30 
COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY 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 w T ake. 
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 27 th 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 Pilipinas in 
