As it turned out, despite the confidence of A. D. Wilson’s assertions, Elizabeth Bisland ended up following almost none of that itinerary. When she arrived in Japan, for instance, Bisland did not take a special “government boat” to Hong Kong; that plan seems to have fallen through while she made her way across the Pacific, as had John Brisben Walker’s earlier attempt to bribe officials of the Occidental and Oriental steamship line to move up the Oceanic’s departure from San Francisco. Still, the officials did assure Walker that the ship would make all possible haste on Bisland’s behalf, and whether it was due to their instructions to Captain Kempson, or simply to the good fortune of favorable weather (or to Elizabeth Bisland’s following through on her joking promise to “make eyes at the Engineer”), the Oceanic covered the 4,690 miles from San Francisco to Yokohama in only sixteen days, one of the fastest westbound crossings on record for that time of year; the ship arrived in Japan on December 8, three days earlier than The Cosmopolitan had accounted for in its itinerary. And though no chartered boat was there to transport Bisland immediately to Hong Kong, the Oceanic stopped in Yokohama for only thirty-six hours and then, despite a northwest gale, took no longer than the typical five days to cross the East China Sea, dropping anchor in Hong Kong on Sunday afternoon, December 15.
One month into her trip, Elizabeth Bisland was one day ahead of schedule, and one day ahead of Nellie Bly.
DECEMBER 15–17, 1889
Hong Kong
In Hong Kong Bay the water was a cool emerald green that glittered in the early afternoon sun. Hundreds of Chinese fishing junks, their bamboo masts and flapping sails like the veined wings of giant yellow butterflies, darted amid larger European ships devoted to war and commerce: ghostly white French frigates; three-masted Russian corvettes with Cyrillic letters painted in gold across their bows; long, dark British ironclads bristling with cannons. In the distance a semicircle of hills sheltered the harbor from winds. Thickets of pine trees grew irregularly on the hillsides; from the treeless patches the ground peeked out warm and tawny, like the hide of a lion glimpsed through the forest. Hong—Kong! Elizabeth Bisland repeated to herself delightedly, the rhyming syllables sounding to her like two reverberant notes of a gong.
Friends of Bisland, a German couple now living in the city, had agreed to put her up during her stay there, and one of them was waiting on the dock now with two of her personal sedan chairs—comfortably upholstered armchairs trimmed with silver and attached on the bottom to two long bamboo poles. The sedan chair was to Hong Kong what the jinrikisha was to Yokohama, but while a single driver pulled the two-wheeled rikisha, each sedan chair was borne on the shoulders of two men. The four chair bearers on the dock were dressed in loose black trousers and white cotton tunics, and their feet were bare; they wore their hair in long pigtails that were pulled back and twisted into a Psyche knot at the top of the head, much like the style lately favored by American shopgirls. Bisland stared at the foot traffic passing by on the Queen’s Road. Hong Kong, it seemed, boasted as many varieties of sedan chair as New York did of carriages. There were chairs made of wicker and wood and bamboo; upholstered chairs and painted chairs; chairs with overhead coverings to protect the occupant from rain or sun; most mysteriously, chairs set inside boxes closed off with bamboo blinds, meant to shield upper-class Chinese women from the gaze of the public. Like many American visitors to Hong Kong, Elizabeth Bisland was at first uneasy about the notion of being carried around on the shoulders of other human beings. “Conveyance in the East is a constant source of unhappiness to me,” she later observed. Her friend, though, had come all the way to the dock to meet her, and there was no other option but to walk all the way up the long, steep hill; overcoming her hesitation, Bisland stepped into the chair and sat down. In a single smooth motion the chair bearers lifted the poles to their shoulders and set off at a swift trot; as they ran the chair swayed gently from side to side, and the effect (once one got over the initial fear of tipping over) was as pleasant as swinging in a hammock.
Buildings along the Hong Kong waterfront (Illustration Credit 10.1)
Riding high above the crowd, Bisland was astonished by the variety of life on display around her. Chinese merchants strolled by in exquisitely brocaded silk outfits, their hands tucked away inside loose sleeves. Plump, prosperous-looking men with astonishingly thick beards wore tailored European suits and tall purple satin hats that bulged outward like upside-down coal scuttles; they were Parsees, members of the Zoroastrian faith who had come to Hong Kong from India to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in the industries of shipping and trade. Stout, ruddy-faced Englishmen rode silently past in their own sedan chairs. Teams of Chinese laborers stripped to the waist knelt as if in supplication, fixing the streets.
