THE lOGBOOR
^^••:-:::^:':-OF ,THE- -
CAPmiN^ GLERK

JOHNSSIWAIL

EX LIBRIS

FREDERICK WELLS WILLIAMS.

W.F.HaPSDN.ieSB

THE LOGBOOK OF
THE CAPTAIN'S CLERK

THE LOGBOOK OF
THE CAPTAIN'S CLERK

ADVENTURES IN THE
CHINA SEAS

JOHN S. SEWALL

BANGOR, MAINE
1905

COPYRIGHT 1905 BY JOHN S. SEWALL
Published October 1905

Printediy C/u^. H. Glass &- Co., Bangor, Maine

Ko t^t Sur&iijors
OF THE
Perrg lExpetittion
TO Japan in
18534

CONTENTS
Prefatory  ix
I On the Way Out  1
II The Fate of the Donna Maria . . 17
III After Mutineers in Patchungsan . . 31
IV Cruising for Pirates and what we
CAUGHT  51
V The Scourge of the Eastern Seas . 89
VI Bound for the Sunrise Kingdom . .119
VII The Famous Perry Expedition to
Japan  139
VIII The Taipings in Shanghai .... 169
IX The Expedition again and the Open
ing OF Japan  209
X A Journey through History back
wards  233

PREFATORY
It is now half a century since the " opening "
of Japan. That famous document — the treaty
negotiated by Commodore Matthew C. Perry —
was completed and signed pn the thirty-first day
of March, 1854. All the signers are now dead
and gone. So are nearly all the actors in the great
Expedition. As I stand by the half-century mile
stone and look back in quest of the two thousand
ofiicers and men who accompanied the American
envoy to the Empire of the Rising Sun, it has a
sobering efiect to find that now less than a score
of them are known to be living. I feel as if I
were alone with my memories, a survivor of a
vanished epoch of history.
These pages contain the record of our principal
adventures in those distant seas. I can hardly
assume that they should have any special interest
for any but personal friends. And yet apart from
the excitement of mere adventure, the testimony
of an eye witness to the scenes and events of the
Japan Expedition, and to some ofthe curious phe
nomena of the Taiping Rebellion, might seem to

X PREFATORY
claim a kind of historical value. Japan has start
led the nations with the rapidity of her growth,
with the brilliant efflorescence of her new civiliza
tion, and just now with her daring and skill in
beating back the mighty northern Power whose
shadow is moving like an eclipse over the great
provinces of the East and threatening to blot out
the Sunrise Kingdom herself. The military and
naval genius displayed in this fight for life has
won the admiration of the world. It is instructive
to look back half a century and study the contrast.
In their original form some of these narratives
first saw the light in the pages of various maga
zines. I owe my thanks — and hereby cordially
pay them — to the proprietors of the Neis) Erig-
lander, the Century, and the Forest and Stream, for
their courteous permission to use material which
they had published before. I should be glad to
express my obligations to the Knickerbocker also;
but that delightful old monthly has long since
passed within the shades, and so have its editors,
and I fancy most of its readers, too; and to reach
them with my thanks would require too long a
journey. I let this little book go out into the wide, wide
world with a feeling of afiectionate regret. It was
my fortune for the next four years after college to

prefatory XI
" follow the sea; " and ever since then the sea has
followed me — haunted me with its visions, with
its memories, with its infinite suggestions of stress
and peril, of melancholy and music, of gallant life
and lurking death. It has been for many years
the recreation of a busy life to call up these dis
tant scenes and reincarnate them in monographs
for the entertainment of friends. And now that
I gather them and clothe them with the dignity
of a book, and the little volume goes out of its
nest in my heart into the chilly atmosphere of the
world, I experience something of the sentiment
one feels in sparing a favorite child who leaves
the fireside for some unknown and distant home.
If it should chance to reach any of the survivors
of the memorable Expedition let it carry a warm
greeting from an old comrade. Nearly all of our
shipmates have finished their voyage. And for us
who remain, who have faced so many perils of
storm and wreck, and for whom the sun must be
now far down the western sky, the poet's prayer
appeals to our sailor instinct as well as to our
aspirations for the immortal life:
Sunset and evening star.
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea;

xii prefatory
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for noise and foam.
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell.
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farew ell
When I embark.
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

I
ON THE WAY OUT

ON THE WAY OUT.
To the novice on the deck of a man-of-war
everything is strange and some things are start
ling. Having thus far wended his way through
life as a landlubber, the transition to ship, sea,
sailors and storms is somewhat bewildering. It
takes time to learn the names and uses of the
tangled tracery aroimd him. And when at last
he can discriminate between the mizzen to' gallant
brace and the foretopmast stun'sail halliard, he
can be credited with a brave beginning. The big
guns, portholes, armchests, cutlass racks, carbines,
boarding pikes and other belligerent contrivances
suggest a martial contrast to the peaceful atmos
phere of his former life on shore. And the tipsy
deck, swelling canvas and webs of cordage strike
him as quite unlike the solid old home of his
boyhood, which staid where it was put and never
threatened to spill him out. Our craft was an old
timer; not a modem gun-boat nor an armored
cruiser; but an old-fashioned sloop of war, a fall-
rigged ship, equipped with a ponderous battery
of twenty-two guns — eighteen thirty-twos and

ON THE WAY OUT

four sixty-eights; no modern languid luxuries;
no new-fangled aids of electricity; in fact we
went equipped with lightning conductors on fore
and main masts on purpose to ward off all such
electricity as we might happen to encounter; no
steam, save that which ascended in fragrant incense
from the ship's coppers. Her driving force came
from no such common and profane thing as steam,
engendered in iron boilers and set as a slave to
drive pistons and turn cranks; but from the sweet
free winds of heaven that played upon her sails
and swelled them into curves of beauty. She was
a handsome craft; and when clothed in snowy
white from deck to royal-mast-head, bending
before the blast and driving on over the green
seas and through the sparkling foam, she made a
superb picture that even a landsman would admire.
Her complement counted up to two hundred and
ten — twenty-two ofiicers and one hundred and
eighty-eight in the crew. My place in this
muster-roll was that of the captain's clerk; a
youngster just out of college, serving Uncle Sam
presumably from patriotism, but mainly with an
eye to Uncle Sam's gold wherewith to pay off
college debts. In close relations with a good-
natured commander the clerk may have great
advantages of observation; and accordingly the

ON THE WAY OUT

chronicles of adventure set forth in these pages
are the testimony of an eye-witness to the prin
cipal scenes described.
We got underway from Hampton Roads in
September, 1850, bound for the underside of the
world. We were to relieve the St. Mary^s or some
other long absent member of our squadron in the
East Indies, and then stay as long ourselves. In
the end it proved much longer. Before night of
the first day out we had sunk the capes of the
Chesapeake and left the whole broadside of the
continent hull down on the western horizon.
Alone on the sea, and " visited all night by troops
of stars." It may not be worth philosophizing
about, but to this day solemn strains of music will
always call up the vision of a ship setting forth
alone on the long journey over the infinite waste,
sailing out from the protecting homeland into the
mysterious future, knowing well that she is to
run the gauntlet of reefs and shoals and storms,
but not knowing whether she will bear herself
bravely through all perils and proudly return, or
will end her voyage and her life in the depths of
the sea. There is melody in the accompaniments
of the voyage itself; the piping and twittering of
soft airs through the rigging, the tinkle of silver
ripples lapping the bows, the drowsy hum of the

ON THE WAY OUT

men at their work, the rat-ta-tattoo of the reef-
points on the topsails, the shrill blasts of the gale,
the keen fife notes of the boatswain's whistle, the
answering shouts from aloft, the roaring diapason
of the waves, the swash and crackle and thunder
of great watery masses sweeping in over the bul
warks or rushing aft into the seething wake —
these sounds of the sea make a rough symphony
that will at any moment set the blood tingling in
a sailor's veins. It may be that the echoes of that
noisy life now far receding still send through the
chambers of memory their faint throbbing pulsa
tions of sound. Or it may be that the music of
it all is only a touch of remembered sentiment.
That far-away past was luminous then with the
hopes of youth and the promise of adventure; it
is hallowed now with memories of a life that is
vanished and of friends that are gone.
Alone on the sea; yet not in absolute solitude,
for we had a welcome from shoals of porpoises
that gambolled around, flying fish that skittered
along the crests of the waves, an occasional surly
shark, and flocks of gulls and petrels that made
the welkin lively with their curvettings and chat-
terings. Our voyage was a kind of royal progress,
attended by a nimble retinue of the denizens of
the deep, all animated by the same tender interest

ON THE WAY OUT 7
in whatever savory morsels might be thrown over
board by the mess cooks and left floating in our
wake. The first thing was to make sufficient easting
and so catch the trades; whose genial gales sent
us bowling down the Atlantic and well into the
peaceful tropical main that Spanish sailors used
to call el golfo de las damas — the ladies' sea —
because in those gentle waters one could entrust
the helm to a young girl without danger. Of
course we met Neptune, trident and all. We were
honored with a visit from his briny majesty when
we crossed the line, and our fresh-water sailors
who had never crossed before were duly initiated
by his aqueous myrmidons. Below the line the
southeast trades swept us smoothly along into the
magnificent bay of Rio de Janeiro. There we
exchanged naval courtesies with the frigates Con
gress and Raritan; bustled around the city on
tours of observation, or on shopping and foraging
trips; went to the opera to see their majesties
the emperor and empress of Brazil; climbed the
peak of Corcovado; and then freighted with sweet
memories of tropical scenery and luscious fruit
cut across the Atlantic to the rocky and sandy
contrasts of South Africa. Our first port was Sal-
danha bay, some twenty leagues north of Cape

8 ON THE WAY OUT
Town; a superb landlocked basin, and like the
great bay of Rio well worthy of its fame as one
of the finest natural harbors in the world. Sweep
ing in from the tumbling ocean outside you find
yourself floating on a broad and deep estuary
like a placid lake that reaches some twenty miles
in among the hills. When we entered it was
deserted and still; not a hut nor a tree in sight;
the low brown sandy hills overspread with brush;
the waters dappled with swarms of wildfowl that
appeared in fluttering clouds from the sea. It had
not always been a solitude. Two centuries ago
Saldanha bay was a busy half-way station for the
great convoys of merchantmen that called here to
rest and recruit on their way to the distant east;
and more than once it thundered and smoked with
terrific battles between Dutch and English squad
rons that here hunted each other to the death.
They were contending for the primacy of the
Cape ; a bloody prelude to the more recent strug
gles in the Transvaal, All this has now faded
into the dim past. The great harbor bears again
the peaceful messengers of commerce and its shores
are alive with a thrifty population whose broad
wheat farms mantle the hills and valleys with
gold. In a mild way some of us youngsters woke
again the echoes of war, trying it on the spring-

ON THE WAY OUT 9
bok, the beautiful little " gazelle of the south,"
which ever and anon darted up from our path.
But the dear creatures were too nimble for us,
and bolted over and under the brush with such
lightning speed that by the time we could bring
our clumsy muskets to bear where they were, they
were somewhere else.
Cape Town readily furnished us the supplies
which Saldanha bay could not. Ten days of town
life under the lee of Table mountain made a com
fortable prologue to the blustering Cape of Good
Hope — much more accurately described by its
original title, the Cape of Storms, We did not
run down to the "roaring forties" to get by, though
one would think so from the fury and foam; for
a tearing gale drove us around and gave us a
vigorous shove up the Indian Ocean. Sixty days
more of sunshine and storm brought us to our next
halting place, a Malay island on the northern
edge of the Banda sea. This was Bouro, one of
the Spice islands. The port was Cajelie bay —
rechristened by our irreverent tars Catch-helly
bay, because we drove into it before a furious rain-
squall which nearly piled us on a reef before we
could get our anchor down, A beautiful spot,
rich with tropical verdure, mountainous, balmy,
aromatic. In size it is just one third as large as

10 ON THE WAY OUT
the State of Vermont; and as some of its peaks
rise to a height of more than eight thousand feet
the scenery is superb. We found there a solitary
European, the Dutch Resident, deputy and factor
of the power that holds so many of those fertile
gardens of the east; around him Malay tribes
who occupy the seacoast rim of the island, while
the interior is tenanted by those mysterious abo
rigines the Alfuras. Our business in this small
paradise was to wood and water ship. And while
that task was going forward, other incidents hap
pened which helped to keep up the supply of ozone
in the atmosphere of the steerage. Did you ever
buy potatoes of a king? If not, try Bouro; you
will find it as easy as forming a trust or selling
a mine. One morning a brace of port steerage
youngsters landed and sallied into the village in
quest of plantains, yams, fruit, or anything legiti
mately edible in our somewhat fastidious mess.
For legal tender we carried fresh from the purser's
storeroom a new jackknife and a bright tin pan.
Sauntering along the street we came upon one
enclosure that seemed larger and more tidy than
the rest, in which a few natives were lolling at
their ea.se. They rose and graciously welcomed
us in. We made known our errand by signs;
whereupon the venerable proprietor took our bas-

ON THE WAY OUT 11
ket and filled it heaping with sweet potatoes and
fruit, and received in exchange the coveted jack-
knife and pan. The next day we were to receive
the king of Bouro on board and fire a salute in
his honor. As we were all drawn up in uniform on
the quarter deck and his russet majesty appeared
over the gangway in Malay regalia, who should
he be but our friend of the day before, the proud
possessor of the knife and pan ! As long as those
nutritious tubers lasted we reflected with pride on
our close contact with royalty, and agreed that
we had never tasted potatoes of a more regal flavor.
Another adventure brought with it a pretty
moral, I was strolling alone on the beach one
day, and presently noticed that I was followed by
a tawny native. He had an ugly creese slung at
his belt, which I took as an impressive sign that
he might bear watching, and therefore kept my
weather eye on his movements. Just ahead a
magnificent tree overhung the beach, as large as a
New England maple, its tropical verdure suffused
with brilliant crimson, and the sands beneath
gorgeously carpeted with the petals which had
snowed down from the branches above, I stooped
and picked up a blossom to examine it, when he
of the creese ran up and tapped me on the shoul
der, took the flower from my hand, went through

12 ON THE WAY OUT
the motions of smelling and eating it, and then
represented the effect of the poison, I never saw
more perfect acting. His cheeks blanched into a
ghastly livid pallor, his eyes rolled up, and he
seemed to be dying in the mere effort to simulate
death. It was a lesson in charity that I never
forgot. Instead of cutting me down with his
creese he opened his human heart and warned me
of danger. We became brothers and friends on
the spot.
Floating through the East Indian archipelago
is like a dream of a fairy world. On every hand
islands buried under a rank profusion of verdure,
some of them mere islets like baskets of flowers
drifting on the sea, some of them of continental
size and piled with mountain ranges, like Java;
occasionally a smoking volcano, whose distant
glow by night gave us the friendly aid of a nat
ural lighthouse; the air laden with fragrance
from unknown plants and fruits hidden in the
rank groves on shore — among them the peerless
mangosteen, with a composite flavor of straw
berry, orange and heaven commingled; gentle
breezes wafting us from one romantic scene to
another, and slowly pushing us on through fairy
land toward our ultimate goal in Cathay, The
Saratoga being a man-of-war and not a merchant-

ON THE WAY OUT 13
man, there was no danger of our idyllic voyage
being halted by a fleet of piratical proas popping
round a headland and dashing upon us in quest
of plunder and blood.
We took the Gilolo passage, or rather the pas
sage took us, and crossing the line in longitude
129° E, we swept out into the Pacific and made
our way north under sunny skies by day and the
full moon by night. Our first glimpse of savages,
the pure unadulterated article, was interesting.
We were passing two level islets some five degrees
north of the line — voyagers in those distant seas
would recognize them by their names on the chart,
Pulo Anna and Pulo Mariere — when a score
of canoes came prancing out over the waves laden
with bananas and cocoanuts for barter. The men
stood to their paddles, and were tall, erect, splendid
samples of stalwart manhood. Tailors were at a
discount in their community ; most of them wore
only a loincloth, some of them indeed decollete to
their toes. Their light olive brown contrasted
finely with the great green waves, and many of
them heightened the effect still further by being
embellished from head to foot with flamboyant
tattooing. We bought and ate their cocoanuts,
and presumed they would like to eat us. We
should have disagreed with them, or at least tried

14 ON THE WAY OUT
to; and yet one could imagine a much worse fate
than to be entombed in such handsome beasts.
All this time we were scuttling north in a clear
sea. Our future clients, the Philippines, were to
the west of our course far out of sight. We made
them a call the next year, enjoyed their tropical
scenery, revelled in their fruit, made friends with
the Tagallos, laid in Manila cheroots galore, and
invested in peiia dresses for girl friends at home;
all the time without a suspicion of any deeper
and more personal interest which the future might
bring to us in those charming islands. But that
was years before Aguinaldo was born, and Admi
ral Dewey was not yet even a sub-middy at An
napolis. In due time we rounded the northern
end of Luzon, raced through the Balintang straits
before a ten knot breeze, passed the Balintang
islands, towering crags at whose base the Pacific
was hammering with tremendous roar, and signal
ized our entrance into the China seas by taking a
header into the rear end of a typhoon. Luckily
we did not hurt the typhoon nor the typhoon hurt
us; but the experience could hardly be called
playful. A day or two of ugly cross seas — cross
in every sense — a ripping tempest, hatches bat
tened down, life-lines led along the guns, decks
swept fore and aft, the poor old wallowing ship

ON THE WAY OUT 15
punched, pounded, staggering, almost buried in
the waves; everything wet, dirty, dismal; if any
body thinks it such a jolly lark, this going to sea,
just come out to China and try a typhoon. But
we pulled through, and so did the ship, and so
did the sun, which blessed old public functionary
kindly dried us up and warmed our hearts. Three
days after we were wafted by gentle breezes in
among the islands that fringe the southern coast
ofthe Central Flowery Kingdom.
As we were slowly working our way through
their serpentine channels, one of my messmates, a
midshipman, sitting in the slings ofthe fore-topsail
yard, beckoned me to come up and joip him. We
were neither of us handsome enough to pose as
" the sweet little cherub that sits up aloft," nor
angelic enough to " keep watch for the life of poor
Jack; " but a hundred feet above the deck made
a superb outlook, and we idled away a long cosy
sunny afternoon taking a birdseye view of the
outer rim of the Celestial Empire, All around us
the waters were dotted with multitudinous fishing
craft and sampans ambling their way to and fro.
Farther off we could descry ranges of hills, pictur
esque forests, cultivated fields, busy villages, the
whole landscape teeming with tokens of a populous
empire; and over all one could imagine the shade

16

ON THE WAY OUT

of Confucius hovering with spectral benediction.
Drifting quietly onward and threading the crooked
passages that wind toward Macao, we reached
that quaint old Portuguese city at last and dropped
anchor in the roadstead a couple of miles off^ the
Praya. It was Tuesday, the eighth of April, 1851;
seven months and twenty thousand miles by log
from home.

II
THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA

THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA.
In that open roadstead we lay rolling at our
anchors sometimes for weeks at a time. Two
years of waltzing to and fro and flitting up and
down the coast, over to Manila, and up to the
Madjicosima islands, intervened before the advent
of Commodore Perry's Japan Expedition, which
as events proved the Saratoga would be kept to
join. Whenever we returned to southern China
from any of these sallies abroad we divided our
favors between Macao, Hongkong,^ Whampoa,
Cum-sing-mun, and the Boca Tigris. Of all these
ports Macao is the most exposed. The winds
have full sweep over a broad expanse and can
raise at their own sweet will a choppy larruping
sea. When you are lying at anchor off Macao
therefore you are literally " rocked in the cradle
of the deep."
1 It was at Hongkong — in one of our many visitations there — that we
saw the Italian patriot, Garibaldi. He came beating up the harbor in com
mand of a Peruvian barque, and as we heard his ringing voice and watched
his masterful evolutions we all agreed that if he was a great soldier he was
an equally good sailor. He had escaped from Italy and was just then find
ing employment in South America : to return two years later to his native
soil to take a hand in the next revolution. As he was to sail for San Fran
cisco we sent a letter bag home by him ; and more than one of my cor
respondents had the pleasure of receiving letters that had been borne across
the Pacific by the great champion of free Italy. It is not every day you can
have a Garibaldi for your mail-carrier !

20 THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA
The first experience that happened to us in
that thumping bumping cradle was delicious.
We of the steerage — middies, past midshipmen
and clerk — slept in hammocks ; and as we swayed
with the swing of the ship we were not only rocked
to sleep but oftentimes sung to sleep by a sub
marine serenade ^ — a sort of music in solution.
The performers were myriads of little fishes, and
sweeter lullaby no man could wish. Macao was
the only port where we enjoyed these liquid con
certs, though very likely musical fishes may fre
quent other points on the Chinese coast. Travellers
have heard them off the rivers of Cambodia to the
south, along the shores of Ceylon, and on some
parts of the African coast. Charles Kingsley
heard them in the West Indies. Others have
noted them along our southern Atlantic coast, in
the gulf of Mexico, and up and down the shores
of the Pacific. There appear to be many varie
ties and difi'erent grades of subaqueous musicians
— from the grunting gurnard and purring sea
horse to the deep-sea drum-fish and the " myste
rious music of the Pascagoula." Why should
there not be diverse tones in a fish orchestra as in
a man orchestra.? Why should not the trouba
dours of the deep have their horns, oboes, flutes,
harps, kettle-drums, triangles, and the rest, like

THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA 21
their brothers of the wind and string on land.?
The weird sounds which Kingsley heard as he
listened from the veranda of a friend's house on
the isle of Monos were like this : " Between the
howls of the wind I became aware of a strange
noise from seaward — a booming, or rather hum
ming, most like that which a locomotive some
times makes when blowing off steam. It was
faint and distant, but deep and strong enough to
set one guessing its cause." He hears the same
sound the next morning in a dead calm, and
learns from the natives " that it came from under
the water and was most probably made by none
other than the famous musical or drum-fish, of
whom one had heard and hardly believed much
in past years." He quotes the description given
by another observer, who while on board a
schooner at anchor off Chaguaramas heard a
variety of notes. " Immediately under the vessel
I heard a deep and not unpleasant sound, similar
to those one might imagine to proceed from a
thousand jEolian harps; this ceased, and deep
twanging notes succeeded; these gradually swelled
into an uninterrupted stream of singular sounds
like the booming of a number of Chinese gongs
under the water; to these succeeded notes that
had a faint resemblance to a wild chorus of a

22 THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA
hundred human voices singing out of tune in
deep bass." Kingsley refers to still another lis
tener, on the Pacific coast and up the rivers of
Ecuador, who heard the music from the water
and at first thought the sound " was produced by
a fly or hornet of extraordinary size; but after
ward, having advanced a little farther, he heard
a multitude of different voices which harmonized
together, imitating a church organ to great per
fection."^ A naval officer who heard this sub
marine music at the mouth of a river in Cambodia
says it sounded like " a mixture of the bass of an
organ, the ringing of bells, the guttural cries of a
large frog, and the tones of an enormous harp."^
Other comparisons have been used. A visitor in
Mississippi was called down to the river one day
by an old fisherman, " to hear the spirits singing
under the water." It was " the mysterious music
of the Pascagoula." Out of the depths of the
river " rose a roaring, murmuring sound which
gradually increased in strength and volume, then
diminished;" " a strange tremulous sound," like
the humming of telegraph wires; and again " a
roaring, rushing sound." The writer even illus
trates the notes by a musical scale; sometimes
^ Charles Kingsley. At Last; a Christmas in th£ West Indies, pp.
157-161. 2 Popular Science Monthly, xxiii ; p. 571.

THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA 23
there were different tones in harmony, and rising
from the keynote to an octave above; sometimes
quick sharp sounds in single notes or in pairs;
and at any sudden noise, like the splashing of an
oar, the music would instantly cease. Another
observer says, " a low plaintive sound is heard
rising and falling like that of an ^olian harp; "
" the sounds are sweet and plaintive, but monoto-
nous."-*^ And still another, cruising in his yacht
along the shores of Florida a dozen years ago,
writes that while at anchor in Old Tampa bay he
heard " a single note, continuous for a long time.
It recalled the singing of telegraph wires, or the
hum of a planing mill, or the music of an .^olian
harp," It had no resemblance to the drum-fish,
which he says is common in Florida and whose
note is " a booming, interrupted noise."^
It is quite a surprise to the lay mind — and
that is the sort I carry-; — to find how many fishes
are known to science as endowed with vocal pow
ers. While engaged in hunting up and making
the acquaintance of some of these scaly sirens on
my own independent hook, a literary friend has
called my attention to a number of scientific
authorities, who count up more than fifty kinds.
I could give the reader a list of them — or at least
1 Popular Science Monthly, xxxvi : pp. 791-794.
2 Popular Science Monthly, xxxvii ; p. 410.

24 THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA
of the fishy prima donnas — all in their Latin dress,
which would be immensely learned and edifying;
but it might take me beyond my depth, as the fish
are already, so I will be discreet and refrain.
It was surely not the drumfish, nor the barking
dogfish, nor the grunting gurnard, that used to
serenade us in Macao roads on those still, tropical
star-lighted nights. Our music came from another
section of the finny orchestra — perhaps from the
string quartette rather than the brass band and
kettle-drums. It was a gentle tinkling or gurgling
as of the breaking of silvery bubbles all over the
bottom of the ship, or like the ringing of myriads
of little bells down under the deep, I am inclined
to think the music was produced by schools of
mullet; and if so they would have been even more
welcome in the frying pan than at the harpsi
chord. The tones floated around us by the hour
together — sometimes swelling into a deep and
solemn strain, sometimes faintly pattering like
the feet of fairies dancing. Had I been born a
poet I should have set the music to rhyme; but
being only one of Uncle Sam's youngsters, a prosy
clerk, it lulled me to sleep, and perhaps rippled
through my dreams with echoes of home.
One can understand a chorus of frogs in a
swamp, or the matins and vespers of birds in for-

THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA 26
est and field. But what was this.? Have the tribes
of the wave a language, which they use as we do
ours? Or is it merely an instinct, an impulse to
put into action some curious power they find they
possess? — and so in their exuberance every little
fish goes to pounding, pattering, tinkling, mur
muring, dancing with all his might at his own
sweet will and without reference to his myriad
brother minnows in the same shoal. Perhaps it
may be the call of love. Since Venus was born
on the wave, she may have left the briny deep all
tinctured with an infusion of love and all the
finny tribes touched with the spell. May not even
fish have their pretty ways of attracting the admi
ration of their scaly paramours? And if so, what
could be prettier and sweeter than this? This is
what Darwin makes it. Yet sometimes it is such
a mournful monotone that one thinks of a dirge
instead; whole circles of family friends may have
been scooped in the dragnet and fallen a prey to
the voracity of that monster, man — and the tear
ful survivors may be celebrating a submarine mass
for the repose of the victims in the monster's
stomach. Or if those mermaids have a religion,
this liquid music may be the worship they offer to
Neptune; or possibly their vain endeavor to pla
cate and win their arch-enemy, man.

26 THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA
So much for our first experience in the Central
Flowery Kingdom. Our second was of quite an
other sort.
The sloop-of-war St. Mary^s which we had come
to China to relieve had sailed on her return voy
age without waiting for us, and Captain Walker
found himself the senior officer on the station.
Finding it agreeable on shore and having no com
modore to order him off to sea, he accepted an
invitation to exist for a while on the cool verandas
of Consul De Silva, and sent off orders to get the
ship round into the Typa. This is a placid expanse
separated from the main roadstead by Typa island
and well protected by other islands from the un
mannerly winds which at times make the outer har
bor so rough. It took several tides and an immense
amount of kedge-hauling, boatswain whistling and
capstan work to warp the Saratoga in over the
two shallow bars; but the bars were soft mud,
and she dragged through without harm. When
at last she shook herself free, with all sail set and
driven by a lively breeze and the stentorian voice
of our first lieutenant she flew to her berth and
executed a pretty "flying moor;" a beautiful
evolution which used to be a fancy trick with the
old-timers, but in these degenerate days of steam
has, I presume, fallen into "innocuous desuetude."

THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA 27
This transfer to the Typa was not a matter of
thrilling interest in itself, but it did put us in con
tact with a startling bit of history which deserves
recording. It is to be found now I imagine only
in the naval archives at Lisbon ; perhaps long ago
forgotten even there.
Our berth was between the U. S, S, Marion on
the one side and on the other the remains of a
Portuguese frigate, the Donna Maria, whose black
ened timbers bore silent witness to her melancholy
fate. It was only five months before — October
29, 1850 — that she met her doom. It was the
birthday of the queen of Portugal. In honor of
the day both ships were dressed from stem to stern
in the flags of all nations and presented a brilliant
picture of emblazonry. At noon the frigate fired
a royal salute, which was answered by the Marion
and by the forts on shore. On board the Marion
the guns were secured, the crew were piped to
dinner, the messes were cleared, and the long sultry
afternoon began to wear placidly away. The men
were gathered in little groups between the guns
sewing, reading, spinning yarns, or sleeping in
the shade. The clean white decks, the awnings
spread, the boats at the booms with a boatkeeper
in each, the officer of the deck quietly pacing his
watch, most of the other officers taking their siesta

as THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA
below — such familiar details will serve to com
plete the picture of routine man-6'-war life in the
tropics. In the midst of this tranquil scene and
without a moment's warning a terrific explosion
brought every man to his feet. Wakened by the
shock and supposing the Marion had for some
unaccountable reason received a broadside from
the frigate, the first lieutenant rushed on deck in
his pajamas shouting "Clear away the batteries! "
But instead the frigate herself had blown up, and
as the smoke drifted away the real horror was
recognized. All that saved the Marion was the
fact that she lay so near. Almost everything went
over her. Two big guns went roaring between
her masts, with a volcanic shower of bolts, dead-
eyes, broken spars, and fragments of human bodies.
One of the guns fell within a few feet of her, and
threw back on board a furious splash of spray.
The whole atmosphere was thick with torn missiles,
tangled debris of planks, rigging, blocks, spars,
sails, handspikes, battle-axes, and all the diversified
paraphernalia that enter into the make-up of a
man-of-war. Over a circuit of a mile in diameter
around the smoking frigate the calm waters were
churned into roar and foam by the descending
shower. The boats were instantly called away and
dashed to the scene in order to extricate from the

THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA 29
tangle of cordage and burning timbers any vic
tims in whom there might still be left a sign of life.
The work of rescue soon lapsed into the more
solemn task of gathering the dead. Out of the
entire crew of two hundred and fifty only five
remained, one Portuguese, two Chinamen and
two Lascars. A second explosion, of a small
deck magazine, drove the boats from their labor.
After it was seen that no life remained the burn
ing ship was left to her fate. As the soundings
were but little over three fathoms she could not
sink beneath the surface, but resting on the bot
tom, in the course of the night she burned to the
water's edge.
The Marion suffered no damage beyond a bro
ken arm or two and a few bruises, a boat stove at
the booms, the awnings slashed, and both awnings
and snowy deck bespattered with blood. Her
men were often sobered by the gruesome sight of
bodies that for days after went fioating past, until
gathered up and buried by the Portuguese patrol
boats; and one day the sentry at the gangway
was horrified at the sudden rising of a Portuguese
sentry from the deep alongside, with musket still
grimly held at " carry arms " as in life.
The fate of the Donna Maria will probably
remain a mystery to the end of time. No man

30 THE FATE OF THE DONNA MARIA
knows whence came the spark that fired her mag
azine. The magazine had been opened that noon
of course, to get the ammunition for the salute.
But the explosion did not come till two or three
hours later; and such an interval, together with
the stringent regulations that control the handling
of explosives on a man-of-war, would seem to pre
clude the theory of an accident. The commander
of the frigate was commonly reputed to be a man
of despotic and passionate temper; and the story
was current in Macao that for some cause, real or
fancied, he flew into a rage with the gunner, sent
for him to his cabin, cursed him, pulled his beard
and even assaulted him with kicks and blows.
The gunner replied that he had been many years
in the service and had never been subjected to such
indignities before; that he was an old man and had
not long to live, but that when he did die many
more should go to hell with him; with which
threat he left the captain's presence. Brooding
over the treatment he had received, and as many
believed becoming crazed with anger, he may
have taken the opportunity of the salute and
when he closed the magazine left a lighted fuse
which in time reached the powder and sent the
ship to her doom. But he went with the rest —
and no man knows.

