Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong

by Captain Elliot

  direct the particular attention of the Protector of Slaves to the domestic economy of this Estate, in order that his exertions may be used as the case may require, either to admonish the Slaves against the indulgence of any wantonly insubordinate feeling, or to bring the Manager to justice for abuses of his authority.31,32

  As a supporter of the abolitionists the Secretary of State sought improvement in the welfare of slaves, but his ability to affect events on the ground in British Guiana (and elsewhere) was limited. By the time his responses to the Governor on the Protector of Slaves’ reports arrived in the Colony, nearly a year had normally passed since the end of the period under review. In that time the situation on individual plantations could have changed – for better or worse – significantly, and the Protector would have taken action where he could. What the Secretary of State was able to do was to provide the Governor and Protector of Slaves with authoritative evidence of the British Government’s continuing commitment to amelioration and eventual abolition.

  Parliament having in 1823 expressed itself in favour of slave emancipation in principle, the debate in Britain in 1832 was about how and when. A Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed in May 1832,

  to consider and report on the measures which it might be expedient to adopt for the purpose of effecting the extinction of slavery throughout the British Dominions at the earliest period compatible with the safety of all classes in the colonies, and in conformity with the resolutions of this House of the 15th of May, 1823.33

  The committee’s twenty-five members included Fowell Buxton, Sir George Murray, Viscount Howick, and two future Prime Ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell. As recorded verbatim in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, oral evidence was taken by the committee, both from those who sought immediate action and from those who counselled caution and delay. It also received documentary evidence, among which were ‘remarks on the means of improving the system by which labour is exacted in the Slave Colonies, by Captain Elliot RN, Protector of Slaves for British Guiana, 18 January, 1832’.34 Elliot was well aware that the humanitarian case for abolition had been accepted. His aims in providing these comments, and in his answers to specific questions posed by Lord Goderich, were not only to press for an immediate improvement in the treatment of slaves, but to make the economic argument that (slave) labour would be more productive if offered incentive rather than being subjected to punishment. After referring to the recent significant increase in the number of punishments recorded in his Protector’s report for the six months ended on 30 June 1831, he continued

  The largely increasing Punishment Returns clearly prove that the actual system of coercion, extensively as it is used, is perfectly inadequate to ensure the completion of the quantum of labour, which it is loudly declared the slaves could easily finish, if they were disposed to make the effort…. It is not my purpose to contend that the slaves will work regularly for wages, and I am perfectly well aware that regularity of work is absolutely necessary in the cultivation of the ordinary produce of these countries; but if they know that the power to coerce them be left, surely it is rational to conclude that they would rather choose to work industriously, with a hope to acquire profit and gain time, than they would perversely determine to work ill and late, to the exclusion of all chance of advantage, and under a strong apprehension of receiving punishment.35

  Elliot set out at some length his proposals for solving the problem of labour inefficiency. The Select Committee’s attention was then drawn to what he considered a major cause of the current restlessness among the slave population, the frustration of hearing of amelioration measures agreed in Britain that never seemed to be implemented on the ground in the colony.

  It is a source of bitter complaint in this country, that the constant expectation of legislation from England is calculated to produce the most unfortunate effects on the minds of the slaves; and it is represented that the consequences of such a vague state of impatience on the one hand, and of alarm and consequent disinclination on the other, are calculated seriously to retard the progress of amelioration. If all had been done and were still doing, which might have been effected by the proprietors themselves, with real advantage to their own interests, to meet the feelings of the country, so unequivocally expressed in Mr. Canning’s Resolutions of 1823, unanimously adopted by both Houses of Parliament, there would have been as little necessity, as there can have been little inclination, to legislate upon this subject at all.36

  It was not, though, just a matter of the process of amelioration being retarded. Mindful of his job description and the formal expectations of his role, Charles Elliot felt exposed and insufficiently empowered in a situation in which he saw simmering discontent likely to escalate dangerously. Towards the end of his ‘remarks’ he laid the blame with the planters, but implied too that the Governor and his senior officials had been negligent in allowing matters to reach this stage. He also made it clear that given the nature of the legal requirements and the size of the country, there was very little he, personally, could do about it. He wrote

  The necessity of ameliorating legislation of a progressive tendency has, unfortunately, been forced upon the government by the disinclination to legislate effectively on this side of the Atlantic. It is superfluous to say that there is very little disposition in this country frankly to accept these laws; and the painful consequence is, that the slave has not derived all the advantage from them which it has been the object of His Majesty’s Government to extend to him…. Here then is the slave population clearly convinced of the benevolent intentions of His Majesty’s Government and the British public in their behalf, and perfectly sensible, on the other hand, that these intentions are frustrated to no inconsiderable extent by the feeling with which the laws are received and acted upon in this country. The probable consequence of this unfortunate state of things is seriously to be dreaded.37

