by Damien Lewis
Thankfully, tonight was a night of comparative quiet aboard the Gnat, devoid of the roar of tortured water rushing past the hull, or ship’s screws thrashing, or engines thumping away belowdecks. As with all Yangtze gunboats, the Gnat steamed only during the hours of daylight, when her crew could see properly to defend themselves against the dangers that lurked along the river’s length. Come nightfall, she’d either anchor in the shallows or pull into one of the many wharfs and jetties that dotted the river’s course.
By any standards the Yangtze was a busy thoroughfare, and most of the local sampans and junks that plied her waters—traditional wood-hulled sailing ships—did so all hours of day and night. Few if any carried any warning lamps—customarily a red light to port and a green to starboard—as vessels are supposed to during hours of darkness. The dangers of having a collision with an unseen craft were legion.
But there were other, more malevolent forces that menaced the waters during the night hours—which was why the Yangtze gunboat captains always preferred to find a riverside dock come sundown. Even there danger still lurked. Armed bandits roamed the fertile lands of the Yangtze River delta, a vast maze of waterways, marshlands, and rice paddies that it would take the Gnat a week or more to navigate. Farther inland the plains, valleys, and lake lands would eventually give way to the dramatic mountains and rugged forests of the interior, all of which were plagued by warlords and the ruthless gangs under their control.
Even when moored up at night, the crew of the Gnat had to be ready to rouse themselves in an instant. The piercing blow of the ship’s whistle and the yelled order of “Repel boarders! Repel boarders!” would mean trouble was at hand. China’s nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek was locked in a struggle with a relatively new adversary—the Soviet-backed Chinese communist revolutionaries. Parts of the country were in a state of virtual civil war, and amid the conflict and insecurity warlords and banditry thrived.
The communist rebels resented the foreign “imperialist” powers that plied the Yangtze, and they were yet another force to be reckoned with. At the order of “Repel boarders,” carbines would be broken out of the ship’s armory and the Maxim machine guns brought to bear as men lined whichever side of the ship the threat was coming from. But the first line of defense was to use the ship’s steam hose—the scalding hot water being a nonlethal means to drive back any aggressors.
As with all British gunboats, the captain of the Gnat was under orders to minimize casualties wherever possible. China was a powder keg waiting to blow, and a massacre of locals could prove the spark that would light the fuse. If there was an “incident”—and there were always incidents when out on the Yangtze—Lieutenant Commander Waldegrave was to avoid deaths wherever possible unless Her Majesty’s subjects or property were directly threatened.
Thankfully, the night of Judy’s shock christening in the Yangtze proved entirely peaceful, which was just what she needed to aid her recovery. At the crack of dawn—the start of day two of their journey upriver—the ship’s bugler blew a sharp blast to awaken the crew. It was 0600 hours and time to ready the vessel for another day’s journey up the Yangtze.
In the officers’ quarters, set in the bows forward of the galley and the ship’s bridge, Chief Petty Officer Jefferey was woken by one of the Chinese boat boys bringing him a mug of tea. Sharing a little of the hot, sweet brew with the handsome beast curled up at his side, Jefferey wondered what the day might bring. There would, he hoped, be no further misadventures by one thoroughly irrepressible ship’s dog.
As soon as he opened his cabin door a crack Judy pushed through and scampered onto the deck, head down and nose sniffing as she caught the scent of food from the galley. Ah, eggs. Scrambled to perfection, just as I like them.
She padded past the caged chickens, giving them a good long sniff as she went. Jefferey hoped that Judy’s keen interest in the ship’s poultry—taken aboard at Shanghai to provide some fresh meat for the journey—reflected the natural affinity she had for game and the performance of her duties as a gundog in the weeks ahead.
Tankey Cooper, Official Keeper of the Ship’s Dog, took early morning custody of Judy so that he could serve her breakfast. Like Jefferey, Tankey was a keen huntsman, and once Judy was fed he decided to give her hunting prowess its first real test. Getting down to eye level with the lithe dog, he proceeded to explain to her in great detail and with seemingly boundless patience what was required of an English pointer when out on the hunt.
