With half a million combatants on either side, the Russo-Japanese War escalated into the largest-scale conflict the world had ever seen. Despite the initial efforts of the Japanese to restrict access to the front, it also become the most widely reported war in history to that point. In fact, as James once wrote to Morrison, some Japanese generals grew so fond of the coverage that they would delay the start of a battle if the correspondents had not yet arrived. Almost no one ever referred to it any more as Morrison’s War.
Port Arthur fell to the Japanese on 2 January 1905. The war itself didn’t conclude until September that year, with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. Morrison travelled to New Hampshire for the negotiations and US President Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his role in mediating the peace. By then, each side had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. The fighting flattened more than two hundred Chinese villages and left nearly three thousand hectares of fields trampled. Thousands of Chinese perished and countless others lost their homes and livelihoods.
In 1911, a coalition of revolutionary forces overthrew the Ch’ing Dynasty and established the Republic of China. In early 1912, Viceroy Yuan Shih-k’ai became President of the Republic and Morrison quit journalism to become Yuan’s adviser. The Avenue of the Well of the Princely Mansions—Wangfujing—was for some time named Morrison Street in English in the Australian’s honour.
Following several other ill-fated attachments, Morrison proposed to his winsome new secretary, the New Zealander Jenny Wark Robin, atop the Tartar Wall. He was fifty and she twenty-three when they married; he worried that he might get a nosebleed at the wedding. Morrison died of illness seven years later, in 1920, just after making his final journal entry, and she three years after that. They were survived by three children.
Martin Egan and Eleanor Franklin married in 1905 and went on to edit the Manila Times together. She achieved international renown for her reporting from the Mesopotamian front during World War I. When she died in 1925, her pallbearers included Herbert Hoover, General James G. Harbord and Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer. Author Jack London, who travelled at least once on the Haimun, reportedly wanted to call his semi-autobiographical 1909 novel Martin Egan after his good friend but Egan objected that it was London’s own story and so London titled it Martin Eden instead.
Lionel James retired from The Times in 1913 and served with the British Army in World War I, after which he managed a racing stable and stud farm, wrote books and did occasional broadcasts for the BBC before his death in 1955.
Mae Ruth Perkins married an Oakland real-estate developer about ten years after her sojourn in China and Japan. She died in her seventies in 1957, leaving no children—only the odd milliners’ bill, some yellowed clippings from the Oakland social pages and a formidable collection of love letters.