The defensive measures taken by Elliot included approaches to the Captain General of the Philippines and the Governor of Singapore for provisions and military stores. He expected no help from the Portuguese, the Americans or any other foreign traders. He now felt, rightly, that the British community for which he was responsible was without any kind of support. He may have had some sympathy for the Portuguese, whose fragile tenant–landlord relationship with China he understood (though he talked of their ‘fears and purposeless jealousy’), but the attitude of the Americans continued to annoy him.31 He considered them especially ‘capable of unworthy and vain intrigues to keep out Her Majesty’s Subjects’, continuing to Palmerston:
what the Americans concede, my Lord, is scarcely conceded at all, for they trade here in point of fact not only with British capital but under the protection of Her Majesty’s Government, and when things are adjusted by the powerful intervention of Her Majesty they will derive the same advantages as ourselves.’32,33
Elliot’s irritation was hardly rational; the Americans were simply using facilities provided by another power for their own commercial advantage, as the British had been doing in Macao for more than a century. The most recent cause of his hostility was the Americans’ apparent denial of any involvement in the Lin Weixi fracas, which he said (not very convincingly)
would not have assumed its present most serious aspect if the Americans had honorably admitted the unquestionable truth of my representation, that their citizens were engaged in the affray, that it was impossible to say who the offender was, American or British, and that they never could consent to the delivering up of a man to the Chinese Government in satisfaction of a homicide brought home against no foreign individual.34
Two weeks passed without any communication from Lin, as a result of which Elliot informed Palmerston that ‘the sober train of reflection in the mind of the Commissioner … enables me to hold out to Her Majesty’s Government the hope that we are upon the eve of some satisfactory temporary solution of actual difficulties’.35 Despite his instinctive optimism, he must have known he was clutching at straws. Silence from Lin did not mean intention to conciliate. At the end of October came a long letter from Lin and Viceroy Deng, listing the whole catalogue of Chinese objections to British behaviour. They cited Elliot’s continued failure to obey their orders to surrender the murderer of Lin Weixi; his continued failure to instruct the merchants to sign the bond; allegations that ships at Hong Kong had secretly been sending opium along the coast for sale; rumours that some families had been drifting back to Macao; and reports that foreign sailors had killed Chinese citizens at Guanghai.36
Lin’s strictures about the bond now had, in Lin’s own view, added force. In mid-October, to the despairing fury of Elliot, the British merchantman Thomas Coutts had entered the Bogue. Her Captain, Warner, had signed the bond, at a stroke breaching the solidarity by which Elliot set so much store. If one could do it, exulted Lin, why not all?
The Commissioner and Viceroy moved from specific alleged crimes to a more fundamental point. ‘It is requisite you should know that the permission the Celestial Court gives you to trade here arises from the principle of showing tenderness towards men from afar. If you fail to obey implicitly the laws, what will be the difficulty of cutting off your commerce?’37 They concluded:
It seems for the most part that these foreigners cannot be aroused or influenced by good words. And We, the Commissioner and the Governor, have no course left but to send out war vessels to proceed to Hong Kong, to surround and apprehend all the offenders, those connected with murders, and those connected with opium, as well as the traitorous Chinese concealed on board the foreign vessels.38
On 29 October Elliot issued a curt reply. He reiterated that he would give no protection to British traders engaged in illegal activity along the coast; he knew nothing about the reported incidents at Guanghai; and he had already dealt with all other matters contained in Lin’s and Deng’s communication of two days earlier. The Chief Superintendent then boarded HMS Volage (28 guns) and together with HMS Hyacinth, a recently joined 18-gun sloop, sailed for the Bogue. A mile south of the fort at Chuanbi, on the eastern side of the Bogue entrance, the two ships cast anchor. They sighted, about eight miles away, a Chinese force of fifteen war junks and fourteen fireboats.
