Chusan
Page 9
Anxious to break the stalemate, Governor Burrell ordered proclamations to be posted around Tinghae informing its wholly absent citizenry that their shops would be broken into if they did not return to trade within the week. The next day a counter-proclamation was posted by an unseen hand, warning nobody in particular not to heed Burrell and predicting an assault that would drive the barbarians into the sea. His every ploy, it seemed, was sidestepped by invisible mandarins across the water, gently tugging the strings that controlled the island. [12]
For Edward Cree at least, from the relative safety of HMS Rattlesnake, trips around the harbour in search of food continued to offer opportunities to win over the natives with his personable charm. A fortnight after Bu Dingbang’s kidnap, Cree and a friend rowed out to one particular island where they felt safe from the soldiers rumoured to roam Chusan. They bought a litter of piglets, though it was worth the money just to catch them. Despite the edict banning fraternisation, some of the islanders rowed over to the Rattlesnake to pay a return visit while Cree was at breakfast and amused themselves at Western table manners. But finally the flurry of proclamations and counter-proclamations convinced even Cree that there would soon be no food to buy at any price. One day he rose early, took coffee, and with a number of followers landed on Chusan armed with pistols for any Chinese soldiers they might meet and with fowling pieces to bag game for the pot. The party found the villages peaceful but the farmers unwilling to sell their livestock — what use was a fistful of silver dollars when it was proof of having disobeyed the emperor? Still, by herding goats and pigs before it and leaving sufficient silver to broach any argument the party soon resembled a walking menagerie. [13]
Just as Cree and his Bengalis were driving their animals back to Tinghae with panniers of live chickens slung over their shoulders, Governor Burrell received a worrying report of four hundred enemy soldiers landing at Sinkong on the west coast of Chusan. Two hundred infantrymen hastily boarded a steamer but found just some junks carrying raw sugar. The entire garrison was on edge. From informants on the mainland were arriving illicit copies of Chinese communications: fiery memorials naïvely promising the emperor that the barbarians would be destroyed; reports detailing a troop build-up on the coast; orders for the casting of cannon and the requisitioning of junks for an invasion fleet. Governor Burrell had no choice but to follow up any word of the threatened invasion, but it was agreed that the Chinese had neither the stomach nor the means to retake Chusan by force. Even a modest plan to install a fifth column in Tinghae came to nothing: a spy sent into the city in the guise of an opium smuggler reported that Burrell was running a tight show, and that a few men at most might make it past the sentries. Besides, in a city peopled by beggars and housebound old women, strapping young guerrillas would stand out like a sore thumb. But leaving the barbarians in peace was unthinkable. For the Chinese, the sole glimmer of hope was that the British were unable to protect their own: Bu Dingbang had been kidnapped within sight of the city walls. The memorial recommending rewards for severed heads had been circulating for a fortnight, and despite the friendly efforts of individuals like Edward Cree the atmosphere of tension between invader and invaded was palpably hardening. Just as in the foreign wars of our own age, the average soldier knew not one word of the local dialect and minor misunderstandings quickly flared into violence. Beatings and worse were meted out to recalcitrant villagers, with the wiry Indian troops, considered social and physical inferiors by the Europeans, especially liable to lord it over the natives. The Muslims among them tended to look upon the Chinese with contempt for their habitual diet of pork, the Hindus for their use of the cow as a beast of burden. More than one soldier had been injured in a spate of attacks on foraging parties, a Bengali had died after a stabbing, there had been numerous Chinese civilian deaths, and a constant trickle of islanders was reaching Tinghae seeking treatment for gunshot wounds and sword cuts. [14]
