Unwieldy lighters and strange-looking _cascos_ now surround the transport, and the new arrival sees the Filipino for the first time. Under the woven helmet of the nearest _casco_ squats a shriveled woman, one of the witches from Macbeth, stirring a blackened pot of rice. A gamecock struggles at his tether in the stern, while the deck amidships swarms with wiry brown men, with bristling pompadours and feet like rubber, with wide-spreading toes. With unintelligible cries they crowd the gunwale, spurning the iron hull of the transport with long billhooks, as the heavy swell sucks out the water, leaving the streaming sluices and the great red hull exposed, and threatening at the inrush of the sea to bump the _casco_ soundly against the solid iron plates of the larger ship. A most disreputable-looking crew it is, the ragged trousers rolled up to the knee, the network shirts, or cotton blouses full of holes drawn down outside. Highly excitable, and yet good-natured as they work, they take possession and disgorge the ship, while Chinamen descend the hatchways after dirty clothes. Off in the hazy distance lies Cavite, or "the port," with its white mist of war ships lying at anchor where the stout Dutch galleons rode, in 1647, to attack the Spanish caravels, retiring only after the Dutch admiral fell wounded mortally; where later, in the nineteenth century, the Spanish fleet put out to meet the white armada, the grim battleships of Admiral Dewey's line. Where now the lazy sailing vessels and the blackened tramps are anchored, lay, in 1593, the hostile Chinese junks, with the barbaric eye daubed on the bows, the gunwales bristling with iron cannon that had scorned the typhoons of the China Sea and gathered in Manila Bay.