[1865-1941]

The Abandoned Pigeon House | Padre Faura | Starry Amorist | The Ivory Tower

About: The book, Light Cavalry | Father Horacio de la Costa S.J.

One grey morning in September, 1865, two young Scholastics stood at a window of the Mission House, looking out on Manila Bay. They noticed several ships stranded on the shore, and knots of seafaring men staring at the wreckage disconsolately.

One of the Scholastics, Jaime Nonell, asked his companion rather naively what had happened.

"Baguio", the other answered briefly. "Typhoon."

Nonell recalled, somewhat tardily, the terrific storm of the night before. He looked at his companion curiously. He had noticed something odd about Francisco Colina of late. The man had been quite preoccupied. Other members of the Jesuit community, too, had noticed Colina's habit of mysteriously vanishing to the roof of the Mission House as soon as his classes at the Ateneo Municipal were over.

Once, Nonell had taken his courage in his hands and followed Colina up. He had surprised the young man tinkering about an abandoned pigeon house. Shyly at first, then enthusiastically, Colina had taken Nonell into his confidence and made a full confession of his dark doings. This, he had said, waving airily towards the pigeon house, was his meteorological observatory. Taking Nonell's arm, he had led him to a tiny contraption consisting principally of hair.

"My hygrometer," he had explained with pride.

The next instrument was a household thermometer doing its best to look scientific. The next, a glass siphon filled with an oily liquid of sickly hue and labelled "barometer." And the third, a rag fluttering from a length of twine.

"What in heaven's name is that?" the bewildered Nonell had demanded.

"Oh, that. Why, that's my anemometer."

Nonell, therefore, more than half suspected the reason for Colina's present preoccupation, and ventured to ask him if he had made any observations during the course of the typhoon.

"Yes," said Colina. "Hourly."

Nonell asked if he could have them. He had himself manipulated the modest meteorological instruments which his Physics professor had set up in Balaguer, and was interested. He plotted out the curves of Colina's homemade instruments. A day or two later, Colina received a note from the Editor of the Diario de Manila requesting a scientific commentary on the recent typhoon. Somehow or other, news of his 'observatory' had leaked out.

With the aid of Nonell's graphs, Colina wrote the article. A long-headed Dutch businessman, at that time head of his country's consulate in Manila, came across the article and was struck by a happy thought. As he remarked to his cronies (probably at Joaquin el Chino's):

"Why cannot the Jesuits do this sort of thing regularly? They might find out the laws that govern these destructive typhoons -- even discover a way of foretelling their arrival. Ja. Good for business!"

His cronies -- traders and sailors -- had nodded sagely in approval. Without a doubt it would be good for business. They consulted the Jesuit Superior about the matter without delay.

Father Vidal sent for Colina.

"Ask Nonell," Colina said. "He knows more about it than I do."

Father Vidal sent for Nonell.

"Impossible with our present instruments," said Nonell.

"We'll buy you good ones," said the long-headed Dutchman.

"We'll need a Secchi universal meteorograph," said Nonell.

"What's that?"

"It's an instrument invented by Father Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory. It registers barometric, thermometric and hydrographic variations automatically. It will serve our purpose, I think. Only --"

"Only --?"

"Well, there are at present only two in existence. One in Rome and one in Madrid."

"How much will it cost to build another?"

"About five thousand duros."

The business men went into consultation. Then:

"Father Vidal, be so good to write to Father Secchi and ask him to make a universal meteorograph for the Meteorological Observatory of the Ateneo Municipal de Manila."

At the beginning of the next year, 1866, the names of the men destined by the Provincial of Aragon for the Philippine Mission were read in the Ateneo refectory. One of the names was Federico Faura, Scholastic.

Nonell turned to Colina and said:

"There's the Director of the Observatory."

The Secchi meteorograph arrived in Manila during the first months of 1869, dismantled. Nonell and Faura dragged the packing cases into an empty room and pried them open with feverish fingers. Soon the floor was strewn with mysterious levers cogs, screws. Nonell uttered an exclamation of dismay.

