In the weekly periodical Household Words and its successor All the Year Round, both edited by Charles Dickens, there appeared over a number years a series of autobiographical accounts of the life of an Englishman living in the south-east of China. These are just some of the many interesting pieces published in the magazines. What follows is provided in the hope that its illustration of attitudes towards, and relationships between, the different races at that time may be thought of some interest. As well as containing a rather good story, the passage gives an amusing illustration of a manner in which the English have famously attempted to communicate with speakers of other languages throughout history. I would not wish it to be understood that I support or even condone the objectionable attitudes that are, from time to time, betrayed. In particular, the ease with which the violent behaviour of some of the author's compatriots is described in the following short extract caused me some disappointment:
"…we sat on the balcony overlooking the bay, whilst our younger friends shot clay pellets at the dogs and tanka girls along shore…"
Below, the article is reproduced in full. The only variations that I have allowed from the text as it was published are: the rejection of certain dated typological conventions; the correction of a small number of errors in both spelling and punctuation; and perhaps the addition of a few more!
It is a glowing, glaring morning at Hong Kong. I awake inside my net-muslin safe, wherein my boy, A-Pow—an urchin in baggy blue breeches and soft thick shoes, which allow him to glide about like a ghost—has consigned me for security from the flies, like a jam tart under gauze in a pastrycook's window, during the dog-days.
A-Pow is about nine, of grave demeanour, and wearing a little pigtail. The rest of his head is shaven down to a leaden blue tint, with the exception of a "cheveux de frise" following the course of the coronal suture, over the head from ear to ear, in the dotted line on the profile of the popular advocate for self-measurement as regards wigs. This fringe, about an inch long, sticks bolt upright, looking rather like a glory: more like, perhaps, one section of a bottle-brush. I had seen him so often on fans, with a veneered ivory face, that when I first engaged him, I felt we were old friends.
"Gud morng," he says.
"Chin-chin, A-Pow," I reply.
He thinks he is speaking English, and I imagine I am talking Chinese. We are both equally wrong.
"Ey Yaw!" he cries, with an expression of delight, as he sees the inevitable mosquito that has annoyed me all night, in a state of bloated gluttony in a fold of the curtains." No hab catchee he."
And with beaming triumph he squeezes him between his fingers and thumb, leaving a red splash, about the size of a florin, on the muslin.
"Maskee (never mind)," I say. "Wilow down sye talkee that comprador catchee my one piecey glass beer all a proper cold. Chop! chop!"
Which interpreted means, "There—never mind that: cut away down stairs and tell the steward to let me have a glass of cold beer. Quick!"
It is a dreadful thing I know to confess to drinking beer in bed before breakfast, but there is no help for it here. I am perfectly assured I shall not have strength enough to dress, unless I get it. For I feel completely washed out, and not dried. My thermometer, which I have plunged into my cold bath, stands at 88°—only four degrees lower than the average heat of a warm bath in England! The air is blowing through the open blinds as if it came from a hot blast furnace. There has also been a heavy rain at daybreak, and a hot mist is rising from the steaming rank vegetation of Hong Kong, wrapping everything in its muggy embraces. The gum-water I made last night in a little saucer is all dried up; my bottle of hair-grease seems filled with thick yellow oil; and a colony of very small red ants so love the orange-scented traces of it on my hair-brush, that I knock out myriads as I rap the on the table. The shock starts a cockroach from under the looking-glass; and causes him rashly to commit suicide in the basin.
My bath and beer are disposed of; and a few minutes, I pay for the indulgence. A copper-coloured rash begins to cover my neck, and arms. I next see it about my ankles I know it is on my back. This is the terrible 'prickly heat' of the tropics—a combination of pills and needles and stinging-nettles. It is bad enough in itself; but, when you are congratulated upon having it, it is maddening. "All right, old fellow," they say; "the best thing that can happen to you. You're safe not to have anything else, while that's well out."
