Chusan
Page 5
‘What a field for missionary exertion they do present!’ he predicted. ‘We humbly trust in the wise government of God, that the doors to these parts will be soon thrown open.’ Gützlaff, of course, knew very well that the tide was in any case turning in favour of blowing those doors off their hinges with British cannon: it was after all he who had recommended as much to Lord Palmerston.
The ‘slightest spark’ which in 1835 Gützlaff had predicted came in 1839, on the day a Chinese high commissioner took the step of seizing and destroying 20,000 chests of contraband opium, estimated to be worth the better part of £2,000,000. The destruction was the culmination of decades of slights to British pride and constant battles over the rules under which trade in Canton was carried out. The Chinese once more suspended trade in the port, robbing HM Government’s Treasury of tax revenues, but the British government made it clear that it would not be stepping in to compensate merchants for their confiscated opium: that was up to the Chinese who had destroyed it. Lord Palmerston informed the Admiralty of his considered response: a military force would be sent, large enough to cow China’s emperor into accepting the reality of British power. [5]
‘It is expected that this expedition shall,’ he explained, ‘on arriving in the China Sea, proceed to take possession of some island on the Chinese coast.’ Some easily defended island had to be selected, ‘which might be permanently retained, if circumstances should render its permanent retention expedient.’ The island he had in mind was, unsurprisingly given the attention that had been drawn to it, Chusan. Once it had been captured, warships were to sail for the mouth of the Peiho, just as Macartney and Amherst had done before, but when there they were to force the emperor to accept Palmerston’s terms at the barrel of a gun. The man chosen to hold his finger over the trigger was one Charles Elliot, the British plenipotentiary in China.
Charles Elliot was a sailor by profession, a captain, born to an aristocratic family, yet he had worked his way up through the ranks after volunteering for the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen just as the Napoleonic Wars were drawing to a close. As a midshipman and lieutenant he had seen action in Algiers and experienced life on the seas of the East Indies, Africa, and the Caribbean. After a Colonial Office posting to British Guiana as protector of slaves, Elliot found himself in Canton acting as a deputy to Britain’s chief superintendent of trade just as the related questions of opium and trading rights were threatening to explode into conflict. A man of considerable conscience — he had no more sympathy for opium merchants than he had for slave-owners — he does not strike one with hindsight as the best man to set about lowering the haughty Chinese into the dust by distress, as Gützlaff had suggested. But he was, at least, on the government payroll and on the spot, and Palmerston was willing to put his faith in him. [6]
Charles held the role of British plenipotentiary jointly with his cousin, Admiral Sir George Elliot, whom Lord Palmerston had selected as naval commander-in-chief of the China expedition. George, by now in his mid-fifties and not in the prime of health, was like Charles a professional sailor who had seen action in more than one battle in the Mediterranean by the age of just ten. Admiral Nelson, under whom he had served aboard HMS Victory, described him as one of the best officers in the navy. An MP for a time, he was serving as Britain’s naval commander-in-chief at the Cape when called upon by Palmerston to head for the China station to join Charles and set about rebalancing Anglo-Chinese relations by force. He would prove to be considerably out of his depth in the role, a fact he himself admitted.
