Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong

by Captain Elliot

  The problem was that Qishan had not actually signed the Convention, and the Daoguang Emperor refused to contemplate agreement to what it set out; nor was the British government, when word of its terms reached London in April, prepared to endorse what Elliot had done. The Son of Heaven made it clear to Qishan that he regarded ‘the demands of the rebellious foreigners totally excessive … it’s time to dispatch a punitive mission to suppress them…. If they try to hand over any more communications, you are not permitted to receive them.’48 Palmerston angrily wrote to Elliot:

  You have disobeyed and neglected your Instructions; you have deliberately abstained from employing the Force placed at your disposal; and you have without sufficient necessity accepted Terms which fall far short of those you were instructed to obtain. You were instructed to demand full compensation for the opium which you took upon you two Years ago to deliver up. To ask Parliament to pay the money was out of the question. You have accepted a sum much smaller than the amount due to the opium holders. You were told to demand payment of the expenses of the expedition, and payment of Hong debts. You do not appear to have done one or the other. You were told to retain Chusan (Ting-hai) until the whole of the pecuniary Compensation should be paid, but you have agreed to evacuate the island immediately. You have obtained the cession of Hong-Kong, a barren Island with hardly a House upon it. Now it seems obvious that Hong-Kong will not be a Mart of Trade, any more than Macao is so. However, it is possible I may be mistaken in this matter. But you still will have failed in obtaining that which was a Capital point in our view: an additional opening for our Trade to the Northward.49

  It was as well that at the end of January 1841 on the South China coast Charles Elliot had no inkling of how the Foreign Secretary would react to the agreement he had reached with Qishan. His mood was positive; he had after all achieved significant concessions from the Chinese which would, he believed, lay the foundations for the development of British trade with China, and had maintained British honour with minimal use of force. He had still not, though, obtained Qishan’s signature to the Convention, despite the commissioner’s celebratory behaviour. Nevertheless, Elliot pressed on. Having with Bremer proclaimed the inhabitants of Hong Kong subjects of Her Britannic Majesty, he gave orders for the Zhoushan garrison, much depleted through disease, to withdraw and rejoin the rest of the force.

  Hearing in mid-February that Qishan had been dismissed and that Chinese reinforcements were on their way, Elliot decided that immediate action was needed and brought the British ships up to launch a pre-emptive assault on the remaining Bogue forts. On 26 February bombardments led by the three 74s, Blenheim, Melville and Wellesley, overcame such Chinese resistance as there was, and by the end of the following day a smaller force including the Nemesis, on which Charles Elliot accompanied Captain Hall, had dispersed a flotilla of war-junks and cleared obstacles placed in the river. After little over two weeks which the Nemesis spent neutralising Chinese fortifications in the river passages west of the main channel, the force reached the waterfront at Canton. Many of the local inhabitants had already fled; those that had not did so now. On 20 March, with echoes of his action nearly two years earlier, Charles Elliot raised the Union Jack in the New English factory. He announced a ceasefire, and also as he had done before, a resumption of trade.

  A month before, Lord Auckland, Governor General of India, had written to his cousin Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty, on hearing of the Convention of Chuanbi and the acquisition of Hong Kong. Deeply unhappy at what he considered wasted opportunities for the force he had dispatched to bring matters to a head, he confided:

  I own that I have read the last reports from Charles Elliot, as I have read many upon the expedition that preceded them in extreme depression, and it is inconceivable to me how little, from the first arrival of our armament in China, those who were appointed to lead it, have grasped great prospects, and how feebly and imperfectly the instructions of the government have been executed. It is a matter for very painful reflection. We have lost one third of our soldiers…. And we have a preliminary treaty and a promise of six million dollars and possession of the island of Hong Kong subject to confirmation by the Emperor – to whom customs’ duties of our new settlement are to be paid.50

  Despite these serious misgivings, Auckland allowed the possibility that others might take a more positive view of events thus far, conceding that ‘Hong Kong may become a valuable possession’.51 He believed nevertheless that even if this proved to be the case, everything should have been done much more quickly.

