MALAY PIRATE PROA.
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum. By permission of R. Walters, Esq., Ware Priory, Herts.
The Chinese seem to have attained to a certain degree of civilisation many centuries ago, and then to have gone to sleep. The dwellers along her coasts were traders and, when opportunity offered, pirates, but as China maintained a policy of splendid isolation both under her old dynasties and after her Manchu conquerors assumed control of her destinies, she had little need of a navy and no interest to serve in encouraging a fighting marine. China used guns in land warfare as early as the eighth century A.D., yet in the eighteenth century she had war junks carrying, not artillery, but soldiers armed with bows and arrows, while the sides of the vessels bore leather shields painted to look like tiger heads, to scare the enemy. Some of her junks were propelled by means of a couple of paddle wheels on each side worked by manual power. The Chinese war junks differed from the trading junks in the greater strength of their construction and in the number of guns carried. Some had guns approximating to 68-pounders, and it was not unusual to find a junk with twenty-one guns of varying dimensions. Each was the same cumbersome, slow-moving craft. These vessels were sometimes over 1,000 tons burthen. One of these junks, the Key-ing, which visited London in 1848, sailed across the Atlantic from Boston to St. Aubin’s Bay in the remarkably good time of twenty-one days, a performance comparing favourably with that of many of the western sailing ships; generally she sailed “like the wind,” that is to say, “where it listeth,” and was as likely to arrive at one port as another. Another famous junk in her time was the Whang-Ho, but whether the junk of that name which started on an exhibition tour of the world two or three years ago was the original or was a copy, as is alleged, is a point which is in dispute. She left San Francisco for New York and London, intending to make the voyage by way of Cape Horn, and soon showed that her intended port was about the last place where she might be expected. Instead of New York, she fetched up at Tahiti, where the crew went ashore and stayed. She sailed with a new crew for the stormy waters of Cape Horn, and was thought to have gone to the bottom until she turned up in Torres Straits, and nearly got into trouble through being suspected of smuggling, or carrying contraband. After being nearly wrecked off Java, she entered Batavia River, and sailed again some weeks later, but her condition became so bad that she had to be abandoned. Her captain wrote in his log-book, in October, 1909: “She will not hold together much longer.... The beams are not fastened to the hull of the vessel, but lie loose in her.... It is certain she has never been a man-of-war, but has been specially built for exhibition purposes in the most careless fashion.” A few days later she was left to her fate.
JAPANESE WAR GALLEYS AND A PROTECTED GALLEY ‘KIKKOSEN,’
15th CENTURY.
Photograph by special permission of the Japanese Imperial Naval Commissioners.
(click image to enlarge)
THE “ATAKA MARU.”