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Updated: May 7, 2025
As the number of sick Spaniards was nothing like sufficient to fill this building, they were asked to turn over the unoccupied space in it to the board of health, which they most generously did. In response to popular clamour a hospital under strictly Filipino management was opened in a nipa building in Tondo.
"I don't know," was the reply. "There are no known hostile elements here, and yet the little nipa hut where Rowe and his men lodged last night was found empty this morning empty and the contents in disorder, the floor spotted with blood." "Do you mean that he has been murdered?" asked the Major, his face, flushed before, looking gray and old. "I don't know," was the reply.
The little nipa houses were flat on the ground or drunkenly sprawling at every slant and angle. Even the best houses had suffered. The constabulary cuartel was absolutely wrecked. The Supervisor's kitchen was gone, and his wife mourned for her dishes, which were scattered up and down the length of the street. The home of the scout officer was jruined.
Through the thick fringe of bushes hiding the mouth of the creek she saw the tall spars of some European-rigged sailing vessel overtopping the summits of the Nipa palms. A brig was being hauled out of the small creek into the main stream.
On every side buildings crashed down, sending showers of sparks over the inflammable thatched roof of the nipa house.
Manila has an up-to-date American fire department, but even there, with water mains and a signal-box system for alarms, a fire once started in a nipa district in the dry season can seldom be checked until the neighborhood is clean swept. In the provinces, where there is not so much as a bucket brigade, the first alarm sends everybody's heart into his mouth.
With the first touch of light we turned out of the main river, which was now a broad estuary as it neared the sea, and fled down a water lane not over fifteen or twenty feet wide, absolutely walled with impenetrable nipa growths.
"That is just it," again laughed my little Master Moro. "Our small nipa hut, high in the air, sways a little, but rides out the storm. Every pole, every beam, and every rafter of the frame, is all made of hollow bamboo. Bamboo is stronger than steel, because it bends and gives, and then springs back. There is no nail in the house.
The journey up river from the mouth is flat and uninteresting, and little is to be seen but nipa and other palms on either side, and although Kuching is but seven miles from Santubong as the crow flies, it is quite twenty by river. It was not till ten o'clock, therefore, that signs of civilisation commenced, in the shape of a few Malay houses built close to the water's edge.
In North Borneo the jungle is generally felled towards the end of the wet season, and planting commences in April or May. The Native Dusun, Sulu and Brunai labour is available for jungle-felling and house-building, and nibong palms for posts and nipa palms for thatch, walls and kajangs exist in abundance.
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