  While Elliot was clear that this situation had arisen largely because of earlier failure to legislate locally, and that the way forward was more use of the carrot and less of the stick, the Governor was less forthright; but Sir Benjamin D’Urban’s cautious approach was little more than a reflection of the British Government’s reluctance to proceed quickly to abolition. He was aware of the discontent among the slaves, but was careful not to antagonise the planters. Elliot’s relationship with him seems to have been workmanlike but distant. He could find the Governor irritating, as he implied, with irony, in a later letter to his sister Emma: ‘When I was at Demerara the governor very frequently did me the favour to send me papers and memorandums to report upon, wholly unconnected with my own duties. These trifling avocations commonly kept me out of my bed until three o’clock in the morning.’38

  The reports and comments Elliot was required to submit to his political masters in London were not the only job-related communications he sent home. He corresponded ‘off the record’ with his friend Lord Howick, pulling no punches and in language stripped of diplomatic niceties. Early in 1832, around the time of his attempt to persuade the Court of Policy to provide for Assistant Protectors, he wrote a particularly blunt letter which was symptomatic of his frustration:

  As to my office it is a delusion. There is no protection for the Slave Population; and they will very shortly take matters into their own hands, and destroy the Property. The only way of saving these Countries is to give the Slaves a reasonable share in the produce of their Labour.39

  He continued in the same vein:

  I am desperately unpopular, although I am sure I have not intended to do my duty captiously. But the fact is that this Colony is in a state of rebellion; the administration of Justice obstructed or totally defeated – no taxes paid – the most vehement clamour, not only against the Laws themselves, but against the Law-making power. What remedy for all these evils is sent out to us? Despatches full of hopes and exhortations, of advice to repent and behave better. This impunity gives strength to the growth of the Evil. The Order in Council is a dead lette
r and a dead letter contemned and decried in the most insulting terms. But if it were respected, would the Slave have benefited to such an Extent as he ought to be benefited, and as he looks to be benefited? No such thing. Setting aside the improbability of ensuring the observation of such a body of Law, I do deeply feel its inadequacy to present circumstances. You have brought forward the Slave to a certain point of civilization and intelligence, and he perceives the utter insufficiency of your System either for his further advancement or for his controul. What should be given to the Slaves is such a state of Freedom as they are now fit for.40

  While in British Guiana Charles and Clara’s first son, Hugh, was born, but it was without his family that Charles returned to Britain with some urgency early in 1833. He had been called home, he later told Emma, ‘because I was thought to be a person it would be well to consult in a most momentous public question’(the ending of slavery in the British Empire).41 That he was considered to have a potentially important contribution to the debate about the method and timing of abolition was the result both of his friendship with Howick and of his assiduous reporting as Protector of Slaves. Howick will not have been surprised by the substance or tenor of Elliot’s correspondence, which served to endorse his own views. He resigned his post as Under Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in May 1833 in protest at government dilatoriness over slave emancipation (though he was reinstated in the Cabinet the following year in a different capacity).42 Elliot was grateful to Howick for supporting him, not only in his stance on slavery and for his work in British Guiana, but also in forwarding his request for compensation for financial outlay and disruption to family life – a discontent which was to manifest itself on several occasions throughout his career, as it had done with his father before him. Having obtained the endorsement of the Secretary of State, Howick passed Elliot’s application on to the Treasury, commenting:

  With respect however to Captn Elliot’s individual claims, Lord Goderich feels himself bound to acknowledge that His Majesty’s Government are indebted to him, not only for a zealous and efficient execution of his office, but for communications of peculiar value and importance sent from the Colony during the last twelve months, and for essential services rendered at a critical period since his arrival in this country, by his exertions and personal influence with Members of the West India Board.43

  He went on:

  His Lordship being thus sensible that Captn Elliot has contributed far beyond what the functions of his particular office required of him, to the accomplishment of objects of great public importance, is aware also that this has been done with serious inconvenience and some expense to himself, as he was sent for to return to this country with the least possible delay, and was obliged to leave his family behind him.44

  Charles Elliot may well have reflected in later life that at this point in his career his standing with British Government Ministers was at its highest. Despite the unrealistic expectations of his role he had worked hard and given more as Protector of Slaves than was asked (in marked contrast to his predecessor). His evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee and his responses to particular questions put to him by the Secretary of State were important contributions to the abolition debate. He also had the satisfaction of knowing that, while observing the conventions of official communication where necessary, he had been true to his own beliefs about the inhumanity (and inefficiency) of slave labour, and had conveyed them in a forthright manner. He argued that slavery was economically unsound not only because he believed it himself, but because, as many in Parliament had recognised, the planters and their supporters were more likely to be persuaded by such an argument than by assertions about human rights. His fundamental hostility to slavery, however, doubtless influenced by his liberal education, stories of his father’s time in the Leeward Islands, and first-hand experience of the Atlantic slave trade, had always been the inescapable injustice and degradation inherent in slave labour and the affront to the dignity of slaves as people. He had made it his business as Protector, notwithstanding the enormity of his task, to talk with individual slaves; a personal letter he wrote to Lord Howick in the autumn of 1832 says much about his awareness of the slaves’ predicament:

