30 COMPENDIUM OF GEOGEAPHY AND TRAVEL 



peaceful bliss undisturbed. The populous towns and 

 villages are decimated by frightful epidemics — smallpox 

 and Asiatic cholera ; while erratic flights of locusts, 

 darkening the heavens like dense clouds, devour the 

 young crops, leaving hunger and famine in their wake. 

 With the change of the monsoons the swollen streams 

 overflow the land; and when the industrious Tagal 

 fancies he has escaped the devastating floods in his log 

 hut or stone house, he is suddenly buried by an earth- 

 quake beneath its ruins, stifled in a burning rain of 

 cinders from some new-born volcano, or hurried to a 

 still swifter death in the overwhelming waters of an 

 earthquake-wave. 



2. History. 



The Philippines will remain for ever famous as the 

 scene of the death of the great Portuguese navigator, 

 Magellan. The Spanish squadron of which he was in 

 command, reduced by desertion and wreck to three ships, 

 sighted the southern point of Samar Island on the 16 th 

 March, 1521, but, finding the coast beset with shoals, 

 bore away to the southward, and the admiral landed on 

 the neighbouring island of Malhou the same night. The 

 first place of any note visited by the squadron was Zebu, 

 in the island of that name, and it was in fighting with a 

 hostile tribe who occupied the islet of Mactan in front of 

 the port that, on the 27th April, Magellan lost his life. 



To the archipelago thus discovered Magellan gave the 

 name of St. Lazarus, for he had first sighted the group 

 upon the day sacred to that saint. It was not till some 

 time after — in 1542 — that Lopez de Villalobos gave 

 them their present appellation of the Islas Filipinas in 



