But the Chinese have another, and much more ornamental description of sea-going vessels called the “Soma,” with (see [illustration, p. 475]) usually only one mast: and, with these vessels, the Chinese sail along the coasts of Batavia, Manilla, Annam, Cochin China, Cambogia, Chinchiu. They are capacious for their tonnage and will hold about a thousand chests of tea. They are high and round on each side, the rudder is slender and can be taken out with very little difficulty. They have no upper sails, but only one great fore-sail, besides the sprit-sails, and the mizen, all of which are made of mats tied together across bamboo sticks. They lower the sails with difficulty, and to effect this are generally obliged to send a sailor up the mast to tread the yard down.
All Chinese sea-going junks are armed with cannon—some of them heavily for defence, and when it suits their purpose for attack, as too many of them, though professing to be honest traders, become pirates whenever a fitting opportunity offers. Numerous instances might be given of these marauding attacks upon the defenceless trading vessels of all nations, especially when a rich booty is anticipated. In such cases, their practice is to sail to windward of their prey, sheer alongside and, if the weather permits, throw from the mastheads “stink-pots” on board of their victims. The atrocious smell from these pots is certain to clear the decks and drive the crew below so that the Chinese can thus, generally, obtain a footing on board without opposition. Except when resistance is offered, the lives of the crew of the merchant-vessels are generally spared; but there have been many instances when all on board have been massacred, when the most revolting scenes have occurred, and when the ships have been scuttled and sunk with all on board. As a rule, however, these pirates, if they obtain what they require, leave the plundered ship and crew to their fate.
[400] The whole of the native craft of China, above a certain size, are usually described as junks, and the name of this particular description is, comparatively, modern. Charnock and other writers have puzzled themselves to know why they are called soma or sommes. Soma in Portuguese signifies cargo or burthen, and the French have the same meaning, bêtes de somme, beasts of burthen; so that soma or sommes as now applied to these vessels, simply means vessels of large cargo capacity, and is not, as Charnock supposes, a corruption of any Chinese word.
[401] See Report of the Delegates of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce on the trade of the Upper Yang-tse, 1869, a most interesting and instructive document published at Shanghai.
[402] Report, p. 3.
[403] Report, p. 14.
[404] Ibid., p. 17.
[405] Ibid., p. 19.
[406] As the merchants resident in the interior of China had no intercourse with, nor, in fact, any knowledge of, Europe till a comparatively recent period, it may be inferred that such guilds are of the most remote antiquity, if not of pre-historic times; and although no mention is made of them in the early records of the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Phœnicians, or Egyptians, it is quite probable that similar customs prevailed among the earliest of those nations, and were interchanged by them in their commercial intercourse with the Chinese on the one hand, and with the Europeans on the other.
My learned friend Sir P. Colquhoun is of opinion that we got our guilds (not corporate bodies, as they became afterwards, but associations of men similarly employed like the present trades’ unions), which existed in England as early as the ninth century, from the East, through the Teutonic tribes who came from the north of Europe. He adds, that the word “Zunft,” German for “corporation,” is also possibly derived from the Arabic plural word “Esnáf,” a view which Mr. Redhouse supports: other Oriental scholars, however, whom I have consulted, see no reason for its derivation from the Arabic.