In mid-August the tension broke into open revolt. One morning, six hungry infantrymen entered a village a few miles from Tinghae. They were heavily armed and, while hardly expecting the streets to be strewn with flowers, were not expecting a confrontation. Hearing a noise from outside the farmstead they were searching, one of the soldiers went out only to find a crowd of some two hundred villagers clearly intent on a fight. A shot was fired over their heads, but far from scaring the mob off this only caused them to charge the man down before he could reload, grabbing and punching him. The fracas alerted his comrades, who fired a volley into the mêlée. Before they could fire a second volley, the Chinese had fled. One had been so badly hurt that he reappeared in Tinghae, carried by his friends, to demand medical treatment. The incident was typical of the standoff that had been allowed to develop: on the one side was a garrison slowly starving to death, on the other a population terrified of these red-haired foreigners who devoured its livestock and killed its menfolk. [15]
But violent resistance and even the threat of beheading could not dissuade starving men. One scorching afternoon two blonde-haired, blue-eyed boys from HMS Blenheim — a fourteen-year-old midshipman and a clerk’s assistant just two years his senior — decided to land on Chusan to buy some fresh goats. They took a few silver dollars from their mess caterer, and the older boy procured a double-barrelled pistol. Reaching a farm, the two were greeted by the farmer, but he would not part with his animals. As they turned to leave, there began to assemble a group of farmhands clutching rakes and hoes. One approached the older boy offering to sell the goats, and the boy, relieved, crooked his pistol and rifled his pockets for the cash. It was then that the man grabbed his weapon while another pinned him by the throat against a hedge. As the man fumbled at the mechanism, the fourteen-year-old midshipman sprang forward to seize it, put it to the man’s temple, and fired, blowing the side of his face clean away. Unfamiliar with firearms, the other villagers were clearly dismayed when the clerk’s assistant now took the gun and discharged it into his captor’s stomach. The boy made no pretence at reloading, pointing the gun instead at the incredulous farm workers who seemed to think it somehow fired endless rounds. The stand-off, so it was reported, ended when a party of Royal Irish who had been digging for sweet potatoes nearby came to investigate the shots. When the boys reached the safety of the Blenheim they were examined as to what had occurred, and the news spread quickly:
But the innocent little creatures could not tell whether they had killed them or not. All that clerky could say was that the one he fired at had one ear and the side of his face blown away, but he hoped that he was not much hurt, as he left him kicking a little. Middie was rather bolder, he said he supposed his chap was dead, but was not quite certain. He fell down, but did not speak or move, and he had a big hole in his belly. And as Sir Humphrey Senhouse, their Captain, said, I think, ‘It is rather presumptive evidence that he was killed dead’. [16]
On another occasion, an officer commanding a foraging party was seized while alone in a farmhouse looking for food. Wrestling a hand free he shot one assailant with his pistol, while a soldier alerted by the report shot a second and peppered a third with buckshot. More soldiers arrived and bayoneted the would-be kidnappers. [17]
The island fought back against the invaders in more insidious ways, too — or was it nothing more than paranoia projected onto the blank canvas of the abandoned city that maddeningly hot summer? When a dog apparently dropped dead after drinking from a well, it was whispered that spies had poisoned Tinghae’s water supply. Refugees passed on rumours, and by the time their stories reached the emperor in Peking the facts were seemingly incontrovertible: concoctions of noxious herbs had been placed in the springs, and now the barbarians who drank the water were falling ill and dying without respite. There were claims that psychological warfare was being used against an enemy army on the edge of its nerves. One report claimed that:
Men were sent under cover of darkness while the rebels slept, to steal away their valuables or to throw stones about, so that day and night they were ill at ease
, their nature much distressed. [18]
His subjects, the emperor could be sure, were fighting back, yet on a pragmatic level it seems not to have struck the Chinese that they were in a pretty fix if this was the best they could boast. The island’s population, after all, amounted to some quarter of a million people. From a British point of view there was no hint that poisonings and petty annoyances, if they ever happened, were having an effect on morale. The sad truth was that the troops were going stir crazy and slowly dying of disease without the Chinese needing to lift a finger.
