8. We live among the dead
By late September of 1840, the fine body of soldiers that had landed in victory only in July had been reduced to a mere shadow. As one naval surgeon recalled: ‘Even those we do see under arms have more the appearance of animated corpses than any other thing to which I can liken them.’ Of more than 3,500 fighting men only 800 could be mustered. From amongst the Cameronians, scarcely a single man was fit enough to go foraging for food. Some of the high-caste Hindu troops were actually starving to death, unable to cook when weakened by disease and incapable of eating anything prepared by a man of lower caste. The lack of fresh food had got so bad that the spongy gums and bruises of scurvy had begun to show. The cure was understood in the navy, but the army had no tradition of supplementing its land diet with lemon juice and no army had ever starved to death like this. Already more than one hundred soldiers had been buried on an acre of muddy ground below Josshouse Hill. The Royal Navy had taken to burying its dead on the tiny Grave Island in the harbour (rather fittingly, the Chinese called it ‘the Rat’, after its rodent-like outline). Bodies were forever being rowed over to the sound of The Dead March, but funerals were now so frequent that firing parties had been forbidden and ceremonial curtailed. ‘Graves are forever open,’ wrote one Scot. ‘And those who assist in paying the last duties to their ill-fated companions look as if they would soon follow.’ ‘I would rather spend five years in Bengal on half batta than as many months in this most accursed place,’ wrote another. [1]
The regimental hospitals set up in Tinghae’s public buildings were a heartrending scene as the life of the garrison ebbed inexorably away. Standing in the southeast corner of the city, the former pawnshop that was now a hospital for the Cameronians was crowded with row after row of soldiers, from young drummer-boys to old warhorses, all of them at different stages of dysentery, typhus and cholera and many lying beyond help in their own filth. Men suffering from bloody fluxes did not die wracked with convulsions or with much screaming out in pain. They lay of their own choice close by the open privies, too debilitated to walk far at the constant whim of their bowels. Their glands would enlarge, their feet and abdomen become swollen. Their face would become pale and puffy, with bloodless lips and sunken eyes. If primitive treatments such as calomel, opium, leeches or blood-letting could not tip the balance in favour of the patient he would become emaciated, and his stomach would retract. With a crystal clear intellect he would finally sink and pass away in silence, as if he had fallen asleep from weariness. The results of post-mortems were shocking: the flesh of men’s intestines was so perished that they practically fell apart in the surgeons’ hands. This was not a matter of dulcet et decorum est, pro patria mori. The regiment’s Color Serjeant John Henderson wrote to his parents in their Lanarkshire village with palpable sadness:
We are all tired of war. It might read well in a newspaper at a fireside in Biggar, but what a lot of misery and desolation in this city. [2]
Governor Burrell grumbled that too many of the Cameronians who had died had been allowed to join up underage — they were scarcely out of childhood. In return, it was pointed out that he had long had it in his power to billet them in the many empty houses in the city instead of in tents upon a hillside exposed to drenching dews by night and broiling sun by day. For all the regiments, guard duty and parades were carried out in heavy, woollen uniforms in temperatures nearing one hundred degrees. But for the Cameronians especially, encamped on a hill over a mile from the harbour and with too few Indian camp followers, the daily strain of fetching supplies from their transport ships — theirs alas was the rotten meat and the maggoty biscuit — had taken its toll. By the time the regiment left Chusan barely one of its teenage soldiers would be left alive, and there was anger that they had died through sheer incompetence, sacrificed for fear of inflaming Tinghae’s residents. Back in Calcutta, where in Fort William the Cameronians had been stationed before leaving for China, The Englishman adopted a scathing line: the policy pursued at Chusan was inexplicable. Burrell had asserted authority over deserted streets, had encamped his men in unwholesome marshes, and seemed to prefer that they fall victims to disease ‘rather than that the enemy should suffer any injury!’ Chusan, The Englishman suggested sarcastically, ought to be rechristened ‘Walcheren Secundus’ after the Dutch island where thousands of British troops had died of disease during the Napoleonic wars. [3]
