Pottinger did not pass the entire winter in the north. Shortly after the new year he set sail in the Blenheim, paused briefly at Kulangsu to inspect the little garrison and squadron that watched Amoy from that island, and early in February 1842 arrived at Hongkong.
He found the place a good deal changed. “Two thousand Chinese laborers are building a road right round the island,” Legrégeois had reported excitedly early the previous summer.1 This was not true, nothing so ambitious had in fact been undertaken; yet there was a road as Pottinger could see, the Queen’s Road, along the northern shore. The tops of the spurs that come down to the water had been sliced away, the gullies filled or bridged; from East Point (where Jardine Matheson, despite its initial land purchases, was doing the bulk of its building) past Possession Point and on to the northwest tip of the island, you could drive now with perfect ease—as one foreigner regularly did, in a carriage and pair brought over from Manila for the purpose. Along this road, which was almost four miles in length, there had grown a straggling ribbon of a town, a town of eight thousand, one count suggests, containing among other things threescore ships’ chandlers, two dozen brothels, and a single confectioner. The Tanka people, who formed perhaps a quarter of the Chinese population, lived in boats moored close against the shore, boats fifteen feet long and five to six wide, with a single mast and sail, and amidships a cabin with a low curved roof. The rest of the Chinese made do for the most part with mat sheds of the sort the July typhoons had torn to pieces. But there was a fair amount of construction in pisé, a mixture of clay, broken stone, and lime pounded between wooden forms—and a certain amount even in brick. The jail was brick, Captain Caine’s magistrate’s office was brick, so were the land office and the post office; on the waterfront you saw godowns of brick set upon stout stone foundations, and on the terraces overlooking Queen’s Road stood private bungalows in brick, granite, or a combination of the two.
Pottinger was impressed and a little anxious too. On his first visit the previous August he had confirmed Alexander Johnston, his deputy superintendent, in the office of acting governor. Johnston had spent a good deal of time on the island and had worked hard to develop it. Pottinger was aware, however, that her Majesty’s government intended that Hongkong should be kept only until the war was over and the claims against Peking settled. Then it would probably revert to the Chinese, and when it did the money sunk in it would be lost—Pottinger was certain the treasury had already thought of this. Any day now the overland would bring him instructions not to spend on the place a penny more than he absolutely had to. Looking around him at “Queen’s Town” (it was not called Victoria yet), observing to what extent it had become a base for the expedition and a refuge for the foreign residents, Pottinger could not help agreeing with Auckland and the dismissed Elliot that to let the island go would be a pity.
It was unhealthy, to be sure. Wherever ground was cleared or terraces cut, the intense moisture and the burning sun brought on the “Hongkong fever,” as malaria was locally called, and though things had become better with the cool dry winter weather, they would grow worse when summer came again. Sickness had already so reduced the 37th Madras Native Infantry that the survivors were sent home at the beginning of March.a The two remaining companies of Bengal volunteers withdrew, and there were many who wished Burrell away too, lest the removal of Gough by death or accident should put that “notable imbecile” (as Matheson called him) in Gough’s place. It was already clear, however, that only a court martial would dislodge Burrell. He stayed on, supervising the garrison from a vessel in the harbor, doing very little to make it less sickly, but doing it comfortably and at great public expense.
Hongkong had another disadvantage: it did not take Canton’s place in the tea trade. Teas were leaving the gulf in almost normal quantities, but they came as usual from Canton, that was where the Chinese tea men were still to be found, and so, perforce, interested foreigners had to be there too. Late that winter the American and French flags rose over the factory square for the first time since the strangulation affair of three years before. Although the union jack did not rise with them, very few English merchants supposing it safe for them to move back yet, English ships loaded quite normally at Whampoa. The transshipping business did not revive.
Opium was another matter. Coasters and clippers no longer bothered with Lintin or the other outer anchorages. They paused sometimes in Macao Roads, and a few lay from time to time at Whampoa, but Whampoa was still an iffy place. Before putting the Jardine to station there, Matheson thought it prudent to change her name to Lanrick (after Jardine’s recently purchased Perthshire estate) and to superscribe her delivery chits with a fictitious “Thomason and Company.” Only Hongkong was both convenient and entirely safe. A great many opium vessels came directly there, and as a matter of course the harbor master, a Royal Navy lieutenant named Pedder, inserted them into the lists he kept and that Samuel Fearon’s new Hongkong Gazette and the older journals published, lists showing (among other things) the cargoes each vessel carried. Ballast and government stores were there; coals, cotton, and rice; but opium too—and specie, everybody understanding perfectly how you acquired that commodity on China’s coasts. It was specie the Red Rover brought when she reached Hongkong from Amoy early in November. At the end of February she was in again, this time from Calcutta, first clipper of the season (as in 1830, 1831, and so many other years), with no nonsense about her cargo, no concealing its nature under “whites,” “greys,” or “chintzes.” That winter, according to Pedder’s lists, every fourth vessel that touched Hongkong carried the drug.
