Suyo Afectísimo, Pelayo: Eight Postcards from Cebu to a Collector in Madrid
Updated: 2 days ago
Eight postcards from Cebu turned up on a Spanish auction site, all addressed to the same man in Madrid. The sensible move was to wait for them to be grouped and sold as one lot. We didn't wait. We bid on them one at a time, card after card, auction after auction, and paid more for the privilege than a single lot would ever have cost. It also took far longer than we planned. So much for collector's patience.
But here they are, together again. And once we laid them side by side on the table, they started talking. To each other, to us, and about the two men who traded them across half the world more than 120 years ago.
Two names on every card
The sender signs every card on the picture side: "Pelayo," "F. Pelayo," and on one card, clearly, "Felix Pelayo." Every card is addressed on the back to "Dr. Arturo Balaguer," Calle de Preciados, Madrid. That's the busy shopping street that runs off Puerta del Sol, right in the city center.
Two cards are dated 4 August 1904. Four carry the green one-cent Benjamin Franklin stamp overprinted "PHILIPPINES," first issued in September 1903. So these were written and posted in Cebu in 1903–04, barely three years after the last Cebuano revolutionaries laid down their arms.
Who were these two men? Honestly, we don't know yet. We found no record of a Félix Pelayo in Cebu around 1904 and no biography of a Dr. Arturo Balaguer in Madrid. (The only Arturo Balaguer we found from the period was a merchant born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, with no link to Madrid or to these cards.) What we do have is what they left on the cards themselves. As it turns out, that's quite a lot.
The eight cards
Captions are transcribed as written, with our translation beneath.
Card 1 · Insurgent outpost on Mount Sudlon
“Avanzada insurrecta en el monte Sudlon — Cebú”
Insurgent outpost on Mount Sudlon — Cebu
Front (left) · Back (right)
Two men in straw hats kneel in tall cogon grass and aim long rifles down a worn mountain track. It looks dramatic, and it is almost certainly posed. The light is even, the men are perfectly still, and nobody holds a pose like that while being shot at.
But the place is real. Sudlon, in the mountains behind Cebu City, was the stronghold of the Cebuano revolutionary forces under General Arcadio Maxilom. American artillery besieged it in January 1900. After it fell, the fighting turned to guerrilla war until Maxilom surrendered in October 1901. Three years later, Pelayo is writing "insurrecta" across the bottom. Spaniards and Americans used that word, and it turns armed Cebuanos into a curiosity for a gentleman in Madrid.
Look closer at the front. A "4" in the top left corner. A date at the lower right that reads 4/8/904. At the top, above the looping signature, it reads what looks like "Suyo afectísimo": yours most affectionately. That's a letter's sign-off, not a souvenir.
Address: Mr. Dr. Arturo Balaguer, "28" Preciados, Madrid, Spain · Stamp: none · Later marks: Z1309, 3000
Card 2 · A native house
“Islas Filip.—Una casa de indígenas”
Philippine Islands — A house of natives
Front (left) · Back (right)
A big bahay kubo on stilts, with a thick thatched roof, woven walls, and sliding window panels. Faces peer out from the upper opening. Below is a cluster of children, a boy riding a carabao led by a man, and someone half-hidden in a doorway.
This was the standard "native type" view that publishers sold to buyers abroad, and the caption is typed in purple, not written by Pelayo. It never says Cebu, so we can't place it. The Spanish-style street lamp on the left tells us one thing, though: this house stood in a town, not out in the countryside. A kubo and a stone house, side by side. That was the real Cebu streetscape of 1904.
Address: Sr. Dr. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 18, Madrid; "España" in pencil · Stamp: U.S. 1¢ Franklin overprinted PHILIPPINES, on the picture side · Later marks: Z1305 [?], 3000
Card 3 · Moro combat, Mindanao
“Islas Filip.—Combate de moros de Mindanao”
Philippine Islands — Combat of the Moros of Mindanao
Front (left) · Back (right)
Two men in turbans square off with spears and round shields in a village street while a crowd looks on. Gongs hang from a carrying pole in the background. That's a strong hint this was a display or a festival bout, not a real fight.
