The Chinese, finding that they met with no success against us in the open field, turned their attention more strongly than ever to their two most notable schemes, of kidnapping our men, one by one, and destroying our ships by means of fire-rafts. Large rewards continued to be offered for the capture of our high officers; but their successes in this system were confined to the men, some of whom were occasionally carried off and a few were put to death in the most barbarous and inhuman manner. Indeed, it was not till after the capture of Chapoo (the next engagement to be described) that the Chinese began to treat their prisoners with a little kindness and mercy.
Many stories of the cleverness of the Chinese in carrying off prisoners, and of the treatment the latter afterwards met with, are familiar to the reader. Towards the close of the war, they were generally pretty well taken care of, for the Chinese could not be insensible to the kind treatment their countrymen met with when they fell into our hands. I remember being nearly caught once at Chusan, just at the close of the war; and the very next day, an attack was made upon two of our officers, who made an excursion in the same direction, and had a very narrow escape. Captain Wellesley, R.N., and Ensign Shadwell, of the 55th, were surrounded at less than a mile from the city gate. The latter shot one of the Chinamen in the breast with a pistol, (a single pistol is always useless,) but was immediately taken prisoner by the others, who were probably soldiers disguised as peasants. His arms were pinioned, and he was dragged along by the legs. In the meantime, Captain Wellesley, instead of firing his pistol, judiciously ran off towards the city gate, to call out the guard; and the moment the Chinese saw them advancing, they threw down their prisoner and decamped. He was thus saved.
On some occasions, the Chinese kidnappers had the worst of it, and were themselves captured: these were principally sent down to Hong-Kong to work in chains, but some were kept in prison at Chusan. The respectable inhabitants, however, were anxious to bring about a more peaceable state of things, and they stated that the kidnappers were not natives of the island, but people sent over purposely from the mainland. It was evident that some secret influence was at work among the people, and that they still dreaded the power of their own authorities, and were instigated to annoy us.
At length, the Chinese became better disposed, and then took to the amusement of making caricatures of us. Many spirited things of this sort were hawked about, rudely executed and strangely coloured, but withal amusing specimens of Chinese drollery. The two annexed sketches, one of an encounter between our own soldiers and the Tartars, and the other of an English foraging party, are accurately reduced from the original Chinese caricatures, and shew more evidence of fun and quickness than we should have expected among so grave a people. There were many others equally amusing. At Ningpo, they made a sort of little peep show of the General and his staff, intended to be a correct representation of them in little figures. That of Sir Hugh Gough, with his beautiful long, grey locks, was fairly done. A capital full-length picture, in oil, of the General was afterwards executed at Macao by a Chinese artist, who had been regularly instructed.
TARTAR AND ENGLISH SOLDIERS FIGHTING.
ENGLISH FORAGING PARTY.
CHINESE CARICATURES.