Moments of terror

There was neither a high intensity earthquake nor a major volcanic eruption in 1881 to shatter the peace of people's lives. Yet seismic activity is never far from daily life in the Philippines. Tremors rocked Manila, evoking uncomfortable fears of the previous year. Mount Mayon, seldom completely quiescent, erupted in July, albeit in a minor way. And a huge fire entirely consumed Calapan, the provincial capital of Mindoro, leaving the town a smouldering pile of ash. None of these events proved fatal, but they all served as constant reminders of what might happen at any moment: the terrible earthquakes in Manila of 1863 and 1880, the violent eruptions of Taal (1808) and Mayon (1814),Footnote ¹⁸ and the great fire of 23 March 1870 that destroyed Binondo, the capital's retail centre within hours.Footnote ¹⁹

Manila was rocked by strong tremors in August, the most serious of which occurred on Sunday, 14 August. According to the Manila Observatory, the main tremor was felt at 9:46 pm and was followed by another, less intense, at 11:08 pm.Footnote ²⁰ Tremors of varying intensity continued the next day and persisted to trouble the city during the following week, only to be overshadowed by the severe typhoon that hit the capital on the night of 19–20 August. Though tremors continued to shake the city throughout the cyclone, residents ‘scarcely felt [them] because of the strength of the wind’.Footnote ²¹ The main tremor struck on Sunday night when the capital's nightspots were filled with people. Both Manila's principal theatres were performing zarzuelas that evening, a popular form of Spanish operetta.

At the Variedades, where Governor-General Primo de Rivera (1880–83) was watching a performance of Dos Leones, the audience sprang from their seats in alarm. Two matrons suffered convulsions, one broke into hysterical laughter, while the other froze rigid and then fainted. Backstage, several petrol lamps fell over, luckily without any further mishap. The governor-general did his best to assuage people's fears, steadfastly remaining in his chair, and signalling for the operetta to resume, although, many in the audience considered it prudent to leave. At the Teatro Filipino, where the zarzuela La Calendaria was playing to a packed audience, the laughter caused moments before by the unexpected shutting of a metal door, died on people's lips as everyone made for the doors at once. In the ensuing crush, one young man, a flautist recently arrived in the colony, tripped, and dislocated his shoulder. The prompt actions of the orchestra's maestro, however, who struck up a popular dance tune, restored a measure of calm to the audience and most people resumed their seats. ‘Those who were able to overcome their fear,’ one newspaper account observed, ‘remained in the theatre disgusted by those weak-hearted who had departed.’Footnote ²²

The anxiety shown by the theatre audiences was understandable given the destruction caused by the magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake the year before.Footnote ²³ Though the tremors caused minor damage in comparison to the earthquake the previous July, they were sufficiently prolonged to evoke ‘sad memories still fresh in the minds of its [the city's] residents’. One writer noted how ‘we were taken by surprise once again by the Earth's convulsions that destroy our interests and alarm our spirits’. Many were unable to sleep at night from fear, ‘remembering bad dreams and troubles little forgotten’.Footnote ²⁴ So great was the alarm that seized some of the owners of the substantial stone houses in Intramuros that they moved their families to the surrounding rural areas. The bahay kubo, the native nipa and palm house, better withstood sudden earth movements and rarely proved fatal even if the structure collapsed.Footnote ²⁵ But these evacuations were temporary. A subsequent report described how the continuing subterranean noises and the repeated shakings of the earth ‘made all those who had returned to their stone structures to think again of nipa ones’, and, in Tondo, ‘several families left, taking with them in their carriages, the essentials necessary to sleep’.Footnote ²⁶ For several days, wagons and carriages could be seen carrying furniture and other household items back-and-forth between the city and its extensive suburbs.Footnote ²⁷

Newspapers devoted much coverage to the effect of the tremors in Manila, fewer details of what happened in the surrounding arrabales (settlements), and almost no space to what took place in the provinces. Events in the capital's theatres are recounted in minute and repetitive detail down to printing the names of the two doctors who reset the shoulder of the unfortunate flautist! Even minor damage to urban property and superficial wounds to its residents received attention. So, readers are informed that Brígido Lim, clerk of the court in Binondo, split his upper lip when he fell awkwardly as the tremor struck his house in the suburb of Trozo.Footnote ²⁸ In contrast, news that the church in Mariquina (Marikina), a nearby pueblo, had lost its entire roof when the central nave collapsed received only passing mention, even though ‘in this locality the tremor was felt more than in 1863, and those of the past year’. Events further afield received even less attention, the barest of telegraphic reports that a tremor had happened at such and such an hour, or that it had lasted for so many minutes, or that prayers of thanksgiving had been said for some community's safe deliverance.Footnote ²⁹ There are reports, too, of further tremors in the provinces throughout the year, hinting at a wider narrative of seismic damage.Footnote ³⁰

