“That will be useful, sir. I doubt not that I shall learn much from him.”
To my surprise, that was just the right thing to say. Captain Partridge was much in favour of my willingness to improve and educate myself and said so at length.
“We shall take our cargo aboard probably on Tuesday of next week, Mr Jackson, and sail as soon thereafter as possible. Have ye any objections to the carriage of opium?”
“None, sir. While you do not require me to smoke the damned stuff, none at all.”
“Leave that to the Chinks, my boy! They’re the fools who want the poisonous muck. Why, I cannot imagine, but it is their funeral – literally so!”
That was the attitude of most in our trade, I discovered. I only ever came across two opium runners who used their own product; neither lasted many months after they entered into the habit. Opium, I gather, offers a sense of euphoria and encourages idle dreaming; not recommended for a man running a fast-sailing ship at night off unlit coasts.
The carpenters came and did their work and the new armourer arrived and showed even more knowledgeable than Master Gunner, and wholly unwilling to teach me anything. I suspect he thought that if he allowed me to learn then I would soon replace him. A nuisance, even so.
We set up the cannonades and had the carpenters make ready-use racks for them and rove their tackle to deadeyes as was necessary. Ugly, stubby little guns, but very effective in their little way. The new long twelve pounder was put in its place on the forecastle and we were ready to go, just as soon as the swivels came aboard. They delayed us almost a week as they had to be cast new, it seemed, there being none for sale in the town. I presumed that there was a stocktake in the arsenal and nothing could be sold under the counter that week. It surprised me that we were able order cast iron barrels on a Friday and have them delivered on the Wednesday following, but that is Bombay.
We replaced the men who had chosen to leave with merchant seamen out from England and not wishing to return; there was always a number to be found, men who had fallen in love with the East.
We sailed and I spent a few days reminding the men who stood where when it came to action, but really, I had small need to do so. Jamadar Rao had his people under his thumb and my boarders were willing to do as they were told, knowing that it meant money to them. Well before we reached the South China Sea, Jenny Dawes was as efficient as she ever had been; possibly more so, thinking on it. Captain Marker had been a true gentleman, that could not be argued, but he was not necessarily the world’s best captain.
Captain Partridge took it on himself to educate me in the ways of trade, having, he said, no doubt that I would become a merchant myself, one day.
“In time, Mr Jackson,” he would never use my given name, thinking it better that officers preserved their dignity. “In time, I say, you will find that adventure is all very well but that money is somewhat better. When that day comes, and you find yourself needing to keep a family and send a son home to England for an education or whatever the need may be, then you will turn to trade, the more easily for knowing the basics of it.”
It was all very simple, he taught me – the need was to discover a good that was low in price now but would become higher later when people found they wanted it.
“The word ‘want’, Mr Jackson, is the important one. People will tell you they have needs, but they don’t. They may ‘need’ food, but they ‘want’ rice rather than wheat flour, or beef rather than pork. It is the wants that count not the needs. There is an alternative for everything that has a price, so it is a question of which people want. Know what they want before they know they want it, and you become a rich man.”
That was not an easy lesson to learn, but he was a clever enough man and managed to bring me to an understanding. He was right, too.
Funny, isn’t it? I still read of those who talk about needs, and believe themselves. But there ain’t no such thing, nothing that has a price is necessary. It’s like these folk who believe in gold, who say that there is something different about it; gold has a price like everything else, and that price changes. While gold has a price, then it is just another commodity. You can make a good profit from people who believe otherwise. I have on occasion.
Chapter Twelve
Nobody’s Child Series
Nobody’s Child
Jenny Dawes wore Mr Ainslie’s house flag high at the main masthead and was recognised as friendly by the Dutch of the Spice Islands. We used the Straits of Malacca and passed under the lee of a big Dutch Fourth-Rate ship of war, fifty guns, her main battery twenty-four pound long cannon, and exchanged salutes most politely. No attempt to stop or examine us – the flag was evidently on their list of those entitled to sail where they wished and when.