Bisland had to make a stop at the local offices of the Great Northern Telegraph Company to inform The Cosmopolitan of her arrival. That task completed, the chair bearers set off again, padding up a broad avenue that curled around the hill, up to the English residential section. (Now it had become clear why sedan chairs rather than jinrikishas were used in Hong Kong: it would be impossible to pull a jinrikisha up those steep streets.) Handsome terraced houses rose, tier upon tier, above the street; the houses were made of granite and had arcades and immense verandahs that reminded Bisland of paintings she had seen of the villas of ancient Rome. Her friends lived near the top of the hill, in a two-story stone house with a rear verandah that overlooked the glittering waters of the bay. The chair bearers trotted down a curving flight of steps and deposited the riders at the front door. Down a long, dark hallway, the large drawing room was adorned with potted palms and ferns and massive furniture of Indian ebony and marble, with photographs of the Hohenzollerns, the Prussian royal family, scattered about. Bisland and her friends drank cups of tea brought by a tall pigtailed servant dressed in silk trousers, a black satin cap, and a crisp blue gown that reached nearly to his ankles and rustled as he moved.
On the verandah Bisland gazed down at the harbor below. The shorefront was lined with massive, imposing buildings made from granite taken from the nearby hills; she could see how the water broadened to bays and narrowed to straits between the island mountains. Her friends told her that Hong Kong was considered to be, with Sydney and Rio de Janeiro, one of the three most beautiful harbors in the world. For Great Britain, the strategic importance of Hong Kong—the easternmost of the Crown’s possessions—was so great that two full regiments were always garrisoned there, and several warships stationed in the harbor.
A servant showed her to a huge bedroom, which had an attached dressing room as large as her drawing room back in New York. The furniture, of mahogany and silver, had been brought over from Germany two generations earlier. The airy, darkly wooded room reminded her of bedchambers in old plantation houses she had known in the American South. Much here, in fact, reminded her of the South: the cool, shadowy rooms filled with ancestral furniture, the lush foliage, the slow pace, the “careful sweet civility” of the conversation—and of course, though Bisland did not mention this, the constant attentions of dark-skinned servants. Dinner that night was formal, with delicate food and fine wines; it flowed, Bisland wrote, with a “cool and unhasting repose.” Perhaps her choice of noun was not inadvertent, for that villa in the hills above Hong Kong must have called to mind thoughts of what her own family’s home of Mount Repose would have been like in the years before she was born, when the war had not yet come and it still seemed possible to maintain a European way of life in a tropical place.
The next day her friends took her to the native section of town. The streets were so narrow and the stairs that ran between them so steep that their sedan chairs could barely pass by. More than 160,000 people lived there—an astonishing sixteen hundred people per acre, far denser than even the worst blocks of the Lower East Side—compared to eight thousand or so residents in the entire English section. Elizabeth Bisland found herself repelled by the crowds moving so tightly around her, and almost reflexively she adopt
ed the Western custom of thinking of the Chinese crowd as a swarm, “buzzing and humming like the unreckonable myriads insects breed from the fecund slime of a marsh.” Even the children she compared to “flies in number and activity.” The air here was at least ten degrees hotter than up on the hill, thick with smells so powerful they were almost dizzying, the bitter, musky scent of burning opium, rows of ducks hanging by their necks in sunlit shop windows, smoky pork and sausages, cut-up bits of chicken and ropy green vegetables and mysterious other foods sizzling in braziers on the street, open jars of pickles and baskets of salted fish: the overall effect was something like moldy cheese aging in a closed cellar. Cauldrons bubbled away in open-air restaurants; out front, men sat at long tables eating their food with chopsticks. They did not sit on the benches placed around the tables, as she would have expected, but instead squatted on them, with their knees up around their chins. The shops were faced in ornate gilded fretwork; hanging outside, long vertical signs displayed black Chinese characters that seemed to her as elaborate and incomprehensible as ancient hieroglyphics. The houses were lime-washed in pale tints of green, gold, crimson, blue; they reminded Bisland of Chinese porcelains on the shelf of an import store, each one tasteful in itself, yet jarring, almost grotesque, when squeezed too tightly together.