It was not that the quantity leaving India was greater than before. If anything it was less: at the first Calcutta sale of 1842 five hundred fewer chests were sold than in the previous January, and in Bombay the export was down a little too. Demand along the coast was sluggish, Patna and Benares drifting as low as $400 a chest, Malwa as low as $350. There was, however, a special reason for vessels in considerable numbers to keep at the traffic. If the drug sold with difficulty, English manufactures sold hardly at all. Jardine’s coasters carried cottons and woolens, tried hard to get rid of them, and got rid of very few. Though some cloth and a much larger volume of raw cotton found buyers in Canton, the buyers did not want to—and in many cases could not—pay silver for what they bought; they paid instead in kind. “It is vain,” wrote Matheson, “to expect from the Hong Merchants a single dollar in cash for our large annual consignments of cotton and other goods, for which we are therefore compelled to take Chinese goods in exchange, chiefly Tea; and the more plentiful money is in the hands of other buyers, the more difficult we find it to obtain Teas on suitable terms.”2 Teas were something Matheson very much wished to have. Without hard coin he could obtain them neither in the best grades nor at reasonable prices.
Of course the expedition, by what it purchased, might have provided the necessary ready money. Not many distant consignors, however, were good judges of what the expedition needed. “Beer, porter, and pickles are poured into this market ten times as much as a whole army would consume, supposing it to eat or drink nothing else,” complained Alexander Matheson.3 The firm’s new Hongkong godown was full of the stuff and gin too (rum would have sold more easily)—the fact was that the only article that could be depended upon to sell steadily and for cash was opium. That was why Jardine Matheson put so many vessels to the work. “It is the command of money which we derive from our large Opium dealings, and which can hardly be acquired from any other source, that gives us such important advantages.”4 When a Singapore correspondent inquired as to whether the house would accept consignments from a Chinese of that place, Alexander Matheson replied of course it would; it would be happy to have the drug “even one chest at a time, from anyone, be he Chinaman, Jew, or Gentile. It is the sort of business we are most desirous of cultivating.”5
Never had the traffic been so open or so hotly pushed. Though opium could be landed without fuss at the godowns off Queen’s Road, the general practice still was to store it in receiving ships—for Jardine’s that meant the General Wood (sometime Syden) moored a few hundred yards from shore. From her, Captain Morgan managed the Jardine Matheson fleet as Grant, Parry, and Rees had managed it from her predecessors. To her came fresh supplies of the drug, to her came the treasure generated by its sale; indeed, Jardine’s command of silver made that firm banker to a great many of the resident foreigners, merchant and missionary alike. Gough himself banked with Jardine’s and by March of this year was overdrawn more than a thousand dollars. “You can repay in any manner most convenient,” James Matheson wrote him at Ningpo, adding that he hoped Gough would occupy his old quarters in the firm’s Macao house when next he came south.6
To the General Wood came also the brigs and schooners whose job it was to distribute the opium: the Ann and the Harriet, the Hellas, Kelpie, Omega, Spy, and four or five others. Demand for coasters was so brisk that anyone with a bottom to sell announced it, if at all plausible, as exactly suited for running opium. Builders in Calcutta and other places continued to lay down specifically for the purpose. From America came schooners of an unusually advanced design. Dent obtained the Zephyr from that quarter; Matheson was so impressed by the sailing qualities of the New York pilot schooner Anglona that he was on the point of making a bid for her when, the Boston-built Ariel (90 tons burden and not to be confused with Dent’s clipper bark of the same name) happening to beat her in a race around Lintin, he turned and bought the Ariel instead.
He sent the Ariel at once to the east coast. The traffic there was so open, the English presence so marked, and the determination of the local authorities so enfeebled that life at the larger opium stations assumed an almost domestic air. At Namoa, Brig Island had been occupied outright. Visiting the place briefly in February, Abeel noticed a bridle path cut around the island and saw crews from the opium ships riding there on little Chinese ponies. He does not say so but perhaps they were joined in this exercise by Royal Navy men, for relations between the two services were friendly and close. When pirates in suspicious numbers collected off Chinchew, a corvette stationed herself there to overawe them. When a junk crammed (it was thought) with gunpowder entered the anchorage at Chimmo, up came a 16-gun brig, grappled the thing, towed it to shore, blew it up, and then bombarded Chimmo town for good measure. Opium afloat, it seemed, was entitled to the same protection that teas, silks, and cottons received, and if a coaster should be reported missing, like as not it was one of Her Majesty’s ships that sailed to find her.
