China Seas

by John Harris

  He enjoyed the throb and creak that came like heartbeats as the ship got under way and loved to buy for his sons things like shark’s spine walking sticks or swordfish snouts, which Abigail promptly consigned to the boxroom. But he was a simple man with a shrewd mind for business and nothing gave him greater pleasure than watching the evening sun go down from the bridge of one of his ships, an immense red molten globe just above the horizon, listening almost for the sizzle as it slipped into the blood-red sea, and watching when it was half-sunk for the leaping dolphin that was invariably silhouetted against the fiery disc. He loved to visit the engine rooms and watch the silent greasers, oilcans in hand at the bottom of breakneck ladders, oiling, oiling, always oiling; to watch the coaling in Java where they erected staircases of bamboo scaffolding, the grimy coolies – some of them semi-nude women with babies on their backs – tipping their baskets into the bunkers among the dust and the constant din of yelling; or listen to the Chinese seamen as they left port, banging gongs and yelling to drive away the devils that might otherwise accompany the ship on her voyage.

  Absorbed in his business, he barely noticed the fact that war in Europe had crept up on them. As it happened, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 didn’t cause much stir at all in the countries surrounding the China Seas. Assassination was an occupational hazard for middle-European princes, and it could hardly affect life a great deal in Shanghai. The place continued as normal, with tennis parties, drinks and business, and the news that Germany and France were mobilising came as a shock. Even when Britain joined in with Russia against Germany and Austro-Hungary, things didn’t appear to change much.

  Willie’s attitude was one of indifference. ‘They’ll need a big gun to land shells on Shanghai,’ he said. ‘It won’t affect us here.’

  Within a week he learned that it would, because news arrived that the City of Winchester, a 6,000-ton freighter carrying cheap Indian coal and tea from Ceylon towards Aden, had been stopped and sunk by a raiding German cruiser. Immediately, it made him realise that being a shipping magnate wasn’t all he’d expected, because by now he had six ships, all small, all old, all crewed by Chinese and – Christ, he thought – all over the shop. He called for his car – automobiles were beginning to replace rickshaws in large numbers now – and headed at once for his office. As the Chinese chauffeur, taught to drive by Willie himself, opened the door, he bolted inside and yelled for Kee.

  ‘City of Winchester,’ he said as he appeared. ‘Heard about her, George?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Kee said. ‘Everybody’s heard by now.’

  ‘What sunk her?’

  ‘German cruiser, sir. Identified as the Königsberg. Three thousand six hundred tons.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve been in touch with the Navy, sir.’

  ‘Good lad.’ Willie frowned. ‘She’s not very big, is she? The Navy’ll soon finish her off.’

  Kee pulled a face. ‘The Navy isn’t so sure, sir. All they have in the area are three cruisers, Hyacinth, Astrea and Pegasus.’

  ‘That ought to be enough, for God’s sake!’

  ‘I hope so, sir.’ Kee shrugged. ‘Hyacinth and Astrea are bigger than the Königsberg, it’s true, but they’re all old. Hyacinth’s sixteen years old and she’s never done more than twenty knots. Astrea’s twenty-one and Pegasus seventeen.’

  ‘You’re a bloody pessimist, George. I must say.’

  Kee smiled. ‘I face facts, sir. The Navy isn’t optimistic. The Königsberg’s only nine years old, they say, and carries ten modern four-inch guns and two torpedo tubes and can do twenty-four knots. The whole Indian Ocean’s her hunting ground and she could threaten the shipping lanes to Australia, Singapore, Java, Calcutta, Bombay, Colombo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mauritius and every other British port of call in the East.’

  ‘All our trade routes in fact.’ Kee’s pessimism suddenly caught hold of Willie and he swung round. ‘Where are my ships?’

  As Kee searched the ledgers, he looked at the photographs of his ships hanging on the wall. None of them were new by any means, but they made a profit.

  ‘Lady Roberts,’ Kee said. ‘Karachi to Aden with Indian coal.’

  ‘She’s right on the spot,’ Willie said at once. ‘She’ll get done sure as eggs is eggs.’