There was urgent debate as to what was behind the high death toll. Nothing was known of bacteria, viruses or amoebae, and it would be half a century before the riddle of malaria was solved. Even officers, who were better nourished than the rank and file, had died, so poor diet alone could not explain the deaths. Many of the top brass, including Governor Burrell himself, were chronically ill. Gützlaff, even with God’s protection, was suffering from fever, perhaps because his residence backed onto the stagnant lagoon. It was noticed by the more keen observers that the islanders had a strong aversion to drinking unboiled water, preferring instead a weak infusion of green tea, but few drew the now-obvious conclusion that it was mostly bad water that was to blame. [4]
For the British fighting man of the 1840s, drinking water was pumped for preference from rivers and streams, but if none were to be found then other sources had to do. With few suitable springs on the island, the garrison had no choice but to drink stagnant water pumped by hand from the paddy into storage butts. Even the wells were no better, being mere receptacles for surface run-off rather than sources of clean groundwater (the men of the 1793 embassy had noticed as much). The unexpected invasion of July and the flight of the valley’s farmers had cut short the annual draining of the rice fields in preparation for the harvest, and then thousands of army-issue boots had trodden the maturing crop into something resembling marshland. This liquid, contaminated with human faeces that had been spread as fertiliser, was drunk unboiled. Men dehydrated from diarrhoea had only more of the same to slake their thirst. From the first pangs, the surgeon Edward Cree attributed his chronic sickness to the ‘dysenteric fluid’ he was obliged to take — ‘it stinks and is white and flatulent’ — but there was nothing else to be had. Sixteen years later in the Crimea, still suffering from the dysentery he had contracted on Chusan, Cree would eventually be invalided out of the Royal Navy. Even the Chinese were suffering — by unhappy coincidence, the summer of 1840 was, after 1822, the worst year for epidemic disease in recent memory. [5]
As for malaria, it was surmised with some justification that exhalations from marshy ground and stagnant water were responsible. Some suspected invisible parasites exposed when soil was excavated; others pointed to Chusan’s granite rocks, to the filth on Tinghae’s streets, to lightning, to rotting timber, to the mudflats exposed at low tide, the imperfectly buried dead of the Chinese tombs, the stench of the bodies burned below Josshouse Hill, even to the samshoo the men drank to dull their senses for a while. Those few officers who enjoyed the luxury of a mosquito net did not do so because of any insight into the transmission of plasmodium parasites but solely to spare them the pain of being bitten by the island’s giant insects: ‘The animals at Chusan are from Brobdingnag!’ joked Captain Pears in a letter home, while another officer complained that they were so numerous at night that he awoke looking like a man with smallpox. With no understanding of malaria’s true cause, the garrison knew it simply had to await the arrival of winter before cases would begin to fall. [6]
As the weather closed in there was still little prospect of fresh food. The medical advice reaching Governor Burrell was now unanimously in favour of moving the men out of their tents, which were not up to keeping out the cold and damp. At long last, Burrell decided it was time to act on his threat to requisition empty houses. On the first day of October, the Cameronians finally moved down the slope of their hill and into the city. Soon the Hertfordshires too had occupied deserted houses on Tinghae’s main street, and the Bengal Volunteers followed. Window-glass being almost unknown in China, men had to be content with paper soaked in oil,
a substitute which rapidly dissolved in the rain to allow the cold north wind to blow in. [7]
Once word got out that the British were finally breaking into their homes, a trickle of claimants found its way to the magistracy to complain. Plenty of warning, they were reminded, had been given but they had chosen to forfeit their properties. With many officers deciding that the houses allotted to them were simply unfit to live in — some were little better than tumbledown shacks — some of the more opulent property owners were lucky enough to receive rent of a few dollars each month. Under orders from Governor Burrell, subalterns were limited to renting a single room, and captains a maximum of two, to prevent the wealthy from enjoying better accommodation than their superiors. Yet with grim determination disease went on killing even after the regiments were moved out from under canvas. It was a cruel disappointment. By the end of October a dozen men or more were dying every day. With palpable sadness, on November 6th Karl Gützlaff recorded a grim nadir: fifteen more men had passed away on a single day: ‘Indeed we live among the dead,’ he wrote. [8]