This is the one card in the set that isn't Cebu at all. In 1903–04 the Americans were fighting in the Moro Province, so a reader in Madrid would have found the scene topical. Why would a Cebu correspondent send it? Perhaps because Cebu was, as it still is, the gateway to the south. Or perhaps because it was simply in the same publisher's series and Pelayo was sending Balaguer the set. Pelayo signed it and dated it what looks like 11 September 1904.
Address: Sr. D. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 18, Madrid; "España" in pencil · Stamps: two U.S. 1¢ Franklin overprinted PHILIPPINES (2¢), torn · Later marks: Z1302 [?]
Card 4 · The coconut seller
“Vendedora de bonote”
Seller of coconut husk
Front (left) · Back (right)
A woman stands before a woven bamboo fence, balancing a tray piled impossibly high with coconut husks and shells on her head. Her face disappears behind the load. All we see is the work.
"Bonote" is the old Philippine Spanish word for coconut husk fiber. Cebuano readers will hear their own bunot in it. Husk and coir, sold as fuel, rope, and stuffing, were the small change of a much bigger story. After 1863, Cebu was one of only three Philippine ports open to world trade, alongside Manila and Iloilo. Under early American rule, copra made the Visayas rich: national production grew nearly fourfold between 1903 and 1918. This woman is carrying the bottom rung of that economy on her head.
Address: Sr. Dr. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 28, Madrid, Spain · Stamp: none · Later marks: Z1307, 2500
Card 5 · The kiosk of Magellan's Cross
“Kiosco que encierra la cruz ante la que se dijo la 1ª misa en Filipinas”
Kiosk that encloses the cross before which the first Mass in the Philippines was said
Front (left) · Back (right)
Any Cebuano will recognize this little building at a glance. So will anyone who has visited the city. The Augustinian Bishop of Cebu, Santos Gómez Marañón, ordered and paid for the octagonal pavilion with its tiled roof and barred arches in 1834. It still shelters the cross at the city's heart and appears on the Cebu City seal today.
In 1904, the kiosk stands in an open, almost empty plaza, with a few figures in white crossing the grass. Pelayo's caption repeats the local tradition that the first Mass in the Philippines was said before this cross. Historians don't agree. The official answer is Limasawa, and even the cross inside has long been debated. For a Spaniard in Madrid, though, this card tied Spain's 377 years in the islands back to their very first day.
Address: Sr. D. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 25, España, Madrid · Stamp: U.S. 1¢ Franklin overprinted PHILIPPINES, on the picture side · Later marks: 492, 2500
Card 6 · Calle de Recoletos, towards San Nicolás
“Calle de Recoletos que va al barrio de San Nicolás — Cebú, Filipinas”
Recoletos Street, which leads to the San Nicolás district — Cebu, Philippines
Front (left) · Back (right)
A wide dirt street between bahay na bato houses, stone below and wood above, with capiz windows and a belfry rising on the left. Women in long skirts and headcloths come toward us with baskets on their heads, heading to or from the market. On the right, almost out of frame, a man in a pith helmet stands. In 1904 that hat meant only one thing: the Americans had arrived.
San Nicolás was Cebu El Viejo, the old Filipino town Legazpi founded in 1565 and kept apart from the Spanish settlement. The Augustinians established a parish there in 1584. The street name points to the Augustinian Recollects, who have been in Cebu since 1621 and whose school became today's University of San Jose–Recoletos. The San Nicolás church was left in ruins by the bombing of 1945. Most of the houses on this card likely went with it, making this view a record of a street that no longer exists.
Address: Sr. Dr. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 25, España, Madrid · Stamp: brown overprinted stamp, not yet identified, on the picture side · Later marks: Z1306, 3000
Card 7 · Funeral honors for an American
“Honores fúnebres a un americano — Cebú”
Funeral honors for an American — Cebu
Front (left) · Back (right)
A line of American soldiers in campaign hats and cartridge belts fires a volley over a freshly dug grave, and the smoke drifts across the frame. A bandsman with a brass horn stands in the ranks. A corporal waits by a stone gate. Behind the mound, a short row of white headboards marks the men buried before him. On the right, an American with his hat in hand stands beside a group of Filipino men against a tall wall topped with pinnacles. In the foreground, a child watches, his back to us.
