From The Adventures of a Younger Son (1831)
Trelawny (b. 1792), as the title of his memoirs shows, was a younger son who left his comfortable home (and oppressive father) in search of adventure on the high seas. At 17, after a short time in the navy, he met the charismatic Dutch-American privateer De Ruyter under whom he served. De Ruyter soon made Trelawny a captain and they sailed the Asian seas side-by-side for four years; the following extract from Trelawny’s memoirs describes this period. After his beloved Arabian wife Zula died, and De Ruyter went to Italy for Napoleon in 1813, Trelawny returned to England. He became an intimate friend of Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, and in fact found Shelley’s body after his death in 1822. The following year he and Byron went to Greece together to fight for Greek independence. Trelawny died in 1881, and his ashes were buried, as he had arranged nearly sixty years earlier, beside Shelley’s in Rome. Although strictly speaking Trelawny was a privateer, not a pirate, his description of taking a Chinese trader’s ship at the turn of the nineteenth century cannot differ much from the description a real pirate would have given.
Continually in chase of something, I fell in, among other coasting and country craft, with a Chinese junk, drifted out of her course, on her return from Borneo. She looked like a huge tea-chest afloat, and sailed about as well. She was flat-bottomed and flat-sided; decorations of green and yellow dragons were painted and gilded all over her; she had four or five masts, bamboo yards, mat sails and coir rigging, double galleries all round, with ornamented head and stern, high as my main top, and was six hundred tons burden. Her interior was a complete bazaar; swarms of people were on board, and every individual, having a portion of tonnage in measured space, had partitioned off his own, and converted it into a shop or warehouse; they were like the countless cells of a bee-hive, and must have amounted to some hundreds. All sorts of handicraft trades were going on, as if on shore, from iron forging to making paper of rice straw, and glass of rice, chasing ivory fans, embroidering gold on muslins, barbacuing fat pigs, and carrying them about on bamboos for sale. In one cabin a voluptuous Tartar1 and a tun-bellied Chinese had joined their dainties together; a fat dog, roasted entire, stuffed with turmeric, rice, suet and garlic, and larded with hog’s grease, the real, delectable and celebrated sea-slug, or sea-swallow’s nest, shark’s fins stewed to a jelly, salted eggs and yellow-dyed pilaff formed their repast. A mighty china bowl of hot arrack punch stood in the centre of the table, from which a boy was continually ladling out its contents. Such voracious feeders I never beheld; they wielded their chop-sticks with the rapidity and incessant motion of a juggler with his balls. The little, black, greedy twinkling eye of the Chinese, almost buried in mounds of fat, glistened like a fly flapping in a firkin of butter. The Tartar, with a mouth the size of the ship’s hatchway, seemed to have a proportionate hold for stowage. Understanding these were the two principal merchants on board, I had come to speak to them; but like hogs, buried up to the eyes in a savoury waste of garbage, there was no moving them from the dainties they gloated on. A sailor, who had conducted me, whispered his Tartar owner who I was; he grunted out some reply, and with a greasy paw, placed several handfuls of boiled rice on a corner of the table, indented it with his fist, poured into the hollow some of the hog’s lardings out of the platter containing the roast dog and then, adding five or six hard-boiled salt eggs, motioned me to sit down and eat.
Driven away by these unclean brutes, I went into the Tartar captain’s cabin, built over the rudder. He was stretched on a mat, smoking opium through a small reed, watching the card of the compass, and chanting out, ‘Kie! Hooé – Kie! Chee!’ Finding I might as well ask questions of the rudder as of him, I hailed the schooner to send a strong party of men.
We then commenced a general search, forcing our way into every cabin, when such a scene of confusion, chattering, and noise followed, as I never had heard before. Added to this, there was the mowing and gibbering of monkeys, apes, parrots, parroquets, bories, mackaws, hundreds of ducks, fish-divers, pigs, and divers other beasts and birds, hundreds of which were in this Mackow1 ark. The consternation and panic among the motley ship’s crew, and merchant-passengers, are neither to be imagined nor described. They never had dreamed that a ship, under the sacred flag of the emperor of the universe, the king of kings, the sun of God which enlightens the world, the father and mother of all mankind, could, and in his seas, be thus assailed and overhauled. They exclaimed, ‘Who are you? – Whence did you come? – What do you here?’ Scarcely deigning to look at the little schooner, whose low, black hull, as she lay athwart the junk’s stern, looked like a boat or a water-snake, they wondered at so many armed and ferocious fellows, not believing that they could be stowed in so insignificant a vessel whose hull scarcely emerged from the water. A Hong silk merchant, while his bales were handed into one of our boats, offered us a handkerchief apiece, but protested against our taking his great bales, when we could not possibly have room for them.
