[Casiguran.] The next morning I accompanied the alcalde in a falua (felucca), manned by fourteen rowers, to Casiguran, which lies directly south of Sorsogon, on the other side of a small bay, of two leagues in breadth, which it took us an hour and a half to cross.  The bay was as calm as an inland lake.  It is almost entirely surrounded by hills, and its western side, which is open to the sea, is protected by the Island of Bagalao, which lies in front of it.  As soon as we landed, we were received with salutes of cannon and music, and flags and shirts streamed in the wind.  I declined the friendly invitation of the alcalde to accompany him any further; as to me, who had no official business to transact, the journey seemed nothing but a continually recurring panorama of dinners, lunches, cups of chocolate, music, and detonations of gunpowder.

[Quicksilver.] In 1850 quicksilver was discovered on a part of the coast now covered by the sea.  I examined the reported bed of the deposit, and it appeared to me to consist of a stratum of clay six feet in depth, superimposed over a layer of volcanic sand and fragments of pumice stone.  An Englishman who was wrecked in this part of the Archipelago, the same individual I met at the iron works at Angat, had begun to collect it, and by washing the sand had obtained something like a couple of ounces.  Somebody, however, told the priest of the district that quicksilver was a poison; and, as he himself told me, so forcibly did he depict the dangerous nature of the new discovery to his parishioners that they abandoned the attempt to collect it.  Since then none of them have ever seen a vestige of mercury, unless it might be from some broken old barometer.  Towards evening Mount Bulusan in the south-east, and Mount Mayon in the north-west, were visible for a short time.  They are both in a straight line with Casiguran.

[Sea’s encroachments.] Every year the sea makes great inroads upon the coast at Casiguran; as far as I could decide from its appearance and from the accounts given me, about a yard of the shore is annually destroyed.  The bay of Sorsogon is protected towards the north by a ridge of hills, which suddenly terminate, however, at its north-eastern angle; and through this opening the wind sometimes blows with great fury, and causes considerable havoc in the bay, the more particularly as its coast is principally formed of clay and sand.

[Pirate rumors and robberies.] When I reached Legaspi again in the evening I learnt that the alarm about the pirates which had interrupted my departure had not been an idle one.  Moros they certainly could not have been, for at that season none of the Mahometan corsairs could reach that part of the coast; but they were a band of deserters and vagabonds from the surrounding country, who in this part of the world find it more agreeable to pursue their freebooting career on sea than on land.  During my absence they had committed many robberies and carried off several people. [88]