Chapter Ten
War
Those who date the start of the First Opium War1 in 1839 usually take the opening engagement to be the (first) Battle of Chuanbi, which was fought on 3 November. There was at this stage no formal declaration of war, and neither Elliot nor Lin was seeking armed conflict. In the preceding weeks there had even been a few conciliatory gestures – Elliot had proposed a search arrangement to replace the intended bond, the Chinese had suggested that the body of a drowned sailor from a British ship might serve to break the Lin Weixi impasse – but none had come to anything. The Thomas Coutts affair had caused Lin to stiffen his resolve; he ordered that unless the murderer was handed over and the bond was signed, all foreign ships should be expelled from the coast. They would have three days in which to comply. Once a last minute attempt to persuade him to rescind his order had failed, the immediate task of the Volage and the Hyacinth was to protect British merchant shipping outside the Bogue from Chinese attack. They also found themselves having to prevent the Royal Saxon, a second British merchantman for which the bond had been signed, from entering the river.
The exact sequence of events which triggered the Battle of Chuanbi is not entirely clear. The senior British naval officer was the captain of the Volage, Captain Henry Smith, a former West Indies colleague of Elliot with whom he had a good working relationship.2 Chinese and most Western accounts agree that the Volage fired a warning shot across the bows of the Royal Saxon. At midday on 3 November, Captain Smith, with Elliot’s approval, ordered the Hyacinth to open fire on the Chinese fleet, which had manoeuvred to facilitate safe passage for the Royal Saxon (and remained a threat to British merchant ships). The Chinese account makes no mention of its fleet having moved, the action by the Hyacinth being represented as wholly unprovoked.3 Whatever prompted the contest it was, inevitably, one-sided. Elliot’s report of the events leading up to the battle (which made no mention of the Royal Saxon incident) assured the Foreign Secretary that he had been ‘Conscious that all had been done which was in my power, to satisfy the just demands of the Chinese officers, and [that he perceived] that the necessity had arrived for checking their hostile movements’.4 As to the engagement itself, Elliot describes the fighting in language which reflects his own many years’ experience in the Royal Navy and his familiarity with the tactics of naval warfare:
the signal was made to engage, and all the ships, then lying hove-to on the extreme right of the Chinese force, bore away in a line a-head and close order, having the wind on the starboard beam. In this way, and under easy sail, they ran down the Chinese line, pouring in a destructive fire…. The Chinese answered with their accustomed spirit; but the terrible effect of our own fire was soon manifest. One war junk blew up at about pistol-shot distance from this ship [HMS Volage], a shot probably passing through the magazine; three were sunk; and several others were obviously water-logged. It is an act of justice to a brave man to say, that the Admiral’s conduct was worthy of his station. His junk was evidently better armed and manned than the other vessels; and, after he had weighed, or, more probably, cut or slipped, he bore up and engaged Her Majesty’s ships in handsome style, manifesting a resolution of behaviour honourably enhanced by the hopelessness of his efforts. In less than three quarters of an hour, however, he, and the remainder of the squadron, were retiring in great distress to their former anchorage; and as it was not Captain Smith’s disposition to protract destructive hostilities, or, indeed do more than repel onward movements, he offered no obstruction to their retreat; but discontinued the fire, and made sail for Macao, with the purpose to cover the embarkation of such of Her Majesty’s subjects as might see fit to retire from that place, and also to
provide for the safety of the merchant ships.5
The next few months passed relatively quietly. British trade with Canton revived, thanks to vigorous and highly profitable transhipment operations especially by the Americans, taking cotton and cloth from British ships up to Canton and bringing back tea and silk to load for the passage to Europe.
An uneasy calm pervaded Macao. Among those who had returned there were Clara Elliot and the 2-year-old Freddy. To keep themselves safe they lived largely indoors, with minimal outside contact, conscious that tensions with the Chinese in the town could quickly change to confrontation or worse. On board the Volage Charles had time to write to his daughter Harriet (Chachy), now 10. The letter is notable for what can be inferred about Elliot’s own convictions:
Pay good attention to your books my dear love, but pay still more to subjection and training of your nature. Say your prayers with thoughtfulness morning and evening, and never fail to read a chapter of the New Testament before you go to bed. When you begin to read the Grecian and Roman histories tell your aunt to buy Langhorne’s Plutarch for you. It is a book which you cannot read too often, at least I have found it so myself.
