Though boys could be excused their playfulness, it was a different matter with adults and a well-known fact that many of the people who had so far dealt with the British had ended up with their heads in cages. Pottinger knew he must impress upon the islanders that they had less to fear from British rule than they had from their own mandarins. He issued a proclamation stressing that Chusan would never be returned to Chinese rule without the emperor first signing an amnesty for anybody who had dealt with the British. The islanders, of course, knew that Pottinger simply did not have it in his power to make the Son of Heaven abide by any such agreement, but there was hardly any need to embolden them to deal with the garrison anyway. In spite of the kidnap and beheading of a fisherman who had been acting as a dialect interpreter for Gützlaff, by mid-December Tinghae’s shops were all open and the city markets were jammed with men and beasts. Good, fresh bread was being baked; there were plenty of vegetables; Chusan’s fishing fleet was landing an important part of the men’s diet. True, the epithets fangui and bizi — ‘foreign devil’ and ‘nose’ — were forever being heard on the streets, reported one officer of the Royal Marines, yet
their ill will, however, did not extend beyond words, and conquerors of islands and cities must not expect to be always welcomed by the conquered, however great may be the forbearance of the victors. [11]
And so Christmas was an altogether jollier affair than it had been in 1840. Divine service was held in a hall of the Josshouse Hill temple that, for the remainder of the occupation, was reconsecrated as a church. The sailors in the harbour enjoyed a day of merry-making (and the master of the ship Worcester, after drinking himself stupid aboard an opium clipper, fell into the harbour and had to be rescued). On HMS Rattlesnake, Edward Cree enjoyed roast pork and suet pudding (the traditional roast beef and plum duff being unobtainable this far from home). The Westmorelands’ regimental mess presented the splendid sight of twenty-five brace of woodcock shot by the officers. Despite the cold, the mood rose yet higher on New Year’s Eve. All hands stayed up until midnight when, at a signal of ships’ bells, the whole harbour was suddenly illuminated in a blaze of guns and fireworks. Gongs were beaten, bells rung and men cheered until the harbour’s great sweep rang with their sound and its very islands echoed the fleet’s optimism. It was an auspicious start to 1842. [12]
Positive thinking, though, could only achieve so much. The reappearance of rupees and dollars might have made for an amicable atmosphere in Tinghae and the harbour islands, but in the villages of the interior it was still positively hostile. When the garrison had finished eating its way clean through all the water buffalo that the villagers near Tinghae were willing to part with, foraging parties emerged to look for fresh meat. Friction was inevitable as hungry soldiers confronted farmers who needed their oxen for the spring ploughing, and the average private’s contempt for the Chinese meant that violence came easily. Two islanders were shot one day, one of them fatally, after a foraging party tried to lead an animal away. An angry crowd threatened a hunting party, and only dispersed when a boat from a serendipitously moored warship came to the officers’ assistance. To general dismay, the same old problems that had blighted the first occupation seemed to be arising again. The question was not simply of lost lives and grieving families — it was ultimately a matter of moral authority. In Calcutta, The Englishman lamented the ultimate effects of the violence:
The whole British nation will become a by-word for all that is bloody, barbarous, cruel and avaricious. Can it be forgotten that when a Chinese is murdered, it is most certain that a wife loses her husband, and children their father; and, perhaps, a widowed mother may be added to the list of mourners, or a father may lament for an only son, whose death has robbed him of all hope that his shade shall be, according to their hopes and fears, propitiated and gratified by the observance of the immemorial worship at the tombs and ancestral ceremonies? [13]
There was at least a little comfort to be taken from the fact that some were willing now to make such humane observations.
