Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  The seizures failed to end either the opium trade or the fundamental antagonism between China and Britain and so the emperor’s army marched south to expel the foreigners, first on Canton and then on Macao (the port authorised by the emperor for Portuguese trade). The British retreated to a small, unprepossessing island down the coast called Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Elliot’s guarantee to Canton’s opium traders landed Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston with a bill estimated at £2.4 million.2 He felt it his duty to the taxpayer to recoup the money. The simplest solution was to declare war on China and extract reparations. By October 1839 he had the consent of Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne for a military expedition and by February 1840 Palmerston had instructed Lord Auckland, governor-general of India, to prepare a task force.

  That summer Palmerston’s fleet made quick work of subduing the port of Tinghai, on the island of Chusan, 50 miles from Shanghai, and by August had delivered an ultimatum to the emperor. Lengthy negotiations resulted in the Chuenpee Convention, offering Britain diplomatic relations on an equal footing, the resumption of trade at Canton, the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain, and a fine of $6 million. This seemed to meet Palmerston’s war aims, in particular the fine, which would offset Elliot’s profligacy, but when details of the deal reached the Foreign Secretary, he was furious. He wanted more Chinese ports open to British trade, not a barren rock like Hong Kong. The emperor’s response to the treaty was just as hostile. He ordered his armies to march on Canton and extinguish the barbarians.3

  Despatched to put some backbone into the British campaign was the blimpish Major-General Sir Hugh Gough, who as a major had fought alongside Campbell at Barrosa Hill. Luxuriant mutton chops and a bluff manner made him the quintessential Victorian general and a popular choice as commander-in-chief of Her Majesty’s Army in China. Though he had not fought a battle since Waterloo, Gough had lost none of his conviction and energy. He would keep plugging away until his enemy keeled over (see Plate 9).

  Chusan, from Thomas Allom’s China, in a Series of Views.

  Gough was convinced of the need to launch a full-scale war to reimpose Palmerston’s terms.4 By May 1841 he was ready to assault his first target: Canton. Against Gough’s 3,500 men were ranged 45,000 Chinese. It was a bold general who advanced on a city in which his enemy enjoyed a near fifteen to one advantage, but as Fortescue put it, ‘the British expect their generals to take these risks and only blame them for rashness if haply overtaken by disaster’. Gough swept all before him. Just fourteen British soldiers were killed and ninety-one wounded.5 Beaten for the second time, the Chinese agreed to hand over the $6 million demanded. By the end of May, $5 million had been paid and, with sureties lodged for the rest, Gough returned to Hong Kong.

  Though officially peace reigned, the Chinese continued to subvert British trade. In August a British steamer discovered the Chinese dropping enormous granite boulders into the river near Canton to impede shipping.6 Gough felt it was time to reach for the slipper and recommended to Lord Auckland that hostilities be resumed forthwith.7 A flotilla of thirteen men-of-war, one surveying vessel, fifteen troop transports and six supply ships left Hong Kong to strike the blow.8 The task force would stop off at a wish list of ports Palmerston wanted open to British trade, destroy their defences and then proceed to the mighty city of Nankin and subdue it.

  Gough easily took Amoy. Chusan fell soon afterwards. Chinhai followed on 10 October (British casualties four killed, sixteen wounded) and on the 13th, Ningpo (a city of half a million people) surrendered without a fight. Its governor was so ashamed he took his own life. ‘The odds at which the poor Chinese fight, the mischief they do, compared with the destruction they suffer, make the whole affair a ghastly, bloody farce, at which the devil himself must laugh,’ declared Punch:* ‘It is a war without glory; a war which, when ended, against such a foe, can give no laurels to the victors: their most fitting chaplets will be wreaths of poppies.’9

  Their election duties over in Ireland, the 98th sailed for Plymouth. Campbell joined them on 23 November 1841. Ahead lay a six-month voyage round the Cape, across the Indian Ocean, past Java, to the feverish outpost of Hong Kong. Sailing to China in the 1840s was still an adventure; the First Opium War was Britain’s most ambitious military expedition to the Orient thus far. HMS Belleisle would be their wooden world for the journey; a 22-year-old, 74-gun man-of-war with a ship’s company of 280, under the command of Captain Kingcome. ‘I take with me six companies of 120 Rank and File with four officers per company’, Campbell told Napier. ‘I have not taken a single sick man on board.’ A company of Royal Artillery, plus 116 women and children.** were to be crammed in as well. Campbell appealed to the navy and, after an inspection, half the artillery company was reassigned, making precious little difference. The 1,750-ton ship would still be carrying 1,277 souls, though built to carry a crew a quarter of that size.10

