Chusan
Page 15
Meanwhile, its flank turned with unexpected speed, the Royal Irish were at liberty to drive the Chinese on the long earth wall from their guns. They advanced steadily from embrasure to embrasure, firing volleys into the utterly unprepared defenders and bayoneting any they overtook. The infernal roar of Congrève rockets exploding amongst them as they fell back only added to the sense of panic. General Ge Yunfei, by now the only one of Yuqian’s three generals still alive, rallied his men at the foot at Josshouse Hill but was brought down with terrible wounds to his head and took his own life. His cannons, still pointed uselessly out to sea, were red hot, their barrels split from days of ineffectual firing. Above them, the temple fort had been cleared by shells from Trumball Island, but the battery on its lower slope was still occupied. With cold accuracy, marksmen killed the last of General Ge’s men as they floundered knee-deep in mud. The walls of their battery, it was found, were covered with large wooden crosses, in the hope, perhaps, that Christians would not fire upon their sacred symbol. The surviving soldiers fled across the fields, casting off their silk uniforms and blending into the populace. As silence returned, the glowing embers of discarded matchlocks set fire to the cotton-padded uniforms of the Chinese dead. Soon the battlefield was strewn with burning bodies that now and then exploded as the powder-bags tied to their waists caught light. It had been another macabre and one-sided slaughter. [13]
A party of officers assessed the scene of the fighting late that afternoon, but it was impossible to tell how many Chinese had died. Certainly it was in the hundreds. ‘Shockingly mutilated’ bodies littered the heights, though people emerging from the city had begun to bury them. It was not a task the British considered their own duty. A week after their deaths, the broken remains of Generals Ge and Zheng were dug up by the islanders and ferried to the mainland. General Wang’s corpse, the Chinese feared, had been dismembered in revenge for his spirited defence of 49th Hill (they were mistaken — it would in time find its way to the mainland, decomposing but otherwise intact). Many more soldiers had drowned when the boats they took to flee the island had foundered in the dark, and the survivors who had reached the mainland had on Yuqian’s orders been beheaded for cowardice. [14]
As reports of the fighting filtered back to him, an increasingly shocked Yuqian provided Peking with a rambling and piecemeal account of events, breaking the news as was his duty but desperately trying to avoid accusations of incompetence. The people of Chusan, he assured the emperor, had been sleeping with spears as pillows, his troops ready at action stations with each high tide. When Nemesis and Phlegethon had first entered the harbour, General Ge had fired on them, shattering a mast and causing the defenceless barbarians to flee like rats. A great victory had been won, the British repulsed. Two attempted landings — these had in fact been successful attempts to render the fortifications on 49th Hill useless — had been met with musket fire, and innumerable barbarians had been killed. The howitzer battery on Trumball Island had been fired on from the earth wall, Yuqian claimed, killing a dozen more of the enemy. In the early hours of October 1st, General Ge had fired at a prowling steamer, hitting its magazine and blowing the vessel to smithereens. When finally the barbarians had landed in force, General Wang and his regiment had almost managed to drive them back. Yet the more they killed, the more there were to replace them. After four days of fighting on 49th Hill, Wang’s 800-strong regiment had been reduced to just a handful, leaving the way clear for the wall to be outflanked. In all, Yuqian’s officers and men had fought bitterly for six days and nights ‘until their sinews were exhausted and their strength was at an end.’ General Ge himself had manhandled a cannon weighing two and a half tons and fired it into the barbarians, ‘whose blood flowed like water in a ditch’. The barbarian chieftain Anstruther had led his troops forward, waving a great banner. When they encountered each other, Ge had personally cut off Anstruther’s head. His sword broken by the force of the blow, he had then charged into the British ranks only to be felled. Even in death, the one eye that had not been hacked from his head had stayed as bright as that of a living man’s. The barbarians, when at last they dared examine it, could only sigh in wonder. A final factor in the enemy’s victory, Yuqian informed the throne, had been traitors from Canton and Fujian who, dressed all in black, had landed in wave upon wave. There must have been more than 10,000 of them fighting for the British. Although Tinghae had again fallen, Yuqian’s intelligence indicated that considerably more than 1,000 barbarians had died, one iron steamer had been blown to splinters, and three warships and many landing boats had been sunk. The emperor, reading of what his children had endured, soon added in his vermilion ink: ‘We read this with fast-falling tears.’ One can only imagine his rage had he known that it had been a fabrication from start to finish. [15]
In truth, the British had lost five men in the day’s attacks, a further thirty wounded, but certainly no ships. Still privy through their network of paid informants to many of the memorials and edicts that travelled between Zhejiang and Peking, they shrugged off such exaggeration. The desperate insistence that everything was under control was a telling insight into how the emperor’s servants were forever anxious to keep him in the dark. Then, as the Son of Heaven took stock, edicts began to emerge from the Forbidden City. Yuqian and Governor Liu were indicted for their failure to hold on to Chusan despite months of preparation and vast sums of cash. The emperor and his Council of State might have suspected that they were being misled, but still their orders betrayed a naïve assurance that once a new commissioner was appointed in Yuqian’s stead the barbarians would be scattered and Chusan retaken. Simply being Chinese was enough to ensure victory. [16]
A foraging party passing through a village, 1840.
13. You have done us incalculable injury
Just a day after the island’s reoccupation, Sir Henry Pottinger announced in a circular to all British subjects in China that Chusan had been retaken. But he had ultimately been sent to China to force the emperor into accepting Lord Palmerston’s terms, a task that could not be achieved from the comfort of Tinghae. A week later, all but 400 of his troops were re-embarked and shipped across Kintang Sound to take the fortified town of Zhenhai that commanded the approaches to Ningbo: so long as the Chinese were able to amass men there, Chusan would be under threat. What should have been a formidable stronghold was swept aside — some of the defenders had seen with their own eyes the effectiveness of the assault on Chusan and did not hang around to see it repeated. As the British secured the area, four severed heads were discovered in a cage. They belonged to Captain Stead, the mate of the opium clipper Lyra, the comprador Bu Dingbang, and one of the Chusanese kidnapped for helping the British. As for Yuqian, the man who had ordered their beheadings, after a failed attempt at drowning himself in the ritual pool of the town’s Confucius Temple he fled to Yuyao (this, coincidentally, was where Anne Noble had been mistreated by the crowds) and there he took an overdose of opium. He had had no difficulty in acquiring a fatal dose: in almost every tent in the Zhenhai encampment Pottinger had seen with his own eyes large amounts of the drug belonging to both officers and men. The emperor, hearing of the suicide, set aside a decree demanding Yuqian’s punishment and instead gave him a posthumous title and lavished honours on his family. For his military commander, though, nothing of the sort: with Yuqian’s honourable death the blame for this latest defeat rested on one man’s shoulders. Commander Yu Buyun was led to Peking in chains and beheaded. It was a pointless piece of scapegoating that did nothing to halt the British advance. [1]
On October 13th, Sir William Parker’s steamers made their way south-westward to Ningbo with three warships in tow. When they dropped anchor, the gates of Zhejiang’s second city were flung open from within and the barbarians allowed to take possession without firing a shot. The first act of the Madras Artillery was to tear down the prison where Captain Anstruther and Anne Noble had been held. The tiny cages in which they had been forced to live were spared destruction and sent back t
o Madras and to London as objects of black curiosity.