I play with my breakfast, dwelling on the charms of a cold raw November day in our own climate, and then crawl up-stairs again to pack up my portmanteau. My impedimenta are very well condensed, and the portmanteau is under overland size: but the labour is so excessive I am glad, once or twice, to sit down on my bamboo chair, panting with exertion. A-Pow cannot help me. I point to my things and the compartmented trunk; but he says, "No can savey that pigeon so fashion," with a hopeless expression of obtuseness. A little steamer, built at Whampoa, by Mr. Cooper, and called the Fei-maa, or Flying Horse, runs between Hong Kong and Canton about twice a week, stopping for the night at Macao. It is to start at twelve this day, according to announcement-bills in English and Chinese, on the walls: and it is for Canton I am bound.
Leaving the club, I find the heat of my room is nothing to that of Queen's-road—the main artery of Hong Kong circulation. The Europeans, in their white jackets and trousers and round pith hats, are driven under the shade of the shop colonnades and thick-leaved trees, to talk. The Sou'west monsoon is blowing freely out at sea; but, as Hong Kong—or rather Victoria—was built, with a noble disregard of position, on the north-eastern side of Victoria Peak (which is not a peak at all, but a rounded hill), not one breath of summer or autumnal air ever reaches it, except that which "cannons" off the hills, at an angle against you. But this moist, stifling heat, so terrible to us, is evidently healthy and bracing to the Chinese. They revel in it, and stretch themselves out to enjoy its fiercest rays like cats in a window; or toil with heavy stones slung on a bamboo, or chairs containing fourteen stone Britons, up the steep paths to the bungalows, with their closely shaven heads unsheltered by anything except their pigtails twisted round them, until their brains must dry up and rattle in their skulls, like lychee.
Queen's-road is all alive, and the natives are running up and down like ants. Nobody remains where he is but the barbers who place their little stools under the shade of a clump of trees near the club, and keep up a noise all day long, which almost out-clamours the crickets above them. Sometimes the travelling cook-shop keeper pauses here for a minute. His entire establishment is slung over his shoulder, and it consists of two bamboo frames, about three feet high by two square. When he stops, he connects them by a board forming a sort of counter, or table. One frame holds his kitchen, which is chiefly a copper heated by charcoal, and containing "stock." The other has his materials in drawers and on shelves; and, on the top, his spoons and little basins, with saucers full of picked shrimps, wheaten paste, small oysters, fowls' entrails, pork fat, fish, and long onions. From a string, he now and then hangs a rat or a large fat frog: and out of these specimens of food he compounds more dishes, by artful combinations, and provides a more varied carte, than any two-franc restaurateur, with"quatre plats au choix" in the Palais Royal. A potage he vends at "two cash a cup" is inscrutable: but as twenty-five cash go to a penny, it cannot be dear whatever it is.
Then people go by with large flat baskets containing what looks like squares of yellow soap, marked with a red Chinese character. This is their substitute for cheese. Nothing will induce them to touch milk in any shape; and this article, called "taou," is made from beans—a species of curd precipitated by an acid. I do not care much about the fruits which they wish me to buy. The Chinese gooseberry is over three inches long, and, when cut through, its section forms a perfect star. The persiman is like a large egg-plum, but containing half a dozen stones; the pear is as hard as a potato, quite round, and tastes of nothing; bananas I abominate, reminding me of cotton wool and bear's grease mixed together; and I cannot agree with Mr. Wingrove Cooke, that the Amoy pomelo is the finest fruit in the world. Be assured, all over the globe, there is no garden like the centre avenue of Covent-garden; no fruit so fine as our strawberry, peach, and hothouse grape. People say to me, "Ah! but you should be here in (some other month) and taste our (some other fruit)." I always want to hit these folks. They are of those who, when you say you have been to Chamounix, always reply, "Ah! but you should have gone to Zermatt."