But while Britons were often guilty of indifference to Chinese deaths, a renewed promise of silver in exchange for severed heads meant that many of the natives on the Zhejiang coast were soon actively engaged in cold-blooded murder. It having been too late in the year to move against the provincial capital Hangzhou, Pottinger was satisfied instead to hold on to Ningbo until the spring thaw. As the city atrophied in the freezing cold, the British stayed active. The towns easily reached by river on shallow-draught iron steamers such as the Nemesis — Yuyao, Cixi, Fenghua — were one by one looted and left burning. As 1842 came around, the frozen canals and snow-bound rice fields witnessed almost daily skirmishes between Gough’s patrols and an army assembling under the late Yuqian’s replacement, a man named Yijing. [14]
General Yijing, an imperial Manchu of the Bordered Red Banner and a nephew to the emperor himself, was the latest mandarin to be encumbered with the impossible task of sweeping the barbarians into the sea. He was said by Pottinger’s informants to be a man of leisure, fond of presents and bribes, but his louche persona hid a determination to succeed where Yilibu and Yuqian had already failed. With the grand title of Awe-Inspiring General bestowed on him by imperial favour, Yijing now based himself in Shaoxing, just 50 miles from occupied Ningbo. His army — levies from a swathe of central China, militiamen from Zhejiang, mercenary boat-people and other ragtag forces — massed on the banks of the Cao’e River. Some (witness the weary conscripts who had fled Zhenhai) had retreated before successive onslaughts and were reluctant to give their all in any counterattack. But with the arrival of Yijing a spark of renewed confidence was evident in the Chinese camp. Here perhaps was the man to change the outcome of the war. [15]
To start with, Yijing began to sponsor kidnappings on a scale the British had not yet seen, aware that the tactic had handed his predecessors their strongest card, Captain Anstruther. For private soldiers even more than a listless officer, the endless round of duties was grinding, and there was no shortage of men prepared to risk capture on a promise of samshoo or sex. Plied with spirits until they were drunk enough to be slipped some poisonous alkaloid, they would be bound hand and foot, slung insensible beneath a bamboo pole and carried, hidden within a bale of goods perhaps, past unsuspecting sentries, or crammed into the bilges of a boat to be punted away to their deaths. One evening, Privates Toplis and Russell slipped out of their barracks for a nearby inn where they were regular customers. Half a rupee’s worth of samshoo — some four pints — was prepared just the way they liked it, with sugar and beaten egg added to soften its kick. As the two started upon a second half-gallon, the innkeeper exited without a word. Their suspicions raised, they sneaked back to barracks with the remainder. Before they had gone far, Toplis confided that he felt unwell, his feet cold and numb. Russell, too, felt distinctly odd. They reached their quarters in a few minutes, unexpectedly sober for men who had drunk the better part of a gallon of spirits between them. Toplis reported ill, lay down on his bed, and soon afterwards was sick. He was quiet for a short time before his comrades heard him cry out: ‘Oh God, it is creeping up to my heart!’ Writhing, he fell from his bed and died in his friends’ arms before they could reach the regimental hospital, his only sign of injury a slight graze to the nose. [16]
Private Russell, meanwhile, his skin clammy and pulse slow and a numbness creeping up his legs, had admitted himself to the care of the regimental surgeon. Dr Shanks administered an emetic and kept him vomiting. Soon his pulse was scarcely detectable. The paralysis was inexorably moving up his chest into his face, while his extremities, clenched and stiff, felt as cold as ice. But the worst passed quickly, and by midnight Russell was sound asleep. What on earth had acted so devastatingly upon the constitution of fit, young men? Evaporating the samshoo, Dr Shanks recovered a peculiar substance that stubbornly refused to identify itself to any of his reagents. His assistant found himself volunteered to try a tiny amount on the tip of his tongue. He reported that it was inte
nsely bitter and, after a few minutes, of a numbness and partial paralysis of his body which lasted for some twenty-four hours. Dr Shanks’ report was full of regret that the state of chemical science was in 1842 not far enough advanced to discover the secret of the Chinese poison, but the 55th Regiment required no more detailed proof than that one of its men had been murdered. Whole villages were being put to the torch for lesser acts of resistance, even suspected kidnappers had been shot without benefit of a trial, and retribution was ruthlessly exacted. [17]
In mid-February the mate of a transport ship landed with eleven Indians at a creek. As the tide fell their launch was grounded and they sat down to await the next. When men approached and made it clear there were prostitutes to be had in their village, the mate agreed to follow them. At dawn a search party discovered his corpse floating in a pond. It was headless, and bore the marks of horrific torture. The sailors took their anger out on the villagers, beating any they found and hauling thirty aboard ship. Eleven who confessed to being on the spot the night before were soon destined for the hangman. [18]