It made me finally certain that we had been set up for the pirates, that the voyage out of Galle had been a criminal cheat. Had Ainslie wished, he could have availed himself of the services of the Dutch navy to carry his valuable stones.
No point to considering vengeance; the past was dead, as was Captain Marker.
It was an idle voyage, as far as I was concerned, my sole activity being sword practice and the four hours a day of exercise with the boarders. It was boring, in fact, and I took to sitting at the stern, watching the handling of the ship and picking up the very basics of navigation. Only the simplest ideas of laying a course and nothing by way of handling a sextant, but I gained a slight understanding of what was happening.
By the time we reached Whampoa I had decided that I must purchase books for the next run – I had to have some way of occupying my mind.
We came to an anchor offshore and Mr Ainslie’s factor came out to us in a sampan and brought instructions to Captain Partridge. He deposited a skinny Chinese man on deck, an interpreter, it seemed, who was passed straight across to me.
“Mr Jackson, take this man Fong under your wing.”
“Yes, sir. Messing and such, I presume, sir?”
“Yes, that certainly. Mostly, don’t let him stray more than a yard from your side when we deliver our cargo. If we are betrayed, you will kill him. You understand?”
“Yes, sir. If he plays us false, he is to die. If he attempts to run, the same, I presume, sir.”
“Quite right, Mr Jackson. Ether you or your man to watch him at all times. He will guide us inshore at the place he points out to us and we will offload into sampans in sheltered waters. He will then return to Whampoa with us. If anything goes wrong…”
The captain made a graphic throat-slitting motion, his finger running from one ear to the other. It was a surprisingly effective pantomime, far more menacing than simple words could have been.
“Yes, sir. Will be done, sir. He will not survive any treachery.”
Fong listened and stared worriedly at me, no doubt debating just how trigger-happy I might be and what were the odds that I might kill him in error. He did not seem to like being in the custody of a round-eyed youth, judging perhaps that I might be nervous and liable to kill him at a whim. He was wrong, but he might not have been in other circumstances. He was lucky that I had seen a little of action, sufficient to have made me sure of myself.
“Stay at my side, Mr Fong. I will escort you at all times. You understand?”
“Yes, Mr Jackson.”
He was bright enough to pick up foreign names at first hearing; that meant he must be watched even more closely.
Captain Partridge nodded his satisfaction, though with what, I was not sure.
“Very good, Mr Jackson. We are to sail northeast a matter of some two days under the prevailing winds, to drop our cargo not so far from the town of Dongshang, or so the factor pronounced it – it does not show on our charts, but few Chinese towns do. We will be met by boats – these sampan things – inshore and will transfer our cargo to them.”
“In daylight, sir?”
Captain Partridge showed surprise at my question.
“Of course. If the bribes have been paid, there will be no difficulty. If they
have not, then darkness would be no protection for us.”
I could not be so casually fatalistic then. I doubt I could be now, but Captain Partridge seemed amused at my concern.
“What of payment, sir? Is that to take place at the site, sir, or is it arranged elsewhere?”
“Nothing has been vouchsafed to me, Mr Jackson. We must assume that it is dealt with separately.”
Fong gave a course for Jenny Dawes, in general terms; it was a matter of little more than paralleling the shoreline and avoiding the fishing fleets. There were literally thousands of boats off that coast – I wondered that there were fish enough for all to take a share of them.
I gave orders to the galley to provide an extra ration for Fong. He scoffed it – commenting that we ate more meat in a day than he saw in a good month. As interpreter, I suspected he was better-off than the average. Mind you, he might have been lying, playing the part of a peasant – he seemed too healthy to be half-starved, but he was very thin.
On the second morning Fong called an order to the helmsman and brought our bows inshore, directing us to a sheltered spot perhaps a quarter of a mile – two cables or so – east of a bay underneath a headland of bare and infertile rock.
