: A Woman's Journey through the Philippines On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route by Russel Florence Kimball - Philippines Description and travel

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The Belle of Bongao Laying a Shore End in a Philippine Coast Town "Until eventide the summer skies above us slept, as sid the summer seas below us" A Philippine Coast Town Dumaguete Diving for Articles Thrown from the Ship "Hard at work establishing an office in the town" "Two women beating clothes on the rocks of a little stream" Church and convento, Dumaguete The Old Fort at Misamis "The native band serenaded us" The Lintogup River A Misamis Belle Laying Cable from a Native Schooner A Street in Iligan Market-day at Iligan "It was evident that he was a personage of no little importance" St. Thomas Church, Cebu Magellan's Chapel, Cebu Unloading Hemp at Cebu Grove of Palms near Cebu Ormoc Releasing the Buoy From the Cable in a Heavy Sea Quarters of the Commanding Officer, Zamboanga Officers' Quarters, Zamboanga A Street in Zamboanga Street Scene, Zamboanga--native Bathing-place, Zamboanga The Pier at Sulu Natives of Sulu Moro Houses, Tuli The Moro School for Boys, Sulu Chinese, Moro, and Visayan Children, Sulu Soldiers' Quarters, Bongao Natives of Bongao Toolawee Market-day in a Moro Village A Group of Moros A Collection of Moro Weapons Pasacao

A Woman's Journey Through the Philippines

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENTS

Life on a cable-ship would be a lotus-eating dream were it not for the cable. But the cable, like the Commissariat cam-u-el in Mr. Kipling's "Oonts," is--

"--a devil an' a ostrich an' a orphan child in one."

Whether we are picking it up, or paying it out; whether it is lying inert, coil upon coil, in the tanks like some great gorged anaconda, or gliding along the propelling machinery into some other tank, or off into the sea at our bow or stern; whether the dynamometer shows its tension to be great or small; whether we are grappling for it, or underrunning it; whether it is a shore end to be landed, or a deep-sea splice to be made, the cable is sure to develop most alarming symptoms, and some learned doctor must constantly sit in the testing-room, his finger on the cable's pulse, taking its temperature from time to time as if it were a fractious child with a bad attack of measles, the eruption in this case being faults or breaks or leakages or kinks.

The difficulty discovered, it must be localized. A hush falls over the ship. Down to the testing room go the experts. Seconds, minutes, hours crawl by. At last some one leaves the consultation for a brief space, frowning heavily and apparently deep in thought. No one dares address him, or ask the questions all are longing to have answered, and when his lips move silently we know that he is muttering over galvanometer readings to himself. During this time everyone talks in whispers, and not always intelligently, of the electrostatic capacity of the cable, absolute resistances, and the coefficients of correction, while the youngest member of the expedition neglects her beloved poodle, sonorously yclept "Snobbles," and no longer hangs him head downward over the ship's rail.

At last the fault is discovered, cut out, and a splice made, the tests showing the cable as good as new, whereupon the women return to their chiffons, the child to her games, and the men, not on duty, to their cigars, until the cessation of noise from the cable machinery, or the engine-room bell signalling "full speed astern" warns us something else may be amiss.

As may be imagined everyone on the ship got to think in megohms, and scientific terms clung to our conversation just as the tar from the cable tanks clung to our wearing apparel, while few among us but had wild nightmares wherein the cable became a sentient thing, and made faces at us as it leapt overboard in a continuous suicidal frenzy.

Half-a-Woman was the queen of the ship, and held her court quite royally from the Powers-that-Be, our commanding officer, down to the roughest old salt in the forecastle. Having a child aboard gave the only real touch of Christmas to our tropical pretence of it. Everything else was lacking--the snow, the tree, the holly and wreaths, the Christmas carol, the dear ones so far away--but the little child was with us, and wherever children are there also will the Christmas spirit come, even though the thermometer registers ninety in the shade, and at the close of that long summer-hot day we all felt more than "richer by one mocking Christmas past."

It was a very busy trip, everyone on the ship being occupied, with the exception of the women who spent most of their time under the cool blue awning of the quarter-deck, where many a letter was written, and many a book read aloud and discussed, though more often we accomplished little, preferring to lie back in our long steamer chairs and watch the wooded islands with cloud shadows on their shaggy breasts drift slowly by and fade into the purple distance.

Now we would pass close to some luxuriantly overgrown shore where tall cocoanut-palms marched in endless procession along the white beach; now past hills where groups of bamboos swung back and forth in the warm breeze, and feathery palms and plantains, the sunlight flickering through their leaves, showed myriad tints of green and gold and misty gray; these in turn giving place to some volcanic mountain, bare and desolate. Then for hours there would be no land at all, only the wonderful horizonless blue of water and sky, the sunlight on the waves so dazzlingly bright as to hurt the eyes.

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