All the Tea in China

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  All commerce and all communication with authority shall be carried out through the merchants of the Hong.

  Smuggling and the giving or taking of credit are forbidden.

  All ships must anchor, unload and load at Whampoa, thirteen miles below the City.

  From the moment that we dropped our Pilot at the mouth of the Hooghly our voyage seemed to bear a charmed life. Every wind was in our favour and of the right force, every line cast overboard brought in a large and succulent fish, and our rate of passage was such that the Captain seemed often almost benevolent in his demeanour, despite Blanche’s protracted headaches. Taking the perilous Malacca Strait without the least trouble – indeed, without shortening sail by a stitch – we found another favourable wind which sped us north and a little east at a splendid rate of knots. Captain Knatchbull appeared on deck precisely twenty minutes before the masthead sighted land – the Island of Hainan – then, without troubling to open his telescope, he gave a grunt of self-approval and vanished below. For all his faults, he was an inspired navigator. This made the crew admire him, although he had forfeited all claim to their affections. In the event, we raised Lin-Tin in the unheard-of time of eighteen days out of Calcutta. Grog was served out to all the fo’c’sle people and they romped and skylarked almost as cheerily as they had in the days before the dreadful Martha Washington affair. Almost but not quite. The more thoughtless and carefree lads seemed to be quite themselves again but Tom Transom and the other older salts were subdued and concerned, while Sean O’Casey, the Irish, professed to have some inner presage of disaster. This gift is not uncommon amongst folk of Celtic blood. The Doctor, too, muttered as he worked, although his concoctions, now that he had fresh Indian spices and herbs to conjure with, seemed to make memory a liar. He dedicated himself to teasing my appetite – which has always been small – into an interested state with ever new delicacies.

  Before going up the Pearl River to Whampoa, where the Eight Rules said that we must unload and load, and, later, by boat to the European Factories and the Hongs, we put in at Macao, a lovely island, in order to learn the going prices of the various grades of the drug, the latest edicts of the Lord of the World sitting in his Court of Heaven, and to smarten the ship before proceeding to Lin Tin and Whampoa. Macao was enchanting: the Portuguese had been there for more than two centuries and their absurd baroque architecture seemed to grow naturally out of that Oriental soil. Our first view of it was a charming little bay with a crescent of old white houses fringing its waterfont and above them a maze of houses, churches and monasteries of every size and shape and style you can imagine. Highest above all were some ancient and imposing forts: there were cannon there still, but now only used, I was told, for ceremonial saluting.

  This delightful place was the centre of European society in the Treaty Coast, for no families could go up to the Factories, nor could the merchants themselves inhabit the Factories except in the shipping season – that is to say, when the south-west Monsoon, which had sped us here, was blowing out.

  It fell to Peter, the most junior watch-keeping officer, to go ashore and carry out the bribery necessary to obtain a pass for the ship from the resident Chinese official, also to buy a landing-permit which cost thirteen shillings and fourpence – although it cost quite that sum again to be passed into the presence of the scoundrel who issued it. We were carried ashore in an “egg-boat”, a curious craft some eight feet long and six feet in the beam and half-roofed over with a hemisphere of matting. It was propelled by two bold and beddable girls wearing, if you can believe it, trowsers of some blue material. I asked Peter whether he thought they were chaste, to which he replied, cryptically, that they were of the female sex, a fact which was palpable.

  We had leave until midnight and, our tiresome business done, we strolled along the Praya Grande, where there were many ancient and crumbling buildings and many lovely, strolling ladies. The Portuguese ones were accompanied by ancient, crumbling dueñas, but the English ones, although not so desirable, walked in pairs, glancing at us boldly. They seemed to be, for the most part, the neglected wives of merchants who were up at Whampoa or Canton, and impatient, in that tepid climate, with the enforced separation.