“No farmers there to see us, Mr Jackson.”
Fong’s comment took me by surprise, but it made good sense.
There was a single junk and perhaps fifteen of sampans, six- and eight-oar boats capable of carrying a ton or two, clustered around it. I stared my hardest but could see no mass of fighting men waiting to overwhelm us.
Captain Partridge brought us to single anchor, allowed Jenny Dawes to swing slowly with the current and then released the bower anchor to hold the ship pointing out to sea with the wind tidily on the stern quarter.
“If the wind holds, then we can break out to sea, if the need arises, Mr Jackson. All hands!”
The seamen set to work at that last command, opening the hatch to the after hold and readying tackle at the booms to swing the cargo up and out. I set the fighting men to their places, muskets loaded and to hand and a pair to each of the swivels. The two boys I ordered up to the masthead, with a lit slowmatch and two buckets full of iron grenadoes; if the need arose, they knew what to do.
Then, it was simply a matter of waiting and watching and smiling casually and confidently - and watching Fong’s slightest move. He signalled to the reception party and they waved back and started to push at their oars.
“Beg pardon, sir,” Fong suddenly said. “Junk to starboard, chop-chop. Sampans larboard, by three at one time.”
‘Chop-chop’ meant quickly in the Pidgin; we all knew that, it was used in India quite equally.
Opium was packed in heads – roundish lumps the size, more or less, of a skull – and carried in tea chests for convenience. The men in the hold loaded them a dozen at a time into a cargo net swinging from a rope at the end of a boom on the mainmast. Then it was a heave on the rope’s end to lift the net out of the hold followed by a second party swinging the boom out and over the junk tied on at the side. The cargo net was dropped and the chests carried away below at the run and the net returned for more.
The meanwhile other men lifted chests out of the hold and onto the deck where coolies come aboard from the sampans picked them up and literally ran their fastest to the side. Each sampan took forty chests in a bare five minutes and cast off under oars and sail and made surprising speed either into the beach or along the coast and out of sight.
An hour and the sampans had taken their loads away and left their loaders to assist with the junk, frantically heaving chests up and out of the hold, a lift of some eight feet by that time, and then across the deck and down into the waiting hands of coolies on the junk.
I watched as they ran, unbroken, back and forth, faster than I could have managed. One of them stumbled and hobbled, having stubbed his bare toe on a ringbolt, I thought. A supervisor, previously shouting orders and pointing them where to go lifted the bamboo staff he had been leaning on and swung it viciously across the limping man’s back, yelled at him to run. I saw blood at his foot and a toe broken and twisted, but he ran again. I wondered what the alternative might be for the poor fellow, but I did nothing. It was their country, not mine, and their way of behaving.
Less than two hours after dropping anchor, the hold was empty. Fong turned to me.
“I will go on the junk, Mr Jackson.”
“Wait!”
I called across to Captain Partridge, asked if Fong was free to go.
“Let him, if he wishes, Mr Jackson.”
I nodded to Fong.
“You may go, Mr Fong. Thank you for your work, sir.”
He gave a quick smile and a nod of his head and then he ran, within the minute was aboard the junk and shouting orders. He was evidently a senior man among the Chinese smugglers.
Three days later, the wind less convenient on the return passage, and we came to anchor off Whampoa again and the factor came aboard. Captain Partridge spoke with him for a few minutes and then called me across.
“I would wish you to take a small party – say six men – and accompany the factor into Canton itself, to the factory there, Mr Jackson. You will escort the cargo back to Whampoa, part of it being uncommon valuable imperial jade to go westward. The remainder of the cargo is silks, to be brought to us in barges in the normal fashion. You can expect to be two or three days at the factory, so will wish to take a bag with you, your men the same.”
Fred ran for a change of clothes for each of us while I organised the little party, doing so without second thought, command already natural to me.
