coming. A sharp volley of shots broke the stillness of the air; and that heart, so true to liberty, was broken and lay bleeding on the earth. So perished one of the noblest patriots of the islands of the China Sea.

AGUINALDO

Aguinaldo, called "the greatest of the Malays," in that he rose against Spanish tyranny, is one of the interesting characters of the closing century. His true character can hardly be determined at the present time. Future events must reveal it. He is of mixed blood, and is said to more resemble a European than a Malay.

He was born in the province of Cavite, and is supposed to have European blood in his veins. He was brought up as a house boy in the apartments of a Jesuit priest – a house boy being an errand boy; a boy handy for all common work.

It has been the policy of Spain for centuries to keep her subjects on the Pacific islands in partial ignorance; but this bright boy had an impulse to learn, to acquire knowledge, to grasp the truth of life. He had a remarkable memory, and he became such an apt scholar as to excite wonder. When he was fourteen years old he entered the medical school at Manila. He lost the favor of the Church by joining the Masonic order.

In 1888 he went to Hong Kong, where was a Philippine colony. Here he sought and obtained a military education, and studied military works, and the historical campaigns of the world's greatest heroes. He learned Latin, English, French, and Chinese.

At the breaking out of the insurrection of the Philippines against Spain in 1896, Aguinaldo espoused the cause of liberty, and was made an officer and became a leader. The revolution grew and affected the native troops, and its spirit filled the archipelago. It became the purpose of the more fiery patriots to "drive the Spaniards into the sea."

Aguinaldo advocated the acceptance of concessions by the Spanish Government, by which the rights of the native races should be recognized and protected. His policy was accepted, and the insurgents disbanded. He received Spanish gold to abandon the war for independence, and fell under the suspicion that his patriotism was purchasable. This suspicion has shadowed his fame. He went to Hong Kong.

The island Hong Kong, which is English, is a school of good government. Here Aguinaldo seems to have conceived an ambition to free the native races of the archipelago, and form a republic of the confederated islands. The Spanish-American War revealed to him an opportunity to strike for liberty. He said to the Filipinos: "The hour has come."

The Filipinos looked upon him as the man for the crisis.

An article in the Review of Reviews represents the chief as saying to an American naval officer:

"There will be war between your country and Spain, and in that war you can do the greatest deed in history by putting an end to Castilian tyranny in my native land. We are not ferocious savages. On the contrary, we are unspeakably patient and docile. That we have risen from time to time is no sign of bloodthirstiness on our part, but merely of manhood resenting wrongs which it is no longer able to endure. You Americans revolted for nothing at all compared with what we have suffered. Mexico and the Spanish republics rose in rebellion and swept the Spaniard into the sea, and all their sufferings together would not equal that which occurs every day in the Philippines. We are supposed to be living under the laws and civilization of the nineteenth century, but we are really living under the practices of the Middle Ages.

"A man can be arrested in Manila, plunged into jail, and kept there twenty years without ever having a hearing or even knowing the complaint upon which he was arrested. There is no means in the legal system there of having a prompt hearing or of finding out what the charge is. The right to obtain evidence by torture is exercised by military, civil, and ecclesiastical tribunals. To this right there is no limitation, nor is the luckless witness or defendant permitted to have a surgeon, a counsel, a friend, or even a bystander to be present during the operation. As administered in the Philippines one man in every ten dies under the torture, and nothing is ever heard of him again. Everything is taxed, so that it is impossible for the thriftiest peasant farmer or shopkeeper to ever get ahead in life.

"The Spanish policy is to keep all trade in the hands of the Spanish merchants, who come out here from the peninsula and return with a fortune. The Government budget for education is no larger than the sum paid by the Hong Kong authorities for the support of Victoria College here. What little education is had in the Philippines is obtained from the good Jesuits, who, in spite of their being forbidden to practice their priestly calling in Luzon, nevertheless devote their lives to teaching their fellow-countrymen. They carry the same principle into the Church, and no matter how devout, able, or learned a Filipino or even a half-breed may be, he is not permitted to enter a religious order or ever to be more than an acolyte, sexton, or an insignificant assistant priest. The State taxes the people for the lands which it says they own, and which as a matter of fact they have owned from time immemorial, and the Church collects rent for the same land upon the pretext that it belongs to them under an ancient charter of which there is no record. Neither life nor limb, liberty nor property have any security whatever under the Spanish administration."

Such was his indictment of Spain.

