Rothdauscher’s Váguio and other Cebu stories part 1

The 12th of December 1879 was a “critical day of the first order,” a memorable day.

It has indelibly written its way into many of my beloved books, so I still have traces to this day. A Váguio, a typhoon of the worst kind, whispered and cursed Cebu and the surrounding islands, sweeping away trees and houses and whipping the sea deep into the land in a terrible flood.

The nipa and the wooden houses flew like paper shreds, sheet metal roofs went off and flew like maple leaves through the air. The tile roofs, which, as already noted, were not just laid but lined solid with thick layers of mortar, were uncovered, the bricks rattling under numbing noise with the mortar mass from the rafters, covering the ground with debris.

“The night had seen bad weather, the morning of the 12th of December looked bad. The wind grew to an ever-greater force; the column of the barometer sank eerily, announcing the typhoon. I made preparations, blocked windows and doors, and gave the garden fence strong supports.

But nothing stands still against the terrible pressure exerted by air mass at a speed of forty meters per second.

The storm grew into a hurricane, and the anger of the airy spirits hunted ever more furiously, not stopping its movement, which at first could still be resisted until the unstoppable impact had to give way.

My fence was soon whirled about like a straw, the garden wall on the street front blown around; the giant seized, drilled and shook at the most exposed part of the roof. And as soon as it had blown out a brick, it penetrated into the breach, lifted the ranks, and threw them with force into the street, where they crashed.

The storage shed in the yard, where the soda water machine was with acids, chalk, magnesite, and others, was stripped of its tin roof and of its planks. My dovecote, which stood on a large, solid column of molasses, was moved.

The rain fell in thick streams and was thrown into the house with vehemence that everything was completely soaked. In the bookcase, the water ran over the books, through the floor down into the pharmacy, into the material chamber, into drawers, pots, and even into glass cups.”

Thus writes 28-year-old Heinrich Rothdauscher. The name no longer rings a bell to Cebuanos. But between 1879 and 1883, this German expat pharmacist, a graduate of the University of Munich, was here in Cebu to run the only pharmacy south of Manila, the Cebu branch of Botica de Santa Cruz.

Surfing the internet looking for Spanish-period photographs of Cebu last week, I chanced upon the website of Gerhard Prokop, who turned out to be a great-grandson of Rothdauscher. His website had a photo of Rothdaushcer and that his great grandfather had been in the Philippines between 1873 and 1883, specifically in Manila, Vigan and Cebu.

And, that in 1932, he had finally completed his memoirs of those years, entitled, “Lebenserinnerungen eines deutschen Apothekers (Memoirs of a German Pharmacist).” My curiosity was immediately piqued. More so because Gerhard announced on the website that he was happy to share a pdf file of the manuscript (in German language of course) to anyone who sent him a request by email.

His website also included a link to a 2013 article in “Philippine Studies” the scholarly journal of the Ateneo de Manila University, entitled, “A German Travels to the North: Golden Anitos, Bird-Scaring, Machines and the Tree of Justice” by Ramon Guillermo and Maria Eliza Agabin. The article, which one could read in toto on researchgate.net, mentioned that only two chapters, 27 and 28, the ones when Rothdauscher was in Vigan, had been translated by Guillermo.

A brief email in German to Herr Gerhard, and voila! The entire manuscript was at hand.

It helps that I had a two-year stint in Germany, four months of which were spent in Goettingen learning the difficult German language (special thanks to German honorary Consul Dr. Heinz Seidesnchwarz, by the way).

And when all gets lost in translation, one can always run to Google Translate for some minor machine translation assistance (a caveat, though, if you have not studied German, beware!).

So who was Herr Rothdauscher? In 1932, five years before his passing, Rothdauscher finally completed his aforementioned manuscript that I assume Gerhard, his great-grandson, retyped and converted into a pdf file of 218 pages, complete with an index and photographs.

The final three chapters of this manuscript are of Cebu and his brief return to Europe to recuperate from an illness and then back to Manila and on to Cebu again, his final stint.

I have now finished the three chapters and included his harrowing description, in an intervening chapter, of the first time that the cholera epidemic struck Manila, way before it arrived and wreaked havoc in Cebu.

All told, Rothdauscher’s memoirs are blunt and at the same time funny. But there are also some lessons to be learned from his observations of Cebu. And I shall show examples next week.

* * *

Let me thank the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) for its splendid work in removing the synthetic gold leaf that had for over a decade covered even the eyelids of the statues or images on the main altar retablo of the Church of Argao (Shrine of San Miguel Arcangel).

As I have written in a previous column, everyone thought it was not possible to remove all that garish gold leafing applied in 2005 or thereabouts, that turned the entire altar screen, rendered in High Baroque two centuries back, into a glaring spectacle that made one squint whenever one head Mass in that church.

Allow me also to congratulate Msgr. Camilo Alia on this splendid outcome and for his graciousness when we visited him during the turnover of the restored retablo, among other events last Monday.

Ditto, to Msgr. Carlito Pono, former head of the Cebu Archdiocesan Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, for graciously hosting during our visit to his parish, the Shrine of Sat. Catalina de Alejandria in Carcar.

Finally, my congratulations also to Fr. Loreto Jumao-as, the parish priest of Malabuyoc, and to Mayor Lito Narciso Creus as well as tourism officer Eric Ybas on the unveiling of the national historical marker on Malabuyoc Church and the turnover of the Malabuyoc Baluarte or Watchtower.

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