Introduction

Marius John’s gravestone plainly showed: “Illinois; Private – Hospital Corps; born February 15, 1877; died May 9, 1962).”  In his early twenties when he enlisted with the US Army, he was first assigned in Angel Island, the US military and immigration facility off San Francisco Bay, and subsequently in the Philippines from 1900 to 1902, during the early phase of American colonial rule.

His book “Philippine Saga” is a compelling narrative of his years of service beginning when he was stationed with the Hospital Corps of the US Regular Army, first in the Pangasinan towns of Alcala, later Santo Tomas, and finally Bautista, along the Manila-Dagupan Railway near the Agno River. The primary task of his contingent was the vaccination of “the natives” against cholera and malaria. A Seventeenth Infantry battalion was quartered in another part of the town.

As the US occupying forces shifted its pacification campaign to a policy of attraction, the colonial regime began to establish a comprehensive American school system to replace the Spanish institutions in place. Qualified soldiers could be discharged to become schoolteachers. Determined to find means to reduce his three-year enlistment, Marius John applied to become an educator, although it had never been his ambition to be one.

After a long wait, he was accepted to the program and soon he would join a group of young men and women from 43 US states and 193 colleges who were scheduled to sail from San Francisco on the US Army Transport Thomas and become teachers in the Philippines. In August 1901, nearly 500 arrived in Manila on the ship Thomas. The young teachers were called “Thomasites” and that term was expanded since then to include any teacher who arrived in the first few years of the American colonial period of the Philippines.

The book “Philippine Saga” was published in April 1941 by Sterling Gazette, a publication owned by the author’s father in Sterling, Illinois. Only rare copies of the book exist. Thus, it was propitious for Bella M. Nacario, an active member of the Baao Historical and Cultural Society, to have found a copy for sale on the internet. We thank Father Fruto Ramirez, SJ, also of BHCS, for providing us with a copy of this book which he had scanned, printed and bounded for limited distribution.

Dateline Ibalon shall feature selections from the book, beginning with “Chapter 10: The Typhoon” through “Chapter 30: I Say Goodbye to Baao”. Marius John’s accounts are a fascinating and vivid glimpse into the past of Baao and Bicol. Notably there were striking similarities in Bicol weather – then and now. A severe storm was brewing when he traveled by banca on inundated waters from Naga to Nabua and on to Baao. The town was flooded when he arrived. He had to paddle on a boat to reach the plaza. The water was waist deep when the mayor first welcomed him!

In “Chapter 9: Off to Ambos Camarines,” he described the weeklong boat trip from Manila to Nueva Caceres of the Camarines as uneventful. From Manila Bay over by Cavite, he saw the scrap iron littering the harbor which were the hulks of Admiral Montojo’s fleet sunk by Commodore Dewey’s squadron on May 1898. He then caught a glimpse of Taal Volcano. After a quick stop in Romblon, the boat sailed around Bernardino Strait. The extinct volcanoes of Sorsogon loomed over the distance. A ribbon of vapor hung over Mayon’s perfect cone in Albay. The vessel entered the mouth of the Bicol River on San Miguel Bay. He noted that Ambos Camarines was a rich storehouse of rice, hemp, copra and some wheat for the Philippines. “The Bicols are not as aggressive as the Tagals, but more enlightened than the Pangasinans, and more open and friendly than either of the other branches of the Malayan race,” he wrote as he concluded the chapter.

Chapter 10: The Typhoon

The Superintendent of schools for the Camarines came down on the boat with us. He immediately took over an office in the provincial capitol building, where he began the work of assigning the teachers to the different towns in the district, which covered for the present a wider area than the Camarines.

Not far from the imposing government building was a large cathedral, and on the banks of the river some distance away was the chapel of Peña Francia, a center of attraction during the annual fiesta of the same name.

The population of Nueva Caceres was about eighteen thousand, but Iriga to the south boasted about twenty- five thousand inhabitants.

“I am sending you to Baao,” (pronounced like bough) the superintendent said. “You will report in the morning on board a Spanish launch going up to Bato. You will be taken as far as Nabua by Señor Ocampo. From there you will have to make some arrangement to get over to Baao.’