  Embarkation of the 98th started on 6 December and carried on for a fortnight. Campbell’s men were squashed into the lower deck, now stripped of its guns, and half the orlop.*** The arrival of Gough’s second-in-command, Major-General Lord Saltoun,**** plus staff, reduced space still further. His Lordship’s brigade major, Captain James Hope Grant, was given quarters big enough to house a ‘Newfoundland dog, my violincello, and a little piano’.11 The musical Saltoun wanted an accompanist on the long voyage. It was a lucky escape for Hope Grant, who had been on the point of resigning his commission. Having inherited £10,000, he had joined the 9th Lancers and squandered his money. A long journey on full pay, food provided, plus the chance of some plunder at the end of it, had an obvious appeal. But for Grant’s musical talents, Britain might have been denied a gifted commander. It was Campbell who was to promote him to brigadier-general sixteen years later as they marched on Lucknow.

  HMS Belleisle in her later incarnation as a hospital ship during the Crimean War, from the Illustrated London News, 21 July 1855.

  On 20 December the Belleisle set sail in convoy with the fifth-rate frigate Apollo and the barque Sapphire,* both of which had had their guns removed to accommodate troops.12 There was little for Campbell’s men to do except parade twice a day and play cards. Each morning at eleven the band practised in the officers’ mess, and every afternoon Saltoun, on guitar, would duet with Grant on cello.13 Wrapped up in either regimental minutiae or self-improving books, Campbell denied himself the outlet Saltoun found in music. Finding it hard to do something for its own sake, he was becoming dangerously obsessive. As boredom drove Campbell to fuss, Saltoun wondered whether his fastidiousness might prove his undoing.

  The one unavoidable hazard of a voyage round the Cape was the ‘crossing the line’ ceremony, held as the ship passed the equator (see Plate 8). By the 1840s the accretions of generations of sailors had turned it into an elaborate spectacle of ritual humiliation. The Belleisle entered the southern hemisphere on 17 January, Neptune arriving on cue ‘in procession in a fine car, attended by all his myrmidons, painted and tarred in the most various fashion, and some of them feathered all over, with a coachman and sea-lions to draw his car’, reported Saltoun. Heedless of rank, every soldier and sailor who had yet to cross the equator was initiated. ‘The process is thus’, Saltoun explained:

  in the lee gangway they have a sail full of water, about three or four feet deep, kept full by the fire-engine. The victim is seized, then they blind his eyes, on which all who have passed before sluice him with buckets of water, and he is taken behind the sail, where, if, they do not like him, they give him a drink of salt water; then he is taken on to kiss Amphitrite, and then they shave him with tar and an iron hoop, more or less severely, as the case may be, and that being done … they pitch him, if he is shy of jumping, into the sail, when the Tritons take and duck him well, and as he tries to get out they play the hose in his face and shy water on him in any way they can.14

  What sounds like harmless horseplay was rough stuff. The ‘razor’ was a rusty serrated hoop, 2ft long or more, smeared with animal blood; the ‘soap’, a
noisome concoction of every foul substance the crew could find, and on a frigate there was ample choice. Anyone protesting found the shaving brush in his mouth.15 ‘Smelling salts’ – a cork with needles sticking out – revived those who fainted.16 The combination of razor, ‘soap’ and tropical heat left some with septicaemia.** The 49-year-old Campbell was a good sport and was shaved and ducked along with the rest.17 Saltoun, however, was conveniently ‘absolved’ by the sea god. With such a packed ship, Neptune ‘never had had so much work upon his hands before’ and the ceremony continued for three hours. Even so, for some the day was a disappointment. Saltoun’s ADC, Cunynghame, overheard two soldiers chatting: ‘I say, Bill, they’ve been hoaxing on us’, cried one. ‘I can’t see no line!’18

  After calling in at Rio to resupply, by 14 March they had docked at Simon’s Bay in the Cape Colony. Here Campbell heard that Gough had taken Ningpo but also news of the disastrous retreat from Caubul. While the sailors caulked the lower deck and took on fresh provisions the army officers set off past the whaling stations towards Cape Town. Saltoun was on the lookout for horses, one each for himself, Cunynghame, Grant and Campbell. Only three animals met his standards, so Campbell had to go without. Then it was on to Wynberg, where Campbell dropped in on Sir Benjamin D’Urban, who had resigned as Governor of the Cape four years before, and after that a visit to the new incumbent, Sir George Napier, Charles’s brother.19 Ruling the empire was very much a self-selecting oligarchy back then.