  Peter carried me off to dinner with an old acquaintance of his, a strange, ugly little Irish with white curls and old-fashioned spectacles like those of my father. He had been in the Orient longer than I had been alive and was a painter much esteemed. His name was Chinnery and his talk was copious and enchanting. We were just becoming agreeably drunk when one of his servants came in and gabbled. It seemed that our ship was, inexplicably, flying the “Blue Peter” from the fore-topmast-head: this flag is blue with a square white centre and it means that everyone of that ship’s company must be back aboard instantly, for it is about to sail. This was vexing, because I had promised myself that I would console a merchant’s wife or two before-midnight, and baffling, because I had heard the Captain dismiss our Ladrones pilot until the next afternoon’s tide.

  When we were outside Chinnery’s house, climbing into a man-drawn vehicle, Peter pointed at the heavens. There was, indeed, a strange look to them, a kind of livid light which changed the colours of everything about; there was also an uncomfortable feeling to the air and a great stillness.

  We scrambled across the “brow” between our ship and the sampan alongside it, under a glare from the Captain. In an instant the men at the sweeps were bending to it with a will and we were amongst a flock of vessels making best speed towards the open sea. I knew enough by now to keep out of the way. The men at the sweeps were pulling like galley-slaves and needed no whip to urge them. “Typhoon,” snapped Peter as he ran past me, “get oilskins – and get below!” I got both.

  Later I crept out to the break of the poop, for nothing seemed to be happening. On the poop stood the Captain and all three mates. Captain Knatchbull and Peter were discussing something heatedly, the First Mate was growling ignorantly and the Second was looking white but holding his peace.

  (Afterwards, I pieced together the burden of their argument: a typhoon in the Northern Hemisphere moves north, you see, and rotates anti-clockwise. The western side or half-circle is navigable but, clearly, blows south – dead foul for us. The eastern semi-circle is dangerous, for the wind there blows at unimaginable speeds – few have attempted to measure these speeds and very few have survived to record them. But that side blows northwards, towards the “country-trade” part of the Coast where, sooner or later, we wished to be. The Captain’s great experience and insanity told him that, by a dashing use of sail, we could make use of the south-western part of the rotatory storm, claw ourselves free on its eastern side and use the residual fringe winds to carry us safely north.)

  I did not, thank God, understand anything of what was said, but I heard the Captain close the discussion with a roar of command, saw Peter throw up his hands in a gesture of despair and was jostled by the First Mate as he thrust by me, eyes terrified, to give orders for making sail. The sky was now a rich reddish-brown, full of bizarre menace. I crept below again. There was some cold food in the cabin but I could not touch it: I confess that I was alarmed.

  This alarm was nothing to my feelings when the wind first hit us: the impact was such that I thought we had struck a great rock. But the blow was from behind: the ship leaped forward like a maddened horse, I could hear the water roaring against the skin of the ship, the yelling, then the screaming of the tortured rigging and above all the demented bellow of the prodigious wind. Again and again I was sure that this was the climax, that nothing could exceed such violence, no force on earth make a more deafening clamour, but again and again I was proved wrong as the clamour grew more intolerable. At last, insane with the noise and the terror, I clapped my hands to my ears and rushed on deck, determined to confront death sooner than later – and not in that rat-trap of a cabin. As I emerged the hellish din was heightened by an explosion – or so it seemed – as the fore staysail burst into tatters. We lost steerage-way, yawed, and in
an instant we were pooped by a cliff-like wave which had been pursuing us. A thousand tons of grey water thundered the length of the ship, lifting me as though I were a fragment of paper and burying me oceans deep. I knew that I was a dead man, there was no question of it, my eardrums cracked, water spurted into my nostrils and, as I opened my mouth to scream, my lungs were instantly so gorged that I could feel them begin to split with the pressure. In the few instants it took to die the whole of my past life flashed in review across my inner eye: this was a disgusting experience.

  I awoke in hell, which did not surprise me, all things considered. A black, glistening demon, ten feet high, was tormenting me excruciatingly, crushing my agonised ribs with his great hands. I spewed a gallon of sea-water at him. He turned me over and attacked my chest from behind. It was intolerable – and I knew that the torments would continue through all eternity. I vomited another gallon.

