Chapter XVI: Piracy

Association with Hongkong and Macao -- Activity of British
navy in suppressing piracy -- Its historic importance --
Government relations with pirates -- The convoy system --
Gross abuse -- Hongkong legislation -- Progress of steam
navigation -- Fatal to piracy.

A factor which has done so much to shape commercial intercourse with China as piracy cannot be properly ignored in a survey like the present. The settlements of Hongkong and Macao were forced into contact with this time-honoured institution, for these places are situated as near to the piratical centre as they are to that of the typhoon zone. From the time of the first war down to quite recent years the British squadron on the China station was almost engrossed in the two duties of surveying the coast and rivers, and of repressing piracy,--services which were not interrupted even during the progress of a war with the Imperial Government. Both proceedings were anomalous, being a usurpation of the sovereign functions of the Chinese Government. That Government, however, never evinced more than a languid interest in operations against its piratical subjects. Piracy, as such, seems indeed to have enjoyed that fatalistic toleration which the Chinese Government and people are wont to extend to every species of abuse, on the principle that what cannot be cured must be endured. Nor is China the only country where banditti have established with their future victims a conventional relation like that of certain predatory animals which are said to live on easy terms with the creatures destined to become their prey. Successful leaders, whether of brigands or of sea-rovers, have from time to time attained high political status in the empire. Wingrove Cooke says:--

Whenever anything occurs of historic importance we always
find that some bandit has had a hand in it. The land was
always full of them. When the Tartars possessed themselves
of China, one of these bandit chiefs had just possessed
himself of Peking, and the last of the Ming race had just
hanged himself. It was a pirate who drove the Dutch out of
Formosa; the son of a "celebrated pirate" who helped the
Cantonese to defend their city against the Tartars; and it
was a pirate who the other day destroyed the Portuguese
piratical fleet at Ningpo. In all ages and at all times
China has been coasted by pirates and traversed by bands of
robbers.

In the 'Peking Gazette,' which he quotes, the Imperial Government itself thus describes the rule of the robbers:--

They carry off persons in order to extort ransoms for them;
they falsely assume the characters of police officers; they
build fast boats professedly to guard the grain-fields, and
into these they put from ten to twenty men, who cruise
along the rivers, violently plundering the boats of
travellers, or forcibly carrying off the wives and
daughters of the _tanka_ boat people. The inhabitants of
the villages and hamlets fear these robbers as they would
tigers, and do not offer them any resistance. The
husbandman must pay these robbers a charge, else as soon as
his crop is ripe it is plundered, and the whole field laid
bare. In the precincts of the metropolis they set fire to
places during the night, that, under pretence of saving and
defending, they may plunder and carry off.

When it suits the Government to enlist rebels or robbers in its service it condones their misdeeds, and confers on them rank and honour. The chief of the Black Flags, who kept up a guerilla war against the French in Tongking, was a recent case in point, as was also, if report speaks truly, the late gallant Admiral Ting, who perished in the Chinese forlorn-hope at Weihai-wei in 1895. The relationship between the authorities and the freebooters is often of so equivocal a character, that foreign naval officers in their crusade against pirates may have failed at times to make the proper discrimination. Vessels seized as pirates occasionally escaped the fate which should have awaited them by proving themselves revenue protectors. But if the Government ever suffered from cases of mistaken identity, the balance was handsomely redressed; for piracy and smuggling being ingeniously blended, the forces of the British colony might in their turn be induced, by information supplied by the Chinese authorities, to act as revenue cruisers, under the belief that they were being led against pirates. The hard fights resulting in the destruction of piratical fleets bearing all the evidences of criminality were, however, too frequent to permit any doubt as to the general character of the craft so treated.

But the anti-piratical agency was not confined to the commissioned officers of her Majesty's navy. Foreigners of all nations were drawn into the coasting traffic, in various capacities, as an antidote to piracy, with benefit, no doubt, to legitimate trade, yet not without some serious drawbacks. Dr Eitel tells us that during the first decade after the war the waters of Hongkong swarmed with pirates, that the whole coast-line was under the control of a blackmailing confederacy, and that the peaceful trading junk was obliged to be heavily armed, so that externally there was nothing to distinguish a trader from a pirate. During this period European seamen took service with the native pirates who made Hongkong their headquarters, whence they drew their supplies, and where they kept themselves informed as to the movements of valuable merchandise and of war-vessels. Foreigners were enlisted also in the service of the honest trader; Chinese merchants began to charter small European sailing-vessels for coasting voyages, whereby they gained the protection of a European flag, the prestige of a European crew, and the better sea-going qualities of a European vessel. Steamers also began to be employed to convoy the native junks.