There were, in fact, a number of dramatic disappearances that autumn and winter. In September the Madagascar steamer, back at last from Calcutta and hurrying up the coast after the expedition, caught fire in heavy weather 150 miles east of Hongkong and after hours of desperate work (the fire had its seat in the coal of the aft starboard bunker and would not be quenched) had to be abandoned. Dicey and a few others managed to reach land and were taken prisoner, but by pretending that they were Americans, corresponding only through Ryan and Delano, and raising a substantial ransom, they persuaded their captors to conduct them to Macao and deliver them into Bridgman’s friendly hands. Meanwhile a much worse disaster struck the transport Nerbudda. Beating up the coast with stores and 170 Indian camp followers, she was driven off course and wrecked on the coast of Formosa. Her master and the handful of other Europeans she carried got safely away and were picked up by an opium schooner. There had been only a few boats, however, and the camp followers and the lascar crew remained stranded on the wreck—a shameful fact that sent a corvette up from Hongkong the moment it was known. The corvette hunted everywhere. Not one of the poor Indians could be found. Months passed, and then it was the turn of Jardine Matheson’s Ann. The Ann had been keeping the Chusan opium station. In March 1842 Denham was instructed to turn that station over to the Omega and come south, collecting Dent and Jardine treasure as he came. (The previous October, Dent had proposed that the ships of the two houses carry treasure for each other and make opium sales on joint account, and Matheson had agreed to the first suggestion though not to the second.) Denham started, disappeared, and a rumor reached Amoy that he had run aground on Formosa like the Nerbudda before him. Without waiting to be asked, Captain Smith of the Druid sent the Pylades to search. Again a blank—Jardine’s had to reconcile itself to the loss of a useful vessel, an experienced skipper, and $50,000 in silver—but at least the Royal Navy had tried.
In the Gulf of Canton the only disappearance to rival these was that of old Thomas Beale, observed one December evening walking near Casilha’s Bay, discovered a month later half buried on the beach with so little flesh on his bones that his clothes alone identified him. No one, however, suspected a repetition of what had happened to Stanton at the same place a year and a half before. Beale’s extreme age and the burden of his debts (he owed the Missions Etrangères alone $5,000) had driven him, it was supposed, to suicide, or else his death had been an accident. Certainly it was not the long arm of the Canton authorities that had struck him down. They were too cowed for that.
From time to time, it was true, those authorities tried to refortify the river between the Bogue and Whampoa. In would go a steamer or a corvette, sink a few junks, tear out a few stakes, blow up a fort here and a masked battery there, and come quietly out again. That was the extent of the fighting in this part of China. That was all the war there was.
The Water Witch arrived with the September overland and news that Melbourne’s government had finally fallen, that Peel and his Tories were in at last. Laird’s most recent iron steamer, the Medusa, coming up from Singapore against unusually persistent head winds, exhausted her coal, burned bulwarks, wardroom furniture, and everything except her boats, and when literally within sight of Macao was obliged to turn and run all the way back to Camranh Bay. The 74-gun Cornwallis experienced, of course, no such difficulty. She arrived at Christmas and went immediately to Chusan to take the Wellesley’s place, and the Wellesley, fore and main masts buttressed with timbers because the years at sea had decayed them so, sailed for England carrying Mrs. Noble’s cage, three enormous brass guns from the Bogue forts, and a number of officers (of whom Ellis was one). The Melville went home. The Larne went home. The Hyacinth went home (her crew would not sign on for another hitch). James Matheson departed. Though not seriously ill, he assured Jamsetjee, “I am summarily ordered off by the doctors to avoid the risk of getting worse should I remain over the hot weather.”7 Bingham went. Mackenzie and MacPherson went. Lancelot Dent was off—and Legrégeois too.
Still, the arrivals more than outweighed the departures. Macao was livelier than ever, houses scarce, rents high, the Praia Grande always crowded. Hongkong, at the other lip of the gulf, could not offer what the old town could. It could not, for example, put on such a ball and midnight supper as Pinto invited Pottinger to on the occasion of the queen of Portugal’s birthday. The future lay with the island, however, not with the town—or so Pottinger must have decided—for at the very end of February, four weeks after reaching the place, he collected his Superintendency from its old Macao quarters, clerks, letterbooks, Fearon the interpreter, and all and brought the whole show over.
Roberts and the Shucks followed in March. Roberts went immediately to Chek Chu (the later Stanley) on the island’s south side, where there was a considerable village, and barracks were being constructed. It could be reached over the island’s spine by a bridle path from Happy Valley. Lewis and Henrietta settled in Queen’s Town and began to raise (by public subscription) money for not just one chapel but two. The first, a substantial brick structure right in the bazaar, was intended for the natives. The second, on Queen’s Road, would serve the West.