The launch owned by a white-bearded Spaniard plied between Nueva Caceres (called Naga by the natives) and Bato on Lake Bato at the source of the Naga River, a branch of the Bicol, which was too shallow for the coastwise steamer.

Colonel Ocampo, the Filipino lord of Nabua, and the Spanish merchant were most gracious.

“Welcome to the Camarines,” was the colonel’s greeting. “We are looking forward eagerly to what the American school system will do for our people.”

He spoke sincerely without the slightest trace of Filipino guile, such as I had often detected in the natives north of Manila. He introduced me to a young college graduate by the name of Crow, and a Miss Donaldson, an experienced teacher from the States, who were to take over the schools of Nabua.

Both Ocampo and the Spaniard were delightful traveling companions who talked incessantly as the launch wound on under giant trees along the banks of the stream filled to the brim in this season of the rains. We chugged up the river all day. It was bright and sunny when we started out, but before we reached Lake Bato the floodgates above were opened wide. The rain fell in torrents. We finally saw an opening through the trees and a wide expanse of water spread out ahead of us.

Suddenly the launch stopped.

There was a hurried consultation between the skipper, the Spanish owner and Colonel Ocampo. I was astonished to note the deep respect of this cultured, capable Spaniard for the opinion of the Filipino.

“There is a typhoon out on the lake,” Ocampo informed us. “We cannot land there without being wrecked.”

The boat swung around and started back toward Nueva Caceres. It finally pulled up in a cove under a bamboo thicket at the edge of the river sheltered by a rise of land densely covered with towering tropical trees.

“We will have to tie up here for the remainder of the night,” Colonel Ocampo explained. “We deeply regret this unfortunate outcome. It will not be a pleasant experience, especially for Señorita Donaldson, but I see no remedy for it.”

It was growing dark, but aside from the deluge of rain the little cove was an excellent shelter from the raging typhoon.

Ocampo called one of his servants.

“I think there is a house back there in the woods on the high ground. Go up and see what accommodations you can find,” he directed.

“Si, señor.”

The man returned shortly to report.

“There is a lone house up in the woods. A couple live there. There is a bed, and they have dinner ready. They will gladly turn the bed over to the señoritas.’

“It will be more comfortable for you, Señorita Donaldson. My daughter will go with you,” offered the colonel.

“I prefer to stay here on the boat with the rest of you,” Miss Donaldson insisted, timid about being alone in the woods with the natives even in the company of Señorita Ocampo.

“You will be drenched here on the launch,” Ocampo explained. “The awning is our only protection-a very poor one, and the downpour will beat in all night.”

“I would much prefer to stay here,” Miss Donaldson was quite emphatic in her refusal to go ashore.

“Bien. I can understand your reluctance, señorita. Then the señores will go.”

The colonel turned to Crow and me.

“Oh, we can stay here, too. We do not want to impose on their hospitality.”

“No, no, no,” he insisted. “They will be disappointed if you do not go.”

Refusal was useless. Filipino hospitality would hear of nothing of the sort, so we followed the servant into the woods. Drenched to the skin like rats in a mill pond, we climbed the hill to the little clearing back from the river.

The couple lived in a substantial two-room house, like most Filipino casas of the middle-class type, with board sides and a hardwood floor in the main room. grass, and the roof was thatched with cogon, native grass and there was a bamboo kitchen lean-to. The large room contained a carved Spanish bed with a canopy draped with mosquito bar.

“You will sleep there, señores,” said the woman.

“Oh, no,” we protested, “we do not wish to rob you of your bed. We will sleep on the kitchen floor.” “No, no, señores,” they both insisted. “You must sleep there. It is a pleasure. That bed is for our guests. We often sleep in the kitchen. It is comfortable there.”

No amount of persuading could have induced them to change their minds, and we knew that there are times when it is best to reverse the Scriptural adage, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and we were giving them pleasure by accepting their humble hospitality. They brought us their dinner-steamed rice and boiled lobster. Again, it was useless to say no.

“We have plenty, too, señores,” they vowed; but I was certain they went without lobster for their dinner that night, and that they slept on the rough kitchen floor.

It is amazing how persistently old poison will cling to the human mind. Way back in some recess of memory I could hear a soldier saying:

“A Filipino will never harm a guest in his house, but I when you leave, watch out. He will plunge a kris or a bolo into your back.”