Ill
AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
Our business in China was to protect the inter
ests of American citizens and American commerce
in the East. The Taiping rebellion had already
started in the southern provinces, and our first
active duty was to visit Whampoa and put our
merchants in Canton under the protection of
American guns. Later the same year we strolled
over to Manila and spent a lazy month amid its
torrid luxuries. But neither of these is the sub
ject of my story, Manila has written her own
record since, and the Taipings will keep; we can
return to them later. Just now we will look in
on a group of emerald isles some three hundred
miles off the Celestial coast.
In the spring of 1852 an American ship, the
Robert Broiime, sailed from Amoy with a cargo
of coolies for San Francisco. Some weeks out the
coolies rose upon the crew, murdered all but five,
and compelled the survivors to navigate the ship
back to China. By the time they sighted the
Madjicosimas on their return they had become
panic-stricken at the possible consequences of

34 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
their crime, and concluded to take refuge on
the islands. The sailors made for Patchungsan
accordingly, and grounding the ship on a reef
near the shore manned the long-boat and began
ferrying the mutineers to the beach. Some three
hundred of them were thus landed, and the boat
came back for the last twenty-five. Instead of
taking them ashore, however, the Yankee tars
dashed up over the gangway and seizing the
nearest handspikes and belaying pins overpowered
the coolies and lashed them to ringbolts in the
deck. Then they ran to the braces, rounded in the
fore and main yards, backed the ship off the reef
and squared away for the open sea, leaving the
crowds of baffled mutineers like a pack of savages
yelling, cursing, tearing up and down the beach
in impotent rage. It was some three or four
hundred miles to Amoy, and thither with their
perilous freight they directed their course. Never
daring to sleep, scarcely snatching a moment to
eat, they kept their vigils by night and by day,
at the wheel, on the lookout, at the braces, watch
ing the sails and the weather, standing sentry
over their prisoners. Many times did the mis
creants gnaw their fastenings and threaten another
tragedy like the first, but were as often refettered.
Fortunately no storm darkened the sky. Fortu-

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 35
nately too, as they approached the coast half a
dozen mates of merchantmen lying at anchor in
Amoy were out on a rollicking cruise down the
harbor when the Robert Browne hove in sight.
She was behaving strangely and her flag was
union down. Plainly something was the matter,
and these tough-fisted pleasure seekers dashed out
over the waves to see. Not a moment too soon;
for as they mounted over the rail the prisoners
had just torn themselves free and were in the act
of charging on their exhausted captors, who in
a few seconds more would have been food for
sharks. Like a thunderbolt the rescuers were upon
them, and once more the baffled coolies were firmly
secured to the deck.
When we reached Amoy the Robert Browne was
lying quietly at anchor, and the prisoners were
turned over to us. Two days later an English
man-of-war, the brig Lily, returned from the islands
with another score, and these also were added to
our charge. She had found the mutineers in a
woful plight, sick, desperate, half-starved. The
natives, a gentle inoffensive people, had helped
them put up bamboo barracks near the shore, and
there they were living on whatever the islanders
not overfed themselves could bring them. When
the Lily appeared round the point they recognized

36 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
her as a messenger of doom and scuttled inconti
nently for the forest-clad mountains in the inte
rior; so terrified that, as the interpreter declared,
no less than forty of those who could not keep up
with their fleeing comrades, took their own lives
or fell and died from sheer exhaustion.
It was to gather in another batch of these poor
wretches that the Saratoga was ordered on a
cruise to the Madjicosimas. Three days' sail from
Amoy, rounding the northern end of Formosa,
and wafted over smooth seas by kindly breezes,
we found ourselves in a beautiful cluster of islands,
of which Patchungsan, named from its "eight
huge hills," was not only the chief but the fairest.
That was our destination. A charming picture
it made as we approached ; mountains draped with
tropical verdure, in which one could distinguish
the breadfruit, the acacia, the broad fronds of
the palm, and even the familiar Norway pine;
and sloping down from the hills to the shore were
green fields, separated sometimes by deep glades
and watercourses, sometimes by craggy fences of
coral. We wondered whether such lovely scenery
could be conscious of holding in its placid bosom
a nest of bloody bandits. We rounded to in the
spacious harbor, dropped anchor, furled sails, and
sent a boat on shore.

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 37
There stood the bamboo barracks, just as they
had been described to us. We watched the party
of natives who met our interpreter on the beach
and took him up to one of the huts for a palaver.
It proved to be as on the arrival of H, M. brig
Lily. The birds had flown. The apparition of
another avenging fury in the shape of another
man-of-war lent wings to their terror, and all but
the sick and dying had bolted again for the woods
in the wildest helter-skelter of alarm. When the
boat returned with such information as was ob
tainable, the captain decided to send out an expe
dition or two in pursuit. Every man on board
was eager to volunteer. It would be such a lark ;
it was just going ashore on liberty, in a wild trop
ical island, and with a spice of adventure thrown
in. Some four or five score of the men were
selected for the privilege.
The next moming the sun rose in a cloudless
sky. The island with its beauties of mountain,
valley, forest and lawn lay peacefully spread be
fore us with scarcely a breath of air to ruffle the
verdure of its fragrant thickets; and circling
around it the liquid sea, as innocent and bland
as if it had never been conscious of such a thing
as a storm. On such a placid day one almost lis
tened for the home church bells, for it was Sun-

38 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
day. But no Sunday for us, and no church bells;
instead, a hustling day of martial order and disor
der. On shore, hid in the caverns, lurking in the
bush, housed in the huts, were the fugitive muti
neers ; on board ship the din, bustle and turmoil
of preparations to catch them. The organization
of a night campaign, the necessary equipment and
drill, together with the complex labors of the com
missariat, turned the gentle Sunday into chaos.
Officers were assigned and four divisions were told
oflF, numbering each some score or more of doughty
warriors. On deck the leaders were mustering
their men; sergeants and corporals were putting
awkward squads through the manual, quarter-
gunners were distributing muskets, pistols and
cutlasses, the sailmaker's gang were stitching hav
ersacks of canvas, and mess cooks below were con
cocting the rations to fill them; while glowering
aloof in sullen disappointment rejected volunteers
strolled to and fro, gazing idly over the bulwarks,
aflFecting indifference, and consigning to the ever
lasting shades the whole blooming enterprise.
By nine o'clock at night the armament began
embarking and by eleven the last man was on
shore. There the guides met them and the four
parties began their long and devious tramp in the
dark. The outlaws had fled up the valleys, over

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 39
the hills, through the woods, among the rocks,
caves, mountain passes, wherever fear drove them
or hope held out the promise of shelter. But up
the valleys, over the hills, through the woods,
among the rocks, caves and mountain passes, like
the avenging spirit of Cain their pursuers steadily
followed on their track. As I did not have the
pleasure of accompanying this " personally con
ducted" tour, but did go in the second expedi
tion, I will not undertake to penetrate the dark
ness of that night and imagine adventures which
I did not share. The party returned the next
day bringing some fifty more of the fugitives, who
were duly added to our list.
Meanwhile all the prisoners were taken on shore
and snugly quartered in the bamboo barracks,
with relays of sentries from our marine guard
pacing their beat around them. It looked really
quite martial, Tuesday morning opened bright,
with a spanking fresh breeze and a lively sea, but
neither of them rampant enough to interrupt the
flying boats which were conveying orders and
provender to the party on shore. In the last boat
that pushed off from the gangway that morning
a couple of youngsters from the port steerage mess
started for a morning stroll. After so many salt
water duckings we cherished ambitions for a fresh

40 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
water bath, if the island could boast a stream big
enough; and anyhow a frolic on the greensward
would limber up our sea-legs. We got what we
were after — and a lot more. That boat was the
last to reach the shore for two mortal days. We
were safely on terra firma, and there we had to
stay through a villainous typhoon. The barome
ter was somewhat demoralized when we left the
ship. But that was in the cabin; and as we had
no barometer in the steerage — only took such
weather as was dealt out to us — we had started
on our tramp in blissful ignorance. First of all
a look at our prisoners in the bamboo barracks.
Poor knaves — there they were, nearly a hundred
of them, old and young, sick and well, huddled
together on the earth floor of the building, whose
roof of thatch shielded them from the torrid sun,
while the open sides admitted the cool breeze.
The more defiant were in double irons, the weaker
only mainacled; the sick and the boys were at
large. Some appeared dazed by the calamity that
had overtaken them, and lay prostrate on their
straw mats heedless of what was passing around.
A few ugly-visaged ruffians, afterwards identified
as among the ringleaders of the mutiny, sat bolt
upright among their companions, reckless of the
crime and scornfully indiflFerent to its retribution.

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 41
One little chap some ten years old was lying on
the ground covered with a tattered mat, the last
ray of hope fled from his boyish face, the drip
ping tears telling more plainly than words what
despair had settled on his young heart. When
we carried him to his home in Amoy a month or
two after, kind treatment had transformed him
into another child and we could hardly persuade
him to leave his new friends.
The freshening breeze piped and whistled over
the grassy hills as we left the camp for a stroll.
It was an interesting country. We peeped into
the cave on the point, much to the displeasure
of its tenants the bats, made morning calls on
the simple natives in their neatly thatched huts,
climbed a crag for the view, strayed into a de
serted temple whose Dagons had fallen from the
crumbling altar and whose devotees brought no
more oblations of smoking incense; and all the
while exploring the landscape for that freshwater
brook in which we were to take that freshwater
bath. No brook appeared; but we got the bath
all the same, of very fresh water, and in over
whelming abundance.
Back to the shore, hoping for a boat from the
ship. No boat. No chance for a boat. Wind
increasing. Horizon murky and lurid. A dirty

%X AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
scud beginning to drive through the sky. The
sun tried for a time to burn through in spots,
and finding itself shut out of its own firmament
by nasty clouds finally withdrew in dudgeon to
parts unknown. The gale was rising, and before
long a sharp drizzle was sweeping through the air
on the yelling blasts that penetrated our dapper
white costume and cut like showers of needles.
We were glad enough to flee for shelter to the
big cabin where the guard was quartered. In the
course of the afternoon we attempted to build a
rookery of our own. The tempest laughed itself
hoarse at our eflForts. Nothing we could put up
was any protection against the pitiless rain. And
presently an ill-mannered blast ripped up the
whole fabric and blew its fragments out of sight.
It was by a logical necessity therefore — hurri
cane logic, not easy to answer — that we spent
that roaring night in the big cabin with the guard.
Wet, tired and sore, we tried to bury ourselves in
a scant pile of straw down in the corner and
shiver ourselves to sleep. It was a kind of cold
storage, and the drowsy goddess had no notion
of being wooed in that fashion. The weary night
dragged slowly on, and would have been more
interminable still but for a sudden alarm that the
hungry pirates were coming down on the camp

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 43
for a foraging attack. All hands hustled out to
meet them. We congratulated ourselves that the'
exercise would at least keep us warm. The attack
did not materialize. All the comfort we got out
of it was that the officer of the guard gave us
each a cutlass, and the belt tightly buckled around
our equatorial regions made life a trifie less win
try. The only other episode of that miserable
night was the sudden outcry of a rough old salt,
"Corporal of the guard! there's a son-of-a-gun a
hangin' himself ! " One of the prisoners, tired of
his misery and uncertain as to what further retri
bution might be in store for him, decided to take
himself out of the case, and with the long folds
of his turban thrown over a bamboo rafter, made
a vigorous push for the unseen. He was easily
cut down and persuaded to resume his earthly
pilgrimage for a while longer.
At daybreak we struggled outside, at the risk
of being blown into the next lot. Whoop! how
that hurricane scoured over sea and land, yelling,
screeching, foaming at the mouth, cutting off the
tops of the waves and hurling them through the
air. It was magnificent, but tragic and grim.
The poor ship had spent as uncomfortable a night
as we. There she lay wallowing, all her top ham
per down on deck, three anchors out ahead, now

44 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
rising wearily over the enormous billows and then
plunging headlong to bury herself in a smother
of spray, tugging at her chains like a Titan, as
if determined to tear them away and rush to her
doom on the reef astern. The big waves came
piling in from the sea in indescribable masses,
raging, furious, passionate, literally tumbling over
each other in the mad rush to get at her, plung
ing on the ship like demons, trying to overwhelm
her and send her to the bottom, or roaring past
to break on the reef in towering hills of foam.
That reef was the loop which united the island
with its nearest neighbor, Kokiensan; there was
nothing beyond but the wild Pacific, and no
passage through. If those cables should give
way, five minutes would seal her doom and that
of every living thing on board. On that frightful
coral bridge the pounding of those surges would
smash her to atoms. Such a fate for our ship
mates set our hearts to thumping. We watched
the confiict for hours with breathless interest; and
all the more dismally because such a catastrophe
would leave us, a handful of white men, on an
island far out of the track of passing ships, and
with those three hundred mutineers in the moun
tains in our rear, disappointed, hungry, savage
and desperate. It was a funereal day, that

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 45
Like a wounded snake dragged its slow length along.
But at last it came to an end. Things gener
ally do. The most furious blasts began to tame
down. The murky heavens began to lose some
thing of their sullen blackness. The rain squalls
came thinner and weaker. The typhoon began to
show signs of exhaustion as if it had about blown
itself out. By nightfall of the second day nature '
was tired of chaos and wanted to rest. The
kindly natives brought us riceballs to keep us
from starving, and then helped us rebuild our
demolished hut. Into the straw we bundled and
knew nothing more until at daybreak a middy
shouted in our ears, " Tumble out there, sleepers !
boat coming ashore ! " Getting back on board
was like getting home. The first lieutenant had
the deck, and all hands were at the capstan bars
heaving up the extra anchors. All hands had a
chance to witness the prodigals' return. As we
mounted over the gangway and waddled aft to
report ourselves to the smiling officer, our spandy
white toggery turned to a bedraggled butternut
gray, all hands smiled with him, some of them
audibly. But we dove below and soon got back
into civilization and clean clothes.
The second expedition was another midnight
prowl like the first. I hastened to volunteer, but

46 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
with an ardor that would hardly pass for patriotic
or even martial. The island was said to abound
in pigeons; and having risen to the dignity of
caterer to the port steerage mess, my quest was
not pirates but game. It was not unreasonable
to expect that while the rest of the cohort were
scooping up the mutineers a few pigeons would
obligingly put themselves under my care. So I
borrowed a fowling-piece and joined the expedi
tion in the role of the mighty hunter. We landed
in the dark, Friday night, a compact force of
eight officers and seventy or eighty blue-jackets
well armed. Our guides met us at the beach. So
did a shower. We had scarcely set foot on tejra
firma before the rain came to welcome us — to
cheer but not inebriate; at first a gentle drizzle,
then a firm crescendo, and at last a tropical
deluge. We began our march by nine o'clock
and tramped for hours under a kind of cloud
burst; the night black as pitch; every gully a
roaring torrent; every coral fence ragged and
multitudinous in scratches and tumbles; the cac
tus hedges disobligingly skillful in rending our
garments and gashing our shins. At first our
path for a long distance skirted the shore. Then
as the curving line of the bay diverged from the
path we struck boldly into the interior, leaving

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 47
on our right a dense grove of pines, and rising
on the uplands by a deep-worn rut tangled with
interlacing roots and plashing with mire. Till
midnight we pushed on through the rain, and the
rain through us. And by the time we straggled
in at the appointed rendezvous, a deserted temple
in a grove, we looked more like a set of ship
wrecked pirates ourselves than a company of
honest men in pursuit of those gentry. All our
military ardor was soaked out of us, and a large
proportion of our morals. Both were somewhat
replenished by a hasty lunch. The silent old
temple took charge of our haversacks and other
freight; and thus relieved we separated, and the
four divisions radiated out into the darkness like
the sticks of a fan. Each corps vivisected itself
into several scouting parties, so that in the course
of the night we covered and explored a wide ter
ritory. It was a still hunt for native cabins.
When one was found we silently surrounded it so
that nothing could escape, and then suddenly
opening the door and thrusting in a lighted torch,
ransacked the hut for hidden pirates. It was not
polite, and the gentle inmates were badly fright
ened; but we did them no harm, and had our
labor for our pains.
In due time the night wore away and with

48 AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN
returning dawn our corps tramped back to the
rendezvous. Pirate-hunting does very well for a
side issue, but my business being pigeons, I took
my bearings from the sacred grove and started
out on a foraging tour of my own, I hunted for
pigeons as faithfully as we had hunted for pirates
— and with the same result. Pastures, woods,
rocks, hills — I scoured them all. Not a bird.
Not a ghost of a bird. Pigeons and pirates had
evidently made common cause and had flown to
the mountains together. The best part of the
hunt was getting back to a hot breakfast at the
old temple. And after all, looking at it philo
sophically, what right had I, a foreign interloper,
to kill and eat Madjicosima pigeons, any more
than they had to kill and eat me? We had a
claim on the pirates, but what claim on the
pigeons? So with the first squad that started,
my gun and I slowly wended our way back to the
ship sadder and wiser, also considerably wetter.
By mid-afternoon all the divisions were safely
back, and the two or three prisoners they had
taken were added to the choice lot already on
board. And the next morning at daybreak it
was up anchor and off for Hongkong,
What became of the mutineers? Deponent
saith not; but I will give you the facts and you

AFTER MUTINEERS IN PATCHUNGSAN 49
can judge for yourself. On our return to Hong
kong the cabin of the Saratoga was turned into
a court-room and the prisoners were brought in
one by one ancj confronted with the survivors of
the ill-fated Robert Browne. The ringleaders
were identified and in due time were forwarded to
Canton and turned over to the Chinese courts.
Perhaps they paid the penalty of their crime.
Perhaps their judges, not over-fond of foreign
barbarians, winked at it as on the whole a merito
rious act. We never knew. But the rest of the
rout we ourselves carried back to Amoy and quietly
dismissed to their homes.

IV

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT
WE CAUGHT

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT
WE CAUGHT
The following September the Saratoga was
again despatched on a mission of vengeance, A
Boston merchantman, the Celestial, while peace
ably wending her way to Hongkong, had run the
gauntlet of a whole fleet of Chinese freebooters,
but had managed to elude them and escape. We
were sent out to catch the miscreants, or any
other red-rovers we might find practicing their
art, and teach them the error of their ways.
Our orders were to cruise for a month down
the coast as far as the gulf of Tonquin- — the
first week oflF the Ladrones, the remaining three
off the Taya islands and Hainan, It was ugly
weather, squally and threatening, when we got up
anchor and disappeared from Hongkong, But it
took us out clear of the islands in dashing style,
and three or four hours brought us to our cruis
ing ground. There under easy sail we stood off
all day and night to the southward and westward,
sharply scanning every sort of craft we met and
looking into the harbors for any bandits that

54 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
might be lurking there. The next forenoon we
wore round and made a long stretch back toward
the Ladrones; giving chase on the way to a sin
ister looking scow that proved to be an inoffensive
trader bound to Macao, whither he fled badly
frightened as soon as we let him off. One evening
we met a fleet of eight junks coming in and
promptly put about and overhauled them. They
were as panic-stricken as the other. The sudden
apparition of a big man-of-war pouncing upon
them like a hawk upon a brood of chickens sent
them scampering o£F to all points of the compass
burning joss paper and wildly beating their gongs
for help from the Chinese pantheon.
At last the week oflF the Ladrones was duly
completed. The helm was put up and round we
went, bound for " fresh fields and pastures new."
A fair breeze was sweeping us smoothly down the
seas when suddenly our foreyard determined other
wise. To the best of our knowledge and belief
it had always been robust and healthy, a well
behaved stick of sound and positive convictions.
But all at once it was discovered that an internal
disorder was preying on its vitals; whereupon the
carpenter bluntly reported to the officer of the
deck, and the officer of the deck to the first lieu
tenant, and the first lieutenant to the captain,

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 55
that the foreyard was rotten in the slings. No
sailor need be reminded what that would mean
in a gale of wind. Round the ship spun again
on her heel, and bracing sharp up began to beat
back for the nearest known port; which haven of
refuge proved to be a cove in an island variously
called Sancian, San chuen, St. John's. It was a
quiet place occupied by fishermen, some seventy-
five miles to the southwest of Macao. High bluflFs,
projecting ledges, with patches of sandy beach
below and between, and the whole plentifully
bestrewn with boulders, the relics of some far
away glacial period, — ^that was the type of scenery.
At the head of a bay some three or four miles off
we could see a fishing hamlet and a fleet of small
craft at anchor before it or slipping in and out
with the tide. Close by us, a few rocky farms,
out of which the tenants managed to scratch a
living by coaxing out of the gravel small crops
of bananas, oranges, pineapples, sweet potatoes
and beans, wherever the jealous boulders would
permit. This was the place where the Portuguese
were first permitted to trade in 1517, before the
founding of Macao. For a few years they had here
a bustling colony. But a neighbor island, Lam-
pa5ao, proved more attractive and gradually
drew away from Sancian both the trade and the

56 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
traders. Macao in turn did the same for Lam-
pa§ao, and the site was so entirely abandoned that
now the very location of the ancient city is quite
unknown. The dim memory of Lampagao and all her
vanished commerce was as nothing, however, be
side our interest in one man, who finished a great
life and breathed his last on the shores of this
obscure islet. It was in 1552 that St, Francis
Xavier died on Sancian, It was in 1852, just
three centuries after, that a party of us stood
reverently on the strand from which the body of
the heroic missionary had been borne away to be
entombed in a distant church in Goa, From that
day to this, though of different faith, I have felt a
sense of possession in the memory and deeds of the
famous East Indian apostle, simply from having
walked the beach which he trod and looked on
the rugged scenery which was the last vision to
his closing eyes.
The delinquent spar was speedily down on deck,
stripped of its harness, laid on its back and made
ready for surgery. A bad case of appendicitis, or
internal cancer, or worse. The carpenter and his
crew went at it con amore, dug out the cankerous
sludge, filled in with sound timber, and fished the
whole with extra spars laid on and heavily clamped

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 57
along the middle of the yard. A reasonably fair
job, and as strong as tools and wood could make it,
but awkward and bungling; the carpenter him
self declared that he would not trust it in a gale
of wind. If we had had that stick aloft in the
typhoon we encountered a fortnight later, very
likely we should have lost our masts and gone to
the bottom; in which case any possible readers
who may be sauntering with me through these
devious pages would have been spared the labor.
But the carpenter's verdict and an official survey
of the bandaged spar changed all that. The cap
tain decided to put back to Macao and get a new
foreyard. I need not hint to you how incensed
the commodore was that we should dare to leave
our cruising ground, nor how he set all the car
penters to work from all three ships to make the
new spar out of our spare main topmast and the
Susquehanna'' s spare jib-boom, and when done
hustled us out of port in short order to finish our
cruise. At any rate we got out of that neighbor
hood as fast as canvas and breeze could take us,
and went to look for the other pirates. Outside
a fair wind swept us down oflF the Taya islands.
There we tried a ruse; ran the guns in, closed
the ports, concealed our multitudinous crew, and
did our best to look like an innocent merchant-

58 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
man, hoping to decoy some red-rover, or perhaps
a whole fleet of them, to an attack. No result;
pious ^raud does not seem to work with pirates.
So we kept on down the coast, passed the false
Tinhosa, and ran in for Tinhosa the real, which
proved to be a steep, rocky, mountainous island
nearly half way down the eastern shore of Hainan.
Another long stretch, and the delusive current
swept us far to the southward and westward of
Gaalong bay, and doubtless chuckled all over its
foamy surface to see us laboriously beating back
in the teeth of an increasing gale. If you have
ever gone fishing for pirates in these outlandish
parts, these unfamiliar names may assist the
geographical side of your memory. We intended
to run into Gaalong bay for shelter, but in the
rising storm we could not fetch in, and so ran for
the open main in order to get plenty of sea-room
in which to meet whatever was coming.
And it was coming, sure. This Thing of the
sea had been getting itself together and lying in
wait for us; a demoniac octopus of the air whose
tentacles were already spitefully snatching at us
from afar. Let us get a look at the monster be
fore it actually arrives, as we did not at the
Madjicosima storm a few pages back.

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 59
Our unlucky cruise was just about timed with
the autumnal change of monsoon. In the China
seas the regular semi-annual shift of atmospheric
currents occurs in September and October; when,
the sun having returned into the southern hemi
sphere, the southwest monsoon gradually retreats
from its invasion of northern zones and the north
east trades chase it back to its home. It is not a
sudden change. There is a kind of tricky recess,
a belt of calms and erratic weather. This is the
happy hunting ground of the typhoon. As M.
Reclus explains in his entertaining book. The
Ocean, " It is at this epoch of the change of the
seasons that the powerful aerial masses, charged
with electricity, engage in strife for the supremacy,
and by their encounter produce those great eddies
which are developed in spirals across the seas and
the continents." The statement which he draws
from another meteorologist that of three hundred
and sixty-five West Indian hurricanes recorded
between 1493 and 1855, more than two-thirds
came in October, when " the strongly heated
coasts of South America begin to attract toward
themselves the colder and denser air of the north
ern continent," might stand as a fair account of
the situation in the East Indies also. The furnace
heat of the tropics, the enormous expansion and

60 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
elevation of the lower atmospheric levels, the
velocity of the other masses rushing in, their col
lision with island peaks and mountain ranges,
their sharp concussion with each other and the
attendant electric explosions, — these are the fierce
dynamics of the air out of which are gendered
those revolving storms that descend to the earth
and go spinning their dance of death over a much
enduring surface.
In point of size, they vary from the tornado
which mows its narrow swath through the woods,
to the full-grown cyclone whose circle sweeps half
an ocean. The hurricane of 1839 was about three
hundred miles in diameter at the Antilles, five
hundred when it reached the Bermudas, and nearly
eighteen hundred when it crashed upon Ireland.
A furious cyclone encountered between Japan and
Formosa in July, 1853, by the Saratoga and three
other vessels of the Japan Expedition, which was
afterwards described and mapped by Mr. Redfield,
was at least a thousand miles in diameter. Still
larger was the storm which overtook our flagship
the Mississippi, not far from the same region in
October of the following year. It was from fif
teen hundred to two thousand miles across, and
travelled for six days at a rate of from twelve to
forty miles an hour. Per contra, the tornado

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 61
which crossed the state of Indiana in April, 1852,
leaving a track littered with wreckage of forests
and cattle and towns, was only a mile wide. The
destructive cyclone in Iowa in 1882 averaged half
a mile. One which obliterated a village near
Springfield, Missouri, in April, 1880, sweeping
its very site so bare that scarcely the splinters
could be found, cut a path nowhere broader than
one hundred and fifty rods. And finally the tor
nado which tore its way through Tuscumbia,
Alabama, on a quiet Sabbath evening in the
autumn of 1874, bursting the stoutest buildings
into fragments and killing a number ofthe inhabi
tants, measured in diameter less than four hundred
feet. The height of the column is as variable as its
diameter. Two miles is an unusual elevation;
and the other extreme might be not more than a
hundred yards, A lofty mountain range is a wall
against which it beats in vain. It cannot climb.
It can only pass by doubling the huge buttresses
and promontories. Sometimes it is fiattened down
to a shallow disk on the surface of the sea, spin
ning like a horizontal fly-wheel, dark, angry,
furious, deadly, while the sea-birds congregate out
of harm's way in the calm regions a few hundred
feet above, and the sun looks serenely down on

62 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
the black delirium beneath. This was the case
with the t3rphoon just referred to as having caught
in its toils so many of the ships of our squadron
on their way back from Japan, Some of the
officers noticed that " even when the wind was
piping loudest, when the water was whiried vio
lently by in perfect sheets, the scud moved over
head at a remarkably slow rate, and the upper
layer of clouds seemed scarcely to be stirred at
all." On one of those grim nights, while our roll
ing ship was lying to off the chain of islands that
stretches from Japan to Lew Chew, not daring to
run through in such a tempest and on such im
perfect charts, I well remember how the moon
struggled almost through the weltering haze and
what a ghastly glare she cast on the boiling sea.
Strange that a few hundred feet of altitude should
make all the difference between a calm and a
hurricane — paradise and hell.
The prognostics of these storms are well fitted
to inspire alarm. Nature is not uniform, A
western tornado will sometimes burst upon its
victims with little or no warning. But those
that come in the daytime can frequently be seen
at a distance making their lurid preparations, A
writer in the signal service describes it thus —
very likely he has seen one coming: " The first

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 63
sign of a tornado is generally a tumultuous and
strange appearance in the southwest; then the
whirling funnel comes in sight writhing and
swinging from side to side, now rising and again
seeming to plunge down to the ground ; its winds
tear limbs from trees and roofs from houses, and
suck them upwards with clouds of dust and debrii.
As it sweeps over a village the houses on its path
are not blown over, but exploded, and their walls
fall outward on all sides. Heavy wagons, beams
and chains are picked up and carried through the
air. Lighter objects, such as boards, shingles,
clothing and papers, are often carried miles away
before they fall." Another observer gives a still
more circumstantial account^ : " Innumerable
descriptions show that the cloud in the northwest
is heavy, black, and comparatively slow in its
movement, until struck by a light, rather smoky,
and more rapidly moving cloud from the south
west. Then the clouds rush to a common center,
and there is a violent conflict of currents, driving
clouds in every direction, up and down, round
and round. Clouds like great sheets of white smoke
dash about in a frightful manner, with such un
natural velocity that the observer is often panic-
stricken and flees to the nearest cellar for safety,
^Popular Science Monthly, xxviii, p. 313.

64 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
Finally a black threatening mass descends slowly
toward the earth, whirling violently, but still
manifesting confusion in form. This soon gives
place to the peculiar funnel-like shape, with
definite outline so well known. It appears in
tensely black, like coal smoke issuing from a
locomotive, and its trunk-like form sometimes has
a wrenching spiral motion, like a snake hung up
by the head and writhing in agony. As white
clouds approach and are drawn into the vortex,
the funnel-shaped trunk sways like an elastic col
umn. It sometimes rises, falls, and careens from
side to side like a balloon. Branches and trunks
of trees, rails, tree-tops, roofs, pieces of houses,
straw, furniture, stoves, iron-work, lumber, and
other debris are seen fiying about in the central
part of the cloud, but are gradually drawn up
ward and thrown out near the top, usually not
until the storm has progressed a mile or two far
ther on from a given point. Dark masses of
cloud are seen to shoot downward on either side
of the funnel, to enter it just above the ground,
and to apparently rush upward through the center
and out at the top in a terrific manner. Some
times the funnel pauses and whirls with apparently
increased velocity, reducing everything to splin
ters, and leaving scarcely a vestige of a house

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 65'
or clump of trees, all being ground comparatively
fine and carried away as chaflF.  The
people at Westwood describe the roar of the tor
nado as having a peculiar hollow, humming sound.
It somewhat resembles the rumbling of cars, or the
booming of the sea. The sound is indescribable
and unlike any other in nature. It is so loud
that the falling of heavy trees against the side
of a house and the crash of falling buildings are
lost in the general roar," The more formidable
cyclones that ravage the deep usually send their
dread heralds in advance. M. Reclus in describ
ing their approach indulges in some vivid rhetoric.
" Some days before the terrible hurricane is un
chained, nature, already gloomy, and as if veiled,
seems to anticipate a disaster. The little white
clouds which fioat in the heights of air with the
counter trade-winds are hidden under a yellowish
or dirty white vapor; the heavenly bodies are
surrounded by vaguely irridescent halos and heavy
layers of clouds, which in the evening present the
most magnificent shadows of purple and gold
stretching far over the horizon, and the air is as
stifling as if it came from the mouth of some great
furnace. The cyclone, which already whirls in
the upper regions, gradually approaches the surface
of the ground or water. Torn fragments of red-

66 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
dish or black clouds are carried furiously along
ty the storm, which plunges and hurries through
space; the column of mercury is wildly agitated
in the barometer and sinks rapidly; the birds
assemble as if to take counsel, then fly swiftly
away so as to escape the tempest that pursues
them. Soon a dark mass shows itself in the
threatening part of the sky; this mass increases
and spreads itself out, gradually covering the
azure with a veil of a terrible darkness or a blood-
colored hue. This is the cyclone, which fills and
takes possession of its empire, twisting its immense
spirals around the horizon. The roaring of the
seas and skies succeeds to this awful silence,"
These hurricanes have a will of their own, and
revolve in opposite directions on opposite sides of
the equator. In the southern hemisphere they
wheel from left to right, like the hands of a watch ;
in the northern, from right to left. This is not
their only motion. Occasionally one will spin on
the same spot, like a top; but most of them, like
the planets, not only revolve on their axis but at
the same time travel in an orbit, sometimes with
great velocity. The rate attained by the entire
body of the storm varies from one mile per hour
to forty, fifty, even sixty. The distances traversed
vary still more. A few hundred rods may exhaust

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 67
the tornado, A few hundred miles would make a
fair average for the cyclone. Probably the most
extensive track that has ever been traced and
mapped was that ofthe great storm of 1885 which
circumnavigated more than half the globe. It
was generated near the southern coast of China
in the latter part of September, " passed over
Japan and the Aleutian archipelago, and entered
the United States October tenth. Crossing the
Rocky mountain range it proceeded through the
northern states and Canada to Labrador and
Davis strait. In the Atlantic it was joined on the
eighteenth by another disturbance which had come
up from the Atlantic tropics, the junction of the
two being followed by a cessation of progressive
movement from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth.
During this period a severe gale which passed
along the southern counties of England on the
morning of the twenty-fourth — a storm the fore
casting of which was shown to be impossible —
was formed. Following in the wake of this storm
the parent cyclone reached the French coast on
the twenty-seventh, its advent being marked by
violent gales and extensive floods over the whole
of western and central Europe and Algeria.
Passing through France and the Netherlands, the
disturbance showed signs of exhaustion, and on

68 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
November first, in the Baltic, it quietly dispersed,
after accomplishing a journey of more than six
teen thousand miles in thirty-six days."^
The speed with which these portents travel
along the surface is slow compared with their
frightful gyrations on their own axis; a velocity
which hurls weighty masses out of their path
with the force of dynamite. In the hurricane of
August, 1837, at St. Thomas, an eye-witness
writes, " The fort at the entrance of the harbor is
leveled with the foundation and the twenty-four
pounders thrown down; it looks as if it had been
battered to pieces by cannon shot  One
fine American ship, five hundred tons, was driven
on shore near the citadel, and in an hour nothing
could be seen of her but a few timbers." In the
Iowa cyclone of 1882 trees, cattle, human beings,
even houses, were sucked up into the enormous
spirals, whisked through the air, and then dashed
to atoms. This was the storm that was so fatal
to the institution at Grinnell. Usually colleges
investigate phenomena; this phenomenon inves
tigated a college, and did it with a scientific
thoroughness that left nothing further to be
analyzed. I have spoken of an " axis." An axis of course
there is; but around it lies a central space of
^Pop. Science Monthly, April, 1886, p. 857.

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 69
calms, which may be rods or even miles in diam
eter. The typhoon center is greatly dreaded by
the navigator. A ship caught within the deadly
enclosure wallows unmanageably in a tumbling
sea and inside a cylinder of wind whose walls are
whirling with a frightful speed. Violent squalls
and waterspouts are sent tearing off from the
revolving walls, and go thundering to and fro
within the cylinder like a Bedlam of demons. In
one of our many visits to Hongkong an English
man-of-war came into port which had undergone
a novel experience. In crossing the Indian ocean
she found a typhoon was making the same trip
just north of her and about parallel with her own
course. Her plucky commander was of an inquir
ing turn of mind and thought his ugly neighbor
would bear investigation. He accordingly bat
tened down his hatches and sailed in and out of
the storm three times for the purpose of deter
mining its size and course and verifying the
direction and force of the wind. Then he hove
to and waited, and when at a safe distance sailed
across its wake. There he found a big ship over
which the center had passed, waterlogged, dis
masted, and terribly mangled in the mighty
struggle. He had the happiness of picking oflF
her crew before she went down.