“Maneater, you and four to accompany myself and Fred. Boat to Canton, to the factory and staying some days while we pick up a valuable part of the cargo. Carry pistols and blades but not the long arms – they show up too much. Put rations and water into the boat, in case.”
Maneater shouted his orders.
“John; Little Arthur; Whistling Dick; Nobby. With me and Mr Jackson and Fred in the boat for five days. Pistols. Breaker of water and a crate of biscuit and cheese aboard, against need. Warm coat for the nights.”
The four most dangerous men in the crew, or from the Poole men, at least. Some of Jamadar Rao’s Indian men were very nifty with a knife but I did not know which exactly. I would back those four against any foolish thief who tried to lay his hands on our cargo.
The channel from Whampoa to Canton - the delta of the Pearl River – was a braided mess of mudbanks and small islands, reedbeds and swamplands and shifting cuts. The main passage was within reason deep and constant, but there were a hundred other waterways interlinking and allowing travel in more or less the same direction.
The European ships anchored at the mouth of the river and took turns to come alongside the limited wharves at Whampoa, apart from those who loaded by means of lighters and dumb barges. The bulk of the opium was transshipped into hulks moored out of sight behind Lintin Island, a courtesy to the Chinese officials who could not see them and therefore agreed they were not there.
I asked Captain Partridge how much opium there was there, what quantity came through in a trading season. He did not know and suspected that the total was never counted.
“Better we don’t know, Mr Jackson. Blissful ignorance, I believe. Sufficient for many hundreds of thousands of pipes, of that I am certain. Possibly millions, but that is a guess. The hills of northern India support huge numbers of poppies, more every year, and the peasants there depend on the crop for their living now. Ban opium and many tens of thousands of Indian peasants will starve. It is not easy to judge opium, you know, Mr Jackson. Personally, I simply ignore it. I would advise you to do the same.”
Wise words – I had no difficulty with them then, or since.
I looked out across the flat mudflats, sniffing at the stink of far too many people, all closely confined, then picked up my ditty bag and ran down into the boat, the biggest launch rather than our own sampan. Captain Partridge wanted there to be no chance
of a mistake, of an official arguing that he had thought the occupants of a Chinese boat must themselves be Chinese.
The wind served and we set the two sails on the little pole masts and set off up to Canton, a Chinese pilot at the tiller and picking his own course, silently. I say ‘we’ set the sails – there were four other sailors who did the actual work and who were under orders to get their heads down in case of trouble.
The boat left the main channel well before dark and the Chinaman in the stern took us through a series of narrow creeks, none of them much wider than the boat and all with tall reeds on the mud banks and completely concealing us. As night came in, he pulled us into a firm stretch of bank and pointed onshore. Little Arthur hopped out of the boat and peered through the reed, calling back that there was a village hidden there.
We stepped nervously into the little settlement, perhaps a dozen of bamboo and reed huts clustered around a larger, more permanent building that seemed to be an inn. We were expected – there was a fish stew hot, and a mound of rice and bottles of English beer as well. After eating we laid down on pallets set out for us in a thatched lean-to with open sides and a pair of smoky fires which kept the insects away. I ordered sentries through the night, always two awake, but we slept undisturbed and returned safely to the boat soon after dawn.
I presumed that the village was hidden away for good reason, and I could see no way that its inhabitants could make a legitimate living from the reedbeds – like so many things in China, it was none of my business. I could never have found the place again and had no desire to do so; their secrets were safe, as they were well aware. I gained the impression, no more than a vague feeling, that we had been taken there simply to impress us with the size of the organisation we were dealing with – not just a little criminal gang but an organisation that owned hidden villages, and probably much more.
Mid-morning brought us to the site of the Factories, a massive and new block of buildings on the riverfront, just outside old Canton. The word has changed its meaning in Britain in these last few years – we use it for ‘manufacturies’, places that are almost unique to us where iron and steel goods are made. In Canton, and in India, at that time, it simply meant the place where the Factors worked.
Nobody’s Child Page 17