The Atalanta arrived back in harbour after her circumnavigation of Chusan to find the food situation worsening, if indeed that was possible. Other than a sparsely stocked tobacconist’s stand, there was nothing to be bought in Tinghae. Come September there was still preserved food in abundance, but much of it had been badly packed and was all but inedible. The regiments which had travelled from Madras and Bombay — the Royal Irish and the Madras Engineers and Artillery — had brought British-cured meat, but the Bengal regiments — the Cameronians, the Hertfordshires and the Bengal Volunteers — were relying on meat dried and pickled in Calcutta. This Bengali meat seemed to have been hastily pickled, and some had turned green, while the Bengali biscuit was so hard and maggoty that some men had stopped drawing their ration. Governor Burrell knew that the average British soldier would readily exchange his ration for a bowl of rice, and for a time considered supplementing their diet with rice confiscated from the county granary, or at least the portion that had not been auctioned off. He decided instead that the Indian troops needed it more. Many thought his decision incomprehensible; after all, there was rice to spare standing ripe in the fields (though in the Vale of Tinghae much of it had been trodden into a malarial swamp) and a large proportion of his land forces had been agricultural labourers before taking the king’s shilling. But with so many men now seriously ill, the governor would not contemplate such a time-consuming and labour-intensive undertaking as a harvest. [7]
At anchor in the harbour and not looking to the army’s commissariat to provide their food, the men of the Royal Navy at least were faring better. Edward Cree for one was dining well, if expensively, on woodpeckers, fowl, and duck eggs. A one-man diplomatic mission, Cree’s friendly demeanour had won over a farmer on one of the harbour islands. On a near-daily basis he had begun to row over from HMS Rattlesnake to sit and share a pipe of tobacco with this man, whom he had cured of ophthalmia, for which kind deed he now got his ducks at a discount. The Chinese trusted him. One day, an old man was waiting for Cree in the farmhouse. He wrote him a note, which Cree took for translation. It transpired that Ching Wang, a farmer from a village across the harbour, had had a water buffalo stolen. It now being the season to plough his fields, he requested its return. Cree, suspecting it had long since been made into beef tea for the sick, promised to make enquiries nonetheless. The farmer’s youngest son meanwhile, a bright boy of nine, had begun to learn English from Cree and from the coarser naval men who visited his island. ‘Go to hell!’ he shouted when one day the surgeon took him playfully by the pigtail. But the farmer, one of the few now remaining, knew what he was risking by fraternising with the barbarians. Soon after he began to consort with Cree, his home was visited by Chinese soldiers who had managed to escape the notice of the garrison. His two older sons were robbed and beaten, and could be grateful not to be carried away to Ningbo and executed as traitors. To the mandarins there such peasants were small fry, worth only the attentions of bullying soldiers who could shake them down for a few dollars. Far greater prizes were being groomed on Chusan, prizes whose capture would bring matters to a head and ultimately decide the island’s fate. [8]
Like many of his fellow officers, Captain Philip Anstruther of the Madras Artillery was bored to distraction by life in a city which felt like an open prison. Come September, he had turned his skills as an artist to mapping the hills around Tinghae — if Chusan was to become a permanent addition to Queen Victoria’s colonies, such work would be necessary. He would be seen leaving the city each morning with his surveying equipment, his elderly Indian servant close by. They would pass the day walking the paths and mounting the hilltops, measuring angles and calculating distances and heights. The locals, their fear of this well-built, full-bearded redhead waning with every portrait he drew for their amusement, would follow him as he worked, taking turns to peer through his telescope. With time, Anstruther began to leave his pistols behind, satisfied that, like Edward Cree, he had reached his own friendly entente with the islanders. One morning he left his tent as usual with his old servant and, passing through the city, climbed a suitable hill to pitch a flag and take bearings. Presently, he became aware of a crowd following them. One man began to attack the defenceless servant, but the enormous Anstruther managed to drive him off. Soon more villagers appeared and pelted them with stones. The servant, downed by a rock, was set upon and beaten to death. Anstruther too was given a severe beating, bound, gagged, and slung beneath a bamboo pole. At midnight a boat took him to Ningbo where he was thrown into a cage. [9]
