The makeshift prison was complete in its containment of the roughly 350 British, Americans, Dutch, and Parsis trapped inside—a number that included not just the traders and their staffs but also thirty sailors on shore leave who had accidentally been caught away from their ships when the walls closed in. It was not, however, an unfriendly place. Most of the “soldiers” who guarded the compound were actually employees of the Hong merchants who had been deputized and armed for the occasion, and they were friendly to the foreigners, many of whom they knew by name. There was no molestation or menace of any kind from the professional soldiers either. (Lin Zexu had in fact given them specific orders to avoid any unnecessary violence—he wanted only to intimidate the foreign traders, not harm them or provoke a conflict.)44
Furthermore, the blockade of supplies was loose enough that a constant procession of capons, boiled hams, roast mutton, and baskets of bread and eggs made its way into the factories, smuggled creatively by Houqua’s assistants and others. On one occasion, a Hong employee showed up for a visit at Russell & Co. with six loaves of bread stuffed into his shirtsleeves.45 The old-timers among the merchants, some of whom could remember when supplies were cut off during Baynes’s standoff over his wife in 1830, had made sure to lay in enough provisions in advance to keep their firms fed for a month at least. Matheson wrote to Jardine that their staff “not only lived comfortably all along” but also gave dinner parties for the other “inmates.”46 In all, looking back a few years later, Robert Bennet Forbes reckoned that he and the other prisoners in Canton in 1839 “suffered more . . . from absence of exercise and from over feeding than from any actual want of the necessaries of life.”47
So nobody would starve, and—other than boredom—the greatest day-to-day annoyance was that these expatriate businessmen, who were long accustomed to being waited on hand and foot by bevies of servants, were forced to cook and clean for themselves in the factories. It didn’t go very well. Class divisions prevailed for the British, with the limited number of sailors on hand being distributed among their firms to do menial work for the gentlemen. But there were hardly enough sailors to go around, so the traders still had to figure out how to build fires for themselves, wash forks, carry water from the river, sweep floors, milk cows, and make their own beds. On the upside, they could wear their pajamas all morning and nobody complained. On the downside, the food they prepared, in kitchens into which none of them had ever before set foot, was atrocious. Trying to feed the Americans of Russell & Co., Robert Forbes’s first attempt at ham and eggs came out a hard black mass approximating the sole of a shoe, though his colleague Warren Delano eventually managed a passable rice pudding from a cookbook.48
The prospect of imprisonment did not seem so amusing to Charles Elliot as it did to the merchants. Rather, it terrified him, conjuring images of starvation and mass executions. So he had already made up his mind what to do to appease Lin Zexu even before he got to Canton to “rescue” Lancelot Dent (whose partner later maintained that he really didn’t need or merit rescuing).49 On the evening of March 26, just two days after Lin Zexu closed off the compound, Elliot told a few of the merchants with whom he was on good terms that he had a plan. When he explained it to them, it was so unexpected that they had to ask him to repeat himself several times just to make sure they hadn’t misunderstood him. They hadn’t. The next morning, bright and early, he went around the factory compound delivering copies of a notice he had just printed up, the wording of which he had rehearsed several times the night before.50
The upshot was this: given his wildly exaggerated notion of the risks the British merchants were facing, Elliot had resolved that they must be made to cooperate with Lin Zexu and hand over every last ounce of their opium—for if they didn’t, as he (and almost nobody else) seriously feared, they might all wind up dead on his watch. His plan to make them comply, which so baffled those who first heard it, was that he was going to confiscate all of their opium himself. In the name of Her British Majesty, he ordered all of the foreigners in possession of British-owned opium to surrender it to him, the superintendent of trade, in return for which he would sign promissory notes guaranteeing that the British government would pay them its fair market value.
