CHAPTER XV

THE KATIPUNAN

To his father and mother he wrote urging them to come to Dapitan and make their home on the land that he had bought. In this he must have lightly estimated the rancor or the vigilance of his enemies, or have been imperfectly informed about what was going on in Manila—or both. It was a time when all suspected persons were to be watched with unusual diligence, and of these the Rizal family came first. Meantime, the exile’s fate, of which he was wont to take a somber view, shifted somewhat its familiar aspect of misfortune and sent him one gleam of happiness. In the midst of his lonely state and Promethean miseries adroitly prepared for him, he met a woman that attracted him, and ended by marrying her.

This came about after a strange fashion. All this time he had been faithful to the memory of Leonora. [190] A few months after he had taken up his residence in Dapitan there came thither a patient from Hong-Kong named Taufer, an American engineer, blind, and drawn to Dapitan by the fame of the great oculist. [191] He had with him his adopted daughter Josefina, who promptly fell in love with Rizal. Her real name was Josephine Bracken; her parentage was Irish. Her father had been a non-commissioned officer in the British army and stationed at Hong-Kong. When he died he left a large family in extreme poverty. Taufer, who was a kindly man of some means, adopted the youngest child as a matter of charity and then grew to love her as if she had been his own daughter. For seventeen years she had been his daily companion; in the long night of his blindness she was his guide and comforter.

If her portraits do her justice, Josephine must have had unusual beauty, but her letters do not reveal in her the intellectual gifts that would have made her an ideal companion for José Rizal. Yet she must have been sympathetic, and he, solitary at the world’s outpost, seems to have been fond of her. When he came to ask her hand in marriage of her guardian, Mr. Taufer was overcome with grief. An hour later, he attempted suicide. He was blind; the examinations of Rizal had shown no chance that his eyesight could be restored; a daughter of his had but lately left him to be married; he had lost his first wife; his second marriage had not been happy; and he felt that without Josephine there was nothing to live for. Rizal came upon him razor in hand about to carry out his threat and narrowly rescued him from himself. [192]

After this, a marriage seemed impossible, and Josephine returned to Hong-Kong with Taufer.

But the affair had gone so far that already Rizal had made overtures to the parish priest to perform the ceremony. The priest shook his head: there were Rizal’s well known heresies in the way; he could not marry a heretic. Rizal said that if by heresies his political opinions were meant, nothing could induce him to profess any change in them; but if the priest meant religious views, he was ready to declare that he was and had been at all times a faithful son of the Catholic religion and purposed so to remain. The priest thought a declaration to this effect might win past the bishop, who now appeared as the chief obstacle; at least he would send to Cebu to find out. The letter of inquiry he had written and was about to despatch when news came that the engagement had been broken. The letter was never sent.

None the less, Rizal and Josephine continued to regard themselves as plighted, and after a time in Hong-Kong Mr. Taufer was won over to consent to their union. Josephine went to Manila, where she made the acquaintance of Rizal’s mother and sisters. She was about to start for Dapitan to renew the attempt to gain the sanction of the church when in a conversation Mrs. Mercado reminded her that there were two views of this proceeding. It was doubtful if the bishop could be induced to think well of the marriage; but even if he could his permission would then be regarded as evidence of compromise on Rizal’s part. In the opinion of many of his countrymen he enlisted against the church when he enrolled against the friars; since the religious orders had come to control the ecclesiastic as well as the political administration, the distinction between church and friar was to some minds fairly vague. Mrs. Mercado desired that nothing should weaken her son’s influence; a constancy from which we may surmise of what fighting stock she came. She knew that anything that looked like compromise would hearten his enemies and dismay his friends. Therefore, she suggested a civil marriage, the church to be ignored. Civil marriages and even common-law marriages were now authorized by the laws of Spain, and, if not yet decreed in the islands, were legally binding there. [193]

This advice the lovers deemed good when Josephine reached Dapitan and reported it; there was no more talk of a dispensation from the bishop of Cebu. A marriage ceremony was performed by the simple device of the taking of hands before witnesses and the registering of their mutual vows.