Gazing into her eyes—which under the dawn light filtering through the canvas awning seemed less coal-like and more asparkle with eager fire—he felt as if she understood his every word. With her long, floppy ears framing her face, there seemed to be something slightly mournful and intensely serious about her expression—and then she’d ruin it all by curling one lip in a lopsided smile or flopping out that long pink tongue of hers for a goofy bout of panting.
Still, she wasn’t yet fully grown, and Tankey reckoned she had plenty of time to prove her worth as a gundog. Deciding a spot of practical demonstration was in order, he proceeded to “point” at the caged chickens, which were the nearest thing to game aboard the Gnat.
Judy stared at him for a long second, head cocked quizzically to one side. She knew from Tankey’s body language that he was up to something of real import, but she couldn’t for the life of her imagine what. Tankey held the pose for as long as he could—see, like this—before Judy gave a rigorous shake of her head, blew a snort through her nostrils seemingly in derision, and turned her nose toward the tantalizing smells wafting from the ship’s galley. Her meaning was crystal clear: message neither received nor understood!
Undeterred, Tankey resolved to repeat the demonstration every morning after breakfast until Judy got it. But part of him wondered whether Judy hadn’t been having a good laugh at his expense as he swayed about on one leg trying to show an English pointer how to point.
Once things were shipshape, the Gnat was untied from her mooring and she pulled into the main flow of the river. The pitch of her engines rose to their familiar throb as she got under way. Making sure to keep well back from the rail, Judy stood on the ship’s raised prow, nose into the wind. They had barely made a mile’s progress, but already the mascot of the Gnat could smell trouble on the river up ahead.
Just after midday—at 1203 hours to be precise—the Gnat passed by a gunboat of the Imperial Japanese Navy steaming in the opposite direction. Just an hour later, the French gunboat Francis Garnier followed, also bound for Shanghai. And shortly a third foreign warship, the French gunboat Balny, passed the Gnat, but this time heading upriver into the Chinese interior. No doubt about it, the Yangtze was getting busy as rival world powers vied for control over the rich trade plied along these waters.
But right now the Gnat was about to be menaced by another threat entirely. From her position up front Judy was first to give voice to the danger. She raised her head, took an extralong sniff, and began barking into the far distance. A vessel could just about be made out drifting lazily downriver. Twin-masted, with gray- and dun-colored square-cut sails set over a high prow, the wooden junk looked like a throwback to the Dark Ages compared with the modern steel-hulled gunboats.
This was the kind of vessel that the Gnat’s crew had seen hauled up the worst of the Yangtze’s rapids by gangs of human coolies. Using dozens of ropes slung from the banks and attached to the hull of the ship, bare-chested men would bend to the strain as they waded through the shallows, dragging the boat behind them step by exhausting step—and all to the rhythmic cry of the gang master who hired his men out to passing vessels. The Gnat’s crew had grown used to such archaic scenes, but the boat ahead of them had a look that none of them liked very much.
The ancient-looking wooden vessel was lying low in the water, which meant it was laden with some seriously heavy cargo. None of the crew could be sure, but as Judy pranced about on the Gnat’s prow and barked excitedly, they knew something untoward was bearing down on them. T
heir dog had never behaved like this before, not even after tumbling into the cold and churning maw of the Yangtze. Something about that vessel had her spooked.
Straining his eyes to get a proper look at the distant ship, Captain Waldegrave turned to his chief petty officer. He had a curl to his lips that betrayed just the slightest hint of repulsion. Jefferey whipped out a pair of binoculars to take a closer look. Through the 8× magnification he could make out the distant boat in more detail. It had a dark hold lying open to the elements, and Jefferey was 90 percent certain what lay inside.
Approaching the Gnat was one of the dreaded “cess ships,” and Judy seemed to have sensed it long before any of the crew had the slightest inkling what was coming. The ship’s captain altered course, and orders were relayed from the bridge to batten down all hatches, close all portholes, and make the ship as airtight as possible—after which all crew members were to get themselves belowdecks as quickly as possible.