  “Din’t eat yo’ nice supper, did you, Maz Cleef,” said the Doctor reproachfully, making me sit up and forcing my head between my knees. “Don’ tell me different: I seen you brung up nothing but sea-water. Might a gone to glory on a empty stomach; ain’t no sense in that now.”

  As my eyes cleared and the shards of my wits reassembled themselves I became amused at the sense of disappointment that I felt. I began to cry, then to giggle idiotically. The Doctor smacked me hard across the face and I sank into a happy sleep.

  What had happened, it seemed, was this: the great mass of water had wedged me into the bowsprit-rigging – in the angle between the martingale-backstays and the dolphin-striker, to be exact – and, as the ship stood on her tail after the wave had passed, gravity had thrown me onto the fo’c’sle, along the deck, where I caromed off the mainmast bitts and fetched up against the galley. The Doctor had plucked me inside, just before the next pooping.

  “Were many drowned?” I asked when I could speak again.

  “Of course not,” said Peter. “Everyone else had the sense to be lashed to something stout – or to stay below when told to. Do your bruises hurt much?”

  “Yes” I said. “Very much.”

  “Good,” he said. But he said it with a kindly grin.

  Strangely enough, I slept through the last of the wind’s fury and, two mornings later, went on deck to snuff the wonderfully clean air. It must, in fact, have been almost the end of the morning for the comprador was standing behind the Captain holding the mahogany box which contained his quadrant (for our Captain did not hold with the new-fangled sextants) and the ship’s chronometer hung about his neck. (The sun is “shot” through the “hog-yoke” as Lubbock called the quadrant in his rough Yankee way, at noon, you understand.)

  The sails were backed and, as Peter called out the time of noon, the Captain fiddled with the quadrant and soon gave Peter some figures. Peter scrambled to the chart-room and was back in less than a minute, handing the Captain a slip of paper which he gazed at with what seemed a kind of satisfaction.

  “I’ll have a sounding, if you please, Mister,” he growled.

  Lubbock – it was in fact his watch but Peter was usually on deck when there was a chance of a sun-sight because Lubbock’s arithmetic was that of the beasts of the field – roared his orders.

  “Transom, there, fly the blue pigeon! Smart you now!”

  In a trice the deep-sea lead was out of its locker abaft the fo’c’sle and Transom was whirling it about his head. (Why “swinging the lead” has come to be a term for idling is a mystery to me for, even with the little six-pound hand-lead and twenty fathoms of line in a flat calm, taking soundings is an arduous and testing work enough; and casting and coiling in the full deep-sea lead again and again, while balanced in the chains in foul weather and, perhaps, darkness is a labour for Hercules himself.)

  Transom sang out numbers of fathoms which now I forget but which seemed to gratify the Captain.

  “Arm it!” he cried. Transom ran to the locker and stuffed some mutton-fat into the hollow of the lead and hove it again.

  The Captain thumbed out the resulting mess and sniffed it, felt it, even chewed a morsel of it. He now seemed uncommonly elated and positively capered to the chartroom.

  “Happy as a dog with two cocks,” growled Lubbock.

  “Why?” I asked civilly.

  He shrugged. I suspect he did not know. The Captain emerged and gave Peter a course which Peter retailed to the steersman and soon there was much bracing of yards and hauling upon this and that rope until we were heading almost due west, with the wind on our starboard beam.

  Within an hour we had raised an island, Namoa, which lies in the Bay of Swatow and was, so Peter assured me, a capital place for the selling of illegal opium of poor quality. When I say that this island is quite three hundred sea miles north of Macao you will begin to understand the ferocity of the typhoon which had driven us there in one day and a half.

  “What a splendid seaman our Captain is, to be sure!” I murmured admiringly.

  “Yes indeed, Karli,” said Peter, smiling at me in a friendly way.

  When we reached the anchorage at Namoa I was alarmed to see two large junks, clearly men-of-war and heavily armed, riding inshore of us. One flew an enormous silken pennant, embroidered with dragons: this, Peter told me, denoted a petty Admiral of the Chinese Navy.

  “Will they fight?” I asked bravely.

  Lubbock, who was leaning over the rail of the poop and had heard, answered for him.

