The Story of Magellan and The Discovery of the Philippines Part 25

"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 n.o.blest 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aguinaldo.]

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, s.e.xton, or an insignificant a.s.sistant 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 a.s.sociated 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 Ca.n.a.l increased the importance of Hong Kong.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Iloilo.]

The great merchant at Canton at the time of the Boston commercial period was Honqua. He was as n.o.ble as he was rich, and Mr. Forbes, the famous old Boston merchant, relates the following story of him:

"A New England trader had gone to Canton, and had been unsuccessful, and owed Honqua one hundred thousand dollars. He desired to return home, but could not do so if he discharged the debt. Honqua heard of his condition, pitied him, and sent for him.

"'I shall be sorry to part from you,' he said, 'but I wish you to return as you so desire, happy and free. Here are all your notes canceled.'"

Here was superb commercialism.

The American sovereignty over the Philippine Islands opens the way to China by the China Sea. In the progress of events the achievements of Magellan have led the ships of the West to the East again, and it is possible that there may yet be great Mongol emigrations to the western sh.o.r.es of the southern continent. The lantern or farol of Magellan was never more prophetic than now. So suggestion lives.

TRAVELERS' TALES OF THE PHILIPPINES.