The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 30

In the presence of the undersigned Peregrin Albano, member of the village council, there being also present the president of the Munic.i.p.al Board of Health, Mr. Tomas San Pablo, and the princ.i.p.al men of the place, there has this day occurred the burial of the corpses, victims of the Pulajans, in the cemetery of this place, to wit: The officer of volunteers, Rafael Rosales, and the following volunteers, viz., Gualberto Gabane, Juan Pacle, Dionisio Daisno, Pedro Damtanan, Carmelo Lagbo; also the two women, Eustaquia Sapiten and Apolinaria N., also one unknown Pulajan. This in fulfilment of the official letter of instructions No. 136, from the office of the presidente of the town of Wright dated to-day. Said burial ceremonies were conducted by the Reverend Father Marcos Gomez, and were attended by the whole volunteer force of this place because of the death of their officer Rosales.

Tomas San Pablo, President of the Board of Health.

Peregrin Albano, Councillor.

(Illegible)----Moro, Captain of Volunteers. [436]

Fancy having doc.u.ments like the foregoing handed you with ever-increasing regularity as you sauntered, morning after morning, from your bath to your coffee and rolls, preparatory to the daily sifting of incidents such as that which included the burning of the American flag on the head of the munic.i.p.al representative of American authority already mentioned, and other like acts of poor misguided peasants stirred up by trifling scamps representing the dregs of insurrection. Motiong was not only within seven miles of the court-house at Catbalogan, but it was so near to Camp b.u.mpus, over in Leyte, where the 18th Infantry lay, that an order to them to move in the morning would have made life and property in all that brigand-harried region safe that night and continuously thereafter.

General Wm. H. Carter, Major-General U. S. A., well known to the American public as the able officer who, in 1911, commanded the United States forces mobilized on the Mexican border during the Mexican revolution of that year, that ousted President Diaz and seated President Madero, was in command at the time--the fall of 1904--of the military district of the Philippines which included Samar and Leyte. A word of request to him would have made life definitely safe in all the coast towns and their vicinity within two or three days after receipt of such a request.

Besides Gandara, Catbalogan, Calbayog, and Wright, Lieutenant Calderon's list included the trio of ill-fated munic.i.p.alities set forth below, concluding with the ill.u.s.trious name of Taft:

MUNIc.i.p.aLITY OF CATUBIG

Poblacion September 5 Tagabiran August 11 San Vicente August --

Catubig was toward the north end of Samar. On the day of the burning and sacking of the poblacion of Catubig, September 5th, which was done by a force of several hundred Pulajans, the scouts and constabulary, so it was afterward reported, killed a hundred of the Catubig Pulajans in an engagement. If this report were correct, as is likely, it was the biggest single killing of natives since the early days of the insurrection. [437] But it did not in the least check the Pulajan insurrection, which simply swerved its fury from the Catubig region toward the coast (the Pacific coast), descending upon the towns, villages, and hamlets of the towns.h.i.+ps of Borongan and Taft, thus:

MUNIc.i.p.aLITY OF BORONGAN

(Calderon's List of Barrios Burned, continued)

Sepa Sept. 23 Lucsohong Sept. 23 Maybocog Sept. 23 Maydolong Sept. 23 Soribao Sept. 23 Bugas Oct. 10 Punta Maria Oct. 10 Canjauay Oct. 11

MUNIc.i.p.aLITY OF TAFT

(Calderon's List continued)

Del Remedio Sept. 22 San Julian Sept. 22 Nena Sept. 22 Libas Sept. 22 Pagbabangnan Sept. 22 San Vicente Sept. 21 Jinolaso Oct. 3

Of the twenty-five pueblos or towns.h.i.+ps of Samar, the Calderon list only pretended to throw light on events in nine of them, those being the only ones from which definite news had then reached headquarters. But as a reign of terror prevailed all over Samar at the time, the rest may be imagined, though it can never be ascertained. Of these nine, the last two were:

MUNIc.i.p.aLITY OF LLORENTE

Pagbabalancayan Sept. 23

MUNIc.i.p.aLITY OF ORAS

Concepcion Sept. 23 Jipapad --

Now it feels just as uncomfortable to be boloed in Pagbabalancayan as it would in a place with a more p.r.o.nounceable name, and the same is true of the comparatively mellifluous Jipapad. True, some of these places were mere hamlets of twenty to forty houses, but you may be sure there were five or six people, on an average, to each house. On the other hand, glance back again at the list of towns of the towns.h.i.+p of Taft that were sacked and burned, and consider that San Julian was about the size of the provincial capital, Catbalogan, and that Catbalogan, the town proper, contained a population of four thousand, though looked at from the amphitheatre of hills which surround it, Catbalogan does not look like such a very large group of houses. Filipino houses are usually full of people. It is easier to live that way than to build more houses.