At first his comrades paid no regard to his disappearance, as he would often lodge overnight with friends in other regiments. But when he was again absent from mess the following day the alarm was raised. A worse turn of events could scarcely have been imagined. The Royal Irish and the Cameronians were too wracked with dysentery to spare any men, but when Lieutenant Balfour of the Madras Artillery wrote to the Madras Engineers and the Hertfordshires asking for help, troops were unquestioningly got under arms. Anstruther was a bright and popular officer, the life and soul of the party (a school friend remembered him as ‘a little, red-haired boy’ who grew into ‘a great, hulking, noisy, drunken but clever fellow’) who only days before had celebrated his thirty-third birthday in the mess. Captain Pears of the Madras Engineers, who was busy fortifying Josshouse Hill, had been a close friend during their training at the East India Company’s military seminary at Croydon in South London. Search parties were sent out in clear defiance of Governor Burrell, who feared a harsh response might upset the islanders. No house, he had ordered, was to be entered during the search without good cause for suspicion. It was an order that might have been issued in hunting for the Governor’s pet donkey! A squadron of boats weighed anchor in the hope of catching any vessel that might whisk Anstruther off the island. Later in the day, two Chinese witnesses confirmed British fears: they had seen the captain being carried away in the direction of Sinkong harbour, the shortest sea route to Ningbo. [10]
By evening, Sinkong was awash with soldiers incensed at the dastardly kidnap of an officer and intent on retribution. They slept in a temple and at first light took hostage the richest-looking man they could find and marched him back to Tinghae in the teeming rain. The other search parties meanwhile were discovering that the islanders were in no mood to submit meekly to British rule. In the valley of Lahoo, which had so far remained unvisited by troops, a mob of more than a thousand men armed with farming implements dogged a search party of just sixteen soldiers, beating gongs and making threats. With just three hundred rounds of ammunition between them, it looked as if the party might simply be overrun and massacred if they dared open fire. After a tense stand-off outside a temple it was agreed that the villagers would draw back if the British left come dawn. It was only by a hair’s breadth that a great deal of blood was not shed on both sides. Two weeks had passed since Gützlaff had read out Governor Burrell’s proclamation to the coastal villages, time enough for word to filter through to farmers like these in the interior. The governor, utterly unfamiliar with Chinese ways — he had been serving as a commandant in Ceylon for the past four years, and the Sinhalese were such different people — had not expected such a flat refusal to obey him. The suggestion that a warship be sent to shell the prefectural capital Ningbo into rubble if Anstruther were not released was turned down: while HMS Blenheim was quite capable of such a feat, the governor did not have the authority to wreak such destruction while the Elliots were in the north negotiating with the emperor’s representatives. Yet still, despairing of winning over the islanders by peaceful means and with a growing realisation that his shilly-shallying lay at the root of their defiance, Burrell decided it was time to show force. In a sudden change of mood he abandoned his policy of conciliation and opted instead for what he understood best — military muscle. [11]
And so a force of more than one hundred armed men set out for Lahoo that evening, and by four the next morning they had possession of the villages where the Chinese had been
in open revolt. A headquarters was established in a temple while the inhabitants slept. When they awoke to find their valley under British occupation, they began to sound gongs as had been agreed. The buglers in reply sounded the call to action, and as the villagers emerged with their hoes and rakes the British viciously beat them to the ground. After an hour or two, some sixty prisoners had been taken and were sat tied together by their pigtails. A notice was read aloud accusing the bemused Chinese of having rebelled against Queen Victoria, and the ringleaders were whipped. The most important-looking were marched off to Tinghae as hostages, the detachment marched to a nearby village which had similarly dared to resist a search party looking for Captain Anstruther, and there it continued the muscular assertion of British rule. [12]
