No matter how each side tried to paper it over, however, the Amherst mission was a catastrophe. Trade would continue unaffected, but new suspicions had been planted on both sides. Jiaqing was left wary. Troubled as he was by the ongoing problems of corruption and sedition within the empire, he had no desire to provoke a conflict with the British as well. But he was fully aware that they might be angered by their collision with his ministers, and was especially concerned (with good reason) about what Amherst’s ships might have been up to after they left their designated anchorages without permission. One of the unintended outcomes of this ostensible mission of friendship was that the British came out of it seeming more sinister than they ever had before. From the other side, the great hopes of the East India Company and the British government for impressing upon the Jiaqing emperor their country’s power in the new post-Napoleonic age, for securing his respect and goodwill, and for opening up a new line of communication beyond the narrow confines of Canton were all dashed. In a grand climax of poetic justice—perhaps the most fitting end possible for this travesty of a diplomatic mission—as the Alceste was carrying Lord Amherst and his retinue back to England, it slammed into an unseen rock and sank.
Back in England, the response to Amherst’s mission was mainly disappointment, though tinged, depending on one’s perspective, with a measure of either bemusement or indignation. The Times, for its part, leaned toward bemusement. It hadn’t expected much to come of the “unfortunate” mission in the first place, and observed sarcastically that “the results of that brilliant embassage” did not afterward include any increase in British imports to China, nor any reduction in the price of tea to “gladden the breakfast-tables of the people of England.” Overall, Amherst’s embassy had “failed in the objects for which it was prepared and put forth by the British Government,” said the paper, and “the political influence of England has not been either satisfactorily proved or successfully enforced, or, according to any human reasoning, much confirmed or extended.” Indeed, in the Times’s opinion, the only useful product of the embassy was the series of detailed travel narratives that its members published afterward. Those it welcomed as the only sign of the mission having been in any way worthwhile.56
The sharpest denunciations of Amherst and his mission came from a new generation of free-trade advocates in Britain who dreamed of abolishing the East India Company’s monopoly on commerce with China. As they saw it, Amherst was an arrogant fool who had offended the Chinese by his refusal to follow their customs. By fussing pointlessly over the kowtow, he had squandered a rare opportunity to expand British commerce. One such critic in the Edinburgh Review complained that the kowtow “does not appear much more humiliating than other court ceremonies” and insisted that Amherst should simply have done it. All of the troubles between Britain and China, he argued, could be traced back to individuals within the Company’s factory in Canton—whether it be John Roberts goading Admiral Drury to invade Macao or George Staunton pressuring Amherst not to kowtow. With easy jobs free from competition, where they had “little or nothing to do” other than sit around and rake in money from their rich and exclusive trade, the Company’s staff were, he insisted, sabotaging Britain’s chances for a more productive relationship with the Qing Empire.
For contrast, he pointed to how well the Americans were faring in China with their total absence of a monopoly company. “The free and extensive traffic carried on by the Americans—an intercourse which is yearly increasing at our expense,” he wrote, “. . . has never for a moment been interrupted by any quarrel or altercation with the Chinese or their government.” The Americans never encountered the kinds of prestige-related problems the stodgy old East India Company did. To his mind, the obvious solution to the problem of relations with China was for the British government to abolish the monopoly and allow private British firms to compete freely for the business of Canton. “Let the Chinese trade, as soon as good faith and the laws will permit, be made free,” he declared, “and we have no doubt whatever, either of its stability or its increase.”57 Such sentiments would only build in the years to come.
Others would take a more nationalistic tone, cheering Amherst for upholding Britain’s honor even at the expense of improved relations with China. On that side, the same current of hostility that Staunton’s book on the Qing law code had stirred up in 1810 rose anew. The Quarterly Review, examining Ellis’s published journal, commended him for debunking the myth of Chinese civilization and revealing “in its true light . . . this government of sages, which Voltaire and his followers conspired to hold up as . . . an example for the general admiration of mankind.”58 Separately, it praised Amherst for not performing the kowtow, declaring that “the national character [has] been upheld by the refusal of Lord Amherst to comply with a disgusting and degrading ceremony.” The British must continue to stand firm against the Chinese, it said, for “the less that is conceded to this pusillanimous and insolent people, the more will their fears for the consequence begin to operate.”59
Down that road lay the fantasy of teaching China a lesson in respect—a resentful grumbling under the collective breath, the fodder for snide nationalistic quips about Jiaqing’s failure to recognize the obvious power of the Royal Navy. John Wolcot, the satirist writing as Peter Pindar who had ridiculed Lord Macartney for humiliating himself before Qianlong (“Say, wert thou not asham’d to put thy prow / Where Britons, dog-like, learnt to crawl and bow?”), sharpened his pen again, but this time to take on the emperor rather than the ambassador. His humor in 1817 was of a darker variety than before, leading one reviewer to comment that in his “patriotic resentment” the well-known satirist’s wit had become somewhat less funny.60 As he addressed Jiaqing:
Thou never didst vouchsafe, perhaps,
To cast thine eye sublime on maps;
And therefore, fancying thyself all-mighty,
Has treated us with pompous scorn—
. . .
