Killigrew and the Golden Dragon

by Jonathan Lunn

  The water was only a few feet below Killigrew and Mrs Bannatyne now, the deck almost vertical. ‘Clasp-knife!’ he told her. ‘In my pocket. You’ll have to cut through the ropes holding the tarpaulin cover in place.’

  She nodded, took the knife from his pocket, and clambered up the skid-beams to where the jolly boat was stowed. She sliced through the ropes and wrenched off the tarpaulin cover. Favouring his dislocated arm, Killigrew climbed inside. ‘Now cut the mooring ropes,’ he told her. ‘Leave the ones at the top until last. And make sure you’re in the boat when you cut them!’

  She did as he told her, climbing into the jolly boat alongside him as she sawed at the last of the ropes. ‘Hold tight!’ he cautioned her.

  The rope parted and the jolly boat shot the last few feet down the deck The bow bumped sideways off the stump of the mainmast an Mrs Bannatyne was thrown against Killigrew. The prow buried itself in the waves, and then came up again and they drifted away from the ship.

  A few inches of water sloshed around the bilges. Killigrew took the bailing scoop in his left hand. ‘You’ll have to row, get us clear of the reef before the Golden Dragon goes down. Think you can manage it?’

  ‘I’ll just have to try, won’t I?’ She fitted the cars in the rowlocks and rowed them until they were clear of both the sinking ship and the reef. Once they were out of danger she stopped rowing and shipped the oars, and the two of them watched as the steamer’s blazing stern slipped beneath the waves with a hiss. For a second or two the golden dragon ensign which hung from the jackstaff was still visible, ragged and smouldering at the edges, and then that too was gone for ever.

  Epiphany Bannatyne cut off his jacket to avoid twisting his dislocated arm and examined the wound in his shoulder where her husband had shot him. ‘You’re lucky. It’s just a flesh wound.’ She did not faint at the sight of blood, but bound up his wound gently but firmly to stop the bleeding.

  ‘One day you’ll make some lucky chap a good wife,’ he told her.

  ‘He can’t be any worse than my last husband,’ she agreed. ‘In fact, I think I could do a lot better for myself.’

  He leaned closer to her. The bruises on her face when Bannatyne had kicked her looked appalling, but Killigrew did not imagine he looked any better. ‘Did you have anyone in mind?’ he asked her.

  ‘If I think of anyone, you’ll be the first to know. Mr Killigrew… are you a wealthy man?’

  ‘Me? No. Poor as a church mouse. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Perfect.’ Her lips slightly parted, she moved her face towards his.

  At that moment a figure bobbed up on one side of the jolly boat, and was followed up by a second on the other side a moment later. Killigrew reached for his clasp knife and Mrs Bannatyne snatched up one of the oars, but they were only Molineaux and Li.

  ‘As pleased as I am to see that you’re both back from Davy Jones’ locker, I must say your timing could have been a good deal better,’ Killigrew said ruefully. ‘Well, now you’re here you can take up those oars and put them to some good use.

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ muttered Molineaux.

  ‘Oars not necessary,’ said Li, and pointed. ‘Look!’

  They all turned to see Framjee’s steam pinnace navigating the reef with Ågård at the tiller. Hartcliffe waved from the bows and presently tossed a line across to them. Molineaux and Li let go of the jolly boat and swam across to the pinnace where Seth Endicott helped them on board. ‘What happened to Bannatyne. Molineaux?’ asked Hartcliffe.

  ‘He’s probably trying to bribe Davy Jones into letting him go even as we speak.’

  They took the jolly boat in tow and headed back to Victoria. Killigrew tried to get comfortable next to Mrs Bannatyne but something was sticking in his back. He reached underneath him and found a bottle of laudanum. ‘Just the thing!’ He pulled the stopper out with his teeth and spat it over the side. Before he could take a sip, however, she snatched the bottle from his hand and threw it overboard.

  ‘You don’t need that any more’

  ‘But I only wanted a sip, to take my mind off the pain.’

  She moved closer. ‘I’ll give you something to take your mind off the pain…’

  Afterword

  Alas, all of Kit Killigrew’s efforts to avert a second war between Britain and China were for naught: the two empires were at war within seven years. Once again the British were the aggressors, declaring war on China because of their insistence that British subjects guilty of crimes in China should be tried in British courts. The Second Opium War (1856–1860) is sometimes known as the Arrow War, after the name of the ship from which a ‘British’ seaman (actually a Chinese) was taken by the Chinese authorities. The man was tried for murder and found guilty, prompting another outburst of Lord Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy.

  It takes two to polka, and the arrogance of the Chinese in believing that all other races on earth – even those they had never encountered – were subject to the authority of the Emperor in Beijing certainly contributed to this second outbreak of hostilities. But the inescapable fact remains that they were well within their rights both to try people accused of crimes on Chinese soil in Chinese courts, and to forbid the import of opium into China, which of course was the cause of the First Opium War (1839—42) – and also the underlying cause of the second. If the Chinese were beaten thoroughly on both occasions, that is as much a reflection of the pacifist Confucian ethos which had been dominant in China for centuries as of the superiority of British technology. While the cultural and technological superiority that China had once possessed over the rest of the world had by the nineteenth century been long permitted to stagnate, perhaps that was a fair price to pay for centuries of relative peace and harmony. Tragically, that peace was only shattered by the arrival of the barbarians.

