Mandarin-Gold (23 page)

‘Of course I did. Because it's only right and proper that the Chinese people should realize how they are being duped by their idiotic rulers. Basically, I am sure they are a simple and friendly people. But they believe what their leaders tell them for they have no yardstick to measure what is true and what is false.'

He turned to Jardine.

'Have you anyone who knows the river well?'

'Of course. I'll lend the
Andromache
my most experienced captain. He knows this river like the back of his hand.'

'Very good,' said Napier. 'Then let the ships sail as soon as possible.'

'We had better land some marines in Canton,' Jardine suggested. 'Just to show that all our power and prowess is not confined to the navy. That would take their stage army down a peg, eh?'

'If I may interrupt, sir,' said Elliot.

'You may not,' retorted Napier. 'It is agreed.'

The
Imogene
had aboard her a dozen Royal Marines, and they were ferried up through the night from the river mouth, fifty miles away. Unfortunately, the frigates could not follow them speedily, for there was no wind. When it. sprang up two days later, it came from the wrong direction, so they had to tack slowly and heavily past the first two forts, moving sluggishly against tide and wind.

The forts fired a few cannon balls at them, but all missed. Then the wind dropped suddenly, and with thirty, guns pointing out from each fort, the two ships were sitting targets. But the Chinese guns could not traverse and their cannon balls still splashed uselessly in the streaming tide. The frigates' guns hammered back at the forts; the sailors could see Chinese soldiers fleeing, clothes ablaze. Then mercifully the wind freshened, and the two ships sailed on slowly, crowded with sail, to the safety of Whampoa Island. One rating had been wounded and the
Imogene
reported a main shroud shot away.

Viceroy Lu, by now concerned about his own position should the ships reach Canton, and word of this Barbarian insolence travel to the ears of the Emperor, immediately sank a string of barges across the river between Whampoa and Canton. Then he ordered the Chinese Army to draw cables from bank to bank. Rows of sharpened stakes were dug into the shore near Canton to delay any invasion. Next, scores of sampans were loaded with wood, straw, sulphur, saltpetre and kegs of oil ready to float out as fireships against the frigates. Two thousand Chinese troops stood by with bows and arrows, muskets and sharpened swords.

Some of these fireboats had ingenious detonators, for the Chinese, as the discoverers of gunpowder, had also pioneered new ways to use it. Lu was proud of the clockwork mechanisms that, at any decided hour, could set off a flintlock and ignite a sampan. The leading boats, which he would expect to be sunk first, contained leather bellows, and if the boats submerged, water would rush into these bellows through a metal tube and inflate them. Their movement would activate a linkage to flintlocks which would fire and so explode gunpowder charges.

Lu had also arranged for a number of powder barrels to be sunk in the centre of the river, where one of the British ships would most probably attempt to pass. Each barrel contained a fine glass tube of sulphuric acid. If the barrel received even a glancing blow, this tube would break and the contents explode.

The two naval ships were powerless against these engines of defence. All the Europeans and Americans and, worse, all the Chinese in Canton and Macao knew this.

Napier had never visualized such a situation. He dictated a rambling message to the Viceroy: 'It is a very serious offence to fire upon or otherwise insult the British flag. I recommend the Viceroy to take warning in time. His Majesty will not permit such folly, wickedness and cruelty as he has been guilty of since my arrival here, to go unpunished. Therefore, tremble, Viceroy Loo! Intensely tremble.'

'You have spelt the name wrong, sir,' said Elliot as he wrote this down at Napier's dictation. 'It is
Lu.
L-U.'

'I have spelt it as I want. Loo. L-O-O. Transmit the message as it is.'

Napier's irritation had been exacerbated by his insidious illness; his skin was now hot and dry, his eyes ached, his lips were cracked and his breath burned in his throat. Now, he could, only walk with assistance, and the breakdown of his physical powers inflamed his mind and clouded his judgement.

'As you say, sir.'

And so it was sent. But Lu knew that he just had to sit and wait. Sooner than Lu had expected, Jardine sought a meeting With the Hong merchants.

'Lord Napier is seriously ill,' he explained. 'As a doctor I cannot be optimistic about his chances of recovery if he stays here. We seek the Viceroy's permission to move him.'

Back came the message from Lu: 'If the Barbarian Eye will speedily repent of his errors, if he will withdraw his ships of war and remain obedient to the old rules governing the conduct of the Barbarians and the citizens of the Celestial Kingdom, I will yet grant him some slight indulgence.’

'And if he does not?' parried Jardine.

‘This is his last chance. If he does not learn from his previous errors and accept our offer, the celestial troops will drive him out.'

'I will tell him of your terms,' said Jardine. But Napier was now too ill to understand clearly what was happening. He lay in his small hot bedroom, and while the bright sun outside blazed on the water, he dreamed of the cool clear lochs of Scotland, and saw again in his mind's fevered eye trout streams and wood fires ringed in by the kindly purple hills of home.

Why was he here in this strange, hot, unfriendly place? What was he doing, what could he hope to achieve with these orientals who had no wish and no need for anything he could offer them? Questions sought answers in his tormented mind, and found neither comfort nor reply.

Lu was still concerned at losing face by the bombardment of his forts and determined that the British should lose an equal amount of face on their side. He insisted that Napier should not travel to Macao in a British ship, but in a Chinese vessel, and under a guard of Chinese soldiers.