A few grew refractory, and called out for aid to defend their property. Some Tartar soldiers got together with their arms; and the big-mouthed Tartar and his comrade, swollen out with their feed of roast dog and sea-slug, armed themselves, and came blowing and spluttering towards me. I caught the Tartar by his mustachios, which hung down to his knees; in return he snapped a musket in my face; it missed fire; his jaw was expanded, and I stopped it for ever with my pistol. The ball entered his mouth, (how could it miss it?) and he fell, not so gracefully as Caesar, but like a fat ox knocked on the head by a sledge-hammer. The Chinese have as much antipathy to villainous saltpetre, except in fire-works, as Hotspur’s neat and trimly dressed lord,1 and their emperor, the light of the universe, is as unforgiving and revengeful towards those who kill his subjects, as our landed proprietors are towards those who slaughter their birds. An English earl told me the other day he could see no difference between the crime of killing a hare on his property, and a man on his property, arguing that the punishment should be the same for both. However, I have killed many of the earl’s hares, and a leash or two of Chinese in my time, instigated to commit these heinous crimes by the same excitement – that of their being forbidden and guarded against by vindictive threats of pains and penalties.
But to return to the junk. We had a skirmish on the deck for a minute or two, a few shots were fired, and a life or two more lost in the fray. The schooner sent us more men, and no further opposition was made. Then, instead of gleaning a few of the most valuable articles, and permitting them to redeem the remainder of the cargo by paying a sum of money, as the rogues had resisted, I condemned her as lawful prize. We therefore began a regular pillage, and almost turned her inside out. Every nook, hole and corner were searched; every bale cut, and every chest broken open. The bulky part of her cargo, which consisted of camphor, woods for dyeing, drugs, spices and pigs of iron and tin, we left; but silks, copper, selected drugs, a considerable quantity of gold dust, a few diamonds and tiger-skins were ours; and, not forgetting Louis, who had entreated me to look out for sea-slug, I found some bags of it in the cabin of my late friend, the defunct merchant. Neither did I neglect the salted eggs, which with rice and jars of melted fat, victualled the ship. I took some thousands of these eggs, a new and excellent sort of provision for my ship’s company. The Chinese preserve them by merely boiling them in salt and water till they are hard; the salt penetrates the shell, and thus they will keep for years.
The philosophic captain, whose business it was to attend to the navigation and pilotage of the junk, having nothing to do with the men or cargo, continued to inhale the narcotic drug. His heavy eye was still fixed on the compass, and his drowsy voice called out, ‘Kie! Hooé! – Kie! Chee!’ Though I repeatedly asked him whither he was bound, his invariable answer was ‘Kie! Hooé! – Kie! Chee!’ I pointed my cutlass to his breast, but his eyes remained fixed on the compass. I cut the bowl from the stem of his pipe, but he continued drawing at the reed, and repeating, ‘Kie! Hooé – Kie! Chee!’ On shoving off, as I passed under the stern, I cut the tiller ropes, and the junk broached up in the wind, but I still heard the fellow singing out, from time to time, ‘Kie! Hooé! – Kie! Chee!’
We had altogether a glorious haul out of the Chinaman. Every part of our little vessel was crammed with merchandise. Our men exchanged their tarred rags for shirts and trowsers of various coloured silks, and looked more like horse-jockeys than sailors. Nay, a few days after I roused a lazy and luxurious old Chinese sow from the midst of a bale of purple silk, where she was reclining; perhaps she thought she had the best right to it, as it might have belonged to her master, or because she was one of the junk’s crew, or probably she was the owner herself transmigrated into this shape, – there needed little alteration. I also got some curious arms, particularly the musket, or fowling-piece, which, had it obeyed its master’s intention, would have finished my career. The barrel, lock and stock, are deeply chased all over with roses and figures of solid gold worked in. I preserve it now, and it has recalled the circumstance by which it came into my possession; otherwise, it might have been driven, like any others of greater moment, from my memory by the lapse of time, and by more recent events.