Around the World with a King

by William N. Armstrong

  When the missionary, with a psychological lantern, explores without preconceived ideas the mysteries of the Chinese mind, he will devise a way to lodge in it the best truth; above all, he will, as one of the ablest of missionaries has said, not destroy what is good in the Chinese religion, but preserve it and add to it. He will not destroy ancestral worship, but gradually enlighten and improve it, so that in the fulness of time it will eventually assimilate itself to the true worship, whatever that may be.

  CHAPTER XIII

  At Hongkong — The King Becomes Queen Victoria's Guest at Government House — Conversations with the Governor — Saluted by Forts and Warships — Official Announcement in English and Chinese — A Tramp Steamer Direct to Siam — Colonel Mosby, American Consul — Banquets and Other Entertainments — Captain Cook's Indiscretion — Reception to Chinese Merchants — Importance of Hongkong — British Rule — The King's Nap at the Banquet — A Lady's Strategy — Chinese Absorption of Christianity.

  THE "Thibet" anchored in the evening in the harbour of Hongkong, but it was after sunset, and thus past the saluting-hour. Owing to the considerable commerce between this place and the Hawaiian kingdom, the King was represented here by a Consul-General, a British merchant of high standing. He promptly boarded the steamer for the purpose of taking the King to his fine residence, as an invitation to stay with him had been telegraphed to Shanghai and accepted. But the twelve-oared barge of Sir John Pope Hennessey, the Colonial Governor, suddenly appeared at the gangway, and Dr. Eitel, his private secretary, brought an invitation from the Governor, asking the King, in the name of the British Queen, to be his guest. The King was forced to break his promise to his own Consul. He was, however, on British soil, and his Consul was an Englishman. He broke his promise on the ground that in social affairs the Queen's wishes take precedence. The Consul and the private secretary wrangled over the matter on the deck of the steamer. My own Solomonic way of settling the matter by dividing the King into two parts, one of which should go to the Queen's representative, and the other to the Consul, was rejected, and we entered the royal barge, rowed by twelve oarsmen in the Queen's livery. At the landing we entered sedan chairs, borne by coolies, also in the Queen's livery, in which we were taken to the Government House, which has a superb situation on a hill overlooking the city. Here the Governor received the King at the door, and led him to his audience-room, where he, with the suite, were presented to Lady Hennessey. It was a royal reception, and restored the continuity of the Royal Progress, which had been broken by the conduct or indifference of the little yellow five-clawed Dragon at Pekin.

  After the King retired, the Governor, who was a clever and brilliant man, listened to the story of our adventures in Tientsin. He was surprised that the suite allowed the King to attempt an interview with the Brother of the Moon, but when he was reminded of the fact that few can check a Royal Horse that takes the bit in his mouth, he gave us his sympathy, and believed that our interview with General Li Hung Chang had compensated for the loss of the sight of the Forbidden City.

  While we were taking coffee the next morning, the forts, with seven warships, fired the usual salute of twenty-one guns. From the balcony of the Government House, high above the city, we looked down on a dense mass of smoke, rolling away to the mainland, pierced with the flashing of the guns; the Hawaiian flag at the mainmast of every warship; the merchantmen also, who like to show their bunting, hoisting the King's colours. It was a pretty sight, very noisy and warlike.

  The Government paper contained an announcement, which is presented with the Chinese and English words side by side.

  We learned that a tramp steamer would shortly leave for Siam by direct route. By taking her we would avoid doubling on our tracks in a voyage to Singapore and return. We resolved to take advantage of this chance, although the steamer was not a passenger-carrier and did not attract us. When we informed Sir John Hennessey of our intention he said that he proposed to give two State banquets in honour of the King, at which His Majesty would meet the chief British and foreign naval commanders, the British officers commanding the garrison, the Consular Corps, and prominent citizens. To facilitate our necessarily early departure he promised to give them at once and in quick succession.

