Observatorio Meteorologico de Manila and the first typhoon warnings in the Far East (1865-1899)
A Jesuit observatory founded at Manila in 1865 to find the laws of the typhoons and announce them in advance. Its first public warning went out on 7 July 1879; by 1880 the warnings were on the Hongkong cable, by 1884 they were an official state service with fourteen stations, and by 1898 a Royal Navy officer was telling Admiral Dewey to restore the cut cable or answer for the lives lost without them.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of early typhoon forecasting begin at the Hongkong Observatory of 1883 or at the United States Weather Bureau, and the Manila Jesuits appear, if at all, as a line about a Spanish colonial curiosity. This object gives the dated record from the observatory's own 1900 imprint, read page by page: the 1865 foundation with instruments borrowed from a school, the warning of 7 July 1879, the November 1879 storm in which the capital was spared and forty-two ships were lost in the ports the telegraph did not reach, the royal order of 28 April 1884 and the fourteen Luzon stations, the exchange with Tokyo from 1890, and the cloud-measurement year of 1896-1897. It also prints the two things a defensive account would omit - that some contradicted the predictions at the time, and that the service's best testimonial is a complaint by a rival director, a suspension ordered by the United States Secretary of War, and a British naval officer telling Admiral Dewey what the missing telegrams would cost in lives. And it says in its own claim that the witness is the observatory itself.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
What was opened for this object, and what it is. The volume read is "El archipielago filipino: coleccion de datos geograficos, estadisticos, cronologicos y cientificos", Washington, Imprenta del Gobierno, 1900, compiled by the Jesuit fathers of the Manila Observatory and credited to its director Jose Algue. It was read directly as page scans of the original imprint. The catalogue record gives no tomo; the volume names itself in the signature line of page 273, "4619-TOMO II--18".
The observatory's stated purpose was forecasting, not record-keeping. The history of its meteorological department dates from the foundation of the observatory itself in 1865, because what its founders intended - and Father Federico Faura S. J. especially - was to study meteorology and "ver de descubrir las leyes de los tifones que con tanta frecuencia visitan estas Islas, a fin de poderlos anunciar con algunos dias de anticipacion y prevenir, en cuanto fuese posible, sus destructores efectos". The seismic, magnetic and astronomical departments were created many years later.
It began as a private undertaking on borrowed instruments. From 1865 to 1869 Faura had no more than a few instruments, the ones absolutely necessary, put at his disposal by the Ateneo Municipal, the Jesuit college to which the observatory was attached until shortly after its official declaration. Even so a monthly and an annual sheet were published with lithographed curves. The establishment was patronised first by private individuals, chiefly sailors and merchants resident in the islands, and only afterwards by the Spanish Government.
The first warning is dated to the day. Faura returned to Manila in August 1878, and the following year, the volume states, "le cupo la honra de ser el primero que en el Extremo Oriente predijo la existencia y demora, y determino la probable trayectoria de los ciclones" - the first typhoon announcement being given on 7 July 1879, indicating that the vortex was crossing the northern provinces of Luzon, which the news of the damage in Isabela and Cagayan soon confirmed. The priority claim is the observatory's own and no independent witness to it was opened here.
The second warning shows both what the service could do and where it stopped. On 18 November 1879 Faura announced a baguio as dangerous to Manila itself; the port captain, D. Alejandro de Churruca, ordered that no vessel leave the bay, and this was done "a pesar de contradecir algunos la probabilidad de tales predicciones". In the capital the losses were relatively insignificant. In the ports the warnings could not reach for want of telegraph, the effects were severe: south of Luzon forty-two ships were lost and many people perished. The cost is printed beside the success, in the same paragraph.
The warnings crossed borders before the service was official. In 1880, as soon as the cable joined the islands to Hongkong, sailors and merchants there pressed so hard for the Manila typhoon announcements that the government of the Philippines had to accede. Faura published the pamphlet "Senales precursoras de temporal en el Archipielago Filipino" in 1881 and offered his barometer for typhoon forecasting to the public in 1886.
Official status came by royal order on 28 April 1884, which declared the observatory an official state centre, subsidised it, and created the meteorological service of the island of Luzon, leaving the way open to extend it to the other islands as the cable reached them. Fourteen secondary stations were established around the centre and coasts of Luzon, each supplied with instruments and with a "Reglamento e instruccion practica" issued by the director, and their daily observations began to appear in the Boletin Mensual in 1885.
It was wired into a regional and then an international network. From 1890, at the request of the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, observations were exchanged with the Central Observatory of Tokyo, to which the typhoon announcements were also sent - these having gone to the China coast since 1880. In 1892 the director Miguel Saderra Mata was invited to the meteorological congress of the Chicago exposition, and Faura and Algue attended at the expense of and representing the Spanish Government.
In 1896-1897 the observatory was, on its own account, the only one in the Far East among the sixteen central observatories of different nations that took part in the international cloud-measurement year invited by Robert H. Scott of the International Meteorological Committee. Two photo-theodolites were ordered from O. Gunther, identical to those he had built for Potsdam, and Algue published the results as "Las Nubes en el Archipielago Filipino". The volume quotes H. H. Hildebrandsson writing on 19 June 1899 that "la publicacion de V. acerca de las observaciones de nubes en el periodo de 1896 a 1897 es la primera que ha aparecido completa hasta la fecha".
The service was suspended by a foreign government and restored by foreign pressure, and the episode is the best evidence of what it was worth. At the end of 1898 the director of the British meteorological service at Hongkong wrote to the United States Ministry of Agriculture in terms very unfavourable to the directors of the Manila Observatory, calling attention to the scandal he said its alarming typhoon announcements caused in the Hongkong press. The immediate effect was an order from the United States Secretary of War suspending all typhoon announcements telegraphed out of the archipelago.
The Hongkong Chamber of Commerce protested energetically to its colonial government against a suspension so contrary to the maritime and commercial interests of the Far East, and the Hongkong government wrote officially to the Military Governor of the Philippine Islands asking that the prohibition be revoked, on the ground that the Hongkong director had not been authorised to make the requisition and had acted against the will of his own government and the welfare of the colony. The documents were collected and published at Manila in 1899 as "El servicio meteorologico del Observatorio de Manila vindicado y rehabilitado".
Two smaller incidents make the same point from the other side. After the cable joining Manila with Hongkong was cut in May 1898, a senior officer of the British Royal Navy at Hongkong wrote to Admiral Dewey begging him to restore it, "si no queria ser responsable de las perdidas en vidas y haciendas que sin duda ocasionaria la falta de los telegramas de tifones del Observatorio de Manila". Once it was restored, Mr Rounsevelle Wildman, United States consul general in the colony, asked that the telegrams be sent to him directly, as they had been to the Spanish consul while Manila was under Spanish sovereignty.
What this object rests on, and what should be discounted in it. The volume is an original imprint opened page by page, which is why it is tiered primary; but it is the observatory's own history of itself, written by its director, and the chapter on the 1898-1899 suspension is a vindication written by the party vindicated. No archive, no Hongkong or United States record, and no independent history was opened against it, so the priority claim of 1879 and the account of the quarrel are given at 0.7 to 0.8 rather than higher. The service was also an arm of a colonial government, and the free service it advertises was rendered first to shipping and commerce.