  While I have no wish to make excuses for the men who smuggled opium into China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – they deserved none – it is only fair to point out that until the mid-nineteenth century it was little understood that opium was addictive; indeed, some tried to argue that opium was beneficial. Uncontrolled before the Pharmacy Act of 1868, it was available over the counter in England, as pills, lozenges, pastilles, liniments and raw poppy seeds, and as the active ingredient in many medicines. ‘Kendal Black Drop’ was a particular favourite of Coleridge and Byron, but opium was not exclusively a rich man’s vice: it was cheaper even than gin, hence its popularity with industrial workers in Lancashire. The withdrawal symptoms suffered by addicts who tried to quit were supposed by doctors to be unrelated ailments. The cure for these ‘unrelated ailments’? More opium-based medicines, of course.

  Although Killigrew fought in the First Opium War, I had no wish to write in depth about his experiences at that time: there was no way I could see of salvaging anything noble or heroic out of that shambolic butchery. I was more intrigued by events that took place in 1849, the events which inspired much of this novel. In that year the ravages of the pilongs became so difficult to ignore that the Royal Navy decided to do something about them. The worst of these pirates were Shap-ng-tsai and Chui-apoo – the joint inspiration for Zhai Jing-mu – who divided up the south coast of China between them: Shap-ng-tsai would operate to the west of Hong Kong while Chui-apoo operated to the east. Shap-ng-tsai was blamed for the murder of Capitão d’Amaral, the governor of Macao, early in 1849, and shortly afterwards the murder of Captain d’Acosta of the Royal Engineers and Lieutenant Dwyer of the Ceylon Rifles were ascribed to Chui-apoo, whom they were said to have insulted.

  In the autumn of that year Her Majesty’s brig Columbine, in company with the P&O steamer SS Canton, chased a fleet of pilong junks to Bias Bay, to the east of Hong Kong, where Chui-apoo had his lair in Fan-lo-kong creek, an arm of Bias Bay. The Columbine kept the pilong junks bottled up in the bay while the Canton steamed back to Hong Kong to fetch Her Majesty’s paddle-sloop Fury. The Columbine was unable to enter the bay because her draught was too great, so on that occasion it was left to the Fu
ry to go in, and she is said to have destroyed no less than twenty-three pilong junks, although Chui-apoo, despite being desperately wounded, is believed to have escaped.

  No sooner had the Columbine and the Fury returned to Hong Kong than they were dispatched westwards to deal with Shap-ng-tsai’s fleet, in company with the SS Phlegethon, a steamer of the Honourable East India Company. Over the course of several weeks they tracked Shap-ng-tsai’s fleet ever westwards, into the uncharted islands in the Gulf of Tonquin, until they trapped the pirates in the Tonquin River. In a battle lasting two days, the two navy vessels and the civilian steamer put paid to no less than fifty-eight pilong junk: and suffered only one fatality amongst their own crews. Once again the pilong admiral escaped, but his fleet was destroyed. The fates of both Shap-ng-tsai and Chui-apoo are shrouded in uncertainty, but according to one account Chui-apoo was captured by the British and committed suicide while awaiting trial, while Shap-ng-tsai surrendered himself to the Chinese authorities and was given a commission in their navy!

  These events actually took place several months after this novel is set. I brought the action forward to set the climax at the dragon boat festival, which also allowed me to feature Captain the Honourable Henry Keppel, who was in command of HMS Mœander at Hong Kong at this time, although I also had to delay his arrival by a couple of months for dramatic purposes. Keppel was one of the great swashbuckling heroes of his day and went on to become Admiral of the Fleet in 1877.

  Many other characters in this novel were likewise inspired by real people who were in China at this time. Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Collier did suffer a paralysing stroke in February 1849 – the month Dwyer and d’Acosta were murdered – and died a few months later. There was an Admiral Huang Hai-kwang who took part in the British expedition against Shap-ng-tsai. He arrived with a fleet of six war junks, but knowing they would not be able to keep up he travelled on one of the British vessels. Determined to keep the Chinese end up, on the second day of the battle in the Tonquin River he jumped overboard and swam out to capture a pilong junk single-handed.

  Cargill was inspired by Assistant Superintendent Daniel R. Caldwell of the Hong Kong Police. Caldwell also took part in the expedition against Shap-ng-tsai, as an interpreter. He emerges from the pages of this chapter of history as one of the few men who took the trouble to understand the Chinese – he married a Chinese, almost unheard of for a European in those days – for which he was subsequently accused by one of Hong Kong’s attorney-generals. T. Chisholm Anstey, of consorting with pirates and being financially interested in brothels. An inquiry cleaned Caldwell of these charges but it was conducted in such a manner – with certain evidence being burned by Caldwell’s friends – that though he was never proven guilty, nor was he proven innocent, and in the end it was decided that he was guilty by association with a man discovered to be a pirate and was therefore unfit to hold the office of justice of the peace (a post which by that time he had already quit).