As Pottinger’s men found their feet on Chusan once more, Yuqian’s boast to the emperor of having opened graves and dismembered British corpses was, like his other reports to the throne, found to be an exaggeration. One officer of HMS Blonde buried on Grave Island had indeed been dug up, and, where the earth wall had cut through the British cemetery, coffins had been disinterred, but most, including the graves of the 26th Regiment on Cameronian Hill, were untouched, perhaps for fear of releasing vengeful ghosts. The living, it turned out, had suffered more on Yuqian’s reoccupation than had the dead: a basket filled with Chinese heads was quickly discovered on Grave Island — presumably they had been accused of fraternisation — and Edward Cree’s pipe-smoking duck farmer was rumoured to have been executed along with an aged Buddhist priest who had stayed to live with the Irishmen in the temple fort. By contrast, now their immediate goal of taking the island had been achieved, the British saw to it that any casualties they could find were treated humanely. [2]
‘My first work was to collect all the wounded Chinese,’ surgeon Alexander Grant of the Bengal Medical Service wrote to a friend, ‘many of whom were in the most pitiable state, and dying for want of surgical aid and proper nourishment, for their countrymen had entirely deserted them.’ Some refused treatment. One man with a maggot-infested bayonet wound to the throat lay under a bamboo mat in the city, sipping from a cup of water but brushing away offers of help until eventually after five days he died. Another tore away his bandages and had to be tied to his bed and guarded around the clock. A year later a letter from Alexander Grant appeared in the Times. The man’s operation had been a success:
I placed [the wounded] in a house next to my quarters, amputated their limbs and dressed their sores. Many of them have recovered, and have been sent to their homes; only two now remain; they have each had a leg amputated, and are now quite well. One is a fine Tartar soldier, about six feet two inches in height, who had his leg shattered while fighting bravely at the beach battery. At first he considered my object was to torture him, but he is now the most grateful and pleased being in the city. I am now getting up a subscription for them amongst the officers in the garrison to pay their passage, and enable them to reach their homes, where they must carry with them some remembrance of our humanity. [3]
Perhaps he was right, but such humanity could not alter the fact that both they and the hundreds of dead were victims of what had been a pitiless attack. Captain Anstruther, perhaps less inclined after his kidnapping to treat the islanders as friends, had not shrunk from lobbing explosives into a densely populated city (for General Ge had insisted that nobody leave Tinghae — it was safe, he said, under his protection). One shell had killed a mother and two children in their home and mortally wounded their father. Injured civilians were daily met with, cowering in their houses too scared to seek help (today it would be called post-traumatic stress). One boy of nine or ten was discovered wandering the streets. Young Afah’s father, it seemed, had been killed, and of his mother’s whereabouts nothing could be learned. William Hutcheon Hall, captain of the Nemesis, took him to live aboard the steamer. [4]
The British too needed a roof over their heads. Whereas Governor Burrell had left his men first to bake and later to freeze in their canvas tents, the very day Tinghae fell Sir Hugh Gough moved his men into shelter in the city. Surprisingly little had changed — the street names the British had put up a year before were still there, their billets designated company by company upon the doors, and even old credit bills chalked on the walls were legible. The vast Zuyin Temple, rundown when Burrell had left in February, had been regilt and repainted in the hope of atoning for the first invasion and warding off a second. Soon its enormous halls, crammed with statues of Buddha, his saints and his disciples, once again sheltered men who had no interest in them beyond their worth as souvenirs. A temporary officers’ mess — the name hid the fact that here was a frail tenement of lath and plaster that teetered on the verge of collapse — was requisitioned, while a courtyard complex was renovated and offices and kitchens erected to create the first purpose-built barracks on Chusan. Instead of the rank and file turning in just anywhere as they had the previous year, they were provided with trestle-and-board beds. By and by, a better officers’ mess was created by knocking through two adjacent houses and converting their rooms to suit British tastes in privacy (though sadly they could not live up to British expectations of comfort, admitting the rain and cold all too readily). [5]
