Dangers aside, the unknown nature of the waters through which they were planning to sail was one of the main attractions of the voyage, an ancillary goal of which was to gather naval intelligence. The Yellow Sea was bordered by both the Qing Empire and Korea, and “no fairer occasion,” one passenger noted, “could offer for penetrating into it, and adding so much to marine knowledge, without creating suspicion or giving offence to the court of Beijing.”10 After all, there was no way for Macartney to get to Beijing without sailing through that unknown sea, unless he were somehow to disembark in Canton and travel a thousand miles overland to the capital with his entire retinue and many tons of fragile baggage. If nothing else, a basic chart of the coastline would open the way for other British ships in the future, of which they hoped there would be many.
The essential strategy of Macartney’s mission was reflected in the presents that crowded the hold of the Hindostan. Some were industrial goods—textiles and manufactures—that the British hoped Chinese traders might be induced to purchase, thus opening new avenues of commerce. Even more important, though, were the scientific and mechanical gifts, which represented the most recent technological developments in Europe. The British assumed that these were unknown in China, and since the public at home viewed them with wonder there was no reason to think they would amaze and delight the Chinese any less. Macartney, and the British government, hoped that the mission’s technical marvels (to say nothing of the combined 120 guns of the Lion and Hindostan) would gently impress upon the emperor of China the power of British civilization and, consequent to that, convince him of the great value and importance of the two countries’ trade.
Among those presents was a gigantic planetarium that had taken thirty years to build and was deemed “the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever emanating from human hands.”11 There were giant lenses of every description. There were globes of the stars and earth, two carriages even more ornate than the king’s own (one for the emperor’s use in summer and the other for winter), “chemical and philosophical apparatuses,” several brass field guns, a sampling of muskets and swords, howitzer mortars, two “magnificent” lustres (elaborate chandeliers that could illuminate a room) packed in fourteen cases, vases, clocks, an air pump, Wedgwood china, artwork depicting everyday life in England, paintings of military battles on land and sea, portraits of the royal family, and other articles worth a total of £14,000.12 Beyond just impressing the Chinese with the greatness of British science and industry, the Times expressed a wish that men of letters could go along with Macartney as well. “We could almost wish Boswell were to take a trip with them to China,” it said, “provided he kept, during the voyage, a literary log book.”13
The embassy’s mechanical expert was a Scot named James Dinwiddie, an astronomer and natural philosopher. He was responsible for the elaborate planetarium as well as the demonstrative experiments—including a diving bell and a hot-air balloon—that he planned to show off to Macartney’s Chinese hosts. The balloon was a new invention, and it was dangerous (one could fall out, crash, get swept away by a storm, explode if using hydrogen, or strand oneself in a treetop), and in England Dinwiddie refrained from going up in one himself. Nevertheless, by the time of Macartney’s embassy he had established himself as one of the foremost experts on such devices in Europe. He was just the man, in the later words of his grandson, “to surprise the Chinese with the power, learning, and ingenuity of the British people,” and when the ambassador invited him along to China he immediately said yes, resolving that he would make his very first ascent in a balloon in Beijing, for the benefit of the Chinese emperor and the awe of his people.14
The ships’ most important cargo of all, however, was a letter from King George III to Qianlong, the emperor of China. It was a wondrous example of overblown diplomatic language in which the British monarch bent over backwards to address Qianlong as he imagined Qianlong might wish to be addressed. Thus King George referred to him as “the Supreme Emperor of China . . . worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand years.” He declared that the English had come to China not for conquest (which was true), and neither had they come for mere profit (which was not). Rather, he claimed, Britain’s sole purpose in sending the mission was for the sake of discovery and to better their own civilization. He spoke of China in the most glowing terms. “Above all,” he insisted, “our ardent wish has been to become acquainted with those celebrated institutions of your Majesty’s populous and extensive empire which have carried its prosperity to such a height as to be the admiration of all surrounding nations.”15
The king’s lofty language wasn’t just a show for his royal counterpart—it appeared in his private instructions to Macartney as well. There, he described the Chinese as “a people, perhaps the most singular upon the globe, among whom civilization had existed, and the arts been cultivated, through a long series of ages, with fewer interruptions than elsewhere.”16 Likewise, the chairman and deputy chairman of the East India Company in London, in a separate private communication to Macartney, referred favorably to “the known character of the Emperor for wisdom, justice and equity.”17 The corruption and difficulty of working with local officials in Canton was well known, but the British in both government and trade at this time shared a deep admiration for China’s overall imperial system of governance and faith in the personal virtue and wisdom of its ruler.
One of the most challenging obstacles to mounting the mission had turned out to be language. Macartney needed an interpreter, but in 1792, as far as the organizers of the mission could tell, there was not a single person in Britain or any of its far-flung territories who could speak Chinese.18 James Flint had recently died, and in the thirty years since his arrest and banishment the East India Company had given up encouraging its personnel to study the language. When in the country, they relied entirely on native interpreters, but nobody knew for sure whether any of those linguists had a vocabulary sufficient for diplomatic niceties, nor whether they would even be willing to accompany a foreigner to Beijing given the well-known fate of Flint’s Chinese teacher.