He began a war for independence from Spain in the provinces of Luzon. He was an inspiring general and practically made prisoners of some fifteen thousand of the Spanish forces. He organized a Government at least nominally Republican, although it has been called a dictatorship. The purchase of the Philippines by the United States, in accordance with the Treaty of Paris, has been opposed by Aguinaldo and his followers in a most distressing war. He has claimed the absolute independence of all the Philippines, although, so far as our knowledge goes, his authority does not extend far beyond certain districts of the Island of Luzon. Without anticipating the verdict of history upon our relations to the Philippines, it is enough to add that the bloodshed and suffering caused by this war are most deplorable.

HONG KONG

Hong Kong and the China Sea have come to stand not only for Europe in Asia, but for America in Asia, though of the latter, Manila is the port. The center of the world's forces changes, and it is a strange current of events that has made the China Sea, with its English port of Hong Kong, and the Luzon port of Manila, facing each other across the blue ocean way, the pivotal point of not only England in China, but of America in the East. The Anglo-Chinese community in Hong Kong represents the union of Europe and Asia in the family of nations, and America joins the world of the higher civilization at Manila, the scene of Dewey's victory.

The civilizing history of Hong Kong is largely associated with Sir John Bowring, whom a large part of the world recalls merely as a writer of popular hymns; as, "In the Cross of Christ I Glory."

The British free traders secured Hong Kong as a market for the East, and added it to the British Empire in the middle of the century. The Suez Canal increased the importance of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, not being an integral part of Asia, became a place of refugees before its union with the British Empire. It lay in the route of the British possessions in Africa, India, and North America. Its Urasian destiny was seen in the alliance between Europe and Asia concluded at Canton (1634) between the East India Company and the Chinese Government. It then became the vantage ground of the Anglo-Saxon race. The early English Governors of Hong Kong made the port the cradle of liberty and free trade, and a civilizing influence in the East.

The island is some nine miles long and from two to six miles broad, with a population of more than one hundred and twenty thousand, most of whom are Chinese. It was ceded in perpetuity to the British by the treaty of Nankin in 1843, when its Government began to be administered by Colonial Governors, under whom it grew commercially.

The East India Trade Company had prepared the way for this little Britain in the East. The United States in the middle of the century began to trade at Canton from the ports of Boston and Salem. It is a very curious and almost forgotten fact that the first cargoes from New England to Canton consisted largely of ginseng, a plant now little esteemed, but which at that time had acquired such a medical reputation in China as to be almost worth its weight in gold. The plant was held to be a magical cure for nearly all diseases and to possess the gift of immortal youth.

Boston and Salem are still adorned with the tall and stately mansions of these old merchants, whose wooden vessels went to the China Sea, at first carrying ginseng and returning with tea. A writer in a Boston paper thus pictures this period:

"The generation that would not have had to look at a map to find out where Manila was when George Dewey arrived there, is almost passed away. These were the great sailors of their time; men who met emergencies with nerve and overcame tempest and adversity with equal complacency, who knew the merchants of Canton and Calcutta as well as the merchants of Salem and Boston, and whose tempers were never ruffled if even stress of circumstance compelled them to put up with a paltry profit of one hundred per cent. They lived at a time when there might easily be a fortune in a single freight, and when one turn round the world might represent more than a million of money. Most of them lived before the day of the bill of exchange, and when the solid old method of carrying specie in the hold was the familiar business practice. They knew the pirate of the China Sea and he of Barbary, too, for it was this old-fashioned system of carrying your capital with you that made the pirates' life worth living. They lived before the cable as well, and from the moment that a ship cleared from Canton or Manila or Singapore there was no way in the world for the consignee or the merchant in Boston to know what she had on board until she arrived here to speak for herself. Be it silks or teas or what-not, the merchant must move quickly to bid or buy, for the nature and value of the cargo could not have been discounted in advance, while the ship was skimming the oceans. Each vessel made her own market, and the wharf was the market place. It was good news, indeed, when a captain with a cargo of teas was informed by his owners, who may have met him upon the completion of a two years' cruise, that the price of tea had advanced the day before his arrival. It was pretty apt to be something in the captain's own pocket, too, for in those days he was allowed to carry twenty-five tons of freight for his own private speculation, and a salary of three hundred dollars a month in addition was not uncommon. There are retired captains on Cape Cod and in Salem and in the suburbs of Boston to-day who earned a competence in those times of Boston's water-front prosperity. They became masters sometimes before they were of age, and occasionally there would be one, like the late R. B. Forbes, who would become a great merchant, the head of a famous, wealthy house, known the world over, almost before he realized how great was the fortune that had overtaken him. And there was another very nice thing about those old days of plenty. If a man came home from China rich, invested his wealth in a railroad or some manufacturing or mining project that would be pretty apt to ruin him, all he would have to do would be to exile himself, under the right auspices, for another year or two in China, and then return to his home and friends with his fortunes quite mended."