Rizal’s stout-hearted mother succeeded about this time in winning permission to visit her son; later came two of his sisters. Their presence revived in him the hope he had once cherished of uniting his family in a spot where, after so much of strife and grief, they might begin life afresh and be free from the friars that were the landlords and rulers of Biñan and Calamba. He could see no reason why Mindanao should not be well adapted to their needs. Government could not urge against such a plan the objection it used against the North Borneo project; Mindanao was Philippine territory. He wrote to Despujol asking for the necessary permits and received a chilly answer reminding him that he was an exile and an outcast and in no position to seek favors of his Government. Steady persistence in the face of whatever rebuff was one of Rizal’s strongest traits; the man seemed as incapable of discouragement as George Washington was; and the philosophical reader of history may well consider the appearance of this quality in three men that founded three nations, William the Silent, Washington, and Rizal, and inquire whether in value to the world this possession did not overtop all others. With one cherished hope crushed, he turned to another. He set himself to improve agriculture in the region where he had been marooned; he showed the farmers how they could raise better crops and get better prices for them. From the United States, where in his travels he had observed with interest the latest agricultural inventions, he imported modern farm machinery, using it upon his own place and teaching its use to others. It has been the lot of few men to lead lives of such varied use to their fellows. He seemed to go through the world with eyes observing whatever was done around him and mind considering how it could be done better.

Meantime, in Manila great changes had been at work, of which he knew nothing. The discontent of the people, always growing, had begun to find a new expression. Another leader had arisen, in all ways different from Rizal except in this that he, too, was an inevitable product of the attempt to force upon a people a distasteful sovereignty. It has been much the fashion, particularly with writers of a scholastic bent or reactionary sympathy (which is probably the same thing), to speak ill of Andrés Bonifacio. If we desire a just estimate of the forces that worked in diverse ways for Philippine freedom, we are not to dismiss this man lightly [194] nor to speak of him with disrespect. Successful revolutions demand the man that thinks and the man that acts, Mazzinis and Garibaldis, Jeffersons and Washingtons. Rizal was the Mazzini of the Philippine struggle; Bonifacio was its Garibaldi.

He was born in the working-class, was almost wholly self-educated, and at the time he began to be powerful in Philippine destiny was a porter in a maritime warehouse of Manila. In his youth he developed a passion for reading; he read when other persons slept, ate, or idled. By diligent study in the night-time he acquired a knowledge of history and its philosophy that in a man of his handicaps and employment was not less than marvelous and alone would have indicated a phenomenal capacity. [195] He studied deeply the stories of other peoples oppressed, the Israelites in Egypt, the Dutch under Spain, the American colonies under England, the French under their monarchical system, and formulated from these a church militant of democratic faith and principles of which he was first the acolyte and then the devout minister. In the end it mastered all his thought and waking hours and became essentially his life. Something of the great truth he saw clearly that the substance of all real progress in civilization has been progress in democracy, and for the most part this has been won by hard blows, rude encounters, and illimitable sacrifices. He caught a glimpse of the magical stimulus that came to the world from the successive emancipations of the American and the French peoples and another glimpse of the probable effect of a similar emancipation on his own. Upon the condition of those countrymen of his, dragging at a chain that stifled in them all mental vitality with all self-respect, he stared with growing impatience while he burned and fretted for another Bunker Hill and another Yorktown.

He was of somewhat violent passions and such deficiencies in self-control as were to have been expected from his experiences and inadequate training. Nevertheless, he had great sincerity, a mind of extraordinary fertility, and a readiness for swift decision and action. He showed himself to be indomitable when wholly concentered upon the one cause; and his contribution to it is not now to be disparaged because he happened to come no nearer the academic walk than Lincoln came.

When Rizal, lured from Hong-Kong by false promises of safety, landed in Manila, Bonifacio was twenty-nine years old. He had long revolved in his mind the fact so patent to all observing Filipinos that the first step to their freedom must be unity. About the time Rizal was founding his Liga Filipina, Bonifacio was formulating another and much more portentous union. The two were launched about the same time; one in the open, the other in the dark and with the utmost secrecy. Bonifacio called his society the Kataastaasang Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng̃ mg̃a Anak ng̃ Bayan, which being interpreted means Supreme Most Respected Association of the Sons of the People. For brevity’s sake the long unwieldy name soon came to be shortened into K.K.K. or the Katipunan, and so remains in history. Bonifacio shaped it like a masonic lodge, with a ritual, passwords, grips, and the swearing of fealty and silence. Its avowed object was the overthrowing by force of the Spanish power and the establishing of the Philippine nation, free and independent.

