Ford of H.M.S. Vigilant: A Tale of the Chusan Archipelago

by T. T. Jeans

This was Lawrence's story, and excited enough he was about it and the chances of our having a "show". "Strangely enough too, sir," he said, "the First Lieutenant of that ship is an old chum of mine—a man named Ching. He was doing a year's training in the old Inflexible when I was a Mid in her. A jolly chap he was—we all liked him—and he's coming over after dinner to have a yarn, if he can get away."

I had to dine with the Captain that night—he positively refused to entertain the two Americans by himself—and I learnt from the old father, Mr. Martin P. Hobbs—I had seen his name in the papers—he was a wealthy railway magnate—the details of their extraordinary escape. This is what he told me, and you can take it for what it's worth; but he was such a weird, cunning little object, that I, somehow or other, found myself doubting his story. He and his daughter Sally, who was as pretty as paint, although her hair had been clumsily cut off, and who was now trying to twist the dear old bully of a Captain round her little finger, had been wandering about the Northern Treaty Ports, and at Shanghai had met some Boston people who were, what he called, doing a "splash". They'd been somewhere up country with a caravan of their own—somewhere where no one else had ever been—and in order to go one better, nothing would content Miss Hobbs but that her father should buy a small steam yacht, which happened to be for sale, and start away for a thousand-mile trip up the Yangtse. The skipper of the yacht—they'd named it the Sally Hobbs—seems to have been a dare-devil sort of scoundrel, according to Hobbs, and instead of taking them up to Hankow, got them to alter their plans, and brought them down among the islands.

One night they had anchored close to an island, and woke up to find the yacht in possession of a crowd of Chinamen, simply swarming all over the decks. They were forced down below and locked in their cabins, and there they stayed for a whole day, while the yacht steamed away. Some time during the next night Hobbs was roughly gagged and bound, a long, blue, Chinese coat pulled over him, and he was made to get into a boat alongside. He found his daughter lying in the sternsheets, gagged and covered with another blue native coat. He heard a scuffle on deck, but it was too dark to see anything distinctly. He thought he heard the voice of the old Scotch engineer of the yacht, and then someone cast off the boat and they drifted quickly away in the darkness.

In the morning they had been seen by the Huan Min, taken on board, were in great danger whilst she was trying to fight the pirates, and were afterwards brought along here.

That was his story, and as I said before, it did not convince me. If the whole scheme had been arranged, and he implied that the skipper of the yacht was the arch villain, how on earth had he allowed Hobbs to escape so easily? He must have known of his enormous wealth, and would surely have kept close guard on him to extort a ransom later on.

However, there was his daughter, and no doubt her hair had been roughly cropped off, and from what I know about women, especially pretty ones, they wouldn't lose their hair if they could possibly help it, and when I looked across at her, the very picture of innocence, and heard her tell the Skipper how they'd shorn it off, putting her hands through the irregular bits left, her lips quivering, and her eyes filling with tears, I was bound to believe that there was some truth in it.

It was amusing to watch the change in the Skipper's manner. He had sat down to dinner with a scowl on his face that would have melted the paint off the bulkhead, and snarled whenever he spoke; but now he was telling her all about his wife and daughters, and she was holding up her wrists to show him where they had been bound and bruised, and had completely mollified him.

Presently Hobbs ventured to ask him if he would try and recapture the yacht, and then the Skipper flared up again and roared at him, "that American citizens should get their own ships to do their own dirty work". The Skipper's language was never too refined, but the little man wasn't to be browbeaten. "Guess the Sally Hobbs was flying your own red ensign, Captain," he answered defiantly.

"Darn my rags! Why didn't you say so before?" shouted the Skipper, and got purple in the face. "Those pirates dare touch anything under our flag? I'll go after 'em to-morrow."

"I rather fancy she was," put in Miss Hobbs. "Poppa and I were in such a hurry, we'd only time to paint Sally Hobbs on the stern and the lifebuoys, and didn't reckon it counted, altering the registration."