General Ge’s insistence that nobody set foot outside the walls turned out to be a stroke of luck for Pottinger: the city, though scared and subdued, had not been evacuated and was filled with people. When pot-shots were taken at patrols and a brickbat thrown at a sentry, suspicions were voiced that many of the young men on the streets were soldiers in mufti. But not everybody was as keen to see the back of the barbarians: familiar faces quickly reappeared to offer their services as servants and factotums. Neither did Gough, determined that not just the mercenary old tradesmen but the island in its entirety would submit to British rule, repeat Burrell’s military mistakes. A show of strength began almost immediately, with the Royal Irish marching out to Sinkong and the other villages on the west coast and the Westmorelands showing their presence in the fishing port of Sinkamoon on the east. Everywhere, the reappearance of the British put the lie to Yuqian’s assurances, found pasted up at each village, that his defences were impregnable. The harvest was fast approaching, and the rice fields were groaning under a rich crop of paddy. The farmers stopped work and simply stood to watch the regiments pass by, seemingly neither astonished nor displeased at the appearance of foreign troops, though they must have feared a repeat of the thefts and violence of the previous year. Some were willing to sell food to the soldiers; more were quite happy to sell them samshoo in abundance. [6]
After resting overnight in Sinkamoon, three companies of Westmorelands marched on in a great loop northwestward to impress the hamlets of the interior — Pishoon, Kanlon and Mowah — before crossing the spine of the island back to Tinghae. Though a long confinement at sea swiftly followed by a forced hike with easy access to samshoo meant that many of his men had to be carried through the city gates on their return, within four days Sir Hugh had managed a more visible show of strength than had Burrell in as many months. [7]
Within the week, Pottinger had issued his own proclamation to the Chusanese: their island would be retained as a British possession until such time as the emperor agreed to his demands and carried that agreement into effect. Years, he stressed, might elapse before that happened, and in the meantime they were to go about their lawful occupations as British subjects under the protection of British law. After Captain Elliot’s farcical attempts to win over the terrified islanders, Pottinger was determined to make it clear that the British were going nowhere fast, and that they had nothing to fear from co-operating with them. A military government would be formed, he declared
to protect the well disposed and quiet, and to punish the ill disposed and refractory…. All classes are hereby invited to resume their usual trades and occupations, under the assurance of being fostered and protected, so long as they conduct themselves as orderly and obedient subjects to the Government under which they are living. [8]
The proclamation ended, as was the usual practice, with ‘God save the Queen’, a sentiment which must have baffled the Confucian islanders.
Major Stephens of the Hertfordshires (he had of course had the arduous but invaluable experience of acting as a military commissioner during the first occupation) was appointed Governor of Chusan. One Captain John Dennis was made military magistrate and given a twenty-strong police force based in posts across the city and the suburb. It was clear now that the British could take Chusan whenever they wished, but to a Chinese unthinkable that the Son of Heaven could bend to their will. Yet if he did not, then Chusan, like Hong Kong, would evidently remain British. Chusan, it must have seemed to the island
ers, would from now on forever be under foreign occupation. [9]
The temperature dropped sharply as winter got underway. The fleet’s barefoot Indian sailors, whose winter clothing and shoes had been lost in a shipwreck, were surprised when one morning they awoke to their first fall of snow. They said it was salt, and that it ‘bit’ them. The cold drove packs of wild dogs to dig up the shallow graves on 49th Hill, their scrabbling uncovering the dead soldiers’ faces. In the city, the sepoys shrank their slight frames into the corners of their sentry boxes, the philosophical Hindus amongst them muttering that death by cold was simply to be their fate. (There were, aboard the merchantmen in Tinghae harbour, plenty of warm, woollen fabrics which would have made fine winter uniforms for the Indians, but the officers who went to look at them found them too expensive for the regimental purse. In any case, as Edward Cree noted incredulously, the Indian troops’ prejudices seemed to prevent them from wearing anything but a thin, white sheet.) As the mercury dropped, the plank walls of the officers’ mess shrank and split and the oiled paper that had substituted for window glass was torn out and replaced with heavy calico. Braziers kept the worst of the chill out, but the combination of charcoal smoke and the fug of tobacco drove men out into the cold for fear of suffocation. Labourers were hired to fit a fireplace fashioned from the barrels of captured matchlocks. The remains of the wharves were cleared to provide fuel, and soon the barracks faced out past its flagstaff and across the ostentatiously named Royal Marine Square all the way to Yuqian’s earth wall. Daily parades were held here as men struggled to keep active and warm. One bright little Chinese boy in particular paid close attention to the drill, saluting like a trained soldier and mimicking the commands — ‘Present arms! Order arms! Shoulder arms!’ [10]