The Yangtze River cess ships carried human waste—invariably well decomposed and stinking to high heaven—down the great river to where it could be dumped away from the major towns and cities. More often than not it was used to fertilize the verdant green rice paddies that lay to either side of the river. The Gnat was approaching the riverside city of Zhanjiang, and no doubt the vessel full of rotting human ordure had emanated from there.
Thanks to Judy’s barking, by the time the sickening stench was upon them most crew members were sealed inside the vessel—including one ship’s dog who’d just demonstrated her unexpected usefulness. The cess ships were a constant hazard on the lower reaches of the Yangtze. If the stench got inside the vessel, it would linger in hair, clothes, and furnishings for days. Judy had just proved herself to be the Gnat’s onboard early-warning system.
She’d done so using her extraordinary sense of smell. A dog’s world, unlike a human’s, is almost entirely defined by odor. Their scent-detecting powers are so superior to our own, it’s almost as if they experience an entirely different dimension—a world defined by innumerable layers of scent.
Whereas humans possess 5 million scent detectors, a gundog like Judy has something approaching 300 million. Such a dog can differentiate between over a million different aromas, as opposed to our mere thousand, and can do so at far tinier concentrations. With her wet muzzle—caused by tear ducts that ran all the way to the tip of the nose—Judy could feel the way the wind was blowing, so isolating the direction from which the smell was coming. Moisture on the nose would then dissolve the tiny scent molecules so that receptor cells could identify them.
But Judy’s powers of scent detection were even more advanced than that. Because humans navigate largely by sight, we have a large element of the brain for processing visual information. In dogs, the olfactory (smell) center in the brain is forty times more developed than in humans. Scents are even picked up by a dog’s whiskers, which channel them to the brain. Plus, dogs have a scent-detecting organ—the vomeronasal, situated in the roof of the mouth—that is completely lacking in humans and one that we as yet little understand.
To Judy, smell was her universe, the first sense by which she interpreted the world around her. Out here on the Yangtze, her nose was the filter through which she would sift all the scent-related information coming to her to better understand and deal with this new and exotic—and sometimes life-threatening—environment. Detecting a cess ship on the Yangtze at a mile’s distance was no trouble to a dog equipped with such acute powers of smell.
This time, Judy’s canine senses had saved the ship’s crew from nothing more than a few hours of sickening and suffocating stench.
But the time was fast approaching when Judy would need to use her incredible canine powers to save the lives of all aboard the Gnat.
Chapter Four
Continuing upriver, the Gnat steamed past four Japanese warships, each trailing the distinctive bright-red rising-sun flag in her wake. It was ominous, the way in which Imperial Japan, China’s age-old adversary, was making her presence increasingly felt this far inland. It was clear that trouble was brewing. The crew of the Gnat could feel it in their bones.
On November 20 the British gunboat reached Nanking, then China’s sprawling capital, pausing only to pick up a sailor who was able to rejoin the ship, having been treated for an ailment in hospital in Shanghai. That done, the Gnat pressed onward until she reached the smaller settlement of Wuhu, where she rendezvoused with her sister ship, the Ladybird.
The Gnat pulled in to moor alongside her—the two gunboats with their tall twin funnels and long canvas awnings running from stem to stern resembling a mirror image of each other. They were also remarkably similar in another key respect: both the Ladybird and now the Gnat had dogs serving as their mascot.
Officers and men from the Ladybird were invited aboard the Gnat, and ship’s rum was served and intelligence swapped between the two parties. This was an ideal opportunity for the captain of the Gnat to glean information about any dangers that might lie ahead, for Ladybird was en route to Shanghai after a long sojourn upriver.
