[Only the coast settled.] The civilized natives live almost solely on its coasts, and there are also Bisayans who differ in speech and manners from the Bicols in about the same degree that the latter do from the Tagalogs.  Roads and villages are almost entirely wanting in the interior, which is covered with a thick wood, and affords sustenance to independent tribes, who carry on a little tillage (vegetable roots and mountain rice), and collect the products of the woods, particularly resin, honey, and wax, in which the island is very rich.

[A tedious but eventful voyage.] On the 3rd of July we lost sight of Legaspi, and, detained by frequent calms, crawled as far as Point Montufar, on the northern edge of Albay, then onwards to the small island of Viri, and did not reach Lauang before evening of the 5th.  The mountain range of Bacon (the Pocdol of Coello), which on my previous journeys had been concealed by night or mist, now revealed itself to us in passing as a conical mountain; and beside it towered a very precipitous, deeply-cleft mountain-side, apparently the remnant of a circular range.  After the pilot, an old Filipino and native of the country, who had made the journey frequently before, had conducted us, to begin with, to a wrong port, he ran the vessel fast on to the bar, although there was sufficient water to sail into the harbor conveniently.

[Lauang.] The district of Lauang (Lahuan), which is encumbered with more than four thousand five hundred inhabitants, is situated at an altitude of forty feet, on the south-west shore of the small island of the same name, which is separated from Samar by an arm of the Catubig.  According to a widely-spread tradition, the settlement was originally in Samar itself, in the middle of the rice-fields, which continue to the present day in that place, until the repeated inroads of sea-pirates drove the inhabitants, in spite of the inconvenience attending it, to protect themselves by settling on the south coast of the little island, which rises steeply out of the sea. [163] The latter consists of almost horizontal banks of tufa, from eight to twelve inches in thickness.  The strata being continually eaten away by the waves at low watermark, the upper layers break off; and thus the uppermost parts of the strata, which are of a tolerably uniform thickness, are cleft by vertical fissures, and look like the walls of a fortress.  Pressed for space, the church and the convent have taken up every level bit of the rock at various heights; and the effect of this accommodation of architecture to the requirements of the ground, though not designed by the architect, is most picturesque.