Perhaps! But I have since been convinced it would have to be a bad guest, and a bad Filipino.

Crow was fortunate. He had not spent more than a year listening to malicious army gossip. But I soon forgot the soldiers’ philosophy of gloom in the cheerful glow of the embers in the shoe-shaped adobe stove on the bamboo kitchen floor.

I do not remember now just how long we were tied up in that cove, but when the sun burst forth we went down to see the occupants of the launch, their clothing soaked to the skin, and learned that the forest stood above the rising floods that inundated the surrounding country.

Crow and I were as dry as tinder and felt a little sheepish when we looked at the others; but they were unperturbed by their drenching.

“I have sent two of my servants to Nabua to bring a baroto,” Ocampo told us. “It is still rough out on the lake.”

The men waded across country, sometimes shoulder deep in water, and returned with a large boat hollowed from a great tree like the one the natives had snaked across the swamp to the Rio Agno at Santo Tomas (in Pangasinan).

There was room enough for us all in the baroto. The colonel and the Spaniard kept up their endless conversation as we were poled across country over the inundated land. Sometimes in the lowest parts the water was up to the branches of the smaller trees, where we saw a few swamp snakes coiled in refuge above the water.

The Ocampo family lived in an imposing casa just off the plaza of Nabua, by all odds the largest house I had seen in the provinces. It was square, with an inner court, mother-of-pearl or oyster-shell sliding windows, mahogany stairways, rich hardwood floors, and every room was furnished in excellent taste.

Ocampo himself had been a colonel in Aguinaldo’s volunteers, his son, Jose, the presidente of Nabua, whom they called Jefe or Chief, had been a major in the insurrecto leader’s regular army. Another son, a youth of ample dimensions, we found to be a band lead- er who, it turned out, had trained an excellent group of players among the young men of Nabua.

Colonel Ocampo was a large man for a Filipino, sleek and well fed, shrewd as they can be found. As we sat about sipping our after-dinner chocolate, we discovered that he was a severe critic of the church, especially under the native padres who were now officiating in the place of the departed Spaniards.

“We like the American system,” Ocampo said. “We are glad you have come. We are eager for an opportunity to educate the youth of the land, and to learn your methods of government and how to rule more wisely.

“Yes, of course, you will say, we fought the Americans under Aguinaldo… We were misled… We had understood the government in Washington planned to sell the Islands to Japan or to a European power That would have been calamity for us.”

The women retired soon after dinner, but the colonel, the presidente, Crow and I sat long into the night dis- cussing the plans for the future schools of the province.

I never saw the white-bearded, aristocratic Spanish owner of the launch after our arrival at the Ocampo residence.

Chapter 11: I Go to Baao

On the following morning two of Colonel Ocampo’s servants came in a banca to paddle me over to Baao. My trunk was placed in the center of the canoe, and I climbed into it from the stairway of the patio, which was underwater. Sitting on the trunk I waved goodbye to the Ocampos and to Crow and Miss Donaldson, then we pushed out into the plaza and over the inundated road across the swamp to Baao.

Even here I was given evidence of that town rivalry that is common the world over. I was warned that there were bad people in Baao. All the people there were bad, and I must keep my wits about me or I would come to a foul end.

We kept in the middle of the road on that little journey across the swamp. The shrubs on either side, and an occasional scrubby tree, were alive with snakes driven up from the swamp by the flood. In writing home I told of this incident. The letter was published in the local daily, which was sent to me at Baao. When the deputy superintendent came to inspect the schools I showed him the newspaper, and he accused me of telling a tall one. I never could convince him of the truth of that story, but let anyone go down that road in the rainy season, and I will wager him dollars to doughnuts he will find them on every tree and shrub.

The native in the prow of the boat struck at one of the snakes with his paddle. It sprang at him from the bush but alighted about two feet from the boatman in the rear. I did not need to understand the Bicol language to know it brought forth a torrent of native profanity. I glanced back at the fellow behind me.

“Mucho malo,” he said, and added in his Spanish jargon, “that was a very dangerous snake.’

That was the only time I saw snakes in the Philippines, although I heard many tales about them. Snake stories like fishing yarns have a tendency to expand.