Bridgman and Williams did not immediately join them. They remained instead at Macao in the house they kept together. Bridgman had at last finished the enormous Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect and seen it through the press. He still had the Repository to edit, however, and he was accumulating materials for a Chinese grammar. Liang A-fa’s son, Atih, was staying with him; Bridgman had it in mind to have the young man help him revise Liang’s Chinese New Testament. When, at the end of March, Commodore Kearny of the American frigate Constellation asked him to join that vessel as interpreter, he was lost to the mission for the two months spent up the Canton River. Williams himself was extremely busy. He had his share of the Repository to write, the finished copy to print and bind, and a little manual to finish—Easy Lessons in Chinese it was cheerfully if inaccurately called. What with proofreading, printing, binding, and his usual translating work, he hardly found time to write home. A move just now would complicate his life unmercifully.
For the time being the Browns too remained at Macao. The school they kept for the Morrison Education Society had survived their absence of half a year at the Straits (they had gone for Mrs. Brown’s health), and on their return in September they had managed to add sixteen boys to the half dozen survivors of the original enrollment. Some of these students had since been dismissed for stupidity or removed by their fathers, but most stayed on, boys ten to thirteen years of age, studying Chinese in the morning and English the balance of the day (it was English the parents particularly wanted, as likely to prove useful in a commercial way). When June approached and preparations were being made for the first public examination, it was gratifying to discover how keenly these young people appreciated the instruction they were receiving. “The English schools are much better than the Chinese,” wrote one, “because the English learn of many useful things, such as astronomy, geometry, algebra, true religion, and many others,” while the Chinese buried their heads in classical literature. How much more difficult Chinese was than English, wrote another. Though he and his fellows had studied Chinese for years, “none of us can write a Chinese letter well.” But the greatest difference was that whereas the Chinese looked to the past, the English looked to the future. “Therefore the Chinese are always about the same, while the English become better and better. I do not mention the Americans because they are descended from them.”8 Sooner or later the school would move to Hongkong—Dent had given $3,000 for that purpose just before he sailed, and Pottinger had promised a plot. For the moment, however, things went very well as they were.
It was the same with the Medical Missionary Society. Parker was still on his travels, poor health had driven Diver home, Howqua refused to reopen Hog Lane, so nothing at all could be done at Canton. But Hobson’s Macao hospital flourished. Two native assistants worked there, Lockhart helped with the more serious operations (he was part-time surgeon to the Superintendency and often busy at Parker’s naval hospital); at any given moment you found several dozen resident patients, and outpatients besides. Pottinger had already offered a piece of land for a Hongkong hospital. When Parker returned, it should be possible to take patients at the factories again. The only question was the old familiar one: did all this tending of the sick, the injured, and the disfigured open the way for Christ?
Indeed, was it sufficient, was it effective even, to distribute books and tracts? Hobson had once thought so, but he was no longer certain; “our experience now teaches us,” he and Lockhart advised their London society, “how immensely important and absolutely necessary it is that the living voice be used.”9 Fortunately the way seemed at last a little clearer for that voice. It was beginning to be lifted now at places outside the gulf.
On 7 February, David Abeel sailed for Kulangsu to open the Protestant Mission’s first station on the Fukien coast. (His vessel, just in from Sydney with coals and general cargo, had been chartered to carry opium, which explains why she stopped at Namoa and allowed the missionary to look around.) Abeel carried a letter of introduction from Pottinger and on reaching his destination was pleasantly received by Major Cowper, the garrison commander. Cowper found him a house and got him carpenters and masons to repair the ravages of looters. The house was inside the English lines—Kulangsu is three miles in circumference, Cowper could not occupy it all—which meant that Abeel was not free to move entirely as he pleased. There were sentries, and after dusk there was a watchword. He was safe, however. His knowledge of Chinese recommended him highly to Cowper and the other officers. Before long he was able to cross the half-mile wide channel and visit Amoy. Best of all, he had the Chinese of Kulangsu to work among. It was true he encountered in them that mixture of indifference and contempt so painfully familiar to him from his Canton and Macao days. Asked after several months’ instruction what God he worshipped, a boy who lived with him replied: “Oh, I am not at all particular, anyone whose birthday happens to come along.”10 Still, Abeel was able to collect a congregation of sorts; to hold Sunday services in Chinese and count on an average two dozen listeners; to feel, in short, that the long preparation was over and the true work of the Protestant Mission begun.