70 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
Of all the apparatus of havoc which belongs to
the hurricane there is one more to be noted which
is peculiarly fatal. It is the storm wave. The
hurricane not only draws into its vortex the
winds and lightnings and clouds; it sucks in the
sea also, and lifts a disk of water above the gen
eral level of the ocean almost as broad as its own
diameter. This enormous tidal wave does not
revolve with the wind, but is drawn forward by
it and keeps pace with it. Like a murderous
slave it does the bidding of the typhoon, and is
ready to engulf fleets, submerge islands, demolish
towns, desolate anything that may lie in its track.
Read the list of hurricanes that have ravaged the
West Indies and our own southern coast, from
the first one noted by Columbus down to this
present year of grace. In how many cases the
storm has carried with it appalling inundations
that have buried villages and strewn the wrecks
of vessels far inland. In October, 1864, this tem
pest-wave raised the Hoogly twenty-two feet for
many miles above Calcutta, sweeping banks and
islands with a fatal fiood. A cyclone which struck
the southern coast of India in 1789 led in its
train three storm-waves which buried a city of
thirty thousand inhabitants and lifted a whole
fleet of vessels far up on the shore. In a similar

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 71
catastrophe in 1876, which broke without warn
ing in the night, three large islands and many
smaller ones oflF the mouth of the Ganges were
buried by a wave twenty feet deep, and more than
two hundred and fifty thousand hapless beings
were swept into the sea. During a typhoon which
passed over Kobe, Japan, in July, 1871, scores of
ships and junks were carried into the fields and
forests far beyond the reach of the highest tides.
In one of the violent hurricanes of the West
Indies the waves broke on the northern shores of
the Barbadoes seventy-two feet above the mean
level. The memorable storm of October, 1780,
has been known as the most terrible cyclone of
modern times. The ravages of its tidal wave
were almost as destructive as those of the tempest
itself. This frightful convulsion hurled its weight
upon the hapless islands and fieets in its way more
like an avalanche of the ocean than a mere tem
pest. It spared nothing. Squadrons were crushed
like eggshells and sent to the bottom with all on
board. An English fleet at anchor oflF St, Lucia
went down on the spot, A French convoy with
five thousand troops on board, several men-of-war
on their way home, and a large number of mer
chantmen trading among the islands, were over
taken and sunk with their crews. Cities and

72 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
plantations were ravaged as terribly as the deep.
On the various islands nearly twenty thousand
people were crushed under the wreck of their
homes, or mangled by the countless missiles flying
through the air, or swept off by the tidal wave,
A less extensive hurricane, but almost equally
destructive, fell upon the southern coast of China
in the autumn of 1874, Hongkong was almost
torn to pieces. Every vessel in the harbor or on
the coast was crippled or sunk, and some eight
thousand lives were lost. An officer of the Pacific
mail steamer Alaska saw a fleet of more than one
hundred Chinese junks founder all at once. The
Alaska herself was driven on shore. Macao,
seventy miles west, fared still worse. The storm
obliterated whole streets and piled them with
blocking ruins. To add to its horrors a band of
pirates fired the city for purposes of plunder and
seven hundred houses were consumed. Every
vessel, foreign or native, was destroyed. Ten
thousand lives were lost; and long before the
dead could be disentangled for burial the air
became loaded with pestilence, and a wholesale
cremation was ordered. The destruction of prop
erty reached a total of millions.
I trust the reader is in a forgiving mood, and
our long delay in reaching this particular typhoon

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 73
will be condoned. There is a melancholy fascina
tion about these tragedies of the sea ; and I have
gathered a few of the grim facts which show the
power and the ferocity of this " sleeping giant of
the Ind " when he wakes in his wrath.
The ninth of October was creeping on. For
some days the weather had been ugly and threat
ening. Somewhere a storm was mustering for the
fray, and" Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof."
The barometer fluttered for a day or two and
then began to sink. The sky looked wicked.
The wind was blowing hard and increasing. Sail
had been gradually reduced. The waves had
worked themselves into an uncomfortable ferment,
" Rocked in the cradle of the deep " is very
romantic when you sing it, but not so nice when
the cradle breaks your head and threatens to
pitch you out. The timbers moaned and creaked,
and the spars aloft groaned with the extra press
ure when some deeper lurch swept them roaring
back against the blast, I do not know a sound
more dismal or ominous than the sepulchral tones
wrung from the very fibre of the ship as she
staggers reluctantly onward to meet the coming
storm, perhaps to meet her doom. She seems to
be groaning her own requiem beforehand.

74 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
When a tempest is on hand, sailors like to
make all snug alow and aloft. Seamanship re
quires it. So does safety. The sailor is not the
reckless being you think him when you see him
at work astride a yard-arm, or standing on a rope
reefing topsails seventy-five feet in the air. He is
a prehensile animal, and has methods of clinging
which are not recognized in common philosophy.
By noon we were in a state of uncomfortable
preparation; royal and topgallant yards and
masts sent down and stowed on deck ; spare spars
and boats made fast with extra lanyards; guns
secured with double lashings; hatches battened
down, and life-lines stretched along the decks, A
man-of-war is built for offensive warfare; but in
an encounter with a tempest she is wholly on the
defensive. She cannot attack the storm, it is the
storm that attacks her. She cannot even strike
back. There is no brilliant manoeuvre with which
she can flank her omnipresent antagonist. Her
petty array of battery, pikes, carbines and cut
lasses, with which she plays battle with other toy
ships like herself, are worse than useless in the
presence of a foe that scours around the horizon,
skirmishes at her from invisible distances, blinds
her with Egyptian darkness, crazes her wifii a
savage drunken sea, and gathering its forces into

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 75
successive paroxysms of wrath swoops down upon
her with the weight and plunge of half the
heavens falling. Then her battery is her deadliest
burden, and her sharpest weapons make her only
a more bristling target for the lightnings. She
cannot screen herself. She cannot ward oflF the
pitiless blows. She can only lie there on the
devilish sea and take unresisting all the fury and
ferocity with which her grim adversary can be
labor her. The Thing that was coming was evi
dently a cyclone; in the vernacular of the east,
a typhoon. Either term is sufficiently hideous to
any one whose judgment of the sign is at all
guided by his experience of the thing signified.
With the data at hand it would not be easy
to determine where this particular hurricane
originated, or in the throes of what atmospheric
convulsion it may have been brought to the agony
of birth. There was a villainous gale the same
day at Madras, with a fearful score of wrecks and
lives; but that was two thousand miles to the
west of us, and our assailant came from the south
east. The October mail steamer was badly dam
aged by a typhoon a few days before us in nearly
the same spot, but that had vanished and ours
could not have been its residuum. The Sobrao,
a Portuguese ship, was caught in a typhoon off

76 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
the Bashees which lasted ten days, and finally,
mangled, dismasted, and utterly exhausted, she
held together long enough for an American barque
to pick off her crew, then sullenly gave up the
fight and went down. This was two days before
our hurricane and seven or eight hundred miles
to the east. It is possible that the vortex in which
we were entrapped may have been an eddy sent
tearing off from this larger sphere. If so, its path
must have been a curve cutting diagonally across
Luzon or down its western shores before it struck
off over the seas in quest of other prey. The
weather record of Manila for the autumn of 1852,
if our Filipino friends kept such records then,
would easily determine. We never knew what
other havoc it may have infiicted, with the single
exception of one comrade in distress, an English
ship that started for California and had the ill
luck to be interviewed by three cyclones in suc
cession. The last of the three was ours, and it well
nigh finished her. It was " too muchy typhoon,"
as our Celestial friends admitted; and in process
of time she came limping back into Hongkong,
halt, crippled, masts gone, bulwarks and every
thing else swept clean with the deck from fore
castle to cabin. Logically she ought to have gone
to the bottom; but her three tormentors were

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 77
considerate enough not to come all at once. It
was an unusually bad season. Many were the
giant storms that stalked over the waves and
many the craft that attempted to run the gaunt
let. Some succeeded and escaped into more
amiable seas ; some were baffled and put back for
help; and some left their mangled ribs to gar
nish the reefs, or vanished in the still depths
where the storms send their victims and plunder
but can never go themselves.
We had been all day standing out to the north
ward and eastward on the port tack, with the
wind from the northward and westward. The
farther we got the more violent was the gale and
the heavier the sea. No wonder, for we were
plunging straight into the storm. The path of
the cyclone was just to the north of us. It was
crossing the China sea on a west-nor'west course.
We entered its southwest quarter, and were there
fore heading straight for its centre nearly all the
afternoon. Any East Indian navigator who may
chance to read this account would say that we
were on the wrong tack. Yes, we were; but to a
ship on a lee shore Hobson's choice may be the
only one open. Our position at noon that day
was lat, 17° 41', long, 110° 34', southeast of
Gaalong Bay, It had been the captain's inten-

78 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
tion to run in, but the wind was contrary, in every
sense of the term, and the coveted shelter of
Gaalong was impossible. Our special danger was
from the Paracels — an immense tract of reefs
and shoals something like a hundred square miles,
without an island or rock above the level of the
sea on which a poor waif might find refuge' in
case he outlived the boiling surge and the tearing
coral. We were just to windward of this sunken
trap. With the Paracels on one side and a
typhoon on the other it was worse than being
caught " between the devil and the deep sea." It
was not inspiring to reflect that if we did not
founder before reaching it we might go smashing
upon it at any moment. In the desperate eflFort
to claw off the ship was staggering under a press
of canvas which otherwise she would not have
dared to carry. The farther out we got, the more
furious and brutal the sea. A stunniug blow
from the crest of a wave dashed in the starboard
head. The decks had long been flooded. At
every lurch mountains of brine tumbled on board.
Sail had been gradually reduced to foresail and
main topsail, both close-reefed, with main trysail
and fore storm-staysail. But the violence of the
wind, instead of driving her forward, pressed her
over almost on her beam ends, and she was drift-

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 79
ing bodily to leeward. But that way lay the
Paracels, That would not do. The canvas must
come oflF, Meanwhile all hands on deck; all the
officers were summoned to the cabin. The first
lieutenant had taken the deck. His stentorian
voice could roar like a bull of Bashan ; but in the
fury of the storm even his voice could not be
heard six inches from his lips. The orders were
given in the cabin and were carried forward
among the men by the other officers who picked
their way desperately along the life-lines. It is a
serious job to shorten sail in a hurricane; com
monly the hurricane does not wait for you but
does it itself. The first rope started might take
the masts out of her. But there was no alterna
tive. And after a hard fight of two hours with
the whole crew at the ropes, the poor Saratoga
was lying under bare poles, wallowing, pitching,
rolling, plunging, almost sinking in the pitiless
sea; the foresail clewed up and stowed after a
fashion, the storm-staysail blown out of the bolt-
ropes, the trysail ripped into shreds and wound
in all impossible ways about the main shrouds and
running rigging. The main topsail gave the poor
fellows the toughest work and the greatest dan
ger. By superhuman eflFort it was clewed up, and
the boatswain, a powerfully muscular man, led

80 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
the crew of maintopmen up to furl it. He man
aged to crawl into the slings of the yard, but not
a man would follow him. Brave as they were, the
scene was enough to defy human power. The
yard, though of course down on the cap, was still
seventy-five feet and more from the deck. The
great sail was flapping and writhing and tugging
like a Titan, and threatened to rip yard and all
into the sea. The mast whirled in giddy circles,
sometimes dipping the yard-arms in the foam ; and
with such sudden and furious jerks that it required
all one's strength to hold on and keep from being
flung overboard. The air was full of driving
scud and black as pitch. The wind scooped oflF
the tops of the waves and sent them hissing
through the rigging with the force of a chain
shot. And the ghastly phosphorescence of the
sea as it boiled around the ship and through the
broken ports and over the hammock nettings cast
a deathly glare over the scene that served to make
the darkness visible. The men crept down and
abandoned the sail to its fate. It had four reefs
in it, and these held; but all below them was
stripped into ragged ribbons. Next morning the
poor topsail, which was nearly new, was a curi
osity fit for a museum.

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 81
All this time we were heading to the north
ward and eastward on the port tack. It was cer
tain that the Paracels were right under our lee;
how near, we could only conjecture. And though
we were forging slowly ahead, yet we were drift
ing very much faster toward those fatal rocks. It
was decided to get the ship about if possible, set
some patch of canvas that might perhaps hold,
and run her out into wider sea-room. Then we
could resume the port tack whenever the shift of
wind should indicate that the storm had traveled
far enough to bring us out of its southwestern
quarter into the southeastern. Any shipmaster
will understand how a vessel caught in a typhoon
to windward of the Paracels axid entering it from
the south would find the port tack the wrong one
to get into the storm and the right one to get out
of it. With infinite difficulty and risk the ship
was got round on the starboard tack, and headed
about southwest. She met her new course with a
fidghtfiil lurch and then a bound and plunge as if
determined to do her best. But it was asking too
much. She meide no headway, and those dread
rocks like a magnet were dragging her to leeward
as fast as before. Three or four hours must settle
our fate. We watched the bsirometer. Will it
never stop falling? Does it mean that we are

82 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
nearing the centre? Shall we go down in that
horrible vortex? Or will the storm keep us up
till it can dash us on those ghastly reefs? If the
cyclone is of great diameter, or is passing slowly,
the wind must hold from the same quarter for a
long time and there will be no escaping the
shoals. Better be on the port tack. That might
give us a ghost of a chance. Preparations were
made accordingly for wearing ship. But by this
time she had become quite unmanageable. In
that weltering mob of a sea, with enormous pyra
mids of black water rushing at her from all direc
tions at once, half submerging her and then in
the next breath pitching her out on the tip of a
roaring billow, she would not mind her helm, nor
pay the least attention to any of the common arts
of seamanship. As a last resort a desperate ex
periment was tried which I had read of but had
never expected to witness. The ship was under
bare poles and not a rag of canvas could live on
her for a moment. With an immense deal of
persuasion, some of it more force than suasion, a
hundred or more of the men were driven into the
weather fore rigging from twenty to fifty feet
above the deck, where they formed a dense mass
against which the hurricane drove with tremen
dous pressure. This was the evolution attempted

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 83
by one of the men-of-war caught in the disastrous
hurricane at Samoa in 1889; in this case the men
being massed in the mizzen shrouds instead of the
fore, I have often thought of those men thus
hung in mid air, and congratulated myself that
it was not one of the duties of a captain's clerk
to be among them. Drenched with the salt spray,
benumbed, yet clinging like death to the slippery
shrouds, whirled and jerked through the air by
the writhing ship beneath, swept over the boiling
caldron of waters now on the one side and the
next instant on the other, it was a miracle that
they were not every man of them snapped oflF and
shot headlong into the sea; and all the while the
black night made lurid and infernal by the phos
phorescent foam, and the elements roaring together
with a din more deafening and horrible than forty
million parks of artillery and as many more loco
motives, all thundering, howling, booming and
screeching at once. While these poor fellows were
hanging on for dear life in the fore shrouds,
other men were stationed with axes to cut away
the mizzenmast. The helm was put hard up.
But the poor ship, lacerated and exhausted, seemed
unable to make any further eflFort and lay help
lessly wallowing and tumbling like a log, A
desperate half hour had passed since the men

84 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
crept into the rigging. It seemed a week. The
order was on the lips of the first lieutenant to cut
away, when at last as if awaking to the situation
and rousing from some dreadful swoon she showed
signs of returning life. She began to feel her
helm and the terrific pressure of the wind on
that black swarm in the fore rigging, and slowly
and painfully began to pay off. It was a perilous
moment as she swung round into the trough of
the sea. Will she live through it? More likely
she will roll herself under and go down. We
braced ourselves and held our breath. Both bat
teries went under, as indeed they had been doing
all the evening. But there was gopd stuflF in her
yet. As she came to her course, with a few tre
mendous lurches she shook herself clear of the
mountains of water on her decks and rose heavily
and wearily on the next wave. Once fairly round
on the port tack it was found that the change had
come which the far seeing barometer had already
predicted. The wind was hauling to the west
ward. This meant that the centre of the storm
was directly north of us and was rapidly passing.
It meant also that we were not to leave our bones
on the Paracels. As it proved, the evolution had
been performed under the fiercest blast we had
that night. It was nine o'clock when we wore

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 85
ship. The storm continued to rage with fury, but
the squalls came less frequently and were less
spiteful. By midnight it had so far spent itself
that it was safe to begin to make sail. With the
close-reefed foresail on her again she was steadier,
and, crippled as she was, did her best to crawl
out of the dread neighborhood in which she had
so nearly met her doom. What that doom would
have been you can imagine from the memory of
scores of proud ships that have sailed out on the
mysterious sea, from which no tidings have ever
come back to the wives and mothers that watched
and wept and prayed. Or if the grim Paracels
had been our sepulchre, death would have been
still more tragic. There are no islands in that
submerged continent of graves ; no friendly strand
on which a drowning waif might possibly be cast;
nothing but murderous ledges and wild tearing
coral reefs. Had the Satratoga struck there, five
minutes would have sufficed to rend ship and crew
into shreds and scatter them through miles of
angry surf.
The next morning was a peaceful Sabbath,
When I went on deck at six bells the sun was
shining. The sea had quieted down, and a lan
guid breeze was wafting us gently along; sky and
ocean demurely innocent — apparently no recol-

86 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
lection of the wild orgies of the night before. The
morning watch was sending down the fragments
of split sails and bending others in their stead.
The decks were still lumbered with debris and
everything drenched and soaked. You may re
member how Bessus, the poltroon in one of Beau
mont and Fletcher's plays, described his memorable
drubbing: " I think I have been cudgelled by
all nations, and almost all religions," If our poor
old belabored craft could have put herself into
rhetoric, that is doubtless the way in which she
would have expressed her feelings. Three boats
were missing, torn away davits and all. The spare
spars in the main chains were gone, ports smashed
in, and loads of the smaller deck furniture, battle
axes, cutlasses, handspikes, life buoys, halyard
racks, and the like, washed overboard. During the
night the spanker boom had got adrift and taken
command of the poop, sweeping it clean of every
thing; and cutting up the heavy iron rail on
both sides had twirled it into the mizzen rigging
like so much wire. There was no loss of life.
Many of the crew were half drowned in the scup
pers, or cut and bruised as they were swept to and
fro across the decks in avalanches of waves, ropes,
spars, men, and everything movable, in a jumble
together. But the thing was passed, and we had

CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT 87
come out alive. It was an immense satisfaction to
find that we were still on top of the ocean instead
of the ocean on top of us, A week sufficed to
repair damages and make things shipshape. And
we started up the seas again to renew our quest
of pirates and glory.
Neither glory nor pirates were to be had for
the asking. But we had the luck to encounter
one episode that is pleasant to remember. One
forenoon, a fortnight after our mauling by the
tempest, the lookout at the masthead sung out,
" Sail ho ! " It was but a speck on the distant
waves, perhaps a derelict, or a tangle of jetsam
from some foundering bark. But as we approached
we could see something moving on board. It
proved to be a Chinese fishing boat, dismasted
in a typhoon three days after ours. The wretched
survivors were waving frantic signals of distress.
We sent a boat and took them off. For nearly a
fortnight they had been drifting about on the
waves, provisions gone, and nothing left but to
surrender to starvation or the merciless sea. They
were helped on board, six gaunt skeletons; and
the first thing they did was to drop on their knees
and knock their foreheads on the deck, worshiping
officers and crew alike for rescuing them from
death, I never saw a more pathetic sight. The

88 CRUISING FOR PIRATES AND WHAT WE CAUGHT
next thing was to turn them over to the medical
department for such mild nutrition as would save
them from starving. Then we went to quarters,
cast loose the guns, and began blazing away at
the dismasted junk in order to sink her out of the
way of passing ships. But somehow the balls
were contrary; the sea was rough, and she got
only four shots out of a whole broadside. As she
did not seem disposed to be good and go to the
bottom, another boat was sent to set her on fire.
We filled away and left her blazing astern.
Another week and our time was up. We plod
ded our way back to the old berth, and without
pirates, without glory, but with a lot of experience,
came to anchor as usual in Macao roads.

V
THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
If we did not catch any pirates in that dismal
cruise, we can pursue them through another
chapter and perhaps may overtake some of them
yet. It is much easier to catch them on paper than
on the high seas.^
If any part of the world might seem to have
been originally designed for a pirates' paradise,
the southern coast of China is the place. Fringed
with capes, beaded with islands of every size and
shape, pierced by estuaries made up of numberless
winding channels, it opens to the sea-rover count
less coves and pockets and watery labyrinths, for
lying in ambush or hiding from pursuit. One
of the wide-spread groups of islands through whose
tortuous passages the Canton river finds its way
to the sea has been the scene of so many of these
tragedies that it has richly earned its sinister title
* The chief authorities for the facts given in this chapter are various vol
umes of the Chinese Repository and of the Asiatic Journal; S. Wells Wil
liams, The Middle Kingdom; Du Halde, Gerieral History qf China;
Guillemard, A ustralasia; Wallace, A ustralasia; Fortune, Residetu:e A mong
the Chinese; Downing, Fangui in China; Forbes, Pive years in China; St.
John, The ivild coasts of Nipon; Yung-lun-yuen, History of the Pirates
¦who infested the China Seafrom 1S01 to ISIO, translated by Charles Fried-
erich Newman; and my own manuscript diary of four years on the East
India station. Many writers on Oriental topics have been consulted, and
various books of travel.

92 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
of the Ladrones, (Robbers.) Ever since pri
meval commerce began to creep along the shores
of the great empire, it has doubtless had its
bloody parasites. The lonely trader and the
clumsy fleet as well have had to reckon with this
ever present menace as one of the risks of the
voyage. It was never certain from behind what
headland or out of what lagoon might issue at
any moment a pack of these ocean wolves. If
departing voyagers never returned, it was some
times the typhoons and sometimes the pirates.
Dead men tell no tales.
It is easy to cover with facile phrase the long
and painful evolution of the centuries, especially
the slow-moving cycles of Cathay, It is not so
easy to fill in the picture with the actual de
tails; to imagine the growing commerce and the
growing piracy that preyed upon it; to portray
the long ages of sorrow on the sea — the stealthy
surprise, the sharp attack, the vain attempt to
flee, the desperate stand at bay, the fight for life,
the brutish yells, the cry for mercy, the ghastly
silence that settles on the slippery decks as the
butchers leisurely proceed to rifle their prey.
What myriads of tragedies like this have been
enacted far back in the dim primeval, while the
Celestial Empire has been slowly emerging from

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 93
savagery into national life, no chronicler has told.
But at least it was a process of martial training.
As Chinese commerce has run the gauntlet and
fought its way into existence, it has developed in
its own mariners, and in their assailants as well,
those qualities of courage, hardihood and grit
which the Western world could but admire in the
brave fellows of the Yalu fight in 1894, The
handling of the Ting Yuen and the Chen Yuen,
especially in the latter part of the action, affords
ample proof of the pluck of the Chinese man-o'-
war's-man when his blood is up. The victory fell
to Japan ; but history will award to the Admiral
Ting Ju Chang and his men the credit due to their
daring and skill. They fought for their country
against what they believed to be unjust usurpa
tion; and as one reads of their deeds of valor it
is easy to imagine that in the veins of some of
those warriors ran the blood of generations of
old-time buccaneers. The annals of Chinese piracy
have not wholly faded into oblivion. Some
epochs in its history are familiar to those students
who have a fancy for mousing about in the
unbeaten tracks of Oriental life, A glimpse at
the modus operandi will help to an intelligent
appreciation of these gruesome records, A few
modern samples will suffice.

94 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
The year before our futile quest for these
gentlemen of the high seas as narrated in the last
chapter, Captain Massie of H, B, M, steamship
Cleopatra had sent out a boat expedition among
the islands which after a running fight of five
hours had captured three eighteen-gun lorchas;
and yet two months afterward on about the same
cruising ground the BrUlante was cut oflF by free
booters, plundered of a large amount of treasure,
the crew massacred, and the ship scuttled and
sunk. In March 1853 her majesty's steam-sloop
Hermes came upon the scent of a whole squadron
a little way up the coast. After a hot pursuit
the outlaws turned at bay and defended themselves
with savage ferocity. But they were no match
for British guns and steam. The Hermes avenged
some of their villanies by sending four junks to
the bottom and towing three more as prizes back
to Hongkong.
In the summer of 1835 there came limping
into Hongkong harbor a much-abused hulk,
whose misadventures inspired sympathy wherever
her pitiful story came to be known. It was the
English barque Troughton from Singapore. First
of all she encountered a typhoon which did not
leave her till her masts were wrenched out of her
and her bulwarks were torn off clean with the

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 95
decks. Her exhausted crew managed to keep her
afioat with the pumps, and rigging a sail on a
jury-mast were slowly wafted in toward the land.
Here a new enemy awaited them. Surrounded
by trading junks and fishing craft, whose crews
would often come on board and lend a hand at
the pumps, their crippled condition was speedily
recognized. At sundown one afternoon two pirat
ical luggers laid her alongside and poured a
swarm of Celestial cutthroats on board. The
captain and mate dashed into the cabin for their
fire-arms; but before a shot could be fired two
hundred pirates had overpowered the crew and
lashed them to the deck. The captain and mate
fought from the cabin as long as their ammunition
lasted, and then did their best to blow up the
ship. Exhausted from loss of blood they were at
last driven from their refuge and bound with the
rest of the crew. The pirates looted their prize
of everything which the typhoon had spared and
then vanished in the darkness.
Sometimes these amiable enterprises are con
ducted by amateurs, so to speak, by your own
crew for example, if you happen to have shipped
a gang of Chinamen, Things have changed some
what even in the Central Flowery Kingdom, but
time was when a little professional venture of this

96 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
sort was not uncongenial to the average Chinese
coolie, whether ashore or afloat. In 1828 a French
merchantman, the Navigateur, was wrecked on the
coast of Cochin China. The commander hired a
junk to carry the remnants of his crew and cargo
northward to Macao. As they neared their des
tination the natives, who were five times their
number, rose upon them, murdered them all but
one and made off with their booty. Thilt one
after fighting desperately for his life leaped over
board and was picked up in the night by a pass
ing fisherman. It helps one to bear the memory
of the outrage more calmly to know that by his
evidence in court some fifteen or twenty of the
miscreants were identified and got short shrift
for their crime.
There have been bloody epochs in the history
of Chinese commerce when piracy was as much
an organized system as the opium traffic is now.
Whole fleets of sea-robbers prowled about the
coasts, plundered villages, levied blackmail on
native and foreigner alike, and generally silenced
their victims by sending them to the bottom. Let
us not be unreasonable. Those were days of the
iron hand everywhere. Why not give the Mongol
his chance as well as the Roman, the Norseman,
the Corsican, the Turk? Why not allow Koshinga

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 97
to play his drama along with Morgan, Hastings,
Kidd, Lafitte, Duval, and all the other great
actors of tragedy?
Chinese annals record two periods during which
these marauding fleets became so powerful and
insolent that the empire with all its resources
could not destroy them nor even repel their
attacks. There is plenty of romance in the story.
The most famous corsairs known to Chinese his
tory, most famous perhaps because most ferocious,
were a father and son, Ching Chelung and Ching
Chingkung. They flourished about the time of
the Manchu conquest in 1644. The son was
familiarly called Kwoshing, but is better known
by his Portuguese Latinized name Koshinga,
The father, after years of adventure, honest and
dishonest, untold and untellable, found himself at
the head of an immense nondescript fleet, with
which he harried the helpless coasts and laid
waste the seas. Bribes of wealth and rank decoyed
the redoubtable chieftain into the imperial service.
He was made supreme commander of the Chinese
navy. In his new position it became his duty to
protect commerce and destroy piracy. He accord
ingly protected commerce and destroyed piracy.
He knew how. No petty scruples of honor or
generous memory stood in the way. It was as a

98 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
sort of grim atonement for his own crimes that
whole squadrons of his former comrades were
with unpitying impartiality despatched to the
infernal shades. He assumed the monopoly of all
lucrative commerce and levied tribute on all
manner of craft. He did what he liked, and no
power in the empire dared question his right.
The emperor even bestowed on his son in marriage
a princess of the blood. In course of time his
unchallenged supremacy made him careless. De
tected in an intrigue against the government he
was enticed to court and there found himself in a
gilded cage beyond whose bars he was never again
permitted to go. There he languished for years
and finally died a prisoner of state.
It would take lurid colors to paint the wrath
of Koshinga when it became apparent that the
old tiger, his sire, was held in hopeless captivity.
No doubt the atmosphere reeked with Chinese
rhetoric. Vowing eternal hate to the whole Tatar
race, he summoned his fellow ruffians and betook
himself to his home on the wave. This was in
1646, For more than thirty years his name was
the terror of the seas. He preyed upon commerce
until from sheer fright commerce shut itself up in
port and dared not come out. As a result the
few prizes he caught were not enough to maintain

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 99
and feed his vast squadron. Then he invaded the
shores and plundered not only villages and towns
but capital cities and provinces. He besieged
Nanking. He captured and fortified Amoy. He
finally stole and occupied the island of Formosa,
seized the government, established arsenals and
ports for his fleets, and thence hurled his filibus
tering raids upon the opposite coasts. At last his
bloody incursions became such an intolerable
scourge to the empire, which could neither prevent
nor resist them, that the extraordinary measure
was adopted of abandoning for the time all trade
on the seas and withdrawing the entire population
from the coast. This was actually done, probably
the only instance of the kind in history, and the
queer Chinese were the only people who would
ever have dreamed of tactics so absurd and so
masterly. For hundreds of leagues up and down
the shores of the great realm there stretched be
tween the hungry vampires and their victims a
strip of abandoned seacoast twelve miles broad,
whose fields lay untilled, whose once populous
cities and villages lay deserted and crumbling in
decay, whose useless junks slumbered and found
ered at their moorings in the harbors, Byron's
" dream which was not all a dream " sounds

100 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
almost like the work of a newspaper reporter
writing up the details:
"The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths ;
Ships sailorless, lay rotting on the sea."
Macao alone was excepted, and that because
the Portuguese colonists were presumed to be
competent to protect themselves. It was seven
years before the deserted sea-fringe of the empire
was re-occupied and trade was allowed to flow
back into its wonted channels. The death of the
dreaded Koshinga soon after closed the piratical
era of the seventeenth century.
Minor adventurers still carried on their more
stealthy depredations, and have done so inter
mittently ever since. The growing value of an
increasing commerce, with the addition of price
less argosies from Europe and America, furnished
ample temptation. China has always grown her
full quota of bandits and thugs, ever ready to
take advantage of such golden opportunities. But
no other outbreak of piracy on so grand a scale
has since occurred, until the first decade of the
nineteenth century.
In December 1806 the mate of an English ship
was captured and brought into the presence of
the commandant of the fleet. He found himself in

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 101
a squadron of some six hundred junks and lorchas,
carrying batteries of from six to eighteen pound
ers, and classed in five divisions under five inde
pendent chiefs. During his captivity he became
familiar with the entire system, its organization,
its stringent regulations, the numbers and arma
ment of the divisions, their plans and methods
of attack. After some five months of captivity
he was finally ransomed. Three years later
another Englishman fell into their hands. The
fleet had grown. There were six divisions. The
total force operating, though rarely all together,
he estimated at eight hundred large vessels and a
thousand smaller craft, carrying an equipment of
some seventy thousand men. The atrocities he
witnessed are detailed with a sailor's frankness
and do not make pleasant reading. It was Kosh
inga redivivus, only worse. The Englishman's
story fully corroborates the chronicle written
down by Yung-lun-yuen, a Chinese scholar who
was a contemporary of the bloody actors and
exploits he describes. The six squadrons sailed
under six flags — red, yellow, black, blue, green,
and white. It was the yellow fleet which has fur
nished this chapter with its label, for it was
the admiral of the yellow, Woo-che-tsing, who
assumed the winsome title " Scourge of the East-

102 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
ern Seas." If actions speak louder than words he
more than made his title good. The red fleet is
of still more thrilling interest, partly because it
outnumbered all the rest put together, partly
because it was for a time commanded by a
woman. In 1807 the arch-outlaw Ching-yih, who
had driven it into the smoke and flarae of many
a desperate conflict, perished in a violent storm.
His widow at once took command, and in a hun
dred fights demonstrated that she had inherited
the temper and prowess of her bloody mate. The
" new woman " of the East had come. Men feared
and obeyed. She maintained the discipline of a
martinet and exacted implicit submission. Never
was petticoat government more strenuous or more
efficient. She was punctilious in her dealings
with the folk on shore, and by honest and liberal
payment for supplies won their confidence and
favor; a policy which the other divisions of the
fleet might have followed with advantage.
Some of the exploits of these red-rovers are
curiously interesting. If any of my readers have
sailed up the Canton river, you will recall the
Chinese fortress of the Boca Tigris at its mouth,
on the starboard side as you enter. Down by the
waterside a long white parapet stretches along the
shore; at each end a wall reaches up the hill and

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 103
disappears over the crest. Whether there is a
fourth wall out of sight, joining the two and com
pleting the square, I do not remember; but cer
tain British tars could tell you, if they have lasted
from 1841 to this present year of grace. During
the opium war the fortress was attacked. The
storming party pulled quietly around the head
land and forming on the beach clambered up over
the hill, and the first notice the Celestials had
that they were being attacked was the sight of
the foreign troops rushing down upon them from
the rear within the walls. There was nothing
for it but to surrender. They surrendered there
fore, but bristling with wrath at such a breach
of military manners. "Hiyah! Why you no
come front side ! More better makee fight where
we makee ready ! "
It was an earlier commandant of this same
fortress who met with equally bad luck. One of
the fleets appeared in his neighborhood and he
sallied out to attack it. The pirates surrounded
him, and after a furious action which lasted all
day and with such havoc as may better be left to
the imagination, captured him and such frag
ments of his fleet as were still afloat. This dis
aster was partly avenged the next year, when the
Chinese admiral with a hundred junks attacked

104 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
another fleet on the same cruising ground. Great
numbers of the pirates were destroyed and some
two hundred taken prisoners. If you are familiar
with Chinese methods you can readily judge how
long the two hundred were kept from joining
their bloody shipmates in the shades below. In
another encounter not far from the same place,
before the combatants could close upon one an
other it fell dead calm, whereupon crowds of the
pirates leaped into the sea like savages, swam to
the enemy with their knives in their teeth, and
attacked with such fierceness that they could not
be beaten off, and actually cut out several junks
from the imperial fleet. The fortunes of war
varied. With provoking impartiality and appar
ently with no preference on the score of justice
or ethics, victory would perch on the standard of
the pirate quite as often as on the banners of the
righteous defenders of their country. We read of
whole squadrons engaged, fighting all day and
all night, two days, even three days at a time,
two or three hundred junks on a side, and a drawn
game at the end. No child's play this. At one
time the admiral was lying quietly at anchor
among the islands; suddenly two hundred pirate
craft slip around the headland and pounce upon
him with an onset so furious that twenty-five of

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 105
his fleet are gone with their captors before he can
get up his anchors and chase them.
These conflicts were not confined to the sea.
There were raids on the villages that lined the
harbors and rivers. Spies made their way into the
bazaars disguised as peddlers, barbers, traders;
if they came out alive they brought news to the
waiting fleet where were to be found the easiest
conquests and the richest booty. Sometimes the
villagers fled, and the women and cattle were
scooped up by the invaders ; sometimes they made
a stand, and the bloody struggle proved the valor
of the longshoreman as well as of the bandit.
Large towns were sacked, and prisoners were
gathered not by the score only or by the hundred
but even by the thousand. Some unique exploits
are recorded. When Mei-ying, the bonny wife
of Kee-chu-yang, was captured, she railed at her
captors with such stinging eloquence that one of
the ruffians knocked her down; whereupon she
leaped to her feet, seized him with her teeth and
sprang overboard, dragging the brute with her
to a watery grave.
It more than once happened that when a com
mander found the brigands were too many for
him and were closing in upon him for the coup
de gidce, he retreated to the magazine and turned

106 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
the tables on them by blowing himself and them
out of water. On one occasion by a happy stroke
of fortune the pirate fleet was caught and penned
in its own lair. Great preparations were made
for a mighty stroke of destruction. Twenty-five
fire junks were sent blazing in among the anchored
craft. The imperial fleet followed; intending
by a supreme blow to annihilate the whole bloody
horde. With the corsairs it was a fight for life.
Any one who has witnessed a Chinese battle can
imagine the uproar of such an encounter. Hun
dreds of the pirates paid the penalty of their
crimes, but the mangled remnant of their fieet
broke through the blockade and scuttled out to
the open sea. The plucky admiral pursued them
and sank a few more. After dark they turned
back on him and repaid him in kind.
Among such turbulent spirits we need not won
der if the internal conditions were not always
serene. In process of time a violent feud broke
out in the squadron under the petticoat chief.
Words came to blows. The mutineers drew oflF
their clientele and staked their destiny on a
pitched battle. The vanquished party after an
overwhelming defeat concluded to retire from
business and submit to government. We get an
inkling of the magnitude of these operations from

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 107
the fact that this one capitulation included no
less than eight thousand men, one hundred and
twenty-six vessels, some five hundred battery guns,
and several thousand stand of miscellaneous arms,^
The commander of the defunct fleet was honored
with a government position.
This appealed to the heart of the widow chief
tain herself. Perhaps a life spent among scenes
of carnage may have begun to pall upon her.
She negotiated. After various diplomatic inter
changes, assured at last of safety, she decided to
capitulate, and with the wives and children of
some of her officers the blood-stained tigress pre
sented herself before the governor general at
Canton, The pardon accorded by government
put an end to what was left of the famous red
squadron, and cleaned out the middle and eastern
channels of the Canton river. Many of her red-
handed followers enlisted in the imperial fleets
and were put at once to the work of "pacification,"
The other fleets were destroyed or saved them
selves by submission. The "Scourge of the East
ern Seas" came in with the rest and so retained
his worthless head. And the Chinese historian
who is my authority for this denouement adds
with a cheerful optimism that is hardly sustained
' Yung-lun-yuen, 74, 75.