It appears now that the name of Rizal was used as an honorary president of this society, [196] but wholly without his authority or even knowledge. For this unwarranted use Bonifacio was much to blame. It is likely that he found at first some difficulty in securing recruits and took advantage of Rizal’s great popularity. Either so, or what seems more probable to us, he expected to have Rizal’s support for the Katipunan when it should have grown to formidable size. In either case, the course was inexcusable. But we are to remember that Bonifacio, warring against the most unprincipled and ruthless of powers, believed he was justified in using any weapons that came to his hand.

Month after month the Katipunan spread among the disgusted and restless Filipinos—secretly, always; and we are to surmise that the care with which the movement was to be concealed until the instant of the blow recommended it to people smarting under a Government so obese and still so viciously protected. How long this Government was ignorant of what was going on nobody knows. If the vast network of spies and agents provocateurs, with which Spanish, like Russian, rule was maintained, brought in no hint of the mine that was being driven beneath the feet of the governing class, the spies must have made their first recorded failure, and that concerning the one thing most important to their employers. Filipinos, one may say, had not so known these ever busy birds of ill omen.

The deportation of Rizal gave to the Katipunan a great impetus; the masses of people bitterly resented the cowardice and perfidy that had contrived at last to drag down the popular champion. At first they knew no way to voice their protest. The Katipunan relieved them of their uncertainty; it was the weapon thrust into their hands. A year went by under this slowly darkening sky; then two years. Rizal was at Dapitan; it seemed likely he would remain there until his last day, for nothing would soften the hatred with which the friars and patricians regarded him, and their word was the country’s law. Yet if he could be brought back in the character of a revolutionary leader the whole country would rise behind him. Ingenious minds brooded upon the ease with which he could be rescued. Only a small force of troops guarded Dapitan; it could be overpowered by a handful of resolute men. Rizal’s habit was to take long canoe journeys alone around the coast, pursuing his scientific inquiries; of his own will he would never violate his parole, but suppose he should be seized and carried off by force? He could then be picked up by a British mail-steamer, be landed at Singapore, and be free. Intimations of these plans were conveyed to him: he vetoed all of them. It was his word of honor that he had given never to attempt to escape; not even with the least connivance at a rescue would he taint his word; not even by allowing other men to entertain a thought that his faith could be tainted; and not even in dealing with a Government that had dealt perfidiously with him.

Bonifacio, looking into the faces of his people, believed more strongly every day that the time to strike was near at hand, and every day he longed the more for the active assistance of Rizal. [197] He knew well enough the danger his movement stood in and how that danger increased hour by hour as knowledge of what was afoot spread and could be therefore the less easily controlled. At last he went to the length of sending an emissary to see Rizal, to lay before him the plans for the revolution and to ask his help. The messenger chosen was Pio Valenzuela, a name afterwards famous and honored among his countrymen. To disguise the real object of his visit he took with him a blind man upon whom, it was pretended, Rizal was to perform an operation. Helped by this ruse, the messenger had a fair chance to talk freely with the exile.

What took place at their meeting was long in dispute. Enemies of Philippine independence have asserted that in wrathfully rejecting Bonifacio’s appeal Rizal declared himself against any effort for national freedom. This is in accordance with a common process of over-emphasizing (for propaganda effect) Rizal’s dislike of force and doubt of the present readiness of his people for self-government. It is certain that he declined Valenzuela’s proposal and with some heat; [198] we may also believe that with all his might he strove to dissuade his countrymen from violence. Yet there is testimony extant that when he found all his pleadings were useless and the violence he feared was but too likely he admitted that he could not in any event separate his sympathies from his struggling countrymen.

The disputed versions of his reply are not worth the attention they have had, because, as has been pointed out here and more than once, Rizal’s convictions on these matters are clear. One obvious reflection is enough to illustrate them. If he had lived through such strenuous days as followed 1896 he would have been found in the front ranks of those that fought for freedom and yet would never have ceased to mourn that freedom could not be won in another way. As to this, “El Filibusterismo,” if there were nothing else, would be testimony enough; and if Philippine independence involved only sentimental and not commercial interests there would be no attempt to distort or to obscure it.