Tremors, however, were not the only seismic disturbance to shatter the peace of the islands in 1881. After nearly ten years of uncharacteristic dormancy, Mayon, the most active volcano in the archipelago, erupted in May and remained in that state for much of the rest of the year. While not a major eruption, the military engineer, Enrique Abella y Casariego, considered it worth his while to pen a brief report of its activities for the Seismological Society of Japan. He describes ‘the quiet excretions of lava from several volcanic vents’ and how the eruption was accompanied by a sound like that of ‘far-off snoring’.Footnote ³¹ A more vivid account of the main eruption on the night of 27–28 June is contained in a letter written by a resident of Legazpi, the provincial capital of Albay, located at the southern foot of the volcano. Amidst the sound of the wind that night, the writer describes hearing strange subterranean sounds, presumably Casariego's ‘far-off snoring’, that he declares are known locally as ‘the children of Mayon’. He also recounts hearing a loud ‘boom’ emanating from the volcano at about 7:30 pm and, a little later, being able to see a ‘flower of fire’ illuminate its cone and light up the countryside for 20 kilometres around. He records three more eruptions during the night and so much rock and sand falling on the surrounding countryside that the main highway to Albay was blocked, and the road to Bigaa ‘not only disappeared but is now really nothing more than a mound of stones and cuttings’. Nor did the dawn bring any relief. The day began with ‘a semi diluvial fall of water’ and the rain continuing for several days, adding to the wildness of the scene. Further eruptions followed. Over the next few days, the volcano continued to eject lava bombs and lapilli, and to emit plumes of smoke exactly like that from ‘the funnel of a steamship if its circumference was magnified four times’.Footnote ³² Even weeks later, the inhabitants of Tabaco, a town on the far side of the volcano, were still able to read perfectly well at night by the light of the volcano.Footnote ³³

Unsurprisingly, local people were alarmed. Daily telegrams were sent to Manila reporting on the progress of the eruption. These were short, matter-of-fact statements, giving details as to the intensity of volcanic activity on that day. More detailed accounts had to await the mail or the return of travellers from the province. Recent arrivals in July related that residents lived in constant fear that the eruption might intensify at any moment. The almost continuous noises emitted by the volcano and the constant presence of ‘fire’ in the cone kept people in a state of barely suppressed panic.Footnote ³⁴ Dread of eruptions was the price one paid for living in the fertile soils around an active volcano, a fear enhanced by the frequency of earth tremors in such areas. Thus, one correspondent to La Oceania Española reported how tremors had set off rumours (described as ‘vague news’) of an impending eruption somewhere in Nueva Vizcaya and had ‘caused great alarm in many people’.Footnote ³⁵

Fire, too, was an ever-present danger, the consequence of a careless moment or the result of an earthquake or volcanic eruption. The August tremors in Manila, for instance, occasioned several domestic fires, most notably in the Madrid Inn, where a Sergeant of Artillery, Camilo Yerba, was celebrating winning the lottery by hosting 20 of his military companions to dinner. The first tremor overturned the oil lamps on the dining table and set the tablecloth on fire. As guests scrambled to escape the building, it was left to the quick thinking of the innkeeper's sister, with ‘a valour unusual in her sex’, to put out the fire by smothering the flames with the overturned table.Footnote ³⁶ Such minor incidents, however, pale into insignificance when compared to the fate that overtook Calapan, the provincial capital of Mindoro, a small island to the west of Luzon. In a matter of hours, this town of 4,500 inhabitants was burnt to the ground on the evening of 12 August.Footnote ³⁷

The fire started at approximately 3:30 pm in a ‘humble shack’ in the centre of town; its origins attributed to the carelessness of the owner, Margarita Acera.Footnote ³⁸ In his report to the governor-general, the province's alcalde mayor (civil governor) describes how he immediately attended the fire ‘with all the forces at my command’, mainly public employees, policemen (cuadrilleros), and prisoners drawn from the local gaol.Footnote ³⁹ The town was mainly deserted at that hour of the day as most people were working in their fields. The governor ordered buildings in advance of the fire to be demolished but the density of the buildings, many ‘constructed illegally, one immediately next to another’, rendered such firebreaks ineffectual. The southwest monsoon wind, the habagat, fanned the fire, ‘wrap[ping] the entire town in an immense tongue of flame’. Calapan was rapidly converted into an immense bonfire that formed a column of smoke and flames that consumed the town's principal buildings: the town hall (casa real), the church, the priest's dwelling (convento), the toll house (fielato), the police barracks, and the prison.Footnote ⁴⁰ The fire also consumed 150 houses, many belonging to the more well-to-do inhabitants. By the day's end, all that remained of the cabecera were some nipa and palm houses on the outskirts of town belonging to poor soldiers and fisherfolk.Footnote ⁴¹

Fortunately, there were no fatalities, but the material losses were great and the loss of public property considerable. Only the most portable items of value were spared from the flames due to the prompt action of government functionaries. The chests containing the town's tax receipts and municipal funds were rescued from the casa real. The entire canonical record perished, however, as church and convento went up in flames and only the ciborium and several sacred images were saved. The fielato fared somewhat better due to the valour of a cuadrillero, Corporal Pedro Gonzalez Vallejo. Although injured, Vallejo and his comrades managed to carry to safety 115 cajones (wooden chests) of second-grade cigars, 103 pesos in silver, and 15.62 pesos in small change. The town's police funds and records also escaped the blaze by being thrown into the nearby river, though nothing is said about their subsequent condition. Even the governor's horse was ‘turned into carbon’, and he was left with only a single chest containing some clothes.Footnote ⁴² ‘The ruin of this place is absolute,’ he concludes his official report, and ‘we are camped outside, on the beach, in need of supplies and aid’.Footnote ⁴³

