The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  The Chinese once revered the Yangtze dolphin – five-foot-long, silvery-coloured, bottled-nosed creatures that, it is said, have resisted evolution for twenty million years. Poets of the time were amazed at how gentle the creatures were, how they smiled and whistled, how they stood up in the water, breast-fed their young, seemed anthropomorphically charming. Dolphins appealed mightily to the mythmaking mind of the ancient Chinese. They called them ‘Yangtze Goddesses’, and the Song dynasty poets had a ready legend for their creation: it involved a slave-maiden who was being ferried across the river by a sex-starved boatman. He tried to rape her, she jumped into the water to preserve her dignity, God took pity on her and turned her into a white dolphin-goddess, while the boatman was tossed into the river and turned into a black finless porpoise which, also still found in the river today, is known in Chinese as a ‘Yangtze Pig’. But whether Goddess or Pig, these two cetaceans are both in dire danger today – the industrial filth of the river being one reason, the invention of the cruel rolling hook trawls another.

  Up until the late 1950s fishermen regarded the animals as simply too godlike to catch. If one turned up in their nets, they let it free. That was the rule, obeyed by all. But in 1958 Mao Zedong inaugurated the Great Leap Forward and declared that there were no more Heavenly Emperors and Dragon Kings: nothing was too revered for inclusion in the great maw of China's great Communist engine-work. Overnight, whatever protection with which history and myth had invested the Yangtze dolphin was peremptorily stripped away. As one Hong Kong journalist put it, almost overnight ‘the Goddess of the Yangtze became lunch’.

  Catching the animals turned out to be ridiculously easy, quite literally like shooting fish in a barrel. The rolling hook trawl was invented to make it easier still: on each line were scores of eight-inch iron hooks, set two or three inches apart. This line was trawled from behind a boat like the one that was now bobbing beside us. When a dolphin was snagged on one hook, it panicked, thrashed violently around and, instead of freeing itself (as might happen had there been only one hook), was promptly caught on a neighbouring hook and then by more and more until it was raked with slashes and cuts and was eventually dragged from the river bleeding to death from a thousand cuts. Baiji meat became swiftly abundant, and was to be found in the riverside markets costing only a few cents a pound. Leather factories opened to make goods from what little unslashed baiji skin was salvaged. Baiji oil was found to have magical healing properties for people with skin problems. And as the new trade flourished, so the number of dolphins in the river dropped dramatically, a tragedy for Chinese wildlife that makes the sad saga of the giant panda seem a triumph by comparison.

  Now there are said by biologists to be only 100 baiji left in the entire river, maybe 150. Did the fisherman feel responsible? I asked. He nodded, and he did indeed look contrite. I let him explain. ‘Back in the sixties we needed to eat. I took a lot of the dolphins out, and I sold them, or took the meat for my family. It didn't matter that we had once called them goddesses. We didn't care.

  ‘But then as the years went by they became more and more difficult to find. We all' – and here he gestured to the other fishermen, who had gathered their skiffs around his and were listening to him, nodding themselves – ‘we all slowly realized what was happening. We knew we were wiping them out. We were killing them off, and by doing so we were helping to kill the river. And soon our attitude changed. Every time a baiji came out, cut to pieces by the hooks, we felt we had lost a little more. So we stopped using these rolling hooks. We went back to nets. And if we ever find a baiji – and I haven't seen one for six or seven years now – we throw it back. It's the rule again.

  ‘Yangtze fishermen have good hearts, you know. We love this river. We love the fish. We love the dolphin and we revere her. But back then – back then it was very different. It was very difficult. Mao did some terrible things. We had to eat. We thought we had no choice. It was the dolphins, or it was our children. Which would you choose?’

  Lily and I walked silently back up the worn old stairway. I could tell she was cross with me. A few days before, in talking to her about the well-publicized lack of fish and wildlife in China's greatest river, I had made some remarks about how it all seemed due to greed and to China's utter and contemptuous disregard for her environment. Perhaps some of this was true. But what this old fisherman had said rang true as well. It seemed something of an explanation, and a very sad one at that. Lily looked balefully at me from time to time. I made a silent vow as we tramped on upward, something to the effect that judgements about China should not be lightly made. So I mumbled an apology, and Lily grinned.