Bridgman too was encouraged. “Three stations, including many tens of thousands of Chinese, are now accessible under British rule,” he wrote.11 Hongkong was one, Kulangsu another, Tinghai a third—for Milne had gone there the same February, and Lockhart (who had worked in Chusan during the first occupation) was thinking of going there too. As the mission spread along the coast, its numbers increased in proportion. Ill health had driven William Boone of the American Episcopal Board up from Batavia; at Macao he had lent a hand with Brown’s school; but when Abeel sailed for Kulangsu, Boone went with him, returned shortly to fetch his wife, and on the second trip up brought Thomas McBryde of the Presbyterian Board and an unattached medical missionary named William Cumming. Thus the Kulangsu station was suddenly served not by one missionary but by four. At Macao there were fresh faces also: Dyer Ball for the American Board, William Dean for the Baptists, young Walter Lowrie for the Presbyterians. Many of the missionaries, the newer ones especially, had wives, and there were children everywhere. The Browns, the Deans, the McBrydes each had one; Catherine Parkes bore Lockhart a daughter (they had married the previous spring); the Boones had two children; the Balls had two and expected another; Henrietta Shuck had three and was expecting too. A contrary current caught poor Mary Gutzlaff. Her first child died in January a few days after birth, and Mary, ill and dispirited, sailed for New York with three little blind Chinese girls. Other deaths would follow, small children too often accompanying their mothers to the grave, but for the moment all was prosperity in the Protestant nursery—and the mission, men, women, and children, approached two score.
As for the war and the opium traffic, which was its occasion and perhaps its cause, the Protestants were not happy about either. Opium, they knew, was addictive (they used the word). It was debilitating, about as harmless a luxury as idolatry is an innocent recreation. But dreadful as the opium traffic was, China’s moral condition was worse; and it was upon China’s moral condition that they fixed their gaze.
True evangelicals, they knew that the state of the soul determines everything else. Social institutions and practices simply reflect the depravity, or it may be the moral health, of man. In the proper ordering of priorities, therefore, bringing Christ to China came before taking opium away. What cried out to be saved was not China’s body but her soul, and if opium was bad for her body, were not its purveyors yet breaking down the same barriers that kept Christ’s message out?
Always it came back to China shut or China opened. Not many of the missionaries moved as far and as fast as Henrietta Shuck, who as early as the summer of 1839—the summer of Chien-sha-tsui and the forced evacuation of Macao—was confessing “how these difficulties do rejoice my heart; because I think the English government may be enraged, and God in his power break down the barriers which prevent the gospel of Christ from entering China.”12 The war once under way, however, and pursuing its desultory course, they laid the accumulated exasperation of years upon its outcome. It is apparent from their letters. Williams begins by thinking the opium traffic a serious impediment to missionary work, in the spring of 1839 is delighted (as we have seen) at the check it is receiving, in the spring of 1840 decides that the quarrel is really not about opium at all, and thereafter plays endless variations on the theme that the English regiments and ships are God’s ax appointed to chastise the Chinese and force them to listen to the Word of Life. “Although war is bringing its train of horrors upon this heretofore peaceful land,” he will write before the summer of 1842 is over, “and the still sorer scourge of opium is slaying its thousands, we will encourage ourselves in the name of the Lord. The cause of the war is exceedingly objectionable, and so has been many of those in ages past which at the end have brought blessings upon the scene of their devastation. The evils resulting from the traffic and use of opium are terrific, far exceeding, we fear, those of the war; nor do we see how they are to be removed until the moral principle of the Gospel is brought to assist the weak efforts of the people to resist the temptation.”13
Only Christ can save China from opium. But only war can open China to Christ. And the war actually in progress has been occasioned by the traffic in the drug.
One is reminded of the principle by which Rasputin is alleged to have led his life. To be saved, you must repent. To repent, you must have something to repent of. Sin, therefore!—it is the only road to salvation. To the Protestant missionaries it appeared more and more obvious that four hundred million Chinese would never attain the Christian life save by the road that led through opium and war.
Parts of the Catholic Mission hardly noticed these things. Away in Szechwan, for example, Bertrand was gloomy enough, but it was not the fighting or the drug that depressed him: it was the two years of terrible harvests followed by a crop the locusts destroyed, it was the famine and plague, the brigandage, the instances of cannibalism even. Pérocheau, his vicar apostolic in succession to the deceased Fontana, noticed that native Christians were sometimes confused with the distant marauding English and that robbers grew bolder because so many soldiers had been withdrawn to fight them. From the lower Yangtze valley Faivre relates how a fellow Lazarist happened to be near a powder magazine when it blew up, flinging stones and burning timbers in all directions and killing several hundred people. The magazine was at Shanghai, for use against the barbarians, but Faivre’s comment was very much a passing one. The explosion attracted his attention only because the priest in question escaped unhurt—clear evidence that God protects those who devote their lives to Him. Faivre cannot have forgotten his coastal trip in Red Rover. He cannot have forgotten that clipper’s trade. But he had long since reached his pastoral station and, like Bertrand, was fully occupied with the work there. That work proceeded with very little attention to opium, war, or a possible change in the empire’s external relations.