Amidst the restless, hurrying crowd of the Hong Kong main street-coolies, naked to the waist, carrying enormous weights; merchants, in bamboo chairs, braving coup de soleil, fever, and dysentery, everything, for the almighty dollar; clerks and tea-tasters, busying, like ants, in and out of their "go-downs," or warehouses; sleek, sly-eyed Parsees, able to cope even with the Yankees; oily compradors bearing bags of Mexican dollars to the banks; boat-girls in their coquettish handkerchief headdresses; toddling women with little feet; babies in pigtails gravely basking in sunny gutters—through all this mingled action and still life, we come down to Pedder's Wharf, and embark in a little boat, covered with arched matting, and pull off to the Fei-maa.
There were seventy or eighty Chinese already on board, partitioned off on the main deck, by themselves, with all sorts of dirty packages wondrous to behold: pillows made of bamboo, matting, raw pork, seedy clothes, pine-apples, old shoes and dried fish packed inside lanterns, umbrellas, giblets carried by a string and collections of such miscellaneous household things generally which you see in the last lots of a sales catalogue.
The English passengers occupied the deck under the awning, and the saloon. We started punctually, and glided out of the harbour between many green islands, with small villages in their nooks and bays, wherein very suspicious pirate craft were lying ready to dart out of their holes, like spiders, upon any hapless little junk that got caught in the meshes of the shallows.
We went pleasantly on, for two hours or so, without the scenery changing, until we emerged, by the Lantao passage, as it is called, into open water, and then we prepared for "tiffin." I say "prepared," for the passengers all looked to their revolvers, and placed them within reach on the table; whilst the English and Portuguese crew stood at the different entrances on the main deck with loaded muskets and drawn swords.
"What does all this mean?" I asked.
"We have too many Chinese on board," replied Captain Castella. "They are nearly six to every one of us; so we do not wish to be served as the Queen was served a year and a half ago."
"And how was that!'"
"The steamer was captured, and the crew and passengers murdered. Mr. Osmond Cleverley was the only one who escaped, and you will meet him at Macao tonight. He will tell you his own story much better than I can.
The excitement gave us all an appetite, and the pale ale (I suspect) gave us valour. The eatables were good and well cooked, and the tiffin was a success, and passed off in safety. When it was over we all went on deck. The crew and passengers discharged their fire-arms at birds and other objects, to show that they had been really loaded and then we sat and chatted in the laziness of repletion, until we arrived about four in the afternoon at Macao.
Macao looks as Weymouth would do after a very long residence in Portugal. Its shore is crescent-shaped; but edged with purely continental buildings and convents. There is a Praja, or promenade, along its border, whereon appear Portuguese troops, and now and then a band. You hear convent bells ringing the Angelus in the still eventide; priests, apparently without insides, slink about and look at you sideways; there is a Teatro San Somebody, and you wonder what on earth has become of China. You could not feel more bewildered if, one day turning out of Belgrave square, you entered the Pontine Marshes; although even that might not be so great an antithesis.
It happens to us all to witness a great many rows in the course of our lives, of various phases—physical, as on the old Jenny Lind nights, amongst the superior classes (whose manners and customs I am sometimes permitted the delight of studying); moral, as when Reverend Boanerges Gong meets Reverend S. Bookay on the platform; domestic, as in a strictly family party after the reading of a will; general, as at the annual meeting of any company you please, started by an inventive genius to make himself secretary thereof; Irish, as when Paddy O'Raggedy—that broth of a of a boy —cries "Hurroo!" and allows his native ready humour to run to fracturing his friend's skull or biting his nose off; and patriotic, as when a lot of nature's nobility, possessing nothing in the world, go in for a division of property and universal suffrage. But we have never had a clear notion of a downright row, until we have dropped anchor off Macao amongst the tanka girls.