  At the top of Small Jetty Street was a redbrick wall, much pitted with age. Behind it, on a small hillock, was the Zhenjiang Museum – a complex of rather ugly redbrick Victorian structures that had once been the British Consulate. Since 1861 this city had been a treaty port, a place where foreigners had been leased a concession in which to trade. The newcomers had been energetic: they built a waterworks and generating station – and, just as in Shanghai and the then Nanking and the forty-five other cities that were eventually to become treaty ports, they built clubs and courts (for both law and tennis) and established a newspaper. The quasi-western infrastructure wasn't quite enough, however, to assuage the boredom of those who lived and worked there. ‘I went to the silent street for a breath of air,’ wrote a Scandinavian called Rasmussen, who lived in Zhenjiang for many years, ‘and walked up and down the Bund, three hundred paces one way and three hundred paces back. To get a little change I walked up and down the only cross street to the south gate of the Concession, two hundred paces one way and two hundred paces back.’

  Britain, Germany, France and Austro-Hungary set up consulates in Zhenjiang. Jardines and Swires had their hulks moored in midriver, a terminal for their steamers; and Standard Oil of New York – Socony Vacuum, which was later to become Mobil Oil, and a company with formidably strong connections in Old China – had a farm of oil storage tanks. Japan put paid to most of this bustle and the relative comfort and prosperity when it captured the city in 1937; later, the Communists managed to finish it off. Few outsiders have lived in Zhenjiang since: the only foreigners I heard about while we were there were a couple of Algerians said to be working in a talcum powder factory.

  Behind the consulate walls, I had been told, lay a relic that would stir the hearts of any English schoolboy of my generation. I had wanted – for many years, in fact – to see it if indeed it was there: the anchor of the famous and (so all Britons of the time had been told) heroic Royal Navy vessel HMS Amethyst.

  I told Lily what I wanted, and suggested we might go to the museum to ask where the anchor might be found. She translated the vessel's name to herself – ‘Amethyst, how to say?’ – and then suddenly snorted with mock annoyance.

  ‘I know the ship. Of course! We call it the “Imperial Make-Trouble-Vessel”, what is the name? Purple Stone Hero, yes, that's it! We defeated it! All Chinese know the story. You came as pirates and we made you run! You were forced to leave a part of your precious ship behind, here in Zhenjiang. You destroyed a passenger ship on your way out. Killed many people. Yes, I had forgotten. We will find the piece you left behind here as proof. The anchor – you're right! It was a great humiliation for your precious British Empire.’

  I reeled slightly from this unexpected onslaught. Not that Lily was entirely correct. Nor entirely wrong, for that matter. The facts – or at least, the facts as presented to us as schoolchildren – had cast the whole affair in a very different light.

  His Majesty's Ship Amethyst was a sloop-cum-frigate of 1500 tons, and in 1949 – an exceptionally dangerous year, considering the vicious civil war going on between the Kuomintang and the Communists – she was assigned to a task on the Yangtze. It was nothing new for a foreign warship: for nearly a hundred years the slew of treaties that had been imposed on the war-weakened China had given a number of foreign countries – Britain, America, France and Italy among them – c
ertain rights on the river. They were allowed to steam their gunboats and corvettes and destroyers and frigates along every navigable mile of the river – the 1600 miles between the red buoy at Woosung and the rapids at Pingshan in Sichuan – and with all guns locked and loaded, for the purposes of protecting their own trade, their own interests and their own citizens.

  By today's standards it was a bizarre arrangement – as outlandish and unimaginable as, say, letting Japanese warships patrol today's Mississippi to protect a Honda plant in Hannibal, or allowing Chinese gunboats to sidle among the punts on the Isis to look out for the interests of Beijing students up at Oxford University. But in the late nineteenth century the Chinese were too debilitated and powerless to prevent such high-handedness. It was an arrangement that had gone hand in hand with the similarly bizarre concept of extraterritoriality – by which foreign citizens in the concession areas of China's treaty ports could be judged only by their own courts, and not be subject to Chinese law. The concept, which became shortened to the word ‘extrality’, is something the sheer strangeness of which should not be forgotten. It led, among other things, to the creation of the Yangtze Patrol of the United States Navy and the Royal Navy's equally famous Yangtze Flotilla – to which, in the spring of 1949, HMS Amethyst was temporarily assigned.