I read in a Manila newspaper that a large snake was seen on one of the streets not far from the Escolta, the famous shopping district. It escaped under a bridge and disappeared somewhere. They could not locate it. A reporter tried to discover just how large it was, but the size varied with everyone who claimed to have seen it. One man insisted it was eighty feet long and as big around as a carabao. It was probably an ordinary reptile.

After I was settled in my house in Baao, Vitaliano Buena, who afterwards became one of my assistant teachers, came over to warn me about keeping my windows open at night. He said something that sounded like “peetha.”

“It is very dangerous,” he insisted. “It is liable to come down from the mountain some night and enter the window.”

“Oh, I don’t think it will bother me,” I replied.

I thought he was talking about some disease supposed to be in the night air, or an evil spirit, an anito, which I had been informed the natives believed in. I gave no heed to his admonition. Not until after I left the Philippines did it occur to me that he was warning me against a python or “peethon,” he pronounced it as a Spaniard would, that might come from the mountain to take up its abode with me. Had I understood him, I suppose I would have shut the windows and missed all those delightful monsoons that whispered through the trees at night.

One could always hear strange noises in the thatched roof of a Filipino house, which I was told came from the geckos, snakes and other creatures chasing each other; but neither serpent nor centipede ever dropped down to make my acquaintance.

I have gone through the jungle and the swamp with the natives, yet I never saw a snake of any description on those occasions. They were there, of course, but they never dropped down from a limb above to thumb noses at me, and they minded their own business when we were in the swamp.

It was reported that there were giant boa constrictors and anacondas in the jungles, and a few cobras in the islands farther south; but the natives feared most the manapo, a green snake found on the rice leaves. If a Filipino has to walk along the ridge of a rice paddy when the leaves are green, he slashes his cane before him to knock it away before it strikes.

One day later when I went with the presidente of Baao out to the fishing laguna, he told me of a previous flood similar to the one over which I was riding now.

“Everyone was forced to leave a village near the river because of the rising water,” he said. “There was one old man they had forgotten when they fled. When the rain ceased we went out on boats to look for him. We found him huddled at the far end of the roof of the largest house. As far away as it could crawl on the opposite end of the roof a large python was curled, each trembling in fear of the other.”

He also told of other parts of the Islands where it was necessary to keep a large snake in the house to drive away the smaller snakes and other pests. They were sold for household pets on the marketplace, tied to bamboo poles. I was glad I was not sent to those parts. Think of having a big serpent cuddling up to you at night, or stumbling over it when you went for a drink!

I say the python's beautiful, 
The presidente said, 
Attired in a pale green waistcoat, 
A jewel on his head; 
For his scales are richly colored, 
His lidless eyes are bright 
As he sways across the pathway 
In forest's checkered light. 
With flowing ease and slender grace 
He glides amid the fern. 
He makes his home in tropic isles 
With none of man's concern. 
I greet thee in thy charming haunt, 
Where wisdom bids thee hide 
Till man's no more thine enemy, 
And peace and love abide. 
O wise one of the wonder coils, 
In arms of green gum tree! 
Wouldst thou not rise to sing Te Deum, 
If man did not curse thee? 

With the snake episode behind us, we paddled into Baao, a temporary nipa Venice.

Men and women peered at us from the doorways of shacks on stilts, some with babies in their arms. Children peeped from behind their mothers’ skirts, large-eyed and wondering. Pigs and fighting cocks looked down upon us from the doorways of other houses, their owners standing in the background. Hundreds of natives stared at the new schoolmaster of Baao, sitting on a strange American trunk. We paddled along the streets until we came to a large house not so large, however, as the Ocampo’s in Nabua, the home of Baldomero Imperial, the Filipino presidente of Baao.

“El maestro, Señor Presidente,” said one of the boatmen.

“Welcome, Señor Maestro,” the presidente greeted me, but not with the warmth of the Ocampos in Nabua. “You will stay at my house for the present. You will remain until I can locate a respectable house where you will reside while here.”

So I “came over the water to Charlie” in a banca from the stairway of the headman of Nabua to the stairway of the headman of Baao.

The presidente was living in a house in the higher part of town, over against a humpbacked mountain down which a tangled jungle crept to shake hands with the nipa houses on the upper side of the pueblo.