"There are no directions for reassembly."

Faura rummaged through the packing cases, the tufts of excelsior. It was true. Father Secchi had overlooked the all-important diagrams.

Nonell and Faura looked at each other in wild surmise. Finally, Faura spoke.

"Leave me alone in this room for three days," he said quietly. "Thrust my meals through the door. Let no one speak to me. With the help of God, I'll assemble the instrument."

So it was done. On the morning of the fourth day, Nonell peered cautiously around the door. He shouted triumphantly. The instrument was mounted. About Faura's thin haggard face, however, hovered a glum dissatisfaction. He had not been able to place four tiny gadgets.

A Filipino watchmaker was called in, Canon by name. This obscure genius took the four pieces, circled about the instrument once, and presto! the pieces were in their proper places.

The Manila Observatory was open for business.

Father Faura did not have the Secchi meteorograph installed many days before he noticed a persistent fall of the barometer. He watched it. Twenty days later a typhoon struck Manila and a happy thought struck Padre Faura. How good a presage of a typhoon is the fall of the barometer? Would it be possible, merely by watching the oscillations of a little column of mercury, to foretell the arrival of these furies spawned somewhere in the Pacific and thus give warning in time to save hundreds of needlessly wasted lives?

The end of his term of teaching, theological studies in Spain and special studies in Rome, interrupted Father Faura's investigations. In 1878 he returned to Manila a priest, was appointed director of the Observatory and proceeded to attack the problem in earnest.

At that time the laws governing the hurricanes of the Antilles had been determined with more or less accuracy by Riedfield; those governing the cyclones of the Indian Ocean by Piddington. But the nature, origin and behavior of the typhoons of the Far East were, as Father Sederra Maso puts it, "still involved in dense nebulosities." Father Faura cleared the first rift in those clouds by provisionally assuming that typhoons were not essentially different from hurricanes and cyclones. Working on this hypothesis, he ventured to announce on July 7, 1879*, merely from barometer readings and wind direction, that a typhoon has just cut across the northern provinces of Luzon. He then sat back and fidgeted until news should come; for he was a nervous man.

The news came, eventually. A typhoon had crossed Isabela and Cagayan. His theory was confirmed by fact; one fact. He continued publishing his weather reports. On the 18th of November of the same year, he announced that another typhoon was approaching, this time towards Manila itself. The sky was still clear, but the Captain of the Port took Father Faura's word and held back all outgoing vessels. The next day, he rode to the Ateneo Municipal, and going to the azotea, found Father Faura waiting tensely, watching the sky.

Gradually, as the day waned, the second quadrant grew turbid with fractocumuli -- broken masses of dark vapor. Four hours later, they had formed a vast nimbus sand bar, heavy on the horizon from NE to SSE. Excitedly, Father Faura clutched the Captain's arm and pointed.

"Here, then, was the center of the typhoon," he wrote afterwards. "We were sure of it, the Captain of the Port and I, who were watching from the azotea. The luminous rays of the moon on the scudding clouds confirmed previous observations. They were in motion; in rotary motion; and now and then thunder would kindle the huge nimbus sand bar. We were sure of it then. 'There it is!' we cried, 'There it is!'"

And the next day at noon the fury was upon them. But the ships in the harbour, having been warned, were safe.

The confirmation of Father Faura's forecasts, fraught with the startling possibility that typhoons would henceforth no longer be the unexpected scourges they used to be, filled official and commercial circles with enthusiasm. From 1872 to 1877 they had contributed a total of P15,084 to equip the Observatory. More contributions now poured in. The scientific infant of Colina's abandoned pigeon house burst its swaddling bands, built a tower for itself at the Ateneo, and with the acquisition of new instruments, no longer confined itself to meteorology, but branched out into astronomy and seismology.