As to Palmerston’s terms, besides taking possession of Chusan and securing the opening of other coastal ports to British trade, Captain Elliot was instructed to demand compensation for the destroyed opium, for the cost of mounting the military expedition, and for debts owed by the unscrupulous merchant guilds of Canton. [7]
‘We are going, it seems,’ crowed the United Service Journal (it was the de facto magazine of Britain’s armed forces and unsurprisingly jingoistic), ‘to chastise the Chinese, and awaken them from their opiate dreams.’ China’s haughty mandarins, who from ignorance or arrogance thought the British ‘barbarians’, needed to be taught a lesson in the harsh realities of the modern world, it thought. ‘Tonawanta’, a correspondent to the Journal, concurred, writing in favour of ‘a short, vicious war’: ‘They are naughty children,’ he observed, ‘and rather sick. We must force a little wholesome medicine down their throats to cure them for the time being.’ [8]
4. A thundering fire
The brig Kite carrying Mrs Anne Noble and her husband and infant son, all three of them unaware of the terrible fates awaiting them, and the merchantman Rustomjee Cowasjee bearing Captain Anstruther and the Madras Artillery were just two amongst a British flotilla that reached the Chusan archipelago at the start of July, 1840. Aboard some four dozen ships were almost 3,800 army officers and men and close on 1,000 Indian camp followers, more than half of these employed privately by the officers and the rest shared between the expedition’s six regiments. With a Royal Navy sloop carrying a complement of anything up to 125 sailors and a third-rate ship of the line (there were three — HMS Blenheim, Melville and Wellesley) carrying up to 650, not to mention the crewmen and their families upon the transports and store-ships that had been specially commissioned, the expedition consisted of the greater part of 10,000 souls. The population of Tinghae alone was more than twice that number. [1]
They had had a torrid time of it since leaving Singapore on May 30th, the weather by turns squally and wet, thunderous or bright, but always unbearably hot: ‘Roasting in own fat. Thermometer ninety degrees,’ one ship’s surgeon noted laconically in his journal. Men-of-war, troop transports and supply ships played follow-my-leader around the narrow promontory that British charts called Kittow Point — the Chinese had named it the ‘towering headland’ for it fell away almost sheer into the sea — and by that unmissable landmark they dropped anchor. [2]
The men of these islands, as always when a foreign hull was sighted, had at first been eager to do business. They crowded about the flotilla, unafraid to approach those men who had landed on the outlying islands and to ask them with hand gestures whether they had any opium to sell. As for years those waters had offered anchorages for great numbers of opium clippers it must have puzzled the Chinese to see so many foreign keels but no-one willing to sell them the drug. One of their number was taken aboard HMS Wellesley so that something of the local navigation might be learned. The poor man, spirited from his small fishing junk onto a 74-gun leviathan of towering white sails, was understandably terrified and next to useless. [3]
Next morning at daylight the flotilla weighed anchor and closed in on Chusan. It was foggy, and the ocean raced through the network of channels between countless islands that loomed out of the mist. The tides here could spin a warship around like a toy, and they seemed to savour their power. Vessels fell foul of each other, had their jib-booms carried away in the crush, and gratefully dropped anchor as the wind died. Then as the tide ebbed it revealed the stakes and nets of the local fishing fleet, strung like cobwebs across the sea. The British had anchored amongst the catch, their chains dragging over the islanders’ livelihood. A few brave men came aboard to remonstrate, only to be pressed into piloting the ships ever closer in. In thick fog the next morning, the Indian Navy paddle-sloop Atalanta sounded the final narrow passage into Chusan’s inner harbour. Her arrival aroused the greatest of interest — with twin paddle-wheels powered by a 210-horsepower steam engine, nothing quite like her had ever been seen on this coast. The islanders crowded the foreshore to witness this smoking iron monster inexplicably moving at will without sails. [4]
A rowing boat was despatched from the Atalanta to take a closer look at the waterfront, and soon the Royal Navy was moving unchallenged and incongruous amongst war junks at anchor. The Chinese seamen, the British noticed, peered down from the crowded decks, faces wreathed in smiles of curiosity, though they had been forewarned these past few days to provide a s
how of naval strength against the British. Along the beach, a sprawl of warehouses and shops was seen to extend over a dozen acres. A pack of boys detached itself from the crowds that had gathered there, running and beckoning playfully and seemingly calling out to the foreigners not to be afraid. From a temple upon a hill on the shore, a platoon of soldiers waved flags to intimidate their uninvited guests. When the men of the Atalanta turned to leave, the soldiers raised a victory cheer: the barbarians had been repulsed. [5]
The afternoon wore on. Aboard HMS Rattlesnake, the officers plied a boatful of inquisitive fishermen with drink and snuff in return for some of their smoked tea. Though they were proving friendly enough on a personal level, still the fishermen were evidently unwilling for word to get out that they had been fraternising: ‘I was taking the likeness of one of the fellows,’ wrote Edward Cree, the ship’s surgeon, ‘who immediately dropped his soup and ran out as fast as he could!’ The Chinese soldiers waiting in the harbour, the Atalanta was able to report back, appeared equally unlikely to offer much resistance. [6]