  In that year the Chinese capital was the city of Nanjing, known then as Nanking: it lies on the south side of the Yangtze a few miles above Zhenjiang, and was indeed to be our next upriver destination. All the major foreign countries that had postwar diplomatic relations with China maintained embassies in Nanjing: the Americans did, and so did the British. As China's capital the city was naturally a prime target for capture by the Communists. In March 1949 the Foreign Office in London sensed that with the recent stunning successes of General Zhu De's People's Liberation Army, matters were deteriorating rapidly. To help raise the morale of the British, and indeed all the rest of the local foreign community, and to prepare for a possible evacuation, a warship was needed: an urgent signal was sent to Hong Kong, and in return the Navy's Commander-in-Chief Far East Station sent the Amethyst.

  The little ship passed the red buoy at Woosung on 19 April 1949, and on the next day approached the section of the river where the Communists were known to be massing. Her captain ordered up precautions: large Union Jacks were to be draped over the ship's side, the guns were to be armed and trained, speed was to be increased to sixteen knots. The ship was officially neutral, and should not attract any hostile fire. But this was China, a country in an unpredictable mood. As she passed Low Island, near the end of a long north–south reach in the river, there was a sudden crackle of rifle fire from the shore. The captain ordered his gunners to train and aim. Then rifle fire was followed, more ominously, by the zoom and whine of shellfire as a shore battery opened up. Huge splashes of water erupted off the starboard beam. Fifteen rounds were fired – none hit the British ship. On the bridge the officers made caustic remarks about poor Communist marksmanship. As Amethyst rounded the bend and began to head due west along the river's muddy, duck-filled Kou-an Reach, the final leg on the way to Zhenjiang, so the order was piped: ‘Hands relax action stations.’ The danger, it was thought, was over.

  The sun was rising into a cloudless mid-morning sky as the ship drew abreast of Rose Island. She was now at reduced speed, her guns trained fore and aft. No one aboard suspected a thing – when suddenly, without any warning, without any cries or flags or bugle blow, a shell flashed across the ship's topmast. The captain ordered ‘Action stations' once more, and demanded speed. The telegraphs clanged urgently, the motors began to roar. And then, in an instant, the Communists found their aim. Three shells slammed into the ship and exploded: one hit the wheelhouse, turning it into a maelstrom of splintered steel and wood and trapping the coxswain against the wheel, pulling it and the ship – hard over to port.

  The wounded vessel was now racing directly towards the thick mud of Rose Island. The captain ordered ‘Hard a-starboard’, trying desperately to correct the course and prevent his ship's running aground. At the same time he ordered his guns to open fire. But almost at the very same instant two more shells hit the ship: the bridge detonated in a ball of fire, and everyone in or near it was killed or terribly wounded. The captain was mortally injured, and would live on for two agonizing days. The Chinese pilot had the back of his head blown off, killed instantly. Another man was blinded when a shell fragment took his entire eye out. The ship's Number One took a piece of shrapnel the size of a matchbox: it tore through his lungs and lodged in his liver. This man, Weston, though bleeding heavily and barely able to speak, took command: he had to watch in impotent horror as the ship slid steadily into the mudflats and then stopped dead, stuck fast, right in the gunsights of the Communist batteries. He managed to croak one urgent Flash signal to the Commander-in-Chief in Hong Kong: ‘Under heavy fire. Am aground in approx. position 31 degrees 10 minutes North 119 degrees 50 minutes East. Large number of casualties.’*