  With greater speed and decisiveness in mind, Auckland now sent a new commander of land forces to the China coast, the performance of the elderly Lieutenant Colonel George Burrell, the senior officer at Zhoushan, having given cause for concern. The new man was Major General Sir Hugh Gough, second-in-command at Madras and a highly distinguished and experienced soldier. Though like Burrell he was in his early sixties, he was an energetic and clear thinking commander, who soon made an impact in China. At about the same time Commodore Bremer decided to leave the coast for Calcutta, probably for health reasons. By seniority the new naval commander-in-chief became Captain Sir Humphrey Le Fleming Senhouse, of HMS Blenheim. Approaching sixty, he too was an officer with much experience, having served at Trafalgar and on the North American and West Indies stations.

  A more robust and determined approach on the Chinese side was similarly signalled by changes in senior personnel. Qishan had submitted to the Emperor a report on the relative feebleness of Chinese military preparedness which was too honest and conciliatory for the Emperor to want to hear. Shortly afterwards, having already incurred the anger of the Emperor for his role in the Convention of Chuanbi, Qishan was recalled and replaced by a triumvirate headed by the aristocrat Yishan and including the illustrious but elderly and ailing General Yang Fang. They arrived in Canton on 5 March.

  During April the legitimate trade, especially in tea, prospered. Opium smuggling also picked up along the coast, and Senhouse refused Elliot’s request to prevent smaller vessels from carrying opium into the Pearl River maintaining, correctly, that Elliot had no authority for such a move. The apparent return to something like commercial normality belied the climate of increasing tension, as the Chinese redoubled their efforts to prepare for further conflict and the British planned the next stage of their campaign. These weeks were also, for Charles Elliot, a rare opportunity for renewed focus on his family. Clara returned to Macao from India, as Charles wrote to their children on 24 April:

  Mama came back to me safe thank God – such safe a week ago in one of the clippers. It was very good of her to undertake such a voyage at an unfavourable season of the year in a small vessel. But her affection for me, and her sense of duty, made the hardship nothing. Let her always be an example to you, Harriet, for she is a devoted wife and mother, and all our best friend. She has found the house in an uncomfortable state enough, but she will soon get it to rights.52

  Continuing with some fond advice and encouragement to Hughie and Gibby he concludes, revealingly:

  Pray to God regularly night and morning for assistance, and remember to ask for forgiveness for anything that your own heart tells you is wrong. I am afraid you have all inherited some of that impatience and impetuosity which are my worst faults, and if you love me, which I am sure you do, you must try to correct these defects. Give my most affectionate love to your Aunt Windsor and now my children – accept my blessing, and believe me your ever affectionate father.53

  Elliot was probably being hard on himself in citing impatience as one of his worst faults, but he was certainly impetuous on occasion. To the military minds of General Gough and Captain Senhouse, however, he appeared differently – vacillating, indecisive, and as Gough put it ‘whimsical as a shuttlecock’.54 Gough must have been conscious also that the Plenipotentiary was in service rank two below him, far less militarily experienced, and more than twenty years his junior.

  On 11 May Elliot became alarmed at the scale
and pace of Chinese strengthening of defences and troop reinforcements at Canton. He cancelled a planned move against Xiamen, ordered the British force upriver to Canton, and advised those traders still in the Factories to leave. After an unsuccessful surprise attack by the Chinese on 21 May, Gough and Senhouse took the Nemesis, with some sixty or more boats in tow, up a channel to the west. The occupants of the boats, around three thousand soldiers, sailors and marines – almost the whole expeditionary force – disembarked two miles northwest of Canton. From there they made their way towards the northern heights above the city, which Gough had calculated would give him a position from which to launch a decisive assault. It was not to be. While Gough was assessing the likely strength and locations of Chinese resistance before making his final deployments, he received word from the Plenipotentiary telling him to not attack. ‘[T]he protection of the people of Canton, and the encouragement of their goodwill towards us, are perhaps our chief political duties in this country’ wrote Elliot.55 Gough and Senhouse, predictably, were extremely unhappy; they had marched their troops to the top of the hill, and as a result of a decision they considered all too typical of Elliot, now faced the prospect of marching them down again. As one of the officers with the Madras Infantry contemptuously put it: ‘Here was our small army to remain for a certain number of days, barely 100 paces removed from the city walls, surrounded by many thousands of an enemy … and in this peculiar position we were directed to remain by a post captain in the Royal Navy’.56 The military had no choice but to comply with the instruction, however, which followed yet more negotiation between the Chief Superintendent and the Chinese. The outcome was that a ransom of $6million (the same amount as in the Convention of Chuanbi) was to be paid, the Chinese reinforcements at Canton were to withdraw, compensation was to be provided for damage and injury to property and individuals, and the British would remove their ships from the Pearl River.