The meaning of his offer was immediately obvious to the merchants—indeed, it seemed too good to be true. At a point of crisis when they knew the Chinese government might at any moment try to seize their illegal opium by force, here was Charles Elliot demanding (in the name of the queen!) that they turn it over to him instead, with a promise of being paid its full value by the British government. It was a stunning deal. Even better was the coercive nature of Elliot’s plan, for the great majority of the opium under control of the traders at Canton did not actually belong to them. They worked mainly as agents to sell opium consigned to them by investors in India and England, so most of what they held wasn’t theirs to give up. At the peril of their future reputations in business, they could not voluntarily hand over their clients’ property—but when Charles Elliot ordered them to do so in the name of the Crown, they had no choice, and so they could never be held to blame by their consignors. From the standpoint of the opium agents, it was a perfect way out of their bind. As James Matheson explained to a worried client, “Our surrender is the most fortunate thing that could have happened.”51
Quite happily, then, through the afternoon of March 27 the British and Parsi traders brought Elliot statements of the amount of opium under control of their firms. He, in turn, signed notes guaranteeing payment by the British government (notes that later became a form of currency in India, traded as “opium scrip”).52 Even the Americans of Russell & Co. came to see him, for while their firm had renounced its drug business a few weeks earlier, they still had more than a thousand chests of British-owned opium that they had been unable to get rid of lingering on a receiving ship at Lintin. The partners gladly signed it all over to Elliot, as did the representatives of all of the British and Parsi firms with any drug stock whatsoever. All told, their pledges came to a staggering total of 20,283 chests, with a market value of roughly $10 million, or £2 million. The editor of the Canton Register fully relished the absurdity of Elliot’s actions, reporting in a fit of jollity the next morning that “the health of the young and lovely queen of England has been drunk, in flowing cups, on Her Majesty being at the present moment the largest holder of opium on record.”53
Elliot’s offer would turn out to be the key to everything that came after. And it was a very strange offer for him to make, not least because he had absolutely no authority to make it. Palmerston had told him explicitly that the opium smugglers must suffer their own consequences if the Chinese government should seize their wares. There was nothing at all in Elliot’s instructions or his previous communications from Whitehall to give him the illusion that he could invoke the power of the British government to protect the dealers from such an outcome. It was simply a rash decision made in an episode of unbridled panic, to which Elliot was becoming increasingly prone (Robert Bennet Forbes called these moments “Elliot’s mad freaks”).54 Elliot convinced himself he had saved not just the lives of his countrymen but also the economy of the empire. “I am without doubt,” he wrote to Palmerston immediately afterward, “that the safety of a great mass of human life hung upon my determination.”55 Even if the merchants handed over their opium to Lin Zexu voluntarily, he rationalized, if they did so with no guarantee of being repaid it might trigger a collapse of credit in the Indian economy, a catastrophic “commercial convulsion” that would cause an “incalculable degree” of financial turmoil for Britain.
Of course, the traders themselves knew perfectly well that Charles Elliot didn’t have the authority to purchase £2 million worth of opium on behalf of the Crown—but the very fact that he had been so unwilling to clarify his powers earlier meant they could plausibly claim that they took him at his word. Even if deep down they suspected that his promise was worthless (though they would never admit such a thing), still they signed, beca
use they knew that even an unauthorized contract endorsed by the British superintendent, if they had signed it in good faith, would give them a strong case against the British government for compensation. Faced with a choice between having their clients’ property seized by Charles Elliot or by Lin Zexu, they knew they would have far better chances of obtaining reimbursement from their own government than from China’s.
Authorized or not, Elliot’s offer of indemnity might also look strange on its face in that it represented a pledge from the British government to pay a group of drug dealers good money for their contraband. But on that count, Elliot’s offer had a more solid precedent, which tied directly into his recent experience with slavery in Guyana, namely the means by which Britain had effected the emancipation of the slaves five years earlier. For even as the British government had condemned the institution of slavery, it also recognized that the owners had property rights and their slaves represented investments of capital. So rather than simply forcing the slave owners to give up their slaves, the government had paid them to do so—a fact that gave weight to Elliot’s belief that the British and Parsis who had invested their money in opium from India, detestable as the traffic may have been to him personally, still had rights to their property.
To pay for the abolition of slavery, the British government had in 1834 created a massive compensation fund of £20 million—ten times the value of the opium in China—to reimburse the owners of emancipated slaves for their losses (though not, to be clear, to compensate the slaves themselves in any way for what they had suffered). In settling on that course of action, one of the most successful arguments had hinged on alleged widows and orphans—innocents—whose only income was derived from the titles they had inherited to slaves toiling on faraway plantations in the West Indies. If the slaves should be emancipated without compensation to their absentee owners, went the argument, the widows and orphans would starve.56 The merchants in Canton and their supporters would try to play on identical sympathies in gaining compensation for their opium. As the editor of the Canton Register argued, if the British government failed to make good on Elliot’s promise of payment, it would cause “the bankruptcy and utter ruin of the owners of opium consigned to China, the ruination and destitution of families, the fall in station and society, the debtor’s prison, the workhouse alms, and, probably, death by starvation by many whose all was involved in speculations of opium.”57
Elliot himself was tight-lipped on the subject, but many assumed that the slavery indemnity was what he had in mind when he signed his pledges. Even opponents of opium could support the idea. A writer in the Chinese Repository—which, being edited by missionaries, had always been critical of the opium trade—argued that the British government and East India Company shared the blame for encouraging the drug’s production in India, so “why not then divide the loss, and let a generous government act as it did on the great question of the West Indian slavery?”58 Others would insist that it was simply a matter of fairness. “Admitting those who deal in opium to be guilty of as grievous a sin against the law of nature—of morality, as those were who trafficked in slaves,” wrote one pamphleteer in England, “what right has the one to compensation that the other has not?”59
Perhaps most important for what would come of this action, Charles Elliot expected—as did others, including many of the opium traders themselves—that compensation would be part and parcel with the termination of the Indian-Chinese opium trade for good.60 Writing to Palmerston just after his arrangement to hand over the opium to Lin Zexu, Elliot said he was convinced that “the time had arrived when the merchants engaged in the trade [in opium] at Canton must resolve to forego their connexion with it.”61 He later expressed hope to Palmerston that the British navy would provide an “effectual check” to stop the opium trade; as with slavery, it appeared the detestable business of opium might finally be brought to an end by buying off those who had engaged in it.62 And on that count, it is worth noting that the precedent of abolition does much to explain why, despite all of the controversy that Charles Elliot’s actions in China would cause back home, one of the least controversial aspects was his belief that the opium traders, no matter how vile their trade, were still entitled to some kind of compensation for their lost property. The question, though, was who would pay for it.