Know, should Old England’s Genius frown,
Her thunder soon would shake thy crown,
Reduce thee from an eagle to a wren,
Thine high Imperial pride to gall,
Force thee to leap the Chinese wall,
To feed on horse with Tartar tribes again.
Against such preening invocations of Britain’s military dominance, more sober voices of caution were few. One, however, came from the very man who knew, more intimately than anyone else then alive, how fleeting a nation’s presumed invincibility could be: Napoleon Bonaparte. In July 1817, Napoleon was living in exile on Saint Helena when he learned that Lord Amherst and his suite (who had been rescued from their shipwreck) would soon be landing at the island on their way home from China and hoped to have an audience with him. As he waited for their arrival, he chatted about the fate of the British embassy with his Irish physician, Barry O’Meara, who had accompanied the defeated general into exile.
Napoleon thought it was absurd that Amherst should have refused to kowtow. “Different nations have different customs,” he told O’Meara. If the British wanted to send an ambassador to the Chinese court they should have told him to follow the customs of the Chinese. “You have no right to send a man to China to tell them, that they must perform certain ceremonies, because such are practised in England,” he said. With a twinkle in his eye, the old general asked O’Meara what would have happened if the British custom were to kiss their king on his ass instead of his hand. When they got to China, would they have ordered the emperor to remove his trousers? All the British had accomplished with the Amherst mission was to lose the friendship of the Chinese over a ridiculous matter of protocol, he said, to the peril of their advantages in trade.61
O’Meara replied that it didn’t matter if the British had the friendship of the Chinese. They had the Royal Navy.
And with that, the joking ended. Napoleon’s eyes turned dark. “It would be the worst thing you have done for a number of years, to go to war with an immense empire like China,” he told O�
�Meara. And his words that followed resonated with the fears of everyone who wondered quietly what might happen if the dragon, as it were, should be awakened. “You would doubtless, at first, succeed,” Napoleon continued, “. . . but you would teach them their own strength. They would be compelled to adopt measures to defend themselves against you; they would consider, and say, ‘we must try to make ourselves equal to this nation. Why should we suffer a people, so far away, to do as they please to us? We must build ships, we must put guns into them, we must render ourselves equal to them.’ They would get artificers, and ship builders, from France, and America, and even from London; they would build a fleet,” he said, “and, in the course of time, defeat you.”62
PART II
The Milk of Paradise
CHAPTER 7
Boom Times
Through the dusk of a mid-autumn evening in 1830, a young American threaded his way on a hired Chinese junk through the crowded anchorage at Whampoa on the way up to Canton. It was his first time in the country, but the image that impressed him most on his arrival had nothing to do with China itself. It was his competition: the trim, powerful line of the East India Company’s trading fleet at rest at Whampoa—sixteen immense ships, as big as American frigates, heavily armed and manned. Quiet for the moment, the mammoth fleet projected a vision of discipline, strength, and unity to the American as he sailed past the anchorage in his little rented boat.1
The young man’s name was John Murray Forbes, and he was seventeen, very much on the small side, the youngest of three brothers from the town of Milton, just south of Boston. If he hadn’t precisely been born into the China trade, there was nevertheless little chance he could have avoided it. His father, a gout-ridden man who had never been a good provider, had died six years earlier when John was eleven, at which time it fell to his brothers, Robert Bennet Forbes and Thomas Tunno Forbes, nine and eleven years older than John, respectively, to support their mother and four sisters. Fortunately, they had a unique path open to them through an uncle. Their mother’s older brother, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, was one of the wealthiest men in Boston and a renowned philanthropist. Most of his fortune, as it happened, had come from the China trade, in which he had played a major role on the American side since the time of George Washington’s inauguration.2
John’s older brothers Robert and Thomas took early apprenticeships under their rich uncle, starting out as clerks and runners in his counting house at Foster’s Wharf in Boston before chasing more distant opportunities in his service. Robert, a natural sailor who loved climbing high up into a ship’s rigging, chose the traveling side of the merchant’s career. He went to sea for the first time at age thirteen on the Canton Packet, one of his uncle’s ships, and by the precocious age of twenty had earned his own command as a captain on the Boston–China circuit. Thomas, older by a year and a half, was more inclined toward the sedentary side of the business, so he moved permanently to Canton, where by 1828 he was chief manager of their uncle’s trading enterprise, Perkins & Co., and served as the U.S. consul. John, being so much younger than they, was sent at their expense to the Round Hill School, an experimental private academy in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he learned to play an early form of baseball, stood up to bullies, studied French and Spanish along with accounting, and tramped through the low, rolling hills and pine forests of the Connecticut River valley.