Of all eight, this is the only card that shows the occupying army directly, and the only one that shows it grieving. We can't name the soldier or pin down the exact spot. One lead to chase: In 1903, Bishop Thomas Hendrick of Cebu donated a plot for American veterans beside the municipal cemetery on what is now Katipunan Street. The pinnacled wall may be a clue. It may also be a coincidence. Pelayo dated this one 4/8/904, the same day as the Sudlon card, and wrote a "3" in the corner. Some later dealer penciled "5000" on the back, the highest figure in the group. He knew which one mattered.
Address: Sr. Dr. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 28, Madrid, Spain · Stamp: none · Later marks: Z1308, 5000
Card 8 · Plaza de Recoletos: the barracks and the north side
“Plaza de Recoletos: Cuartel y fachada norte”
Recoletos Plaza: barracks and north façade
Front (top) · Back (bottom)
The showpiece. A double-width folding card, a panorama of a great empty plaza scored with cart ruts. A lone street lamp in the middle, a belfry on the left, two-story stone houses with tiled roofs across the back. On the right, a long barracks block with barred windows: the cuartel. Folding cards were printed in far smaller numbers than ordinary ones, and the center fold tends to wear through. This one is worn, but it held.
Turn it over, and you find the only real message in the whole set:
"Muy Sr. mío: Recibo en este momento su postal, de la que ya tenía aviso por nuestro común amigo Srta. Amparo, y tengo un verdadero placer en establecer el cambio que me propone. Por falta de tiempo…
My dear Sir: I have this moment received your postcard, which our mutual friend Miss Amparo had already told me to expect, and it is a real pleasure to set up the exchange you propose. For lack of time…
And there it stops, mid-sentence, at the edge of the card. Two strangers, one introduction, one exchange. Everything else in this post follows from those few lines.
Address: Sr. D. Arturo Balaguer, Preciados 28, España, Madrid · Stamps: two U.S. 1¢ Franklin overprinted PHILIPPINES (2¢), on the picture side · Later marks: Z1315, 3000
Reading the mail: why we think Balaguer was a collector
In 1904, picture postcards were mostly greetings. "Arrived safely, weather hot, regards to all." Not one of these eight cards says anything like that. Here's what they say instead.
The word "cambio." The panorama's message accepts "the exchange you propose." Balaguer wrote first, to a man he had never met, asking to trade. That's not a tourist writing home. That's a collector building a network.
A go-between. Pelayo already knew the card was coming because "our mutual friend Miss Amparo" had told him. Collectors of the period found each other through introductions, club lists and bulletins. By 1901, Barcelona already had a Boletín cartófilo. Amparo was the human version of that list.
Signed and dated on the picture. Pelayo signs every view, often inside a looping flourish, and dates several. Under the American postal rules then in force, the back was for the address only, so writing had to go on the front. But the exchange collector's habit was to include a full signature and date on every card. It turns a printed view into a document with a name on it.
Stamps on the picture side. On cards 2, 5, 6, and 8, the stamp is stuck on the view itself, so the postmark lands on the picture. Golden-age collectors prized exactly this: stamp, cancel, and image tied together on one face.
Captions in his own hand. Pelayo captions six of the eight himself: Sudlon, Recoletos, San Nicolás, the kiosk of the Cross. He's not sending pictures. He's curating them, telling a stranger in Madrid what he is looking at and why it matters.
Numbers, dates and missing stamps. The Sudlon card is numbered "4," and the funeral card "3," and both are dated 4 August 1904. Neither carries a stamp, and neither does the coconut seller. Our best reading: Pelayo numbered a batch and sent at least part of it under one cover, in an envelope, the way you'd ship a set rather than a greeting.
One series, one address, one man. Same printer's monogram, same brown "Tarjeta postal — Post-Card" backs, same addressee across at least two mailings. Even the house number wanders between 18, 25, and 28, as if Pelayo wrote from memory each time. Somebody in Madrid was building a set.
