When we went on deck, we saw a couple of canoes, hollowed out of big tree trunks, circling round, and containing natives dressed in loin-cloths, offering to dive for coins, in the approved fashion, west of Port Saïd. They were fine young men, yellowy brown in colour, and they made a great deal of noise, but did not dive very well. After breakfast some of C——’s friends came off in a launch and took us ashore, when we drove in the usual little victoria, drawn by two small ponies, to the British Vice-Consulate, a large house on the borders of the town, where the Vice-Consul, Mr Fulcher, entertained us royally.
Here I followed the same programme as I did at Manila, resting in the cool house all the long, hot day, and driving out in the evening at about five o’clock, when the sun had begun to go down. We drove all through dim streets, with a gorgeous sunset fading in the sky, and I could not make things out very distinctly, but could see that we were passing along ramshackle, half-country roads with overshadowing trees, and every now and then we passed a row of little open shops with bright lights in them, and natives squatting about. There are no bazaars in this country, by-the-bye, only little mat-shed shops where food is sold.
That was all I saw of Cebú, as I did not go out this morning, and we sailed in the afternoon. When we came down to the wharf to get on board, the tide, or the Port Doctor, had allowed of the _Kai-Fong_, drawing up to the wharf, so we came on board up a plank, when one had to look at the ship instead of the water on each side! The ship was very busy getting a cargo of hemp into one of the holds, hemp being the peculiar produce of the Island of Cebú and the opposite ones of Samar and Leyte, all long-shaped islands lying almost parallel in the middle of the Archipelago.
[Illustration: DISCHARGING HEMP FROM PARAOS (NATIVE BOATS).
The hemp comes on board in great oblong bales, looking like oakum, and a man told me it was the fibre of a plant like a banana tree, which the natives split and shred very skilfully, and then it is dried and done up in bales, and “that is all there is _to_ it,” as the Americans say.
Opposite the town of Cebú is a long, low island called Mactan, where the great Portuguese Navigator Magellan was killed in the year 1521. The story is that the natives of the islands, finding Magellan invincible, and believing him to be enchanted, lured the great explorer away by treachery to the little island of Mactan, where they had prepared a pit covered with branches, such as they use to trap wild pigs. Magellan fell into this trap, whereupon the savages rushed out of their hiding-places and shot him in the joints of his harness with poisoned arrows, and one bold man finally finished him off with a spear. They poison their arrows to this day as they did then, by dipping the tip into a decomposed human body.