Her friends, Bisland noted, were “loath that I should lose a single pleasure,” and so they set off again back up the hill. More than one hundred feet above the town they passed the stately Government House, the residence of the colony’s governor, and entered the green twilight of the Botanical Gardens.
We pass under the tremulous lacey shadows of ferns twenty feet high, through trellises weighted with ponderous vines that blow myriad perfumed purple trumpets up to the golden noon, and emerge upon sunny spaces where fountains are sprinkling silver rain upon banks of crimson and orange flowers. The flaxen-haired, muslin-clad English children play here, cared for by prim trousered Chinese amahs; and we meet pretty blue-eyed German ladies in their chairs taking this road home.
From far below, Bisland could hear the faint ripples of water lapping at the foot of the hills. The afternoon sun filtered through the pines. Behind a milky-white bungalow young Englishmen in white flannels played tennis on a freshly mown court, the thwack of the ball echoing in the air. In Around the World in Eighty Days Jules Verne had written of Hong Kong: “Docks, hospitals, wharves, godowns, a Gothic cathedral, a Government House, and surfaced roads—everything made you think that one of the many market towns in Kent or Surrey had passed right through the terrestrial sphere and popped out at this point in China, almost at the antipodes.” On every stone wall and balcony railing stood rows of earthen jars full of greenery and blossom, spiky aloe and cactus, poinsettia, bougainvillea, passion flower, regal orchids blooming in the November sunlight; there was a casual luxuriant beauty here, profusion almost to the point of surfeit, that reminded Bisland of New Orleans. It was at times like this that she felt grateful to John Brisben Walker for insisting on this wild-goose chase; she could do without the whirlwind of the race, of course, that constant pull and hustle, but for someone who had never been out of the United States, for whom New York, only a few years earlier, had been the height of exoticism, it was a splendid opportunity to see the world. She rode for some minutes in a haze of content, gently swaying on a sedan chair several feet above the macadam, feeling herself at one with a little piece of England, the land she had first imagined as a girl in a ruined library, dreaming along with Coleridge as he yearned to see again shaping in the steady clouds / Thy sands and high white cliffs, or with Wordsworth, who declaimed O, England!—dearer far than life is dear / If I forget thy prowess, never more / Be thy ungrateful son allowed to hear / Thy green leaves rustle, or thy torrents roar! If all went smoothly, in scarcely a month’s time she would be seeing it for herself at last, this other Eden, demi-paradise / this fortress built by nature for herself / against infestation and the hand of war.
Bisland was jolted from her reverie by the sight of a tall, darkly bearded figure standing at attention by the roadside; he wore a khaki uniform with an intricately folded scarlet turban, and at his side, dramatically, he carried a long sword. Seeing him, Bisland gasped in astonishment. “Is it an emperor?” she called to her friend riding in a chair alongside.
“An emperor? It’s only a Sikh policeman. There are hundreds about the place quite as splendid as he.” The British had imported them from India to serve as colonial policemen in Hong Kong; the “exceedingly tall” Sikhs, The Chautauquan magazine reported that year, “make a figure among the short people of southern China well calculated to strike terror into the hearts of the disobedient.” Bisland found it impossible to believe that there could possibly be others, much less hundreds, as noble-looking as this one, and in contemplating this she suddenly recalled a story she had heard about the Egyptian soldiers who had fled before the assault of the Highland Brigade at Tel el-Kebir a few years before. Stunned by the ferocity of the Scottish soldiers in their kilts, the Egyptians were said to have exclaimed, “If these are the Scottish women, what must the men be?” If these are the Sikh policemen, Bisland wondered now, what must their princes be?
Even as she was contemplating this, one of the Highlanders came striding down the hill, a member of the Forty-Second Royal Highland Regiment—the legendary “Black Watch,” the Scottish regiment that had helped defeat George Washington on Long Island and Napoleon at Waterloo and had most recently put down native uprisings at Cawnpore and Lucknow in India. Now the Black Watch was garrisoned in Hong Kong. Despite the tropical climate the Highlander was dressed in plumed helmet, scarlet jacket, blue tartan kilt, and long hose, as Bisland later described it, “with six inches of bare stalwart pink legs showing, and a fine hearty self-confidence in his mien that signifies his utter disbelief in the power of anything human to conquer him.”