Not dear Chachy that my reading has been much or useful to me. But that book is full of ennobling sentiments and will help to elevate your character, and it is folly to think that there is a difference in the high thoughts which should become women as well as men – generosity, justice, contempt of falsehood, perseverance, are as needful and as good to women as to men. Pay good attention to your geography and arithmetic. As for accomplishments, my own love, cultivate these whilst you can; but take my advice, and strive to make yourself useful rather than ornamental.6
Much to their parents’ relief, Harriet and Hughie Elliot had arrived safely at Charlton in August. By February 1840 Clara and Freddy, too, were leaving the China coast.
News of the spring blockade of Canton had reached London at the end of August 1839. When they became public the events of March and April, described by Elliot in his letters to Palmerston, had the immediate and predictable effect of causing disquiet.7 Quite apart from the consequences for trade, the forcible confinement of Her Majesty’s subjects was humiliating and should not be tolerated. In August this was also Palmerston’s reaction, but other more pressing matters meant that China was still not among his top priorities. That changed in September when a more detailed account was received from Elliot, and the matter was given added urgency in December when confirmation arrived of the surrender of the twenty thousand chests. The handing over of the opium and the promised compensation were vexed issues, but by illustrating how severe must have been the coercion exercised by the Chinese, the news served chiefly to reinforce public demands for retribution in the face of insult to British honour.
If the British public felt aggrieved, Parliament had even more cause for concern, for the news from China did not enter the public domain in August as a result of parliamentary debate, but from merchant and missionary sources and the newspapers. Elliot’s dispatches about the blockade were retained in the Foreign Office, their contents undisclosed to Parliament, until March 1840. The Cabinet, though, was not deprived of the intelligence from China. Since his arrival in England earlier in 1839 Jardine, along with other returned China hands and merchant houses in London, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and elsewhere, had been pressing for compensation to be paid. In order to oblige the Chinese to cooperate in establishing a sound basis for future trade, they sought decisive intervention on the China coast.
The Cabinet addressed the China situation on 1 October at a meeting at Windsor. It did so against a background not only of merchant lobbying, but of controversy over the morality of opium trading, and of outrage at the maltreatment of British subjects and insults to the flag. All these were now in the public domain. One of the pamphlets circulating was a version of Charles King’s earlier letter to Elliot. The anti-opium moralists were supported by The Times, which printed a vigorous polemic by an Anglican evangelical, the Rev. Algernon Thelwall.8 Later in October The Times published its view that ‘Our sin in growing and encouraging the trade in opium is, indeed, one of the darkest that ever invoked the wrath of the Most High God upon a people’, and that ‘Justice forbids that the steps taken by the Chinese to arrest a system of wrongs practised on them, under the mask of friendship, be made the pretence for still deeper injuries’.9,10
Before bringing the China question to Cabinet the Foreign Secretary had responded to Jardine’s repeated requests for a meeting. Armed with first hand information from Jardine about topography and sailing conditions on the China coast, Palmerston presented to his colleagues a possible plan for military action. In line with opinion in the country at large, and as on other occasions during his career, he was moved primarily by the need to exact redress for the coercion of British subjects and for disregard of the honour of the Crown. Those present at the Cabinet table included the historian and staunch advocate of British education and culture T.B. Macaulay, Secretary at War, who did not need persuading, and Sir Francis Baring, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who did. Baring did not see how the Treasury could possibly fund an effective punitive expedition against China, nor compensation to the merchants, estimated at some £2 million (in 2015 terms £187 million11). There was debate about the compensation issue and the size – and therefore the cost – of the force to be sent, but in the end it did not take Palmerston’s inclination and Macaulay’s eloquence very long to result in a decision for war. The reasoning was that armed conflict, which Britain would of course win, would enable reparations to be exacted from the Chinese both for the confiscated opium and for the cost of the military campaign, and it would restore national honour. Overtly at least neither the morality and future of the opium trade, nor the desire to establish a more stable basis for Anglo-Chinese commerce in general, were major factors in the decision.