108 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
by the sequel, that now, (that is, in 1810) "ships
pass and repass in tranquillity. All is quiet on
the rivers, the four seas are tranquil, and people
live in peace and plenty,"
But an opulent commerce, growing richer every
year, was very attractive and made piracy as
tempting as ever. And so it came to pass that
the great "pacification" of 1810 did not stay
pacified. The China seas have never since been
vexed by such enormous squadrons of buccaneers,
nor have witnessed such tremendous battles; but
local adventurers have been plentiful, and on
occasion have combined into very considerable
fleets. The Chinese navy has now and then
roused itself to a spurt of zeal, but has never
accomplished much in the way of clearing the
seas; apparently it has not had much stomach
for the attempt. Most of the actual suppression
of Chinese piracy has been due to the courage
and skill of British tars.
Many officers of the royal navy, while serving
in the East, have had a hand in the exciting task
of ferreting out and destroying these highwaymen
of the sea. Captain St, John, who was thus em
ployed for several years, gives graphic details of
his various expeditions, now chasing them into
the winding channels which form so large a part

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 109
of the intricate network of the Canton river, now
surprising them in the snug harbors where they
lay concealed behind the hills. His account of
their attack on the mail steamer plying between
Hongkong and Canton gives a sample of their
audacity, A fleet of forty-four junks pounced
upon her from the reaches that open into the
river; she had to run the gauntlet of them all
and was badly hulled with shot before she man
aged to escape. On another page he describes a
large opium junk which lay at anchor close by
his own berth. She was' bound up the coast to
Swatow, and with a crew of forty-five and a full
battery of twelve and eighteen pounders seemed
so absolutely secure that some forty passengers
came on board to take advantage of a conveyance
so safe. She got underway at nightfall, but had
scarcely cleared the Lymoon Pass before it fell
calm and she was obliged to anchor. At mid
night a large junk slipped quietly alongside,
boarded her and overpowered the watch on deck
before they fairly knew they were attacked. The
passengers and crew were driven below and secured
under hatches and the vessel taken around to a
secluded spot on the south side of the island,
where every soul on board except a small boy was

110 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
lashed hand and foot and flung overboard. The
junk was then rifled and sunk.
It is an immense satisfaction to know that these
miscreants occasionally fall into their own trap.
The fate they prepare for their victims rebounds,
and they get a taste of their own villainy, A
thrilling adventure of this sort happened to Major
Shore ofthe English army. Having occasion just
after the opium war to visit Ningpo, he was
obliged to return at once and at night over a
route swarming with pirates. He was in a Chinese
passage-boat, his own little boy the only other
passenger, and his only weapons two double-
barrelled duck guns and a brace of heavy pistols.
The night was still and he slept with his guns for
company. Just before daybreak one of his boat
men, blanched with terror, roused him with the
news that the pirates were coming. He seized his
arms and leaped on deck. The silvery mist of the
dawn obscured his vision, but presently he made
out a dark object looming through the haze, a
large ugly-looking boat crowded with a gang of
assassins stealthily creeping toward his defense
less craft. One can imagine his reflections in the
brief interval before they would be alongside.
His only chance lay in giving them such a sudden
and hot reception that they would suppose his

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 111
boat filled with men. He could see them now, a
score of bronze villains with long knives in their
hands, some of them stripped to the waist, some
of them with dirks stuck through the coils of their
pigtails. There they crouched like tigers ready
to spring, as vicious a lot as ever murdered an
honest crew. For just such game as this, if he
should have the ill fortune to meet any, he had
taken the precaution to load each barrel with a
double charge, and as it would not do to miss fire
he reprimed his percussion locks with fresh caps.
In the deathly stillness he even noticed the tick
ing of his watch and the beating of his heart, and
" wondered how soon both would cease forever,"
Crouching behind the rail and scarcely breath
ing till the boats were within ten yards of each
other, he took careful aim and let drive both
barrels straight in the ruffians' faces. Shrieks
of rage and pain and a crash of tumbling bodies
bore witness to the execution. Those two shots
cleared the forecastle. Not daring to lose any
chances he seized the other gun and blazed away
at the crowd in the waist. Another yell, a panic,
and a babel of confusion. He was swiftly reload
ing when a ball from a swivel gun on the pirates'
bow whizzed by his head and shivered the mast.
The savage who had thus missed his mark was

112 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
apparently the leader of the gang, a swarthy
muscular chief, whose giant frame loomed dark
against the gray dawn. The major instantly
covered him with his pistol; a sharp explosion,
and the miscreant with his fuse still burning
pitched headlong into the black waters beneath.
At this final blow the pirates stood not on the
order of their going but incontinently fled. The
passage boat with sail and oars scuttled away
from so dangerous a neighborhood at the top of
her speed. The chastisement inflicted by the
brave major taught the brigands a lesson not
soon forgotten. It was a long time before they
dared attack anything, native or foreign, until
well assured that their victim was Unarmed, or
that they could dash upon him unawares.
While the southern coast seems to have been
the favorite field of operation for these Celestial
vikings, the northern seas have also suffered from
the same dread scourge. None of the estuaries
of the north are so admirably contrived for bucca*
neering purposes as the Canton river, with its
countless branches, channels and creeks; but
there are plenty of islands alid jutting capes and
snug coves behind or within which any discreet
pirate could conduct his business in safe seclusion.
Whoever therefore has had occasion to entrust

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 113
himself to wind and wave on errands of commerce
or science or travel has found it to his advantage
to take account of the corsairs as one of the perils
of the deep.
Mr, Fortune describes in his entertaining book
a trip he once took on the steamer Erin from
Ningpo to Shanghai, They had scarcely cleared
the river Min below the city when they found them
selves in the midst of a squadron of freebooters
engaged in blockading the passage between Silver
island and the shore, and capturing every sort of
native craft that attempted to run the gauntlet
in or out. Some of the prizes were plundered at
once and turned adrift. The more valuable were
taken to the pirates' den to be held until ransomed
by their rich owners in Ningpo, Negotiations
would be carried on sometimes for weeks, and all
the while a posse of Chinese men-of-war sleeping
lazily at their anchors within half a dozen miles
of the scene. The Erin threaded her way through
the fleet unmolested, witnessing as she passed the
capture of a big Shantung junk which they had
decoyed into their ambuscade. " During the time
they were in sight," Mr. Fortune continues, " we
observed several vessels from the north fall into
their hands. They were in such numbers and
their plans were so well laid that nothing that

114 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
passed in daylight could possibly escape. Long
after we had lost sight of their vessels we saw and
pitied the unsuspecting northern junks running
down with a fair wind and all sail into the trap
which had been prepared for them,"
In a short time, however, the avenging furies
were on the track of the outlaws. On her way up
the coast the Erin met an English cruiser, the
Bittern, and gave her the needed information.
The rendezvous of the piratical fleet was found to
be at She-poo, a landlocked harbor a few miles
south of Chusan. For She-poo the Bittern headed
at once with her ally the Paoushcm, a steamer
which had been recently purchased and equipped
by a company of Chinese merchants for the pro
tection of their commerce. The pirates had a
well organized system of sentries and spies, and
knew of their assailants long before they appeared
oflF the narrow entrance to the harbor. Confident
in their overwhelming numbers they welcomed
the two vessels with derisive yells and deafening
clamor of guns and gongs. The steamer towed the
brig into position, where she leisurely anchored,
and so close to the pirate lines that the storm of
shot from their batteries passed over her and
splashed harmlessly into the water beyond. Her
response was something terrific. The first broad-

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 115
side demolished or sank more than one of the
braggart junks. Her guns were aimed by British
gunners and every shot told. Junk after junk
went to the bottom. The derisive yells were
turned into shrieks of terror and pain. The har
bor was strewn with mangled wreckage and float
ing bodies. Hundreds of the pirates were mowed
down by shot and shell, or were drowned as they
dashed overboard and vainly struck out for land.
Some two or three hundred succeeded in scramb
ling on shore, and throwing up a hasty redoubt
mounted some guns. A squad of British tars
landed in pursuit and by a swift flank movement
routed them to the four winds. The victory was
supreme. The annihilation of the pirates and
their fleet was as great a surprise and almost as
complete as though a volcano had suddenly risen
in their midst with a fiery eruption in full blast.
The throngs of village and country folk who
crowded the hillsides around the bay were lost in
admiration at the bravery ofthe " foreign devils."
How the plucky little brig and her consort dared
venture into the tigers' lair and grapple such an
enormously superior force was a miracle quite
beyond the Celestial imagination.
But the centuries pass. Even China yields to
the pressure of modern life. Railroads are begin-

116 THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
ning to run their lines of steel toward the heart
of the empire. Telegraphs and telephones are
spinning their web of wires over the land. The
government is minting its own coinage, developing
its mines with Yankee machinery, establishing
arsenals, steam-works, navy-yards like the rest of
the world. Chinese schools are teaching western
science. Christian missions are disseminating a
higher faith, a purer morality, and a more rational
civilization. The same progressive spirit has laid
hold of commerce. The sleepy junk cannot keep
pace with the swift demands of business, and now
along the vast water front of fifteen hundred
miles most of the carrying trade is handled by a
fleet of jaunty steamers owned by the govemment
and sailed by European officers. The inland
waters are open to steam navigation, foreign as
weU as native, and that means not only an enor
mous increase of commerce but the penetration of
the Chinese world in every direction with western
ideas. It may indeed happen that an occasional
paroxysm of reaction, like the Boxer massacres,
may sweep over some section of the great empire
and may for the time turn all progress and all
hope into chaos. But the world moves fast. And
no oriental barrier can long withstand the flood-
tide of modern civilization.

THE SCOURGE OF THE EASTERN SEAS 117
These forward movements are enough to make
old Koshinga's bones rattle in his tomb. The
modem bandit, too, looks out from his lair with
consternation. His old lorchas and mandarin
boats are no match for steam. He can do little
more than a small and stealthy retail business.
A sudden dash upon a lonely trader and a stab
in the dark may win an occasional prize; but let
him come out into the open and dare anything
on a larger scale, and the imperial steam navy
would speedily hunt him down on his own blood
stained seas. And if the Yellow Dragon needs
help in the operation, many another knight errant
like Chinese Gordon would be eager to volunteer.

VI
BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
Japan is the Emerald Isle of the east. Its
people call it the Empire of the Rising Sun, Its
sun is rising fast. The transformation is so com
plete that the Japan of flifty years ago is forever
past and gone. When I dream over again the
adventures of that famous Expedition, I seem to
be sitting among the shadows of past centuries
and watching the argosies of the middle ages, or
the bucaneering voyages of Raleigh and Caven
dish and Drake.
In the summer of 1872 Mr. Mori, then Japan
ese minister at Washington, made a speech in
English before an educational convention in Bos
ton. I could hardly credit my senses as I listened
and thought ofthe marvelous change. Only nine
teen years before I had witnessed the strange
scenes which befell on those mysterious shores,
where by the laws of the realm it was death for a
foreigner to set his foot; and here already was an
educated Japanese gentleman habited in western
costume and addressing us in our own language !
It was one of the miracles of history. Other mira-

122 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
cles, political, commercial, social, martial, have
followed in swift succession. And they have so
transformed the Japan of the dark ages into an
enlightened modern nation keeping step with the
civilization of the west, and now standing in line
with the other world-powers, that one can hardly
remember there ever was a blind past of super
stition and isolation^  - — 
The interest felt in our oriental venture was
not confined to America. Over that secluded
land on the rim of the world had always brooded
a cloud of mystery ; and that threw a sort of halo
over the fleet itself. Its progress was watched by
all Europe. Japan, too, was on the alert, for the
air was thick with rumors, and the coming squad
ron was casting its shadows before. There are
reasons of course why we Americans should feel a
special concern in our own enterprise. As it was
American diplomacy that unlocked the gates of
the Sunrise Kingdom to the outside world, so Amer
ican institutions have largely furnished the mod
els for the reconstruction of her social and politi
cal life. And by the great highway of the Pacific
America lies nearest to the marts of commerce
and trade thus laid open to the fleets of the west.
But why send an expedition to those distant
shores? What was our interest in Japan, or

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 123
Japan's interest in us, that should prompt such
a mission? The letter which Commodore Perry
bore from our government to the Mikado asked
for a mutual treaty.^ The original instrument
was drafted in May, 1851, by Daniel Webster,
then Secretary of State, and was signed by Presi
dent Fillmore. There it rested. Perhaps the
presidential autograph and seal proved too heavy
a dignity. At any rate it never rose after that,
and it never got to Japan. In November, 1852,
Mr. Webster's successor, Edward Everett, fished
it out of the departmental pigeon holes, took it
to pieces, and re-fashioned it. Three copies were
prepared and were splendidly engrossed in Eng
lish, Dutch and Chinese. These were enclosed
together in a sumptuous gold case; and to make
the whole presentment still more impressive to
the Japanese mind the gold case was enshrined
in a coflFer of rosewood. This was the precious
missive borne by the American fleet. One would
hardly think so small a package would require a
^ It has greatly interested me to discover that the original suggestion which
led to this treaty came from my late neighbor and friend, Hannibal Hamlin,
senator from Maine, afterwards Vice President with Abraham Lincoln,
" His attention was drawn to the possibilities of trade which the United
States might build up with oriental nations. On Feb. 21, 1850, he intro
duced a resolution calling on the Secretary of State for whatever information
he might possess covering these points [abuse of our sailors, and possibili
ties of trade] and also requesting him to report on the advisability of
appointing a commissioner or diplomatic agent to open up amicable rela
tions and negotiate commercial treaties wim these nations.''
Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin, by his grandson, Charles Eugene
Hamlin, p. 230.

124 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
whole squadron to carry it. Why would not a
single messenger of peace be more appropriate
than batteries and guns? The lords of creation
do not commonly make their proposals to the
weaker sex at the cannon's mouth. But Japan
was a somewhat supercilious dame, and had hotly
resented such overtures before. She would do so
again. There was no reason to expect that the
haughty empire would deign to receive, much less
to read and answer, any appeal from the outside
barbarian world unless backed by a force capable
of making its mission respected, America had
reason to demand a hearing, and her fleet made
it possible to get it. The document entrusted to
Commodore Perry asked ofthe Japanese court two
things, friendship and trade. Friendship, for the
safety of our seamen; that first and foremost.
Many a hapless crew had been driven into their
ports by storm or wrecked on their rocky coast,
escaping the perils ofthe deep only to be welcomed
to a dungeon or a cage on shore. This wrong
must be stopped at all hazards. The American
flag is bound to protect the American sailor; and
it was high time to teach the island empire of the
east how to behave to the citizens of the great
republic of the west. And if in addition we could
persuade Japan to enter into friendly relations of

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 125
trade, the two countries by mutual interchange
of productions might promote each its own pros'
perity and the welfare of the other. It was
thought that an Oriental might see that as well
as a Yankee, In the end they did. It cannot be
said that Japan ever really yearned to be "opened"
any more than an oyster does; yet when the time
came, she yielded as gracefully as any oyster I
ever had the pleasure of meeting.
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry reached
Hongkong in the steam frigate Mississippi April
seventh, 1853, His arrival produced the usual
flurry of rumors; and when the air cleared, the
one fact left which specially concerned us was
that the Saratoga would be detained to form a
part of the great expedition. The appointed term
of our cruise was up, indeed, or would be by the
time we could reach home. But the squadron
was small at best, and the commodore could ill
aflFord to spare a single ship; and on our own
part a visit to that mysterious land was too big
a thing to miss.
We wasted no time in bewailing our fate.
Orders flew thick and fast from the flagship, and
a month was spent in miscellaneous preparations,
diplomatic, financial and commissariat. The
beginnings of even the famous movements of his-

126 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
tory are prosaic. At last all the fleet was safely
gathered at the appointed rendezvous, Napa, the
chief harbor of Lew Chew. The Saratoga brought
from Macao the interpreter, Dr. S. Wells Wil
liams; and as we neared the entrance we met the
Susquehanna and the Mississippi just going in.
They had come from Shanghai; and some days
later the Plymouth appeared from the same quar
ter. These four with the storeships Supply and
Caprice, constituted our entire force in the China
Seas. A small armada with which to " open " an
empire !
It might seem as if now that the fleet was all
present the one thing to do was to up anchor and
make straight for Japan. But expeditions are
ponderous things. They do not go off like a
rocket. Beside the main issue there are other
matters, more and of larger concern than are
dreamed of in common philosophy. And while
the commodore and his satraps are attending to
these, the rest of us can take to the road and idle
about in whatever direction the scenery or the
people may promise entertainment. We may not
get to Japan in this chapter, but if the function
aries are duly deliberate we may have leisure to
observe divers and sundry things.
The Lew Chew islands are velveted with a quiet

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 127
garden-like verdure which gives them an air of
peaceful dignity. The interior is more picturesque
than the border-line of the shore. The well
groomed valleys are separated frora each other
sometiraes by crags whose ragged heights are
festooned with piasses of trailing vines, sometimes
by smoothly rounded summits where grow side
by side with equal ease and no envious rivalry the
tropical palm and the northern pine. The natives
impressed us as a courteous and sedate folk, some
what stately and reserved, yet amply endowed
with human nature.
A British flag which was flung to the breeze as
we neared the anchorage marked the residence of
the only white man on the group, the missionary
Dr. Bettelheim. We found him an interesting
man, sent there by the London Naval Mission,
and faithfully working for the good of the natives.
He furnished us with vocabularies, and it was not
long before we could parlez-vous with the people
in their own language, at least on such momentous
facts as poultry, potatoes, plantains and pigs.
Though just outside the tropics, we found the
islands richly embellished with tropical growth to
the hilltops; and the transparent waters of the
bay revealed gardens of many-hued coral beneath.
The diving apparatus was at various times brought

128 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
into requisition to examine the bottoms of the
ships, I remember one afternoon the diver hav
ing finished his task took his boat to a submerged
reef, threw over his ladder and descended for a
stroll in the coral gardens below. It was like wan
dering through the pleasure grounds of Neptune's
palace, among shrubbery, brilliant with parti
colored flowers and fruit. Coming to the edge of
the reef he threw over his ladder again, and
climbing downward came presently to a cave in
the cliff which he entered and explored. Perhaps
he was prospecting for " full many a gem," which
the poet declares " the dark unfathomed caves of
ocean bear." One cannot help wondering how
the poet knew. Had he been a diver? But all the
gems our submarine prospector found were alive
and wonderfully chromatic and tame; children
of the sea of fairy shape and rainbow colors that
were flitting in and out or gathering in respectful
shoals around him and watching with eager curi
osity the movements of this lusus naturae which
had invaded their watery realm. They scarcely
protested when he even took them in his hands to
examine their graceful shape and iridescent scales.
While we lay at anchor two episodes lent a
mild flavor of interest to the passing days. One
was an official visit of the commodore with a big

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 129
retinue to Shudi, the capital of Lew Chew, where
they were fraternally entertained by the regent,
his staflF, and crowds of curious spectators, who in
turn were themselves immensely entertained by the
band music, the gilt trimmings of their foreign
guests, and the general outlandishness of the pag
eant. The other was an exploring party sent out
to examine the geology of the island, its agricul
tural conditions, the people and their modes of
life. Bayard Taylor was a meraber of this recon-
noitering squad and on its return wrote out the
official report. This was the first introduction of '
most of us to the young traveller. He was not
yet twenty-nine, but had already acquired dis
tinction both as a traveller and as a writer. His
stalwart manhood impressed us. There was a
genial look on his face that reflected a generous
nature within; yet there were lines which had
been traced by suflfering; and we learned after
wards of the death of his young wife two years
before. On his way home from Egypt and the
Soudan he had been turned back by an order
from the New York Tribune directing him to
meet the Expedition in China and accompany it to
Japan. He overtook the commodore at Shanghai,
and found to his surprise that for an outsider to
get a chance in the navy, especially for such an

130 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
unusual mission, required not only diplomacy and
red tape but a large araount of persistence. The
commodore finally consented, and the young
aspirant, destined afterwards to be a foreign
ambassador himself, was duly rated on the ship's
muster-roll as a master's mate — a dignity about
corresponding to the rank of passed midshipman.
He was not the only man who coveted a place in
the expedition. Many of the gentlemen occupy
ing commercial and official positions in Chinese
ports were intensely interested, and several of
them raade earnest endeavors to capture a berth
in it. I remember a resident of Hongkong sent
me a fervent request for the use of my clerkship
for a few weeks, even to the extent of offering a
year's salary for the privilege. Bayard Taylor
adorned the modest rank of raaster's mate for some
four months, and with the commodore visited Lew
Chew and the Bonins before starting for Japan,
In both the commodore sent out exploring par
ties to make a study of the islands and their
resources. Bayard Taylor was a meraber of both
missions. He wrote out the official report of the
first, and must have had a hand in the other also
as he was the leader of one of the two divisions.
His diary of experiences in this naval service
must have been entertaining, but alas, it is buried

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 131
fathoras deep in the naval archives at Washing
ton. In accordance with an order issued by the
commodore to all who kept journals of the expe
dition, he turned it in to the Navy department
and never saw it again. ^ When the squadron
came away frora the first visit to Japan he laid
down his mateship and returned to New York in
December of that year.
On the ninth of June, leaving two or three of
her consorts at anchor, the Susquehanna got under
way with the Saratoga in tow, and left the harbor
on a tour of observation. Very nice and comfort
able to be tied to the apron strings of a motherly
steam frigate when you want to get somewhere
and the wind is either dead calm or dead ahead.
Our objective was the Bonin islands, or as on
Japanese charts the Ogasawara, a group sorae
eight hundred miles to the eastward of Lew Chew.
The commodore was in quest of a coaling station
for future trans-pacific lines of ocean greyhounds.
Nobody dreamed then that the Philippines and
Guam would some time drop into our lap. And
commodores being no more omniscient than the
rest of us, such a historic surprise could not be
foreseen ; otherwise he would have had no interest
' His impr^essions of the Sunrise Kingdom and of the famous embassy
were embodied a year or two later in a volume entitled A Visit io India,
China and Japan in the year 1853.

132 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
in the Bonins, and we should have missed a unique
experience. In due time the islands began to lift in dim
tracery on the eastern horizon; a rugged group
of volcanic fragments upheaved from the floor of
the ocean in some dire geologic convulsion ages
ago; serving in recent times for the occupancy
of wild hogs and goats and a score of human
waifs almost as wild who had drifted thither
from sundry corners of the earth. The harbor in
which we came to anchor. Port Lloyd, is said to
be the submerged crater of an ancient volcano
whose fires were long since extinguished by the
sea. One can well believe it when he finds his
anchorage in eighteen to twenty-two fathoms;
he shuffles off a mortal coil of cable and before it
stops running out his anchor seems to be going
down into the very bowels of the earth.
Here, as at Lew Chew, exploring parties prowled
through the interior and found it more mountain
ous, more tangled and more picturesque than
Lew Chew. The heights were crowned to their
craggy tops with trees of great variety and often
of brilliant beauty. From the surarait one could
trace the irregular shores ofthe three main islands,
Stapleton, Peel and Buckland, and could count
the brood of callow islets and rocks that littered

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 133
the sea around them. There was plenty of occu
pation for the four days we lay at Port Lloyd;
climbing the hills, threading the forest, visiting
the inhabitants, pulling about the harbor, explor
ing the cave in the cliff at the entrance. You
could pull in through the arch by boat; inside, an
enormous cavern big enough to hold the ship.
We landed on the beach within; and up on its
topside, as a Chinaman would express it, saw
another opening through which we crawled and
found ourselves facing the ocean outside, I re
member digging from a seam in the cliflF close by
a tolerable specimen of opal. The seine netted for
us bushels of delicious mullet, and trips to the
reefs outside brought in chelonia enough to make
turtle soup for the whole ship's company for
weeks. Some of these iraraense arraor-plated beasts
were four, five, even six feet long. Two or three
of them we carried to sea with us, and when the
men were holystoning the decks in the early
morning it was a favorite amuseraent with them
to trot out the turtles and have a ride or rather
a crawl on their backs. They were automobiles,
but not of the racing kind.
The hook and line brought us only fisherman's
luck. One calm lazy afternoon the first lieuten
ant proposed a fishing party outside. The cap-

134 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
tain's gig was borrowed for the occasion, and into
the stern sheets he stowed hiraself, the doctor,
the ra aster, and by a streak of good luck the clerk.
In a very few minutes our boat's crew put us on
our fishing ground and there we lavished the
various seductive arts known to the craft. In
vain ; only one solitary fish could we persuade to
leave the briny deep and come in out of the wet,
but that one was so gorgeously caparisoned he
must have been a member of the royal family.
We were fishing in some eight or ten fathoms.
Looking over the side we could clearly see bottom
through the liquid azure, and not merely the
bottom but a submarine rose garden of coral, and
shoals of little finny cupids playing to and fro in
the watery bowers as brilliant as the coral — a
kind of living symphony of color. My fish ap
peared to be about the size of my finger when he
cautiously essayed a lunch oflF my hook and then
started so suddenly for the upper regions; but
when he came sailing in over the thwarts he was
twelve or fifteen inches long, and from stem to
stern one glowing splendor of scarlet more bril
liant than any goldfish I ever saw. We held a
naval court martial over our trophy and sent him
on board the flagship to sit for his portrait to
Mr, Heine, the artist of the expedition. And

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 135
when afterwards the Congressional Report of the
Japan Expedition came out, there was my fish,
not so resplendent as in life, but a very fair
counterfeit.^ As no other of the scaly cherubs
below seemed to yearn for the same honor we
pulled in our lines and headed for the little rocky
islet just oflF the southern foreland of the port. It
had no beach and its craggy gnarly sides went
sheer down into the crystal depths. A low jagged
point gave us a landing spot to bundle ashore.
We had to watch our chance and jump; and by
either miracle or luck the feat was accomplished
without broken bones or a souse in the sea. We
found the little island supporting a denser popu
lation to the square acre than London or even
Canton; bipeds, too, though of another family;
but enjoying life as much and attending as strictly
to business. Most of the inhabitants were sol
emnly sitting on their eggs; a monotonous life I
fancy, though I never tried it, but rewarded with
ample dividends. They showed no signs of fear,
which I am ashamed to say was because they did
not know us. And we strolled among battalions
of gannets and seagulls and shags so densely
crowded that we could scarcely move without
stepping on them, leisurely examining their
1 Vol. II, plate III : description, p. 257.

136 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
plumage and even handling their eggs. They
meanwhile kept up a subdued gossip and chatter
which I suppose was their way of expressing
their opinion of their outlandish guests. It ought
to have been favorable, for we came away without
killing a bird, but left them to their peaceful
labors of populating the cliffs and waves with no
fear of Malthus before their eyes. That was
the nearest I ever came to attending Chaucer's
Assembly ofFoules.
I have credited the Bonins with a score of occu
pants. To be strictly accurate there were thirty-
one : three or four Americans, three or four Eng
lishmen, and one native of sunny Portugal; the
Kanaka wives and the half breed children made
up the sum total. The head chief of the island,
so far as there was any head, was a man named
Savary, a waif from Massachusetts. In token of
his primacy the commodore presented him with
an American flag, which was run up at once on
the flagstaflF over his bungalow among the trees.
It was a pleasant sight for the first thing in the
moming to greet our eyes when we came on deck.
Peel island was the only one of the group occu
pied; the citizens of the others were wild hogs
and goats. The settlers lived a quiescent semi-
civilized subtropical life, cultivating a few acres.

BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM 137
raising their own sugar and tobacco, obtaining
other commodities from the outer world by barter
with occasional passing ships, to which they fur
nished such natural supplies of wood and water
and food as the island could afford. During our
stay three whalers appeared oflF the port and sent
in their boats for the purpose. In all this half
century since I have met but one person who has
ever visited this out-of-the-way group. That was
a former teacher in Yokohama, now the wife of a
banker in America, On one of her voyages to
Japan the ship in which she was a passenger was
driven by a typhoon to take refuge in Port Lloyd.
While there she made the acquaintance of the
settlers, especially the house of Savary, and later
a little granddaughter of the white chief was for
some years a pupil in her school at Yokohama,
At the time of her visit the Japanese governraent
had assumed control and formed a colony; and
there were then already some five hundred Japa
nese in residence. The old independent solitude
so dear to the original barbaric rovers had van
ished, and the islands were beginning to hum with
the common activities of life. While writing these
pages I have by accident discovered one of their
industries. Having occasion to open a can for the

138 BOUND FOR THE SUNRISE KINGDOM
household, it gave me an agreeable shock to find
it was canned turtle from the Bonins.
We left these charming islands Saturday morn
ing, the eighteenth of June. The last thing I
did on shore was to fill my pockets with lumps of
chalcedony which lay scattered among the peb
bles on the beach. As I was showing my treasures
on board, sorae of them beautiful specimens, one
of the ward-room officers who had entered the
navy as a middy in his boyhood, and so had
gleaned his education not from schools but from
general experience in knocking about the world,
said eagerly, " Now, Clerk, some of these stones
ought to be polished and set; as soon as ever you
get back to Boston I would take them to a dilap-
idary ! " Bless his heart, that was just what I did.
And the "dilapidary" did such fine work that
one of my lady friends prizes her chalcedony pin
and cuff buttons to this day.
Five days later we were at anchor again in
Napa harbor, ready now for the final move on
Japan,

VII
THE FAMOUS PERRY EXPEDITION
TO JAPAN

THE FAMOUS PERRY EXPEDITION
TO JAPAN
At last on the second of July, 1853, four of the
fleet got underway for Japan. The Saratoga
took her place in tow of the Susquehanna as
before, and the Plymouth in tow ofthe Mississippi.
The Supply storeship was left for the time at
anchor in Napa harbor, and the Caprice under
command of Lieutenant William L. Maury was
sent to Shanghai. Our course followed the chain
of island groups which extend to the northward
and eastward from Lew Chew to Nippon, and
some of the time in sight of them. One of the
last we saw and passed was Ohosima, a well-bred
volcano which was enjoying a quiet smoke all by
itself. It may wake up some day and start its
furnaces, as its fiery neighbor Torisima has been
doing while these pages have been in process of
incubation. There is plenty of time; geology
will furnish all it wants. And it may yet make
its record in history and hold up its head with
Vesuvius and Krakatoa and Mont Pelee. They
are uncertain characters, these volcanoes; you

142 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
can never be quite sure when any given island is
preparing to burn out its chimney. The safest
plan is to follow Confucius' advice about the
gods, — " Respect them, and keep out of their
way." We made moderate speed and reached Japan
on the eighth of July. It was Friday, a mem
orable day in our calendar. That morning the
lookouts at the masthead echoed through the fleet
the rousing call, " Land ho ! " We rushed on
deck. There it was, at last. There it was, a
dark silent cloud on the northern horizon, a terra
incognita still shrouded in mystery, still inspiring
the imagination with an indefinable awe, just as
it had years ago in the studies of our childhood
at school. We came up with it rapidly. But the
rugged headlands and capes still veiled them
selves in mist, as if resolved upon secresy to the
last. About noon the fog melted away, and there
lay spread before us the Erapire of the Rising
Sun, a living picture of hills and valleys, fields
and hedges, groves, orchards and forests that
tufted the lawns and raantled the heights, villages
with streets a trifle wider and houses a little less
densely packed than in China, and defended by
forts mounted with howitzers and "quakers," and
fenced with long stripes of black and white cot-

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 143
ton, which signified that the fortifications were
garrisoned and ready for business. On the waters
were strange boats skimming about irapelled by
strange boatmen, uncouth junks wafted slowly
along by the breeze, vanishing behind the prom
ontories and reappearing in the distance, or low
ering their sails and dropping their four-fluked
anchors in the harbors near us. And towering
above all, forty miles inland, like a giant man-
at-arms standing sentry over the scene, rose the
snowy peak of Fusiyama, an extinct volcano four
teen thousand feet high, one of the most shapely
cones in the world, and well named "the match
less mountain,"
Our squadron comprised, as already noted, two
steam frigates and two sloops of war. For equip
ment we mustered sixty-one guns and nine hundred
and seventy-seven officers and men — a respecta
ble force for the times, but soon eclipsed and for
gotten in the vaster armaments of the Civil war,
and of our late scrimmage with Spain, Such a
warlike apparition in the bay, small as it was,
created a powerful sensation, A Japanese writer
informs us that " the popular commotion in Yedo
 was beyond description. The whole city
was in an uproar. In all directions were seen
mothers flying with children in their arms and

144 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
men with mothers on their backs. Rumors of an
immediate action, exaggerated each time they
were comraunicated from mouth to mouth, added
horror to the horror-stricken. The tramp of war-
horses, the clatter of armed warriors, the noise of
carts, the parade of firemen, the incessant tolling
of bells, the shrieks of women, the cries of chil
dren, dinning all the streets of a city of more than a
million souls, made confusion worse confounded." ^
Of all this we were quite unconscious. We had
no idea we had frightened the empire so badly,
the capital being some forty or fifty miles away
from our anchorage. But that the town near us
was thrown into convulsions by the big " black
fireships ofthe barbarians," as the Japanese called
us, was sufficiently evident. Before our anchors
were fairly down a battery on Cape Kamisaki
sent a trio of bombshells to inquire after our
health, or perhaps to consign us to perdition.
But they exploded harmlessly astern, and we sent
no bombshells back to explain how we were, or
whether we intended going in the direction indi
cated. Our friends on shore knew something of
guns and gunnery — that was plain. How much,
we could not tell. But our glasses showed us that
not all the black logs frowning at us from their
* Nitobe. Intercourse between the United States and Japan, -p. ^.

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 145
portholes were genuine. Some at least were "qua
kers," that could not be fired except in a general
conflagration; like the battery of a native guard-
boat in the harbor of Nagtisaki that once upon a
tirae capsized in a squall; various things went to
the bottom, but most of her guns floated!
By the time we were well anchored and sails
furled and men piped down, swarms of picturesque
mandarins came oflF to challenge the strange
arrival and to draw around the fleet the customary
cordon of guard-boats. This looked like being in
custody. The American ambassador had not
corae to Japan to be put under sentries. He
notified the mandarins that his vessels were not
pirates and need not be watched. They pleaded
Japanese law. He replied with American law.
They still insisted. Whereupon he clinched the
American side of the argument with the notice
that if the boats were not oflF in fifteen minutes
he should be obliged to open his batteries and
sink them. That was entirely convincing, and
the guard-boats stood not on the order of their
going but betook themselves to the shelter of the
shore. I well remember that still star-lit night which
closed our first day in Yedo bay. Nothing dis
turbed its peaceful beauty. The towering ships

146 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
slept motionless on the water, and the twinkling
lights of the towns along the shore went out one
by one. A few beacon fires lighted on the hill
tops, the rattling cordage of an occasional passing
junk, the musical tones of a distant temple bell
that came rippling over the bay at intervals
through the night, — these were to us the only
tokens of life in the sleeping empire.
A sleeping empire truly; aloof frora the world,
shut in within itself, utterly severed frora the
general world-consciousness, not awake to the
opportunities and privileges it was later so sud
denly and so brilliantly to achieve as one of the
world-powers, not even conscious that there was
any such high position to be attained. While the
Expedition is resting at its anchors, and the
empire around is asleep, let us take the chance to
paint in a bit of the background, A historical
reminiscence or two will enable us more fully to
appreciate the aim and the ultimate success of the
I enterprise. The Sunrise Kingdom, like the telescope, was
discovered by accident. In 1542, when Henry
VIII of England, Charles V of Germany, Knox,
Calvin and Luther were the chief characters on
. the European stage, a Portuguese vessel bound
( to Macao in China was driven by storms into

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 147
Bungo, a port of Kiusiu, It was the first meet
ing of Japanese and Europeans, It seems to have
been mutually agreeable. The accidental visitors
were dazzled with the riches of the Oriental para
dise they had found, and the natives were pleased
and entertained with their outlandish guests.
When the news reached Europe it started a cru
sade of adventurers to the eastern seas. There
was a gold fever, and all the commercial nations
of the west had it. The fiags of Portugal, Eng
land, Holland, France and Spain waved in suc
cession over the waters of the newly discovered
empire. The Japanese were amiable, and a busy
barter was maintained for some scores of years.
Traders and speculators were not the only /
visitors in that distant mart. Some ten years ;
later the Jesuits resolved to signalize the begin-i
nings of their new order by converting those rich \
and dissolute Gentiles, Their crusade was suc-|
cessful, like the other. It is related that when
the first missioners, as they were called, reached
the field of their operations, some of the courtiers
desired an edict against the propagation of the
new faith, " How many religions have we now?"
asked the emperor, "Thirty-five," was the answer,
" Very well," said the tolerant monarch, " one
more will hurt nobody — let them preach." And

148 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
they did preach. And Xavier, the renowned Jesuit
apostle and saint, though within the year he
returned to China to die, lived long enough to
baptize multitudes of the penitent pagans, grandees
as well as commoners and peasantry. Other mis
sioners fiocked to the harvest. The Jesuits were
followed by Dominicans and Franciscans. The
splendid robes and ritual of the church proved
attractive and large numbers of the people were
gathered into the Roman fold. Shrines were
deserted and priests found their custom wasting
away. This was a result not entirely palatable to either
the priesthood or the court. Several of the emper
ors recalled their apostate subjects to the mourn
ing gods. Persecutions began. The foreign monks
and friars were accused of political intrigue. The
story is a bloody one and covers a whole genera
tion of tragedy and horror. Let us turn the page
and simply record the fact that Christianity was
k^punged from Japan. The final catastrophe was
'me fall of Simabara in 1637 and the massacre of
itome forty thousand Christians. The histories tell
us that the bodies of the martyrs were tumbled
together into one vast pit and over it was raised
this defiant inscription: " So long as the sun shall
warm the earth let no Christian be so bold as to

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 149
come to Japan; and let all know that the king of
Spain himself, or the Christian's God, or the great
God of all, if he violate this command, shall pay
for it with his head," ^ Then the murderous em
pire wiped its sword, shut its gates, and barred
itself in against all the world. One of the pre
cautions by which it protected itself against Chris
tianity and the civilization of the west was the
famous ceremony of trampling on the cross; the
astute pagans rightly divining that no foreigner
would consent to such a sacrilege who had enough
of the religion about hira to disturb the erapire.
The ceremony was performed every year, as
raethodically as taking the census or collecting
the taxes, and was only abolished as late as 1853,
after our first visit to Japan.^ Once a year offi
cers went to every house with boxes containing
the crucifix and images of the Virgin. These were
laid on the floor, and all the household from octo
genarians to infants in arras were required to
tread upon them as a proof that they were not
Christians. This law was enforced among the
Dutch, the only Western nation that maintained
its foothold in the hermit land during all those
darkened centuries. It is said that the cross was
* MacFarlane, Japan, pp. 49, 50.
"^ Griffis, Matthew Calbraith Perry, p. 349.

150 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
carved into the stone thresholds of their ware
houses so that they could neither go nor come
without trampling upon it. The placid Holland
ers do not seem to have been rauch distressed by
the requirement; their convenient religion was
easily detached and left in Europe, One of them,
we are told, one day wandered away from the
warehouses on the island of Dezima across the
bridge into the streets of Nagasaki, and was sud
denly halted by a Japanese patrol, "Are you a
Christian?" was the challenge, "No, I am a
Dutchman ! " He was allowed to pass.
It is time to return to the ships. We left thera
sound asleep at anchor off Uraga the night of our
arrival in Yedo bay. Yet not all sound asleep,
for a more vigilant watch has rarely been kept
than was kept that night on board that fleet.
Nothing happened however — except a brilliant
display of meteoric light in the sky during the
midwatch, an oraen which terribly alarmed our
friends on shore, as portending that the very
heavens themselves were enlisted on the side of
these foreign barbarians. The commodore alludes
to the phenomenon in his narrative, and adds the
devout wish, "The ancients would have construed
this remarkable appearance of the heavens as a
favorable oraen for any enterprise they had under-

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 151
taken; it may be so consti-ued by us, as we pray
God that our present attempt to bring a singular
and isolated people into the faraily of civilized
nations may succeed without resort to bloodshed," ^
In spite of the menacing sky we all survived,
Yankees and natives, and in the morning were all
alive and ready for business. During the day our
new friends came off to visit the ships and were
some of them admitted on board. These first
interviews were a constant surprise to us; we
found them so well informed. They questioned
us about the Mexican war, then recent; about
General Taylor, and Santa Ana, On board the
Susquehanna one day a Japanese gentleman asked
the officer of the deck, " Where did you come
from?" "We came from America," was the
reply, " Yes, I know," he said, " Your whole fleet
came from the United States. But this ship —
did she come from New York? or Philadelphia?
or Washington?" He knew enough of our geog
raphy not to locate our seaports on our western
prairies or up among the Rockies — a pitch of
intelligence not yet too common among even our
European friends. One of them asked if the
monster gun on the quarter deck was a "paixhan"
gun? Yes, it was, but where and how could he
1 OfScial Narrative ofthe Expedition, &c. I, p. 236.

152 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
ever have heard the name? When two or three
midshipmen were taking the sun at noon, one of
them laid his sextant down and a Japanese taking
it up remarked that such instruments came from
London and Paris and the best were made in
London, How could a Japanese know that?
Our colloquies were carried on in Dutch through
our Dutch interpreter, Mr, Portraan, the educated
Japanese being then accustomed to the use of that
language somewhat as we use French, We nat
urally supposed, therefore, that all their informa
tion had come through the Dutch, the only nation
beside the neighboring Chinese and Koreans that
had for the last three centuries kept its hold upon
the good graces and the commerce of Japan,
But we afterwards found that the Japanese printers
were in the habit of republishing the text-books
prepared by our missionaries in China for use in
their schools. The knowledge of America which
we found thus diffused in Japan had come straight
from Dr, Bridgraan's History of the United States,
a manual written and published in China, which
had also had, what the good Doctor never dreamed
of, a wide circulation in the realm of the Mikado.
That book had already prepossessed its readers in
our favor. The following winter it was my privi
lege to make the acquaintance of the author at

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 153
his home in Shanghai, and to sit often at his
genial board. It has been one of the regrets of
my life ever since that I could not tell him and
his accomplished wife of the mission of good on
which the little text-book was speeding its way in
the empire of the rising sun. But at that time,
alas, none of us knew it. They have both long
since gone home to the heaven they loved, and
probably never learned in this world of the good
they had thus unconsciously done.
The next day was Sunday. According to cus
tom divine service was held on board the flagship.
The capstan on the quarter-deck was draped with
the flag and the Bible was laid open upon it.
Chaplain Jones took his station beside it. I do
not know that any record was made of the service;
presumably the chaplain followed the usual lit
urgical form, and preached a brief serraon. But
the hymn sung on the occasion has become his
toric; it was Watts' solemn lyric
" Before Jehovah's awful throne,
Ye nations, bow -with sacred joy."
It was sung to the tune of Old Hundred; and
led by the full band the familiar strains poured
in mighty chorus from two or three hundred lusty
throats, with a peal that echoed through the fleet
and wafted the gracious message to the distant

154 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
shore. The Japanese listened with wonder; and
their wonder deepened into amazement when they
found that the whole day was to be observed as a
day of rest and none of thera could be admitted
on board.^
On Monday the secular tide was turned on
again and diplomatic overtures began in good
earnest. In their official dealings with us it was
interesting to see how the authorities clung to
their time-honored policy of exclusion. It was a
curious contest of steady nerve on one side, met
by the most nimble parrying on the other. First
they directed the commodore to go home; they
wanted no letters from American presidents, nor
any treaty. But the commodore would not go
home. Then they ordered him to Nagasaki, where
foreign business could be properly transacted
through the Dutch, But the commodore declined
to go to Nagasaki, If then this preposterous bar
barian would not budge, and his letter must be
received, they would receive it without ceremony
on board ship. But his Western mightiness would
not deliver it on board ship. Then they asked
for time to consult the court at Yedo, and the
commodore gave them three days — days big with
» Griffis, Matthew Calbraith Perry, p. 324.
Official Narrative ofthe Expedition, &c. I : p. 240;

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 155
fate; but exactly what happened at court we
may never know. This much is certain, that our
reluctant friends yielded at last; that pestilent
letter would be received, and commissioners of
suitable rank would come from court for the pur
pose. Even after all preliminaries had been set
tled they begged to receive the letter on board
ship, not on shore. But the Rubicon had been
passed. Some three miles below our anchorage a little
semicircular harbor makes in on the western side
of the bay, and at the head of it stands the vil
lage or hamlet of Kurihama, That was the spot
selected for the meeting of the Western envoy and
the imperial commissioners, and there the Japa
nese erected a temporary hall of audience. It
was a memorable scene. The two frigates steamed
slowly down and anchored off the harbor. How
big, black and sullen they looked, masterful,
accustomed to have their own way, full of pent-
up force. Our little flotilla of fifteen boats landed
under cover of their guns. We were not quite
three hundred all told, but well befeathered in
full uniform and armed to the teeth ; a somewhat
impressive lot, and yet of rather scant dimensions
to confront five thousand native troops drawn up
on the beach to receive us, with crowds of curious

156 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
spectators lining the housetops and grouped on
the hills in the rear. However we were ready for
anything and had no fear of treachery. The em
blazonry of those Japanese regiments surpasses
any powers of description that have been vouch
safed to the present deponent. Their radiant uni
forms and trappings and ensigns raust have been
cut out of rainbows and sunsets; and the scores
of boats fringing the shore heightened the effect
with their fluttering plumage of flags. There was
one thing not lively; the officers of these gorgeous
troops sat in silent dignity on carapstools in front
of the line ! — a kind of military coma which the
hustling regiments now tackling the great North
ern Bear in Manchuria evidently have not inher
ited and could not comprehend.
The situation was unique, not likely to be for
gotten by any who participated in it, either
American or Japanese. It was a clear calm sum
mer morning. As our lines disembarked and
formed on the beach the commodore stepped into
his barge to follow us. Instantly the black "fire-
ships" were wrapped in white clouds of smoke,
and the thunder of their salute echoed among the
hills and groves back of the village. To the
startled spectators on shore they must have seemed
suddenly transformed into floating volcanoes.

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 157
And when the great man landed they gazed with
wonder, for no mortal eye (no Japanese mortal)
had been permitted to look upon him before. In
all the negotiations hitherto he had played their
own game and veiled himself in mystery. They
could communicate with so lofty a being only
through his subordinates. This was not child's
play. It was not an assumption of pomp incon
sistent with republican simplicity. Commodore
Perry was dealing with an oriental potentate
according to oriental ideas. He showed his
sagacity in doing so. At this time he was fifty-
nine years old, a man of splendid physique and
commanding presence. He had already lived
through a varied experience which had helped to
train him for this culminating achievement of
his life. Endowed with strong native powers he
had risen in mental capacity and executive force
with every stage of his professional career.
The war of 1812, in which also his famous
brother Oliver Hazard and two younger brothers
served, gave him his first baptism of fire; and
later the Mexican war, service in various parts of
the world civilized and savage, duties on naval
boards at home, investigations and experiments
in naval science, naval architecture, naval educa
tion — these and numberless other methods of serv-

158 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
ing his country both in the professional routine
and in general affairs, had developed his judg
ment, his mental acumen, his breadth of vision,
his knowledge of men; and thus had prepared
him for his high mission as ambassador and dip
lomat. Unquestionably his insight into the ori
ental mind, his firmness and persistence, his stal
wart physical presence, his portly bearing, his
dignity, his poise, his stately courtesy, were prime
factors in his success as a negotiator with an
Eastern court. He was the right kind of man for
America to send on such an errand to such a
people. On his arrival we raarched to the hall through
an avenue of soldiers, our escort being formed of
sailors and marines from the four ships. Leaving
the escort drawn up on the beach, the forty offi
cers entered. We found ourselves within a broad
canopied court of cotton hangings, carpeted with
white, overlaid in the center with a scarlet breadth
for a pathway leading to and extending up on
the raised floor of the hall beyond. Many two-
sworded officials in state robes were kneeling on
either side of this flaming track. Within the hall
sat — not in Japanese fashion but on chairs —
the imperial commissioners, the princes Idzu and
Iwami, surrounded by their kneeling suite. They

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 159
were both men of years, fifty or sixty perhaps;
Idzu a pleasant intellectual looking man, Iwami's
features narrow and soraewhat disfigured by the
small-pox; both attired in magnificent robes
richly embroidered in silver and gold. The
vacant seats opposite the commissioners were
taken by the commodore and his staflF. Between
the lines were the interpreters, on one side a
native scholar on his knees, on the other erect
and dignified the official interpreter of the squad
ron, S, WeUs Williams LL, D,, a well known
author and missionary in China, Behind them
stood a scarlet lacquered chest which was destined
to receive the fateful missive for conveyance to
court. Overhead in rich folds drooped the purple
silk hangings profusely decorated with the impe
rial arms and the national bird, the stork. I had
scarcely noted these few details and glanced at
the genial face of Bayard Taylor as he stood
behind the commodore taking notes, when the
ceremony began. It was very brief, A few words
between the interpreters, and then at a signal
entered two boys in blue followed by two stalwart
negroes, probably the first samples of the ebony
type that had ever shaded the landscape of Japan.
In slow and impressive fashion the two darkies
brought in the rosewood boxes which contained the

160 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
mysterious papers. These were opened in silence
and laid on the scarlet coflFer. Prince Iwami
handed to the interpreters a formal receipt for the
documents. The commodore announced that he
should return the next spring for the reply. A
brief conversation in answer to a question about
the progress of the Taiping rebellion in China,
and the conference closed, having lasted not
more than twenty minutes, A short ceremony,
and witnessed by not more than fifty or sixty
persons out of the entire populations of both the
great countries engaged; but it was the opening
of Japan. It brought together as neighbors and
friends two nations that were the antipodes of
each other not only in position on the globe but
in almost every element of their two types of
civilization. That the Japanese have themselves appreciated
the significance of this memorable meeting appears
in the amazing historical developments which
have followed all over the empire along the lines
of commerce, industrial art, education and religion,
and is shown also by innumerable public utter
ances from the platform and press; and they have
recently commemorated the occasion by erecting
a monument at Kurihama in honor of the Ameri
can commodore. But this later material can wait

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 161
till the end of the chapter; we will keep on here
with the main story.
This first act of the mission was now achieved,
and the squadron rested from its labors. A great
weight was lifted off its mind. The next day,
with lightened conscience, it set itself to the easier
task of surveying and sounding the bay, exploring
future harbors, locating islands and rocks, measur
ing distances and plotting charts. These uncanny
operations were watched with some solicitude by
the coast guards. They oflFered no active opposi
tion, though once or twice we had occasion to
show how thoroughly each boat was armed and
ready for emergencies. The Saratoga, not will
ing to be outdone in this hydrographic work,
located one shoal with undoubted accuracy by
running upon it full tilt. Fortunately the wind
was light and the bottom smooth; no harm was
done to either ship or shoal. We were not proud
of the achievement; but the commodore did us
the honor to immortalize it and us by naming
the sandbar the "Saratoga Spit; " and that title
it bears to this day. Some years later it acquired
a tragic interest when the U. S. S. Oneida, coming
down the bay to sail for home, was run into in the
night and sunk by the British mailship Bombay.

162 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
She went down close by the Saratoga Spit, carry
ing with her most of her hapless crew.
A few days after the Kurihama conference we
left the Erapire of the Rising Sun and returned to
the Central Flowery Kingdom. On the seventeenth
of July, as silently as they had entered nine days
before, the two frigates steamed out of the bay
with the two ships in tow. Outside they separated
and went their several ways; the two steamers
and the Plymouth back to Lew Chew, the Saratoga
to Shanghai, We parted in a storm. If our
Japanese friends could have seen our belabored
ships scuttling away into the darkness and foam
they would have taken it for a special interposition
of their wind-god, wreaking vengeance on the
western barbarians for their temerity. The gale
grew into a tempest, and the tempest into a ty
phoon, the largest though not the most vicious of
the four encountered by the Saratoga in those
uneasy seas. We compared the logbooks after
ward of several ships that were caught in different
sections of its enormous circuit, and found that
it was more than a thousand miles in diameter,
and in its progress swept over the larger part of
the north Pacific ocean. It raged for several
days, and every vessel in our fleet got entangled
in some part of its vortex. Our own ship, the

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 163
Saratoga, was under orders for Shanghai; and
after the gale struck us, with battened hatches
and sea-swept decks we rode on the outer rim of
that cyclone almost all the way back into the
mouth of the Yang-tse-keang, It was riding a
wild steed, as all sailors know who have tried it,
but we got to Shanghai all the quicker. Six
months we lay there at anchor off the American
consulate. It was the time of the Taiping rebel
lion. As if to give us further object lessons in the
oriental way of making history, one night the
Taipings inside the walls rose and captured the
city. The imperialist forces came down from
Pekin to retake it. And about once in three
days we were treated to a Chinese battle — some
times an assault by land, sometimes a bombard
ment by the fleet of forty or fifty junks; all very
dramatic and spectacular, occasionally tragic,
frequently funny. But, as Kipling says, that is
another story and deserves a chapter of its own.
Meanwhile here is the place for a codicil in
which to record the Kurihama celebration just
referred to. During the autumn of 1900 Rear
Admiral Beardslee, retired, was travelling in
Japan, and took occasion to revisit the scene of
the famous landing. In 1853 he was a young
midshipman on board the Plymouth, and was in

164 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
charge of one of the boats of the flotilla. He
easily identified the spot, and finding it neglected
brought it to the attention of the Beiyu-Kwai —
" Society of Friends of America" — who assumed
the patriotic task of renovating the place and
commemorating the event. The occasion was an
inspiring one. On the fourteenth of July, 1901,
the forty-eighth anniversary of the conference,
and on the spot where the hall of conference
stood, there assembled a distinguished company
of dignitaries of the empire, the officials of the
Beiyu-Kwai, Admiral Beardslee and other repre
sentative Americans, together with many thou
sand interested spectators. Baron Kaneko presided
and addressed the company. Other addresses fol
lowed, from the American minister Colonel Buck,
Viscount Katsura, Admirals Rodgers and Beard
slee, U. S. N., and the governor of Kanagawa.
It was a specially felicitous circumstance that
when the suprerae moment came the monument
was unveiled by Admiral Rogers, a grandson of
Commodore Perry, and at that time commanding
the American squadron in the east. The memorial
is a shaft of unpolished granite standing on a
massive base and rising to a height over all of
thirty-three feet. The side facing the bay bears
this inscription in Japanese:

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 165
This monument marks the landing place of Com
modore Perry of the United States of North
America. Marquis Ito Hirobumi, Highest Order
of Merit.
On the reverse is an inscription in English which
reads thus: ,
This monument commemorates the first arrival
of Commodore Perry, Ambassador from the Uni
ted States of America, who landed at this place
July 14, 1853. Erected July 14, 1901 .
This solid memorial will forever dignify the little
hamlet of Kurihama as the birthplace of the new
Japan and the scene of the beginnings of a great
international friendship.
In this epilogue belongs also the record of
another celebration more recent and of a more
personal flavor. The Japanese in foreign lands
have a patriotic custom of strengthening the home
ties by celebrating the birthday of their emperor,
which falls on the third of November. The year
1903 marked a half century from the first land
ing of the Perry expedition on Japanese soil, and
Mr, Uchida, the Japanese consul-general in New
York, conceived the happy idea of adding still
further prestige to the usual celebration by com
memorating that famous event. Invitations were
issued to the descendants of Commodore Perry
and to the now few survivors of the fleet. Out of

166 THE FERRY EXPEDITION TO .lAPAN
the more than two thousand officers and men who
composed the personnel of the expedition less than
a score are known to be living, three of whom
were present at the reception. To these three,
who had not met for half a century, it may well
be imagined the occasion was impressive, not to
say thrilling. The forty or fifty Japanese gentle
men and ladies present, and as many raore Amer
icans, some of them descendants of the famous
commodore, and others who had been resident in
the Mikado's dominions or were specially inter
ested in the country and its people, made a bril
liant assemblage. The memories were inspiring.
The half century had enlarged the dimensions of
the event; rather had brought out and developed
its natural results along the lines of trade, indus
trial art, commerce, education, intellectual and
moral enlightenment, and so splendidly that the
growing light reflected back on the original act
and revealed its magnitude. With these senti
ments were mingled tender thoughts of shipmates
long since gone, memories of scenes that made us
sigh — for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.
On the walls hung a large old-time colored
lithograph representing the landing at Kurihama,

THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN 167
a print struck off soon after the return of the fleet,
and loaned for the occasion by one of the commo
dore's daughters. Near it was a companion picture
of the same size, a photograph of the Perry mon
ument at Kurihama.
After the social hour the consul called his guests
to order and made an address of welcome, allud
ing to the emperor, the expedition, and the pres
ence of some who had been members of it. Two
other brief speeches were made, one by Admiral
Rodgers, a grandson of the old commodore, who
spoke of his grandfather's mission in Japan, his
own service in the east, and the unveiling of the
Kurihama monument. The other was by one of
the survivors, and was of course largely reminis
cent of those distant scenes and descriptive of our
famous old commander. It gives one a funny
sensation to stand before a brilliant company as
a relic of some ancient bit of history, and be
watched by such curious eyes while you step out
of your own past generation into the light of
modern times to make your speech!
When the tables were brought in for the ban
quet it fell to us three " relics" with three or four
friends to surround the same board ; a sumptuous
improvement on a middies' mess in the steerage
of a man-of-war, and seasoned with high memories.

168 THE PERRY EXPEDITION TO JAPAN
As we broke bread together and the current of
converse moved swiftly on, it seemed almost as if
we were surrounded by the unseen forms of mess
mates who had long since sailed on to the haven
beyond. And back of all was the thought of the
Sunrise Kingdom herself, the hermit land of half
a century ago, so exclusive, so mysterious, but
now so teeming with the activities of a new civil
ization, the resources of a new power, the dignity
and responsibility of a new place in the world.
The occasion itself, the sentiments it inspired, and
the distinguished corapany uniting in the Celebra
tion, all combined to make it a memorable evening.

VIII
THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI:
AN EPISODE OF THE GREAT REBELLION

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI:
AN EPISODE OF THE GREAT REBELLION
From Japan to China is not a long voyage, if
you ride on the rim of a cyclone. The memories
linger still of a rusty and belabored man-of-war
wearily crawling up the wa^'es and then plunging
down in roar and foam, rolling almost on her
beam ends and burying her batteries alternately
out of sight; the air full of driving spray, wind
shrieking through the rigging, sails fiapping to
pieces, hatches battened down, everything tumb
ling, chaotic, dismal and wet. At last the tempest
chased us into the turbid waters of the Yang-tse-
keang, and sheered off down the coast in quest of
easier prey.
It does not strike one like a river — the Yang-
tse-keang — but a broad gulf, whose low alluvial
shores are far and away out of sight of each other.
Up some sixty miles you turn south into a branch,
the Wusung, and thread your way up through a
motley fleet of foreign ships, opium hulks, lorchas,
junks, tanka boats, sampans and other Celestial
craft. By the aid of a Chinese pilot, a little wind.

172 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
storms of pidgin-English, and divers bumpings
with awkward junks, you traverse sorae fifteen
miles more and come to your moorings off the
city of Shanghai,
At least that was the way the Saratoga got
there in August, 1853, We dropped anchor oflF
the foreign quarter. It was a scene of busy pros
perity. First of all, the bund, an esplanade lined
with residences facing the river as if on parade,
clean broad streets, warehouses and godowns
stored with the products of the empire ; and over
all the protective flags of the consulates, English,
American, Spanish and French, Farther up the
river to the south lay the Chinese city behind a
wall twenty feet high and a moat twenty feet
wide, environed even on the river side with sub
urbs as dense and crowded as the streets within;
its houses jammed and dovetailed together like the
pieces in a puzzle; its thoroughfares too narrow
for any but pedestrians and sedans; its atmos
phere redolent of those pungent aromatic odors
which no visitor in the great empire could ever
mistake or ever forget — for in the Central Flow
ery Kingdom landscape has not only form and
color but smell; its sombre level of gray tiles
overtopped and relieved by the French Catholic
cathedral in the southeastern quarter, the spire of

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 173
an American Episcopal mission near the centre,
and a forest of masts rising from an indescribable
chaos of junks along the river front. The city
stands within the forks of the Wusung and the
Hwangpu, which here unite and carry their com
mon burden forward into the Yang-tse-keang.
The Hwangpu brings down from Suchau and
other great inland marts hundreds and thousands
of country barges laden to the water's edge with
the produce of field, garden, shop and loom. The
Wusung, though with its best endeavors less than
half a mile wide, accommodates the heaviest mer
chantmen as well as immense fleets of native craft
which swarm hither to share and swell the enor
mous traffic in rice, tea and silk. A snap shot
from the quarter-deck in the cool of the after
noon, if kodaks had arrived on this planet in those
faraway days, would have given one a lively raix-
ture; lumbering tea-boats, freight-hoys, yachts,
sampans, arrow-like shells out for pleasure or
practice, and all manner of shipping from almost
every maritime power under the sun. On shore
a still livelier turmoil — a bustling Mongolian pan
demonium, of Orient and Occident commingled.
Byron's picture of a carnival in Venice would
answer quite well for the motley array one en
counters on the Shanghai bund:

174 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
And there are dresses, splendid but fantastical,
Masks of all times and nations, Turl:s and Jews,
And harlequins and clowns, -with feats gymnastical,
G-reeks, Bomans, Yankee Doodles and Hindoos.
We had been there but a month in the midst
of these busy conditions when suddenly, like the
proverbial thunderbolt out of a clear sky, some
thing happened. Things have a way of happen
ing in China. Of late it has been the Boxers.
Then it was the Taipings. Outbreaks of popular
violence in the Great Flowery Kingdora have
been frequent and in many ways show a common
origin and a family likeness. The opium war of
1842, the Taiping rebellion, the French and
English invasion of 1857-60, the recent eruption
of the Boxers, even the collision with Japan in
1893-4, may all be credited in a general way, as
they have been, to the irrepressible conflict between
two types of civilization. Wherever the sea meets
the shore there is a foaming line of surf. And
wherever the advancing tide of Western life meets
the solid mass of Mongolian conservatism the im
pact produces more or less of tumult. In the case
of the opium war China was trying to choke out
the fatal drug from the empire, and England, to
her lasting shame, was making reprisals for the
loss and fastening the curse upon the unwilling

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 175
victim. The uprising of the Boxers was a savage
attempt to sweep all foreigners from the sacred
soil and bar the gates against the polluting con
tact of the western world. The Taiping rebellion
was a more tremendous tragedy than either, and
had for its aim a blind and blundering endeavor
to overthrow the Manchu dynasty. Unlike as
these conflicts have been, they were the eflFerves-
cence of the same chronic spirit of repugnance
against foreign interference or even contact, which
secretly ferments in the Celestial mind.
There can be no doubt however that by these
bloody stages China is making progress. The
empire is slowly leavening with the forces of the
new century. In retum for the great ideas and
inventions she had long since given to the world,
some of them hoaiy and moss-grown with anti
quity, the world is now forcing upon her the new
and larger methods of life which have developed
in the swifter nations of the west. A rapid evolu
tion is going on in her commerce, in her modes
of business, in railroad and telegraph, in new
lines of manufacture, even in her military methods.
Modem armor is usurping the place of the old
jingals and spears. Some of her battalions have
had the benefit of foreign drill. The empire had
a lesson pounded into her in her quarrel with

176 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
Japan, and another lesson from the Powers on
the subject of Boxers. She will remember them
both. In the garrison captured by Admiral Sey
mour near Tientsin was found war material of
the latest make and of enormous quantity — a
sight to open Western eyes. And the viceroy of
Hankow is not the only Celestial patriot who has
seen far enough ahead to establish vast plants for
the making of modern guns and ammunition.
The contrast between the war apparatus these
plants are turning out and the antiquated weapons
we saw the Taipings using half a century ago
would be ludicrous if it were not so startling. If
the world keeps on arming these countless millions
and drilling thera in the latest arts of destruction,
and does little or nothing to elevate them in either
Christian character or international ethics, an
explosion may come big enough to shake all
Christendom. The great empire outnumbers the
total populations of Europe and America put
together; a fact which may well give us pause.
For if with modern equipments and European
methods the Chinese should discover their power
they might become literally a " yellow peril " to
all the rest of the planet.
Tai-ping means Great Peace, a term not alto
gether appropriate to the wholesale plundering.