  Restocked, the Belleisle set forth again but three days out ran into a storm. It swept two men and all the boats and livestock from the deck of the Sapphire and split the Apollo’s mainsail.20 The Belleisle’s ‘ports were broken in, officers were washed out of their cabins, and we had no regular meals’.By the time it had subsided, the Sapphire and Apollo were nowhere to be seen.21

  The Belleisle limped on alone, passing Christmas Island on 27 April, before skirting round Java and into the Straits of Banca, east of Sumatra. As they reached Singapore on 12 May, ‘boats containing every species of tropical fruit, and various Asiatic luxuries, now crowded around the ship’. In the harbour, side by side with opium clippers and Chinese junks, were three warships and half a dozen transports bound for Hong Kong,22 but of the Apollo and Sapphire there was no sign.

  Campbell was carried by palanquin to the governor’s modish guesthouse at Government House, where each room had the unheard-of extravagance of an en-suite bathroom. ‘Little more than twenty years since it was a mass of jungle, where the savage tiger roamed, the lord of the soil’, wrote Cunynghame. ‘Now elegant houses and gardens are to be seen in all directions.’* But amid the prosperity the effects of opium were evident. Addicts ‘totally bereft of their senses’ could be seen ‘wallowing, like beasts of the field, in filth … others, not yet arrived at that stage of listless inactivity, throwing their emaciated bodies into the contortions of maniacs’.23

  On 17 May Captain Kingcome, tired of waiting for the two lost ships, prepared to sail, but just as they were about to head to sea, the Sapphire and Apollo were sighted rounding the harbour mouth.24 Having helped the Apollo out with some much-needed spares, on 22 May the Belleisle left both vessels to resupply while she hoisted canvas for the final leg of her journey.

  On 2 June 1842 they reached Hong Kong.25 Losses had been inconsequential and the 98th were fighting fit. Four artillerymen had deserted at Rio and back on 18 January one soldier had been lost over the side. ‘He was one of the recruits, a bad-conditioned man and a thief’, wrote Saltoun. ‘His company were going to cob him for stealing other men’s messes, so he jumped overboard – no great loss to the regiment.’26 A sailor, one woman and a child had died during the voyage, but on the other side of the ledger three babies had been born. With nearly 1,300 souls corseted into a ship built for 300, a mortality rate in single figures for a six-month trip was something of which Campbell could be justly proud;27 it was rarely achieved in London barracks in the 1840s, let alone a navy transport. Insuring the Belleisle left with only healthy men, combined with Campbell’s fretting, had preserved the regiment.

  The 98th carried the latest military technology; new percussion muskets in place of the old Brown Bess flintlocks. They would be fighting Chinese troops armed with either obsolete matchlocks* or bows and arrows. As for artillery, the Chinese might have invented the gunpowder-fired cannon half a millennium before, but now their guns were charged with inferior powder,28 and were often so badly cast they exploded when fired. Some were museum pieces. After their first attack on Chusan, the British found a gun cast in 1601.29 The enemy’s swords were literally rusty, their naval vessels outmoded,30 but above all their leadership was lamentable. As one officer put it, ‘The Chinese are robust, muscular fellows, and no cowards – the Tartars desperate – but neither are well-commanded or acquainted with European warfare.’31 Unsurprisingly, while the 98th had been at sea, the emperor’s strongholds had surrendered one by one. Yuyau, Tsz’ki, Funghwa and Chapu all threw in the towel. So far the Chinese had shown ‘Much bluster and bravado as far as big words went,’ as Campbell put it, ‘but nothing scarcely beyond big words.’32 As before, a comparison of casualties provides a stark contrast. At Chapu the Chinese lost between 1,200 and 1,500 men; the British just nine.33

  Back home, Gough’s easy victories made the public take triumph for granted. Punch predicted that at Pekin Gough would find only a portcullis ‘composed of solid rice paper with cross bars of chopsticks’ buttressed by ‘ramparts of japanned canvas and bamboo rods’, manned by natives brandishing ‘varnished bladders containing peas and date stones’ to scare away the barbarians.34 In London, the war was beginning to look like the act of a bully and the questionable morality of the cause only reinforced that perception. Campbell was damned if the army won and damned if it lost.

