From this number General Bell deducts several thousands as having been recaptured by the Spaniards, or bought in. I at once hear some former comrade-in-arms of the Philippine insurrection say: "Oh, no. They couldn't have had as many as 40,000 guns, or near that." I thought the same thing when I first read General Bell's report on the matter. But he removes the doubt thus: "They are being continually sent away to other provinces." We did not understand Aguinaldo's movements then. All his troops were not around Manila. From what I learned from General Lawton and his staff in 1899, my belief is that Aguinaldo had perhaps 30,000 men with guns around Manila, and out along the railroad, at the time of the outbreak of February 4th. It is idle, of course, at this late date, to claim that the Filipinos were not bent on independence from the first. The matured plans of their leaders, formulated at Hong Kong May 4, 1898, before they ever started the insurrection, preserved in the captured minutes of the meeting already noticed, [153] provide the programme to be adopted in the event we should be tempted to keep the islands. In that event, they were prepared against surprise, or any necessity for making new plans, and were agreed to accept war as inevitable. From the first, they made ready for it. Governmentally and strategically, the Philippine Islands, except Mohammedan Mindanao, which is a separate and distinct problem, may be described very simply and sufficiently as consisting of the great island of Luzon, on which Manila is situated, and the Visayan group. [154] We are already familiar with the conditions in Luzon in December, 1898. You hear a great deal about the Philippine archipelago consisting of a thousand and one islands, but there are only eight that are, broadly speaking, worth considering here. The moment a jagged submarine ledge peeps out of the water it becomes an island. And even before that it may wreck a ship. But we are talking about islands that need to be charted on the sea of world politics. The Visayan Islands that really count at all in a great problem such as that we are now considering, are but six in number: Panay, capital Iloilo; Cebu, capital Cebu; Bohol, Negros, Samar, and Leyte. [155] Iloilo is some three hundred and odd miles south of Manila, and, besides being the capital of Panay, is the chief port of the Visayas and the second city of the archipelago, Cebu being the third. Under the Spaniards, as now under us, a vessel might clear from either of these places for any part of the world. As we saw in the chapter preceding this, as early as November 18th, Admiral Dewey had cabled Washington that the entire island of Panay was in possession of insurgents, except Iloilo. By the end of December, all the Spanish garrisons in the Visayan Islands had surrendered to the insurgents. (Otis's Report, p. 61.) Iloilo did not surrender to the insurgents until the day before Christmas. But let us not anticipate.