John had originally thought he might become a minister, but he lost his taste for the Bible in Northampton after having it shoved too much down his throat at school.3 His thoughts often tended toward China, where he wondered if he would follow someday in his brothers’ footsteps. He envied them—especially Thomas, who after their father’s death was the closest thing to a patriarch in the family. The elder brothers had become wealthy enough in their China ventures to support their mother and establish one of their sisters independently, and John hoped eventually to do his part as well. From Canton, Thomas wrote to young John as a father would, giving him sober instructions on how to make his studies useful for a future in commerce, how to dress well without becoming a “Dandy,” and how to choose the kinds of friends who would make him a gentleman. Mercifully, he also reminded him not to let the carefree joys of youth slip by. “Enjoy them all while you may,” wrote Thomas in 1828, “for the time will come soon when they shall have passed away.”4
That time came sooner than either expected. In the summer of 1829, Thomas was drowned in a gale near Macao. It took six months for the news to reach Boston, and within six months of that, John was on his way to China. The uncle’s business had lost its manager in Canton, and John’s family had lost its main provider. Robert, the middle brother, a bright-eyed young man with a rosy complexion and a squirrel of curly hair on top of his head, happened to be home in the United States at the time to outfit his own ship for the China trade, a barque called the Lintin (named after a small island in the Pearl River estuary about sixty miles south of Canton). When the Lintin launched at Medford, Massachusetts, that summer and Robert made for Canton on its maiden voyage, John—now all of seventeen years old and never to attend school again—sailed with him to take up their late brother’s residence in the American factory.
. . .
The Canton where John Murray Forbes arrived in the autumn of 1830 was, on its surface at least, little changed since George Staunton had arrived there on the Hindostan at a comparably young age thirty years earlier. The narrow dimensions of the factory district were unchanged, though most of the buildings had been rebuilt after a fire in 1822. The rules that governed the lives of the compound’s small population of a hundred or so foreigners were as strict as they had always been, and the visible objects of commerce—tea, silk, cotton—were also the same as before. The foreign community itself, however, was nearly unrecognizable. Most of the old guard were now gone. Staunton himself had returned to England in 1817 soon after the Amherst mission and in 1818 obtained the seat in Parliament that he, and his father before him, had always dreamed of—a purchased seat for a “rotten borough” with only a few dozen voters rather than a genuinely contested one, but still a seat nonetheless.5 After an inconspicuous start to his parliamentary career, he had managed by this time to get himself appointed to the East India Committee of the House of Commons, where he hoped to begin putting his China expertise to work in the service of his country (as well as, of course, the interests of the Company that had served him so well).6
Others had moved on as well. Thomas Manning, the bearded eccentric, left with Amherst in 1817 and survived the Alceste’s shipwreck with the others. In England he joined the Royal Asiatic Society, which George Staunton cofounded with a Sanskrit scholar in 1823, and for a time he served as the society’s honorary Chinese librarian. Charles Lamb welcomed him back to his London literary circle and loved him fiercely. “I am glad you esteem Manning,” Lamb wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1826, “though you see but his husk or shrine. He discloses not save to select worshippers, and will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is.”7
There were only a few left in Canton from before. Old Beale, the Cantonese-speaking private trader and nominal Prussian consul, was still kicking about. He had gone bankrupt in 1816 but still tended to his aviary in Macao, where by this time he had several hundred species including a rare bird of paradise and a parrot who could say, “Bring Polly a pot of beer.”8 A couple of the junior members of the British factory had grown into senior positions. But the unlikely doyen of the factory compound turned out to be Robert Morrison, who, alone among the first generation of British Chinese speakers, still lived in Canton with no plans to return home. He held court in Macao during the off-season, and in Canton he acted as the East India Company’s senior interpreter as he had done now for twenty years. Thanks to his dictionary, the final volume of which was published in 1823, the ranks of the translators below him were growing steadily; in contrast to the days when Staunton was told it would be useless to know Chinese, the select committ
ee now had a rule that all junior writers in the factory should study it. And thanks to Morrison’s Bible—which was finally completed that same year—other Protestant missionaries were beginning to arrive in his wake, hoping somehow to get into China to further the work he had begun.
Morrison’s wife, Mary, had felt strong enough to return to him from England with their two children in 1820, but within a year of her return to Macao she died of cholera. Since the Portuguese still would not let him use the Catholic cemetery, the Company staff purchased a small plot of land for him to open a Protestant cemetery in which to bury her.9 He remarried in 1824 while traveling in England to raise support for his work in China, and his new wife (who would bear him several more children) had by 1830 settled down in Macao. His only living son from his first marriage, John Robert Morrison, lived with him in the British factory at Canton and followed in his father’s footsteps—not as a missionary to the Chinese, for Morrison had mostly failed in that capacity, but rather as a linguist. In the same week that John Murray Forbes arrived, John Robert Morrison, by then sixteen years old, gained his first appointment as translator for the private British merchants in Canton.10 If young Morrison carried on the secular side of his father’s work, his older sister Rebecca continued the legacy of their mother insofar as she too was forbidden by virtue of being female from living in Canton. Like her mother before her, she had to stay behind in Macao during the trading season.
Imperial Twilight Page 22