Staunton volunteered his services, and wound up being asked by the Canton governor-general to interpret for Captain Dilkes and the accused in a Chinese court within the city. It was an utterly unprecedented event—Staunton described even the fact that the Chinese had a written code of laws as a “discovery.”22 Fortunately it went well, and eventually the sailors were set free, mainly because after forty days the Chinese victim had not died, so they were no longer liable for charges of murder. The irascible captain of the Providence was not fully pleased with the outcome, however, and taunted the Company supercargoes for what he saw as their craven groveling before the Chinese authorities. “I beg leave to congratulate you,” he wrote to them, “upon this recorded acknowledgment of your entire independence of His Majesty’s Service.”23 However, it was the first time that such a conflict between foreign sailors and Chinese had been settled respectably in a court of law.
The case was eye-opening. It turned out, for one thing, that the law against teaching Chinese to foreigners did not necessarily apply to the foreigners themselves (or at least it wasn’t enforced in that way), for Staunton was not punished for speaking Chinese. Quite the opposite, he had been actively welcomed as interpreter, and one imperial official who spent some time chatting with him even complimented him on his fluency, telling him that in three more years he might “acquire sufficient perfection,” as Staunton wrote happily to his father.24 The only real negative for Staunton was that some of the Hong merchants seemed resentful toward him afterward, as he had proven he was now capable of going behind their backs to the officials.
Furthermore, the incident with the Providence was enough to convince the president of the select committee, a man named Hall, that not only should Staunton continue in his study of Chinese, but also that the Company should pay for it, even if the directors in London hadn’t approved. Hall had seen, for the first time, how Staunton’s ability to use the language might in certain situations give leverage to the otherwise powerless foreigners in Canton. Staunton had gotten a glimpse, as it were, beyond the walls that surrounded the traders in their little enclave. He had engaged in direct communication with Chinese officials without the mediation of the Hong merchants, and in this instance at least, there seemed to be no backlash.
With Hall’s financial support and encouragement, Staunton redoubled his efforts to learn Chinese. He couldn’t study in Canton itself—where, he told his father, he was “unable to find anyone acquainted with the Chinese language in its purity, and bold enough at the same time to give me lessons on it.”25 But he did manage to secure a teacher in the comparatively free setting of Macao for the summers, a Chinese Roman Catholic who knew Latin and the Mandarin court dialect. He started reading imperial edicts and lists of regulations. At the expense of the Company he also purchased a copy of the entire Qing legal code, in 144 volumes, and began slowly to translate it into English with help from his teacher. For the first time since James Flint, there was a British interpreter in Canton, and his interests went well beyond just the negotiations for trade. It was the beginning of something, though Staunton didn’t yet know where it might lead.
George Staunton’s melancholy first two years in Canton ended—or shall we say culminated—in 1802 with the news that his father was dead. The elder George Staunton had actually passed away quite a bit earlier, but it took half a year for word to reach his son in China. Sadly, most of the letters the young man had written—asking his father to raise funds for him to invest, relaying his victories in first using his Chinese—were never read by the man to whom he addressed them. Staunton wound up being allowed to visit home much earlier than expected, but for more dismal reasons than he had hoped.
From 1802 until 1804, Staunton was back home in England on leave from the Company, to prove his father’s will and take over the family estates in Ireland (he also inherited at this time his father’s baronetcy, and became Sir George). Even in the absence of his father he found a sympathy back home he hadn’t felt in China. Lord Macartney took a paternal interest in him, and said he would treat him like his own son. In December 1802, Macartney took young Staunton for an audience with King George and Queen Charlotte. With Macartney’s patronage and on the strength of his studies in Chinese he was made a fellow of the Royal Society and elected to the Literary Club, a group founded by Samuel Johnson whose past members included Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. He greatly enjoyed being with his mother. And by the time he sailed back to Canton in June 1804 the Company had promoted him to supercargo. With his inheritance, and a substantial salary increase from the promotion, things looked up for him financially. He wished he didn’t have to go back, though, and still considered life in China to be a “painful sacrifice.”26
Staunton was at least comforted to know that his time in Canton would not be eternal. As supercargo he would have a guaranteed leave in a few more years, and if his advancement through the factory’s ranks continued, it would be just a matter of time before he had enough money to come home for good. Although he had managed to convince the select committee in Canton that it was important to have someone on their side who could speak and read Chinese, he had no intention of spending the rest of his life being the person to do that for them. So while he continued his studies after his return and worked diligently on his translation of the Qing legal code, he otherwise looked forward to finding a way to share the load with someone else. But newcomers in Canton were few and far between, and those who came under the Company’s auspices had no interest in learning the language. In 1807, however, two unexpected new arrivals would change Staunton’s luck.