As Tinghae’s prison began to fill with insurgents awaiting interrogation, far away in Peking the emperor was reading reports from his mandarins on the Zhejiang mainland gleefully boasting of their very own haul of captives. Besides Captain Anstruther and the comprador Bu Dingbang, there were two dozen Indian and European soldiers and sailors and a white woman whose name the mandarins could best render as Yannanabu. To her friends on Chusan she was Anne Noble. [13]
Anne, a captain’s wife, had sailed from Tyneside a year earlier aboard a brig named the Kite, stopping at Bordeaux to pick up a cargo of wine. The ship’s mate was one Mr Witts, and the sailors beneath him revelled in suitably Dickensian names — Henry Twizell, Pellew Webb, William Wombwell. The rest of the crew was typically cosmopolitan for the time — an Italian, a Filipino, ten lascars, and an Indian cook. In Madras the Kite had been requisitioned as a transport for the China expedition and had dropped anchor in Tinghae harbour the day the city fell. There she had lain until September, when she was sent to accompany a survey of the Yangtze estuary, carrying a dozen marines and ship’s boys from all over the British Isles. Anne herself — a gaunt redhead just twenty-six years old — had given birth at sea, was now nursing a five-month-old son, Ralph, and was once more pregnant. Two days’ sailing from Chusan, dysentery had struck the Kite with a vengeance, and soon a third of the crew was either dead or seriously ill. Maybe this contributed to what happened next. Instead of making port, the Kite struck an unseen sandbank with frightening violence. Turned sideways now to a strong tide, she keeled over. Anne heard her husband’s last words, warning her to hold on, but saw no more of him. Both were thrown overboard along with everyone else on deck before they could fetch their child, asleep below in his cot. The others, many weak with dysentery, scrambled into the rigging or clambered onto the masts and yards. Anne caught hold of an iron bar, Mr Witts’ little pet dog quivering on her breast. ‘But at last I was obliged to put it off,’ she would recall. ‘Oh! had it been my child I would have died rather a thousand times.’ [14]
Somebody managed to right a lifeboat, and it was into this that Anne was dragged by the leg. For hours she shouted and screamed to the figures on the masts to find her husband and baby, and when the wreck vanished from sight she just sat like a statue, unable to cry any more. Her husband had become the third of his family to drown at sea. The tide turned in the afternoon and brought the lifeboat back within view of the wreck. She was submerged but for one mast. Three times in all the boat drifted back on the tide, her crew unable without oars or sail to manoeuvre her. The third time, there were no more figures clinging to the yardarms. Anne was wearing only the thin gown she had had on that morning and was unshod. They had no food or water. So even when the boat that spotted and picked them up turned out to be Chinese rather than British they were grateful for their deliverance. Soon, though, they were handed over to a patrol of the humiliated Green Standards. The soldiers beat Anne, put a chain around her neck, and force-marched her and the others to a town where her wedding ring was stolen from her hand. Separated from the men, she was made to walk in the rain filthy and barefoot past jeering crowds, her only comfort an unshakable faith that God would not forsake her: even if she were to be killed, she could look forward to seeing her husband and child once more. One week after the disaster, she was put in a bamboo cage. It was so small that her nose touched her knees. When eventually it was shipped to England to be displayed at the United Service Institution, the Devonport Telegraph reported its dimensions: 2’8” long, 1’6” wide, 2’4” tall. In this, Anne was carried to Ningbo. [15]
Although she was unaware, the Kite’s crew had all been picked up by passing junks — all, that is, but her husband and baby son. At first the survivors were treated tolerably well, but one by one they too were handed over to the local soldiery. Alone or in small groups, these twenty-six half-naked men were led in chains across the flat farmland, spat at by crowds during the day, tethered to posts at night, and exhibited in cages. Well-to-do men and women in silks came to look at the prisoners as if they were a freak show. Two marines were beaten to death by their guards, their corporal left near insensible, while townspeople acted out how their eyes, tongues and noses were sure to be cut off.