When Bonifacio received Valenzuela’s report of Rizal’s decision, he swore, after his fashion, and determined to press on with his own plans and forget the exile. Against the notion that the Philippines were unready for revolution or unfitted for self-government he set himself like a man in a battle that has thrown away fear with his scabbard. He recalled that, weighing duly the relative strengths of the antagonists, the American colonists were not worse prepared for the struggle that set them free. Most revolutions, history had taught him, had been begun by people that fought with broken weapons or bare hands; witness Camille Desmoulins and the ragged crowd he led from the café in the courtyard of the Palais Royal that fateful night in July. Hardly a weapon among them all more deadly than a hammer, and yet to the echo of their feet fell absolute government in every corner of Europe. All the world now honors those empty hands; on the very spot where Desmoulins addressed the crowd, behold now his statue! Are revolutions ever wrought by well ordered ranks of daintily uniformed guards? Are they ever launched when every condition is fitted, like joiner-work, to their success? And, in fact, are they ever made to any man’s volition or by anything but blind destiny that sits behind the whirlwind?

Bonifacio, at least, had no idea of waiting until the Philippines should be populated with university graduates able to demonstrate in scholarly phrases the philosophical sweetness of liberty. Desiring freedom, he desired it then and there. Month by month, the Katipunan spread and carried with it, as a flood carries a straw, the catastrophe of this story.

At Dapitan life went on unchangingly. It is likely that Rizal had there a happiness and a serenity he had not known since childhood. He says as much in one of his letters:

My life now is quiet, peaceful, retired, and without glory; but I think it is useful, too. I teach here the poor but intelligent boys reading, Spanish, English, mathematics, and geometry. Moreover, I teach them to behave like men. I taught the men here how to get a better way of earning their living, and they think I am right. We have begun, and already success has crowned our trials.

He tells how even in that out-of-the-way place there were lessons for him to learn; how he was taught there to steer and reef, to manage a canoe, to speak Visayan, and the better to know his own country. “God can send you your fortune,” he adds, “even amidst the persecutions of your friends!”

In this letter he dwells with a kind of delight on his exacting labors in philology, of his studies in Tagalog and his Tagalog grammar, which he had almost completed. It is plainly to be seen that his activities kept him from nostalgia, as his captivity from the turmoil of his years in the noisy and bitter world; and now he was happily married!

But man is not so easily separated from his Nemesis. Of a sudden all this house of content fell in ruins about him.

All this time he was maintaining his correspondence with his friends, the European scientists, and particularly with Dr. Blumentritt, [199] the closest and most sympathetic of his intellectual allies. Early in 1896 a letter from Dr. Blumentritt told him of the sad condition of the hospitals in Cuba. Yellow fever was raging in the Island, and there were not nearly enough physicians to meet the emergency. No such report could be made to Rizal without awakening in him his sympathy and instinctive impulse to help whomsoever might be in distress. He wrote to the governor-general offering to go to Cuba as a volunteer physician in the government hospitals. There was a new governor-general now; Despujol had ended his clouded career and gone home. Governor-General Blanco accepted Rizal’s offer, and on August 1, 1896, the exile sailed from Dapitan for Manila. With him went Mrs. Rizal and his little niece.

Even as a volunteer surgeon in the yellow fever hospitals he was nominally to be a prisoner always; hence he must go to Cuba by way of Spain and under the Spanish flag; otherwise Spanish sovereignty would lapse and he might escape from its power. He planned to reach Manila in time to take the next mail-boat, the Isla de Luzon, for Barcelona, where he was to transship for Cuba. Mrs. Rizal was to reside in his absence with his relatives at Biñan or in Manila. But the steamer that took him from Dapitan made but a slow voyage. He had time to attend en route a dinner in his honor at Dumaguete, and to perform an operation on the eyes of a patient at Cebu. He reached Manila a few hours after the Isla de Luzon had sailed. Nearly a month must elapse before another steamer would start for Barcelona. Meantime he was detained on the Spanish cruiser Castilla, a beautiful vessel that two years later lay at the bottom of Manila Bay riddled with American shells. But his confinement seems to have been easy. In a few days the officers were his friends. The captain repeatedly invited members of his family to dine with him on board. Mrs. Rizal came to see him, and so did former pupils of his that had drifted from Dapitan up to Manila. He wrote letters to his family, including one of great tenderness to his mother, in which he included loving messages to all the household at Los Baños. [200]

The captain of the Castilla was one of many Spaniards that counterpoised the grim tale of his usual treatment under their flag. Governor-General Ramón Blanco, still remembered in the islands for his kindly, gentle ways, was another. He furnished Rizal with letters of recommendation to high Spanish officers in Spain and in Cuba. One of these to General Azcárraga, Spanish minister of war, was as follows: [201]

Manila, August 30, 1896.