  Kee shrugged. ‘Atherfield Hall,’ he went on. ‘She must be in the Bay of Bengal somewhere. She reported leaving Calcutta for Hong Kong.’

  ‘She’s all right. Well out of the way.’

  ‘Dahinda. Somewhere between Singapore and Rangoon.’

  ‘She’s safe, too.’ Willie stared at the chart on the wall. The small Shamara and the Kum Kum Kiuw were both close to Hong Kong in the South China Sea. Which left only the Winifred Whitehead, his pride and joy. ‘What about the Winifred?’ he asked.

  ‘Dar es Salaam, sir.’

  ‘Well, thank God, she’s out of the way, too,’ Willie said. ‘That’s all right.’

  He was pleased the Winifred was safe. She had been only four years old when he’d bought her soon after having the Lady Roberts wished on him by Emmeline. It was sad for the crew of the Lady Roberts, but he felt if he had to lose any of his ships he would rather it were the Lady Roberts than any of the others. She was really past her best; the fact that she’d been named after the wife of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, who’d been made a baron in the last century, pretty well established how old she was.

  He headed for the Shanghai Club and made for the bar.

  ‘Celebrating, Sarth?’ The speaker was a middle-aged taipan called Gerald Honeyford, who ran Mason and Marchant’s, one of the big Shanghai hongs with offices along the bund. He was a product of one of the big public schools in England and was always condescending and always correct, though that didn’t stop him escaping from a boring wife to enjoy the favours of a Chinese girl he kept. Everybody knew about it but tactfully ignored it.

  ‘Don’t often see you in here, Sarth,’ he said.

  Willie shrugged.

  ‘Heard about the City of Winchester? First blood to the Germans, what? Sunk by the cruiser, Königsberg.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Based on German East Africa. Probably originally part of the German East Asia squadron from Tsingtao.’

  ‘Is that what they say?’ Willie asked.

  ‘We’ll soon root them out of Tsingtao.’ Honeyford smiled confidently. ‘And East Africa for that matter. They’re completely cut off. They won’t be able to get coal. They couldn’t even take coal from the City of Winchester, I hear, because it was cheap Indian muck that would clog their boilers and wreck their power plant. Have you got anything up near Aden?’

  ‘One old ship,’ Willie admitted.

  ‘You’ll lose her.’

  Willie tried to appear nonchalant. He was one of the youngest members of the Club and far from the wealthiest, and well-established people like Honeyford looked down on him as an upstart – although an upstart to be reckoned with because he moved fast and didn’t believe in the old casual, languid Far Eastern habits. He knew they talked about him behind his back, so that he had always to appear more confident than he sometimes was.

  ‘She’s insured,’ he said. ‘There’ll be compensation. It won’t worry me much.’

  ‘What about the rest of your fleet?’ There was a faint contempt in Honeyford’s voice because Willie’s ‘fleet’ was a joke among the wealthier members of the club.

  ‘They’re safe,’ Willie said. ‘Well out of the way.’

  Unfortunately, he was calculating time and distances on the speed of the Lady Roberts and wasn’t allowing for the speed of a nine-year-old cruiser, and within a week he discovered that the Winifred Whitehead had disappeared off the face of the earth. Kee immediately got in touch with his contact in the Navy, but nothing was known, and it wasn’t until August had passed into September that they learned that the Winifred Whitehead had been caught by the Königsberg north of Mombasa as she was running for shelter
and she had been sunk with all her coal. The news had been late arriving because the crew had been put into boats and it had taken them some time to reach Mombasa, while the Navy was a little preoccupied, because a few days later the raider had caught the old British cruiser Pegasus in harbour at Zanzibar and blown her to pieces.

  Willie was furious that it had to be the Winifred Whitehead. Why couldn’t it have been the bloody Lady Roberts, he wondered. Nobody would have missed her.

  It was Abigail who brought him down to earth. ‘What about Edward?’ she asked.

  ‘What about Edward?’

  ‘He’s a naval cadet now.’

  ‘They don’t send cadets to sea,’ Willie said. ‘They’ve too much to learn.’

  But then they heard that three naval vessels, the Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, had all been sunk in a matter of an hour by one submarine off the Dutch coast. The fact that the ships were all old and almost toothless was some consolation, but they also learned that a great many naval cadets from Dartmouth had been sent to sea in them and that many were lost. Willie stared at Abigail, shocked.