  Punch might crow about the frailty of Gough’s enemy but the risk of death was very real. One mistake on the part of the British, one trap artfully laid by the Chinese, and Campbell and his men faced torture and worse. Upon entering a Chinese harbour, one captain, expecting to meet up with a British flotilla, found to his horror that the ships had already sailed. The Chinese viceroy had him arrested, tied to a post and slowly flayed alive.35 Thereafter, as one officer admitted, ‘the greatest difficulty was experienced in preventing the soldiers from firing on the Chinese after they had laid down their arms and were supplicating for mercy’.36

  News of Gough’s victory at Chapu reached Campbell in Hong Kong on 5 June. The Apollo and Sapphire had sailed into harbour the day before.37 The women and children disembarked and the crew of the Belleisle made their final preparations before heading out to join Gough’s fleet. After their long voyage, regiments arriving in India underwent an intense regimen of exercise to get them fit. The 98th had sailed further, for longer, but were sound as a bell and raring to go. The sense of expectation grew as the men sharpened their bayonets, pipe-clayed their belts and composed their wills. But a matter of greater import weighed heavy on Lord Saltoun’s mind, as it had done for thousands of miles past. To discuss it, the general convened a special ‘council of war … composed of Grant, Colby, an officer of the 98th who is a great mechanic, and the ship’s carpenter’.38 Campbell was not invited. The bridge of Lord Saltoun’s guitar had broken and, try as he might, in the tropical heat he had been unable to re-glue it.39 Across the Indian Ocean he fiddled with clamps and adhesives to no avail. He poured out his disappointment in letters home. Now, at the end of his tether, he opened the floor to trusted officers and selected artisans. The instrument was inspected, methodologies dissected and suggestions discussed, but still nothing worked. Eventually the ship’s doctor took pity on him and lent the general his guitar. Very soon Saltoun managed to break that too.**

  On 7 June the Belleisle left Hong Kong, in company with HMS Rattlesnake.40 They reached Chusan ten days later. On the 19th Gough took Shanghai and two days after that the Belleisle met up with the rest of the expeditionary force at Woosung.41 From here the frigate would be guid
ed up the largely uncharted river by the survey steamship Plover.42 With Campbell’s men and extra reinforcements from India, Gough had 9,000 men,43 and now organised them into five brigades. Campbell’s 98th, the 26th Foot (the Cameronians), the flank companies of the 41st Madras Native Infantry and the Bengal Volunteer Battalion would form the 1st Brigade, under Saltoun. The 5th Brigade, including the artillery and powder ships, was placed in the hands of Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery of the Madras Artillery. For this new command Montgomery was promoted to brigadier. Campbell was incandescent. To everyone else it was logical for Montgomery, the senior artillery officer, to lead the artillery, but having been a lieutenant-colonel seven years longer, Campbell felt he deserved the command on the grounds of seniority. With Napier-esque petulance, he lodged a formal complaint. Gough soothed Campbell with semantics, explaining that Montgomery would not get the rank of an army brigadier but merely the title ‘Brigadier of Artillery’.44

  Having restructured his army, Gough’s next objective was the city of Chinkiangfoo at the junction of the imperial canal and the Yangtze. As Gough steamed ahead in the Vixen to reconnoitre on 16 July the place seemed deathly quiet.45 The garrison had entrenched themselves in the hills, sure that the British, believing the city to be empty, would ‘advance boldly inland. Then our forces would fall upon them unawares, and the whole ugly tribe would be annihilated.’46 Gough had other ideas. Three brigades would go ashore, under Major-Generals Saltoun, Schoedde and Bartley. The main offensive thrust would be from Bartley’s 3rd Brigade, which would assault Chinkiangfoo from the west.* Meanwhile, Saltoun’s brigade, including Campbell’s 98th, would confront the entrenched Chinese camps about a mile to the south-west. As a diversion, Schoedde’s 2nd Brigade would ‘take and occupy the two hills commanding the north and east faces, with directions to turn this diversion into a real attack, if he found it practicable without incurring much loss’.47