  Hong Kong certainly seems to have been a lively place. Writing of the Hong Kong newspapers in the 1840s, Jan Morris informs us:

  We are told of ‘astounding rumours implicating certain Chinese residents… in dark deeds of piracy and crime’. We are told of the ‘diabolic procedures’ employed by the hordes of pirates infesting the Pearl River Estuary. We hear at length of ‘the ruffian Ingood’, who specialized in robbing drunken sailors, and who, having drowned one over-protesting victim, became in 1845 the first European to be hanged in Hong Kong. We read of a plot to poison twenty-five men of the Royal Artillery, of a battle in the harbour between junks and boats of HMS Cambrian, of an attempt to burn down the Central Market, of a reward offered for the Governor’s assassination, of protection rackets, robberies with violence and incessant housebreaking.1

  Hong Kong was a colony based purely on trade and the tai-pans of the trading companies must have set the tone. They were hard, ruthless men who would stop at nothing in the pursuit of wealth. Foremost amongst the China traders was the company of Jardine Matheson. Scottish Presbyterians and the epitome of Victorian hypocrisy, they brought God and opium to China and by no means in equal quantities. Unlike Bannatyne, both men lived long and died millionaires in comfortable retirement, which was more than they deserved. Such wealthy men were extremely influential – like Sir George Grafton, both William Jardine and James Matheson returned to England to become members of parliament – and there can be little doubt that it was partly the influence of such men that drove Britain to attack China in the first Opium War.

  Samuel George Bonham became Governor of Hong Kong, Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of Trade in 1848, after his predecessor was forced to resign by the opposition of the China traders. Bonham was knighted in 1851, made a baronet the following year, and remained governor until 1854.

  Ultzmann is a fictional character, but inspired by a real one: the Reverend Karl Friedrich Gutzlaff, known to British sailors as ‘Happy Bowels’. He worked for Jardine Matheson for a while and ultimately became Chinese Secretary at the office of the Hong Kong Superintendent of Trade. When he left the colony for France to raise funds for his missionary activities, the French consul at Macao wrote to his government to warn them, describing Gutzlaff as ‘a man of considerable inventiveness, who has always sought to enrich himself… I regret to say that there is not a word of truth in the tales of this Sinologue’2. Sir Dadabhoy Framjee is modelled on Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy, the first Indian baronet, who was active in the China trade at this time. He made a fortune from the opium trade, but he at least seems to have ploughed vast amounts of money into charitable works in his native Gujerat.

  Wu-yi – which simply translated means ‘martial arts’ – is of course better known in the West nowadays as kung fu (strictly speaking, gong-fu). It was practised by Shaolin monks, whose temples became centres of opposition to the Ch’ing Dynasty in the eighteenth century. Another focus of opposition to the Manchus was the many interlinked secret societies which formed the Triads, of which the Brotherhood of Heaven, Earth and Man was only one. Today the Triads are predominantly criminal organisations, but in the nineteenth century their purpose was very much political. In 1850, however, their efforts were subsumed into the Taiping Rebellion, which the Manchus ultimately crushed in 1864, but only after a bloody war which is said to have cost more lives than the whole of the Second World War. Secret societies continued to be part of Chinese society until Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu Dynasty in 1911: the ‘Boxers United in Righteousness’ – also known as the ‘Harmonious Fists’ – of 1898–1900 were one such organisation. If there are still secret societies intent on overthrowing the current regime in China to this day, the Communists aren’t telling.

  Despite the efforts of the Royal Navy and the Chinese authorities, piracy continues to be a problem in the South China Sea into the twenty-first century. During the 1850s, Westerners seemed to supplant the natives as the foremost pirates in the region for a time. Two of the most notorious were the Americans William ‘Bully’ Hayes and Eli Boggs. But that, as they say, is another story…

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to thank the following for their invaluable assistance: James Hale, for agenting duties and for knowing exactly what to say when I was starting to lose my self-confidence; Sarah Keen for her excellent editing and suggestions; Yvonne Holland for a thorough job of copy-editing; Rosemarie Buckman for getting me into Europe and Alastair Wilson, whose astonishing breadth of knowledge enabled him to check the manuscript for errors both technical and historical (if you find any mistakes, I guarantee it’s because I occasionally took liberties with strict historical accuracy for dramatic effect, rather than because he failed to set me straight).

  I should also like to thank the following for providing inspiration: David Arnold, John Barry, Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, William Laird Clowes, Michael Curtiz, Roald Dahl, James Robertson Justice, Jet Li, Basil Lubbock, Jan Morris, Tyrone Power, Frank Welsh, James Wong and John Woo.

  First published in the Uni
ted Kingdom in 2001 by Headline Book Publishing

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2001

  The moral right of Jonathan Lunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781911591870

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Endnotes

  1.

  Jan Morris, Hong Kong, Viking. 1988. pp. 90-91. « Back

  2.

  Affaires Diverses Consulaires. Quai d’Orsay, quoted in Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong, p. 164. « Back