Immediate steps were taken to restore governance and the necessities of daily life. Temporary structures were erected to house the town hall, the toll house, and, interestingly, the local butchers amidst the ‘ashes and debris’.Footnote ⁴⁴ A small room was also set aside to function as a temporary church where mass might be celebrated.Footnote ⁴⁵ On authorisation from Manila, a 1,000 pesos was distributed from the public calamity fund to meet the inhabitants’ immediate needs.Footnote ⁴⁶ The homeless crowded into the remaining houses on the outskirts of town, whose owners generously opened their doors to their neighbours. It was, though, ‘impossible to provide shelter for so many people’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Orders were issued to Hacienda (Treasury) officials in the neighbouring province of Batangas to supply Calapan with timber and other materials needed for reconstruction.Footnote ⁴⁸ All these measures, however, proved hopelessly inadequate given the sheer scale of the destruction. Newspaper editorials alternated between appeals for charity and demands for ‘necessary measures’ to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. Officials were called upon to ensure that the laws governing the construction of houses were properly enforced, that the ‘disorderly agglomeration of houses’ be prevented, and that streets were wide enough to facilitate firefighting.Footnote ⁴⁹

Calapan was undoubtedly the largest conflagration in 1881 but there were many other fires that consumed whole buildings rather than entire towns. Thus, ‘a voracious fire’, caused by a typhoon in the province of Abra, reduced the barracks of the Guardia Civil (regional police) in Talalan to ashes in a few moments despite the torrential rainfall. Troopers only had time to save their arms and a few personal effects.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fire, whether caused by typhoon, tremor, arson, or carelessness was a constant threat to people living in structures built from very flammable materials, and where lighting and cooking depended on naked flames. In the traditional bahay kubo, the kitchen was usually a freestanding structure separated from the main house to minimise the spread of fire. Such precautions, however, were not always successful. The fire that reduced Calapan to a heap of ashes in just a few hours reportedly started in just such a kitchen.Footnote ⁵¹

Days of rain

Buildings were not just constantly at risk from fire but were likewise vulnerable to flood. The rain that inevitably accompanies typhoons proved immensely damaging to property and often cost lives. Reading through the litany of disasters contained in the pages of the 1881 report, the reader is struck by the frequency and sheer magnitude of the floods that beset the islands’ inhabitants. In particular, the provincial towns, the cabeceras and the pueblos, many located on riparian sites, were flooded as rivers, swollen by torrential downpours, overflowed their banks and inundated, especially low-lying barrios (neighbourhoods). Letters from provincial residents, printed in the columns of the Manila newspapers, graphically portray their experiences. Thus, a correspondent in Agno, Zambales relates the ‘indescribable terror’ he felt on the morning of 19 October as he watched the river overflow its banks ‘seeming to want to bury us in its breast’. The waters continued to rise all day until only the town's rooftops were visible, and people had to come and go by banca, a type of dugout canoe with outriggers.Footnote ⁵² Another writer, this time in Bataan, recounts how, on opening his window after a night of violent winds and torrential rain, ‘we observed with terror that all the fields and streets were converted into one immense sea’, and the waters were rising so quickly ‘that we believed the town would disappear’.Footnote ⁵³

The sheer quantity of water that accompanied typhoons was often enormous, rain falling sometimes for days at a time. It rained solidly for five days in Camarines Sur after the typhoon of 28 June and so much water fell that the province was flooded for 25 square leagues around. The towns of Bato, Nabua, and Bao appeared rising out of the floodwaters as if they were ‘houses floating on a wide sea’.Footnote ⁵⁴ A letter from Capiz complained that for 15 days the torrential rain had continued without people ‘having sight of the sun all this time’ and that, consequently, ‘everything is flooded’.Footnote ⁵⁵ After weeks of ceaseless rain, a resident of Abra jokingly mused that they were returning ‘to being amphibians’.Footnote ⁵⁶

It was the rivers, though, that posed the real threat. Rivers swollen by torrential downpours might rise by metres in a few minutes. ‘The overflowed river seems to want to bury us within it,’ another eyewitness account from Agno in Zambales wrote, ‘the water increased moment by moment, and by 6 pm, had flooded [the town] entirely’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Towns were not uncommonly submerged to depths of 2 to 3 metres or more, with low-lying settlements suffering the most. Streets became rivers, and people were forced to ply their lengths in boats.Footnote ⁵⁸ At other times, the force of water was overwhelming. Floodwater struck the town of Quinamotian in Pampanga (unidentified location) with such force as a typhoon passed overhead on 19 August that it swept away everything in its path, leaving scarcely four houses standing and these only because they were situated on higher ground. Water rolled ‘over the houses and inhabitants together in the obscurity of the night so that it was a miracle that not everyone died’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The situation was often worse in rural areas. The typhoon of 20 October struck Nueva Ecija with such ‘extraordinary violence’ that it caused serious flooding, damaging crops and orchards.Footnote ⁶⁰ Agriculture suffered badly as fields were inundated, often to depths of 4 metres or more.Footnote ⁶¹ ‘For more than 15 days the rains have not ceased,’ lamented a correspondent from Iloilo, ‘and so much water threatens the fields … that are flooded by the rising of the rivers’.Footnote ⁶² Too much standing water in July ruined the sugarcane,Footnote ⁶³ while the force of the water in August pulled sugarcane up by its roots.Footnote ⁶⁴ In other provinces, floodwaters destroyed the tobacco crop, ruining entire harvests.Footnote ⁶⁵ Tobacco, if anything, was even more vulnerable once harvested. Bundles stacked in storerooms were susceptible to floodwater and government employees went to great lengths to save as much of the crop as possible when threated with inundation—often at considerable personal risk.Footnote ⁶⁶ But to the peasant farmer, it was what happened to the palay, the rice crop that really mattered and determined his family's fortune for the coming year.Footnote ⁶⁷ Too much water made it difficult to transplant seedlings or simply killed the plants.Footnote ⁶⁸ Waterlogged fields made it impossible to harvest the rice.Footnote ⁶⁹ Even after the water receded, it often left the rice ‘covered by a cap of river sand, half a vara [about 0.4 metres] thick’ reducing the fertility of the field for several seasons.Footnote ⁷⁰