  They duly did, and the Chinese kept their side of the agreement, but not before Gough had dealt with what the British subsequently considered to have been a little local difficulty. The villagers of Guangdong province, as elsewhere in rural China, were both xenophobic and had little in common with city-dwellers. The inhabitants of Sanyuanli and other nearby villages in the hinterland of Canton, as customary when sensing external threat, had formed local militias. The threat represented by the foreign devils was compounded, as they saw it, by the feeble capitulation of the Canton mandarins. Some of these militias encountered detachments of Gough’s troops behaving with provocative disrespect for their communities. When the desecration of graves was followed by assaults on women, they moved against the British. The skirmishes lasted a week, and involved more than a thousand villagers. Though the Chinese were primitively armed, torrential rain all but neutralised the superior weapons of the British, the encounters then mostly taking the form of hand-to-hand combat. Gough’s men saw off the Chinese attacks, but the peasants regrouped; further fighting was averted when a messenger from the city persuaded the insurgents that a peace agreement had been reached, and they dispersed. From a British military perspective the Sanyuanli incident, as it became known, was a minor setback, satisfactorily dealt with, in an otherwise straightforward campaign which demonstrated overwhelming British superiority. For the Chinese, it became regarded as a major example of heroic anti-imperialist resistance, and has remained so in Chinese official consciousness ever since.

  At the beginning of June British attention turned to the next phase. The plan, agreed some weeks earlier, was for the expeditionary force to sail north again to secure key ports and threaten Beijing. The force was not, though, in good shape. The operations on the river and around Canton, in heat, poor weather and often difficult terrain had taken their toll in illness and deaths. On 13 June Senhouse became a fatal casualty himself; he was buried, like Napier and Robert Morrison, in the Protestant Cemetery at Macao. Charles Elliot, too, was ill, but not until he had embarked on the first steps to settle Hong Kong.

  Within days of the island’s being proclaimed British some of the merchants, Jardine Matheson among the first, staked their claims by erecting temporary godowns (warehouses) on the north shore adjacent to the harbour. The development was entirely unplanned and the siting of the buildings uncoordinated, but they were subsequently connected in these early months by the construction of what became Queen’s Road. Elliot made his first appointment, of William Caine as magistrate, in April, but it was not until his return from Canton in June that the first official sales of plots of land began. A further proclamation by Elliot in June, which was to have a lasting impact on the development of Hong Kong, announced that the territory was to be a free port, with no charges payable to the British government. When Elliot prepared to go north with the expeditionary force his long-standing Deputy, A.R. Johnston, was left in charge.

  As Elliot and Bremer, who had returned from India as Joint Plenipotentiary, made their way by cutter to join the Wellesley for the voyage up the coast, the start of the main typhoon season announced itself with ferocious force. The Louisa lost her master overboard and was swept way off course until Charles Elliot managed to steer her to an inlet at Sanchuen. Those on board were with difficulty able to get off, but the vessel was then smashed to pieces on the rocks. Elliot and Bremer paid some local villagers to ferry them to Macao which they reached, after their boat came close to being stopped and searched by an official patrol, on 24 July. As he was about to make his way ashore, he was given the news from London that his time in China was about to end. Palmerston had written formally in early May:

