CHAPTER VII

[The Lagoon of Bay.] My second trip took me up the Pasig to the great Lagoon of Bay.  I left Manila at night in a banca, a boat hollowed out of a tree-trunk, with a vaulted roof made of bamboo and so low that it was almost impossible to sit upright under it, which posture, indeed, the banca-builder appeared to have neglected to consider.  A bamboo hurdle placed at the bottom of the boat protects the traveller from the water and serves him as a couch.  Jurien de la Graviere [62] compares the banca to a cigar-box, in which the traveller is so tightly packed that he would have little chance of saving his life if it happened to upset.  The crew was composed of four rowers and a helmsman; their daily pay was five reals apiece, in all nearly seven pesos, high wages for such lazy fellows in comparison with the price of provisions, for the rice that a hard-working man ate in a day seldom cost more than seven centavos (in the provinces often scarcely six), and the rest of his food (fish and vegetables), only one centavo.  We passed several villages and tiendas on the banks in which food was exposed for sale.  My crew, after trying to interrupt the journey under all sorts of pretences, left the boat as we came to a village, saying that they were going to fetch some sails; but they forgot to return.  At last, with the assistance of the night watchman I succeeded in hauling them out of some of their friends’ houses, where they had concealed themselves.  After running aground several times upon the sandbanks, we entered the land and hill-locked Lagoon of Bay, and reached Jalajala early in the morning.

[The Pasig.] The Pasig forms a natural canal, about six leagues long, between the Bay of Manila and the Lagoon of Bay, a fresh water lake, thirty-five leagues in circumference, that washes the shores of three fertile provinces, Manila, Laguna and Cavite.  Formerly large vessels full of cargo used to be able to sail right up to the borders of the lake; now they are prevented by sandbanks.  Even flat-bottomed boats frequently run aground on the Napindan and Taguig banks. [63] Were the banks removed, and the stone bridge joining Manila to Binondo replaced by a swing bridge, or a canal made round it, the coasting vessels would be able to ship the produce of the lagoon provinces at the very foot of the fields in which they grow.  The traffic would be very profitable, the waters would shrink, and the shallows along the shore might be turned into rice and sugar fields.  A scheme of this kind was approved more than thirty years ago in Madrid, but it was never carried into execution.  The sanding up of the river has, on the contrary, been increased by a quantity of fish reels, the erection of which has been favored by the Colonial Waterways Board because it reaped a small tax from them.