Nor were the animals spared. Livestock frequently grazed lowland pastures alongside rivers and were swept away in the swollen floodwaters. One observer in Ilocos Sur saw ‘a multitude of animals, some alive and others dead’ in the river. Some were spared as the current swept them to the riverbank but most were not so fortunate.Footnote ⁷¹ The bodies of 40 cows and horses were discovered washed ashore on the beach at Iba, carried downriver from the town of Botolan, their ownership identified by their brands.Footnote ⁷² The toll from such floods might be considerable with one stock breeder in Zambales reportedly losing 200 head—horses, cows, and carabaos.Footnote ⁷³ In the same province, the town of Santa Cruz lost more than 100 cattle in an earlier typhoon.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was left to the authorities to organise their removal. In Iba, local officials had to arrange the burial of 50 carcasses, afraid that ‘so much putrefying flesh’ less than a kilometre from town might lead to an outbreak of disease.Footnote ⁷⁵

Any animal might be vulnerable to floodwater, but some were apparently more vulnerable than others.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the riverine pastureland of the Bao swamp, the main livestock area in the province of Camarines Sur, one acute observer noted how species responded differently to floodwaters during the typhoon of 28 June. The carabao, evidently ‘blessed with great intelligence’ and followed by most of the cattle, had, on their own initiative, undertaken a timely tactical retreat to higher ground as soon as the river overflowed. The horses, however, daunted by the great amount of rain, took shelter under the bamboo, ‘and nobody but nobody’ could make them move ‘until they were surprised by the water and drowned’. A stockman from Bula later reported having seen more than 300 horses drowned and had only been able to save 40 animals. Another stockman estimated more than a thousand horses had perished.Footnote ⁷⁷ Overall, floods took a terrible toll on rural production. The predicament was succinctly summarised by one provincial correspondent who, in the aftermath of the August typhoon, wrote that ‘without palay and animals, Zambales perishes’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Floodwaters also played havoc with rural communications, carrying away bridges, damaging roads, cutting telegraph lines, and isolating, often for weeks, the cabecera from Manila, and the provincial capital from surrounding pueblos. Most bridges were built from wood and unable to resist the force of water, their timber planks and piles disappearing downstream. Copious rains in Benguet on the night of 7 July destroyed two bridges in both Galiano and Tublay, forcing residents to cross the river by raft.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the same month, the wooden bridges linking Iba to its province of Zambales were swept away by the raging waters.Footnote ⁸⁰ The same bridges were destroyed once again a few months later during the typhoon of 19–20 October, leaving the town isolated for a further 48 hours.Footnote ⁸¹ So vulnerable were wooden bridges to damage from floodwaters that local officials often resorted to cutting the central section away in advance of a typhoon and mooring it to the bank, though this action was still insufficient always to save the structure from destruction.Footnote ⁸²

Roads were vulnerable to floodwaters too. ‘Chunks’ of roadway were repeatedly lost to the current or simply slid down hillsides as their foundations were undermined.Footnote ⁸³ The rammed earth overlaying the stone foundations of major highways were ‘left stripped by the waters’ and the roads gouged into metre-deep ditches. Landslides blocked roadways, preventing the passage of wheeled vehicles.Footnote ⁸⁴ In August, metre-high floodwaters rendered several sections of the road between Angeles and Bataan impassable. At Magalang in Pampanga, the flooded Paruao River cut the road at various places, sweeping away bridges, and leaving 3-metre-deep ditches along its surface.Footnote ⁸⁵ The typhoon of 19–20 October left the public highways in Zambales flooded and passable only ‘at the risk of one's life’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Telegraph lines, often running alongside roadways, also suffered damage from floodwaters. Poles toppled over, interrupting the tenuous flow of information between town and capital. Severe floods in July temporarily cut all communications between the district of Principe (present day Aurora) and the province of Nueva Ecija.Footnote ⁸⁷ Telegraph lines spanning rivers were particularly vulnerable. A sudden 3-metre rise of the Abra River in Lepanto in the wake of a typhoon on 19 October pitched cable and poles into the water and prevented their timely retrieval.Footnote ⁸⁸ The telegraph line to Abucay, Bataan, was ‘completely destroyed’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Floodwaters might leave communities isolated for days or even weeks at a time, delaying the request for aid, and compounding the hardships exacted by reduced harvests and loss of livestock.Footnote ⁹⁰

Nor, of course, was Manila spared from the ravages of floodwaters and many of its low-lying barrios were regularly inundated. Incessant rain at the end of June flooded various parts of the capital, especially Tondo, reducing transportation to movement by boat.Footnote ⁹¹ In August, 200 houses were destroyed in Tondo and the water was waist high in some streets.Footnote ⁹² Industry, too, suffered. At the important foundry of La Olimpia (Macati), many unfired bricks were ruined when floodwaters submerged the kiln in August.Footnote ⁹³ Floodwaters disrupted trade and commerce by rendering major urban arteries impassable to wheeled traffic and causing permanent damage to the city's principal highways unless their foundations were promptly repaired.Footnote ⁹⁴ Flood was more of a risk to life and property in both country and city during the habagat, the southwest monsoon season from May to October, and also the principal season of typhoons.Footnote ⁹⁵