Father Faura's observations on the earthquake of 1880 added new laurels to his crown. Manila made him her adoptive son. The Director of Posts placed all the telegraph stations of the islands at his disposal. The English Governor of HongKong wrote saying that the projected observatory of that island was at his service, and requested instructions regarding its construction: "lo que," Father Pastells adds slyly, "para un ingles fue mucho pedir"* Governor Genral Primo de Rivera appointed a commission to discuss the question of giving official character and subsidy to the Ateneo Observatory.

The Jesuit scientist was surrounded with a sudden blaze of glory. He became a half-legendary figure, a sort of superhuman being who could in a very literal sense which way the wind lay, even before it blew. But the center of this typhoon (as it were) of awed admiration was no divinity; only a very slim shy individual with the lustrous eyes and sensitive mouth of a poet, delicate of health, and growing more and more worried as his work assumed astronomical proportions.

"It is impossible for me," he wrote, almost frantically, to the Provincial of Aragon, "to continue working at this rate. Will your Reverence please let me have an assistant, so that the work (of the Observatory) may be brought up to date, and not left to pile up until it will be quite impossible to do it right!"

The Provincial replied with a warm letter of commendation, both on his part and in behalf of the Father General; and with the still more welcome news that two young men have been appointed to specialize in the work of the Observatory. Father Faura at once wrote back detailed instructions regarding the specialists. They must spend two or three years at Stonyhurst, then go to Florence for Mathematics and Seismics, then do practice work at the Kerry Observatory. We wanted no amateurs for Manila, he wanted scientists; and the Society of Jesus gave them to him.

In the meantime, Father Faura, in spite of his consistently poor health, carried on. In 1882 his Senales Precursoras de Temporal en el Archipelago Filipino was published. At the same time, he started working on his typhoon barometer, now universally known as the Faura aneroid. And in 1884 the royal decree constituting the Ateneo Observatory, under the title of Observatorio de Manila, a branch of the government service, was promulgated. Father Faura was jubilant. He was now able to establish secondary stations all over the Archipelago, and thus reduce weather forecasting from more or less brilliant guess work to a scientific system.

The decision to construct a new building for the Escuela Normal was accompanied by the decision to transfer the Observatory to the same site as that establishment. Again, although it meant more work, Father Faura was jubilant. And here we shall leave him for the present, his thin shoulders hunched over the outspread plans of the new Observatory, fronting the street to which he was later to give his name.

*"Which is asking a great deal -- for an Englishman."

Father Faura rose after Rizal had gone and, sick at heart, directed his steps towards Ermita. The new Observatory building, with its queer conical nipa roof, was finished. He and his staff had just completed the transfer and installation of the instruments. Father Faura brightened a little at the thought. Poor Rizal's soul may have gone out of alignment, but at least all the Observatory's tools were functioning. What a pity one cannot repair a spirit (and such a spirit!) gone out of order, as one can repair a scientific instrument gone awry! Well, the political atmosphere looked rather ominous; flicked with strato-cumuli, he would say; and that young Rizal had a great deal to do with it. That was what had prompted his remark about ending up on a gibbet. There was the book the young man had written in Germany: Noli Me Tangere. A brilliant book; but also a bitter book, and dangerous. The authorities had forbidden its entrance into the Islands, but there were rumours that copies of it were being smuggled in, and that it was being read avidly behind closed doors. Some said it was satanic attack against the religious orders and the government. Others said: No, it was merely an emphatically phrased petition for redress of grievances and reforms long due. Some said it was heretical: a treatise against faith and morals insidiously masquerading as a romance. Others said: No, merely clever political propaganda which in the hands of the ignorant masses may become dynamite. Some said it was literature. Others said it was not even grammatical. But all agreed it was dangerous, and most thought that it should be forbidden. It was forbidden. Yet many began to read it.

All this puzzled and depressed the ordinarily decisive Father Faura. How much was there in all these restless rumours and rumours of restlessness that was true? that was false? that was conjecture? Was the Colonial Government really impeccable? All its officials Solons? All friars saints? And was there really no suffering among the common masses, no oppression, no scandal, no tyranny? Then why, having so long been silent, because they were uneducated and knew not letters, why, when they were able to speak at last, through this grave young man called Rizal who happened to be a genuis, why should their first articulate cry be a cry of pain, of protest against the great ones of the land? Father Faura could not tell; could any other?