All through spring the tally of kidnappings steadily rose, with headless bodies identifiable only by their insignia regularly being dragged out of rivers. In April, a private of the Hertfordshires was found strangled. Into his mouth had been stuffed a large walnut wound around with hair, a task that had demanded the slitting of his cheeks. One kidnapper was caught red-handed, and when his home was burned a female accomplice was flushed out. Another time, the whereabouts of a missing soldier were rightly presumed to be a favourite samshoo den. When his lacerated and headless body was found in a sack the inn was burned though the landlord had already escaped. But Chinese collaborators too remained targets just as before, and they died in even greater numbers. Most simply vanished without the British ever hearing about it, and it was only by chance that the kidnapping of a Chinese occasionally came to light. One took place in Ningbo. There, the sampans which by morning transported night-soil and slops out of the city were allowed to pass unsearched through the watergates. A boatman happened one day to strike the stone archway, knocking himself flat and uncovering a secret compartment that hid a Chinaman of Karl Gützlaff’s native police force, gagged and bound (Gützlaff had travelled north once more with the British and been made magistrate of Ningbo on its occupation). The boatman, when he had recovered from a beating that almost killed him, confessed to seven other kidnaps. Though Gützlaff pushed for a summary hanging, Gough was away fighting and had not deputed the authority to pass a capital sentence. On another occasion a Chinese, the servant to a British officer, screamed out his only two words of English — ‘police!’ and ‘mandarin!’ — as the night-soil boat he was tied up in passed out of Ningbo. The gang behind his kidnap was quickly rounded up and imprisoned (‘A more ill-favoured half dozen I have never set eyes upon,’ admitted a correspondent to The Englishman) but Gough ignored calls for their summary public execution. Gützlaff, himself almost murdered when a bomb planted in a house exploded a fraction too late, held such men in contempt. They were the dregs of maritime society, he said, ruthless cowards, able to murder with utter sang froid but terrified when faced with a single armed Englishman. Yet, just as today, there was little defence against an enemy who refused to engage in battle. [19]
On Chusan, where plentiful food and bracing temperatures had had a remarkable effect on the garrison’s health, kidnapping now became the sole cause of British deaths. Dozens of men disappeared, black and white alike, beheaded for the reward money and their superfluous bodies hastily buried or dumped at sea. Others had frighteningly close calls — even the amiable ship’s surgeon Edward Cree, who still counted a number of the islanders amongst his friends, had narrowly escaped being taken while out sketching. When a local boy working for Dr Milne of the London Missionary Society was abducted by a kidnap gang based in Hangzhou, its ringleader Mr Le was able to wring from him a picture of the doctor’s daily life. Milne, eager to live amongst potential converts, had already turned down an offer to move in with the Westmorelands for his own safety and went on living in an outhouse in a respectable man’s garden in Tinghae. Unable to bear the thought of killing a man, even in self-defence, he had locked away the pistol they had given him. He awoke one night amid a thunderstorm to hear the mumble of voices from outside. Leaping out of his hammock he took up an iron bar, struck it against the window frame and shouted the curfew salute of the English sentries — ‘Who comes there?’ — and the men ran off. At daylight, Milne found a discarded sack and a sword. [20]
It was to be not force of arms but good old military intelligence that finally dealt a body blow to the kidnappers who plagued Chusan. In early May an informant brought word to Governor Stephens that the culprits had gathered to carouse and fritter away their reward money. In the early hours of the next morning a house in a village some seven miles from the city was surrounded and its door smashed down. A cache of matchlocks was found, as were the ringleader Little Babao and his elder brother. Twenty men were bound and taken to Tinghae, another shot dead as he tried to escape. All were spared the hangman — orders only allowed for men caught in the act to be lynched out of hand — and were transported instead to the secure new gaol in Hong Kong. Though the risk of kidnap and murder diminished with the arrest of the Babao gang, others remained ready to risk the noose: the very next day, a servant boy and a ship’s boatswain were both kidnapped within a stone’s throw of 49th Hill and were not seen again. [21]