Yet even for Catholics it was different on the coast. Huc, a recent French Lazarist arrival, found it comparatively easy to move about China once he had put salt water behind him. He moved due north through Kiangsi and Hupeh, visited Peschaud, Laribe, Rameaux, and Baldus in that order, and stopped near Wuchang long enough to inspect the grave of Perboyre (a young Chinese Christian led him to the little hill where the martyr and Clet lay buried side by side); he passed through Peking, was briefly mistaken for a Russian, and at last arrived in Mongolia (or Tartary, as it was often called), which Rome had recently confided to his congregation and where another Lazarist already worked. His reaching Mongolia at this time and by this route is perhaps the best possible evidence that Indian opium and English belligerence endangered Catholic missionaries hardly at all, that what had happened to Perboyre was an accident and not likely to be repeated. At the beginning of Huc’s six-months’ journey, however, there had been a difficult moment: the getting out of Macao and up the waterways past Canton (this in the winter of 1841, when there was intermittent fighting in the river). Paul, the Cochinchinese courier who betrayed himself by dropping things upon the deck, had been caught within miles of Macao. So had Taillandier and Augustin Ko. Where English and Chinese actually confronted one another, the Catholic missionary found it by no means simple to turn his back and cultivate his garden. He had to take a position—and the position he took was not so very different from that taken by the Protestants.
He recognized opium for the terrible thing it was. “A mind brutalized, a body enfeebled, the premature death of the smoker followed by the sale of all his and his wife’s and children’s worldly possessions and their descent into a life of misery and crime—these are the normal consequences of this fatal passion,” Baldus once observed, adding that he did not think most Europeans cared, “and particularly the English, in whom love of humanity never prevails over love of gain.”14 But Baldus also admitted that the Chinese took to the drug much too readily. Was not this a sign of their dreadful inner condition? As for the English, they were even now shouldering their way with sword and gun into regions of the empire where, until this moment, the foreigner had moved humbly, stealthily, sometimes not at all. It would be foolish not to recognize the opportunity their boldness offered, seize it, and let it serve the cause of the true Catholic church.
The church needed help. Unassisted, without secular intervention or support from any quarter, it had entered China many years before and had spread and flourished. Now it slowed, stood still, slipped backward even, so that to preserve his flock and keep it from actually diminishing was the limit of Baldus’s ambition in his own Honan. The trouble was with the material. The Jesuits of a previous age had esteemed the Chinese too highly. “I think,” Baldus felt compelled to point out, “that in all things they are decidedly inferior to the Europeans, whom indeed the Lord seems to have regarded as his second chosen people.”15 (This had to be the case, otherwise the true faith would not have flourished in Europe for the past eighteen centuries.) Persecution and martyrdom did not drive the Chinese to Christ. The example of Perboyre was evidently quite lost on them. What they required, if they were ever to embrace Christianity, was the assurance that their own mandarins wished them to—or would at least allow it. In the grand old days, when the Jesuits were visibly welcome at Peking, they had had that assurance. They had it no longer; they must recover it; if they did not, he, Baldus, would spend the rest of his life moving secretively from one little community to another, never raising his voice, never venturing into strange places, baptizing no one whom the accident of being child, servant, or apprentice to a present Christian did not bring within his reach.
“We stand here, awaiting the Lord, ready to preach when we shall be called to that work. . . . But who will unbind our lips, who will shift from the path the enormous rock that blocks our way? Will it be the English, who, they say, are disposed to try?”16
In the course of 1841 three Missions Etrangères priests, two French Lazarists, three Jesuits who happened to be Frenchmen too, and three Italian Franciscans reached Macao from Europe.17 It was the largest addition to the Catholic Mission in years. With it came a decree detaching Hongkong from the see of Macao and confiding it to Joset, procurator of the Roman Propaganda, a decree that must have issued the moment Rome learned that England had assumed formal possession of the island.
When Joset, however, prepared early in 1842 to take up his commission, the Portuguese protested loudly, would not admit the validity of the papal decree, and gave him three days to pick up and get out of Macao. Poor Joset! He had never intended leaving the town. From the hut off Queen’s Road that became his refuge now, he approached Johnston and warned him that Portuguese animosity might pursue him right across the gulf. Johnston laughed, told him not to worry, and promised to help him get established. Established the Propaganda very soon was, in a proper stone building, the first procure on the island—with plenty of Irish Catholic troops to minister to. When Joset himself died suddenly the following August, his work went confidently on.