If you were a westerner who wanted to go to live in Canton in the early 1800s, you did not have many choices. If you were British, you could try to become a writer for the East India Company like George Staunton did, which was close to impossible unless you came from the right family. Alternatively, you could ship off to India with a private firm and try to bluster your way past the objections of the Company staff in Canton by getting yourself made consul for some other country like Sweden or Denmark, which was the only way to subvert the Company’s monopoly on British citizens trading with China. (Beale, the private English trader who spoke Cantonese, for example, was technically consul for Prussia.) If you were American, you didn’t have to worry about the East India Company’s monopoly, but unless you had the funds to buy and outfit your own ship you had to get a position with one of the very few, extremely small, and closely held New England firms that kept a permanent representative in Canton. The way to do that, even more so than with the East India Company, was through birth or marriage into the right family. And finally, no matter where you came from, if you did not have a job with one of the existing companies lined up in advance, your options were almost nonexistent. The China trading ships did not as a rule take passengers.27
Initially this was not a great problem, because there were essentially no British or Americans who dreamed of traveling to China for any reason other than trade. Even those who did go for trade spent most of their time in the country, like George Staunton, looking forward to the day when they could return home. But something shifted at the opening of the nineteenth century, thanks in large part to the many travelogues and memoirs about China that were published by the members of the Macartney mission. Those books made the country seem a less impossible destination and began for the first time to attract travelers who had purposes other than commerce in mind.
The first arrival of this new generation was a playful and spirited young eccentric from Norfolk, England, named Thomas Manning. An Anglican rector’s son with a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair, Manning had studied mathematics at Cambridge but never graduated because he refused to take examinations. Sometime around 1801, for reasons he never fully explained, he started to be “haunted with the idea of China,” as a friend put it.28 In his own words, Manning became obsessed with “the design of attempting to explore that country myself, and by my own observations and researches . . . to dissipate some of the obs
curity and doubt which hangs over its moral and civil history.”29
Since there was no way to learn Chinese in England, the would-be explorer Manning traveled to Paris in 1802 to study with a Dr. Joseph Hager at the Bibliothèque Nationale, who had examined various Jesuit texts and claimed to have unlocked a grand theory to explain the Chinese written character (a theory later revealed to be bunk).30 Whatever useful knowledge Manning might have gained from Hager, however, the peace of Amiens broke down the following summer, hostilities resumed, and he was made a prisoner of war until the fall of 1804 when he escaped France with, allegedly, the only passport ever granted to an English prisoner by Napoleon.31 A great self-promoter, Manning intimated that the reason Napoleon let him go was because the general supported Manning’s intended exploration of China and admired him as “a man who had destined himself to voyages of discovery.”32 Once safely back in England, however, Manning was still no closer to China. In frustration, he turned to studying medicine. He was “melancholy,” noted a friend, “and seems to have something in his head which he don’t impart.”33
Manning was well connected in Britain’s literary world, being a close Cambridge friend of the essayist Charles Lamb, who himself was intimate with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lamb was delighted and titillated by the sheer outlandishness of Manning’s plan to go to China. “For God’s sake don’t think any more of ‘Independent Tartary,’” he wrote to Manning in February 1803, at a point when Manning thought he might enter the Qing Empire from the north, through Russia. “I tremble for your Christianity. They will certainly circumcise you.” On an even more histrionic note, Lamb added, “My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to bury such parts in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable, horse-belching, Tartar-people! . . . The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You’ll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray try and cure yourself.”34
Ultimately, Manning wound up setting his sights on Canton, where he hoped to study Chinese with George Staunton before smuggling himself into the country. He had no position with the East India Company to get him there, but he did have his connections. Joseph Banks, the eminent natural scientist and president of the Royal Society, wrote a letter on his behalf to the directors of the East India Company to recommend him for a secret mission of exploration. Banks noted that Manning would have no hope of success unless he could blend in perfectly: he must learn to dress like a Chinese, act like one, and speak with no accent at all—all of which he hoped Manning could learn in Canton. “I take a deep interest in the fate of this very amiable young man,” wrote Banks, “both on account of his mild character and the energies of his mind.”35 On the strength of Banks’s endorsement, the directors granted Manning free passage on an East Indiaman departing in 1806, along with permission to live in the British factory as a doctor once he arrived.36
Manning did not want for self-esteem, and his audacity in hoping to sneak into China was companion to a faith that he was simply smarter than most people. “My greatest want is good society,” he wrote with ennui during the passage to China, tiring of how much everyone on the ship fawned over his brilliance. “I am among a set of grossly ignorant people. The rogues soon found out my superiority of acquirements, and they now will give me credit for knowing what I am really ignorant of.”37 He began to grow a beard, as if to underscore his nonconformity and set himself apart from the merely ordinary passengers on the ship. By the time he arrived, the beard would be half a foot long, lovingly groomed, and still growing. Eventually it would reach down to his waist. “China! Canton!” wrote Charles Lamb to him as he sailed, in a letter otherwise filled with theater gossip and the latest on Coleridge (who had recently come to live with Lamb). “Bless us—how it strains the imagination and makes it ache!”38
In January 1807, Manning arrived at Canton and immediately sought out George Staunton, to whom Joseph Banks had given him a glowing letter of introduction. Staunton was already a great admirer of Banks, who had been a close friend of his father’s and helped prepare the Macartney mission (which Banks had hoped in vain would return with the means to cultivate tea in British India, by bringing back either tea plants, Chinese tea farmers, or both).39 So Staunton was delighted to welcome Manning to Canton—here, at last, was another Englishman who wanted to learn Chinese. The select committee, for its part, was skeptical of Manning’s likelihood of exploring China, but they still let him take up residence in the factory. “Although we entertain but a very faint hope of his success,” they conceded, “. . . the consequence might be rather favourable than otherwise to the public service.”40
The other new arrival in 1807 was a round-faced son of a boot-tree maker from Northumberland named Robert Morrison, a twenty-five-year-old with a mop of thick, curly black hair who came to Canton for entirely different reasons than Manning and against even greater odds. Like Manning, Robert Morrison did not have a job with the Company—nor did he want one—but being from a lower social class he also did not have any connections to speak of. Morrison was trying to get to China not because it called to him personally in any particular way but because the directors of the London Missionary Society had seen fit to appoint him as the first Protestant missionary there. They did not, however, have any clear plan for how he should accomplish that. Catholic missionaries from the European continent had been going to China for generations, but by this time the Chinese government had outlawed their activities, so only the few who were kept by the emperor in Beijing were allowed to reside legally in the country. The rest lived in secret and risked violent persecution if discovered. Furthermore, many of them were French, and since Morrison was a Protestant rather than a Catholic, even aside from the tensions of the ongoing war between their countries or the religious crackdowns of the Chinese government, he knew that he would have no help from their channels.