The flotilla upped anchor once more early on the morning of July 4th. The scenery was striking, each turn in the channel bringing into view sheets of water seemingly land-locked by countless verdant islands. It seemed a shame to carry war to such a peaceful country. HMS Wellesley sounded a suitable anchorage for herself in the inner harbour, and an official delegation was rowed across to the principal war junk (she was not hard to find, for painted on her high, flat stern were great tigers’ heads, traditional symbols of martial authority). Soon the delegation, to which Karl Gützlaff had attached himself as interpreter, found itself amidst a crowd of Chinese sailors straining eagerly to inspect their strange visitors. Others waded into the sea to get a better look. Tea was served, and presently the commander of the Chusan garrison arrived. His name was Zhang Chaofa, and like Lan Li and Shi Shipiao a century and a half earlier he held the rank of zongbing — brigade general — in the Chinese army of the Green Standards. A military man, General Zhang somewhat outranked Chusan’s civil magistrate Yao Huaixiang who accompanied him, and from setting foot on his personal junk he made it clear that, of the two, it was his opinion that counted. He was elderly, a red-button mandarin, and, handed a note in Chinese, he would not stoop so low as to read it. It had been written by Gützlaff in an inexpert hand, and besides, it was utterly beneath his dignity to accept petitions from a barbarian officer. Instead he passed it to his aide-de-camp to read out. The men who stood before General Zhang, the note explained, had the honour to inform him that they had come by command of the Sovereign of Great Britain for the purpose of occupying Chusan and its dependencies. If the inhabitants showed no resistance, it was not their intention to injure them or their property:
We therefore summon your Excellency to surrender the same peaceably, to avoid the shedding of blood. But, if you will not surrender, we shall be obliged to use warlike measures for obtaining possession. The official messenger who transmits this letter will only wait an hour for an answer. When this time is elapsed, and your Excellency refuses to surrender, and does not return an answer, we shall then immediately open a thundering fire upon the island fort. [7]
Though he was clearly angry at the threat of such unwarranted violence, General Zhang at least agreed to repair to HMS Wellesley to discuss the matter further. But there, even when the destructive power of a naval broadside was spelled out to him, he remained unmoved: he was not at liberty to surrender the emperor’s territory to barbarians who had arrived in defiance of every protocol! Told that the deadline for surrender was noon the next day, his last words were delivered with a nihilistic smile: if the British did not hear from him before sunrise, let the consequences be upon his own head. The British could scarcely comprehend this ill-favoured old man, who to judge from his features was clearly an opium addict: what use this obstinacy, when his destruction was guaranteed the instant the Wellesley opened fire? [8]
All that day, warships threaded a path into the harbour, while around them boats full of locals came and went about their everyday business. The only sign of resistance came from the troops arrayed on the decks of the brightly coloured war junks, who beat tinny gongs and set banners flying. At length it grew dark. Throughout the night the shoreline hummed with activity. Streams of lamps could be seen ascending to the temple on the hill, and there could faintly be made out the silhouettes of boats piled dangerously high with cargo and crowded with women and children. The Royal Navy let them go quietly on their way. [9]
After disembarking HMS Wellesley, General Zhang had hurriedly assembled his officers in Tinghae to decide what to do. They agreed that the barbarians of the Great Western Ocean lived mostly on board ship and in war relied on their broadsides, a tactic of use only on water since their cannon weighed three tons apiece and could not be used as field artillery. Zhang did not anticipate the British possessing field guns that could readily be deployed against his city. Less excusable, though, was an unchallenged assumption in Chinese thinking: none had ever faced the British in a land engagement, and it was believed that this sailing nation shrank from them for fear of defeat. Mandarins had observed their tight trousers and jackets and concluded that once they had fallen over in battle they could not get up again. The very same Chinese commissioner who had destroyed the confiscated British opium in Canton informed the emperor himself how easy it would be for an infantrymen dressed in voluminous silks to kill a British soldier once he was helpless on the ground. So a land battle seemed General Zhang’s only hope of victory, and his officers urged him to sacrifice his junks and withdraw into Tinghae, leaving a detachment to occupy a pavilion that blocked the only road to the city. But Zhang would not contemplate such a cowardly response and issued incontrovertible orders that his men were to face the British on the waterfront. [10]
It was inevitably going to be a one-sided engagement, for General Zhang’s men, though regular soldiers on paper, were not remotely the equals of a professional British regiment. The Green Standards (they took their name from the colour of their battle flags) were drawn from the native Han population rather than from the hereditary warriors of the Manchu Qing dynasty that had conquered China by force of arms two centuries earlier. More a provincial constabulary than a campaigning army, in coastal regions like Zhejiang one of their more important roles was the suppression of piracy, and their instinct was to treat the British as not much more than buccaneers. Underpaid and under-motivated, and with only the most cursory of military training, they were armed, if at all, with a positively medieval assemblage of bows and arrows, pikes and halberds, interspersed with a few gingals — wall-mounted matchlocks that fired iron balls or grapeshot — and even these had been obsolete in England for at least a century.