A season of winds

Not unexpectedly, the report of 1881 is preoccupied with typhoons, their number and size, which towns and provinces lay in their paths, and the amount of damage and death they caused. An average of 20 tropical cyclones enter the Philippine Area of Responsibility each year, more than anywhere else in the world. On average, eight or nine of these cyclones make landfall, mainly between the months of July and October.Footnote ⁹⁶ The report initially lists ten typhoons for the year, three of which struck Luzon, and then, in an addendum, gives details of two further typhoons in October.Footnote ⁹⁷ The most damaging of these typhoons occurred on 19 August, a month that ‘will live in our memories … for the quantity of bad things that have happened’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Since the establishment of the Manila Observatory in 1865 and the completion of the initial telegraph lines in 1873, weather observations had become routine and more accurate, able to warn of approaching tropical cyclones.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Observatory's founder and first director, the Jesuit Fr Federico Faura, was praised in the colonial press for his ‘great service’, though, his name was ‘still not yet sufficiently well-known among the public’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By 1881, at least 13 provincial towns had rudimentary electro-meteorological stations that included a barometer and some form of anemometer to measure wind speed and direction. The data gathered by these instruments were communicated to the Jesuit fathers, whose observatory was linked to the Inspectorate of Telegraphs in 1878.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The effectiveness of this warning system, however, rested entirely on the telegraph network whose wooden poles were often among the first casualties of severe weather. Consequently, news about passing storms might take days to reach Manila.Footnote ¹⁰² A typhoon at the end of June, for instance, disrupted the telegraph network across the whole of Luzon, interrupting international services to Europe, and took several days for engineers to fully restore.Footnote ¹⁰³

Issuing weather alerts was a new role for the Observatory, whose staff were keenly aware of the need ‘to proceed with care’ and avoid unnecessarily ‘causing alarm’ by untimely warnings.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Still, the newspapers are full of detailed information about ongoing weather conditions and the passage of low-pressure systems and tropical cyclones. An account of weather conditions for the month of May, for example, describes a typhoon as it tracked across Luzon on 23 May in graphic detail: the sudden fall of the barometer by two degrees, clouds that turned red ‘as in some immense fire’, and windspeeds of 72 mph with gusts of 88 mph.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Another report on 28 June recounts how factory workers had to be sent home at noon because of the rapidly deteriorating weather conditions.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These advisories, however, were not always accurate or timely. A resident of Tuguegarao in the far north of Luzon complained how the town was ‘unexpectedly’ hit by a typhoon on 14 October that destroyed many nipa and palm houses, levelled the tobacco crop, and sunk many local craft.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ At other times, too, editors apparently simply failed to report the ‘careful observations’ issued by the Observatory and so gave no notice of impending storms.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Nevertheless, the growing accuracy and sophistication of weather reports often did give advance warnings of an approaching typhoon—at least to the larger provincial centres linked to the rapidly expanding telegraph network. These advisories provided precious hours in which state and church authorities might prepare populations for what was coming and allow them to put in place whatever preventative measures they were able to in the time available. Typhoons, however, continued to wreak untold damage on communities lying in their path.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Windspeeds in excess of 90 mph and gusts of over 100 mph were not uncommon.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Perhaps, the most iconic structure to fall victim to the force of the wind in 1881 was the lighthouse of San Nicolas, newly erected at the mouth of the Pasig River to guide vessels entering the port of Manila. The latest addition to a series of lighthouses that had stood on that location since 1642, the tower was constructed entirely of iron and had only been inaugurated on 1 August 1879. This ‘elegant and strong’ structure disappeared overnight during the typhoon of 19 August, and, on the following morning, only the great screw piles to which the lighthouse had been attached were left to mark the spot where it had once stood.Footnote ¹¹¹

The strong winds accompanying typhoons took a terrible toll on urban centres and their rural hinterlands, leading one government official to conclude that they ‘cause more suffering and damage than large earthquakes’.Footnote ¹¹² While it was not always possible to record the strength of the wind, there were other ways by which to gauge its force. One correspondent noted how the capital's residents ‘barely felt’ the tremors that struck Manila at the same time a typhoon passed over the city in August.Footnote ¹¹³ Another letter described how the wind blew with such ‘hideous fury, so that the houses seemed like hammocks’, remarking that it was ‘a rare person who remained calm’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Strong winds might last only a few hours but, at other times, they might blow for days. The typhoon that struck Dagupan in Pangasinan on 18 October lasted for 37 hours.Footnote ¹¹⁵ All too frequently, one typhoon followed hard upon another, giving no time for the stricken inhabitants to repair the damages caused by the previous storm. A resident of Tuguegarao describes how three typhoons struck the town on successive Wednesdays, on 12, 19 and 26 October. He went on to note, somewhat wryly, that ‘the sky took on a certain unsettled character, giving us the first indications that we were going to be struck by another [typhoon] that had come to see if there was anything left in the inkwell’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The ubiquitous nipa and palm house, the bahay kubo, was most at risk to strong winds.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The typhoon of 28 June wreaked havoc among such dwellings in Manila's suburbs, with Tondo losing 248 houses, Mariquina (Marikina) 130, Novaliches 89, and other districts between 15 and 20 houses.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Houses in rural areas fared no better, as, for example, when a typhoon in August damaged 237 nipa and palm houses in Abucay, Bataan.Footnote ¹¹⁹ One account describes seeing an entire house lifted up by the wind and blown away, its final resting place unknown.Footnote ¹²⁰