Esteemed General and Distinguished Friend:

I recommend to you with genuine interest Dr. José Rizal, who is leaving for the Peninsula to place himself at the disposal of the government as volunteer army surgeon to Cuba. During the four years of his exile at Dapitan he has conducted himself in the most exemplary manner, and he is, in my opinion, the more worthy of praise and consideration in that he is in no way connected with the extravagant attempts we are now deploring, neither those of conspirators nor of the secret societies that have been formed.

I have the pleasure to reassure you of my high esteem, and remain

Your affectionate friend and comrade Ramón Blanco.

On September 3, the next mail-steamer, the Isla de Panay, departed for Barcelona, with Rizal as a kind of self-watched prisoner, guarded by his parole and not otherwise; for here as before it is to be remarked as one of the curiosities of this story that however his enemies in the Government might hate him they seemed to have full confidence in his word of honor.

But while he was still waiting on the Castilla in the harbor disaster had begun to ripen for him.

The whole Katipunan conspiracy was laid bare to the Government.

According to the accepted story, on the night of August 19, the mother superior of a convent-school at Tondo burst upon the parish priest at his house with information that she had discovered a terrible plot to massacre all the Spaniards in the Islands. A brother of one of her pupils was a member of the Katipunan. Assessments upon members of the order had now become frequent, as Bonifacio’s preparations drew to a head. It is an ancient Filipino custom for the woman in each household to keep the purse for the men. This young man’s treasurer was his sister. Of late he had been coming to her so often for funds that she insisted upon knowing what he wanted the money for. Then little by little she wormed his secret from him and fled with it to the mother superior, who took it to the padre.

Father Gil seems to have made one leap with the news to the Civil Guard, who arrested the girl’s brother, forced a confession from him (probably with tortures), and, taking the priest in tow, went to the place that the youth had said was the printing-office of the Katipunan. There they found, or said they found, incriminating documents that revealed the plot. [202]

Or some plot. At the best of times, as we have seen, hysteria in the governing class of Manila slept on a hair-trigger, and, being once awakened, offered a credulity more than childlike to the most grotesque creations of the most unhealthy imagination. On this occasion its manifestations were of the worst. Such wild tales as flew about the city in those days, and had the approval of grave men that must have known better, were fit only for a group of children telling ghost-stories in the dark. That in the middle of the night armed bands of ferocious, horrible natives were to steal upon the innocent repose of every white person and slit his throat from ear to ear as he slept, was the least terrifying of these rumors, and the earliest fruitage of an aroused and exotic fancy. Curiously enough, it had no merit in originality, but was wan and hoary with age; for one hundred and fifty years, at every revolt of the overtaxed natives, it had been brought out and paraded. It even persisted to a later day and was used to frighten adult Americans that might have been deemed beyond such melodrama. Certain plans required American dislike of the Filipinos, and thus the dislike was to be engendered. In the present instance, it can hardly be necessary to say to any Filipino reader that wholesale murder was no part of Bonifacio’s plans, nor any other of the ogreish and blood-curdling designs that he was then said to have formed. That it seems needful to do him this justice before another public is only further evidence of the gross misrepresentation that interest and profits have made of all this chapter of history.

In the madness of panic for an hour or a day men may and doubtless will do strange things; the abject terror that shattered the reasoning faculties of the governing class in Manila seemed only to increase with time. There was first fear let loose on its wild charger and then its immediate reaction, the thirst for revenge. A Spanish mob gathered at the gates of Malacañan clamoring for instant and sanguinary reprisals. Rizal in his flight across the American continent had commented sadly on the lynching-parties that disgraced the Southern States of the American Union. If he had been in Manila in those days he would have seen the same spirit displayed by the mob that demanded his own death. It was 1872 come again, but infinitely worse. [203]

At the first alarm, Bonifacio and some others had made their escape; he was now in the country proclaiming the republic and raising troops; but of Filipinos that still remained and could be accused of affiliation with his hated society there was naturally no lack, and in a few hours the jails were overflowing and the executioner overworked.