And they stayed together. The penciled stock numbers on the backs run from Z1302 to Z1315. Some dealer, decades later, kept them as one group. Someone split them up only recently. We put them back, at some cost.
Let's correct ourselves first. We imagined these cards spending months at sea. They probably didn't. By 1904, a steamer from Manila through Singapore and the Suez Canal could get mail to Barcelona or Marseille in about four to six weeks, then on the train to Madrid. Add the inter-island boat from Cebu to Manila to connect with the mail ship, and any wait for the next sailing.
But one leg isn't an exchange. Balaguer's proposal had to sail east first. Amparo's word reached Cebu even before his card did. Pelayo had to buy the cards, caption them, sign them, number them, and find the time, which he admits he barely had. Then the whole lot sailed west again. One round of trading easily took two to three months, and a set built this way took years. No airmail could shortcut it. The Philippines' first airmail flight came only in 1919, and the first flight from Madrid to Manila not until 1926.
The postage was the cheap part: one or two American cents a card. The real cost was everything else. Trusting a stranger eleven thousand kilometers away on a friend's say-so. Writing a letter where a greeting would do. Waiting a season to learn whether the other man kept his side of the deal.
So what does that tell us about "true collectors"? That they've always been the same animal. They will cross oceans for a piece of cardboard, through friends of friends, on the strength of a promise. They'll hand-letter captions for someone they'll never meet, and wait months for the reply. Only the shipping has changed. A hundred and twenty years later, we paid extra to buy these one by one rather than wait for a lot. Pelayo would understand perfectly.
Why these belong to Cebu
Most Philippine postcards from the first years of American rule show Manila. Cebu views from 1903–04 are much harder to find, and views captioned by someone who actually lived in Cebu are rarer still. We should be honest here: we aren't Cebuano. We came to these cards as collectors, not as locals. That's exactly why we're writing this one for the people who know these streets better than we ever will.
Six of these eight are unmistakably Cebu's. Pelayo names Sudlon, Calle de Recoletos, the San Nicolás district, the kiosk of the Cross, Plaza de Recoletos, and, on the funeral card, Cebu itself. A passing traveler wouldn't know to name these places. He wasn't passing through. He lived there. The other two, the native house and the Moro combat, are generic "Islas Filipinas" cards from the same printer's series. They were probably sold over the same Cebu counter.
Read together, the eight cards hold four layers of Cebu's past in one small stack. The founding of Christianity in 1521 at the kiosk of the Cross. The Spanish town in the stone houses of Recoletos and San Nicolás. The revolution and the war at Sudlon and in the American cemetery. And the coconut trade on one unnamed woman's head. Much of what they show didn't survive 1945. That's why we think Cebuanos should see them first.
There's plenty still unsolved here, and we suspect the answers are in Cebu, not Madrid. Certainly not with us.
Who was Felix Pelayo? A Spaniard who stayed after 1898, or a Spanish-speaking Cebuano? Old Cebu newspapers, the 1903 census, and Spanish consular registers are the next places to look.
Where exactly were the Calle and Plaza de Recoletos, and what are they called today?
Whose small interlaced monogram sits in the lower corner of every view? Local studios like Francisco Pertierra's were active in Cebu in 1904, but nothing ties this series to any of them yet.
Who was the American buried on card 7, and is that the Katipunan Street plot?
And who was Miss Amparo, the friend who brought two collectors together across the sea?
If your lola's albums, your parish archives, or your own collection hold any of these answers, we'd love to hear from you. We'd ask in Bisaya, but our Bisaya stops at "salamat." So: salamat daan.
Where everything has a past… and some even have a future.
Sources
The Freeman, "Gen. Arcadio Maxilom and his battles (Part I)" (2014) and "Sudlon, a historical landmark" (2019)
Postage stamps and postal history of the Philippines (airmail 1919; Madrid–Manila 1926)
Article on early Spanish postcard collecting and exchange (Boletín cartófilo, Barcelona 1901)
T. Geiger, "The Benjamin Franklin One Cent Green"; Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Second Bureau Issues 1902–1908
TheOldChurches, San Nicolás de Tolentino, Cebu City
Philstar, "The coconut comes full circle" (2011)
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