LUKBAN
The items may appear harmless, but to the Americans, everything looked suspicious. One or two bancas would look insignificant, but ten of these could feed and supply squads and companies. Exactly how many small boats the Americans seized, there are no existing records. 21
Two months after the blockade was put up in earnest in the waters around Leyte and Samar, Lukban was already complaining about food shortage early in July- and actual fighting had not even started yet. Beginning July, Lukban said, he and his men had been eating sweet potatoes in the morning,“ morisqueta”( boiled rice) at noon and“ lugao”( porridge) in the afternoon. When they were lucky, they got harina de palmira( flour from palm trees). Rice was rarely available. Lukban’ s army was not poor because it had money from hemp collections, but there was just nothing to buy because of the blockade. 22
This explains why he kept on repeating the order to plant rice, but to many farmers, hemp farming was a more lucrative enterprise. They could trade hemp for rice and other necessities before the blockade started. Food problem would hound Lukban and his troops in the coming months. In fact, many of his leaders went over of the side of the Americans because of hunger.
Preparing his arsenal
Lukban was not one to be bogged down by such issues though. Instead, he put his energies to developing his arsenal in preparation for the coming battles against the technically superior Americans.
The Filipinos’ arsenal of guns was quite diverse. Their main weapons were those that they had seized from the Spaniards: Spanish M93, also the standard infantry arm of the Spanish, and the Remington Spanish rifle. In addition to these were added Krupp, Hontoria, an Ordóñez gun, Hotchkiss, Nordenfelt, Maxim guns and Colt guns, and the Filipino lantakas, originally made of bamboo and later reinforced with steel. Moreover, they had improvised artillery weapons made of water pipes reinforced with bamboo or timber, which could only be fired once or twice.
This merry assortment of weaponry created problems rather than solutions for Lukban because that meant they had to fabricate all sorts of bullets in different shapes, which would dissipate their efforts. Each model had different cartridge shells to serve as mold to bullets. Practically each bullet would have to be handmade, indeed.
Their first arsenal was hidden somewhere in the mountains of Catbalogan. It was here that many a church bell was melted and transformed into bullets, while the cartridges were made using old
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