But valuable as his services were now, as they had been when assistant to Fisher, he was again not allowed to remain at the Admiralty for long. Admiral Sir C. H. Seymour chose him as Flag Captain on the Centurion. It is hardly necessary to point out that the Centurion of 1898 is no longer on the active list, if indeed she exists at all. H.M.S. Centurion, now “watching and waiting” somewhere in the North Sea, was built in 1912, and belongs to the King George V. Class; she has a displacement of 25,000 tons, and a speed of 21½ knots.
The old Centurion was a very different class of boat. She was on the China Station, and when the Boxer Rising occurred in 1900—just as we hoped we were finishing our work in South Africa under Kitchener—Jellicoe found himself in the firing line again.
The Boxers were the moving spirit in a vast organization which had for its object the extermination of Christian Missionaries and the aggressive commercial white men who followed in their train.
“China for the Chinese” might be translated as their popular war cry. The Dowager Empress of China was, if not at the head of the movement, certainly at the back of it, in spite of her protestations to the contrary.
The Chinese are the most conservative people in the world. They love and respect the traditions of their race as they love and respect their Ancestors. The “foreign” missionaries, railway concessionaries, mining agents and other outriders of modern civilization threatened to destroy and outrage their cherished ideas and institutions. They did not particularly object to the British; the Englishman—when he did not try to convert them—was the least hated of the foreign devils.
Americans, French, Russians, Germans, were all hated and feared.
The Boxers decreed that they would have to go. The rebellion started quietly enough, but once having started it spread with alarming rapidity until Europe saw itself face to face with the Yellow Peril. China threatened to over-run the Western Continent.
Proclamations were issued by the Boxers in all the towns and villages of the great Empire and appeared on the walls of Pekin itself.
“The voice of the great God of the Unseen World—