When the Tinghae garrison was further reduced to just 300 men as, with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting recommenced in earnest on the mainland, those who wished to see the back of the British took their chance to plot against them. The heads of Chusan’s villages met in secret one day in a temple in the interior. Here were gathered the men — landowners, elders, Confucian gentry and literati — who had most to lose from a protracted occupation, an elite whose social status in Chinese eyes now counted for nothing when they stood before Governor Stephens and Magistrate Dennis. They penned the Manifesto of the People of Tinghae, and proclaimed that it would be better to die fighting than face their ancestors tainted by treason. Homes had been burned, people arrested and ransoms demanded, temples had been demolished and the gods desecrated. The native police force was nothing but a band of bullies with a commission from a monarch whose authority they did not recognise. The same went for the quisling directing the cultivation of all land within 5,000 feet of Tinghae’s walls: an order from Gough that the malarial paddy be drained and replaced by dry wheat and barley had been received with incredulity — rice was the very foundation of the empire. Seeing the hard life that private soldiers had to endure and believing them to be on the point of mutiny, the elders urged them to make that leap: they were tens of thousands of li from home, they were reminded, dying so that their officers could grow fat on spoil. If they died on Chusan they would become hungry ghosts in an alien land, a pitiable fate by Chinese thinking. ‘You black and white sons of devils,’ the Manifesto appealed (though it was a choice of address unlikely to endear it to its audience)
why do you suffer to assist in their tyranny? Kill your leaders now or hand them over, else we shall not differentiate good from bad and shall kill you all. [22]
The black and white sons of devils soon had a copy of the Manifesto. From the outset it was suspected that it was a forgery, that General Yijing was behind it, but details of known events on Chusan hinted at collusion rather than outright concoction. And from where the Chinese stood, of course, the Manifesto was speaking the truth. Though such a naïve attempt at fomenting a mutiny amongst the garrison never stood a chance, it did encourage yet more kidnap attempts by the islanders. It was complained that, by the end of an unusually wet May, an unarmed European could no longer walk in safety from the seafront to the city walls in daylight. Even beyond that point, the streets were effectively in the hands of the Chinese once a patrol had passed by. Attempts were made to burn the Tinghae barracks, watering parties were fired on, and th
e essential task of maintaining a presence in the villages soon left the garrison exhausted. In late July three men were paraded out of the south gate to a roadside tree, and there they were inexpertly hanged, leaving one of them kicking and struggling for twenty minutes. They had been caught trying to carry off Indian water-carriers. Perhaps they were gentry, sworn to rid Chusan of the British; perhaps hired indigents, hoping for a reward or for the peacock feather the Manifesto had promised. Nobody stopped to ask; they were just glad that these particular men would not be attempting another abduction. ‘It ought to be a good lesson for them to leave off the work,’ a lieutenant of the Madras Native Infantry remarked in a letter to his wife. But even if the true authorship of the Manifesto was in doubt, a letter left anonymously at the foot of Josshouse Hill bore all the hallmarks of the genuinely aggrieved. ‘You dwell in the West,’ it began,
and your manner, clothes and language differ from ours. You have an ancestor whom you call Jesus Christ, whose doctrine is to save the whole human race. You have for many years been permitted to trade, and go back and forth through our land, yet for good you have returned evil. Ever since the days of the Jiaqing Emperor your vessels have been engaged in trade here and you have been permitted to deal in various merchandise; but all these favours you have forgotten, and have, in return, robbed and plundered the common people. You have in your incorrigible wickedness attacked our cities, killed and wounded our officers, burnt and destroyed wherever you have come, so that your conduct is obnoxious to gods and men. The consequences of your wickedness fall upon our unfortunate heads. At the mouth of the Ningbo River you take taxes from all who pass up and down. Perhaps you think we have more than enough for our own support? Within 100 li of where you live, bullocks, geese, fowl and ducks are made scarce by your rapacious appetites. You assert your concern and love for the common people, but do your actions correspond with your assertions? On the contrary, you have done us incalculable injury. You know that the sale of opium is forbidden, so why do you not obey? At the same time, you make us attend to yours against samshoo, on pain of houses being burned down. Our commander-in-chief knows how to make use of his troops, and that there are thousands who will volunteer themselves to defend their families and country. Even women and children are ready to take up arms. For every one that falls on your side, you lose one, but for every one that falls on ours, two spring up in his place. If we do not do our best to exterminate you, may we for ever be blasted with misery and suffering. You are acting contrary to the principles of heaven. Repent of your wickedness, lest shortly repentance may come too late! [23]
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