  General Zhu's men showed no mercy. Shell after shell tore into the ship, and within minutes the deck was an inferno, littered with dead and wounded men. The ship's power was cut, the radio was out, the sick bay suffered a direct hit, the aft gun-turret was ruined, the depth-charge store was penetrated by an armour-piercing shell and Amethyst's TNT went up in a roar. Injured men lay untended among the flames, and if not burned by the fires they were hit by splinters from new shell bursts. For more than an hour the ship shuddered and shook under the barrage: Weston gave the order to evacuate – though not totally abandon – the vessel. A steaming party was to be left on board, as were volunteers to help tend the wounded. The rest swam or took life rafts to shore – under withering hail of machine-gun fire, which killed further numbers of the terrified men. Those who made it set themselves up in the underbrush, watched and waited. The plan was to reboard the ship at nightfall, repair her, refloat her and get away. The Communists stopped shelling shortly before noon, and the river fell quiet.

  The Amethyst remained where she was, critically wounded, immobilized and impotent, for the next 101 days – a neutral ship held hostage to a foreign revolution's fortune, a symbol of the unfamiliar new demands of what was being called the Cold War.* Everyone in Britain knew about her: just as with the American hostages who were held in post-revolutionary Iran some thirty years later, this was a drama that enthralled the nation. Not a day passed without the broadcast of some scrap of information on the helpless ship. Not a Briton lived who did not care about the trapped vessel and her helpless crew.

  As it happened, however, neither the ship nor the crew turned out quite as helpless as was thought. Slowly but eventually, the engines were repaired, as was her steering mechanism. And when everyone involved realized that negotiations with the Communists were going nowhere, it was decided, during the unbearable heat of the last days of that July, that the ship would try to escape. She would try to make her way downriver under the cover of darkness, and to break out from under the very gun sights of Zhu De's batteries.

  All manner of precautions were taken for the run. Mattresses and awnings and hammocks were arranged along the ship's sides to make her look as different as possible from usual. She rearranged her lights, showing green over red, masquerading as a civilian vessel, a merchantman. The crew were told that talking above a whisper was forbidden; smoking was banned; no one could use the intercom, certainly not the radio. To preserve the silence that was vitally necessary for the break-out moment it was decided that the anchor could not be raised in the normal way – the chain's rattling passage up the hawse pipe would make a din certain to awaken every Communist battery from Zhenjiang to Shanghai. Instead it was decided to knock the pin from one of the half-shackles that held together the lengths of anchor chain, and to let the chain fall into the water – vertically, with thick grease on all and any of the ship's surfaces that it might touch. This, it was said, was the anchor I might see behind the old consulate's redbrick wall.

  At 10 p.m. on the hot and moo
nless night of Saturday 30 July the bosun knocked out the pin on the anchor chain, the ship gunned her engines and steamed out into the night. Twenty miles downriver she was spotted, gunfire rang out, and she was hit – though not badly. Someone sent a signal to the C-in-C in Hong Kong. The admiral was hosting a dinner party, and a toast was drunk – ‘To HMS Amethyst and all who sail in her.’

  More signals came in to headquarters during the night. ‘Halfway,’ said one. ‘Hundred up,’ another (a cricketing term, to which the admiral replied with the same metaphor: ‘A magnifi-ccent century!’). A junk unexpectedly crossed into the path of the fleeing and unlit ship: the bridge officers waited, sickened, for the awful crunch of smashed wood and the cries of drowning fishermen. There was nothing they could have done. Many must have died. But the Amethyst could not afford to stop. It raced on, now doing an unheard-of 22 knots.

  At dawn they passed under the searchlights of Woosung Fort, where another Communist battery stood on the right bank, just where the Whangpoo entered the Yangtze. The searchlights briefly glanced off the hull – everyone on board holding his breath – and then moved on. Amethyst kept roaring onward. ‘Everything you've got!’ the bridge telegraphed down to the engine room. ‘Damage to engines accepted.’

  And then finally, there in the dim light of morning, and resting under a plume of smoke on the wide grey waters of the outer Yangtze estuary, the spotters on the bow of Amethyst saw the familiar outline of her sister ship, the destroyer HMS Concord. The signal was flashed by Aldis lamp: ‘Fancy meeting you again.’ It was now beyond doubt that HMS Amethyst – after 101 days in captivity, and with 23 of her crew dead and 31 missing – had at long last broken free.