The job of finding an interpreter fell to Macartney’s longtime secretary, Sir George Leonard Staunton, an old friend who would be the number-two-ranking member of the embassy. Staunton, a baronet, was a physician with an inordinately large nose who saw the quest for a Chinese interpreter as a fine chance to improve the education of his eleven-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton, who had never in his life seen a Chinese person but would be coming along as Macartney’s page. Young George (who shared his father’s nose) was a sickly and timid child, and Staunton had determined that what the boy lacked in physical strength he would make up for in education and worldliness. Perhaps to compensate for having been absent in India with Macartney for the first four years of the boy’s life, Staunton doted on his son and made him into something of a philosophical experiment. He took him to scientific lectures, hired private tutors instead of enrolling him in ordinary schools, forbade him to read fairy tales, and tried to indoctrinate him with a grounded love of the natural world. The two traveled throughout England to see and learn about the latest developments in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing—a living education if there ever was one.
It was toward this end that he brought the boy along with him on his hunt through Europe in the winter and spring of 1792 to find someone who could speak Chinese. Catholic missionaries from the continent had in small numbers been traveling to and from China since the early seventeenth century, and were generally the only thread other than trade to link those two ends of the world. Staunton’s best hope of finding one was in Italy, which had long been a base for the Jesuit missions to China until they were driven out by Qianlong’s grandfather in the early eighteenth century (and later suppressed in Europe as well). The Vatican was said to employ a handful of educated Chinese to curate its collection of Oriental manuscripts, so that was their fallback destination. But France was closer, so for their first step father and son sailed the
Channel in the wet chill of January 1792 and took a carriage overland from Calais to see if they could scrounge up a returned missionary in Paris.
France was just three years fresh from its revolution when they arrived, and they found an atmosphere of excitement and novelty, friendly peasants wearing tricolor cockades in their hats to celebrate the new nation (a nation the Stauntons never imagined would so soon be at war with their own). They paid their respects to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—out of power, but not yet guillotined—and visited the ruins of the Bastille. They listened to speeches at the Society of the Jacobins, toured the gardens of Versailles, and admired how the Palais-Royal had been converted into shops for ordinary people. They did not, however, find anyone who could speak Chinese. There were two institutes for foreign missions in Paris, one housing nobody who had ever been to China, the other containing just one, an old Catholic missionary who had come home some twenty years earlier. Even if he hadn’t almost entirely forgotten the language, he insisted that he “was not disposed to visit that distant country again, on any terms.”19
The urgency of their business pressed them onward, through Germany and then down to Italy, where, after a difficult midwinter crossing of the Alps, they arrived in Rome only to find that their information was out of date. The Vatican, it turned out, had not employed any Chinese scholars in a very long time. But in a turn of luck, the British ambassador at Naples managed to succeed on their behalf. He pointed them to a Roman Catholic College of the Propaganda, which had been founded in 1732 to educate the young Chinese boys European missionaries tended to bring home with them like so many botanical specimens.20 The college trained the boys in religion so they could eventually return to their home country as Catholic missionaries in their own right. When the Stauntons arrived, they found four such students, now men in their early thirties, who were conversant in Latin and Italian along with their native Chinese, and who wished very much to go home.21 Staunton engaged two of them (“of amiable manners, and of a virtuous and candid disposition,” he believed) to join the embassy as interpreters.22 The two men came back with Staunton and his son to England that summer, lived with them in London, and then set sail with the embassy to China in September.
The Lion and Hindostan would be ten months at sea. From England they sailed southward to the Portuguese island of Madeira, then Tenerife in the Canary Islands off Morocco to take on a load of wine for the voyage. They were accompanied at the outset by a small tender brig, the Jackall, which promptly got separated from them and, they assumed, wrecked (though it would turn up again months later, after they were almost to China and had purchased another to replace it).23 They were traveling in a familiar corridor and had regular contact, speaking to British Indiamen on their way home, passing French and American whalers. They then continued southwest across the full span of the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, which young George Staunton was pleased to discover was “not so hot nor so infested with venemous serpents” as his mother had led him to believe.24 Then came the longest leg of their voyage, catching the prevailing winds to sail back eastward across the southern Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and back up through the Indian Ocean to the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra in modern-day Indonesia.
In contrast to the ships’ crews, who worked with little sleep under harsh and dangerous conditions, subject always to the bosun’s whip, there was little for the gentlemen passengers to do on board the ships during the long, queasy voyage. But they managed to while away the time reading and conversing, listening to Macartney’s musicians, drinking tea, and watching for curiosities of nature—unknown birds and fish, strange patterns of weather and lights in the night sky. There were occasional floggings for them to view, crew members being punished for drunkenness and other infractions. They could take exercise on the quarterdeck, counting their paces to ensure mile-long walks on the small platform. Sometimes they were able to go ashore on a volcanic island and boil a fish in a hot spring or shoot at exotic species.