As soon as the merchants had finished signing their opium over to Charles Elliot, he wrote to Lin Zexu promising to surrender it all to the Chinese government. Up to that point, the largest single drug seizure recorded in China had been Qishan’s haul at Tianjin on the eve of Lin Zexu’s appointment in 1838, which netted altogether about eighty chests’ worth.63 Lin Zexu’s own anti-opium campaign in Hubei and Hunan in 1838, for which he would be famous, had only turned up something on the order of ten or twenty chests of opium all told. Even the aggressive and sustained efforts of Deng Tingzhen at Canton over the two years preceding Lin’s arrival had pulled in the equivalent of less than six hundred chests.64 Yet those successes had met with the effusive praise of the emperor, so there was no necessary reason for any official to take the risk of trying to go much higher.
When Lin Zexu first ordered the British to hand over their opium and the Hong merchants advised them that a thousand chests would be plenty, their advice made sense. With the capture of a thousand chests of opium, Lin would have confiscated more of the drug in one stroke than had been netted in all of the major campaigns to date, combined. He could, they expected, have used that seizure as grounds to declare victory to Daoguang and then leave Canton in peace. The cost of all that opium would be high—roughly half a million dollars—but the Hong merchants could absorb the loss without bankrupting themselves. They could reimburse the foreigners for their lost property, the waters would smooth, and the regular trade could return to normal as it had always done in the past. That, at least, was the most likely outcome right up to the point where Charles Elliot flung himself into the works. Lin Zexu left no record of his reaction when he first saw Elliot’s total, but it is not difficult to imagine his shock upon learning that the British superintendent was volunteering to surrender more than twenty thousand chests of opium—well over a thousand tons of the unprocessed drug—with a market value of $10 million.
Lin Zexu had no sense that anything might have gone wrong. In his first dispatch to the emperor after Elliot’s surrender, written a few weeks after the fact on April 12, 1839, he detailed just how successful his efforts had been. He expressed little regard for the foreigners—all of them were cunning by nature, he told Daoguang, though the opium dealers were the most treacherous of all. But he was pleased to report their swift capitulation. Elliot had agreed to hand over the British opium almost immediately, just a couple of days after Lin locked down the compound. Furthermore, Elliot complied without making any trouble (as compared to, say, Napier, who had called in gunboats when faced with a similar situation). Lin Zexu had prevailed without needing to use any military force at all, he told Daoguang; all he had to do was to confront the foreign traders with the heavenly might of the emperor’s authority and “naturally they were cowed into submission.”65
Since the most difficult part of the matter seemed to be settled, Lin advised Daoguang to show benevolence toward the newly chastened foreigners. He recommended that the emperor forgive them their past crimes, and said that he had already sent them a large gift of livestock since they were (as he imagined) running out of food in their factories. He also explained to Daoguang that since the merchants were surrendering all of their opium they would no longer have any money with which to conduct trade. In light of their submissive respect for the law, he asked Daoguang to consider sending them an imperial gift to make up for their losses.
The Hong merchants had been confident that the foreigners would eventually be reimbursed for most of the value of any opium Lin Zexu might confiscate from them, whether by Lin Zexu or by the Hong merchants themselves.66 But that was when they were talking about a thousand chests of opium. Nobody was in a position
to make good for twenty thousand chests. And as it turned out, while Lin Zexu had in fact been planning on compensation, the amount he had in mind was paltry. In writing to Daoguang after the surrender, Lin recommended that for each chest of opium the foreign merchants handed over, the emperor should reward them with a few pounds of tea. Even at the current depressed prices for opium, that would be compensation of less than a penny on the dollar. Lin expected they would be grateful to have it.67
Unknown to Lin Zexu at the time he wrote that dispatch in mid-April, however, Charles Elliot was not feeling so submissive anymore. He had in fact come to the end of his rope. He was deeply, furiously angry that after all he had done to arrange the surrender in late March, after all of the risk he had taken on with his own people and his own government in order to appease Lin Zexu—after putting his own personal honor on the line with the other foreigners—Lin had not immediately released the British from Canton. Rather, Lin said that he would only grant the foreigners permission to leave the factories after three-quarters of the opium had been collected, a process that would take weeks, if not months, since most of it was on ships that had been scrambled for safety to ports as far away as Singapore and Manila. And so as of April, when Lin Zexu wrote the confident report above, the lockdown at Canton still continued.
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