In the 'Peking Gazette,' which he quotes, the Imperial Government itself thus describes the rule of the robbers:—
They carry off persons in order to extort ransoms for them; they falsely assume the characters of police officers; they build fast boats professedly to guard the grain-fields, and into these they put from ten to twenty men, who cruise along the rivers, violently plundering the boats of travellers, or forcibly carrying off the wives and daughters of the tanka boat people. The inhabitants of the villages and hamlets fear these robbers as they would tigers, and do not offer them any resistance. The husbandman must pay these robbers a charge, else as soon as his crop is ripe it is plundered, and the whole field laid bare. In the precincts of the metropolis they set fire to places during the night, that, under pretence of saving and defending, they may plunder and carry off.
When it suits the Government to enlist rebels or robbers in its service it condones their misdeeds, and confers on them rank and honour. The chief of the Black Flags, who kept up a guerilla war against the French in Tongking, was a recent case in point, as was also, if report speaks truly, the late gallant Admiral Ting, who perished in the Chinese forlorn-hope at Weihai-wei in 1895. The relationship between the authorities and the freebooters is often of so equivocal a character, that foreign naval officers in their crusade against pirates may have failed at times to make the proper discrimination. Vessels seized as pirates occasionally escaped the fate which should have awaited them by proving themselves revenue protectors. But if the Government ever suffered from cases of mistaken identity, the balance was handsomely redressed; for piracy and smuggling being ingeniously blended, the forces of the British colony might in their turn be induced, by information supplied by the Chinese authorities, to act as revenue cruisers, under the belief that they were being led against pirates. The hard fights resulting in the destruction of piratical fleets bearing all the evidences of criminality were, however, too frequent to permit any doubt as to the general character of the craft so treated.
But the anti-piratical agency was not confined to the commissioned officers of her Majesty's navy. Foreigners of all nations were drawn into the coasting traffic, in various capacities, as an antidote to piracy, with benefit, no doubt, to legitimate trade, yet not without some serious drawbacks. Dr Eitel tells us that during the first decade after the war the waters of Hongkong swarmed with pirates, that the whole coast-line was under the control of a blackmailing confederacy, and that the peaceful trading junk was obliged to be heavily armed, so that externally there was nothing to distinguish a trader from a pirate. During this period European seamen took service with the native pirates who made Hongkong their headquarters, whence they drew their supplies, and where they kept themselves informed as to the movements of valuable merchandise and of war-vessels. Foreigners were enlisted also in the service of the honest trader; Chinese merchants began to charter small European sailing-vessels for coasting voyages, whereby they gained the protection of a European flag, the prestige of a European crew, and the better sea-going qualities of a European vessel. Steamers also began to be employed to convoy the native junks.
The extension of the convoy system brought in its train the most terrible abuses, the class of foreigners so employed being as ready to sell their services to the pirates as to the merchants, and to turn from protector to oppressor of the honest trader with as much facility as Chinese fishermen and pirates interchange their respective parts. Many tragedies were enacted along the coast and rivers of China—many more, no doubt, than ever became known to the foreign public. Mr Medhurst, consul at Shanghai, said that the foreigners employed by the Chinese to protect their property on the water were guilty of atrocities of all kinds in the inner waters, which the Chinese authorities and people were unable to prevent. And Mr Adkins, consul at Chinkiang on the Yangtze, reported in the same year, 1862, a series of brutal murders committed by foreigners on the river, with which the native authorities declined to interfere. The criminals, not being amenable to any jurisdiction but their own, were thus left free to commit their outrages, unless some representative of their own country happened to be on the spot. The Taiping rebellion attracted desperate characters from all quarters, to whom it was a matter of indifference under what flag they served—pillage being their sole inducement. The only conspicuous case of trial of a foreigner for piracy was that of a young American, Eli Boggs, who was condemned in the Supreme Court of Hongkong in 1857, and sentenced to transportation for life. From such experiences it is to be apprehended that should any part of the Chinese empire become disorganised, lawless foreigners will be a more terrible scourge to the inhabitants than even the native pirates and bandits.
Of the abuses developed by the convoy system, and of the character of the foreigners concerned therein, a graphic yet matter-of-fact account is given by Wingrove Cooke. As the state of rampant lawlessness which prevailed at the time on the China coast, and the traditional attitude of the Government towards freebooters, are so perfectly illustrated in his concise narrative of the destruction of a Portuguese convoy, no apology is needed for quoting a passage or two from Mr Cooke's letter dated Ningpo, August 24, 1857:—
The fishing-boats which ply off the mouth of the river Yung pay convoy duties to the extent of 50,000 dollars a-year; and the wood-junks that ply between Ningpo and Foochow, and the other native craft, raise the annual payment for protection to 200,000 dollars (£70,000) annually. These figures are startling, but I have taken pains to ascertain their correctness.
The vessels employed in this convoy service were Portuguese lorchas. These vessels were well armed and equipped. There were no mandarin junks and no Portuguese ships of war to cope with them or control them, and they became masters of this part of the coast. It is in the nature of things that these privateers should abuse their power. They are accused of the most frightful atrocities. It is alleged that they made descents upon villages, carried off the women, murdered the men, and burnt the habitations. They became infinitely greater scourges than the pirates they were paid to repel. It is alleged, also, that complaints to the Portuguese consul were vain; that Portuguese sailors taken red-handed and handed over to this consul were suffered to escape from the consular prison. Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese thought that the consul was in complicity with the ruffians who were acting both as convoy and as pirates.... The leader of the pirate fleet was—I am going back now to a time three years ago—a Cantonese named A'Pak. The authorities at Ningpo, in their weakness, determined to make terms with him rather than submit to the tyranny of the Portuguese.
A'Pak was made a mandarin of the third class; and his fleet—not altogether taken into Government pay, for that the Chinese could not afford—was nominally made over to A'Pak's brother.... After a few of these very sanguinary provocations, A'Pak—not, it is believed, without the concurrence of the Taotai of Ningpo—determined to destroy this Portuguese convoy fleet.