Presidente Baldomero Imperial was a little man, shrewd, with a wrinkled face, but nattily dressed in white ducks, Manila hat with a broad scarf. He generally wore a piña camisa of the finest texture or a linen coat, and I never saw him without white canvas shoes. He carried a cane carved from carabao horn, smoothly polished like black marble, a white knob at the top.

The dinner was not as sumptuous as that of the Spanish coastwise steamer or at the Ocampo table, but it was tastily prepared. There was only one course of meat, served with rice cooked dry and eaten like bread, such as will be found in nearly every Filipino’s home. Presidente Imperial was not as well informed on world affairs as the Ocampos, so our conversation was not as animated as in Nabua the night before.

I did not enjoy the breakfast so much at the presidente’s house where the servants had not learned to keep the ants out of the rice left over from the night before.

There was this advantage in the Ocampo household: their floors were scrubbed regularly with coal oil, which the ants do not like.

A boat came to take Señor Imperial over to the plaza. During the rains that followed I often waded to the square in water waist deep. When the presidente returned later in the day, he announced: “I have found just the right house for you, Señor Maestro. The home of Widow Martinez. The little rent you will pay her will be a fortune for the widow. Come, we will look at it. I hope you will like the house.”

Baao was long and rather narrow, a picturesque place, nestling beneath the mountain. An arroyo gurgled down from the foothill near the upper part of town, and another flowed through its center past the church, convent and plaza to the swamp, although at present they were both lost in the flood. Each of these streams was spanned by a quaint stone Spanish bridge, adding an artistic touch to the town. One road ran through Baao from Nueva Caceres to Iriga and beyond, forming the main street of the municipality.

The house of Widow Martinez was on this main thoroughfare about halfway between the two stone bridges. The house was cogon thatched. It contained a combination sitting and bedroom, furnished with a table, a bamboo armchair, two or three straight back chairs and a Spanish bed with the inevitable canopy top, draped with mosquito bar. A closet to the rear was large enough for a small bedroom. There was also a dining room, a kitchen lean-to with a bamboo floor, and a rustic balcony surrounded it at the rear, overlooking some thick shrubbery, a clump of bananas and a papaw tree. A double row of tall trees lined the dark street behind the house, which led out to the poorer district.

“It’s grand, Señor Presidente!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “How soon may I move in?”

“Today. The señora is moving out this afternoon.” The presidente also sent me a boy, a bright lad in his late ‘teens, to do my cooking, marketing, look after my laundry and keep the house spick and span. His name was Horspicio. He scrubbed the floor twice a week with coal oil, and we did quite well in outwitting the ants. We kept the table legs in pans of water and the sugar bowl in a plate of water on the table, but they climbed up to the ceiling and jumped down; at least some would get into the sugar in spite of everything we could do. We could not scrub the roof as in the tightly ceilinged Ocampo home in Nabua.

“Do not pay Horspicio more than two pesos a month,” the chief executive advised me. “It will spoil him if you increase his pay.”

Two pesos was less than a dollar in our money. “That seems like a small amount,” I protested.

“It is enough for him. If you pay him more, he will be so opulent he will not want to work.”

I followed the presidente’s advice in the beginning, but I thought I knew more about human nature than he, at least about what money would do, so after some months I raised my muchacho’s wages to five pesos a month.

Horspicio was not a good servant after that. I finally had to find another, but there is also a different story and a deeper reason behind the lad’s falling from grace which will be told later.

The header image features the winning entry to the student art competition held during the Kamuy-an Festival which is celebrated in Baao as thanksgiving for a bountiful harvest and God’s blessings (photography: Audrey Agtarap, Baao Historical and Cultural Society). Our February 2025 Edition will feature Chapter 12: Starting a School and Chapter 13: Life in Bicol.

Marius John was named Adopted Father of Baao during a special session of the municipal council on February 15, 1941. During the session, excerpts from Mr. John’s book were read after which the resolution of respect, gratitude and appreciation was passed. This was during the term of Mayor Luis G. Dato.

Born in Sterling, Illinois, where his father was a publisher of the Sterling Gazette, Mr. John graduated from the George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, studied at Stanford University and graduated from the Sterling Business College. He was in the staff of the Salt Lake Tribune, served as Editor of the Orlando Sentinel, and contributed articles to various magazines and newspapers. He was a member of the Associated Arts of Brooklyn and various writers’ clubs.