The face and the stride of the Jesuit grew longer as he crossed the gate and passed the ravelin, for he was tormented by many thoughts. He was no politician; he would leave the whole confused contradictory thing alone. Typhoons can be forecasted; who can forecast revolution? No; let him confine himself to his science and his instruments, and to such certain things as uncertain weather. Samples of his barometer were coming in from the London house to which he had entrusted its construction; coming in side by side in the holds of ships with copies of Noli Me Tangere. Now what the effect of Noli Me Tangere was, whether good or ill, he did not know; but what the effect of the Faura barometer was, he knew. He was constantly being told, by grateful skippers especially. Almost every steamer on tropical waters had it now. The Ship of State might be heading straight towards a tempest, and he not know any statemanship at all to warn it; but the weather he knew, and his knowledge, incarnate in a little metal cylinder with an indicator, was constantly saving ships and men. That was something, at any rate.

Springier of step, he turned to the Escuela Normal gate and entered. He found his assistant, Father Juan, hovering as usual about the magnetic instruments he had brought from Europe. A brilliant young man, who had been pleading with Father Faura to let him make a magnetic map of the Islands. Father Faura needed little enough wheedling. In April of the next year, 1888, Father Juan was off for the south with his dip needles, accompanied by Father Doyle, commissioned to collect specimens for the Ateneo Museum. And by July of the same year, Father Juan was dead.

He had died quite suddenly of a fever. The shock, together with the strain of unremitting labour, proved too much for Father Faura. He was sent back to Spain, with instructions not to return until perfectly fit. While in Italy, he mentioned quite casually to a fellow Jesuit that the Manila Observatory had plans for acquiring an equatorial telescope, when it should have the money.

What was his surprise, therefore, when a few months after his return to the Islands, he received a letter from Mertz of Switzerland, saying that the eighteen-inch lens which he had ordered through Father Ferrari was already at his disposal! He had placed no such order. He had no money to pay for it. He had made no arrangements for the tube and all the accesories that should go with such a lens, nor for a building to house it. But there it was -- cast, polished, ready for shipment.

What to do? Fortunately, friends and Superiors rallied round him in his need. Mr. Benito Legarda offered to lend him P5,000 without interest for the purchase of the lens. Father Pastells, then Superior of the Mission, gave the Jesuit Procurator in Spain carte blanche regarding the purchase of the cupola, assuring him (for Procurators always look for such assurances) that he would honour the cheque when the Ateneo and the Normal paid their debts to the Mission Procure. And finally, Father Algue, in training at Washington to succeed Father Faura, took charge of the construction of the equatorial itself.

The piers for the astronomical building were laid in 1891, under the deft direction of the Military Engineer, Don Ruperto Ibanez; the construction marching steadily thenceforth according to plan, even up to the graceful staircase leading to the top of the cupola. On June 13, 1894, two apprehensive astronomers supervised the opening at the customs house of a big, well padded box. Nervously, they removed the padding, then breathed a sigh of relief. The eighteen-inch objective was intact; and a thing of beauty.

But Father Faura never saw it mounted; never sat under the dim dome which he had built to house it, nor looked through it at a star. As Francis Thompson said of Father Faura's friend and fellow astronomer, Father Perry, this starry amorist had gone starward. The disturbed political condition of the Islands during the last decade of the century, growing more and more dangerous as it neared the end, distressed him; for he loved both Spain and the Filipinos, and therefore his heart was torn. His health broke down for the last time; and on the 23rd of January, 1897, he died.

Men, remembering his uncanny ability to forecast the weather, might be tempted to call him a prophet. But he was not prophet; merely a great scientist who knew the signs in the heavens, and used his knowledge for the benefit of mankind. He was no prophet, for he never prophesied, except once, and that unconsciously. But he met again before he died the man to whom he had made that prophecy -- on the eve before the prophecy was fulfilled.

