312 
MANILA UNDER THE AMERICANS. 
out or were saving them—a brown felt hat, which to my mind, hardly 
looked thick enough to keep out a tropical sun in hot weather. 
Sets* Roque. The rain having stopped, we took a vehicle of the 
country which we found outside the Arsenal, 
and after going about half a mile over an atrocious road, found 
ourselves on the causeway leading over to San Roque—this cause¬ 
way was neutral ground between the American and Filipino lines. 
The Insurgent sentries, probably recognising us as British officers, 
did not seem to object to our passing, so we drove round the 
village of San Roque—the type of a Filipino village—if one dis¬ 
regards the unsettled appearance of the place due to the large 
number of armed Insurgents billetted there. The village looked neat 
and tidy, houses built on piles, the frame-work chiefly bamboo and 
thatched with leaves of nipa-palm, each house surrounded by its little 
garden planted with vegetables and hedged with bamboo and banana 
palms, and here and there a tall cocoa-nut palm. After driving round 
the village, we re-crossed the neutral causeway and paid off our Jehu, 
deciding to return on foot after our recollections of the road. 
The Defences An accommodating American sentry allowed us to 
r pass through a sally port which led up to the 
of Cavite. ramparts facing the causeway, and here for the 
first time we had an opportunity of examining the Spanish pre¬ 
parations for defence when the war with America broke out, the 
guns having been left untouched since the American occupation. In 
the cavalier at the south-west corner were three guns facing south :— 
The first, a bronze gun, hexagonal bore, about the size of our 32-pr. 
S.B. Still loaded and spiked—it could never have been fired without 
breaking up the carriage on which it was mounted. The second, a 
S.B. gun of much the same size supported in a carriage, the breast of 
which was too narrow to admit of the trunnions going down into the 
trunnion-holes, the breech was propped up on scraps of fire-wood, this 
too was loaded and could never have been fired. The third, a similar 
gun to No. 2, was mounted on a more suitable carriage, but the slide, 
of iron, was probably intended for a 7" or 9" gun—this gun was not 
loaded and might have been fired during the battle of 1st May ! On 
the western face of this cavalier the Americans had placed a 1" 
Gatling machine gun to command the neutral causeway, an ideal 
place for a Maxim, but hardly for a gun throwing a 1" bullet. 
From this place we could form a very fair idea of Cavite and its 
surroundings; the western half of the peninsula had been a fortified 
rectangle about half a mile long and a quarter broad, surrounding a 
native village where probably the Arsenal employees lived; the 
eastern half, irregular in shape, was taken up by the Arsenal and 
Dockyard. N-and I decided to return to the Arsenal along the 
southern face, a straight wall with the sea coming right up to it—the 
wrecks of four Spanish war vessels lay off this shore—I suppose these 
attracted us; we were glad when we had reached the far end of that 
wall, some 800 yards long. We were afforded an opportunity of 