  I have to state to you that Her Majesty’s Government do not approve of the manner in which, in your negotiation with the Chinese Commissioner, you have departed from the instructions with which you have been furnished … Her Majesty has determined to place the conduct of her affairs in China in the hands of another Plenipotentiary.57

  ‘To this [news] Elliot made answer, that to be cast ashore at Sanchuen, and find himself adrift at Macao, was more than a man had a right to expect in one week, be he Plenipotentiary or be he not’, and he quoted to the Commodore from Dryden’s poem: ‘“Slack all thy sails, for thou art wrecked ashore”.’58,59

  At this less than convenient juncture Elliot’s brother Ned, whom he had not encountered for several years, now appeared. He and his family had been blown off course and forced to seek refuge at Macao. Elliot saw to it that they were properly accommodated: ‘I left my dear old Ned and his family well in my house. The day I wrecked my poor little cutter in that terrible typhoon, he was within a few miles of the place we were cast on shore.’60

  Charles Elliot’s successor as Chief Superintendent and Plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger, arrived in August. There followed several months in which instructions to cease further civil development, from the Foreign Secretary to Pottinger and from Pottinger to Johnston, were either too late in arriving or were ignored anyway. They nevertheless created uncertainty about the future, which prompted Matheson to write to Jardine in London:

  I fear that Elliot’s unpopularity will in some degree descend upon his pet child…. But I know not where else we could have got as harbour equally good, more especially for large vessels. Were we able to settle this in right earnest under the acknowledged and irrevocable protection of the British Government it could hardly fail to become a considerable Emporium.61

  The new Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, and an indecisive Parliament were equivocal about Hong Kong’s becoming a permanent acquisition. In the event, Elliot’s eagerness to encourage building and settlement, Johnston’s enthusiastic implementation of it and Pottinger’s de facto endorsement led the British government to accept the cession of the territory. Pottinger had been unsure at first; as he put it to Aberdeen:‘I had no predilection for raising a colony at Hong Kong or at any other place in China’ but ‘this settlement has already advanced too far to admit of its ever being restored to the authority of the Emperor.’62 Hong Kong was formally proclaimed a Colony on 26 June
1843, Pottinger becoming its first Governor.

  Chapter Eleven

  Recall, Reaction and Resolve

  The news of his recall – in effect, dismissal – took Charles Elliot aback, but it was not entirely unexpected. Although he had supporters in or close to government, he had always known that his continuation in post in China was dependent on the approval of the Foreign Secretary. He had been aware, too, that by comparison with his brief he had sometimes sailed very close to the wind. It was this which prompted him to ensure, as far as he could, that there was a particularly thorough written record of the reasons for his actions. With his natural proneness to verbosity the consequence was a very lengthy collection of correspondence. In the nearly four years between assuming the duties of Chief Superintendent and the start of the war, Elliot sent more than three times as many, and usually much longer, communications to Palmerston and the Foreign Office than he received from them.1 While most of the Foreign Secretary’s letters were instructional, descriptive and broadly neutral in tone, and a few were complimentary and encouraging, some were mildly or severely critical. Palmerston’s opinion, and that of the government, Parliament and the British public, of Charles Elliot might have been very different had the threatening of Canton, and the resulting concessions, occurred and been fully reported before the letter recalling him was written.2 Instead, London heard first from General Gough, smarting from the denial of what he considered an obvious opportunity for military victory. Henry Taylor, whose expressions of support and admiration for Elliot were sometimes excessive, wrote that

  unhappily that event was first announced in a despatch from the General in command of the forces, which was unaccompanied for the moment by any despatch from Elliot (always least occupied with what most concerned himself); and the General wrote in a spirit of grievous mortification and disappointment, as if, when Elliot had prevented Canton from being taken by storm, he had substituted some tame treaty for a magnificent feat of arms. Though at the date of the General’s despatch, he and Charles Elliot were living together in the same house and on cordial and friendly terms, the despatch was not shown to him, and he only knew of its tenor when the return mail brought him the results of it in a clamorous echo by the press and the people of the General’s cry of distress.3