XIII

Batu.In an hour and a half after leaving Polangui we reached Batu, a village on the north-western shore of the lake of the same name. The inhabitants, particularly the women, struck me by their ugliness and want of cleanliness. Although they lived close to the lake, and drew their daily drinking water from it, they never appeared to use it for the purpose of washing. The streets of the village also were dirty and neglected; a circumstance explained, perhaps, by the fact of the priest being a native.

A neglected product.When I revisited the same lake in February, I found its waters so greatly fallen that they had left a circular belt of shore extending all around the lake, in most places nearly a hundred feet broad. The withdrawal of the waters had compressed the tangled seaweed into a kind of matting, which, bleached by the sun, and nearly an inch thick, covered the whole of the shore, and hung suspended over the stunted bushes which, on my first visit, had been under water. I have never either seen elsewhere, or heard any one mention, a similar phenomenon. This stuff, which could be had for nothing, was excellent for rifle-stoppers and for the stuffing of birds, so I took a great quantity of it with me. This time the bird-hunting went well, too.

The native priest of Batu was full of complaints about his parishioners, who gave him no opportunities of gaining an honest penny. “I am never asked for a mass, sir; in fact, this is such a miserable hole that it is shunned by Death itself. In D., where I was for a long time coadjutor, we had our couple of burials regularly every day at three dollars a head, and as many masses at a dollar apiece as we had time to say, besides christenings and weddings, which always brought a little more grist to the mill. But here nothing takes place, and I scarcely make anything.” This stagnant state of things had induced him to turn his attention to commerce. The average native priest, of those I saw, could hardly be called a credit to his profession. Generally ignorant, often dissipated, and only superficially acquainted with his duties, the greater part of his time was given over to gambling, drinking, and other objectionable amusements. Little care was taken to preserve a properly decorous behavior, except when officiating in the church, when they read with an absurd assumption of dignity, without understanding a single word. The conventos are often full of girls and children, all of whom help themselves with their fingers out of a common dish. The worthy padre of Batu introduced a couple of pretty girls to me as his two poor sisters, whom, in spite of his poverty, he supported; but the servants about the place openly spoke of these young ladies’ babies as being the children of the priest.

The native clergy.The guiding principle of Spanish colonial policy—to set one class against another, and to prevent either from becoming too powerful—seems to be the motive for placing so many native incumbents in the parsonages of the Archipelago. The prudence of this proceeding, however, seems doubtful. A Spanish priest has a great deal of influence in his own immediate circle, and forms, perhaps, the only enduring link between the colony and the mother-country. The native priest is far from affording any compensation for the lack of either of these advantages. He generally is but little respected by his flock, and certainly does nothing to attach them to Spain; for he hates and envies his Spanish brethren, who leave him only the very worst appointments, and treat him with contempt.

Nabua.I rode from Batu to Nabua over a good road in half an hour. The country was flat, with rice-fields on both sides of the road; but, while in Batu the rice was only just planted, in Nabua it already was almost ripe. I was unable to obtain any explanation of this incongruity, and know not how to account for such a difference of climate between two hamlets situated in such close proximity to one another, and separated by no range of hills. The inhabitants of both were ugly and dirty, and were different in these respects from the Tagalogs. Nabua, a place of 10,875 inhabitants, is intersected by several small streams, whose waters, pouring down from the eastern hills, form a small lake, which empties itself into the river Bicol. Just after passing the second bridge beyond Nabua the road, inclining eastwards, wends in a straight line to Iriga, a place lying to the south-west of the volcano of the same name.

Mt. Iriga.After a vain attempt to reach the top of the Iriga volcano I started for Buhi, a place situated on the southern shore of the lake of that name. Ten minutes after leaving Iriga I reached a spot where the ground sounded hollow beneath my horse’s feet. A succession of small hillocks, about fifty feet high, bordered each side of the road; and towards the north I could perceive the huge crater of the Iriga, which, in the distance, appeared like a truncated cone. I had the curiosity to ascend one of the hillocks, which, seen from its summit, looked like the remains of some former crater, which had probably been destroyed by an earthquake and split up into these small mounds.

Advertising. When I got to Buhi the friendly priest had it proclaimed by sound of drum that the newly-arrived strangers wished to obtain all kinds of animals, whether of earth, of air, or of water; and that each and all would be paid for in cash. The natives, however, only brought us moths, centipedes, and other vermin, which, besides enabling them to have a good stare at the strangers, they hoped to turn into cash as extraordinary curiosities.

A church procession. The following day I was the spectator of a gorgeous procession. First came the Spanish flag, then the village kettle-drums, and a small troop of horsemen in short jackets and shirts flying in the wind, next a dozen musicians, and finally, as the principal figure, a man carrying a crimson silk standard. The latter individual evidently was deeply conscious of his dignified position, and his countenance eloquently expressed the quantity of palm wine he had consumed in honor of the occasion. He sat on his horse dressed out in the most absurd manner in a large cocked hat trimmed with colored paper instead of gold lace, with a woman’s cape made of paper outside his coat, and with short, tight-fitting yellow breeches and immense white stockings and shoes. Both his coat and his breeches were liberally ornamented with paper trimmings. His steed, led by a couple of cabezas, was appointed with similar trappings. After marching through all the streets of the village the procession came to a halt in front of the church.

