THE FILIPINO SUGAR DADDY
Richard West discovers an English
pioneer in the Philippines, and finds the Irish critical of him
Iloilo, Philippines ON REACHING Panay Island from Neg- ros, over the Guimaras Strait, the three- decker ferry boat chugs past go-downs on either side of the winding river until it moors at the passenger dock of Iloilo City. Stepping ashore at evening, and making Your way perhaps to the bar of the River Queen Hotel, you pass by the statue of a Conradian Englishman, the 19th-century merchant and vice-consul, Nicholas Loney. When the monument was erected in March 1981, the then President Ferdinand Marcos sent a message, praising Loney's 'singular achievement that made him Father of the Philippine Sugar Industry'. The British Ambassador, who had helped raise dona- tions towards the statue, said that `Loney's work in the development of the sugar industry and the expansion of the port of Iloilo was a classic example of what is today called "development co-operation".' The souvenir programme said that Loney Was 'largely responsible for converting the island of Negros from a sparsely popu- lated, practically virgin island to the coun- try's number one producer of sugar'. Before the end of 1981, someone dyna- mited the statue, toppling Loney from his Pedestal. Next year, the Roman Catholic Columban missionaries on Negros pub- lished and distributed 10,000 copies of their own account of the life and works of ,Loney, entitled Social Volcano. The book- let states: 'Within thirteen years of his arrival at the Port City of Iloilo on 31 July 1856, Nicholas Loney had killed a city, raped a province, destroyed all local indus- try and initiative, and had set up an economic system which ensured a life of increasing poverty for the vast majority of the people, and super profits for the rich.' The Columbans insisted that Iloilo City, at Loney's arrival, was not, as the souvenir Programme said, 'a small town of around ,000 people. . . (but) one of the most progressive cities of the world, comparing to size to Sydney, Chicago and Buenos Aires. . . one of the textile centres of the World' with 60,000 handlooms producing Weaves of silk, cotton and pineapple fibre. Hardly a diocese in Europe and South 4luerica was without sacred vestments woven in Iloilo.' As an agent of Lancashire textile mills, Loney copied the local pat- terns and had them cheaply produced by machine, then 'followed up his shipment of textiles with another ship loaded with machinery for sugar production. The si- lenced looms had given him an educated elite of small capitalists and hungry work- ers', whom he led to Negros Island and with whom he `set up the hacienda system which lasts to this very day'.
The furious tone of Social Volcano may or may not have something to do with the fact that Loney was an Englishman, while many Columbans came from Ireland. It is tempting to find analogies in the way that settlers from Panay crossed to Negros, drove the locals off their ancestral land and forced them to toil on the new plantations. To discover more about Loney, I went to the Panay Museum where there are numer- ous artefacts of that period, including a handloom, bottles of Scottish beer, and a replica of the boat that Loney designed to bring the sugar from Negros, a craft called the lorcha combining the sails of a junk with the hull of a Brixham trawler. Loney came from a Devonshire family; he was the younger son of an admiral. From a History of Panay in the museum library, I learned that handloom weaving was not important during the 18th century, when Panay's main products were leaf tobacco, sugar, sapan wood, rice, hemp and hides. Most of the handlooms in the 19th century were found not in Iloilo but in the larger neighbouring towns like Jaro, where Loney himself lived, and where you can still see faded colonial mansions. When Loney arrived in Iloilo, it had only one stone house and ships had to unload off Guimaras Island, opposite. According to Carlos Quirino's History of the Philippine Sugar Industry (Manila, 1974): 'Loney built a stone warehouse on a swampy seashore land; other traders followed, and in a few years Iloilo had an imposing wharf they later called Muella Loney in his honour. The town, which had a population of about 6,000 inhabitants at the time of Loney's arrival, had nearly doubled by the time of his death. No wonder that at Consul Loney's death practically the entire town attended his funeral to pay him their last respects.' But what about all those women weavers put out of work by the power looms of Lancashire? Unfortunate- ly, their livelihood was doomed by the competition of new technology. The steam-powered mills had killed off the handlooms in England and Scotland and then the world. The weavers of Iloilo lasted longer only because they enjoyed the protection of Spain's colonial govern- ment, until the year before Loney's arrival.
From A Britisher in the Philippines, or the Letters of Nicholas Loney (Manila, 1964), it does not appear that he wanted to ruin Panay, or Negros, 'a gorgeous isle'. Until his marriage, Loney suffered from lack of company and of intellectual stimu- lus, for which he compensated by reading Goethe, and much delayed copies of the Spectator. At first he complained of the lack of compatriots, but did not take to the one who came out as a junior partner: `John Higgins is the uneuphonious name of the youth in question — a Liverpudlian style of youth, with Liverpudlian manners and a squeakyish voice.' Loney made friends with the padre at the local convent: `He derives a very good income from the large town of Jaro — upwards of $6,000 or £1,600 a year. We talked about the sugar crop and the future greatness of Iloilo.' Most of Loney's letters stick to business. `Sugar is being shipped and contracted for; piece goods are being sold, Chinamen dunned into paying up.' He even wrote an ode to the Negros sugar industry:
When the long rows Of purple stalks fall beneath the steel And yield their sap to the revolving mill, And bright grained sugar from the Wetzel pours With crystals, yellow as the golden sands Of fabled Pactolus, then let me contracts make And let the prices be tip-top — say five and six, Not a cent less, by the Eternal Powers!
Loney died on Negros in 1869, of a fever caught exploring the slopes of the active volcano, Mount Kanlaon.
Because of its volcanic soil, Negros soon overtook Panay in growing sugar. In this century, Negros came to produce half the sugar in the Philippines, which in turn accounted for more than half the country's exports, thanks to a quota from the United States, the new colonial ruler. In the 1930s, the Iloilo dock workers, who handled the sugar from Negros and reloaded it into freighters, went on strike for more money, but lost, since the merchants found they could transfer cargoes at sea.
Panay is now one of the few Philippine islands still fairly prosperous after the ravages of the Marcos era. Rice and fishing are more important than sugar; handloom weaving is once more a thriving cottage industry, as in such places as Bangkok and the Hebrides. Paradoxically, it is Manches- ter and Liverpool, the cities that brought
such change to Iloilo, which now are ruined. Manchester has lost its textile industry in face of the new technology from the East. The Liverpool dockers, unlike their comrades here, have managed to close the port by striking, thus putting themselves out of work.
On Negros, two hours away by boat, it is another story. There, sugar was the only industry, and it was pillaged. An American authority on the Philippines, Richard J. Kessler, suggests that Marcos personally `may have stripped away $1.2 billion (£800,000,000) from the sugar industry alone'.
Next week, Richard West reports from Negros.
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