The Chinese practice of having one’s coffin made while still alive, and then stored without a trace of ghoulishness in one’s own home, had at first provided the garrison with plenty of hefty firewood. Then, as deaths mounted, orders had been issued not to burn them. Now, when the coffins ran out, bodies were placed in grave pits with a minimum of ceremony. The islanders watched these hurried burials, and word reached all the way to the emperor in Peking. ‘They showed very little compassion for the corpses of whites,’ wrote one witness, ‘and just cast aside the blacks who had died of disease.’ What more evidence of the inferiority of these barbarians was needed than their disregard for the dead? Transports were requisitioned to evacuate the chronically sick — two to India with the worst cases, and two more to Manila. Conditions aboard were terrible, with many too weak to climb into their hammocks and lying instead on decks awash with excrement. In Manila the authorities refused these plague ships permission to land, and they headed instead for the British fleet in the South China Sea. By the time all four vessels reached suitable ports, half of the 372 Cameronians aboard them had died, and one third of the Hertfordshires. By the end of the year, one in five of the garrison landed in July was dead, to say nothing of the anonymous Indian servants who went to their graves in simple shrouds followed by crocodiles of shivering mourners. Less than one third of the original 900 Cameronians were still on Chusan, and most of these lay sick in the ill-adapted pawnshop that passed for a regimental hospital. When the space allotted in the muster book to the names of men no longer drawing their pay ran out, somebody gummed in a strip of foolscap. When this was full they started to write on its back. The list finally ended at entry no. 208. Under the heading ‘Remarks, explaining the cause’ was entered simply the word ‘died’, while below came columns of unbroken dittoes. [9]
9. A Chinese Singapore
One Monday morning in late September, HMS Wellesley re-entered Tinghae’s crowded harbour with the British plenipotentiaries aboard. After six hours of talks on the foreshore of the Peiho with Qishan, the governor-general of the capital province of Zhili which surrounded Peking, Captain Elliot had accepted assurances that British demands — these boiled down to improved trading rights and recompense for the cost of the expedition and for the destroyed opium — would be listened to if he returned to Canton. Though Elliot had left satisfied that the meeting would bear fruit, Qishan had in fact conceded nothing — not on the possible cession of Chusan, nor on the sale of opium in Canton, and especially not on Palmerston’s wish for a fortune in compensation. [1]
The Chinese man on the street — then as now — was well attuned to subtle shifts emanating from Peking, and word of the peaceful interview at the Peiho soon trickled down to Zhejiang. The refractory barbarians appeared to have become a little submissive. Though deaths from disease still rose on Chusan, the food situation at least began to improve. At the start of October, two transports arrived laden with sheep and oxen. Before the month was out, men who had been surviving on reduced rations of salt meat would be riding buffaloes bareback through the streets of Tinghae. Four dozen head more would arrive in early November, it having been discovered that a small island off the Korean coast was home to vast herds of cattle, which were now stolen by the British despite their owners’ protests. Bum-boats began to enter the harbour to sell fowl to the Royal Navy. The arrival of junks from the mainland set the seal on the changed Chinese policy toward the British: they contained thirty head of oxen, eighty goats and six hundred chickens, a goodwill gift from a mandarin named Yilibu, the governor-general of the Yangtze River provinces of Jiangxi, Jiangsu and Anhui. [2]
Yilibu, by all accounts a rather kindly man in his late sixties, had been given a special commission by the emperor to travel to Ningbo to oversee the military response on the Zhejiang station. At first, he had been full of grand plans to unseat the barbarians. There could be no pitched sea battle, of that he was sure: even the pride of China’s maritime provinces — the ‘rice boats’ of Canton and the ‘weaver’s shuttle’ boats of Tong’an — were less than half the size of a modest British warship and could only carry eight small cannon without sinking. His forces would instead have two goals — burn the ships in Tinghae harbour, and massacre the troops in the city. He would launch feints to distract the British, he boasted, place fifth columnists in Tinghae, pick off their outposts, and then ‘tear open their belly’. [3]