Typhoons also damaged more substantial buildings, those constructed of stone or other materiales fuertes (literally, strong materials). Strong winds frequently ripped the galvanised iron or tin roofs off a town's principal structures, its municipal and commercial buildings, and the residences of the more well-to-do. The massive cigar factory of Meisic, the fábrica de puros in Tondo, lost 150 metal roof sheets during the typhoon of 28 June.Footnote ¹²¹ Most houses in the Manila suburbs of San Mateo and San Juan were unroofed during the ferocious typhoon of 19 August.Footnote ¹²² Streets were left ‘strewn with roof sheets and broken shell windows’.Footnote ¹²³ Even partial damage to the roof during a storm might expose personal belongings to the elements, ruining clothes, books, furniture, and spoiling stored agricultural produce such as rice and tobacco.Footnote ¹²⁴ People, too, complained of the shoddy construction of many buildings and the ubiquity of leaks, ‘where it rained almost as much inside the houses as in the streets’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Wooden structures were particularly vulnerable to damage as timbers deteriorated rapidly if left uncovered for any length of time.Footnote ¹²⁶ Residents, however, were not without recourse and might lash down thatched and tin roofs with canes and ropes, if given sufficient warning of an approaching storm.Footnote ¹²⁷

The growing urban and communications infrastructure of the late colonial state, public lighting, telegraph poles, and roads were particularly exposed to the full fury of the wind. In Manila, the typhoon on 19 August wrought havoc among the city's lampposts, wrenching some from the ground and leaving many others without glass. In only one subdivision of Intramuros, 34 lampposts were destroyed.Footnote ¹²⁸ Telegraph poles, often placed in exposed locations, were blown down like skittles and the tenuous lines of communication that linked provincial centres to Manila snapped in a storm's aftermath. Telegraph lines in Tuguegarao, damaged in a typhoon on 12 October, had still not been restored two weeks later.Footnote ¹²⁹ Nor were telegraph offices immune from wind damage; rainwater rendered the Dagupan station inoperative when the structure lost its roof and window shutters.Footnote ¹³⁰ Roads were all too often blocked by fallen trees or rendered nearly impassable by potholes ‘so that those on foot had to be gymnastically talented to pass by, while those travelling by carriages experienced mortal somersaults lurching from abyss to abyss’.Footnote ¹³¹ Even the Jardín Botánico, the botanical gardens established outside the walls of Intramuros in 1858, did not escape the ravages of the wind. The typhoon of 19 August uprooted two rare trees, the only specimens of their kind in the archipelago, Pithecellobium saman, a native of Central and South America, and Cassia javanica L., the rainbow shower tree.Footnote ¹³²

In rural areas, agriculture suffered as rice plants were stripped, and sugarcane and tobacco crops were flattened by the wind. The provincial governor of Zambales explained how the typhoon of 19–20 October had caused such extensive damage ‘due to the fact that the palay plant was in flower, and they have been stripped so reducing the harvest to one-third’.Footnote ¹³³ Coconut plantations and orchards were particularly susceptible to high winds as boles were easily toppled and branches divested of their fruit.Footnote ¹³⁴ Along the shore, fish pens, a risky investment at the best of times, were at the mercy of the wind due to their exposed locations. Losses could be extensive, running to ‘thousands of pesos’, and lead to a reduction in badly needed tax revenues. In the aftermath of one typhoon in October, a newspaper concluded that there had not been a fish pen ‘in the bay that has remained unscathed and without some damage and disruption, and others have disappeared altogether’.Footnote ¹³⁵

Some newspaper reports are visceral in their depictions of the wind. Sounds are repeatedly described: loud noises in the roof, doors slamming, and the clatter of objects flying around.Footnote ¹³⁶ The violence of the wind alarmed people ‘with its loud clashes made by slamming doors and windows, while the rolling round of pots made it seem like an earthquake’.Footnote ¹³⁷ In some districts of Manila, residents reported being unable to sleep ‘so loud was the noise in the roofs of their houses’.Footnote ¹³⁸ This discordant racket was in stark contrast to the eerie stillness that reigned over urban centres in advance of a storm's approach, when ‘you could not see anyone in the streets, as, everyone, either from cold or fear, is curled up in their houses’.Footnote ¹³⁹ And sometimes, too, the noise heralded death as well as destruction. In Polo, Bulacan, the wind caused the death of two little girls and injured three other children when their house collapsed around them in the 19 August typhoon.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

A year of carnage at sea

If the land often proved unsafe, matters were little better at sea. While there are no reports of storm surges or tsunamis striking the archipelago in 1881, typhoons wrought havoc among local vessels plying between the islands. Given the insular nature, mountainous topography, and dense tropical forests of the Philippines, transport in the nineteenth century largely revolved around water. An array of sailing vessels of all sizes carried goods and people to and from their destinations. The seas were alive with their comings and goings, from the ubiquitous two masted brig-schooner (bergantin goleta) and the more recent steamship (vapor), the workhorses of inter-island trade, to the smaller sailing ships (lancha, pailebot, panco, and pontin) favoured for coastal traffic, to the single-masted lorcha and flat-bottomed casco found in shallower waters and inland waterways, to the traditional, outrigger crafts (banca, balangay, and paraw) powered by paddle and sail and favoured by fisherfolk and local traders.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These crowded waterways and the vessels upon them were particularly vulnerable to high winds, storms, and typhoons.