The tanka is, as its name implies in Chinese, an egg-shaped boat, little at the prow end, big at the stern, and hooped over with arches of bamboo and matting. It forms the home of more than one hundred thousand of the amphibious Cantonese; and these residences of the wind stretch out on the Pearl River to Whampoa and Macao, as our rows of clerks' houselets do to Woolwich and Gravesend on the living stream of the railway. This, however, is scarcely a comparison. The tanka population is considered so low as to be almost unworthy of a place in the census. They live and marry amongst themselves; and are as distinct from the Cantonese proper, as the fishing inhabitants of Portel are from the people of Boulogne.
As soon as the steamer nears Macao, the tankas shoot out from the shore towards the spot where they know she will anchor; and their oars are plied so well, that their approach assumes the air of a cutting out expedition. Throw a bun into the water of St. James's Park, and the ducks will give you the best notion of the manner of attack. One woman skulls behind, and the other takes her place on the forecastle, with a rope and a boat-hook, prepared for the worst; and, as the entire fleet makes for the sponsons of the steamer, when they meet the row begins. A-moon, the belle of the tankas, arrives first; and showing her beautiful white teeth as she "chin-chins" the captain, makes fast to our paddle-box, and then nods her pretty head, over which she has lightly tied a red handkerchief in that coquettish style which young ladies who know they are nice-looking adopt in the hall of the Opera when waiting for their carriages to come up. But A-tye, who is a sort of rival in good looks, skulls strenuously up and then with a good way on her boat, ships her stern oar, runs forward, banging between the tankas of A-moon and A-miu (who is a terrible vixen, and, they say, can fight like a cat, whence her name, which appropriately signifies Mrs. Puss in Chinese), runs in well and gains her place. A-miu immediately springs on her, all claws set, and knocks her over into the other boat. A-moon resents the intrusion with a boat-hook, upon which A-tye seizes a chopper, not her own, and cuts A-min's tanka adrift, which is immediately shoved out to sea by A-yung, A-chung, A-lin, A-ming, and as many more as you please.
A herd of female jackos after one nut, in their native jungle, could not have made such a screeching clatter, and their Chinese swearing must have been something awful. The first bold man who disembarked had a terrible time of it. He carried letters and despatches. Now I have always considered the conveyance of the mails in Russia on an insecure and unsatisfactory footing as illustrated by the Courier of St. Petersburg on his four horses at Astley's; but I saw this man, with my own eyes, in four boats at once. I never heard whether he reached the shore or was pulled to pieces. A-miu now returned and knocked A-tye over into the water with her oar; but the girl swam like a fish, and climbed up the boat in an instant—her clothes, only a silk blouse and trousers, soon drying in the Macao sun. And at last, amongst screaming, fighting, and struggling—crying, laughing, and swearing—I got to shore, but how, I have no more notion than how I once fell with a burst balloon, from the height of a mile, surrounded by fireworks, into a street in the Vauxhall-road, which, for the life of me, I never could find out afterwards.
A very agreeable dinner, with plenty of cool beer, and "cups" of various descriptions, and a ride round the city, with a visit to the Cave of Camoëns, caused the evening to pass pleasantly enough. The kindness and hospitality of the great English houses in China is unbounded.
Travellers bring in their luggage, and become "'squatters" in the establishment for as long as it suits them, coming and going as they please. It is no intrusion on privacy to mention the names of the Dents and Jardines in connexion with these real accommodations in a country where hotels are not. Their courtesy to travellers is world famous.
It was my good fortune that evening to meet Mr. Osmond Cleverley, as Captain Castella had presaged. He alone escaped from the terrible massacre on board the Queen, the year before; and as we sat on the balcony overlooking the bay, whilst our younger friends shot clay pellets at the dogs and tanka girls along shore, he gave me the following particulars:
He left Hong Kong one fine morning in February, 1857, in the Queen—as I had left in the Fei-Maa with a mixed crew and passengers—English, Portuguese, and Chinese—the latter predominating.