On first reaching Ningbo, Commissioner Yilibu had ordered the casting of enormous new cannons. The men at his disposal amounted on paper to 2,000 infantry and 3,000 marines, which was certainly too few to launch his planned attack, but he was still awaiting the arrival of regular Green Standards from the inland provinces. So many thousands of soldiers might at first appear to have been a formidable force, but it is doubtful that the numbers were at all accurate, and even the translations ‘infantry’ and ‘marines’ are misleading: the Chinese called them yong and shuiyong — ‘braves’ and ‘water braves’ — and they were mostly farmers or fishermen conscripted from among the Tanka boat people who lived along the coast. The Qing practice of paying such men to fight had its risks: the local mandarins were, after all, arming people who in peacetime they would have thought of as undesirable vagabonds, and thus creating a pool of potential rebels for the future. But it was at least a cheap option, and one which avoided the need for Peking to fund a regular military response, always a slow and expensive process. [4]
As luck would have it, news had just at that moment reached Commissioner Yilibu that Elliot was prepared to talk peace in Canton, and he was spared the ignominy of certain failure. His gift of oxen, goats and chickens was the kind of generous treatment one could expect when one submitted to the emperor’s wishes. As for the mandarins who delivered this little fleet of Noah’s arks, they had been specially chosen for the task. Headed by Yilibu’s most trusted aide, and including a military man to cast an eye over the British force, they sailed back to Yilibu with their impression of the island and its occupiers. On November 1st, Yilibu addressed a proclamation to the natives of Chusan assuring them that the barbarians had been ordered to repair to Canton to have their complaints ‘soothed’. Once that little matter was concluded, he told the islanders, the barbarians would not tarry in Tinghae. For their part, the islanders should forget all about the rewards promised for severed heads. Instead, Yilibu insisted, they ought to go back to quietly ploughing their fields and studying their books: ‘If the barbarians do not distress you, you must no longer hunt out and seize them!’ [5]
Comforted by the news that the rebels were being pacified, Tinghae began to return to something approaching normality. Though the weather took a turn for the worse, with heavy rains turning unpaved roads to mud, a renewed sense of confidence settled on the city. The number of refugees returning increased daily, and people moved about amongst the troops and confidently opened up shop without fear of arrest. But however positive the news of a possible agreemen
t at a political level, the ongoing detention of Captain Anstruther, Anne Noble and the other prisoners remained unresolved. Just days after returning to Chusan from the negotiations in the north, Captain Elliot crossed Kintang Sound for a face-to-face meeting with Commissioner Yilibu to demand their immediate release. His optimistic offer to swap for Anstruther some one hundred junks that had been captured in Chusan’s waters was turned down, though a delegation of the junks’ captains themselves travelled to Ningbo to argue the case. Yilibu restated the Chinese position — if Elliot wished his friends back he must leave Chusan — while Elliot restated his — release the prisoners and then talks on Chusan could start. But Yilibu quite understandably did not trust the British, and the willingness of their highest officer to negotiate in person only convinced him of the importance of holding tight to his hostages: ‘This Anstruther,’ he informed Peking, ‘must be a man most intimately related to the barbarian chiefs for them to have no choice but to demand his release like this.’ [6]
Both sides agreed to observe a truce along the coast (though it proved somewhat wary) pending the Elliots’ sailing to Canton to continue the negotiations. The communications now arriving from the Chinese subtly changed: the word ‘barbarian’ disappeared, and Britain became an ‘honoured nation’. The price to be paid for such respectful addresses was the obligation to consider Yilibu’s proposal. On November 6th a memorandum was issued on the details of the truce. Occupied territory was defined as comprising all of Chusan and its nearby satellites (this technically included the Buddhist holy island of Putuoshan!), and it was from this provisionally British archipelago that Captain and Admiral Elliot sailed south a week later, bound for Canton. [7]
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