It is difficult to gauge the extent of the toll on local shipping as there are no systematic records of their losses. The scale of the carnage taking place at sea is only hinted at in the columns of the Manila newspapers. Short reports like that for the town of Enrile (Cagayan) that ‘all the local craft were sent to the bottom’ due to a typhoon on 12 October.Footnote ¹⁴² Only the larger maritime disasters receive more extensive coverage. So, for instance, in early July, letters began to appear in the press describing what was considered ‘not only by seamen but by old fisherfolk as well as one of the worst maritime disasters in this country’. In the Gulf of Albay, at least five oceangoing vessels, including the steamship Mariveles and ‘two of the best ships in Philippine shipping’, the brig-schooners, Navarro and Leonor, were lost during a typhoon on 27 June.Footnote ¹⁴³ Two letters dated on 29 June provide most of the details. The three vessels had docked earlier in the day and had begun to unload their cargos, continuing to do so till evening when the stevedores retired for the night. It had been a beautiful day with only a light breeze and a few showers. At 7 pm, however, the barometer began to fall rapidly, and the wind rose. These portents of things to come convinced the ship's captains to take some precautionary measures: uncouple their vessels from their moorings, and anchor further out in the roadstead attached to buoys. On the Mariveles, the boilers were also relit to give the ship steerage during any impending storm.

Unfortunately, the measures proved to no avail. As the wind increased to typhoon strength, the buoys to which the ships were moored broke loose, and both buoys and ships were cast onto the beach. In the case of the Mariveles, the weight of the steamship's chains and anchors left the vessel sloping sideways to port exposing its timber deck and superstructure to the full force of the waves. The former was stripped away, and the latter splintered ‘into millions of fragments’. The two sailing ships lay on the beach with their hulls shattered, their crews managing to save their lives ‘but nothing more’. However, four Chinese passengers on board the steamship drowned. When, next morning, a group of local officials and merchants led by the provincial governor came down to the beach to organise the recovery, they were struck by the sad sight of the ‘half naked’ crews salvaging what they might.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Nor were these the only vessels to flounder that night. Perhaps as many as five other brig-schooners were lost in the seas around Bicol during the typhoon: the Legazpi and San Fernando in the Straits of San Bernardino, the San Rafael in the port of Tabaco, as well as the Carmelita and La Jóven Petrona.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ There was news, too, that another steamship, the Aeolus, was stranded on the beach at Tabaco,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ and that an additional brig-schooner, the Oretano del Pilar, had run aground off Panlatuan but was later refloated.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As was only to be expected, many smaller vessels also sank: a pontin (yawl) and a schooner in Tabaco, five pontins and paraws off the Sorsogon coast, and the loss of a paraw from Catanduanes carrying Fr Clemente Emerenciano—though it is possible this craft was lost on the previous day.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Commenting on events in Albay, the Diario de Manila concludes that the ‘major part of its best cabotage boats’ had been lost during the passage of this one typhoon.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Less than two months later, another typhoon of an intensity considered ‘unparalleled in twenty years’ struck shipping in Manila Bay on 19 August. An eyewitness depicts the scene along a stretch of coast the following day. How, close to the Paseo de Luneta, he had come upon a beautiful schooner, the Roca, from Dagupan lying amidst blocks of concrete from the smashed embankment. Nearby, the Florida, a pontin with a cargo of rice, also from Dagupan, had run aground. Only 200 metres further on lay the brig-schooner, Angela, stranded on the shore, while higher up the beach, a lorcha, the Arpa, was in a sorry state. Still walking further in the same direction, the witness describes ‘stumbling’ upon two more stranded lorchas, the Ada and the Quiapo, with their cargoes respectively of sugar and timber intact and salvageable. Finally, in front of the watchtower, lay a casco with its spoiled cargo of rice, badly damaged.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Around the bay, many other vessels were in a similar condition, several paraws and brig-schooners sunk or run aground off Tondo, a pailebot (cutter) lost on the rocks near the Pastel gun battery, and the barque, Titania, recently arrived from Wales, dragged close to the Malecon, and stranded on the sand.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Throughout the year, storms and typhoons wrought a terrible toll on local shipping and the newspapers frequently reported vessels run aground, smashed against the rocks, or otherwise sunk. The flat-bottomed, low-riding cascos, ubiquitous to inland waters, seemed particularly vulnerable in high winds and choppy seas.Footnote ¹⁵² Often towed and laden with cargo and/or passengers, they were ‘at the mercy of the waves’ if the hawser broke or snapped during a storm.Footnote ¹⁵³ ‘Intelligent people,’ one correspondent observed, ‘consider these coasts most dangerous during times of typhoons.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴

By 1881, the Manila Observatory was issuing regular weather advisories that kept those port authorities connected to the telegraph informed of impending storms. Ships’ captains who received such warnings had time to take the appropriate measures to ensure the safety of their vessels. Even so, not all choices proved to be the right one. In the event, the decision of the captain of the steamship Mariveles to remain in port and not to ride out the typhoon at sea led to the loss of his vessel.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Nor were the losses in 1881 in any way exceptional. Miguel Saderra Masó, in his history of the Manila Observatory, describes how a single typhoon that hit Manila Bay on 20 October 1882 was responsible for sinking or badly damaging 57 vessels of all sizes, from steamships to lorchas, adding ‘I do not believe we will ever know even a fourth part off what happened to the smaller craft.’Footnote ¹⁵⁶