So Napier and his party set off miserably and in darkness, which mercifully hid the full extent of their humiliation. The night was noisy and hot, and at a creek port twenty miles from, Macao they were detained for hours, while an officious Chinese customs man examined their papers. All around the ship crackers kept exploding and gongs booming in some interminable Chinese festival. Even the tides were against them; they took eighteen hours to cover the final twenty miles to Macao.

Lord Napier by then was too weak to walk and had to be carried ashore.

He lay for some weeks with a high temperature; his health steadily worsening. The frequent ringing of the bells from the twelve churches in Macao so disturbed his fevered sleep that, in the last days, the Portuguese priests stilled them. Thus when Lord Napier died, he died in a silence of bells.

And with him died Jardine's dreams for quickly opening up China's vast and secret kingdom to Western trade. Yet the benefits he believed would flow from its realization were too abundant to abandon easily. So he sat now, his cigar growing its ashy beard, looking at the dancing lights outside. Matheson was going back to England, accompanying Lady Napier and her two daughters. There he would see the Foreign Minister and then the Prime Minister to urge on them both some positive action in the East — to open up the area to trade and to teach China that British subjects could not be treated with such contempt.

This could only mean more trouble. Ferguson was a Lowland Scot in his late forties; tough, honest and unimaginative. He would not seek an interview with his employer outside specified hours unless the matter was important. He came in awkwardly, holding his cap in both hands.

'Begging your pardon, gentlemen,' he began. 'I heard that Mr Matheson was going back to England with Lady Napier, and I thought you might be engaged tomorrow.'

'What's it about?' asked Jardine briefly.

'The
Hesperides,
sir.'

'Well?'

'We were trying the north coast trade, sir, as you suggested. And I understood from Captain Fernandes that he was also on the same tack, but in a different area. So I hailed the
Hesperides
when she came alongside. Some young feller replied — name of Gunn. Dr Gunn. I asked after Captain Fernandes and the young feller said he was too busy to talk.'

'What about Crutchley? Where was he?'

'This Dr Gunn said he wasn't on board, sir. Said he had decided to take a holiday ashore. His actual words. Then they started trading and deliberately undercut us. I told him to stop. He refused. I warned him you would not like this.'

'Civil, yes, sir. But reserved. He seemed rather, well, almost
amused
at the whole thing. As though he were enjoying it.'

'Did he say why Crutchley had gone ashore? Was this his way of telling you he had gone native?'

'I don't know, sir. Mr Crutchley drank heavily, of course.'

There was nothing odd in that; you drank or had a half-caste mistress, or, if you were like Mackereth, a boy; but you always remembered who you were; you never let down your guard completely, unless the sun got at you and everything became too much to bear. Maybe this had happened to Crutchley?

'Who is this fellow Gunn? I've never heard of him before.'

'I've been making some enquiries, sir. I understand he disappeared in Canton some time back, off the
Tre
lawney.
Officers of the
Trelawney
were asking after him. They thought he might have been kidnapped.'

'Where's the
Trelawney
now?'

'On the homeward run.'

'It's odd that this Dr Gunn should suddenly turn up at Whang-pi. That's four hundred miles away from here. A
doctor,
you say? A
medical
doctor?'

'I assume so, sir.'

"Thank you very much, captain. Well, he has to come back either to Whampoa or Macao, and I'll make it my concern to see him and then we can sort this out between us.'

'I thought you would, sir,' said Ferguson, relief in his voice. He was a sharp one, was Jardine. It would take more than Gunn to upset him.

How many times had they ordered their captains to pull alongside a rival and undercut him? If he was selling mud at ten dollars a pound, then you sold it at eight. When he came down to eight, you dropped to six. You could afford to lose a whole shipload because you had so many other interests, and he had nothing.

His whole future was bound up with one boat, while to you a ship was only a part of a vast mercantile equation, an unimportant fraction of your equity.

You were lending money; buying goods for other merchants; remitting returns in goods, bills and specie. Your name was enough to guarantee bonds and bills. You chartered ships of all kinds, and you handled freight. You collected debts, insured cargoes, borrowed money from Parsees and Jews in India at rates as high as twelve per cent, and then lent it out again to the Hong merchants at twenty or twenty-five, and often not even on a letter, but on your word, and a handshake. You were accepted, trusted, envied, copied and feared. You were Jardine and Matheson, and every merchant east of the Cape knew your credit was sound and your promise was your bond.

Other companies had admitted defeat, graciously or not, because they had to. One, Rona-Lloyd, with five or six ships, had capitulated only months before; now, it seemed, another upstart would have to be taught the same lessons. Jardine would instruct his captains accordingly. But first he would discover what he could about this man Gunn. He did not like to fight another doctor and the cheek of this young fellow commended itself to him. He stood up.

He walked out of the room and along the corridor to his own quarters, and stood for a long time at the window overlooking the river. The lanterns were still alight; a lot of traffic was on the water for this hour.

Watching the familiar scene, the houseboats, the sampans, the junks, he felt an almost overwhelming sadness that he was where he was; all the fun had been in the journey, not the arrival.

Jardine even found himself, in a wry and quite inexplicable way, envying Gunn. Whoever he might be, he was only starting
his
journey; and now he would have to fight him. It was as though he was preparing to fight himself, as he had been, when he was beginning, years ago.

11

In Which a Newcomer Arrives in

Canton, and the Parsee Makes a Prophecy

It was the Hour of the Hare, five o'clock on Sunday morning, as the Barbarians counted time and days, when Viceroy Lu's personal bodyguard parted the silken curtains of the Viceroy's bedchamber.