  With those who promptly called upon the King was the American Consul, Colonel John S. Mosby, the Confederate guerilla, who a few years before, in the Civil War, had harassed the Federal forces around Washington and greatly disturbed the peace of President Lincoln. He had taken at a bound the "bloody chasm" between North and South, and by the kindly act of President Grant he had received this Federal office, and was now as loyal to the Flag as any Union veteran.

  Mr. Chetar, a rich merchant, gave a luncheon party, or tiffin, in honour of the King, at Kowloon, on the mainland opposite to the city. Men of all nationalities were there,—the men drawn to this great free port by commerce, as fish are attracted to a net by a torchlight: English free traders, American protectionists, large-framed and clever-looking Chinamen, Portuguese from Macao, Parsees from Bombay, Frenchmen in exile from the Parisian Jerusalem, and Japanese getting into Western ways.

  Extract from Hong Kong Newspaper.

  In the first toast, after tiffin, "To the Queen!" we saw the impassioned loyalty of the British colonists to their Queen, the centripetal power which makes the British Crown, with its setting of colonial diamonds, the central figure of the world. The Governor then gave a toast to the King. He declared that the British power protected rather than injured or absorbed well-regulated States; there had been trifling incidents in the relations of her Majesty's kingdom with the Sandwich Islands, in past years, such as the killing of Captain Cook by his Majesty's predecessor, on one of his islands, and a British captain had once captured the group and deposed the king in the name of the British Queen; but he had quickly restored it, and the British government was the first to propose that the Great Powers should recognise and protect the independence of that kingdom, for it was for the interests of commerce that it should be free from any foreign control.

  The King replied by thanking the Governor, who, in the name of the Queen, had tendered to him such gracious hospitality. He said that he did not make speeches, but that there was with him a Minister who had been commissioned to speak for him. Upon this his Minister said that the King and his suite recalled a day in the year 1842, when a British sloop-of-war, the "Carysfort," seized the Hawaiian Islands, and annexed them to the British possessions. For three months the king and his suite had been British subjects, but were extremely disloyal. At the end of that period the British admiral voluntarily restored the islands to the native sovereign. The British had originally interfered with the islands by directing Captain Cook to "discover" them; but he had exceeded his instructions, for after he had discovered them he permitted the natives to worship himself as a long-lost god, by means of which he had secured pigs, chickens, and vegetables. But disputes had arisen, and the native King, in order to test his divinity, had stricken him with a club, and the experiment was fatal. This was therefore a unique case of a monarch without breeches committing a breach of international law; it was a serious question and had never been decided by the publicists. Captain Cook had personified a god, and had obtained pigs and chickens by doing so. By the law of England it was a criminal offence for one person to personify another for gain, but in the vast literature of the law, from the Roman Pandects down, there was not a single instance of a case where a man had been charged with falsely personifying a god, as Captain Cook had done. The British government, in spite of the death of the great navigator, had been generous, and refused to make war on the early kings of Hawaii; the relations of the two countries had been friendly. In 1810 the celebrated King Kamehameha employed a British sailor, named Campbell, to aid him in shipbuilding. The sailor told the King about George III, his own sovereign. The King asked if George III ever went to war. Campbell replied that he did. "Tell him," said the King," as soon as you reach home, that if he gets into any more wars I will go
over and help him." Now, two years after this kind and kingly offer was made, George III went to war with the American nation. But not a single historian, either English or American, has alluded to this neglect of an offer which might have enabled the British to destroy the American navy. The King was now about to visit some of the British colonies, and he hoped to meet some of the statesmen who had made British rule in distant lands wise and safe.

  After this luncheon the party returned to Hong-kong, where, in the Government House, the King received the calls of a number of Chinese merchants who traded with the people of his islands. Many thousands of coolies had emigrated from this place, to serve as labourers on the sugar plantations, and although they were of the lowest class in China a number of them had acquired wealth in Hawaii and had not been treated unjustly. These merchants told the King that their countrymen in his kingdom were entirely loyal to his government.