But one member of the Ladybird’s crew was decidedly not welcome. Bonzo, their ship’s dog, had started acting very strangely just as soon as the Gnat had steamed onto the horizon. A large boxer-terrier cross, Bonzo had started to dash about the deck like a crazy thing, tearing back and forth ceaselessly. With Bonzo’s nose glued to the Gnat, it didn’t take the brains of an archbishop to work out what was up. He had sensed the presence of a beautiful and glamorous young lady dog aboard their sister ship and had amorous designs upon her.
On being alerted to the threat, Captain Waldegrave ordered Tankey, as Keeper of the Ship’s Dog, to maintain Judy under strict lock and key. The last thing they wanted right now was a brood of boxer–terrier–English pointer crosses. Judy of Sussex wasn’t particularly happy at being so constrained. She’d always enjoyed free run of the ship, but little did she know it was being done for her own good. She remained safely locked away until the Ladybird departed downriver and Bonzo’s dishonorable intentions toward her had been well and truly thwarted.
With Bonzo gone, Judy was free to join the Gnat’s crew on expeditions ashore. There was a navy canteen on the Wuhu docks where—joy of joys—the beer flowed freely. For some reason the place also seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of something that Judy proved very partial to—ice cream. As soon as the ship’s crew entered the canteen Judy would adopt a suitably regal pose, nose pointed directly at the trunk that contained the delicious treat.
One evening the men forgot to provide her with her customary plateful. Finally losing her patience, she sneaked behind the canteen bar, grabbed the handle of the ice cream trunk in her jaws, and dragged it out into the center of the room. She turned to the astonished drinkers, barked once in command, and demanded that her ice cream be duly served.
Above Wuhu the Yangtze narrows considerably as the flatlands of the delta give way to a series of dramatic, sweeping valleys. Three chokepoints—the Xling, Wu, and Qutang gorges—funnel the river waters through towering rock faces and knife-cut cliffs that rear up hundreds of feet to either side. Such terrain offered the perfect territory for the kind of piracy for which the Yangtze was infamous—although the Ladybird had been able to give no specific warnings of any such threats lying ahead.
Two days out from Wuhu the Gnat entered the steep-sided, echoing Xling Gorge, sparsely vegetated slopes sweeping down into the fast-flowing water. With dusk approaching the captain decided to anchor for the night. As thick smoke from the Gnat’s funnels drifted across this valley that dwarfed the ship, he maneuvered his vessel into shallower water before ordering the anchor dropped.
With the Gnat safely moored Captain Waldegrave declared, “Ship secure—hands to tea.” It was time for a refreshing brew after a long day’s steaming on the Yangtze.
This being wilder, less-populated terrain, the crew was instinctively more alert. But as the slash of sky above them turned a velvety purple with the setting sun, there
was little sign of any danger lurking out there on the darkening river. All was apparently peaceful until around 0300 hours, when Judy sat bolt upright in her box-cum-bed on the Gnat’s bridge. Throwing aside her ship’s blanket, she pricked up her ears. Moments later she’d leaped onto her four paws and made a mad dash for the open wing of the bridge.
Barely pausing to fix the direction of the approaching threat, she began to bark wildly at a point somewhere in the darkness. For a moment the officer on watch wondered whether it mightn’t be another stinking cess ship that had dragged Judy out of her slumber, but it was quickly clear that her attitude and demeanor were entirely different this time. There was an aggression and ferocity in her barking the likes of which he’d never heard before.
The crew of the Gnat were learning by now to pay all due attention to their dog. The officer on watch took immediate action. He grabbed the nearest Aldis lamp—a powerful handheld light more normally used for signaling from ship to ship—switched it on, and turned it toward the point at which Judy was directing her fury. Immediately the reason for her behavior became apparent: two large junks were drifting silently toward the Gnat—though not quietly enough to have avoided detection by a dog’s hypersensitive hearing.
Wasting not a second, the officer on watch drew his pistol and fired a single shot into the dark sky, the hollow crack of the low-velocity bullet reverberating around the sleeping ship and bringing the crew instantly awake. From all directions pajama-clad men tumbled out of hatches and doorways, rifles, pistols, and an assortment of other weapons held at the ready as they hurried to their predetermined stations to repel boarders.