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 177
ravaging and slaughtering that came to be per
petrated under its banners. The full euphemism
by which the leader styled himself was " Heavenly
Father, Heavenly Elder Brother, Heavenly King
of the Great Peace Dynasty of the Heavenly
Kingdom." Heavenly Kingdom means China —
little as the unenlightened might suspect it. And
though the whole title sounds like a flourish of
profanity, it only expresses what the arch-rebel
sincerely claimed to be. It was not personal con
ceit; it was a sober fanatical faith in himself and
his mission. Like most disturbers of our planet,
the Tai-ping-wang was a visionary; literally so,
for his great ambition began in the visions that
glimmered around his sickbed when a young man
of twenty -four. He had been in heaven; had
met there a " venerable old man" and an " elder
brother," with whom he held interviews. They
appointed him to his great work on earth. He
held a divine commission from them to conquer
and rule China, No personage of less pretensions,
and a Chinaman at that, could have asked Sir
George Bonham whether the Virgin Mary had not
a pretty sister for him, the Heavenly King, to
marry! His visions sustained him through his
period of obscurity into the dawn of success, when
adherents trooped around him and weary marches

178 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
issued in brilliant campaigns. Nor did the golden
dream utterly fade until in the final crash of de
feat and ruin he took his own life in his palace
at Nanking.
At first the rebellion had an aim. That was
to overturn the Manchu dynasty, which had ruled
the empire ever since the conquest in 1644, and
restore to the throne a native Chinese prince. The
Taiping claimed to be a descendant of the Mings,
the last native dynasty which had occupied the
Chinese throne. It was also claimed that he had
in his possession the banner which distinguished
the last emperor of that house. It had been
preserved by a sage and handed down with the
prediction that he who unfurled and bore it
would overturn the hated Manchu and recover the
ancient sceptre. It had magical virtues, and
under this talisman the rebels were surely march
ing to victory. With this main purpose was
curiously mingled a sort of hybrid Christianity.
The Heavenly King had in his youth received
instruction from an American missionary,^ He
1 Rev. Issachar Roberts, a'Baptistmissionary. I met him in Hongkong,
in 1852, and found him enthusiastic in his hopes of the results that would
come to his beloved China from such a glorious revolution. At the request
of the rebel leader he visited the camp and was warmly welcomed. He
remained some months and assisted the Taipingwang in establishing his
novel reforms. Whether it was the unique form of baptism adopted by the
rebels in place of immersion — wiping the breast with a wet towel in token
of a clean heart — or whether a growmg incompatibility of temper between
the two leaders, or even graver matters of discord, I cannot say ; but his
mission came to a sudden end, and he saved his head by disappearing from
camp. See Martin, A Cycle of Cathay, pp. 131, 132.

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 179
had carried to his home in the interior some
religious tracts prepared by a countryman, Leang
Afa. Imbibing the new opinions he became an
eager zealot and iconoclast. Ten commandments
were promulgated somewhat like the ten of the
Old Testament, A form of worship became part
of the camp routine. And wherever they marched
temples were looted and the impotent gods were
left strewn in fragments on the ground. The two
motives — a rescued country and a new religion —
proved attractive. The Taipings were brave sol
diers, and when led by competent chieftains per
formed deeds which deserve a place in history.
Beginning in the autumn of 1850 near Canton,
the revolt grew from a handful to an army, and
spread from a single centre till it had infected
whole provinces. Sweeping rapidly northward the
insurgent forces cut a vast swath through the heart
of the empire, mowing down cities, hamlets, towns,
everything that came in their way. When Nan
king was taken by storm and its defenders put to
iiie sword, the Heavenly King selected the great
city for his capital and there set up his banners
and his throne. This was in March, 1853. The
next thing was to reduce Peking. An army was
despatched to the north for that purpose. It
never reached Peking; yet the exploit was one

180 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
that might well deserve the admiration of any sol
dier of the West, In six months these insurgents
marched fifteen hundred miles, traversed four
provinces, fought numerous battles and defeated
every army sent against them, took twenty-six
cities, and won their own subsistence from the
country they traversed and the enemy they fought.
An American, who spent most of his life in China
and was a contemporary of the great struggle,
declares that under the circumstances it was a feat
quite equal to Sherman's exploit of ten years later,
the famous march to the sea.
The rebellion lasted from 1850 to 1865, In its
later years it degenerated into a predatory war,
and its armies into hordes of banditti. The Heav
enly King, as events proved, had no broad view
of his own future, no capacity for organizing
government, no large plans for establishing his
dynasty of Great Peace, and scarcely a shred left
of his mongrel Christianityi It was just a blind
remorseless struggle for conquest, trusting to luck
or to heavenly visions for a favorable issue. The
fantastic costume of his troops, their outlandish
flags, their wild hairy aspect (they did not shave
their heads) struck terror into the hearts of their
enemies; and wherever they went they left their
track in ashes and blood. What torments the

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 181
wretched empire was suflFering from both its foes
and its defenders may be seen in the fate of Han
kow, a populous city which within a period of two
and a half years was taken by assault by one
army or the other no less than six times, and was
turned literally into a heap of ruins. Ningpo
would furnish an example still more striking.
After it had been recaptured by the allied forces,
French, British and Chinese, Captain Dew says in
his official report of the action, " I had known
Ningpo in its palmy days, when it boasted itself
one of the first commercial cities of the empire;
but now on this eleventh of May one might have
fancied that an angel of destruction had been at
work in the city as in the suburbs. All the latter,
with their wealthy hongs and thousands of houses,
lay leveled; while in the city itself, once the home
of half a million of people, no trace or vestige of
an inhabitant could be seen. Truly it was a city
of the dead." ^
It was estimated by foreigners resident in the
empire at the time, that the struggle cost on both
sides fully twenty million lives. This frightful
aggregate is not to be credited to actual slaughter
in battle, nor to the later ravages of wounds and
disease. The attention of the govemment was of
1 Williams, The Middle Kingdom, II : 609.

182 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
course concentrated on the war. Every available
soldier was drawn to the front. Whole provinces
were almost depleted of their laborers. That
meant wholesale neglect of the Grand Canal. At
numberless points therefore the abandoned dikes
broke down and immense sections of once popu
lous territory were flooded. And still worse the
refractory Hoang-ho, which has a habit of chang
ing its course every few years and ploughing a
new channel to the sea, more than once burst its
banks and spread desolation right and left, sweep
ing farmsj flocks,, villages, even citiesj with their
hapless occupants, into indiscriminate ruin. These
terrible floods, together with the famines that
usually followed in their wake, may be accounted
responsible for a large proportion,, perhaps half;
ofthe twenty millions.^
It was in this great contest that Chinese Gordon
was assigned to a command in the imperial army.
As the war dragged on it had become more and
more evident thair the Great Peace held; out no
hope fbr the distracted empirei There was in it
no emancipation from thB Tartar yoke, no eleva
tion of the masses into freedom, no melting of
1 Any one interested in looking up the biographjj — one might say indeed
the autobiography — of this insubordinate ri-ver, will, find.'a- brief and clear
account by ProfeBsor'Pumpellyin Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge,
No. 202 (1866); together with eleven charts which show the different forms
he river has taken within the pa«t twenty-five hundred years.

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGH-\I 183
pagan night into the dawn of a Christian day.
Some of us had hoped and believed that we were
about to witness the moral and political regenera
tion of an empire. It had come to be instead a
scramble for loot and blood. Every new turn in
the progress of the rebellion only added to the
disappointment of its more thoughtful friends;
and more than one foreign officer entered the
imperial army to aid in stamping out the horror.
General Ward,^ who served in 1860-'61, was suc
ceeded by another American, Burgevine, and he
by two Englishmen, Holland and Cooke. General
Ward drilled the army and really raised it from
a rabble into a disciplined and effective force.
And though the foreign community regarded him
as an adventurer, the Chinese looked up to him
as an able leader, and Jifter his death at Tsz'ki in
1861 erected a shrine to his memory before which
incense was kept burning for many years, perhaps
to this day. Gordon accepted his appointment in
March, 1863, and with Li Hung Chang took com
mand of the imperial forces. He improved upon
the methods of General Ward; and within little,
more than a year, drilled and led by him, the
Ever Victorious army turned, the tide of defeat
and began to vindicate its vainglorious title. By
^ Frederick G. Ward, of Salem, Mass.

184 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
a series of thirty-three battles, several of them
brilliant and daring exploits, some of them carry
ing fortified cities by storm, some of them general
actions in the field, the great Taiping rebellion
was suppressed. In China, as well as before Sebas
topol and in the Soudan, the famous soldier exhib
ited not only great military genius but still more
a generous devotion of self to the service of oth
ers. It did not win a Celestial shrine and smoking
incense, but it is commemorated in the inscription
recorded later on his monument at St. Paul's, —
" always ready to give his strength to the weak,
his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the
suflfering, and his life to God."
The adventures chronicled in this chapter
formed an episode in this tremendous tragedy of
the Taipings. For five months we were curious
spectators of a Chinese war, and the scenes we
witnessed left ineffaceable memories. We began
with sympathy for the new cause. We ended with
sympathy for the lacerated empire. A contest in
which a Christian knight like Gordon could em
bark his conscience and his sword was worth wag
ing, and is worth recording. Some of the battles
we saw before he arrived were highly dramatic,
and when they did not draw blood were spectacu
lar and entertaining.

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 185
On the night of the sixth of September, 1853,
as the Saratoga was lying peacefully at anchor
oflF Shanghai, a band of Canton and Fohkien assas
sins rose within the city, expelled the taotai, put
some of his officials to the sword, sacked their
houses and seized the govemment. A reign of
terror foUowed. For some days these Celestial
Robespierres and Marats had their own bloody
way. Everything that could get away fled. Junks
scuttled oflF from the docks as fast as they could
unmoor, until scarcely a sampan was left, and the
river front was as bare as an abandoned canal.
Multitudes left their homes and sought safety in
flight. At last the conspirators fearing that the
city would become literally depopulated, closed
the gates and made desertion a capital crime.
Within a month the imperial forces assembled
to retake the fallen city. They came trooping
over the plains in straggling battalions, flocking
in fleets up the river from the coast and down the
streams from the interior. We visited their camps.
It was a sight worth seeing. I would not speak
disrespectfully of the "tigers" of China — a name
often borne by the national troops, not on account
of their man-eating propensities, nor for their
bravery, but simply because they so frequently
carried the brute's head painted on their shields.

186 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
We found them a mongrel crowd, swarthy, boor
ish, lank, and much bedizened in their parti-col
ored uniforms. (Bear in mind that this was seven
years before General Ward, a whole decade before
Gordon,) Now and then a big trooper looked
well-fed and unctuous. But the rank and file
were tatterdemalions; their barbaric accoutre
ments and their still more barbaric selves seemed
not so much an army as a sort of freak museum.
In those faraway days, coming from the interior
as they did, they had never seen a westerner, and
we were as great curiosities to them as they were
to us, They thronged around us. They fingered
our clothing and felt of our hands and faces.
They unbuttoned our collars and inspected our
necks. Nor would they be satisfied till we had
bared our arms and bosoms to. convince them that
our pallid complexion was not a kind of wash.
that would rub oflF,
Their first summons to the insurgents only met
with derision. And with stolid Mongolian pa
tience they set themselves down to the task of
beleaguering the city. Their operations on the
river side were in plain view from our decks ajid
we watched many a battle. Some were serious,
some were comic. In their land skirmishes they
commonly left their artillery at the camp, and

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 187
equipped with spears, swords, knives and jingals,
they charged toward the walls brandishing their
weapons, waving their flags, beating their gongs,
blazing away with their jingals, hooting and scoff
ing at the enemy. They were met with similar
tactics from the ramparts — gongs, shouts, ban
ners, bravado and guns; which last did the busi
ness and sent the assailants scampering back
toward the camp. Rallied by their screaming'
leaders they would get into line again and repeat
the same manoeuvres, with the sarae results. Some
times the rebels sallied from the gates and chased
their assailants off the ground, to be driven back
in turn to the shelter of the walls. And so on for
hours; the same ground would be fought over, or
rather raced over, half a dozen times in a single
fight. On both sides discretion seemed to be gen
erally regarded as the better part of valor. Nei
ther party betrayed: any anxiety to get too near
the other. Each brave doubtless felt a wholesome
respect for his own skin. The risks involvedwere
too much like those referred to by Lord Chatham ^
when he was speaking of General Gage shut up
in Boston : " His situation reminds me, my lords,
of the answer of a French general in the civil
* Speech on removing the troops from Boston, House of Lords, Jan. 20,
1775.

188 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
wars of France — M. Conde opposed to M.Turenne,
He was asked how it happened that he did not
take his adversary prisoner, as he was often very
near him, 'J'ai peur,' replied Conde very hon
estly, ' J'ai peur qu'il ne me prenne ! ' "
In the early part of the siege there were some
odd encounters in which the losses were by deser
tion, A storming party would advance brimful
of fight, A parley ensues. Then as if inspired
with shdden valor half the assailants rush to the
walls, plant their scaling ladders, dash up the par
apet, swarm on the ramparts, and drawing up
their ladders after them fraternize with the rebels.
The balance of the assaulting party gaze stupidly
at the phenomenon, and then turn campward sad
der and wiser men; soraewhat hastened on the
home stretch by a parting volley from their late
comrades in arms.
To the Chinese the art of gunnery was then in
its infancy. The handling of their batteries was
skilfully awkward. To fire was the main thing,
specially if it made the welkin roar; but how the
piece was loaded and whither aimed did not ap
pear to be matters of prime importance. The
charge was loose powder, and that of a poor make.
When a bombardment was prolonged till after
dark we frequently saw the powder burning and

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 189
dropping into the river many rods away from the
muzzle of the gun. And China had been using
gunpowder in battle for four centuries, and in fire
works for a thousand years before that. One
would think that in that length of time even slow-
moving China might have learned to make it bet
ter; or that the powder might if left to itself have
grown better by some process of evolution. In
the attacks on the land side, instead of shot and
shell the missiles often consisted of a bucketful of
slugs, nails, fragments of pottery, brick, old iron,
pebble stones and the like — a charge which would
spread enough to sow an acre of groimd. The
north gate of the city was a sort of tower or bas
tion, with an eighteen-pounder mounted in the
embrasure above the portal, A few rods away
stood two houses belonging to an American mis
sion and occupied by two missionary families.
The families had been removed at the outbreak
of hostilities ; but to keep the premises from being
seized and garrisoned by either party as a conven
ient point from which to attack, the gentlemen
were obliged to stay by and hold them under the
protection of the flag. One of these teachers,
though a southron and used to firearms, was of
somewhat nervous temperament and did not enjoy
his lonely vigils. He invited me to share them

190 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
and I often did so. The enclosure stood in the
centre of the common field of action ; and on two
¦ of those occasions we were roused from our slum
bers hy a midnight battle going on right around
the house. If any of my readers have ever been
present in a really serious Chinese shindy, they
can easily imagine the hullabaloo; the infernal
racket and din — the shouts, yells, screams — the
discharge of jingals and fire-arrows — ^^and every
tfew moments the explosion of the big gun over
the gate. It is not altogether playful to look out
from your chamber window and see the midnight
blackness lighted up by incessant flashes from
muskets and jingals, or to trace by its comet tail
of spatks the fiight of a rocket firerarrow, know
ing, too, that every discharge may carry death to
some miserable combatant. ,1 have one of those
fire-arrows beside me as I write, picked up on the
fieldi of -battle; it is dumb now and has never con
fessed its murderous deeds. How much havoc the
noisy gun on the bastion raay have carried into
the ranks of the assailants, I cannot say; but the
miscellaneous charge peppered our house every
time from foundation to xidgepole, and the :next
raorning we picked out nails and slugs by the
handful. Among other tricks of strategy the besiegers

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 191
attempted mining. On one occasion they found
themselves on the eve of success. The workmen
had burrowed through the soil till they were actu
ally beneath the walls. The tidings flew to camp.
Great preparations were made, A doughty col
umn was ready to storm the breach, and mighty
deeds were promised. Meanwhile the rebek were
not idle. They had spies. And having located
the approaching mine they had sunk a deep coun
ter-trench at right angles and kept it -filled with
water. When the fort\' miners reached it the thin
partition of clay burst with sudden roar. A brief
struggle in the dark and all was over. That was
the end of their experiments under ground,
I was threading the narrow streets one day
toward the walls when I suddenly came upon a
crowd. It was not so noisy as Chinese mobs often
are. There was no laughter, and the chatter here
and there was in a subdued undertone. They
were watching something, I elbowed my way in
and not being an adept in the vernacular inquired
by signs what was the matter. They pointed up
at the side of a shop. There hung, suspended by
its cue, a ghastly head. It was a young brave who
had been caught and decapitated by the impterial
"tigers." Poor wretch, the bruises and slashes
on his pate showed how hard he had fought for

192 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
' life. But his dream of military glory had come
to an untimely end. He was of no further use to
his day and generation than to dangle his skull
from a peg by the roadside as a warning to his
fellow-rebels. What honors his heroism may have
won for him in the Chinese heaven I cannot say,
not having yet travelled in those parts, Perad
venture he may have rivalled the high reward
bestowed on his countryman General Chin, That
redoubtable warrior commanded the forts at the
mouth of the Wusung in the opium war of 1842
and there fell in battle. In recognition of his
services his family was ennobled, his image was
set up in Shanghai and for many years incense
was kept burning before it. But far beyond these
trivial honors was the promotion he received
above. According to a current rumor in Shang
hai two or three weeks after his death. Chin sent
down word that he had been elevated by the su
preme ruler of heaven to the position of second
General-in-chief to the Board of Thunder; so that
though he could not exterminate the foreign dev
ils while in the flesh, he could still give them an
occasional shock from the clouds!
My path led me presently out into the open,
and across a paddy-field directly to the wall and
the north gate. I was wandering along in a so-

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 193
bered mood when bang went the eighteen pounder
on the bastion just before me. The gunners doubt
less meant to aim at the imperialist camp about a
mile oflF; but as they had loaded up with a generous
overdose of slugs, nails, bits of glass and rock,
the charge spread like a fan and went screaming
through the air, ripping oflF showers of leaves and
twigs from the trees, plowing up the grass, and
doing all sorts of execution except damaging or
frightening the enemy. Some of the slugs struck
and rebounded in the gravel at my feet; where
upon I shook my fist at the gun's crew and beat
a masterly retreat, in good order and without loss
of baggage or temper. Coming back to the house
of a young missionary whom I knew, I rang at
the gate. He sent a coolie to admit rae, but
raeanwhile called from the window, " Roll your
self up small — the balls are flying lively this
morning." I went in and we gathered up his
penates for flight. Several balls had riddled his
house, smashing the crockery, puncturing the
library, going through his books quicker and
more thoroughly than he had ever done himself,
and turning things generally into bric-a-brac.
His family had been sent to the foreign quarter
that morning; and putting together the necessary

194 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
traps we presently fastened up the premises and
followed them.
There was a battle every two or three days.
The land attacks were frequently seconded by the
fleet on the river. It was interesting, and some
times droll, to watch the evolutions of forty or
fifty junks beating about on the tide and bom
barding the fort at the east gate. The firing was
irregular and incessant. The river was ploughed
by the passing shot and well be-fountained with
jets of spray. Occasional stray balls went over
the fort into the city, but did little harm beyond
frightening the dogs, splintering the tiles, and
sending up a cloud of dust from a demolished roof.
The rebels had purchased a foreign barque and
a brig, and these with three or four native gun
boats they had heavily armed and equipped, ahd
had moored them oflF the east gate battery. The
imperialists attacked them. After a furious duel
with broadsides two junks laid the two vessels
alongside and boarded them, A desperate hand-
to-hand fight on deck made short work of it. We
could see the wretched crews leaping overboard in
mortal terror and making for the shore. Not one
lived to reach it. The victors jumped into their
boats, dashed after them, and with clubs and
spears despatched them in the water.

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 195
One afternoon there was an unusual stir in the
fleet. We were on the alert to watch develop
ments. Presently a large flotilla of boats gath
ered from the various junks and pulled up by us
gaily decked with banners and loaded to the gun
wales with warriors intent on valorous deeds.
They grinned at us as they passed, as if to assert
a familiar brotherhood in arms and to claim our
endorsement of the bloody job they had in hand.
Their objective point was a small river battery
near us — so near that we could see the faces of
the combatants. Some of us younger sprigs of the
navy, to get a better view of such an object-lesson
in actual warfare, scrambled like monkeys to the
mizzentop and spent the balance of the afternoon
taking in a birdseye view of the scene. The reb
els raade a desperate stand and for a time the
fighting was hot enough to satisfy Mars himself.
Swords, jingals, spears, clubs, pounded, punched,
roared and flashed on both sides. The rebels
broke, Sorae dropped and died where they fought.
Some fled, and their streaming wounds printed
their tracks on the pavement in red. The victors
turned the captured battery on the fugitives.
How many were mowed down as the fatal shot
ploughed those crowded streets we never knew.
They must have been consumed in the flames where

196 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
they fell, for the troops fired the houses in order
to burn out the suburbs, and whole streets melted
away before our eyes. We could see the forlorn
inhabitants snatching whatever they could save
and rushing in a maddened stream for the foreign
quarter; some loaded with the contents of their
shops, some with the tools of their trade, some
with pots, pans, baskets, tables on their heads and
children in their arms, some with their old moth
ers on their backs. The wind blew fresh and
fanned the flames; and the whole district looked
like the crater of a volcano. All that afternoon
and night and all the next day the fires went roar
ing like a furnace and devouring whatever was
left to burn. When they stopped for lack of more
worlds to conquer, there lay spread before us the
ashes of temples, dwellings, tea gardens, hongs,
godowns and shops — two square miles swept level
with the ground — a dismal holocaust to the god
of war.
A few days later the whole fieet got underway.
That east gate battery had not been silenced.
Something must be done. All the afternoon the
whole rabble of forty or fifty junks were beating
to and fro off the battery and pounding away
with boisterous and imbecile fire. We youngsters
watched it as usual from the mizzentop. The

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 197
admiral seemed easily satisfied with the glory and
noise he had achieved, and very likely was hun
gry for his supper, for by five o'clock he signalled
the fleet back to the anchorage. But two junks
panted for more. Breaking from the line they
dashed across the river and beached themselves
directly under the ramparts, determined to carry
the fort or die in the attempt. It was brilliant
and brave; but in the expressive rhetoric of the
shops, " too muchee no can ! " The rebels were
literally too many for them. Murderous volleys
poured from guns little and big, and blazing fire
balls came crashing down upon their decks, till
the successive explosions appeared like one con
tinuous flash. Both vessels were soon in flames.
Their gallant crews driven from their guns fought
like wild beasts at bay. In the midst of the bloody
struggle the fire reached the magazines and with
a frightful explosion both vessels went thundering
into the sky. An instant hush silenced every
gun. An enormous white sulphurous cloud rose
majestically and spread umbrella-like over the
scene, and out of its folds came dropping big
guns, blazing sails and spars, and fragments of
men. The numbers destroyed on the two junks
may not have exceeded the list of those who so
suddenly went to their death on our ill-starred

198 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
Maine at Havana; but in this duel on the Wusung
not a soul survived to tell the tale. A few days
after, in a lucid interval between the battles, some
of us strolled up there to view the remains. It
was no light task to pick our way through the
burnt district, where the streets were obliterated
and ragged piles of ruin faced us wherever we
turned. By tacking and wearing toward every
point of the compass we at last zigzagged our way
to the spot. There lay the blackened hulls, or
rather the under shells of them, all the upper
works gone, clean scooped out by the force of the
explosion. Our friends the enemy were greatly
flattered by our interest in their prowess, and
issuing from the fort gathered round and over
whelmed us with voluble attentions. Not only
that, but they took us within the fortress and
showed us its impregnable defences. Whereupon
we made another interesting discovery. There was
the table-boy of our port steerage mess installed
in the fort as a high official in silks and buttons.
He had skipped some weeks before. And what
better qualification could be desired for a cap
taincy in the rebel artillery than that he had
served in a " Melican man-o'-war?" He saw that
we recognized him; but his value as a servant
had not been so priceless nor his loss so irrepara-

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 199
ble that we cared to disturb his dreams of mili
tary fame.
In February, 1854, we were summoned away
from these lively scenes to attend to what a Celestial
would call " pidgin" of our own. There followed
the second chapter in the story of the Japan
expedition and the signing of the treaty. The
Plymouth took our place at Shanghai, and the
Saratoga, bearing the new treaty, spread her white
wings for home. And while our rusty old sea-
bird was flying, rolling, plunging homeward round
the Horn as fast as canvas and tempest could
drive her, events went tripping on almost as
nimbly in the land of the yellow dragon. The
Plymouth found plenty of interesting things to
watch.^ Matters had not been running smoothly between
the Celestials and their foreign neighbors. An
unexpected stroke of idiocy on the part of the
Chinese commander brought aflFairs to a focus.
An American merchant on his way to his place
of business in his own private boat, over which
the American flag was flying, was hailed by one
of the war junks and ordered alongside. He paid
1 On accoimt of our alibi the adventures contained in the rest of this
chapter I cannot record as an eye witness. But fortunately I have a letter
from a friend who happened to visit Shanghai in a merchantman soon after
we left, and who saw and shared in the events. I find some assistance also
in incidental allusions from various travellers of the day.

200 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
no attention to the order and kept on his way.
A second and more peremptory hail was accom
panied by a shot, and he pulled to the junk to
demand the cause of the outrage. He was seized
and made prisoner, his flag torn to shreds and
trampled under foot. When the affeir was reported
to the commander of the Plymouth an officer was
instantly sent with a boat's crew who rescued him.'
But the insult to the flag was a graver matter.
After consultation with the American consul Com
mander Kelly sent notice to the Chinese chief and
to the authorities of the city that on the follow
ing Monday at one o'clock the fleet should as an
atonement publicly salute the American flag, or
he would blow every junk out of water. Mon
day morning he got underway, moved down and
dropped anchor in the circle of junks with ports
open, guns trained, and men at quarters; and at
the appointed moment the stars and stripes rose
to the masthead of the admiral's flagship and
was humbly saluted with Chinese powder. One
refractory junk started to escape, but a ball from
the Plymouth crashed through her ribs and brought
her round into line. As an additional lesson some
of the junks were then dismantled, their guns
spiked, and their small arms thrown overboard.
Such drastic discipline one might imagine would

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 201
teach the Chinaman manners. But the conceit of
the great empire was more swollen then than now.
She would deal as she pleased with the few foreign
barbarians sprinkled along her shores. It required
many lessons to convince her — if indeed she is
yet convinced — that the persons and interests of
other nations cannot be touched with impunity.
The next unpleasantness happened with the
British flag. An English gentleman was out one
afternoon for a constitutional with his invalid wife
who was borne in a sedan. Without warning or
provocation they were rudely beset by some strag
gling soldiers from the imperial camp. The Brit
ish consul promptly demanded satisfaction. The
infatuated officials not only refused but posted
notices warning all foreigners to leave Shanghai
and all foreign ships to vacate the harbor within
a week. The proclamation was drawn in blood
curdling rhetoric, and if not complied with threat
ened to lay the whole foreign quarter in ashes.
A consultation was held. There were but two
men-of-war in port — the American sloop Plymouth
and the British frigate Encounter. It was decided
to land the marines of both ships and as many of
the bluejackets as could be spared; and these with
a volunteer squad of a dozen or fifteen tars from
each merchantman in port made up a battalion

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
of some four hundred troops arraed to the teeth
and of immeasurable grit. The intent was simply
to protect the foreign quarter. But the derisive
attitude of the imperial army and the occasional
shots from camp became annoying and brought
on a collision. It is not often that four hundred
have a chance to attack fifteen thousand. But
they did it handsomely — bridged the moat, leaped
the mud parapets, and stormed the camp with
such a wild and riotous rush as to overturn tents,
jingals, men and dogs together, and send the Ce
lestials scuttling up country like an army of rab
bits. I doubt if our boys at Santiago could have
done it in better style. They chased the fugitives
for some miles. A few came limping back with
flesh wounds, and one or two lives were sacrificed
in the affair. It cost the Chinese, alas, a long list
of wounded, missing and dead, and proved a mem
orable lesson.
These irregular conflicts made it manifest that
it was to the common interest of both foreigners
and natives to emancipate the stricken city and
turn the pirates out. The Imps too (as the rebels
called them with a pardonable abbreviation of the
foreign term) had become an unbearable nuisance,
and the downfall of the city would bring things
to an end. Their departure would be hailed with

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 203
applause. It was neither English nor Americans
however who brought matters at last to a crisis.
The nearest foreign suburb to the native city
happened to be the French, which lay on the
north side bordering the moat. The situation
came to be past endurance, and the French decided
to join the Imps in a combined assault. The
attempt was made Jan. 6, 1855, and proved a
failure. Another a month later produced a like
result. A year of fighting had given the rebels
fine practice and they had profited by it. But
though not dislodged they were alarmed, and
concluding that other such assaults might make
the place too hot for them, decamped in the
night of February sixteenth. Like the rest of
their compatriots they left mementos of their
departure in bloody and smoking ruins.
This ended the Taiping tragedy in Shanghai.
Five years later another rebel army marched on
the city, ravaging and plundering the country as
it advanced; but the French and English had
armed to protect their homes, and joining the
imperialists inflicted upon the invaders a bloody
repulse. Another invasion was ordered by the
Taiping- wang in 1862; and it was the menacing
operations of this filibustering force which finally
led to the appointment of Chinese Gordon as the

204 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
leader of the Ever Victorious army in 1863. The
result is well known to the world.
It is not surprising that the great insurrection
should have been hailed at first as the advent of
a national deliverance. The Chinese themselves,
those at least who cared enough about their coun
try to give it any thought, hoped that it might
emancipate them from their Manchu conquerors
and reinstate the native dynasty on the throne.
Foreigners, in so far as they expected anjrthing
serious, hoped that it might result in the further
opening of the reluctant empire to western civili
zation and western trade. Both were doomed to
disappointment. What had seemed to rise as a
golden dawn soon darkened, and finally closed in
a night of terror, like one of their own frightful
typhoons. And when the Heavenly King took his
own life in his palace at Nanking, the curtain fell
not on the pathetic failure of a people's struggle
for freedom, but on the fortunate collapse of a
tragedy which had nothing left for motive but
vengeance and pillage and lust. With that final
blow the empire was released from the toils of a
fiery conflict which was rending her heart and life.
Peace proclaimed itself in the usual flourishes of
Chinese rhetoric, and the busy myriads settled
down to the industries that constitute their life and

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 205
that hold the great loose-jointed country together.
With all her faults there is something about
the big empire that wins the visitor who treads
her shores. Those who know the Chinese best
come to like them most. Their quaint peculiari
ties we can smile at and condone. They can do
the same with ours. One must admit that the
Chinese character is a medley of contradictions;
honest, industrious, practical, shrewd, patient,
docile, good-natured, yet capable of frenzied out
bursts of cruelty, untruthful and yet the bankers
and merchants men of probity whose word is as
good as their bond, phlegmatic, unemotional, un
imaginative, conservative and superstitious, with
a national vanity the most egregious and a civil
service the most corrupt on the globe, content
with things as they are and incapable of initia
tive. We are quite mistaken if we imagine the
whole vast domain peopled with the same kind of
peasantry we find in our laundries and kitchens.
Among the staple productions to be sure are
pirates and Boxers, along with the common vari
eties of ruffian and rogue, such as flourish on west
ern soil. The rabble can be treacherous and vin
dictive, as recent events have shown; and yet the
national disposition is pacific and obliging. In
all ranks may be found that contented self-compla-

206 THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI
cency which would be ludicrous if it were not such
a bar to their own progress. Yet back of it all,
allowing for the discordance of oriental and west
ern ideas, the bulk of the nation is right-minded,
level-headed and just. There is in the average
Chinaman a certain sturdiness and steadiness of
temperament, a masculine common sense, a genius
for industry and honesty, which make him the
Anglo-Saxon of Asia. He is not poetic but prac
tical, not transcendental and speculative but per
sistent and plodding. It raakes one's blood boil
to think of the unpatriotism and the blundering
medieval mismanagement that made such a mara-
moth of an empire and swarming with such prac
tical matter-of-fact people let itself be whipped
by little Japan. But the defeat carried with it a
prodigious lesson, which China has slowly set
herself to learn. The two peoples are widely
diflFerent, If the Japanese might conceivably be
compounded by melting together a Frenchman
and a Greek, with a dash of Arab, to make the
Chinaman one needs only Tartar and Teuton,
If the Celestial may not be so brilliant as the
Japanese, neither is he so nervous and fickle.
He raay be slow, but he is virile, has stuflF in him,
and equilibrium, China cannot be the peer of
Japan in the finer arts of painting, poetry, ora-

THE TAIPINGS IN SHANGHAI 207
tory, and the general embellishments of life ; but
she has great capacity for the practical arts, and
long before the Sunrise Kingdom had been heard
of in the west she had bestowed on the world
such priceless commodities as silk, paper, tea,
gunpowder and the compass. No one who really
loves China can listen with patience to the schemes
of western avarice, or think calmly of this proud
antique ever being in danger of vivisection into
" spheres of influence," If the Powers leave the
empire in her integrity, as agreed upon by the
two great antagonists, Russia and Japan, in their
treaty of peace just now completed, it is safe to
predict that the future will show an "open door"
much wider open than ever before to the best
influences of the west. And when China has been
leavened and refined by the eflFect of Christian
civilization, as she will be in time, she will help
more than any other native force in working out
the commercial, religious and social regeneration
of the vast continent of Asia,

IX

THE EXPEDITION AGAIN AND THE
OPENING OF JAPAN

THE EXPEDITION AGAIN AND THE
OPENING OF JAPAN
In February, 1854, the American fleet again
met in Yedo bay. It went the first tirae with
four ships, the second time with nine. The west
ern barbarian had come to get his answer. Instead
of stopping at Uraga as he had done the year
before. Commodore Perry moved up to Kanagawa,
where the city of Yokohama now stands, some
twenty-five miles above Uraga and within ten or
fifteen miles of Yedo, So powerful a force within
an hour's sail of their great metropolis must have
expedited the negotiations. And though the
American demands were contested inch by inch,
yet it was done with good nature and the com
missioners alraost invariably yielded.
Here enters another actor. As in all historical
movements, and certainly in all novels, other in
fluences were at work behind the scenes. It was
only another part of the mystery brooding over
this strange land that forces unknown and unsus
pected should be working for us in the dark. Not
till years after did it transpire what a friend we