  During our brief visit we saw the attractive features of the place. It is located, however, behind a mountain, so that it is cut off from the cooling winds.

  At the two grand State banquets which swiftly followed each other, the dishes, the service, and the wines were such as are found on an English table in London; but coolies patiently pulled the punkas which stirred the lifeless air in which, with the heavy food, one becomes drowsy. There were present admirals, generals, noted citizens, and fine-looking Chinamen, who did not show the "childhood" which De Quincey declared was their condition. This port was the feeding-ground of the commercial ducks of the trading nations; migrating here for profit, as the northern birds fly to the tropics for food. Not one of these guests, excepting the Chinese, had a "home" here, but although these men came and left, and were succeeded by others of their kind, there remained enduring and solid the British power, which maintained law and order and made it the largest free port of the world excepting London.

  I must preserve in this memoir an incident of the last banquet. I pray that the King's ghost will not vex me for relating it. The numerous receptions and late hours had deprived the King of sleep. His eyelids drooped, and soon after we were seated I noticed his hand. idly held his fork, and his anointed head slightly nodded. The banquet, like all royal banquets, was without wit or hilarity; a monotonous decorum pervaded the chamber. The Governor's wife was seated on the King's right, and I was seated next to her. I feared a nasal explosion if the King's doze should deepen, and devised several ways of preventing it. It was a case of emergency. I whispered to the Governor's wife what my fears were, and asked her to aid in preventing a loss of royal dignity. She hesitated to break through the divinity which hedges kings, but she saw that a crisis was near. Moving her fan with dexterity, she hit the royal shoulder as if accidentally, and the King opened his eyes. I said, in the native language:—

  "Your Majesty, naps are dangerous."

  He replied: "It is very hot; how can I get away?"

  He glanced up and down the long table to see if his doze had been noticed. But the air was hot, and the food heavy. Within a few moments he quickly dropped his fork again and closed his eyes. The royal dignity was drifting on a lee shore and would soon be on the rocks, and a Crowned Head would be struggling in the breakers. The clever wife of the Governor whispered to me, "Will any special piece of music waken him up?"

  I replied, "Only our national anthem; if that does not do it, we are lost."

  She quietly called the major-domo, and in a minute the military band in the balcony filled the air with the music of "Hawaii Ponoi." The King woke up. I advised him, afterward, to decorate the lady who had thrown out a life-line which saved the royal dignity from shipwreck.

  It is the inexorable rule of courts that guests do not leave a reception-room or table until royalty has withdrawn. I imagined the King falling into a deep slumber in his chair, and the banquet ended; the guests waiting for him to rise; the whisper "His Majesty sleeps;" the final weariness of the guests until they too, bound to their chairs by a remorseless rule, fall asleep also; an admiral slipping from his chair, a diplomat in a wild nightmare, the walking of a somnambulist on the edge of the furniture, and the company in general with lax figures hanging on chairs and table, waiting for the cock's crowing to rouse the sleeping monarch and release them. "Hawaii Ponoi" had "saved our face," as the Chinese say, and we were out of our peril, by the tact of a woman.

  From the high balcony of the Government House we looked down upon the harbour flecked with ships, junks, sampans, and steamers, war and mercantile, great fortresses protecting this commerce, and within the city an Asiatic population of two hundred thousand, of whom hardly three thousand were Englishmen; yet it is the third in importance of British ports. Standing over it, one realised the important relation of this place, with its solid British sovereignty, to the great unknown empire that is divided from it by only a narrow sea. It is more than a great free port. It is the visible and perpetual object-lesson to all China of the advantage of law and order.