Reaching the prison attached to the city magistracy in Ningbo, Anne met with Bu Dingbang, the kidnapped comprador, who interpreted and acted as an unofficial maître d’hôtel, and with Captain Anstruther who as the senior officer took responsibility for the prisoners’ welfare. Clearly regarded by the mandarins as a man of some import, Anstruther arranged clothing and food, and doctors for the sick (though he could not help the badly beaten corporal of marines who lay in his cage soiled from dysentery, maggots crawling about him, until he was blessed with death). Anne was given two women to attend her (one brought a little boy who cried incessantly, the other a dirty little girl) and a room beside the captain’s, albeit just a small dirty cell with scarcely a roof above the open rafters. Besides the tiny cage, in which she was still forced to sleep, her furniture consisted of a stool, a table and an oil lamp. Soon she was honoured with a bedstead. The mandarin who oversaw her incarceration would sometimes ask her to dine with him, pressing her to tell and retell how she lost her family and asking how closely she was related to Queen Victoria. [16]
As the weeks passed, a secret channel of communication was opened between the prisoners and Chusan by ‘an ugly vagabond’ of a Chinaman whom the British dubbed Blondel de Westa. Causing a diversion by splashing water at his gawping onlookers, Anstruther would pass Blondel letters which would find their way to Tinghae. By and by, parcels began to arrive: clothing for Anne and for her baby son (of whose death the British had yet to hear), shoes, a Bible, wine, ale, a case of gin and $300 to buy food from the guards. A gift of soap never arrived, and it was wondered sarcastically whether the Chinese had eaten it, given that they did not blush at eating far worse. Anstruther asked for a copy of Gibbon’s Decline & Fall, some shirts, a concealed knife and a steel pen and paper, and soon he was bartering drawings for improved conditions. At his captors’ request he sketched a steamship, drew portraits of Queen Victoria, maps of England, and of London with all its famous sights.42 One day, a savoury stew was sent to him as thanks for a portrait of a local mandarin. It was delicious. Not knowing what was in it, Anstruther looked at the servant who had brought it and asked ‘quack, quack, quack?’ to which the man shook his head and replied: ‘bow, wow, wow.’ [17]
Shuttling incognito between Ningbo and Tinghae, Blondel de Westa briefed the British on the situation in the gaol. Of the guards, most were friends of his and could be bought over. The prison sat close by a river, and the boat owners were poor and easily bribed. Even Ningbo’s magistrate had a price: he owed a vast sum to the government and was known to be near bankruptcy. In return for rescuing the prisoners, Blondel asked only that a kinsman of his be allowed to remove his remaining stock from the family timber-yard in Tinghae — cold weather was by now forcing the garrison to burn any fuel it could find, even to the point of dismantling houses and temples. But Blondel de Westa was, after all, a Chinese and a turncoat, and Captain Anstruther’s opinion was sought by secret letter. He wrote back, vetoing the plan: he himself might easily escape, but this would mean severe pr
ivation for the others and possible retaliation against the pregnant Anne Noble. Her condition would make any escape attempt exceedingly dangerous. Even if the expendable Indian sailors were left to suffer whatever fate awaited them, the captain wrote, either all the Europeans needed to escape or none. Blondel’s plan was out of the question. To console himself, Anstruther requested some brandy and cheroots, the Artillerist’s Manual and Hutton’s Mathematics, and took to using the prison walls as a chalkboard to advance his study of ballistics. [18]
As letters from the prisoners and communiqués from their captors began to arrive in Tinghae, the British were provoked into responses guaranteed to infuriate mandarins trained in more circumspect language. An official reply to a communiqué from Urgungga, the governor of Zhejiang province, concluded in no uncertain terms:
You call yourself a great nation, yet it is truly unworthy of the name to behave like this. If so much as one hair of the prisoners’ heads is harmed, then officers and men of this nation shall pour forth a righteous vengeance, wiping out the guilty and the innocent alike! [19]
The sentiment was understandable, but the British had unintentionally shown their hand with their frantic insistence that Anne, Anstruther and the rest remain unharmed. The Chinese for the first time knew they had a weapon as powerful as any naval broadside — white hostages. Urgungga answered swiftly, spelling out his new demands: if the British wished to see their countrymen released, the emperor’s mercy might be petitioned on one condition — the British must leave Chusan. With autumn drawing in and living conditions in Tinghae worsening, such an offer was beginning to sound reasonable.
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