A singularly uneventful year

1881, then, is not so historically uneventful as it first appears—if measured, not in terms of major disasters, but the repeated misfortunes that afflicted large numbers of communities across the islands. All around the archipelago, people in the nineteenth century continually experienced moments of sudden terror from fire and quake, days of torrential rain and flood, seasons of typhoons and high winds, and the endless annual carnage at sea. The everyday effects of this constant death, destruction, and disaster from events that are low (or lower) intensity but high frequency needs to be assessed against those that are high intensity but low frequency. What shapes the past more, annually recurring disasters such as the fire that destroyed Calapan and the typhoon that wrecked five ships in the Gulf of Albay, or the ‘once in a century’ earthquake that devastated Manila in 1880? Which type of hazard has the longer-term impact on agriculture, commerce, culture, and the environment? Which of the two has a greater impact on people's psychological health and so influences their behaviour more? Paul Slovic shows that people ‘refuse to worry about losses whose probability is below some threshold’, they tend ‘to ignore rare threats’, and to dismiss risks perceived as uncontrollable, have catastrophic potential, or result in fatal consequences. Instead, they are concerned with more frequent hazards of lower intensity, the everyday disasters.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Risk perception is not an actual calibration of probabilistic risk but a measure of the factors of how people envisage risk in terms of their attitude, cognition, and vulnerability, the ‘perceived risk’ as opposed to the ‘real risk’. These are the considerations that really influence people's behaviour.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The sheer frequency of lower intensity disasters in the Philippines, the repetition as one hazard follows another in close succession, has left its psychological imprint on the Filipino consciousness and sense of identity. The harshness of everyday life in the archipelago has been compared to burden-bearing, pagdadala. Over time, Filipinos have learnt how to pack their burdens correctly to bear their weight more lightly, magaan tayong magdala. All Filipinos have these burdens to carry, but for some the load is heavier.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ That some people were more vulnerable than others in the past is evident in the archival evidence and verified by eyewitness accounts. The Spanish governor-general, Fernando Primo de Rivera, reportedly said that typhoons ‘mainly affected working people who were left without shelter’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ It was the poor who invariably suffered most. It was their homes in the lowest-lying areas of urban centres, whether in Manila or rural towns and settlements, that flooded first and longest.Footnote ¹⁶¹ It was their houses, too, that suffered the most damage in typhoons ‘because their light construction could offer no resistance’.Footnote ¹⁶² And it was the poorest consumers that were most adversely affected as the price of fish, ‘the principal food’ in the market, rose as strong winds and tides wrought havoc among coastal fish pens. Typhoons inevitably had ‘incalculable [consequences], especially for the proletarian class’.Footnote ¹⁶³

The frequency with which hazards occur in the Philippines, past and present, and the social implications of their uneven impact on different sectors of the population, especially the vulnerability of the poor, suggest that the historical impact of disasters on Filipinos requires urgent integration into the nation's historiography. Recent scholarship in Disaster Studies has increasingly focused on the need to understand the occurrence of multiple disasters in one location and how one event might precipitate another, causing an otherwise isolated event to become multiple.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ How, for instance, heavy rainfall linked with a typhoon can cause loose pyroclastic material lying on a volcano's slopes to form lahars that then engulf nearby towns and settlements—as happened around Mount Mayon on 31 October 1875 causing 1,500 fatalities.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ A single event that initiates a chain of interactions that both amplifies the effects of its impact as it progresses through different states as well as adversely affecting larger and larger areas is known as a compound or cascading hazard. Increasingly common as societies become more complex, Gianluca Pescaroli and David Alexander argue that cascading effects in disasters ‘are associated more with the magnitude of vulnerability than with that of hazards’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ There are many occasions in 1881 where such cascades are evident: tropical rainfall that caused floods, ruined harvests, and left the poorest destitute, or cyclonic winds that sank ships, disrupted inter-island commerce, and deprived fisherfolk of a living. These chains of interactions require fuller investigation.

However, compound hazards can trigger more than just linear physical causal pathways and can have secondary impacts that are of even greater import and affect even wider spatial locations than the initial event. These are not so much cascading hazards as ‘cascading disasters’, not just a chain of interactions but one type of disaster spawning another type of disaster.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Significantly, too, these secondary disasters do not have to be linear interactions, where one event directly initiates another, but rather triggers that generate unexpected events of strong impact that can be further exacerbated by the failure of physical structures and the social functions that depend upon them.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Susan Cutter refers to these unanticipated social, cultural, economic, and political effects as ‘social cascades’ in which the initial disaster has become ‘entwined in its effects and historical meaning with other events’, has lost its singularity, and has ‘a perverse multiplier effect … on the spatial and temporal extent and nature of social existence, historical memory, damage sustained, and efforts to realize recovery’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ If cascading disasters and social cascades are increasingly seen as the hallmarks of today's complex societies, the intertwining of the physical world with the social fabric of society is already apparent in the nature of disasters in a late colonial society such as the Philippines. The chain of interactions between hazards, topography, climate, agriculture, market forces, technology, social structures, and cultural norms, as attested to by the accumulated accounts of the small-scale disasters that took place in 1881, suggest that disasters were no longer discrete events—if ever they had been ones. Only now, the temporal and spatial pace with which disasters cascaded make these interactions more historically visible. The year 1881 may be singularly uneventful from the standpoint of national historiography, but in terms of understanding the socio-environmental history of the islands, it is one full of historical moment that reveals much about how disasters affected everyday life in the nineteenth-century Philippines.