Neither, for that matter, would he have any help from his own kind, because no Protestant missionary had ever gone to China before—and the East India Company rather liked it that way. Morrison noted ruefully in his diary in December 1806, while he was trying to get permission to travel on a Company ship to Canton, that “strong prejudices existed in England and in all parts of India where the British influence extended against missionary exertions.”41 Most of the Company’s directors viewed missionaries as sanctimonious troublemakers who could easily upset the local authorities, so they refused Morrison passage on any of the Company’s ships—the only civilian vessels that sailed between England and China. It was an unpromising start for a man who, as his instructions from the London Missionary Society informed him, was supposed to “go far hence to the Gentiles, as an ambassador of the Prince of Peace.”42
Morrison settled on taking passage to New York—the wrong direction, but where he hoped to find an American ship that would bring him to Canton. On January 8, 1807, just before he left England (and just as Thomas Manning was landing comfortably in Canton), Morrison was ordained as a minister in preparation for his journey. It was as if he were going off to war. “I have now to buckle on my armour,” he wrote in his diary. “O! to be enabled ‘to deny myself, to take up my cross,’ and to follow the Lamb fully!” Denial would indeed describe much of what was to come. It was a disastrous 109-day passage across the Atlantic, marked by storms and fire and snow so heavy he couldn’t see the bow of the ship. He fought back fear and depression on the way, trying to rein in his resentment at the hopelessness of his mission. (“Were it not for God,” he wrote in his diary, “I should sink under this pressure.”) He tried preaching to the ship’s crew, but nobody would listen to him. Arriving at New York, he disembarked only to find that there were no ships there, either, that were willing to take him to Canton.43
In despair, Morrison left New York and took a rough wagon ride down to Philadelphia, where he finally found one ship whose owners were willing to give him a berth—but only at the price of $1,000 for his passage, which was more money than the London Missionary Society
had given him to fund his entire mission, let alone his journey to Canton. The Americans, however, turned out to be far more sympathetic to missionaries than the British. An enthusiastic network of American Protestants took him in, giving him places to stay and introducing him to others like himself, one of them a missionary to the Cherokee in Tennessee. They also agitated on his behalf, and they had influence. One managed to persuade a ship’s captain in New York to give him passage to Canton, at the cost only of his food (for which another of the Americans paid). And despite his not being a citizen of the United States, they even managed to prevail upon the secretary of state, James Madison, to write him a letter of introduction to the U.S. consul in Canton asking him to do anything he could to help.44 Morrison sailed in May and arrived in Canton 113 days later in September 1807, eight months after he left England.
The warm glow of Morrison’s reception in America had faded by the time he reached China, where he faced the bleak reality of his situation. His fellow British refused to let him live in their factory in Canton. The Portuguese, being that they were Catholics, did not want him in Macao. And he hadn’t quite understood how difficult it would be to find someone in Canton to teach him the language until one of the foreigners explained that the Chinese could be put to death for doing so.45 So he turned to George Staunton as the only man who could possibly help him. The Royal Society president, Joseph Banks, had given Morrison a letter of introduction to Staunton just as he had done for Thomas Manning, and Morrison delivered that letter when he arrived. However, Banks had made a more confidential assessment of Morrison’s prospects in the letter he wrote for Manning several months earlier. After having sung Manning’s praises as an explorer so brave that he held “even Death itself in contempt,” Banks had mentioned offhandedly that there was also a missionary on his way from England, and about him he was far less enthusiastic. “My own opinion,” he wrote, “leans to the probability of his obtaining the crown of martyrdom much more readily than a single convert to the Cross.”46
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