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An Englishwoman in the Philippines

Chapter 45: FOOTNOTES
By Mrs. Campbell Dauncey
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About This Book

A series of letters recording a nine-month stay in the Philippine Islands presents vivid impressions of urban Manila and provincial Iloilo, island travel, climate and monsoon weather, domestic life and housekeeping, social entertainments and religious festivals, local dress and crafts, markets and labor conditions, Chinese and Spanish influences, and the effects of American occupation and administration. The narrative blends travel anecdotes and sensory description with practical notes on housing, sanitation, tariffs and commerce, offering an immediate, impressionistic account of daily routines, public ceremonies, and the social and economic interactions that shaped colonial-era island life.

Transcriber’s Note: The map is clickable for a larger version, if the device you’re reading this on supports that.

THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

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.”

INDEX

PRINTED BY OLIVER AND BOYD, EDINBURGH.