Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/578



Y the great victory of our fleet in Manila Bay, another of the world's side-tracked capitals has been pulled out from obscurity into main lines of prominence. Take the steamship "China" some afternoon at San Francisco, and in twenty-five days after she has passed the Golden Gate she will have dropped anchor in Hong Kong, with but two stops on the way, Honolulu and Yokohama. Thence the "Esmeralda," 950 tons, Captain Taylor, makes the 700-mile run, to the southeast, across the China Sea, in sixty hours. In the early morning of the third day out from Hong Kong, the mountains on Luzon—largest and most northern island of the group—appear blue and dim off the port bow, and in a few hours the "Esmeralda" steams in through the "Boca chica," or narrow mouth of the great circular bay on whose opposite perimeter squats Manila. I say "squats;" for although the Philippines are mountainous, and although the entrance into the bay is made between flanking chains of low mountains that start upward from the water's edge, Manila itself is on the low alluvial plains which form a sort of huge door-mat to the main backbone range of Luzon Island, that runs up and down the eastern coast along the Pacific Ocean.

It is twenty-seven miles across the bay, and it looks as if the blue mountains in the background formed the opposite shore. But as the "Esmeralda" comes in toward the anchorage, the front row of houses and walls in Manila slowly rise out of the water which they seem to be hugging closely. Off to the right, on the south shore of the bay, is the low and almost invisible sand spit on which, in the haze, sprawls Cavité, while directly in front are a dozen hemp and sugar vessels lying at anchor some four miles off the seawall. Behind lies the city, like a white chalk line on the low shore, and some of its domes are faintly silhouetted against the mountains fifteen miles inland. The "Esmeralda"