With almost the first breath of this midsummer madness, his enemies thought of Rizal. “Noli Me Tangere”! The time had come full cycle for revenge for that flagrant insult. Days passed, and the object of their hatred lay there almost before their eyes, the broad yellow and red of Spain flapping over him, wholly at the mercy of the Government he had opposed. What hindered it that it did not seize him and thrust him into prison with the rest of the conspirators, and so to Bagumbayan and an end with him? After a time the impatient clerical party concluded that the real obstacle was Ramon Blanco. With him the friars had never been content; after the uncovering of the Katipunan they accused him of lack of energy in killing rebels, and a feud sprang up between him and Archbishop Nozaleda. [204] By common report he was now at the crisis of the play giving to the world an illustration of the folly of nationalistic generalizations. All Spaniards were supposed to hate and fear Rizal; Blanco, a Spaniard, would not deliver Rizal to the torturers because he knew the man was innocent, and he was resolved at whatsoever cost to stand between innocence and the lynchers. [205]

But if this was a worthy exhibition of virtue in Spanish character it led in the end to only another demonstration of the power of the friars. They worked the cable to Madrid, and in two months they secured the recall of Blanco [206] and the appointment of a man in his place that had no scruples about judicial murder and much thumb-screwing. Polavieja was his name. The Philippines were not likely soon to forget it.

But at the moment the victim the Interests Triumphant sought was slipping out of their hands. They must have reflected with inexpressible rage that he would have been helpless if they had but allowed him to remain in Manila instead of marooning him on the shores of Dapitan. Yet there was a chance that he could be clutched and brought back and torn to pieces. Some news of the sirocco of rage and terror that had seized Manila reached the Isla de Panay. One of his Filipino fellow-passengers, Pedro P. Roxas, rich but a sturdy advocate of Philippine independence, foresaw what was at hand and quietly stepped ashore at Singapore, where he was under the protection of another flag. Fervently he had urged Rizal to go with him, pointing out that his enemies were certain to take advantage of the existing panic to kill him, and that as he was virtually a political fugitive he was justified in seeking a political asylum. He pleaded in vain: Rizal made answer that he had done no wrong; he would not flee. [207] He held upon his way, and at Suez the great claw descended upon him. On a cabled order from Manila he was put under arrest, and thence to Barcelona he was a prisoner. [208]

The instructions were that he was to be returned as speedily as possible to Manila for trial. He arrived at Barcelona in the morning. A steamer was to sail for Manila that afternoon. Nevertheless, for the few hours he must stay in Barcelona he was thrust into prison, the sudden reversal of the confidence with which he had before been treated indicating plainly enough to the initiated which party was now in control at Manila. By a strange turn of fate, the Spanish commandant at Barcelona was that same Despujol that had so basely decoyed him from Hong-Kong into Spanish power and but for whom he might have been at that moment safe beyond Spanish clutches. Despujol had the hardihood to call upon the man whose life he had sold. Rizal received him with the tolerant spirit that was so marked in his character, for it is not recorded of him anywhere that he uttered so much as one reproach against those that had wronged him; and Despujol seems to have felt something like contrition as he viewed the wreck he had made of a life so unusual.

That afternoon the steamer left for Manila with Rizal a prisoner on it.

It is like a story of overruling destiny. News of the arrest, by this device, of the most illustrious savant in all the Spanish dominions, one of the foremost scientists of the times, had been telegraphed about the world and stirred a general resentment. All men that understood colonial Spain looked with gloomiest forebodings upon his probable doom, now that he was fanged by that medieval dragon. A plan was formed to rescue him when the steamer should reach Singapore by suing out a writ of habeas corpus and so snatching him from Spanish authority. [209] So slender are the chances of fate that a mere decoration on a flag brought to naught this benevolent design. The steamer was the ordinary packet-boat, but on this occasion she was carrying a few troops to the Philippines. Being deemed, therefore, on this voyage to have the status of a transport, she hoisted the Spanish royal ensign, and against that emblem the kindly plotters felt they had no right to proceed. Government vessels are not subject to the authority of other nations whose ports they chance to enter.

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