212 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
had in Nakahama Manjiro, a Japanese waif, whose
story reads like a romance. In 1838 he was out
fishing with two other boys, when their boat was
caught in the current, carried out to sea and
wrecked on a desolate island. There for half a
year they lived a Robinson Crusoe life until
picked oflF by an American whaler and brought
to Honolulu, Nakahama learned the language
of his new friends, and finally coming to the
United States received an education. Another
whaling voyage, a visit to the California mines,
and he was back in Honolulu anxious to revisit
his native land. Nothing could deter him. The
dissuasions of his friends, the distance and perils
of the way, the likelihood of being beheaded for
his pains if he should succeed, — no argument or
obstacle could stand for a moment before his un
utterable longing for home. In due time there
fore Nakahama and his two comrades, now grown
from lads to young men of twenty-five, were
equipped with a whaleboat, a sack of ship's bis
cuit, a Bowditch's Navigator and a compass, and
were put on board an American merchantman
bound to Shanghai. A few miles from Lew Chew
they and their whaleboat were launched and com
mitted to the waves. After a hard day's pull they
reached the shore, but only to be arrested and

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 213
imprisoned; and six months later they were for
warded in a trading junk to Japan, to be impris
oned again, this time for three years. It would
seem that for three whole years the officials wres
tled with the problem before they could decide
whether getting blown oflF the coast in boyhood
and being brought back in manhood constituted
a capital crime. The year 1853 came round.
The Perry Expedition had come and gone, and
was to come again. Here was a captive in their
dungeons who had actually lived in the country
of these western barbarians, spoke their uncouth
language and knew their crafty ways. Why be
head an expert just when he was needed.'' Instead
they brought him to court and made him open
his budget of information. From a prisoner he
was transformed into a noble and decorated with
the two swords. By order of government he was
provided with a crew of carpenters and required
to build a whole fleet of whaleboats like his own ;
and then with a corps of scribes he was directed
to translate his Bowditch^s Navigator and make a
score of copies for the use of the Japanese marine.
One of these copies Nakahama afterwards gave to
his friend chaplain Damon in Honolulu, and it
was on exhibition at the Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia in 1876. Dr. Damon had often in-

214 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
quired after the three adventurers but had never
learned their fate. One raorning, years after the
treaty had been signed, a fine Japanese steamship
anchored off Honolulu and her commander came
on shore to call on Dr. Damon. It was no other
than the long lost Nakahama, now an officer in
the Japanese navy. The mutual explanations can
be imagined. " Where were you at the tirae of
the expedition?" asked the chaplain. " I was in
a room adjoining that in which the negotiations
were going on," said Nakahama. " I was not
allowed to see or communicate with any of the
Americans. But each document from Commodore
Perry I translated before it was handed to the
coraraissioners, and the replies also I translated
into English before they went to the commodore."
Which explains what so mystified our diplomats
at the time, that the papers from the " party of
the second part" carae to thera not alone in Dutch
and Japanese but in English also, Nakaharaa
was more than interpreter. He knew the Ameri
can people, the magnitude of their country, their
wealth and coraraerce, their prestige and power.
He believed in them. He was the channel through
which by a kind of preordination American ideas
filtered into Japan, It is easy to recognize a
divine preparation of the man, an overruling plan

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 215
and purpose in his whole training from the hour
when the three castaways drifted to sea in an open
boat till the day when the Sunrise Kingdom faced
the demands of the American fleet.
Meanwhile the stem public sentiment of this
isolated nation was rapidly melting away before
our neighborly advances. The people seemed to
be glad of our coming. They flocked on board
and were received as friends. They admired our
ships. They liked our dinners. As an impartial
historian I must admit that they took kindly, some
times convivially, to our brandies and wines. And
on shore these courtesies were duly reciprocated.
The negotiations took time. Many meetings were
held ; and on most of these occasions an entertain
ment was served by the Japanese in native style,
Sidney Smith once said of his countrymen that
" an Englishman is like an oyster — you must get
into him with a knife and fork," That was one of
the ways we got into Japan, and many a treat
went into that treaty.
At one of these dainty banquets it was my good
fortune to be one of the guests. It was the day
when the Mikado's gifts to our govemment were
exhibited. They were samples of both the fine
arts and the mechanical arts of the country; some
of them exquisitely graceful, some showing rather

216 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
the ingenuity and skill of plain handicraft. The
cabinet lacquer-work especially surpassed in artis
tic design and beauty of finish anjrthing of the
kind we had seen. The other presents were silks,
crapes, silverware, bronzes, porcelains, furniture,
and samples of household utensils and artisans'
tools. For some years after the retum of the fleet
these gifts could be seen at the Patent Office. I
believe they are now exhibited in the National
Museum at Washington.
When we had sufficiently admired all the pretty
things our genial hosts led us to the banquet room
and dinner was set on. This was of course com
posed of native viands, served in native style, and
to be eaten with native chopsticks. To eat in that
method requires either long practice or that the
applicant be to the manner born. If you are a
western barbarian and have not had the advan
tage of oriental training, do not attempt it, at
least when you are hungry; the results are apt to
be disappointing. The dinner was abundant. To
our Saxon sea-appetites it was toothsome; and
what with chopsticks and our own fingers and
penknives we wrestled with it in masterly fashion.
First they seated us on benches in long rows
around the hall and then ranged similar benches
before us spread with scarlet tea-cloths. Upon

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 217
these in front of each guest was set a small wooden
lacquered stand six or eight inches high and twelve
or fifteen square, and protected by a rim which
kept the dainty dishes from crowding each other
oflF. Mine was filled with the most delicate porce
lains, and albeit somewhat hungry I longed to
appropriate the ceramics instead ofthe provender.
The menu had its unique points; there were soups,
vegetables, oysters, crabs, boiled eggs, pickled fish,
seaweed jelly, and a variety of compounds which we
did not quite recognize and therefore felt toward
them that hesitating awe experienced by the elder
Mr. Weller in the presence of " weal pie," The
drinks were tea, served as always in the East with
out alloy of sugar or cream, and saki, a strong col
orless alcohol distilled from rice, somewhat like the
samshu or " white wine " of China, To these edi
bles and potables we applied ourselves with cour
age, and considering our disabilities with the chop
sticks they proved remarkably evanescent. More
saki and tea prepared us for a dessert of candied
nuts, sponge cake, cookies of various genera and
species, sugared fruit and confectionery. When
all was done our funny hosts brought us each a
sheet of bamboo paper to wrap up and carry away
what we had not consumed. Some of raine was still
extant when I reached home seven raonths later.

218 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
This was a point of etiquette they observed
themselves, and it led sometimes to interesting
results. One day at a dinner party on board the
flagship a Japanese functionary fell in love with
a frosted cake and a bottle of hock. According
to custom he desired to take them home. But it
was late, and his potations having made him too
unsteady to be the bearer of any other freight,
the coraraodore promised to send them by a spe
cial messenger in the morning. Morning carae,
but not the cake. During the night that had
absconded; some unregenerate tar had stowed it
away inside for safe keeping. Here was a terrible
dilemma. What if the negotiations should be
imperilled for lack of that cake ! A sort of coro
ner's inquest was hastily sumraoned to sit on the
missing loaf. The verdict was, " Send the hock,
but tell him that in America we present cake in
the evening." The guest was entirely satisfied,
and by sunset another frosted cake like the stolen
one was concocted at the galley and was duly sent
on shore.
After the dinner our hosts conducted us to the
beach. Among the presents was a large supply
of rice for the fleet. It was put up in straw sacks
or bales containing about a hundred and twenty-
five pounds each. By the pile stood a company

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 219
of athletes and gymnasts chosen from the peas
antry for their strength and size, and trained for
the service and entertainment of the court. At a
signal from their leader, who was himself a giant
of muscle and fat, a sort of huraan Jumbo, they
began transporting the rice to the boats. It was
more frolic than work. Some of them bore a bale
on each hand above their heads, some would carry
two laid crosswise on the shoulders and head, while
others performed dexterous feats of tossing, catch
ing, balancing thera, or turning somersaults with
them, I saw one nimble Titan fasten his talons
in a sack, throw it down on the sand still keeping
his hold, turn a somersault over it, throw it over
him as he revolved, and come down sitting on the
beach with the sack in his lap. Beat that who
can. If you iraagine it "as easy as preaching,"
try it the next time you go into the gymnasium.
But let me advise you, first raake your will.
Later in the afternoon the sarae athletes enter
tained us with a wrestling match. A ring had
been prepared in the area of the council-house
and the ground softened by the spade. Enter
twenty-five performers in a slow and dignified pro
cession, stripped to the loincloth and equipped
with satin aprons gorgeously embroidered and
fringed. Ranging themselves in a circle around

220 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
the ring, with grave pomp they enacted a series
of incantations and passes. Then they filed oflF to
the rear and laid aside their satin millinery for
business. As their names were called by the mas
ter of ceremonies a pair of them would axivance,
take their stand at opposite points of the ring,
crouch on their heels and repeat the mysterious
passes. Then entering the circle and warily ap
proaching each other they again crouched, again
gesticulated, and finally with a demoniac yell
sprang at each other like two monstrous billy-
goats. They used the head, not the fist. They
plunged into each other, capered wildly about
and dove into each other headlong, butted each
other on the breast and shoulders with frantic vio
lence. Some of them I noticed had raised large
welts on their foreheads by frequent indulgence in
this frisky pastime, and some of them were drip
ping with the blood that oozed from the fat
creases of their necks. An hour sufficed for these
huge calisthenics. When it was all over and the
puffing giants had collapsed, the ring smoked
with the dust of battle and looked as if it had
been trampled and tom by a herd of gambolling
elephants. Another spectacle that afternoon, more pro
phetic of the new future just opening on the

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 221
empire, was the first railroading in Japan. Among
the presents to the Mikado we carried a railroad;
not to be sure a fully equipped road, well weighted
with mortgage bonds and watered stock, tied up
in a merger or run by a receiver; but so much of
the genuine article as is represented by the rails,
the engine, and a car. In the rear of the council-
house the mechanics of the squadron had laid the
circular track, and thither our gentle hosts now
led us. There stood the locomotive and car,
exquisite specimens of American workmanship,
the engine already hissing and fuming, impatient
to show itself oflF, the car as sumptuous as the
richest woods and the finest art could make it.
The whole was constructed on a scale of one
quarter size, and so nothing larger than a St.
Bernard dog or a French doll could enter the
dainty rosewood door. The engineer sat on the
tender and bestowed his legs along the engine.
And when a timid Japanese was finally induced
to take a John Gilpin ride, he had to sit on the
roof of the car and stow his feet on the tender.
You can imagine with what a death grip he clung
to the eaves of the car, and how his teeth chat
tered and his robes fluttered as he flashed around
the circle. He thought he was a dead-head; and
so indeed he was. This miniature railroad was

222 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
for some years kept as a sort of imperial toy, A
storehouse was built for its safe-keeping; and
every little while they would relay the track and
gay parties of princes and courtiers would go fly
ing around on a sort of circular picnic. The
empire has long since outgrown the toy and is
laying its own railroads in all directions. Every
year witnesses substantial additions to the mile
age, the travel and the traffic.
The telegraph seemed to be more of a puzzle to
them than the steam engine. We carried them a
line fifteen miles long, and set up a short stretch
of it as a sample. They would go to one end,
deliver a message, and then trot mystified to the
other end, only to find their message safely
arrived, written out and waiting for them. It
was just Yankee magic, necromancy, witchcraft!
But they have long since become adepts in the
same magic, and their picturesque land is inter
lacing itself all over with an ever expanding web
of wires.
Another of our presents was a brass Dahlgren
howitzer. Not long after a thousand pieces like
it had been cast at their foundries and were
mounted in their forts. It was from these guns
that their salutes on Washington's birthday and
the fourth of July were appropriately fired.

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 223
Washington's name and fame had reached the
empire long before the expedition had been
dreamed of ; "a very great man," they said, "we
know him very well in Japan."
After many meetings the negotiations were
finally completed and the treaty signed on Friday,
the thirty-first day of March, 1854. Our ship
had been longest in commission of the whole
squadron and was therefore selected to bring the
precious document away; and having received
the bearer of despatches Captain H. A. Adams,
on the fourth of April the Saratoga spread her
white wings for home. It was inspiring, and to
us who were at last homeward bound it was thrill
ing, to hear the rousing cheers frora each ship as
we passed down the line, and frora the commo
dore's band the strains of " Home, Sweet Home."
We were soon out on the Pacific again, and that
was our goodbye to the fleet and to Japan. At
Honolulu Captain Adams left us for Panama and
reached Washington with the treaty some time
in June. The Saratoga, wishing in vain for a
Panama canal to give her a short cut home, had
yet to plough through boundless latitudes and
longitudes. Calling at Tahiti we lay for a week
within the dreamy shadows of the verdure-clad
hills that look down on the harbor of Papiete;

224 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
then rolled and pitched and foamed along through
the darkness and tempests and cold of Cape Horn,
which we passed on the middle day of winter,
July fifteenth; and after calling at one port in
Brazil, Pernambuco, finally dropped anchor at
Charlestown Navy Yard in September, five and a
half months from Japan, and absent from America
just four years.
All the world knows now to what a splendid
outblossoming of new life the national energies
of Japan have risen in these later years; and
all the world has the right to prognosticate from
such an exaraple the kind of regeneration that
ought to follow the American arms and the
American schoolmaster on Philippine soil. The
contrast between the Japan of today and the
Japan of half a century ago is little short of
miraculous. On the first of January, 1873, the
Gregorian calendar was adopted, and since that
day the weeks, months and years of Japan are
measured like our own. When we entered Yedo
bay there was nothing to mark the channel or
warn us of hidden rocks, and we had to grope
our way in with lead and line; but since 1869
every dangerous headland and reef has been
guarded by a lighthouse or a buoy. When the
first Japanese embassy visited America its advent

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 225
was heralded by the native steamer Kanda maru,
which came to San Francisco navigated indeed
by one of our naval officers, but manned by a
Japanese crew, run by Japanese engineers, and
sailed by a Japanese commander, who was none
other than our friend Nakahama Manjiro. But
the native cleverness and skill have easily mas
tered the new conditions; and now the country is
pushing her commerce in every direction, and
holding international expositions to attract for
eign trade. She is filling her bounds with rail
roads, telegraphs, electrics, steamers, factories,
power plants, post offices, hospitals, and banks.
She looks at herself every moming in a myriad
daily newspapers. She is beginning — alas for
her own picturesque grace — to array herself in
western garb. Among other luxuries she has a
finely growing and very promising national debt.
To place her regeneration on a permanent
basis the government has established a Bureau of
Education, partitioned the empire into districts
for schools and colleges, and crowned the whole
system with the University of Tokio. Many of
the more advanced pupils have been sent abroad
to be trained in the institutions and methods
of the western world. Among these wide awake
young students have been members of the nobility

226 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
and sons of the daimios, even a brother and an
uncle of the emperor. The emperor is a lineal
descendant of the first historical ruler of Japan,
whose date lies back more than twenty-five hun
dred years. He is said to be the one hundred
and twenty-third sovereign in the direct line of
succession. Both he and his empress have grandly
improved upon the traditions of such a venerable
antiquity. One may hazard the statement that
no country in the world has ever passed through
such a transformation within the lifetime of a
single ruler. The present Mikado — to borrow
the language of one of our American authors who
has spent many years in Japan, and knows from
the inside the whole history of the great achieve
ment — "has abolished the feudal system, eman
cipated four-fifths of his subjects from feudal vas
salage and raade them possessors of the soil; dis
armed a feudal soldiery numbering probably six
hundred thousand men trained to arms, reorgan
ized the order of society, established and equipped
an army forty thousand strong and a navy supe
rior in ships and equipments to that of the United
States;"^ an army since increased to hundreds of
thousands, which has driven the Russian Bear out
of Manchuria; a navy which dispersed the fleets
' Written in 1887. Griffis, Matthew Calbraith Perry, p. 423.

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 227
of China in the memorable action oflF the Yalu
river in 1895, and now ten years later by its finer
strategy and better marksmanship has annihi
lated two powerful Russian squadrons. Captain
Brinkley puts the contrast in still further detail,
" When an American squadron arrived to break
down her isolation, she did not possess even the
beginnings of a national fleet or a national army;
of an ocean-going mercantile marine; of a tele
graphic or postal system; of a newspaper press;
of enlightened codes, of a trained judiciary, or of
properly organized tribunals of justice; she knew
nothing of occidental sciences and philosophies;
was a complete stranger to international law and
to the usages of diplomacy; had no conception of
parliamentary institutions or popular representa
tion, and was divided into a nuraber of feudal
principalities, each virtually independent of the
other, and all alike untutored in the spirit of
nationality or iraperialism. In thirty years these
conditions were absolutely metaraorphosed. Feu
dalism had been abolished; the whole country
united under one administration ; the polity of the
state placed on a constitutional basis; the people
admitted to a share in the government under
representative institutions; an absorbing senti
ment of patriotism substituted for the narrow local

228 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
loyalties of rival fiefs; the country intersected with
telegraphs and railways, and its remotest districts
brought within the circuit of an excellent postal
system; the flag of the nation carried to distant
countries by a large mercantile marine ; a power
ful fleet organized, manned by expert seamen, and
proved to be as capable of fighting scientifically as
of navigating the high seas with marked immunity
from mishap; the method of conscription applied
to raising a large military force provided with the
best raodern weapons and trained according to
western tactics; the laws recast on the most ad
vanced principles of occidental jurisprudence and
embodied in exhaustive codes ; provision raade for
the adrainistration of justice by well-equipped tri
bunals and an educated judiciary; an extensive
system of national education inaugurated, with
universities turning out students capable of origi
nal research in the sciences and philosophies of
the west; the state represented at foreign courts by
competent diplomatists; the people supplied with
an ample number of journals and periodicals; the
foundations of a great manufacturing career laid,
and the respect of foreign powers unreservedly
won. Such a record may well excite wonder."^
^ Captain F. Brinkley, Japan, iis History, Arts and Literature. Vol. I : pp. 9-11.

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 229
The first parliament assembled in 1890; and
it is a significant fact that some of its members
were Christian men elected by non-Christian con
stituencies. The famous edict against Chris
tianity, after standing upon the statute books for
more than two centuries was repealed in 1873.
Christian missions are actively engaged in laying
the foundations of an evangelized empire. And
though the swift intelligence of the people, their
remarkable aptitude for absorbing western ideas,
and their instinctive penchant for a materialistic
philosophy have led many of them into strange
vagaries of opinion, and the faithful missionaries
and native pastors have met with some severe dis
couragements, yet the great current of Christian
civilization is steadily sweeping over the whole
broad land. The first Protestant convert to Chris
tianity is said to have been a government official
who picked up a New Testament floating in the
bay; and ever since that day the kindly oceans
have been wafting to the shores of the Sunrise
Kingdom frora all Christian lands the raessengers
of the Cross and the glad tidings of the Christian
gospel. The first missionaries landed in 1859,
five years after the treaty; and now nearly a
thousand are living and laboring in diflFerent
parts of the empire, A vast and rapidly increas-

230 THE OPENING OF JAPAN
ing Christian literature has arisen, oftentimes
decorated and beautified for its mission by Jap
anese art itself. Churches have been gathered,
and many of them have native pastors well edu
cated in their own colleges and professional
schools. Many of these churches are not only
self-supporting but already engaged in broad
philanthropic service for others. Young Men's
Christian Associations, King's Daughters, Chau
tauqua circles. Christian Endeavor societies, in
dustrial schools and other varieties of organized
benevolence vie with each other in broadening
and deepening the intellectual and spiritual life
of the empire. On the very spot where guns were
cast to resist Commodore Perry's fleet " now
stands the Imperial Female Normal College; " and
on the grounds at Yokohama where the treaty
was signed now " rises the spire of a Christian
church."^ Some of our first missionaries in Japan
lived in Buddhist temples rented to them by the
priests, who to give them accommodation moved
out, idols and all. A happy omen of the spirit
ual transformations which are cleansing those
shrines and filling them with Christianity — taking
out the idols and putting in the Cross. The
morning sun is pouring its radiance over the hills
1 Griffis, Matthew Calbraith Perry, pp. 32B, 3S7.

THE OPENING OF JAPAN 231
and valleys of that beautiful land. The great
island kingdom of the Orient is even now in the
golden dawn of her renewal; and now more than
ever, in her physical beauty, her material expan
sion, her spiritual quickening, and the high place
among the nations which she has won by her
arms and her generous diplomacy, deserves to
wear the diadem of her ancient title, the Empire
of the Rising Sun.

X
A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACK
WARDS

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACK
WARDS
I CANNOT assume that the ingredients of this
chapter ever actually appeared in the log-book of
the captain's clerk. But having since grown out
of studies initiated by the experiences therein
described, they will serve as a suitable peroration
to this record, or, if you prefer, as a seasonable
coup de grdce.
To the visitor in China the first view gives an
impression of civilization which grows stronger
with every week of his stay. The coasters that
swarm about the islands and capes as he approaches
do not betoken a savage state; they are the mes
sengers of commerce, the bearers of wealth, the
servitors of luxury; and they are manned not by
barbarians but by men of industry and enterprise.
On shore he finds himself within an empire more
extensive than was ever the Persian or the Assyr
ian, more populous than the Roman in its golden
age, perhaps as old as the Egyptian and far more
enduring. He finds it a great country, big and
bustling, with cities, temples, bridges, roads, ca-

236 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
nals; a coimtry with a history £ind a literature,
with libraries, schools, theaters, with paper mills
and printing shops, with government, soldiers,
nobility smd taxes, with agriculture, manufactures,
commerce, music and art, with minted coin and
even paper money; and capping the climax the
oldest newspaper in the world. All these are ven
erable with age, and some of them he finds emerg
ing fiom an antiquity that had passed into history
before Greece was yet in a state of protoplasm.
He is forced to admit that this looks like civili
zation. It may not be his kind, but it is civiliza
tion. These people may be fossils, but they are
not savages. Their Central Flowery Kingdom,
within which they have tried to barricade them
selves against the world, is opinionated and fanat
ical, and yet embodies in itself the political
philosophy, the social ethics and the mechanical
industries of more than a hundred generations.
This is not barbarism. It is society. It is civili
zation. The ingredients have been queer, and
they have produced a queer result. But it is not
a case of "arrested development," It is a true
civilization, and in an advanced stage. And the
wonder of it is that it grew up in a country sepa
rated from outside influences, walled in by ocean,
desert and mountain range, and among a people

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 237
who down to the nineteenth century were but
twice conquered by any foreign power,^ and then
not till ages after their nation had become mature,
compacted and permanent. So far from being
assisted in their evolution by the religion and cul
ture of the West, these Orientals had never heard
of the Christian faith, or of the Roman eagles, or
of Grecian art, or of Phoenician commerce, until
their own national life could be measured by
twenty centuries. A French author affirms that
" of all the peoples who have existed or who still
exist on the globe, the Chinese are the only peo
ple, except the Indian, whose civilization from
the time when the earth began to be peopled has
accomplished its complete development of its own
movement and by its own nature, without the help
of any foreign civilization brought in by conquest
or transmitted by literary monuments, as have
been the European civilizations, and perhaps even
that of ancient Egypt."^ He does not allow that
the advent of Buddhism from India was a civil
izing agency, since China was already in advance
of any influence which might otherwise have been
exerted by that. Here we have an indigenous
civilization. Its processes have not been tampered
' Genghis Khan in 123S— the Manchus in 1644.
' Pauthier, Chine, ou Descrip. Historique, Gfic, p. 5.

238 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
with by any meddlesome hand. They were spon
taneous and sui generis. A country which has
thus worked out its own problems in its own way
and apart from all others must have had some in
teresting experiences. And this chapter shall give
it a chance to tell its story.
History is not a crab, and does not indulge in
the habit of walking backward. It seems hardly
courteous to invite her to do so. When a vener
able empire in her progress down the centuries
has gathered from each some token, some invention,
some utility or convenience, it is not nice to make
her turn about and retrace her steps to the start
ing point, and all along the way lay aside piece
by piece one art after another, one bit of inven
tion or discovery after another, one custora or
appliance or craft or tool after another, redeposit-
ing in each cycle the gains she had gathered, until
back in the twilight primeval she stands in her
original barbaric simplicity, stripped of all the
comforts and conveniences of the later civiliza
tion. And all for our delectation ; that we luxu
rious moderns may inspect her slow and painful
developraent, and be able to see for ourselves just
where and when and how she picked up those
odds and ends of civic life out of which she has
slowly builded her oriental state. It is a good

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 239
deal to ask. By way of justification we can re
mind the ancient dame of her own method of
teaching her boys at school — who, when they
bring their lessons to the master turn their backs
to him, and recite their task from memory, and
thus " back " their way through all the classics
of their mother tongue. In this chapter we will
back our way through Chinese history.
In countermarching from this twentieth cen
tury toward the beginnings of things we shaU
finaUy reach a period where only the rudiments
of the social fabric will be left; life reduced to
its simplest terms. And still beyond lies a region
of m3i;h whence issue only the echoes of tradition,
and whose denizens, shrouded in primeval twi
light, appear rather as specters roving among the
shadows of the dawn than as beings of flesh and
blood who could have had anything in common with
the man of today. In trying to span the enor
mous space which divides us from these distant
shades we shall find it convenient to do so by
periods. Let us fix our milestones say a miUen-
nium apart; for if it is possible to go back in
time at all, it will be quite as easy to take a
miUennium at a single bound.
Planting our first guidon in the year 1000 A, D,
and starting on our journey thither we shall

240 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
speedily begin to miss multitudes of conveniences
which had become familiar objects in the China
of today. As we recede we leave behind all those
modern arts and appliances which have come
from intercourse with western powers in our own
times, and which cling mainly to the shores of
the great empire without penetrating very far
inland or exerting any sensible influence on the
mass of the people. Many branches of mechanical
industry have sprung up in our own generation,
and their success is ample evidence that the Celes
tial is not the utterly servile and imitative being
we had been given to understand , The first things
to disappear would naturally be the modern Chi
nese navy, her fleets of commercial steamships,
the European arms and tactics in some divisions
of her army, her modern arsenals and munitions,
her steam cotton factories, and her nascent rail
roads and telegraphs. Following these we should
presently lose the arts of modern glass blowing
and bronze work, the preparation of vermilion
and Prussian blue, the modern newspaper, the
manufacture of gold leaf, pearl buttons, glass
mirrors, clocks, watches, fire engines, the use of
such conveniences as the capstan and windlass,
and the improvement in mathematical insfruments,
field artillery, copper block printing and the like.

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 241
introduced in the seventeenth century by the
Jesuit missionaries. Opium will be gone, with a
good riddance; for though long known and used
as a medical nostrum — said to have been first
brought into China by the Arabs in the latter
part of the thirteenth century — it is only within
the last one hundred and fifty years that it has
been working such havoc as a narcotic poison.
As we go on the people will begin to look
strangely abnormal, or rather normal, for they
will be wearing the hair nature gave them instead
of shaving the head and cultivating a queue — a
mark of subjection imposed by the Manchus after
the conquest in 1644, We shall miss the courtly
columns of the Pekin Gazette, the oldest newspaper
in the world; and must be content to continue
our journey without the solace of either fiction or
drama, which appeared in China somewhat sud
denly and nearly together about the thirteenth
century. Paper money will still be a convenience
to us, for that has been in use at various times
for nearly a thousand years. We shall in due
time emerge on the other side of the barbaric
court of Genghis Khan, the Mongol conqueror of
China; and of his still more famous grandson
Kublai Khan, who has been called " the most
civilized prince of his time," whose capital was

242 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
visited by the Italian adventurer, Marco Polo,
and under whose rule the nation grew prosperous
and powerful. The Grand Canal, of which he
was the builder, will disappear, and his whole
vast power, then at its greatest extent, will melt
from view " like the baseless fabric of a vision" ;
as indeed it did less than a century after the
death of the great khan.
On completing this first stadium of our journey
and looking around upon the country and the
times, we find the sarae industrious people, the
same busy toil of rice and tea culture in the fields,
the same pottering traffic in the towns, the same
plodding commerce on the rivers and along the
coast. In Europe at that date the wheels of civi
lization drave somewhat heavily. Our Saxon
fathers in England still after a fashion held their
own, not yet conquered by Canute and his Danes,
William the Norman was not yet in his cradle.
The ravaging Norsemen had stolen that slice of
Northern France which has ever since borne their
name, but had not yet invaded England, nor set
up their kingdom of Sicily, The Saracens were
occupying Western Asia, Northern Africa and
Spain, The Turks had not yet appeared before
the walls of Constantinople, The Crusades had
not begun. The soil of Europe was blanketed

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 243
with feudalism. The tiraes were still dark. But
the people were slowly emerging, and were grad
ually improving in those mechanical arts with
which they were to build a better civilization.
Christianity was doing what it could to regener
ate society, but was itself too often borne back
in the struggles of those turbulent times. In
China the conditions were quite diflFerent. It was
a pagan civilization, but it had entered upon its
period of maturity. The empire already sustained
an iraraense population; and by the discipline of
its own internal feuds and wars with outside
assailants had become compacted into a solid
state. Letters were cultivated by high and low.
There was a large literature of block-printed
books. Schools existed in every town for teach
ing the poor, and the masters were paid at the
public charge. Government officials were selected
from the literary graduates, and that had been
the rule for four or five centuries. There were no
post offices, but the emperors sent written man
dates to the provincial kings and governors by
relays of post horses. The people were skilled in
porcelain, in lacquered ware, in silk-weaving.
Cotton, which had been known for two or three
centuries before the Christian era as a garden
plant, and the cloth woven from it as a rare and

244 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
costly fabric, was now beginning to be cultivated
for general use. Among the craftsmen were ex
pert carvers and even artists. People lived in
houses of wood or brick or even stone; their
rooms were adorned with ancestral tablets, mot
toes from Confucius, and household shrines where
they worshiped idols and the shades of their
ancestors. They had dials to measure time, and
the two Mohammedan travelers^ who visited them
two centuries before report that they found clocks
run by weights. There was copper coin in abun
dance, but no money of silver or gold. The wom
en dressed their hair with ivory combs. The
people were not addicted to wine, and the ravages
of opium and samshu were unknown. Tea was
the coramon drink; the plant had been cultivated
for many centuries. The two Arabian travelers
give us the fir.st news we have of it from any for
eigner, and their quaint notice is worth quoting:
" The Emperor also reserves to himself the
revenues which arise from the salt mines, and
from a certain herb which they drink with hot
water, and of which great quantities are sold in
all the^cities to the amount of great sums. They
call it Sah, and it is a shrub more bushy than
the pomegranate tree and of a more taking smell,
^ Their A ncient A ccoutU was translated from the Arabic by Renaudot.

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 245
but it has a kind of bitterness with it. Their
way is to boil water, which they pour upon this
leaf, and this drink cures all sorts of diseases."^
The people married as many wives as they pleased,
and were fond of gaming and all manner of diver
sions. Their scholars cultivated astronomy, but
attained to little real knowledge of the stars, and
still less of other sciences. The nation was peace
able, though able to fight on occasion; and had
an army, equipped with bows, spears, swords and
shields. Gunpowder was already in existence,
but was used in fireworks, sometimes by way of
entertainment, soraetiraes to scare oflF evil spirits ;
its use for slaughter on the field of battle did not
dawn on their innocent minds tiU about the
twelfth century,^ The Chinese drew most of their
living from the soil then as now, and used hoes,
spades, shovels, mattocks, plows and harrows.
They irrigated their fields, and had water wheels
for the purpose, with other devices of a cruder
sort. All these implements were somewhat rudi
mentary, in much the same primitive shape in
which they had been originally contrived.
These data will help our modern imagination
to picture the great empire as it stood in the year
1 Ancient Account, Renaudot, p. 25.
* S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom, II : p. 90.