The Portuguese turned next on Legrégeois’s successor, Libois, for they were not at all pleased to see Jesuits in China again, and the three newcomers of that society, with Joset gone, had taken up quarters in the procure of the Missions Etrangères. Pinto summoned Libois, tried to get him to send the three away, and when Libois would not, saw to it that the procure’s mail was overcharged or deliberately delayed. Libois paid little attention, however, and as for the Jesuits, though they left, it was only for Chusan. There they set up, temporarily, their own procure.
Two Italian Franciscans and Danicourt went with them, and by another ship two more French Lazarists. Guillet, Torrette’s successor as procurator, was anxious to claim the island; it was, after all, part of the vicariat apostolic assigned to Rameaux. Yet would any of these gentlemen have dared spend a week on Chusan—would the two Spanish Dominicans who went to Kulangsu and were received there by Major Cowper as cordially as Abeel had been have dared expose themselves there for a day—had the English not seized the places first? It looked very much as if, on the coast at least, the Catholic Mission rode the coattails of the English expedition.
In June, Milne counted nine Catholic priests in and about Tinghai. “Higher motives activate Protestant missionaries,” he assured his London society, “than mere ambition to emulate those of a spurious faith.” Nevertheless it was disquieting. Late that summer Williams had it on good authority that a ship bearing sixty-two had recently reached Singapore, and though some of these were obviously intended for the Philippines and other places in east Asia, a great many were sure to come his way. “They have twenty men to our one,” he warned the American Board, adding that he trusted “God is with the unit.” How fortunate it was that England and not some other power battered at China’s gates. “What a difference it would make in all our plans and prospects if Portugal or Spain or Russia, or even ‘young France’ or Protestant Holland, were in the ascendant.”18
The priests of the French procures naturally looked at the matter differently. “At last we have reached Macao,” wrote one of the new Missions Etrangères men. “Here we are at the gates of China, that strange land that ever thrusts aside the profferred torch and is content to remain in darkness. For almost three centuries true religion and enlightened polity have counselled her to turn and enter the family of nations. In vain; her isolation feeds and sustains an immense and grotesque self-satisfaction; always she has preferred to close her ears to the message of salvation. But now, suddenly, everything is altered. Soldiers appear unannounced and uninvited to execute upon her body the terrible and sublime decrees of Heaven. All about the empire the cannon growl and roar.”19
This was how Blanchin put it, with an enthusiasm that time did not have the opportunity to temper—for he died suddenly three weeks later. Reading him, one cannot help feeling that he at least had wished that the soldiers and the cannon were French.
France did take an interest. The Mediterranean war scare that had driven the Danaide from the gulf came to nothing and did not recur, so the corvette was able to return and follow Admiral Parker and the English fleet as they moved north in August 1841. Meanwhile the government of Louis Philippe dispatched a proper mission aboard the 46-gun Erigone, with instructions to find out what was going on along the coast of China and to protect French interests there. It was, in fact, the Erigone that brought the three Jesuits and two Lazarists from France. She reached Macao Roads shortly before Christmas; early in February 1842, Cécille, her captain, managed to meet the Chinese provincial authorities privately outside Canton; in March, Dubois de Jancigny, the head of the mission, met them too. Handshakes were exchanged in place of the kowtow. If prompt, direct access to mandarins of rank was the measure of a foreigner’s importance, the French had acquired importance very quickly and cheaply indeed.
When, however, the mission suggested to Ishan and Ch’i Kung that China face the reality of her situation and concede open ports, resident ambassadors, and payment for the confiscated opium, those gentlemen were astounded—how ever convey such a thing to Peking? And when the French intimated that their own sovereign was ready to mediate the war with the English, the Chinese were put at once on guard. Barbarians were by nature cunning. Were these fo-lang-chi trying to take advantage of England’s undeserved successes and China’s temporary weakness? Jancigny, in fact, had exactly this in mind.
Unfortunately he lacked both the means and the authority to intervene in any real way, and Cécille, the Erigone’s captain, would have protested had he tried. Cécille represented the navy. Jancigny, who had once advised the Nabob of Oudh, spoke for foreign affairs. When another corvette, the Favorite, reached the coast (the Danaide having departed), Jancigny took her for himself. Thereafter Cécille and he moved and operated apart. Jancigny was supposed to look after France’s commercial interests. These were small, however; France bought few teas, sold no opium, and was represented in the factory community by no one the measure of a Matheson, a Dent, or even an Innes. Religion might have taken commerce’s place. Guillet, who contrived to be the mission’s interpreter and guide, did his best to promote the proposition that French priests in foreign parts deserved the active support of French arms. Cécille was privately sympathetic, Perboyre’s example (or it may be his relics) already exerted influence at home—but French public policy did not permit the connection.b The missionaries who boarded the Erigone atBrest had found they could celebrate mass only at three in the morning, and then only behind closed doors. In the end all that the ships and the interviews did was show the flag for France, exactly as Cécille, for one, had been instructed.