After the Pulajan descent on Llorente, the people of Llorente all went off to the hills to the Pulajans for safety. They were not allowed to have firearms. This was forbidden by law, except on condition of making formal application for permission, getting it finally approved, and giving a bond, conditions which, in practical operation, made the prohibition all but absolute. The law was general for the whole archipelago. The theory of the law was that the inhabitants were under "the peace and protection of a benign civil government." The real reason of the law was that if the people were allowed to bear arms it was very uncertain which side they would use them on, our side or the other. But, by 1904, the lowland and coast people of Samar would have been glad enough to have stuck to us and gone out after the mountain robber bands had we armed them. Left unprotected, a feeling seemed to spread in many places that about the only thing to do to be safe was to depart from under the "protection" of the American flag and take to the hills and join, or seem to join, the uprising.

Toward the last of September, the provincial treasurer of Samar, an American, a Mr. Whittier, visited the east coast of Samar, including Taft. On October 5th, he stated before me as follows:

All the presidentes that I have talked with, and this man Hill, [438] said that they wanted some protection for their towns. Except at Borongan there are no guns in the hands of the munic.i.p.al police. [439] This band near Taft was said to have nineteen guns, and they felt they could not defend their towns with spears against these guns. There were reported to be between 200 and 600 in operation on the coast at that time, and they felt that they could not defend their towns with the means at hand. I found at Taft that they had taken all the records of the munic.i.p.ality, and the money, and taken it over to an island away from the main coast, in order to protect their money and their records, and I understand the same thing was done at Llorente. At Oras they had practically decided to take the same step if it became necessary. All of the commercial houses on the east coast and a large number of people congregated at Borongan, which was safe on account of the protection of the constabulary; and the constabulary there were doing very good work, doing everything they could with their small force, and they (the presidentes) felt that if they had guns in the hands of the munic.i.p.al police or if they had the constabulary to guard their towns, they could go out after these people themselves.

The importance of all this testimony, relatively to its forever sickening any one acquainted with it with colonization by a republic, is that a transcript of Mr. Whittier's statement of October 5th was placed in the hands of the Governor-General a few days later by Mr. Harvey, the a.s.sistant Attorney-General, and yet this situation continued until shortly after the presidential election. Several years afterwards, in the North American Review, Judge Ide, who was Vice-Governor in 1904, after admitting that he was in constant consultation with the Governor-General all through that period (by way of showing his opportunities for knowing whereof he spoke), denied that the failure to order out the military to protect the people from ma.s.sacre had any relation whatever to the presidential election then going on in the United States.

Mr. Whittier also stated before me that the total population of the munic.i.p.ality of Taft was 18,000, and that twenty-five men armed with guns in each of the four princ.i.p.al villages thereof that were burned would have prevented the destruction of those villages. So we did not protect the people, and we would not let them protect themselves. I do not select the pueblo of Taft on account of its distinguished name. "What's in a name?" The fate of Taft and its inhabitants was simply typical of the fate which descended upon scores of other places in "dark and b.l.o.o.d.y" Samar between the outbreak of July 10, 1904, and the presidential election of November 8th, of that year, and between those two dates the shadow of such a fate was over all the towns of the island on which it did not in fact descend. Mr. Whittier stated to me informally that at the time he was speaking of in the above formal statement, there were pending and had been pending for a long time (he seemed to think they must have been pigeon-holed) applications for permission to bear arms from fifteen different pueblos. After Mr. Whittier had finished his statement the Presidente of Taft made a like statement on the same day, October 5th. My retained copy shows that this official bore the ponderous name of Angel Custodio Crisologo. He declared a willingness to lead his people against the Pulajans if given guns, though the fervent soul did qualify this martial remark by adding, "If I am well enough," explaining that the presidential body was subject to rheumatism. Mr. Crisologo stated among other things that there had been eight hundred houses burned in the jurisdiction of Taft before he left the east coast for Catbalogan--about a week before. Like Mr. Whittier's, a copy of Mr. Crisologo's statement was delivered a few days later to the Governor-General in person by the a.s.sistant Attorney-General, Mr. Harvey, who had been present when it was made and taken down.

This Mr. Harvey need not be, to the western hemisphere reader, a mere nebulous antipodal ent.i.ty, as the Hon. Angel Custodio Crisologo might. He is a very live American, a very high-toned gentleman, and an excellent lawyer, and was at last accounts still with the insular government of the Philippine Islands, though in a higher capacity (Solicitor General) than he was at the date of the events herein narrated. There was very little congenial society in Catbalogan when Mr. Harvey came there to help dispose of the criminal docket, and his advent was to me a very welcome oasis in a desert of "the solitude of my own originality"--or lack of originality. On September 19th I had wired Vice-Governor Ide that there were 172 prisoners in the jail awaiting trial and "many more coming." Of course no justice of the peace would be trusted to pa.s.s on whether an alleged outlaw should or should not be held for trial. If he were secretly in sympathy with the discomfiture American authority in Samar was having, he might let the man go, no matter what the proof. Also he might seek to clear himself of all suspicion in each case by committing men against whom there was no proof, thus unnecessarily crowding an already fast filling provincial jail of limited dimensions, wherein beriberi [440]

was already making its dread appearance.

