A Chinese Command: A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas

by Harry Collingwood

It was then that he obtained his first insight into the subtle ways of Chinese Naval officialdom. He knew perfectly well what kind of ammunition he required, and how much of it, but he seemed utterly unable to find anybody who possessed the necessary authority to issue it. He was sent from one official to another, all of them gorgeously dressed and very eager to give every assistance; yet when the moment arrived for the stores to be actually given into his hands—well, they were heart-broken to give the honourable captain so much trouble, but would he be pleased to obtain the approval of his Excellency the honourable Somebody Else, whose signature was also needed before the ammunition could be removed.

At last, so disgusted did Frobisher become at all this delay and prevarication that he went back to the Su-chen, selected some twenty of the strongest members of his crew, and himself took them up to the magazine with a number of hand-wagons which he had collected, under much voluble protest, en route. Then, having found the required pattern of cartridge, he ordered his men to load the cases on to the wagons, and, amid the intensely-shocked expostulations of the outraged officials of the Ordnance Department, who were quite unaccustomed to fill a requisition in less than a month, the several indents were wheeled down to the gunboat by the Chinese sailors, who already began to show the respect they felt for a man who knew what he wanted, and got it.

The task was finished at last, and that afternoon the Su-chen dipped her ensign to the San-chau, on board of which Admiral Wong-lih had his quarters, steamed down the river Pei-ho, past the Taku forts at its mouth, and out into the open sea on her way to the mouth of the Hoang-ho, some three hundred miles up which lay the village of Tchen-voun-hien, at or near which the pirates’ lair was said to be situated. During the hundred-mile run across the gulf of Chi-lih, Frobisher set his men to clean ship thoroughly, overhaul and polish the guns, and make things in general a little more shipshape than they had been since the time when the Su-chen left her builders’ hands on the Thames.

Frobisher was fortunate in the moment when the gunboat arrived off the mouth of the Hoang-ho, for the sea was smooth, and the usually dangerous bar at the mouth of the river was passed with ease. But there were many reminders, in the shape of broken spars, and in some cases fragments of hulls, projecting out of the water, to show that the sea was not always in so gentle a mood, and that many other captains had been less fortunate. The bar at the mouth of the Hoang-ho is indeed one vast graveyard, both of men and ships.

Frobisher anchored a few miles up the river, and spent a whole day exercising his men at cutlass and small-arm drill, to smarten them up a little and prepare them as far as possible for the cut-and-thrust work which, he felt sure, the task of exterminating the pirates would ultimately involve. Early on the following morning the voyage upstream was continued, the Su-chen making not more than about six knots an hour against the strong current, the result, evidently, of heavy rains up-country, for the river—well named the “Yellow River”—was thick and turbid with mud, which had been washed off the surface of the land by the floods.

Mile after mile the Su-chen crept along, and the low, flat, uninteresting banks slipped gradually astern. A few junks were passed, but they were all too far away for Frobisher to communicate with them, as they were well in under the land, while the gunboat was obliged, on account of her draught, to keep more or less in the centre of the river.

One afternoon, however, there came from the man whom Frobisher had posted in the foretop, to give warning of rocks or shoals, a shout that there was a dismasted junk about a mile ahead which appeared to be trying to intercept the gunboat. She seemed, the look-out reported, to have been on fire, as well as having lost her mast, for he could plainly make out through his telescope the black patches where her deck and bulwarks had been charred. There were only two men on deck, he added, and these men were doing all they could to attract attention, waving something—he could not quite make out what—above their heads, and leaping about excitedly. There were other dark-coloured patches about the deck, but at that distance it was not possible to say whether they were the result of fire, or of something else. Frobisher, however, who had carefully listened to a report of the details from the interpreter, had the conviction that there had been some happening on board that junk other than that of mere fire, and that he was shortly to receive evidence with his own eyes of the activities of the pirates whom he was going to exterminate; for he felt certain that the dark stains were not those of fire, but of blood.

As soon as the unwieldy craft, which was progressing solely by the force of the current, approached to within a quarter of a mile of the Sit-chen, Frobisher rang his engines to half-speed, so that the gunboat barely made headway against the current, and thus awaited the junk’s arrival. The gunboat was skilfully manoeuvred alongside her, and the crew, with ropes and grapnels, soon secured her, and assisted the two men who formed her sole complement up on deck. Here Frobisher, after giving them some refreshment, of which they were plainly in great need, questioned them through the interpreter as to the cause of their present condition.

It was precisely as he had expected. The junk had, it seemed, sailed a few days previously from Tchen-tcheou, a town about six hundred miles from the mouth of the river, with a valuable cargo of sandalwood intended for Tien-tsin; but on passing the spot where the old bed of the river used to lie before the channel was diverted, she had been attacked by no fewer than five large and heavily-armed junks, crowded with men. Before the crew could even place themselves in a position for defence, the junk had been seized and the men cut to pieces by the ruthless pirates. The two men standing on the Su-chen’s deck had escaped as by a miracle, for, after taking all her cargo out of the junk and throwing dead and wounded overboard, the leader of the pirates had indulged his humour by binding the two survivors and laying them on the deck, afterwards firing the junk and setting her adrift. The men had secured their freedom by one of them gnawing the other’s bonds loose, and they had then managed to extinguish the fire.

But—would not the honourable captain take his ship up the river, and wipe the pirates out, lock, stock, and barrel? Frobisher informed them that such was his intention; and, after asking the two men whether they would accompany him as guides, and receiving their assurance that they desired nothing better, he set the junk adrift again, since she was absolutely useless, and continued his journey.