The European passengers had, as usual, sat down to dinner in the saloon, off Lantao, when the Chinese left on deck and about the boat, by a preconcerted movement, suddenly knocked the mate and the man at the wheel on the head, threw them overboard, seized the arm-chest, which was on the bridge, with its cutlasses and ready-loaded muskets, and began firing down on the passengers. The captain (Wynn) and Mr. Cleverley seized their revolvers, and rushed up the ladder. The former was cut down as he reached the deck, and, falling on the latter, they were both thrown back into the cabin, and the hatches were immediately closed by those above, one of whom fell dead into the cabin by a shot from Mr. Cleverley's revolver.
Thus closed in a trap, they had nothing to look forward to but to be killed like beasts. The captain was almost senseless from a sword-cut on his skull; the engineer was undressing rapidly to leap overboard ; and the passengers and crew were too panic-stricken to do anything. Knowing that when the guns of the Chinese were fired they had no means of loading them again, Mr. Cleverley went up the ladder with a fresh revolver, and, forcing the cabin door open, met his assailants. He was received with their fire, but shot three of them dead. They fell back, and, emboldened by this, he was advancing, when a musket-ball passed through his thigh, smashing the bone. He again fell down back into the cabin, and the captain, seeing this, said, "Then all is over, sir. Here, take my revolver, and God bless you! we shall never meet again." He then stumbled to the stern-port, and threw himself into the sea, followed by the engineer. The Chinese fired after them, and they were never seen again.
Mr. Cleverley now bound up his broken leg, and was limping to the aft cabin, when another volley from deck was sent after him, followed by a Chinese yell of victory, as they rushed towards the saloon. Certain there was no chance left, he seized one of the rattan chairs common in China, and dragging it and himself towards the port sponsons, threw it into the water, and dropped in after it. Fortunately he was not perceived; the steamer, with nobody at her engines, kept on her way, and he was soon astern, floating, but alone in the sea!
In great agony, as the swell moved his broken bone, he floated for nearly an hour, with the assistance of his chair. Once it escaped from his hand, and in turning to recover it, as he rose in a wave higher than ordinary, he discovered a lorcha working to windward: and, from his nautical knowledge, he knew that, not being weatherly, his true course would bring her within hail. And he was right: she came nearer and nearer, until she got within hail, and just within an hour from his leaving the steamer he was taken on board as the hapless Queen was seen slowly standing to the northward, and was now half-funnel down.
The lorcha took him on to Macao, not, however, before the crew had asked him how much money he would give them to do so; and even then they would not land him amongst the Chinese boats. But he wrote on a card in pencil, "Mr. William Dent, or any other European;" and in half an hour Mr. Dent arrived, and took him to his house, placing him on a bed, which he did not leave for many months. He is now a cripple, and, although formerly distinguished for athletic exercises, limps about in great suffering.
All the Europeans on board the Queen were murdered, and the ship was burnt. The whole plan was conceived and carried out by that fiendish miscreant Yeh—another link in the chain of his hideous cruelties. Mr Cleverley declared that if a couple of men had stood by him he could have recaptured the boat.
As this narrative was finished, the sun went down. A band was playing on the Praja; the inhabitants were out in their best costumes for a walk in the cool evening, that is, cool by comparison, for the thermometer was still at 90°; and A-moon, A-tye, A-miu, and the tanka sisterhood, were burning coloured paper and beating gongs along the shore to propitiate Joss, all their quarrels ceasing until the next steamer came.
"You will go bathing with us to-morrow, about five?" asked my host.
"Certainly; anything you please."
"Boy!" he cried, "go catchee three piecey boat, washee-pigeon morrow!' Then he added to me: "A-tye will row you out, because she can speak pigeon English!"
"What!" I exclaimed. " Nonsense! I can't go bathing with that young person."
"It's all right, my dear fellow; it's thought nothing of here: it's the custom. She don't care, if you don't. You're over particular, and should go to Japan for a little while, or, better still, to Ramsgate. I can assure you it's all proper."
"Bless me!" I replied, "how very odd!"
And then we all went to bed, and I was again sweltering inside the mosquito curtains.
From All the Year Round, 30th April 1859 Volume 1 № 1