Approaching one such island, Amsterdam Island in the remotest heart of the Indian Ocean more than two thousand miles from the nearest continent, its waters teeming with sea snakes and large codlike fish, they were startled to see two men up on a hill waving a handkerchief on a stick. They naturally assumed the men were shipwrecked, but it turned out they actually lived there on purpose. There were five of them altogether on the rocky island, three Frenchmen and two Americans from Boston. A French ship had left them there six months earlier with a contract to spend a year and a half procuring seal skins for eventual sale in Canton. They had forged a makeshift life for themselves on the island in the interim, building a hut of stones and clearing a path across a hill that separated them from their hunting grounds, where they had already managed to bludgeon and skin eight thousand seals. They still had a year left on their contract before the ship would finally come and pick them up to bring them to China. After a brief visit, the Lion and Hindostan left them to their grim work. The ships weighed anchor at night, the island receding behind them aglow in the dim light of its volcano.25
With encouragement from his father, little George Staunton occupied himself for much of the voyage with the interpreters, taking basic lessons in Chinese until he was able to hold short conversations and write a few characters. The elder interpreter, known as “Padre Cho,” turned out to be cantankerous and foul-tempered. The other was more agreeable, however, a Mr. Jacobus Li with northern Chinese features, who could converse in Italian as well as his native tongue and intended to avoid censure in China by passing himself off as a foreigner. He dressed in a European uniform, accessorized with a cockade and sword. His Chinese surname Li meaning “plum,” he was known to the English—unnecessarily, given the ease of pronouncing his actual name—as “Mr. Plumb.”26
The ships of Macartney’s embassy were cursed with terrible luck on their outbound journey. Perhaps it was the albatross one of the gentlemen shot at the island of Tristan da Cunha, deep in the southern Atlantic. A heavy gale blew up the night afterward, ripping loose the Lion’s anchor and nearly dashing the ship on the rocks. They survived that catastrophe, but as they made their way around the Cape of Good Hope and then up into Southeast Asia, the companies on board were plagued with accidents and disease. On March 28, the Hindostan’s cook died of a fever. The next day Macartney’s carpenter was killed by natives while washing linen on shore. The day after that, a sailor died of illness. This was while they were sailing through the region where Lieutenant Colonel Cathcart, Macartney’s predecessor, had died of fever on the failed embassy to China five years earlier. On April 1, they reached the island where Cathcart was buried, and Macartney and Captain Gower went ashore to see the wooden monument by the water that marked his grave. The next day, a servant on the Hindostan died of fever, and four days later a sailor fell from a mast into the water and drowned. The day after that another sailor died of fever. On April 12 the purser of the Lion died of illness. On April 23, another sailor fell from the masthead and was lost.27
As they made their way up into Southeast Asia they could begin to feel the gravitational pull of China. Their contact with the European ships of the Atlantic had long before given way to the vast emptiness of the Indian Ocean, but now as they reached modern-day Indonesia they entered the outer domain of Chinese shipping—gorgeous, elaborately worked seagoing junks with ribbed sails that plied the water routes from coastal China down to Vietnam, Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra to their west, the Philippines and the Spice Islands to their south, routes they had been navigating for more than a thousand years.28 Chinese-built ships began to dominate the anchorages and settlements where the embassy stopped for water and provisions long before the Lion reached China itself. At the Dutch colony of Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) they found a city of two hundred thousand people, half of whom, they were told, were Chinese—itinerant merchants, fishermen, and settlers alike. In contrast to the indigenous peoples of the various islands and ports along their journey
, whom the British uniformly considered to be savages, the Chinese settlers represented to them another civilization. They “appear to be a quiet and industrious people,” one passenger on the Lion noted with approval, a far cry from the “savage and ferocious disposition” of the natives.29
The ships first touched Chinese territory at the Ladrones Islands near Macao on June 20, 1793. Staunton took a small boat to the Portuguese settlement for a couple of days to gather news from the East India Company’s supercargoes (who lived in Macao in the off-season until they were allowed back to Canton in the fall). He returned to the Lion delighted to share the news that the emperor had responded favorably to Britain’s proposal to send an embassy, and the officials up the coast had been notified to attend to their needs on the way to Beijing. Even better, the supercargoes had been told that the emperor was positively “impatient” for Macartney’s arrival and greatly looked forward to “the curious and valuable presents” they had brought for him.30 Staunton also reported, in a boost to British pride, that the Dutch and Portuguese were extremely jealous. On the downside, however, he heard that the value of the embassy’s gifts had been greatly exaggerated in certain Chinese accounts, so there was a danger that the actual presents might come as a disappointment.31
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