The Manila Massacre of 1820

From March 9 to 11, 1820, between ten to fifteen thousand Filipinos went on a murderous rampage throughout Manila, killing around 125 foreigners before the mob dissipated. This was not one of those incipient native revolts against the Spanish colonizers. In fact, it was the Spaniards themselves who had incited the Filipinos to riot.

Those facts I gathered from this book I recently bought for bathroom reading, The Pessimist's Guide to History. Don't go buy it -- it is an atrociously written book, featuring such vapidities as "[a]nother attempt by Mother Nature to wipe out the population of China". 

Still, the Manila Massacre surprised me as I had never heard of it before. Agoncillo does not record such an event, and the intimidating online archives of The London Times (from 1785!). Googling soon led me to this post by wesley at the past is the key to the future, and a July 2005 article by Ambeth Ocampo over at PDI. It appears that the massacre occurred during a cholera epidemic, and at a time when French scientists were collecting water samples from the Pasig River. The rumor spread that the French were actually poisoning the water supply and even when the French started ministering to the sick, the word came out (probably from the Spaniards) that they were actually trying to wipe out all the Tagalogs. This of course led up to your kill-the-beast moment, replete with "pikes, knives and bludgeons". 

Mr. Ocampo speculates that the massacre might have been a ploy to keep foreign businesses out of the Philippines, or it may have been designed to target specific people. Whatever the reason, what ensued was the systematic hacking to death of foreigners -- Caucasians and Chinese, though no Spaniards were apparently killed. There are some discrepancies between the PDI story and that from Pessimist's Guide. Mr. Ocampo gives the death toll at 39, the number of participants at 3,000, and the date of the massacre as October 9, 1820, which vastly differs from the figures cited above from Pessimist's Guide. Go with Ambeth on this one. 

I have a passing interest in urban epidemics. Manila was only one of many many major cities of the world periodically plagued with epidemics that would wipe out hundreds of thousands every few decades. Authorities were at a loss as to the causes and preventive measures of these outbreaks. Many wrongly assumed that "bad air" caused the disease, leading to remedies that often aggravated the problem (i.e., dumping raw sewage into the River Thames) The epidemics mostly stopped when it was figured out that germs, usually water-borne, caused cholera and other diseases and cities scrambled to improve their sanitation and sewage treatment facilities. Because of that, I often worry about the possibility of outbreaks even in this day over at urban poor communities, where sanitation facilities are not often reliable.