It gives me my first real impression of the power of England, who tames these mountain lions and sets them to do their police duty. It would seem incredible that this rosy commonplace Tommy Atkins who comes swaggering down the street in his scarlet coat can be the weapon that tamed the fine creature in the turban. What is it makes this cheerfully vulgar Anglo-Saxon the lord of the Hindoo? Physically he is not the Sikh’s superior, and in profound and passionate sentiment, if one may judge by the countenance, the Hindoo is infinitely above the Briton. Nor is the latter greater in courage or dignity, for these Indians made a noble resistance to English encroachment, and after submission were enrolled in the army of the conquerors as their bravest and most loyal troops. What is the secret? Is it more beef and mutton perhaps—or more of submission to orders and power of self-discipline?
In seeking the “weapon that tamed the fine creature in the turban,” Elizabeth Bisland might have looked instead to the fleet of British ironclads she had seen back in the harbor. After all, machine guns mounted on warships—the fearsome Gatling guns, each capable of firing more than six hundred rounds per minute—had played a decisive role at Tel el-Kebir, where Egyptian soldiers faced a barrage of some forty thousand rounds fired by British sailors at close range. “Round whisked the Gatlings, r-r-r-r-r-rum! r-r-r-r-r-rum!” enthused The Army and Navy Gazette in its issue of October 1882, one month after the battle. “The report of the machine guns, as they rattle away, rings out clearly on the morning air. The parapets are swept. The embrasures are literally plugged with bullets. The flashes cease to come from them. With a cheer the blue-jackets double over the dam, and dash over the parapet, only just in time to find their enemy in full retreat. That machine gun was too much for them.” The Highlander Regiments, like their fellow infantrymen in Egypt, had been supplied with breech-loading rifles accurate to one thousand yards and loaded with soft-lead slugs, as a chronicler of the Tel el-Kebir campaign noted, that left “wicked wounds.… the enemy were usually literally ‘blown-away’ by sheer fire-power—as was the fate of innumerable Afghans, Afridis, Dervishes, Egyptians, Zulus and a host of other native tribesmen in various Victoria
n colonial wars.”
Though the British imperialists of the time liked to ascribe their conquests to moral superiority over the dark-skinned natives, to the qualities of patriotism, sportsmanship, selflessness, daring, and courage collectively known as “Anglo-Saxon manhood”—much as Elizabeth Bisland herself looked to attributes such as self-confidence and self-discipline—and though it was comforting for the British to tell one another inspirational stories about General Gordon, the devout soldier-saint of the defense of Khartoum, or Bishop Hannington and his missionaries bravely facing the warriors of King Mwanga in Uganda, the real explanation for the dominance of Great Britain (and the other imperial powers) in the colonial world lay elsewhere. “In the final analysis,” one military historian has observed, “it was not superior virtue that brought them victory after victory. It was superior firepower.”
The late nineteenth century was an age of unprecedented technological advance, when wood gave way to coal, iron to steel, and the horse and the sail to the steam engine; many of the new technologies, not surprisingly, were quickly put to the service of warfare. Powerful steamships—fueled at a far-flung network of coaling stations on fortress colonies—could command the entrances to rivers and harbors, bombard enemy strongholds, and deliver troops by the thousands to the scenes of colonial disturbances halfway around the world. Over land, railroads could transport troops and supplies far more quickly and on a far greater scale than the mules and wagons used by earlier generations of armies. “Ten thousand men with a rail to travel by,” wrote a British correspondent for the Lahore Chronicle in 1857, “are fully equal, in this country, to thirty thousand by the existing means of conveyance.” Thanks to newly laid telegraph wires, generals could issue orders to many battlefields at once, and do so while remaining at a safe distance from the front lines. As a British colonel based in India observed, “It is almost impossible to over-estimate the assistance which the telegraph renders, not only in the administration of the country, but in the conduct of every military operation that is undertaken.” During the Sepoy Mutiny, for instance, when Indian soldiers based in Meerut rebelled against their British officers, telegraph operators in nearby Delhi were able to transmit news of the uprising to British regiments around the country, allowing them immediately to disarm the local Indian troops. In his report afterward, the judicial commissioner of the Punjab declared, only somewhat hyperbolically, “The electric telegraph has saved India.” (By which, of course, he meant the British in India.)
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