246 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
of our Lord one thousand. Its inhabitants were
evidently less enlightened than now. They had
not yet come to the enjoyment of so many of the
arts and comforts of life. Yet they were a civi
lized people, A country besprinkled with cities,
towns, plantations, markets, schools, libraries and
temples, interlaced with innumerable lines of com
merce and trade, ruled by a fully organized gov
ernment, and professing for their ethical ideals in
business and social life the maxims of their great
sage Confucius, such a country had surely reached
a well-defined stage of civilization.
Measuring off another millennium in our reces
sional through Chinese history will set our next
milestone at the beginning of the Christian era.
The reigning house is the great Han dynasty from
which to this day the Chinese love to call them
selves the sons of Han. The occupant of the im
perial throne is Ping-ti — "the Emperor Peace;"
a strange coincidence often noticed, that this
should be the title of the monarch of the great
oriental kingdom when on the other shore of Asia
He who was born Prince of Peace was lying in
the manger at Bethlehem. This distant date is
still but a mediseval period for so ancient a realm ;
and when we reach it we shall find Chinese society
of nineteen hundred years ago more rudimental

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 247
and less homogeneous. The pacific title which
stands at its head apparently had small influence
over the actual flow of events. The whole period
is strongly marked with political convulsions.
There are frequent changes of dynasty; and in
each many of the aspirants attain to the throne
only by lavish use of dagger and poison. During
almost the whole of this turbulent millennium
Chinese history bears a close resemblance to the
bloody annals of the later Roman empire. While
such monsters as Comraodus, Caracalla and Heli-
ogabalus were rioting in debauchery, unknown to
thera and alike unconscious of thera, such other
monsters as Tung-cho, Fe-te, Lew-yu were rival
ling their unnatural crimes in the east. The phys
ical world too seemed disposed to emulate the ma
lign activities of raan. There were earthquakes,
furious and fatal. Droughts were followed by
famines. Once an entire population of a hundred
thousand families migrated in quest of a more
kindly soil. The rivers, neglected by the mon
archs, who were busy with their courtesans and
their feuds, took the opportunity now and then to
burst their dykes and sweep oflF whole communi
ties and almost whole provinces at a time. And
yet in all the hurly-burly, and under the incubus
of such atrocious misrule, there was a vitality in

248 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
Chinese civilization that raade it grow, and made
its growth substantial and permanent. This was
the period that introduced the culture of tea, the
manufacture of porcelain, the genesis of gunpow
der, improvements in glass-making, the use of
India ink for writing, and the invention of block
printing. This period witnessed a radical civil
service reform in limiting to literary graduates
the selection of officials for governmental employ,
and adopted various improvements in the conduct
of aflFairs municipal and provincial, and even in
the imperial administration itself. It was in this
period that the nation fought off the Huns and
bought off the Turks, and grew into such pros
perity and renown that overtures of friendship
and trade came from Arabia and Hindostan, and
later frora Persia and Rome, In the first century
China welcomed the religion of Buddha; in the
seventh a Nestorian priest brought the gospel of
Christ. Within this millennial terra occurred
three general epochs of reformation and revival
of learning; under Ming-ti in the first century,
Leung-wu-ti in the sixth, Heuen-tsung in the
eighth. Other less extensive movements in the
same direction are noted by the native historians.
Schools and colleges were established, libraries
were gathered, learned men were encouraged, and

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 249
literary degrees became the passport to promotion.
In such facts as these we have the picture of a
nation learning to think for itself, becoming con
scious of its needs, and beginning to put forth its
inventive powers to supply them. It was already
a large empire. The present provinces of Kwang-
tung, Kwangsi and Fuhkien had lately submitted
to the imperial sceptre — a region of more than
two hundred and eleven thousand square miles —
almost exactly the size of raodern Germany ; and
with these additions the national boundaries had
expanded to very nearly their present limits. At
the beginning of the Christian era the Chinese
monarch received homage and tribute from a ter
ritory that stretched from the Pacific to the Cas
pian. It is irapossible now to compute the popu
lation which occupied these vast plains. The more
fertile sections naturally swarmed with life, while
some of the rougher and more forbidding tracts
were scarcely inhabited at all. On the boundless
interior steppes the subject races wandered at will;
but in China proper, from the Kiayu pass to the
Yellow sea, there was nothing nomadic or preda
tory, save some fragmentary tribes who to this
day linger among the mountains of the southwest.
The Chinese were even then a nation. They had
a central government, laws, literature, cities and

250 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
trade. They cultivated rice, raade silk, coined
copper money. They had foundries for casting
tripods and bells. The mass of the people were
of course of menial occupation, and were ignorant
and poor. Very few could read. Books were scarce
and costly, as in the Saxon times under King Alfred
and for the same reason. The raechanical arts
were rude. In the common handicrafts the simple
contrivances which had come down from a still
remoter antiquity could hardly be dignified with
the name of machinery. The houses people lived
in were decent, and the villages made some pre
tensions to respectability; yet Canton, then as
now the queen city of southern China, was walled
around with a stockade of bamboo and mud.
A glance at the west will show us the familiar
names and events which stand on the same parallel
with the period we have reached. It is the Augus
tan age of Rome. Seated on the throne of the
world she has pushed her boundaries outward in
all directions. The well known legions have broken
the power of Carthage and have reduced to vas
salage Syria, Macedonia and Greece. Alexandria
is the centre of commerce and learning. The great
men of Sparta and Athens are in their graves.
The last prophet of the Old Testament has uttered
his warnings, and the Maccabees after bravely

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 251
struggling to maintain the national prestige have
vanished from the stage. In the west the Teutonic
tribes have swarmed from their jungles and swept
down upon the more civilized people of the plains,
and the long and bloody struggle has ended in
Caesar's conquest of Germany, Gaul and Britain.
The homes of our Saxon ancestors were still in
the Schleswig forests, and the British Celts had
only just learned to bow to the inevitable Roman,
The world was witnessing the progress of two types
of pagan civilization, the Latin and the Greek;
while unknown to both a third type, the industrial,
was slowly working out its problems in China,
and has outlived them both.
These in brief were the conditions east and west
about the beginning of the Christian era. Meas
uring back from that point, the next period will
reach to 1000 B, C, This is the time of Solomon
the great king in Jerusalem, perhaps of Zoroaster
the great reformer in Persia, The Phoenicians,
the energetic Yankees of the Mediterranean, have
built up their luxurious metropolitan seaport Tyre,
and forth from it are launching their argosies of
commerce and colonies of settlers to every acces
sible coast. Babylon, though declining from its
former splendor, is still a powerful state. Its
neighbor, Assyria, warlike and cruel, has spread

252 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
its arms and its boundaries over a large part of
western Asia. The Hittites, their rivals, a more
civilized people than either Assyria or Babylon,
are yet powerful enough to hold their own for
centuries in presence of both. And Egypt, the
oldest of them all, has passed its golden age
and is already far gone in decay. Rome will
have to wait for yet a couple of centuries and
more before its twin founders are suckled by the
she-wolf, Greece too is still in the shell; the Hel
lenic tribes doubtless there, but as yet no nation,
no state, no poetry and art, no drama, her famous
temples not built, her sages still unborn, the blind
bard not yet awake to sing the adventures of
Ulysses and the fall of Troy,
In Chinese history this was a great millenniura.
In its centre stands Confucius, the one illustrious
name that has dominated China for more than
two thousand years. By his side appears an elder
sage, Lao-tse, fifty years old when Confucius was
in his cradle, a man whose speculations have
grown into the system we know as Taoism, a phi
losophy thoroughly unphilosophical, and a reli
gion thoroughly irreligious — probably as unin
telligible now to his own countrymen as to the
rest of us. In this era too lived and reigned the
lordly Che-hwang-ti, brilliant and unscrupulous,

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 253
often called the Napoleon of China. He was the
builder of the Great Wall, the projector of roads,
palaces, fortresses, canals, and withal a great polit
ical reformer; more famous perhaps for his mon
strous attempt to destroy the literature which had
accumulated in China before his day; some say
in order to immortalize himself and stand in his
tory as the First Ruler of the great empire; oth
ers, and with more reason, say that he aimed to
demolish the dead and dried-up ideals of the past
and force his people to form new habits of looking
forward instead of backward. This period can
show great deeds as well as great names. One was
the crude beginning of printing; so big a thing
indeed that it seems to have required at least two
eras of discovery — the original contrivance, and
then a thousand years later finding out its inesti
mable utilities. The books of the ancients had
been traced with a style on leaves or reeds or slips
of bamboo, but more recently had been engrossed
on cloth or silk. It was in the latter part of this
period that paper came into being and at once
swept everything before it, remanding all other
devices to the oblivion of the past. It was this
period which settled the form of the Chinese let
ters, and produced the first dictionary of them.
It was this period that gathered the first library

254 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
and compiled the first lexicon of the language,
said to be the most ancient universal lexicon in
any tongue. This was the period of the Chinese
Herodotus, Sze-ma-tseen, in whom the national
history began to assume its proper rank in litera
ture. Almost the entire period was covered by
the Chau dynasty. Thirty-five emperors held the
imperial sceptre two centuries longer than any
other reigning faraily. Under this dynasty the
evils ofthe ancient feudal systera culminated; and
the next reigning house vainly attempted to con
solidate the empire by destroying the power of the
petty princes and reducing by force the provinces
which would not yield to reason or gold — a savory
enterprise which was completed later by the Hans.
This was therefore a critical period in the early
life of the nation; and we have in it an interest
ing spectacle of a great people emerging from the
feudal chrysalis state into the higher and more
homogeneous monarchical form.
Throughout nearly the whole of this period the
Chinese had copper coin. Very early in it they
made silk — probably even before. They knew
the properties of the arch long before the Romans
or the Greeks. According to Du Halde they were
the first of all people to use iron in their bridges.
The loadstone was known to them from a remote

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 255
antiquity, and its power of aflFecting iron is noted
in a Chinese dictionary as early as A, D, 121, In
a work written a hundred years later Pere Gaubil
says he found the use of the compass distinctly
recorded. There is even a story that eleven cen
turies before the Christian era the emperor Ching-
wang presented certain ambassadors with chariots
fitted with box-compasses to direct their home
ward way. The artisans of the empire made pot
tery, bells, tripods, vases of silver and gold, weap
ons for the troops, and the siraple utensils required
by the farmer and the fisherman. They were
mainly an agricultural people ; and the two great
river deltas and the vast swampy plains of the in
terior fed the increasing millions with the already
national diet of rice.
In many ways the conditions prevailing at the
beginning and at the end of this period, with a
whole millennium between, present us with a not
able contrast. We have seen what the people were
under the Han, To picture them as they were a
thousand years before we must divest them of
much that made the times of Han their Age of
Chivalry, First of all we must conceive of the
Chinese without Confucius ; an almost impossible
thing, since the name and fame and teachings of
the sage are for more than two thousand years so

256 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
interwoven with the life of the nation, its history,
its politics, its philosophy and religion, that the
very best part of Chinese civilization may fairly be
ascribed to him. Think of China without Confu
cius; without his writings, without his pupils and
coramentators, without his influence, without a
tablet to his memory or a temple for his worship.
Think of China without Taoism or Buddhism;
without printing or paper; without porcelain or
lacquer ware, or tea; without compass or gun
powder or coin, possibly without silk; without
her Great Wall and her Grand Canal. It is not
easy to imagine China so stripped. What can be
left? There was left a people not nomadic, but
nationalized and settled; a people of some mil
lions — how many no one knows; a people seg
regated into provinces and ruled by hereditary
princes who held some sort of feudal relation with
each other and with the central court; a people
who lived in houses, and decorated thera with
raottoes frora their ancient sages, and with metal
vases sorae of which are still in existence and are
greatly admired; a people who knew something
of the common handicrafts, carpentry, metallurgy,
husbandry; who had no coin, but traded by
barter; who indulged in war and fought with
bows and swords; a people whose raen of letters

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 257
recorded their learning on strips of bamboo, whose
astrologers kept account of eclipses and other for
midable freaks of nature, whose poets still live in
the grave lyrics afterwards embalmed by Confu
cius in the Shi-king, whose chroniclers left their
annals to be gathered into the Shu-king by the
sarae pious hand.
These were the beginnings of civilization. They
are not the beginnings of the nation. To reach
that distant goal we have a goodly journey before
us yet. Another millennium backwards will set
us down at 2000 B, C, This is about midway
in the Hia dynasty which was founded by Yu the
great and lasted for nearly four centuries and a
half; a period generally reckoned by Chinese his
torians as the first that can be called properly
historic. At this ancient date the country does
not throng with such hordes of people as we have
found in later periods. Yet there was a wonder
ful vitality and fertility about them. In spite of
war and famine and flood, according to their old
est maps they had already spread enough to occupy,
or at least to hold, a territory stretching seven
teen degrees from north to south and twenty-five
from east to west. Their employments and their
belongings were of the simplest kind. According
to the native chroniclers the property of Shun

258 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS

when he succeeded the emperor Yao B, C,
consisted of cattle, bow, shield, spear, some house
hold furnishings and musical instruments; among
the furnishings may be allowed sorae clay ware
for the kitchen, since he was himself a potter, as
well as fisherman and farmer. The people were
still engaged, as they had been for some centuries,
in clearing the jungle, draining the marshes and
reducing the land to cultivation. They made
pottery, and soon acquired some practical knowl
edge of metals, as is shown very interestingly by
specimens which have survived to our own time.
There is an ancient Chinese work, the Po-ku-tu,
in sixteen large volumes, descriptive of sacred
vases, jugs, bottles and mirrors, of gold, silver and
copper, of the Shang, Chau and Han dynasties,
covering some eighteen centuries and coming
down to the Christian era. It contains several hun
dred plates of them. Some of the vases described
are still extant, nearly four thousand years old.
Several figures of them are given in the Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society, and show consider
able art and skill. At the beginning of this period
the Chinese already possessed a rude alphabet;
E Yin presented to his sovereign a written memo
rial in the year 1765 B. C. ; solar eclipses were
recorded as early as four centuries before.

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 259
These figures do not take us back to the origin
of this ancient people. We shall get nearer to our
quest if we lay out another millennium and put
down our next stake at 3000 B. C. Here we must
do much of our traveling in the dark. It is the
period of the Five Emperors, a legendary and
mythical region. Yet the accounts seem to wear
an air of credibility as far up as Fuh-hi, the first
of the famous Five. The date assigned to him is
B. C. 2852. We may discount the extravagant
claims of the Chinese for the full-blown glory of
this monarch, and make due allowance for their
somewhat nebulous proofs ofthe antiquity of their
institutions, and yet there would seera to be a
residuum of grounds for believing in Fuh-hi. The
mythical period of China stretches back into a
darkness which we have no means of exploring.
But Fuh-hi seems to half emerge in an early dawn
where night has begun to melt into a semi-dark
ness in which as we strain our eyes we can discern
an actual living figure moving to and fro in the
gloom. We cannot well refuse to believe that by
his time, raore likely some centuries before, the
forbears of the Chinese had arrived on the banks
of the Hoang-ho and were actual settlers. The
first provinces occupied were not on the coast but
in the interior, Fuh-hi's capital was in Shensi, a

260

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS

territory on the western bank of the great river
and more than seven hundred miles from the sea.
The migrating tribes had entered what was to be
China from the west; and the legends of that
earliest reign exhibit them as already passing
from the nomadic to the provincial. Ignorant of
the vast expanse into which they had emerged
through the passes of the Thien-shan, they spread
gradually down along the banks of the Yellow
river, halting here and there as they lighted upon
favorable spots for putting up their huts and graz
ing their flocks. They found theraselves in a coun
try battieraented around on three sides with a
rampart of mountain ranges, and on the fourth
defended by the sea. It was a territory of im
mense alluvial plains, crossed by straggling ridges
of limestone and granite, and channeled by num
berless rivers. The inundations of these untamed
floods reduced vast regions of soil to swamp. Pos
sibly the immense " fault " which, according to
Professor Pumpelly,^ produced the ancient lake
system of northern China, may have been at the
time of the Chinese immigration a recent event;
and the tremendous deluge which native tradition
locates at a period as early as thirty-one centuries
^ Described and mapped in his Geological Researches in China, Mongolia.
and Japan, pp. 43-45.

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 261
before the Christian era, may have been the first
rough experience the tribes encountered on their
arrival. At any rate this much is true, that the
possession of her magnificent rivers has entailed
upon China more frequent, more extensive, and
more destructive inundations than are known in
any other country. The very watercourse along
which the earliest migrants picked their way has
long borne the tragic title of "China's Sorrow."
The traditions are full of tokens that the first
settlers found large tracts overflowed, and were
obliged to resort to lake dwellings raised on piles
above the floods, or to cave dwellings tunneled
into the cliflFs of clay or limestone that skirted the
ravines. In the remote parts of the northwestern
provinces and in Mongolia it is said that such
caves are occupied to this day.
In point of civilization these early tribes who
became the founders of ancient Cathay were
scarcely more like their modern descendants than
the cannibal Celt was like the modern highlander,
or the barbarous Saxon like the modern English
man. What we know of thera is gathered from
the traditions preserved by the native historians.
They were a black-haired race, similar in size and
build to the Celestial of our tirae. When they
arrived they found other savages in occupancy,

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
straggling to and fro through the forests and over
the mountain ranges in search of food. These
aborigines they soon dispossessed, absorbing them
or chasing them off the territory. Sorae of the
remnants are extant to this day, and under the
name of the Meaou-tze still occupy the mountains
of the southwest, hereditary foes of the Chinese,
yet occasionally seen in the markets of Canton.
Du Halde, drawing from native sources, paints a
picture of these primitive times which is not pre
possessing: " Men diflFered but little from brutes;
they knew their mother, but not their father;
the sexes lived in common; they fed mainly on
animals taken in the snare or the chase, devour
ing every part and drinking the blood and wear
ing the skin ; they had no letters, and kept their
records with knotted cords." Yet these untamed
barbarians brought with them, whencesoever de
rived, a dim knowledge of the true God; a
knowledge which with the unrolling centuries was
to act as one of the mighty impulses that would
lift them out of savagery into civilization. An
other witness fills in the details with equal vigor.^
1 Pfere Mailla was a Jesuit missionary in China. Barrow gives this
account of his History from which we can form some opinion of its value :
" We may take for granted that when the Emperor Kaung-hee (1662 — 1723)
summoned to Pekin the most learned men of the empire for the purpose of
translating into the Mantchoo language an abridged history of China from
the earliest times, those annals only were consulted which were considered
as most authentic, namely, those which are compiled and published by the

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 263
" Les premieres peuples qui habiterent la Chine,
n'en occuperent d'abord que le partie septen-
trionale, qui consiste dans ce que renferme au-
jourd'hui la province de Chen-si; iis etoient si
grossieres et si barbares qu' iis tenoient beaucoup
plus de la bete que de I'homme: sans maisons ni
chaumieres, les bois et les campagnes etoient leurs
demeures ordinaires; iis ne vivoient que des fruits
que leur fournissoit la terre, ou de la chair crue
des animaux qu'ils tuoient, dont iis n'avoient pas
horreur de boire le sang, et iis se garantissoient
de la froidure en se rev^tant de leur peau, sans
d'autre apprgt que celui de la nature. NuUe loi
pour leur conduite, nuUe regie, nuUe discipline;
chacun suivoit les mouvemens que sa passion lui
inspiroit, et ne paroissoit penser qu'a la vie
purement animale; enfin, iis ne difieroient de la
brute qu'en ce qu'ils avoient une ame capable
de leur inspirer de I'aversion pour une telle vie."
It appears then that the Chinese locate their
college of Han-lin. Pfere Mailla was one of those missionaries who viewed
the Chinese less through the eye of prejudice than most of the Jesuits, He
was employed by the emperor in making a survey of the empire which cost
him and his colleagues the labor of ten years ; he passed forty-five years of
his life in the country, and generally about the court, during which time he
made himself perfectly acquainted with the Mantchoo and the Chinese lan
guages, when therefore Kaung-hee undertook the laudable design of giv
mg to his Mantchoo subjects an authenticated history of China in their own
language, Pfere Mailla conceived the idea of proceeding pari passu with a
translation of the same work into French ; and having lived to complete this
Herculean labor, it was published at Paris after many difficulties and delays
by the Abbfe Grozier, in fourteen large quarto volumes, under the title of
Histoire Generate de la Chine.'^ The quotation in the text is taken from
the first chapter of this work.

264 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
own beginnings on the lowest levels of humanity.
They admit the savage conditions in which their
progenitors groped their way into the field of the
future empire. No trace of civilization here; the
only hope for it is contained in the significant
fact noted by the Jesuit — " the mind capable of
feeling disgust for such a life," and capable there
fore of attempting to improve it; an impulse due
in part to the obscure promptings of that religious
knowledge of which I have just spoken, and in part
to the wretched conditions which came to be so un
bearable. Whatever the motive that urged these
wanderers forward — the passion for vagrancy,
the love of adventure, the quest of food, the thirst
for conquest, the pressure of populations in the
rear — the horde swept on down the valleys, and
found theraselves tenants of a boundless domain.
To make it habitable they must needs clear the
jungles and drain the swamps. They set them
selves to the task, and out of that task came the
Central Flowery Kingdom. Their civilization was
born of their work. The clearing of the jungle
diminished the supply of wild beasts for food, and
agriculture became a double necessity. Agricul
ture needed a tool, if nothing more than a pointed
stick. The pointed stick could only be fashioned
by fire or with an edge of flint. The flint knife

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 265
required a stone hammer and some degree of skill.
This was a pitch of practical sense to which they
must have attained in their nomadic life; for even
then the stone implements must have been needed
to shape the weapons with which they fought their
battles and killed their game. The cultivation of
the soil would become a civilizing infiuence in
more ways than one; it was a new employment
and therefore a new application of handicraft,
and unlike hunting it was itself a thing of growth,
requiring more tools, harder labor and quicker
processes to satisfy the wants of an increasing
population. We can easily imagine therefore how
the pointed stick would in course of time get it
self improved into a rude pick or shovel or hoe ;
and then how some inventive genius more brilliant
or more lazy than his fellows, would contrive to
attach to it an ox or an ass or his rauch-enduring
squaw, and transform it into a plow. Such better
ments come tardily with the slow unfoldings of the
ages. At the time of the chieftainship of Fuh-hi
the tribes had made but little advance toward the
arts of civilized life. They had learned to produce
fire by friction, to make clothing of skins, to build
huts and dig caves; they had contrived a sort of
notation by means of knotted cords; they had
done something toward clearing and draining the

266 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
land. From this point forward the advance was
more rapid. The reign of Fuh-hi seems itself to
have been prolific; better clothing, better cabins,
better food were among the fruits of his times.
The knotted cord disappeared and a sort of ideo
graph took its place. Marriage was enjoined, and
the people learned to labor, Fuh-hi seems to have
been the Hiawatha of his race. Within two centu
ries was invented the famous Cycle of sixty years,
which has governed the Chinese calendar from
that day to this, and has been in use therefore for
more than forty-five hundred years, the longest
chronological era known. Five centuries more and
we find them observing the stars and recording
eclipses. By about the same period the crude
marks devised by Fuh-hi had grown into more
orderly characters somewhat resembling the mod
ern, and the people had learned to use them in
writing. In one of his volumes Niebuhr charges his oppo
nents with having overlooked the fact " that no
single example can be brought forward of an
actually savage people having independently be
come civilized." But China appears to be such
an example. If Rome brought her light from
Greece, and Greece took hers from Egypt, and
Egypt kindled hers at the primitive hearthstone

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 267
of the race, here was an empire that borrowed
from no other, but lighted her own torch and on
her own soil. And from the early dawn until
now, oftentimes checked but never entirely inter
rupted, the progress of the national life has made
each century broader and richer than the last in
the material appliances of oriental comfort and
the industrial arts.
It is time to take account of the other "stream of
tendency " of which I have spoken — the religious
knowledge which these barbaric tribes brought
with them. What became of it.? Crude and ele
mentary it must have been, and yet, as we have
seen, it became an impulse in their rising civiliza
tion. Did it continue to supply them with higher
ideals, and so continue to uplift and enlighten.?
Or did it go down in the general struggle for
existence? Did it spend itself and disappear?
We can understand the evolution of the primitive
savage into the modern oriental as a process of
mechanical civilization. But there is another side
to him. In his moral nature the Chinaman seems
almost like an example of arrested development;
so much so that in contrast with the swift move
ments of the west his whole type of civilization
has been called " stationary." What has hap-

268 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
pened? While the mechanical side of his devel
opment has been slowly rising, have the spiritual
forces with which he seems to have been equipped
at the start entirely ebbed away ? If we turn from
his material growth and enter his moral world we
may experience something of a shock. There are
curious phenomena there ; our discoveries may be
interesting in themselves, and may possibly help
to account for some of the incongruities we find
in his make-up.
When the first colonists arrived it is evident
that they brought with them that knowledge of
the true God which had been held by their fore
fathers and which is so plainly reflected from the
pages of the Shu-king, They seem to have made
no strenuous effort to retain it, and the light began
to fade from the national consciousness. It was a
slow and gradual eclipse. Judging from native
records it was not till fifteen centuries after the
settlement of the country that the Chinese began
to worship images. Their original conception of
the Supreme Being had suflFered a sad change be
fore any such travesty could have been thought
of. But now they have reached a farther extreme.
No other great people in the world have ever so
lapsed into practical atheism. In all that vast
empire there is now but one native temple conse-

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 269
crated to the worship of the supreme Deity, and
but one worshiper, the emperor, who celebrates
the pageant three times a year. But before Con
fucius and for some centuries after him this higher
form of worship was common among the people.
The name of God is frequent in both the Shi-king
and the Shu-king, "Te, or Shang-te, appears there
as a personal being, ruling in heaven and on earth,
the author of man's moral nature, the governor
among the nations, by whora kings reign and
princes decree justice, the rewarder of the good
and the punisher of the bad," ^ These appear to
have been the earliest conceptions of God araong
the Chinese, So inwrought are they into the very
texture of the ancient chronicles and odes that
Confucius himself, who " preferred to speak of
Heaven" rather than of God, did not expunge
them from his compilations, but left them just as
they stand to reflect the earlier and purer beliefs.
Listen to such a prayer as this: "T'ang said, I,
the child Le, presume to use a dark-colored vic
tim, and presume to announce to thee, O most
great and sovereign God, that the sinner I dare
not pardon, and thy ministers, O God, I do not
keep in obscurity. The examination of them is
' See the whole passage : Dr. Legge, Life and Teachings of Confucius,
pp. 100-102.

270 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
by thy mind, O God." ^ Yu the Great, founder
of the Hea dynasty, 2205 B, C, "sought for able
men to honor God." ^ The house of Chau showed
its fitness to assume the reins of empire by seeking
men " who should reverently serve God, and ap
pointing them as presidents and chiefs of the peo
ple." ^ Shun, 2238 B, C, oflFered sacrifices to the
Supreme Ruler.* Shin-nung, the successor of Fuh-
hi, about 2737 B, C, "sacrificed, say the Chinese
historians, to the Supreme Lord in the temple of
light," ^ Such tokens of monotheistic belief are
common in the earliest chronicles and ballads.
Along with them are traces of other ideas which
sound strangely familiar to minds that are accus
tomed to think in terms of the bible, " Without
recognizing the ordinances of heaven," said Con
fucius, "it is impossible to be a superior man,"®
"He who oflFends against heaven has none to whom
he can pray," ^ And here is the Golden Rule in
two of the many forms in which it appears in the
teachings of the eastern sage, " Tsze-kung said,
What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish
* Confucian A nalects, B. XX ; 1, 3. T'ang was the founder oi the Shang
dynasty, 1766 B, C. The "sinner" is the tyrant Kee, the last ruler of the
preceding line.
2 From Chinese authors. XiOoims,Confucivs and theChineseClassics , p. 33_.
3Do. p, 34,
¦" Gutzlaff, History of China, I : p, 84.
^ Pauthier, Histoire de la Chine, p. 26.
« Analects, B, XX : iii, 1, ' Do. B. Ill : xiii, 2.

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 271
not to do to men. The Master said, Tsze, you have
not attained to that." ^ "Tsze-kung asked, saying.
Is there one word which may serve as a rule of
practice for all one's life? The Master said, Is not
Reciprocity such a word? What you do not want
done to yourself, do not do to others." ^ In his
description of the Shi-king Mr. Hardwick says,
" It coraprises three hundred and eleven odes and
other lyrics, for the most part moral in their tone,
and sometimes breathing, in the midst of tender
sentiments and deep regrets, a freshness and sim
plicity entirely characteristic of the earliest ages
of raankind. The ancient bard appears raore con
scious than the modern Chinaman of some corrup
tion cleaving to the human family as a whole;
and here and there we trace an ardent aspiration
after some raore lofty stage of being, which as
time went over was corapletely stifled by the grow
ing love of pelf and the incurable self-sufficiency
engendered in the heart ofthe Chinese,"^
These few citations out of multitudes will suf
ficiently exhibit the spirit which pervades the sur
viving fragments of early Chinese tradition. It
is manifest that the first immigrants brought with
them a clearer and larger knowledge of God than
1 A naUcts, B, V : xi, ' Do, B, XV : xxiii.
3 Christ and other Masters, Part III : pp. 19, 20,

272 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
was retained by their posterity. To the modern
Confucian - Taoist - Buddhist ancestor - w orshiping
Chinaman these traces of a higher spiritual knowl
edge must be quite unintelligible. The Chinese
reverence their classics with an almost superstitious
homage; but the great Narae which shines on
many a page has lost its power. In their vague
remerabrance of the God of their fathers the mass
of the people can rise no higher now than to wor
ship heaven and earth, and even that is done for
them on stated occasions by their officials. The
highest conception of God recoverable by their
acutest philosophers is that of an invisible univer
sal soul to the visible universal body. From this
dogma downward to materialism and idolatry is
a rapid descent; and here is where the Chinese
are today. Their knowledge of God is but an
infinitesimal fragment of that which they pos
sessed when they first entered the country. By
sheer neglect of it that priceless inheritance has
slowly melted away.
The causes of this decay are not far to seek.
To say nothing of the unwholesome propensity
for things evil which seems to aflBict huraan nature
— a factor in history as disastrous then as now —
the conditions of noraadic life would naturally
draw the attention away from such momentous

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 273
subjects and concentrate it on the immediate
struggle for existence. The thought of God is so
vast, so mysterious, so baflling, that we can easily
iraagine the early pagan tiring of the lofty pur
suit and giving over the attempt to hold a knowl
edge which seemed so volatile in itself and was
often so unwelcome in the possession. The appa
ratus of thought was meagre. The language was
as rude as were the symbols by which men sought
to express it. With such inadequate means for
retaining knowledge, and such ever waning mo
tives, it is not wonderful that the primitive tribes,
in the thick of the struggle for existence and quite
willing to be relieved of moral restraint, should
gradually slacken their hold on the divine.
Especially is this moral deterioration apparent
from the time of Confucius. His influence moulded
the nation into conformity with maxims of con
duct, business, manners, political economy; and
the religious sense has proportionally dwindled.
He was a statesman, and had no thought of found
ing a religion or being taken for a religious
reformer. He would be on good terms with the
gods, but keep out of their way. Living himself
an upright life, he gave his disciples rules of
behaviour worthy of Chesterfield, maxims of com
mon sense like those of Franklin, precepts of

274 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
morals that might have come from Epictetus, or
Marcus Aurelius, or even Paul; but as to the
soul and its spiritual relations and responsibilities
he maintained a sort of armed neutrality. To
this day no man can affirm what were his inner
most beliefs. " The subjects on which the Master
did not talk were prodigious things, feats of
strength, disorder, and spiritual beings."^ A
thousand years later one of the emperors rejected
Confucianism because it did not inform him about
the existence of God and the immortality of the
soul. The whole vast authority of this wonderful
man, whose name has for more than twenty cen
turies wielded an immensely greater power than
did his living self, has gone into the scale of poUt
ical philosophy; and the national conscience has
easily slackened its hold of that which appeared
to be of so little importance to the Master. Yet
it is an iUustrious spectacle; and every generous
mind must admire the persistent courage and
hopefulness of the sage, as through aU the vicis
situdes of his life — teacher, traveler, premier, ex
ile, author — he stedfastly held to his one heroic
aim. Standing as he did in the midst of oppres
sions, cruelties, debaucheries, misgovemment, cor
ruption, anarchy, he undertook single-handed to
1 Anakcts, B. VII: 20.

A JOmVEY THBOCGH HISTORY BACrWAEDS 275
reduce the chaos to order and pacifv the quarrel
ling provinces; stni^Ung to stem the tide with
only the native force of virtue for his sole means
of achievement. Vain hope! He had a royal faith
in the possibUitiei of human nature, but he never
found in his sordid countrrmen the virtue which
was to work such magic results. The moral decay
of the nation must have gone far when even such
a mind as his could not appreciate the reforming
and elevating influences that would have come
frt>m the knowledge and service of the true God.
During the life of Confucius his contemporary
Lao-tse was dreaming out the curious system
which has since grown into such a farrago of
sorcery, necromancy, and demon-worship com
mingled. Five or six eentories later tlie advent
of Buddhism from India completed the triad of
o-eeds. And since Buddhism drifted down into
image-worship the three have gone on together
demoralizing the empire and reducing the relig
ious ideas of the people more and more hopelessly
to the ordinary pagan leveL At about the time
ofthe Norman conquest of England there occurred
one of those minor eras of the revival of letters,
so many of which are chronicled in Chinese his
tory; and the majority of the writers were anno-
tators who employed much of their ingenuity

276 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
in explaining away the allusions to the supreme
God that still survived from the ancient classics.
So often as this process was repeated the nation
settled deeper and deeper into ignorance of the
true God. Their ancient literature shows abund
antly that the Chinese once knew Him ; their mod
ern literature still more amply betrays the fact
that they know Him no longer. And the work
of our missionaries, whom they now and then tum
upon and glorify with martyrdom, is really not so
much the communication of a foreign religion as
the restoration of their own proper relations to
the God of their fathers.
It is in this direction we must find the principal
cause that produced the eflFect we see today in the
stunted civilization of China. Those lands which
have preserved and cherished the inspirations of
religion are alert and keen, teeming with scientific
research and inventive art, resonant with the hum
of machinery that is bringing the best products
of labor and the tribute of every clime within the
reach of all; while poor China, antiquated and
unwieldy, lacking the stimulus of the highest mo
tive, is content to plod clumsily on, with the tools
and apparatus of a thousand years ago; so self-
centred and so indiflFerent to anything but her own
past that she would never even have heard of the

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS 277
miracles of steam and electricity had they not
been forced on her attention by the enterprise of
the very nations whom she aflFects to despise. The
Chinaman walks backward through life, worship
ing the past and ignorant of the future. No won
der that such a habit of regression and on such
a low pedestrian level has exhausted the powers
of civilization and has brought the development
of the empire to a standstill. And although the
spirit of the Occident is beginning to pour in upon
the Orient the activities and methods of the mod
em business world, what is still lacking is the
stimulus of high religious motive. A torpid ori
ental temperament, even though seasoned with a
kind of Anglo-Saxon sturdiness, must need the
quickening of some divine afllatus. The national
arrogance and the national materialism both need
to be deodorized. The whole fabric of Chinese
civilization, allowing aU we may for its remarka
ble excellencies, was yet left palsied and decrepit
by the loss of the religious ingredient, and de
mands re-sanitation ; a divine alchemy which can
only be wrought by this gracious agency from
above. All honor to those faithful Christian work
ers, Protestant and Catholic, who are laboring to
restore and revivify in the national consciousness,
and in a higher form, the knowledge of the Su-

278 A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY BACKWARDS
preme God which the progenitors of the empire
once possessed. When Chinese society becomes
Christianized, and the great empire, interfused
with the modern spirit, learns to look for her
golden age in a reconstructed future rather than
in a faded past, she will find at last the realization
of her dreams.

3 9002 00771 4737

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

From the Library of
PROFESSOR F. WELLS WILLIAMS
Yale iSyg
Permanently deposited hy
Yale-in-China