  ‘They’ll never send Edward,’ he said. ‘He’s too young.’

  ‘He won’t be if the war goes on and on.’

  ‘It couldn’t last that long!’

  ‘Our civil war in the States did.’

  It was a horrifying thought that they suddenly had to learn to live with, and the danger had also arrived on their own doorstep in the Far East because Japan had also declared war on Germany.

  By this time it had become obvious that, despite what they’d thought, Shanghai was in the war and as the first news of the appalling casualties in France appeared with the first losses at sea, young men began to disappear homewards to join the army. Suddenly, familiar faces were no longer there as their owners took themselves discreetly off to the shipping offices to buy tickets for Europe, unable to stay any longer out of the conflict, and the City’s ruling body, made up of senior taipans caught by a whiff of patriotism, made the suggestion that the residents should raise some sort of territorial force in the event of a landing being attempted.

  ‘Who by?’ Willie asked. ‘The Germans? All this way from home? The Austrians? They haven’t got a navy worth talking about. Turkey? They couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding with their fleet. Some of the other places the Germans expect to come in on their side, like Bulgaria? They’re only tiddlers.’

  Despite Willie’s scorn, a form of militia was raised which gave many people the pleasure of putting on a uniform without risking their necks, and George Kee represented Sarth’s by joining it. Willie considered it for some time, but it came to nothing because he was suddenly called to Naval Headquarters.

  As he left the office, Kee was talking business with Yip Hsao-Li. Despite left-footed boots and poor-quality cotton in Vladivostok, they had never been able to pin anything on him and he was still very much in evidence, still a customer of Abigail’s, still full of smiles, still claiming Willie as a friend.

  He never seemed to do much work and the trade he brought to Sarth’s was infinitesimal. In fact, nobody knew for sure what he did. His trips to Amoy and Swatow were common knowledge, but still nobody knew why he took them, and it was assumed that from there he moved on to Hong Kong where his brother-in-law, Lun Foo, Willie’s former agent, had moved after his attempt to defraud Sarth’s. Willie was certain he was in touch with the Green and Red Dragon secret societies which operated in Shanghai, that he was manipulated by the gangsters, and that his trips south covered some nefarious project no one knew about.

  Still thinking about Yip, Willie was escorted to the office of the admiral, a brisk no-nonsense type he had met at a garden party, a short square figure with a face that was yellow with too many years in the East. Alongside him was a tall, languid individual who reminded Willie vaguely of Sir Claude MacDonald from all those years ago at the siege of Peking.

  ‘This is Arthur Mallinson, Willie,’ the Admiral said. ‘Foreign office. He has something to ask you. I think you might be interested.’

  Mallinson, who had a curiously high-pitched voice and appeared to be speaking from the back of his throat, took up the story.

  ‘We’re worried about the Japanese,’ he said. ‘Their Foreign Minister says that Japan has no desire or inclination to become involved in the European conflict, but that she believes she must be faithful to the alliance with Great Britain and ensure permanent peace in the East by protecting the special interests of the allied powers.’

  ‘That’s a lot of bunkum,’ Willie said bluntly. ‘What she’s got her eye on is territory.’

  Mallinson smiled suddenly. It transformed his face. ‘That’s what we think, too, Mr Sarth.’

  The admiral smiled also and produced a bottle of Plymouth gin, known to everybody in the East as Jossman from the picture of the monk on the label. With glasses in their hands, they got down to business.

  ‘They landed in Shantung fifteen years ago,’ Willie said, ‘but they got pushed out by the Germans. I bet they’re after reversing it.’

  Mallinson gestured. ‘Do go on, Mr Sarth. It’s a pleasure to listen to someone with an opinion.’

  Willie grinned. ‘Japan’s only got limited access to Chinese raw material,’ he said. ‘And that’s in the southern portion of Manchuria. The war in Europe’s changed things to her advantage.’

  ‘How do you come to that view, Mr Sarth?’

  ‘Business dealings. Knowing Japanese. Listening to ’em talk.’