No other European power sent agents or an armed presence to the coast during the war, not Holland, not Spain, not Portugal, though Russia followed the business closely—at Macao in early 1842 the rumor ran that Russian officers were advising the Chinese on the Chekiang coast. The United States was another matter. Americans did more business at Canton than anyone except the English. They were next to the English in numbers, mixed with them easily, spoke the same language. Like them they were confined to the factories and to the curious style of life the old Canton system imposed; paid cumsha, measurement duties, and tariffs that varied with the rapacity of the mandarins; bought teas, smuggled opium, and got proscribed for it (ineffectually, of course). If the English had the gunner of the Lady Hughes on their conscience, the Americans had poor Terranova on theirs. And they were Protestants if they were anything—indeed, as the Protestant Mission was more than half American, the Americans understood more readily than anybody else why that mission’s future hung on China opened.
In March 1839 they, like the English, had been detained against their will. In May, Bennet Forbes, Delano, Nye, and half a dozen others had framed a vigorous memorial asking Washington to send a naval force; suggesting, too, that now was the time to compel Peking to accept a resident ambassador and open ports other than Canton. The memorial had gone to Congress. There papers had been requested just as they had been in England. The request, however, was not a partisan one, and the papers, though they reached clear back to the Terranova affair, were much too slim to break through floors and generated little argument. There was another difference. Forbes and the others did not repeat their memorial. From many quarters, instead, came the caution that the government should think twice before doing anything at all, and when it was learned that English newspapers represented America as anxious to join actively in bringing Peking to terms, there was a scene on the floor of the House of Representatives. Where England was concerned, Americans were suspicious to the point of touchiness.
This touchiness sometimes showed itself right in the gulf. Once, H.M.S. Herald and Russell’s Lintin happening to anchor very near each other, and the frigate making known in a peremptory manner that it did not wish the sometime receiving ship to put out a kedge lest its bower be overlaid, the Lintin’s skipper stood on his taffrail and showered the frigate with such abuse that she felt obliged to send a boat’s crew and forcibly fetch the fellow over. When he threatened to put a “Kentucky bullet” through his captors, they tied him up and left him to stew. For the most part, however, common interests and a common experience persuaded Americans actually on the spot to see the war and the Chinese as the English saw them. They tended, that is, to agree with John Quincy Adams, secretary of state at the time Terranova was strangled and now chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who after much thought and a careful reading of the Parliamentary Papers came to the conclusion that it was not the confiscation of twenty thousand chests that had driven the English to arms. It was the arrogance of the Chinese, their persistent denial of normal, civilized intercourse. The war, Adams decided, was about the kowtow.
This was a line Americans resident in China were much inclined to take. Even in China, however, there were exceptions—Bridgman held opium to be the “proximate cause” of the war—and in Boston and other places along the eastern seaboard the exceptions became the rule. The public lecture in which Adams made his case was stormily received. One prominent journal refused to publish it. Sentiment formed at such a distance from China and so little familiar with Chinese exclusiveness turned easily and naturally against John Bull. The opium traffic was lucrative; England had gone to war to safeguard it; that was the whole, and shameful truth of the matter. It did not follow that America should actively intervene on China’s behalf. To do so would be, practicably speaking, madness—besides, though England’s motives were ignoble, the probable result of an English victory, namely, China opened, was much to be desired. But one could be thankful for what was going to be effected and still look askance at the agent.
So Washington did very little. The heavy frigate Constellation and one smaller vessel were sent to the China coast. Kearny, the frigate’s commander, took her up to Whampoa in the spring of 1842, kept her there for nine weeks, and with Bridgman’s help obtained mandarin interviews as promptly and impressively as Cécille and Jancigny had done. He did not meddle, however in the controversy between the English and the Chinese. He simply extracted compensation for the injuries done the previous May to Coolidge, poor Sherry, and the others. When the Frenchmen and their men-of-war followed the English expedition to the Yangtze, he and his frigate stayed quietly at the gulf.
That was the difference. The French did not take part in the war but, suddenly noticing it when it was part way through, danced around the edge half wanting to join in. The Americans waited to see what would happen when it was over. It was the English alone who fought. In the summer of 1842 they undertook to bring the thing to a final and decisive conclusion.