  It is the merest nonsense to suppose that the Slaves are not keenly alive to the painfulness and injustice of their situation. I know a Slave – a common field negro … who possesses that vigorous character and immense influence with the people, which would enable him to place himself, tomorrow, at the head of ten thousand of his fellows … [He] told me once that he had learned to read; and that every night of his life he occupied himself in teaching his children to do the same. I asked him why, if he had spare time, he did not work hard so as to earn the means of buying his children’s freedom, one after another. He said ‘Master, I want to teach them Knowledge; Freedom is sure to follow’.45

  Elliot’s response revealed the importance he attached to understanding others and to forbearance:

  I did not answer as if I understood him literally, but said, it was very true that knowledge was an excellent thing – the more so as it taught us to look justly at the dependent condition of all mankind, and enabled us to bear the painfulness of our respective situations (and no situation was without pain) wisely and manfully.46

  His role and status prevented him from more overt empathy with this man, but he knew well the frustrations and aspirations of the slave community as a whole:

  What must be the feelings of the Negro population towards us? Think of their moral degradation, of the fearful wrongs they have suffered; consider their half-civilized situation, getting every hour more conscious of their own strength, and utterly void of any of those feelings which might dispose them to use it mercifully. Their confidence in every man with a white face is every day diminishing – in Government and all. Out come Laws, pretending, as these poor people may reason, to ameliorate their condition, but in point of fact rendering it not a whit less irksome.47

  After extensive debate over many months, in August 1833 the Bill to abolish slavery in the colonies was read for its third and final time in the House of Commons and the House of Lords and passed into law, taking effect in the great majority of colonies in August 1834. Compensation to the planters was agreed in the sum of £20 million. Slavery was initially replaced by a compulsory apprenticeship system, which by the end of the decade had been discontinued.

  In February 1834 Charles and Clara Elliot, and their children Harriet and Hughie, sailed in HMS Andromache for the Portuguese colony of Macao. Charles had been appointed to serve as Master Attendant to the Commission led by Lord Napier, Chief Superintendent of Trade in China.

  Chapter Six

  Trade and China

  China’s 4,000 years of dynastic rule had been turbulent, moving between fragmentation as external powers invaded or internal dissension divided, and consolidation as strong rulers repelled or unified. During times of relative peace Chinese explorers had travelled widely to other continents, their journeys of exploration reaching their zenith in the fifteenth century during the rule of the Ming emperors (1368 – 1644), a long period of social stability in which art, literature and commerce flourished.

  The goodwill extended by China to its commercial partners incorporated a degree of condescension, an assumption that they could never expect to trade as equals. The emperors and their senior officials were aware of the power and accomplishments of some of the other states and groups of states with which they had contact, notably the Roman Empire, but it was taken for granted that none could rival their own civilization. The Chinese were not the only ones who marvelled at Chinese achievement, however. Many ‘barbarians’ (as the British believed China referred to foreigners) greatly admired their wealth. The mid-fourteenth century Moroccan traveller Ibn-Battuta wrote: ‘Nowhere in the world are there to be found people richer than the Chinese … porcelain in China is of about the same value as earthenware is with us, or even less’.1 Unsurprisingly, Chinese merchant shipping was well r
eceived in Arab ports, where local conditions allowed. An historian recorded one instance:

  A report came from Mecca, the honoured, that a number of junks had come from China to the sea ports of India and two of them had anchored in the port of Aden, but their goods, chinaware, silk, musk and the like, were not disposed of there because of the disorders of the State of Yemen... The Sultan wrote to them to let them come to Jeddah and to show them honour.2

  The Chinese traded mainly silk and porcelain for spices, gemstones and glass. Their commerce was conducted in ports as far west as the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, but two of the main centres were Malacca (now Melaka) in modern day Malaysia, and Calicut (Kozhikode) on the Malabar coast in Kerala, southern India. Both these ports were frequented by Arab traders bringing merchandise from their own lands and from places further west, such as Venice. Malacca’s proximity to the spice islands – the Moluccas (Indonesia’s Maluku Islands) – and to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean made it an ideal place for entrepôt trade, and it developed into a major centre which was later to be exploited by the Portuguese, Dutch and British.

  European contact with China had begun in the thirteenth century during the rule of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, through the journeys of travellers such as the Venetian explorer brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo and Niccolo’s son Marco, and of Franciscan missionaries. After the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century ad, overland trade routes between Europe and China had continued to be operated by middle-eastern Jewish merchants, but it was travellers from Italy – explorers, Franciscan missionaries and Papal envoys – who laid the foundations for later, much expanded European involvement in imperial China. The lead in religious mission to China was assumed during the sixteenth century by the Jesuits whose founder, St Francis Xavier, had died in 1552 on his way to China shortly before reaching his destination. Ricci and Ruggieri, the two Italians subsequently tasked by the Jesuits with taking their work in China forward, were to become influential figures in the imperial court. They pursued, in addition to their evangelism, a policy of cultural assimilation, bringing western knowledge to China while conveying to Europe information about Chinese history and achievement.