  ‘What are your plans, Mr Sarth? Quite a few men as old as you have gone home to join the army. Is that your intention?’

  Willie paused. He and Abigail had discussed it at some length. To Willie it seemed cowardly not to go home when Britain was in danger, but Abigail had taken the view that he could be of more use in Shanghai. ‘It’s crossed my mind,’ he said.

  Mallinson took a sip from his glass. ‘I think you could be of greater value here,’ he suggested.

  Willie’s eyebrows lifted. He had accepted Abigail’s view that trade was essential and that he was part of it, but he couldn’t imagine what use he could be to Mallinson.

  Mallinson gestured. ‘I believe you’re acquainted with a gentleman by the name of Yuhitsu Shaiba.’

  Willie nodded. ‘He did me a good turn at the time of Port Arthur. Said I saved his life in Peking. He probably saved mine in return. I might have gone bust otherwise.’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘We were good friends.’

  ‘Would you care to see him again?’

  ‘Shaiba? How do you work that out? He’s a captain in their navy.’

  Mallinson stirred. ‘Admiral now,’ he said. ‘In charge of naval building and repair at Nagasaki.’

  ‘Is he?’ Willie nodded approvingly. ‘What have you got in mind?’

  ‘I suggest a business trip to Japan–’

  ‘I have no business in Japan. I tried. I couldn’t get in. They keep too firm a grip on it.’

  ‘You could try again. Perhaps you could suggest that England, which, of course, must export to pay for the war, has things to sell. Perhaps even suggest that, since Japan’s also now in the war, they also might need to export to pay for their part in the conflict.’

  Willie cocked an eyebrow. ‘There are a lot of people in Shanghai more important than me.’

  ‘Important, perhaps. But, so I understand, not as brisk, not as willing to take risks, and certainly not as young.’ Mallinson smiled. ‘While there, perhaps you could suggest a meeting with your old friend, Admiral Shaiba, and get him to talk. We’d be interested to know if their intentions are as you suggest.’

  ‘Well–’ Willie hesitated ‘–I think he’d see me.’

  The admiral beamed. ‘Shall we have another gin?’ he suggested.

  ‘Special envoy,’ Willie announced to his wife when he returned home. ‘Better get my best suit out, Ab.’

  Abigail smiled. ‘I can’t believe it, Willie. You!’

  Willie
grinned at her. ‘Neither can I,’ he admitted. ‘But there it is. Laid on the mat for us to look at. After only a few weeks of war, too! It must be what we did at Peking. I’m taking George Kee with me, so you’ll have to keep a watch on the business. Luis Da Braga can take care of the Yangpo end and everything else ought to function all right if you just keep one eye on it.’

  ‘I’ll do more than that, Willie. I’ll keep both eyes on it. I know what goes on. I’ll be in the office several hours a day.’

  ‘With one eye firmly in Yip Hsao-Li,’ Willie advised.

  ‘That, too.’ Abigail smiled and kissed him. ‘I’m very proud of you, husband.’

  It had been decided that Willie should make the voyage by passenger steamer, so he used his own ship, the Atherfield Hall, and there was a nervous crossing of the East China Sea with the passengers splitting into three watches to assist the crew in keeping a sharp look-out to the north, from where German raiders might well come. The German base at Tsingtao was still a threat. Admiral von Spee’s fleet still had its headquarters there and at that moment was believed to be somewhere in Chinese waters, while one of his ships, the cruiser Emden, had been detached and was already creating havoc among merchant ships from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific.

  As they dropped anchor at Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu, a steam launch flying the rising sun flag and with a large ‘H’ painted on its funnel appeared alongside. It was the harbour health officer’s boat and out of it climbed no fewer than eleven Japanese doctors in gold-braided uniform, all looking like railway guards. The crew were lined up for inspection, Europeans to starboard, Chinese to port, and the senior medical officer gravely counted everybody to make sure they were all present, while his colleagues moved round, felt pulses, looked at tongues and prodded the Chinese in the groin to see if they had the plague. It was all very grave, and farcical when the engineer on duty was found to be missing. The ship’s papers were examined, the engineer found, then, satisfied and with deep bows, the Japanese climbed back into their launch and disappeared.