The Manila Weather Observatory occupies the left wing and adjacent grounds of the main building of the Ateneo de Manila. Not all of it, because the school has found it necessary to use the first floor for classrooms and to occupy a recently constructed third floor with living rooms for the faculty. Substantially, however, the Observatory remains as Father Faura and Father Algue have left it, with the central tower that flaunts its weather vanes in the face of every wind of heaven, and the open bridge that leads to the annex which houses the clocks of the Time Service, and the telescope cupola crowning this annex, glinting like a helmet of burnished silver in the sun. All around it everything has changed. High school boys shout at play where seminarians of San Jabier once strolled sedately; long lean limousines glide down the street where only an occasional carabao cart used to lumber by; a radio blares jungle music where late the sweet birds sang; but the Observatory remains. It remains, unchanged and apparently changeless; an oasis of scientific tranquility amid an increasingly restless world.

We have seen how both the Spanish and the American governments availed themselves of the services of the Jesuit Observatory and made it an integral part of the government service. The same arrangement has been maintained by the Philippine Commonwealth. The Jesuit scientists at present attached to the Observatory are also government employees; Father Miguel Selga as Director of the Weather Bureau, Father Charles Deppermann as Assistant Director, Father Bernard Doucette as Chief of the Meteorological Division, Father William Repetti as Chief of the Seismological and Magnetic Division, and Father Leo Welch as Chief of the Time Service. Father Pablo Guzman-Rivas, although without government status assists Father Welch at the same time that he pursues special astronomical studies.

Besides his Jesuit collaborators, the Director of the Observatory has under him a staff of specially trained observers and technicians, employed by the government to aid him in his work. Some of them work at the central office in Manila; others take care of the numerous weather and rain stations scattered all over the archipelago.

The government supplies the Observatory with personnel, equipment, and special telegraphic facilities to answer to main questions: "What is the correct time?" and "Where is the typhoon?" The government hasn't caught the Observatory napping yet.

The correct time is, of course, of prime importance in any part of the world. It is of special importance to the Navy, the postal service and the railroad, all of which have direct telegraphic connections with the secret and mysterious chamber where Father Welch keeps the clocks of the Philippines in tune with the eternal stars.

When Norman Reyes, the pleasant-voiced announcer of station KZRM, tells you that "the long signal will indicate exactly eight o'clock in the evening," you can be sure that it is accurate to within three one-hundredths of a second; or at least was that accurate the signal flashed from the Observatory. You may think that is pushing accuracy a bit too far, but that is the tradition which has won the Manila Observatory the international rating of an A-1 Time Station.

Even more vital to the Philippines and the Far East in general than the correct time is where exactly the typhoon (if there is a typhoon) is located, how it is progressing and where it is going. Father Doucette is the man who answers these questions. How exactly he goes about it is a trifle too complicated to explain. The effect, however, is obvious. Hundreds of lives and thousands of pesos' worth of property are saved every year at the tall sloping desk where Father Doucette plots his daily weather maps.

Whether he is personally acquainted with him or not, Father Doucette is the friend of every sailor who ventures out to sea, every aviator who must trust himself to the elements. Pan American Airways is especially indebted to him; his word usually decides whether a clipper will take off or not.

Father Doucette takes care of the actual forecasting of the weather; Father Deppermann investigates its causes. If you want to know whether there is a typhoon, you must ask Father Doucette. But if you want to know why is a typhoon, you must go to Father Deppermann. That is also where the United States Navy goes.

Father Deppermann's brochures on the origin and causes of typhoons in the Far East are required reading for the meteorologists of the Navy: The fruit of years of painstaking research, his adaptation to the tropics of the "Front Theory," developed by Norwegian weathermen, has won international recognition and is now universally accepted. He is still hard at work at its details, however, with that slow and minute thoroughness which is the mark of all true scientists.