So the writ of habeas corpus remained unsuspended, thus making it possible to so state in later official certificates covering that period. But habeas corpus cut no more figure in the situation than it did at the battle of Gettysburg, or at the crossing of the Red Sea by the chosen people, or at the sinking of the t.i.tanic. The constabulary would worry along with such force as they had in the island of Samar, only a few hundred, certainly nearer five hundred than one thousand. And, whenever they had a battle with the outlaws, if they themselves were not annihilated, which happened more than once, they would bring back prisoners in droves and put them in the jail, and I was expected to sift out how much proof they had, or claimed to have, of overt acts by persons not actually captured in action. Of course a race then began, a race against death, to see whether death or I would get to John Doe or Richard Roe first. And though I held court every day except Sunday from August to November 8th, sometimes getting in sixteen hours per day by supplementing a day's work with a night session, death would often beat me to some one man on the jail list whom I happened to have picked out to get to the next day. Men so picked out were men as to whom something I might have heard held out the hope of being able to dispose of their cases quickly by letting them loose, [441] thus getting that much farther from the danger limit of crowding in the jail. Some of these would be specially picked out because reported sick. I kept track of the sick by visiting them myself when practicable, and talking to them. Of course many of them were brigands---Pulajans--but some of them were the saddest looking, most abject little brigands that anybody ever saw. Of course you might catch some nasty disease from them, but n.o.body, somehow, ever seemed to have any apprehension on that score in the Philippines. This does not argue bravery at all. It is merely the listless stoicism that lurks in the climate. I recollect going to walk one afternoon, after adjourning court at 5 o'clock, saying to the prosecuting attorney before adjourning, "We will take up the case of Capence Coral in the morning; there does not seem, from what I can understand, to be enough proof to convict him of anything." Of course when you were dealing with hundreds of people, you did not have any nerve-racking hysterics about any one man. Leaving the court-house I pa.s.sed by the hospital, where Capence had been transferred, pending the arrival of witnesses against him and the rest of the crowd captured with him. I asked the hospital steward how Capence was. The answer was he had died at 4:45--some twenty minutes before. Death had beat me to Capence. When I meet Capence he will know I did the best I could. I was under a great strain, a sort of writ of habeas corpus incarnate, the only thing remotely suggesting relief from unwarranted [442]

detention on the whole horizon of the situation. I was trying to do the best I could by the Const.i.tution, in so far as the spirit of it had reached the Philippines. I broke down totally under the strain about November 8th, came home in the spring of the following year and remained an invalid for several years thereafter; and as a noted corporation lawyer once said after recovery from a similar illness, "I haven't had much const.i.tution since, but have been living mostly under the by-laws."

American office-holding in the Philippines is not so popular with the Filipinos as to have moved them to any outburst of grat.i.tude in the shape of an effort to create a pension system for Americans who lose their health in the government service out there. When they leave the Islands they become as one dead so far as the Philippine insular government is concerned. And the men whose health is more or less permanently impaired by disability incurred in line of duty in the Philippines are not and will never be numerous or powerful enough back home to create any sentiment in favor of a pension system for former Philippine employees, since the Philippine business is not a subject of much popular enthusiasm at best. So if I had not had private resources, the results of the Samar insurrection of 1904 would have left me also in the pitiable plight in which I have beheld so many of my repatriated former comrades of the Philippine service in the last seven years, to whom the heart of the more fortunate ex-Filipino indeed goes out in sympathy. But to return to the race to beat death to prisoners in that grim and memorable fall of 1904.

In September the crowded condition of the jail had begun to tell on the inmates. The constabulary force at Catbalogan was quite inadequate for the varied emergencies of the situation, there being, besides the town itself to protect, the provincial treasury to guard, the governor's office, the court-house, and the jail. Consequently the jail guard was too small. The jail buildings were in an enclosure a little larger than a baseball diamond, surrounded by high stone walls. But it was not safe to let the inmates sleep out in the enclosure at night. They had to be kept at night in the buildings. Any American who has visited the central penitentiary at Manila called Bilibid has seen a place almost as clean as a battles.h.i.+p. This is American work. But the Filipinos are not trained in sanitary matters, and all they know about handling large crowds of prisoners they learned from the Spaniards. The Governor was a native half-caste, a very excellent man, but free from that horror, which I think is an almost universal American trait, of seeing unnecessary and preventable sacrifice of human life, no matter whose the life. I inspected the jail as often as was practicable, and managed to keep down the death-rate below what it might have been, the prisoners being allowed to go out in the open court during the day. They also had such medical attention as was available. However, during the last five or six weeks of that term of court I would be pretty sure to find on my desk every two or three days, on opening court in the morning, a notice like this:

Carcel Provincial de Samar, I. F.

Oficina del Alcaide

Catbalogan, Samar, I. F., 22 de Septiembre de 1904.

Hon. Sr. Juez de Ia Instancia de esta provincia, Catbalogan, Samar, I. F.

Senor:

Tengo el honor de poner en conocimiento de ese juzgado, que anoche entre 12 y 1 de ella, fallecio el procesado, Ramon Boroce, a consecuencia de la enfermedad de beriberi, que venia padeciendo.

Lo que tengo el honor de communicar a ese Juzgado para su superior conocimiento.

De U. muy respetuosamente, Gonzalo Lucero,

Alcaide de la Carcel Provincial.

which being interpreted means:

Provincial Jail of Samar, P. I.