  It stands for even more than an example of good government. It is the warm sun of Western civilisation in the Far East, the heat of which will slowly melt the edges of this great Asiatic glacier. The European has not studied the Chinaman and knows little about him. He constructs him out of his own interior consciousness, and deals with that fiction as the real man, as Englishmen and Frenchmen have for three hundred years taken each to be,—not what they really are, but what each has imagined the other to be. Whatever the Chinese are, they will be reformed or reconstructed from within, and not from without, as the Japanese have reformed themselves. The influence of Christendom, sorely needing vast reformation itself, will have no more power over the masses of Chinese than a stream of water from a three-inch pipe would have in increasing the volume of the ocean. The Chinese, of their own accord and in due time, will take true Christianity in their own way, through their own people; least of all will they take it from a nation whose members loudly chant "From Greenland's icy mountains" in their churches, and then, by law, exclude a Christian Chinaman from entering its domains. To the fervent missionary, preaching the vast benefits of Christianity to his own nation, the thinking Chinaman replies: "When your own nation follows the teachings of Christ and does us justice, then come to us!"

  CHAPTER XIV

  We Sail on the "Killarney" for Siam — The Irish Captain and the German Valet — Cochin — China — The Captain Disturbs the King with Stories of Piracy — Enter Gulf of Siam — Received at Mouth of Menan River by Siamese Officials — Reach Bangkok in the Royal Yacht — The Royal Barge — Our Reception — Siamese Attendants — "The Wine of the Coral Reef".

  AFTER four days spent in royal receptions, tiffins, and garden parties, irrespective of barracks and docks, the King, with parades and numerous salutes, embarked on the "Killarney" for Siam.

  When the Governor bade him good-bye at the gangway he said to me that the bearing and conduct of the King could not be excelled by any sovereign; and he only voiced the sentiments of the cosmopolitan city of Hongkong. The voluntary expression of gratitude by the Chinese merchants to the King for the justice and the impartial administration of the law in his kingdom was an event of which any king might be proud.

  The captain of the "Killarney" was an Irishman, who was astounded when his agent told him that he would have a Crowned Head for a passenger; as astonished as the Yankee skipper whose sloop one morning ran into a Methodist meeting-house, which a flood in the Connecticut River had detached from its foundations and swept into the river and out into the ocean. He cleaned up his cabins, took on board fresh provisions, and received at the gangway, hat in hand, this royal derelict which he had accidentally struck in these remote seas. His cargo was mainly of Chinese provisions in numerous tubs, and if freight had been paid on their odour his voyage would have been a profitable one beyond estimate.

  For some days Robert, the valet, had most properly discharged his duties and seemed to be reconciled to his lowly lot. But the Governor's private secretary, a German of great learning, had known his relatives
in Prussia and verified his claim to be the Baron von O——Before we embarked Robert had indulged overmuch. While the King and suite were standing on the after deck of the steamer, watching the smoke from the saluting guns of the shipping and forts as it floated away in dense clouds, we heard contention below. As the captain was his own purser, steward, and executive officer, he had assigned a berth to Robert which displeased him, for the accommodations were small. Thereupon Robert had made some comments on the captain's Irish origin, and the captain in return had used some picturesque language in regard to the "damned Dutchman." This controversy interrupted our meditations over the fading splendours of our farewell to Hong-kong; instead, therefore, of filling our breaking hearts with noble sentiments, which the occasion richly deserved, we turned to this sudden and domestic disturbance below. The Chamberlain, who was the supervisor of our domestic affairs, at once went below and interceded with the belligerents. The captain was easily pacified, but Robert was disposed to assert his patrician privileges. Whereupon the Chamberlain declared that he had shipped as valet, and as we were on the high seas he was liable to be placed in irons and kept in the hold for disobedience. Robert had also a grievance against the Chamberlain. It was his business to look after the luggage of the party, and in doing so he employed persons at various times to aid him. In the early part of the voyage the Chamberlain had supplied him with funds to compensate such men; but he had not done so for some time, because the valet had expended the cash in treating himself with spirits. Robert, therefore, had failed on several occasions to tip the baggage-tenders, and had been addressed by some of them in profane pidgin-English: "You no top-side man-go hellee!" (The word "top-side" is the equivalent of "distinguished" or "celebrated.")