“Not an hour ago, sir,” returned Frobisher. “I met him, with his retinue, just leaving the dockyard. He honoured me so far as to treat me to a very impertinent scrutiny as he passed.”
“Leaving the dockyard!” echoed Wong-lih. “I did not see him about here. He ought to be on board his ship, the Ting Yuen, by rights, for she is quite ready for sea; and I know Admiral Ting is only too eager to take his fleet out to look for the enemy. Indeed, as soon as you are aboard the Chih’ Yuen and have hoisted your flag, he is likely to make the signal to proceed to sea. No; that man had no business here. I wonder what he was doing.”
Acting upon Wong-lih’s hint that the interview had better terminate, Frobisher and Drake took their leave of the kindly admiral, and went back into the city to transact some necessary business before going on board. This included securing uniforms, and suits of mufti, toilet articles, and, in fact, personal requisites of every kind, of which both men had been destitute for several months past. This business having been transacted, their new possessions were packed and sent to the ship, and Frobisher and Drake followed immediately afterward. Arrived on board, the former had his commission read by the interpreter (for it was, of course, written in Chinese script), and at last, after many strange vicissitudes, found himself standing on his own quarterdeck, captain of the Chinese cruiser Chih’ Yuen.
Chapter Seventeen.
Prince—and Traitor?
Once fairly settled on board the Chih’ Yuen, although there turned out to be an enormous amount of work to be done, and numerous little matters to be attended to before the cruiser could be said to be thoroughly “shipshape”, Frobisher found time to look round him a little, and to cast his eyes over the remainder of the northern fleet lying off the city of Tien-tsin. Accustomed as he was to the sight of Great Britain’s noble squadrons, and the enormous size of her battleships and cruisers, the Chinese fleet at first glance seemed utterly insignificant as a fighting machine. In the first place, the ships were few in number, and there were but two battleships among them; and both they and the cruisers would nearly all have been considered obsolete in England.
About a quarter of a mile from his own ship, and anchored in mid-stream, lay the two battleships which formed the backbone of the Chinese Navy at that time—the Ting Yuen, the flagship of Admiral Ting, with Frobisher’s pet abomination, Prince Hsi, as captain; and the Chen Yuen, commanded, like his own ship, by an Englishman.
Both these craft were old and out of date, having been built as long ago as the year 1879; but their armour was enormously thick, and both of them carried two eighty-ton monster guns, placed in turrets and set in echelon, so that the immense weight of the weapons should be evenly distributed. The ships themselves were a little over seven thousand tons displacement, and were fitted with particularly long and strongly reinforced rams, upon the effective use of which the Chinese admiral was building largely—not without justification, as events proved.