By late August of 1840 there were close on 5,000 foreigners living ashore on Chusan, including public camp followers, private servants, soldiers’ wives, and even some children. Aboard the dozens of warships, store vessels and transports in the harbour there were even more. Only one of that great number, the fearless Karl Gützlaff, now dared to venture alone out of sight of the walls, ignoring the solemn warnings, guffawing and insisting that no Chinese would dare touch him as he distributed his Christian tracts. God, he insisted, would preserve him. Others though were being forsaken; there had already been three dozen deaths amongst the soldiers, and cases of dysentery were rising. Fully one quarter of the Cameronians were in hospital, and not one of them was well enough to carry his standard-issue kit for ten miles. Scurvy had killed at least one of the regiment, so bad were the salt rations and so scarce fresh food. [19]
‘England knows how to conquer,’ observed one officer, ‘but never yet has she learned the secret of turning to advantage the successes in many cases earned by a lavish expenditure of blood and treasure.’ The Englishman & Military Chronicle back in India was just as scathing:
The powers that be seem never to adopt prompt measures, and by their shilly shally are destroying the 26th Regiment who might have been comfortably housed a fortnight since in the town, and many a fine fellow’s life saved…. ’Tis too bad!! [20]
Even the Chinese seemed aware that the British situation was so precarious as to put the invaders off their guard. One balmy August evening, Captain Pears of the Madras Engineers was in his mess tent on 49th Hill after a busy day improving the escarpment below the temple fort. Relaxing in his favourite lacquered chair (one of many looted from the city) he happened to look south. One of the war junks captured a month earlier, and now used as an ordnance store, was heading out of the harbour of its own accord. Quickly he assembled a boatful of sepoys to discover that five Chinese in a sampan were towing it away. The thieves were taken prisoner, led to gaol tied together by their pigtails, and the next day were spread-eagled and ‘introduced with the usual forms to the boatswain’s mate,’ with two dozen lashes apiece. [21]
But it simply ought not to have fallen to an officer of the Engineers to prevent a magazine ship being stolen from a British harbour. Something radical had to be done to turn the occupation to Britain’s advantage before the Chinese and the Grim Reaper together stole away any hope of success.
Anne Noble being carried in a cage to Ningbo.
7. Go to hell!
After two months in charge, George Burrell finally decided that the islanders should be officially informed of British rule. ‘Not before time!’ it was murmured around the officers’ mess-tables: so far the aged governor had proved himself to be ‘a man without ostensible authority, and incapable of exercising real influence.’ His staff, too, were thought ‘a remarkably slow set’, and the men of the expedition had begun to despair of achieving anything creditable under their command:
With the want of interpreters, want of knowledge of the people, and want of sense, the whole affair has been hitherto as beautifully mismanaged as the warmest admirer of British blundering could wish. [1]
Governor Burrell’s plan to win over Chusan’s population consisted in a show of military strength and a series of public announcements on how the Chinese were expected to behave from now on. On day in late August, the Indian Navy’s paddle-sloop Atalanta steamed out of Tinghae harbour with ninety infantrymen, several dozen marines and Karl Gützlaff aboard. It was Burrell’s intention to have her touch at various points along the shoreline with a carefully worded proclamation. A few miles along the coast, a party was rowed ashore to a village and Gützlaff began to read aloud his translation in Chinese:
Magistrate Caine of Tinghae by this proclamation notifies the elders of the city, the villages and the valleys, and all the inhabitants. Having received the command of the general in highest authority, desiring the suppression of disturbances and the protection of law-abiding subjects, patrols will be dispatched to the villages and valleys. The details of how the people are to behave when soldiers pass through a village or a valley are hereby explained. Receive and understand these instructions! [2]
Whenever British soldiers appeared, the proclamation went on, elders were required to arrange bearers and workmen, who were promised high wages for their labour, and a daily market for the sale of goods at a fair price. Islanders with grievances were promised the full protection of the law, but in return they were expected to turn over any spies or militiamen to the custody of the British authorities on fear of severe punishment. It was hinted that houses used to harbour Chinese soldiers would be burned down.
