V
First Impressions of Manila
The China Sea has an evil reputation. On its shores one hears much about the typhoon season and the changing monsoons, and bad sailors would, no doubt, like to have their sailing dates determined by the Weather Bureau; but this is not always possible.
The Kasuga Maru, on which we made the voyage from Yokohama to Manila, lay in Hong Kong Harbour while one of the great mid-August storms tore up from the south and set skippers and seamen agog with fears of dreadful conditions we would have to meet on the trip across to Manila. In the China Sea there are crosscurrents which make for bad going at the best of times, and when they are piled up by a typhoon into great, warring waves the result is likely to be extraordinary.
My husband cabled me to take a larger vessel, a United States army transport which left Hong Kong about the same time we did, but I was comfortably located with my family on the little Kasuga Maru; the transfer of baggage was a troublesome task; and I figured that as long as the Kasuga Maru had been afloat in south seas for a good many years, she might be trusted to keep afloat for a few days longer.
We caught the calm between two storms. The sea had been beaten down by torrential rains; and while great, smooth waves rose under us and sent us rolling in a sickening zigzag all the way across, there was in them no threat of destruction, and I really began to feel that the China Sea had been maligned.
A feeling of intense curiosity got me out of my stateroom bright and early on the morning of our arrival in Manila.
To the northward lay a stretch of unbroken, mountainous shoreline; while we were headed for a narrow channel guarded by rock islands against which the surf broke in clouds of spray.
“Corregidor,” said the skipper, pointing to a high, green hill behind the rocks. Corregidor—it was the first time I had ever heard the name which since has become synonymous, in so many minds, with Gibraltar. On the other side of the entrance to Manila Bay stood Meriveles, a beautiful mountain, sloping gently back from the sea and up into soft, white clouds. But Manila—where was Manila? Cavite—where was Cavite? And where did the Spanish ships lie, when Dewey sailed in past Corregidor not knowing what he would find? Questions, these, which everybody asked in those days. Manila was twenty miles ahead at the far end of the Bay, while Cavite, across on the south shore, in the nearer distance, lay flat and almost invisible under low-spreading trees.
Flat; that is the word which occurs to everybody who sails for the first time into Manila Bay. The city is built on the lowlands; low, as I afterward learned, to the point of being below sea-level in certain places, and subject to sudden floods in the big typhoons. But far behind the flats are towering ranges of blue and purple hills, with here and there a softly rounded mountain standing, seemingly, alone.
The hot sun beat down on the glassy surface of the Bay and sent back a blinding glare which brought an ache into eyes and nerves, but we were all too interested to seek shelter in the darkened cabin.
While our ship was still miles from shore we could see long lines of low, red roofs and the white gleam of many domes and spires; and off to the right we had pointed out to us the eloquent wrecks of some of the Spanish fleet whose masts and battered hulks rose high out of the shallow water in which they were sunk.
But for ourselves, for me, for Mrs. Wright, for Maria and the children, the most important thing in sight was a little fleet of harbour launches which came hurrying down the Bay to meet us. I saw my husband and General Wright standing in the bow of one of these long before they could pick us out in the crowd of passengers lining the rails of the Kasuga Maru.
Then came the happy welcomings which make absences worth while; excited children; everybody talking at once; explanations begun and never finished; interruptions by customs officials—American soldiers in those days; comments on the heat and the bright white light, and laughing assurances that it wasn’t hot at all and that the climate was perfect; transferring baggage to the launch; glimpsing, occasionally, strange scenes and strange peoples; asking and answering a thousand questions; busy, bustling, delightfully confusing hours of landing in the farthest orient.
Our husbands turned themselves into willing “Baedekers” and instructed us on the way. We steamed up in our little launch to the mouth of the Pásig River, wide and deep and swift, and covered with what looked to me like millions of small, green cabbages.
“Carabao lettuce; the river’s full of it,” explained Mr. Taft, but I was much too occupied just then to stop and ask what “carabao lettuce” might be.
We came up past a bristling fort at the corner of a great, grey, many-bastioned and medieval wall which stretched as far as I could see down the bay shore on