On 18 October Palmerston wrote to Charles Elliot informing him that an expeditionary force was to be dispatched and was expected to reach the China coast in March 1840. The letter arrived on 16 February on Jardine Matheson’s newest and fastest clipper, the Mor, and lifted Charles Elliot’s spirits both for its news of the British government’s commitment and for the positive view it conveyed of him personally. Elliot wrote a week later to Emma that a communication from her
had been accompanied by a private letter from Lord Palmerston announcing the determination of the government to support me, or at all events, to accept the transactions of last Spring. But his letter was most gratifying as it manifested great confidence both in my zeal and capacity. I hope he may have no reason to regret it.12
The situation had turned in to something of a standoff. The continuation of British trade at Canton via the trans-shipment system was in the face of a decree by Commissioner Lin that from 6 December all Chinese trade with British merchants should cease indefinitely. The decree had been endorsed by the Emperor, who had added that all British vessels should be expelled.13 Elliot’s assessment of next developments, which if there were no unforeseen events of consequence would be prompted by the arrival of the British force, was such that the safety of his family again became a major preoccupation. Governor da Silveira Pinto could not, given his constitutional position as tenant of Macao, do other than support Chinese efforts to remove the British. Isolated and under threat, Elliot decided with Clara that she and Freddy should leave – not for England, but for Singapore. As he wrote to his sister on the day of their departure in February 1840:
My single-hearted and wise wife (for wise she is in the best sense of the word) has resolved to spare me the pain of constant anxiety while she is here, and to take the whole bitter burden to her own heart. She leaves me this morning for Singapore where she will remain till these troubles have either blown over, or till I can join her.
We are again menaced with more of seriousness than usual by these perverse people, and as it is so plain to see that sharp blows must soon be struck, that I have never had one moment’s comfort while d
ear Clara was here. Besides I owe it to my countrymen to leave no hostages here and the jubilation of the Portuguese at Macao means trick and cowardice.14
After conveying affectionate thanks for her care of his children, as he always did in letters to Emma, he concluded:
Distress and anxiety dearest Emy will be my excuse for this hurried scrawl. Clara is a better correspondent than I, and she will tell you how sorely I have been beset by troubles. But be under no fear about my poor reputation … I know that I shall be able to show I have kept fast hold of right principles and ulterior objects. But for me, dear Emy, the loss and the degradation would have been equal but there would have been no just pretext for resenting them, and for setting all things on a firm footing.15
Defence of his own conduct was now to be a recurring feature of Charles Elliot’s reports to his elder sister. He knew that when the expeditionary force arrived events would move on quickly, and that while his military colleagues would doubtless be ready with advice, responsibility for overall strategy would be his. Emma was to be a trusted recipient of his explanations and, on the departure of Clara and Freddy, confidante on family matters also. He was remarkably frank about his wife:
Clara … is a good woman with many of the qualities for which I have always set you down as the wisest person I ever knew. Influenced by her sense of duty beyond the power of wrong motives; capable of any sacrifice for honourable independence sake; clear sighted; and of a most affectionate nature. But withal, not without flaws which are much rather my reproach than hers for I might have worked them out of her nature, if I had been thoughtful and patient. As it is, she is in all things so much my superior … that she has got to feel, poor woman (utterly without the consciousness of such a condition of mind) that she has a right to be wayward and perverse, when she pleases; and then comes the notion that waywardness and perverseness are of wholesome effect because I have been fool enough to let them work upon me.
Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong Page 15