Dawn revealed the Green Standards’ handiwork. On the wharves below the temple hill they had piled up rice sacks to form crude batteries mounting guns of little more than 6 lbs. The temple itself had been provided with a handful of weapons, as had a small stone tower at its foot, upon which was a big, red flag. Fishing nets had been stretched over the waists of two dozen war junks to stop the British from boarding, and their decks bristled with small cannon. Wicker shields painted with roaring tigers were hung over their sides, and boards strung between them bore ugly black faces intended to terrify the enemy. A mile inland, the walls of Tinghae were lined with soldiers waving flags. What to the Green Standards must have seemed a formidable array of weaponry appeared to Western eyes as just a tragicomic display of theatricals. It was as if, ruminated one observer, the illuminated manuscripts of the Hundred Years’ War had come to life. They might as well have been kittens raising their hackles against a pack of ravening dogs. [11]
The cloud that morning was low upon the hills framing the harbour, the atmosphere melancholic, and rain threatened. Crowds could be seen squatting in the fields, smoking pipes and watching events unfold with detached interest. At 8 a.m. the Royal Navy received the signal to prepare for action. Noon came and went with no word from Gene
ral Zhang, but by then the tide was ebbing and it made little sense to man the boats. Finally, at half past two o’clock, a 52-lb British cannonball slammed squarely into the stone tower, bringing down its red flag and sending up a great cloud of dust. As the report echoed and died away, the Chinese batteries returned a feeble salvo. There were a few final moments of calm before the air was torn by the roar of cannon. Raising a blue flag as a signal to the fleet’s gunners, the Wellesley shuddered as she let fly a broadside into General Zhang’s junk, which was all but obliterated, while the rest of the flotilla poured solid iron and explosive shells onto the shore. (The attack came a decade too late for Zhang’s men to stand an earthly chance against the Royal Navy: in 1830 HMS Excellent had been founded as a gunnery training ship in Portsmouth. Three years before the assault on Tinghae, a rigorous drilling in the science and practice of naval gunnery had been extended to the entire fleet. Where Chusan’s generals had syphoned off funds meant for its defence, the Admiralty was spending some £300 training each gunnery officer.) Shots passed clean through the junks as though through paper before ricocheting about the warehouses. The Chinese soldiers simply dropped their arms and ran as musket balls buzzed about their ears. After scarcely seven minutes the signal to cease firing was hoisted, three cheers were given from the boats, and as the smoke dissipated men could be seen scurrying away in all directions. The junks, dismasted and peppered with holes, settled silently into the mud. The buildings along the shorefront had been devastated. The tower was in ruins and the rice-sack batteries had been tossed about like litter. A few mutilated bodies could be seen lying around. As for the Royal Navy, other than some chipped paint and a broken halyard the sole casualty was an unlucky gunner whose legs had been crushed by a cannon’s recoil. [12]