The Filipinos: Manila and Mussulman

A historical writer in the French Revue des Deux Mondes has described the condition of the endless conflict in the archipelago in a manner to exhibit the spirit of Spanish colonial government as it is displayed in the capital of Manila and in the restless and unconquered provinces. There, as in Europe and America, Spain set upon every locality she occupied the indelible mark of her sinister and unchanging intolerance and pride. In Manila, as well as in Mexico, Panama, and Lima, was the severe and solemn aspect, the feudal and religious stamp, which the Spaniard impresses upon his monuments, his palaces, his dwellings in every latitude. Manila appeared like a fragment of Spain transplanted to the archipelago of Asia. On its church and convents, even on its ruined walls, time has laid the sombre, dull-gold coloring of the mother country. The ancient city, silent and melancholy, stretches interminably along gloomy streets, bordered with convents whose flat facades are only broken here and there by a few narrow windows. It still preserved all the austere appearance of a city of the reign of Philip II. But there was a new city within the ramparts of Manila, sometimes called the Escolta, from the name of its central quarter, and this city is alive with its dashing teams, its noisy crowd of Tagal women, shod in high-heeled shoes, and every nerve in their bodies quivering with excitement. They are almost all employed in the innumerable cigar factories whose output inundates all Asia. The city contained 260,000 inhabitants of every known race and color.

From Manila throughout the archipelago the religious fanaticism of the Spaniards radiated, coming into collision with manners, traditions, and fanaticism fully as fierce as those of Spain -- that rooted in the fatalism of the Mussulman. At a distance of 6,000 leagues from Toledo and Granada, the same ancient hatreds have brought European Spaniard and Asiatic Saracen into the same relentless antagonism that swayed them in the days of the Cid and Ferdinand the Catholic. The Sulu archipelago on account of its position between Mindanao and Borneo, was the commercial, political, and religious centre of the followers of the Prophet, the Mecca of the extreme Orient. From this centre they spread over the neighboring archipelagoes. Merciless pirates and unflinching fanatics, they scattered terror, ruin, and death everywhere, sailing in their light proas up the narrow channels and animated with implacable hatred for those conquering invaders, to whom they never gave quarter and from whom they never expected it. Constantly beaten in pitched battle, they as constantly took again to the sea, eluding the pursuit of the heavy Spanish vessels, taking refuge in bays and creeks where no one could follow them, pillaging isolated ships, surprising the villages, massacring the old men, leading away the women and the adults into slavery, pushing the audacious prows of their skiffs even up to within 300 miles of Manila, and seizing every year nearly 4,000 captives.

Between the Malay creese and the Castilian carronade the struggle was unequal, but it did not last the less long on that account, nor, obscure though it was, was it the less bloody. On both sides there was the same bravery, the same cruelty. It required all the tenacity of Spain to purge these seas of the pirates who infested them, and it was not until after a conflict of several years, in 1876, that the Spanish squadron was able to bring its broadsides to bear on Tianggi, a nest of Suluan pirates, land a division of troops, invest all the outlets, and burn the town and its inhabitants, as well as the harbor and all the craft within it. The soldiers planted their flag and the engineers built a new city on the smoking ruins. This city was then protected by a strong garrison.

For a time, at least, piracy was at an end, but not the Moslem spirit, which was exasperated rather than crushed by defeat. To the rovers of the seas succeeded the organization known as juramentados. One of the characteristic qualities of the Malays is their contempt of death. They have transmitted it, with their blood, to the Polynesians, who see in it only one of the multiple phenomena and not the supreme act of existence, and witness it or submit to it with profound indifference. Travellers have often seen a Kanaka stretch his body on a mat, while in perfect health, without any symptom of disease whatever, and there wait patiently for the end, convinced that it is near, and refuse all nourishment and die without any apparent suffering. His relatives say of him: "He feels he is going to die," and the imaginary patient dies, his mind possessed by some illusion, some superstitious idea, some invisible wound through which life escapes. When to this absolute indifference to death is united Mussulman fanaticism, which gives to the believer a glimpse of the gates of a paradise where the excited senses revel in endless and numberless enjoyments, a longing for extinction takes hold of him and throws him like a wild beast upon his enemies. The juramentado kills for the sake of killing and being killed, and so winning, in exchange for a life of suffering and privation, the voluptuous existence promised by Mohammed.