  “Will they fuck,” he said in his coarse fashion.

  No sooner were we swinging with the tide than a scow put off from the side of that junk which bore the imposing flag. Plainly to be seen in it, clothed in great finery and puffing at a long pipe, was a grossly fat man, surrounded by well-dressed servants who fanned him incessantly. In his cap was the button of a mandarin. I did not, at that time, know the insignia of the different grades of mandarin and at this time I have forgotten them.

  Peter whistled.

  “The Clam-Jandrum himself,” he said, “Governor of the whole district.”

  “Has he come to arrest the ship?”

  “Not he. Watch the Captain.”

  The Captain was at the gangway, clad in his best uniform and flanked by two miraculously-scrubbed seamen and, behind them, his two servant boys. The representative of the Court of Heaven was prised out of his armchair in the sternsheets of the scow by his rattan-hatted servants and our Captain himself, having bared his head, assisted the great bulk aboard. The party proceeded to the cabin with measured tread. A moment later I was sent for: I was to bring the schroff and a ledger. Any ledger.

  In the cabin the mandarin reclined on the sofa at full length, sucking wetly at one of the Captain’s biggest cigars and disdainfully sipping a tumbler of gin. The Captain was standing, a servant on each side. The schroff began to interpret.

  “Fat old pig say why you doing here, no at Canton? He say he must cut off all heads by mercy of Emperor.”

  “Tell him,” said the Captain, “that we have been blown here by terrible winds and that all we ask is to rest a while and to buy, with permission, some fresh food.”

  “He say Emperor’s mercy bigger than all seas, perhaps give water, sell one-two pigs, one-two ducks. Then you go, chop-chop.”

  “Tell him his world-famed generosity reflects the infinite compassion of the Celestial One himself,” said the Captain, grinding his teeth soundlessly.

  The mandarin made a wonderfully elegant gesture with his third finger and all his people left the cabin. The Captain made an economic gesture with his head and one eyebrow and all his people left except for the schroff and me.

  “Fat old pig say how many chests Western shit you get here in boat, Captain?”

  “How many, Mr Van Cleef?” asked the Captain, staring at me meaningfully. “About a hundred and fifty, I fancy?”

  I ran a diligent finger down the columns of a ledger-page which were, if the truth must be told, devoted to the sales of pigtail tobacco from the slop-chest.

  “One hundred
and forty nine, Sir,” I said at last, brightly.

  The schroff translated at such length and with such unction that I became certain that his words, although they sounded like a small dog being sick, meant something like: “Idiotic young officer pretends only 150 chests but I, being a poor man, supporting many grandparents who display an undignified reluctance to die, throw myself upon the richly-embroidered slippers of the august one, confident of his famous generosity to the poor and ancestor-encumbered, and declare that from my hunger-shrivelled breast I have plucked a number closer to three hundred.”

  The mandarin drew an exquisite little abacus from the depths of a sleeve and made its jade and cornelian beads flicker with a silver-encased fingernail until he had worked out, one supposed, some little problem of percentage, such as used to trouble us lads at school. (The Chinese and the Arabians will one day inherit the earth because of their mastery of the abacus, mark my words.)

  Fatigued with this, he let the abacus lie on his lap. No, this is not accurate, for he had no lap. He let the little instrument lie on the point of one knee, where the splendid folds of his belly had left, as if by design, just enough space for it.

  The Captain squinted at the position of the abacus-beads on their golden wires, nodded courteously and went to his desk. He counted certain guineas into a bag and left the bag absently on a chair. The Chinaman pulled out a tiny whistle of gold from his infinitely resourceful sleeve and blew upon it. His secretary slipped in, bowed with different degrees of obsequiousness to everyone present except the schroff and vanished. He had not, it seemed to me, approached the chair whereon the guineas lay, but they were gone.

  “Fat old pig say now he sorry to take sunshine of his face from your blinded eyes but too much light not good for common men. Means he now fucking off. Also, on order of Celestial One, must seize any Western Ocean strong waters in boat. Think he wants get pissy-pissy.”