Lake Buhi.The Lake of Buhi (300 feet above the sea-level) presents an extremely picturesque appearance, surrounded as it is on all sides by hills fully a thousand feet high; and its western shore is formed by what still remains of the Iriga volcano. I was informed by the priests of the neighboring hamlets that the volcano, until the commencement of the seventeenth century, had been a closed cone, and that the lake did not come into existence till half of the mountain fell in, at the time of its great eruption. This statement I found confirmed in the pages of the Estado Geografico:—“On the fourth of January, 1641—a memorable day, for on that date all the known volcanoes of the Archipelago began to erupt at the same hour—a lofty hill in Camarines, inhabited by heathens, fell in, and a fine lake sprang into existence upon its site. The then inhabitants of the village of Buhi migrated to the shores of the new lake, which, on this account, was henceforward called the Lake of Buhi.”

A mistranslation.It is very strange that the text given in the footnote does not agree with A. Perrey’s translation. The former does not mention that water came out of the mountains and says just the contrary, that trees, which were torn up by the roots, took the place of the sea for one hour on the shore, so that no water could be seen.

Unreliable authorities.The data of the Estado Geografico are apt to create distrust as the official report on the great earthquake of 1641 describes in detail the eruptions of three volcanoes, which happened at the same time (of these two were in the South of the Archipelago and one in Northern Luzon) while Camarines is not mentioned at all. This suspicion is further strengthened by the fact that the same author (Nierembergius) whose remarks on the eruptions of 1628 in Camarines are quoted, gives in another book of his a detailed report on the events of 1641 without mentioning this province. If one considers the indifference of the friars toward such events in Nature, it is not improbable that the eruptions of 1641 when a mountain fell in in Northern Luzon and a lake took its place, has been transferred on the Iriga. To illustrate the indifference it may be mentioned that even the padres living at the foot of the Albay could not agree upon the dates of its very last eruptions.

Another attempt at mountain climbing.When I was at Tambong, a small hamlet on the shore of the lake belonging to the parochial district of Buhi, I made a second unsuccessful attempt to reach the highest point of the Iriga. We arrived in the evening at the southern point of the crater’s edge (1,041 meters above the level of the sea by my barometrical observation), where a deep defile prevented our further progress. Here the Igorots abandoned me, and the low-landers refused to bivouac in order to pursue the journey on the following day; so I was obliged to return. Late in the evening, after passing through a coco plantation, we reached the foot of the mountain and found shelter from a tempest with a kind old woman; to whom my servants lied so shamelessly that, when the rain had abated, we were, in spite of our failure, conducted with torches to Tambong, where we found the palm-grove round the little hamlet magically illuminated with bright bonfires of dry coconut-leaves in honor of the Conquistadores del Iriga; and where I was obliged to remain for the night, as the people were too timorous or too lazy to cross the rough water of the lake.

Rain prevents another ascent.At Buhi, which is not sufficiently sheltered towards the north-east, it rained almost as much as at Daraga. I had found out from the Igorots that a path could be forced through the tall canes up to the summit; but the continual rain prevented me; so I resolved to cross the Malinao, returning along the coast to my quarters, and then, freshly equipped, descend the river Bicol as far as Naga.

Mountaineers’ arrow poison.Before we parted the Igorots prepared for me some arrow poison from the bark of two trees. I happened to see neither the leaves nor the blossoms, but only the bark. A piece of bark was beaten to pieces, pressed dry, wetted, and again pressed. This was done with the bare hand, which, however, sustained no injury. The juice thus extracted looked like pea-soup, and was warmed in an earthen vessel over a slow fire. During the process it coagulated at the edges; and the coagulated mass was again dissolved, by stirring it into the boiling fluid mass. When this had reached the consistency of syrup, a small quantity was scraped off the inner surface of a second piece of bark, and its juice squeezed into the vessel. This juice was a dark brown color. When the mass had attained the consistency of a thin jelly, it was scraped out of the pot with a chip and preserved on a leaf sprinkled with ashes. For poisoning an arrow they use a piece of the size of a hazel-nut, which, after being warmed, is distributed uniformly over the broad iron point; and the poisoned arrow serves for repeated use.

Igabo hot spring.Not far from Tibi, exactly north-east of Malinao, we found a small hot spring called Igabo. In the middle of a plot of turf encircled by trees was a bare spot of oval form, nearly a hundred paces long and seventy wide. The whole space was covered with stones, rounded by attrition, as large as a man’s head and larger. Here and there hot water bubbled out of the ground and discharged into a little brook; beside it some women were engaged in cooking their food, which they suspended in nets in the hottest parts of the water. On the lower surfaces of some of the stones a little sulphur was sublimated; of alum hardly a trace was perceptible. In a cavity some caolin had accumulated, and was used as a stain.