The fact that seismology and terrestrial magnetism are scarcely branches of knowledge which set the popular imagination on fire makes it quite probable that Father Repetti will be remembered more as an historian than as a scientist. Science is his profession; history is his hobby. Father Selga and Father Repetti are the two historians of the Philippine Mission. They bring to their historical researches the same passion for scientific accuracy which distinguishes their professional work. Both of them devote most of their spare time to work on the same general field: the history of the Philippines. It is doubtful whether there are half a dozen Filipinos who have covered as much of the historical bibliography of the Philippines as Father Selga; or even two who can speak with as much authority as Father Repetti on his own special subject: the missions of the Society of Jesus in the Philippines before the Suppression. Father Selga's work on the Philippine Historical Research Commission is well known, while Father Repetti's monographs on the beginnings of education in the Philippines have aroused widespread comment in learned circles. He is at present working on a definitive history of the Society of Jesus in the Philippines, based on all available material preserved in the Roman, Chinese, and Philippine archives of the Order.

As these lines are being written, somewhere over England a German bomber squadron is hovering with its nightly load of death. Somewhere on the flat plains near Moscow a fleet of German tanks is roaring to battle in a desperate race against the snows that have always fought for the Russians since the time of Genghiz Khan. Somewhere in Northern China a Japanese trap is closing in on a Chinese guerilla band. A night of fury and despair and dooms hangs over all the earth. Here, it is morning.

Yet even here, the window that looks out on the morning and the tranquil sea looks out on sinister submarines stealing in from their incessant prowling around the archipelago. A pursuit plane whines overhead. The radio across the street is droning the early morning flashes from the battle fronts of a world at war.

It seems as though all the energies, all the passions of men are concentrated with a terrible intentness on the business of destruction. They are engaged in it, planning for it, watching it, with their whole heart, and with their whole soul and with their whole mind. They can think of nothing else. They can talk of nothing else. They can write of nothing else. Blood has been spilt, and the scent of blood is in all men's nostrils. Europe has sown in hate, and the world is reaping the whirlwind.

Only ...

Only, at a tall, sloping desk, a meteorologist is plotting a weather map. And at another desk, an astronomer is calculating time from a star. An historian is peering through a lens at a letter penned by long dead hands three hundred years ago. A teacher had just entered a roomful of boys, and they are saying the "Hail Mary" together. A writer, brows knit in thought, is about to set down on paper a radio play. And in a sunlit chapel, a lay brother is beginning the day's work with a visit to the King.

How do these men fit into the iron patter of a world at war? How can they go about their peaceful occupations with the great guns thundering almost at their very doorstep, and nation destroying nation across the sea? Does it not strike them as a trifle futile and even anomalous, all these painstaking research and passion for accuracy, all this calm and unhurried pursuit after the things of the mind, the things of the spirit?

Do they not realize that they are living in an ivory tower, while far below them a dark and dismal business convulses all the nations of the earth?

Doubtless they do. But they also realize, with a clarity of vision that the smoke of battle cannot obscure, the one fact men seem to have forgotten, but which they can ill afford to forget. And that is the fact that this dark and dismal business, this business of destruction, is not the essential business of man. Man was not created to demolish, but to build. He was not given a mind to fashion engines of destruction, but to observe the heavens and probe with patience the laws of the universe, harnessing them like kindly giants to serve the children of men. He was not given a voice to teach hatred, but wisdom. For war is a passing madness. Man is made for peace.

And therefore when war comes, it is good that there should be some of us to ascend the ivory tower, until that frenzy of self-mutilation which has cursed mankind since the closing of the Garden, long ago, shall have passed away. For we shall have need of them. After we have finished pulling down the fabric of a civilization that has taken centuries to build, when all that we have amassed of learning and beauty and permanent achievement lies in ruins about us, we shall have need of them.

Then shall the men of peace come down from their ivory tower, to bring us back once more to the essential business of mankind; teach our dulled intellects once more to the thrill to the pursuit of truth, our hardened hearts to throb to the call of beauty; restore the sciences and the arts; awake the human spirit, weary of so much destruction, and inspire it to build again.