Elders and villagers, where previously respect was paid to the civil and military authorities of the Celestial Dynasty, will now pay respect to those of Great Britain. Let these articles be understood! All who carry on their occupations in peace will be protected by the law, but those daring to disturb the peace or cause obstruction will be suppressed. It is for each individual to choose between calamity and good fortune. Beware contravention!
To the British soldiers who witnessed Gützlaff’s speeches, the curious villagers displayed a mixture of ignorance and incredulity, as though incapable of conceiving any other power than that of their emperor. They had, so it appeared to Captain Pears, ‘not the remotest conception of the manner in which they are capable of being transferred from the mandarins’ rule to that of foreigners and barbarians.’ Simple incomprehension might have been as good an explanation: Gützlaff, though a gifted linguist, had had less than two months to adjust to the islanders’ dialect, and his German accent cannot have helped their understanding of his perplexingly formal translation of Governor Burrell’s words. When toward the end of the year the emperor himself added his personal opinion to a copy of the proclamation, he simply pronounced it ‘Abominable in the extreme’. [3]
But most villagers did not even wait around to listen to Gützlaff. Each time the Atalanta was sighted, her deck crowded with the red jackets of infantrymen and her paddles thrashing the water, the shout would go up and so would begin the exodus into the hills. It quickly became clear that, where the British had for eight weeks proved unable to assert themselves, the local gentry had stepped into the vacuum left by the suicide of Tinghae’s civil magistrate. In one village a notice was found. Under the authority of the village constables, it said, the community had assembled in the temple and voted unanimously for the extermination of the foreigners. It had been resolved that, on the English being sighted, gongs would be beaten as a signal to band together for protection and to attack them. The British had left the safety of Tinghae planning to establish the pax Britannica in an ungoverned interior. Instead they found the islanders governing themselves. With just five Chinese speakers, the task of maintaining order in Tinghae had been difficult enough. If the British hoped to govern the entire island they would need the help of local men willing to act as policemen in Governor Burrell’s pay. And so with Gützlaff translating as best he could, one respectable-looking gentleman was made to accept, before a large crowd, a lithographed commission to serve Her Majesty Queen Victoria as a British constable. It is likely that the ranks of British troops spurred him to accept, but doubtful that the commission continued to have any effect once the red jackets had marched on to do the same in the next hamlet. [4]
On the last Sunday of August, the Atalanta landed a shore party at the fishing community of Sinkamoon on the south-ea
stern tip of Chusan. Ominously for the health of the garrison, one of the soldiers dropped dead. He had been in fine spirits just a moment before. His body was re-embarked, and his comrades continued inland. Reaching the head of a valley, two old women were spied tottering along on sticks, carrying a basket between them. When they saw the British they turned and ran, ‘scared as much as they would have been by a couple of Bengal tigers,’ reflected one officer. ‘It makes one question one’s own real character, we look and feel so like barbarians and robbers.’ [5]
The neighbouring Buddhist holy island of Putuoshan too was officially informed of the change of rule, but its monks proved characteristically philosophical and were very little moved by the news. A few miles further, and the Atalanta’s approach was met with the familiar gongs and the sound of animals being herded into the hills. Some of the villagers though stood their ground, and one handed Gützlaff a piece of paper with a defiant message: ‘We know and care nothing about your comprador. We want none of your money. Nor do we wish to have anything to say to you.’ The same quiet, contemptuous refusal to interact was met with at every anchorage. When the next day two elderly men were made to stand and hear Governor Burrell’s proclamation read out, they just looked around uneasily and in the end simply walked off. At another village, Gützlaff found a prominent house and stood on its verandah, the proclamation held aloft for all to see. Eventually an educated man walked up, read it in silence, then without a word retreated into the crowd and disappeared. [6]