The extension of the convoy system brought in its train the most terrible abuses, the class of foreigners so employed being as ready to sell their services to the pirates as to the merchants, and to turn from protector to oppressor of the honest trader with as much facility as Chinese fishermen and pirates interchange their respective parts. Many tragedies were enacted along the coast and rivers of China--many more, no doubt, than ever became known to the foreign public. Mr Medhurst, consul at Shanghai, said that the foreigners employed by the Chinese to protect their property on the water were guilty of atrocities of all kinds in the inner waters, which the Chinese authorities and people were unable to prevent. And Mr Adkins, consul at Chinkiang on the Yangtze, reported in the same year, 1862, a series of brutal murders committed by foreigners on the river, with which the native authorities declined to interfere. The criminals, not being amenable to any jurisdiction but their own, were thus left free to commit their outrages, unless some representative of their own country happened to be on the spot. The Taiping rebellion attracted desperate characters from all quarters, to whom it was a matter of indifference under what flag they served--pillage being their sole inducement. The only conspicuous case of trial of a foreigner for piracy was that of a young American, Eli Boggs, who was condemned in the Supreme Court of Hongkong in 1857, and sentenced to transportation for life. From such experiences it is to be apprehended that should any part of the Chinese empire become disorganised, lawless foreigners will be a more terrible scourge to the inhabitants than even the native pirates and bandits.

Of the abuses developed by the convoy system, and of the character of the foreigners concerned therein, a graphic yet matter-of-fact account is given by Wingrove Cooke. As the state of rampant lawlessness which prevailed at the time on the China coast, and the traditional attitude of the Government towards freebooters, are so perfectly illustrated in his concise narrative of the destruction of a Portuguese convoy, no apology is needed for quoting a passage or two from Mr Cooke's letter dated Ningpo, August 24, 1857:--

The fishing-boats which ply off the mouth of the river Yung
pay convoy duties to the extent of 50,000 dollars a-year;
and the wood-junks that ply between Ningpo and Foochow, and
the other native craft, raise the annual payment for
protection to 200,000 dollars (£70,000) annually. These
figures are startling, but I have taken pains to ascertain
their correctness.

The vessels employed in this convoy service were Portuguese
lorchas. These vessels were well armed and equipped. There
were no mandarin junks and no Portuguese ships of war to
cope with them or control them, and they became masters of
this part of the coast. It is in the nature of things that
these privateers should abuse their power. They are accused
of the most frightful atrocities. It is alleged that they
made descents upon villages, carried off the women,
murdered the men, and burnt the habitations. They became
infinitely greater scourges than the pirates they were paid
to repel. It is alleged, also, that complaints to the
Portuguese consul were vain; that Portuguese sailors taken
red-handed and handed over to this consul were suffered to
escape from the consular prison. Rightly or wrongly, the
Chinese thought that the consul was in complicity with the
ruffians who were acting both as convoy and as pirates....
The leader of the pirate fleet was--I am going back now to
a time three years ago--a Cantonese named A'Pak. The
authorities at Ningpo, in their weakness, determined to
make terms with him rather than submit to the tyranny of
the Portuguese.

A'Pak was made a mandarin of the third class; and his
fleet--not altogether taken into Government pay, for that
the Chinese could not afford--was nominally made over to
A'Pak's brother.... After a few of these very sanguinary
provocations, A'Pak--not, it is believed, without the
concurrence of the Taotai of Ningpo--determined to destroy
this Portuguese convoy fleet.

For this purpose A'Pak's brother collected his snake-boats
and convoy junks from along the whole coast, and assembled
about twenty of them, and perhaps 500 men. The Portuguese
were not long in hearing of these preparations, but they
seem to have been struck with panic. Some of their vessels
went south, some were taken at the mouth of the river.
Seven lorchas took refuge up the river, opposite the
Portuguese consulate. The sailors on board these lorchas
landed some of their big guns, and put the consulate in a
state of defence, and perhaps hoped that the neighbourhood
of the European houses and the character of the consulate
would prevent an attack. Not so. On the day I have above
mentioned the Canton fleet came up the river. The
Portuguese consul immediately fled. The lorchas fired one
broadside at them as they approached, and then the crews
deserted their vessels and made for the shore. About 200
Cantonese, accompanied by a few Europeans, followed these
140 Portuguese and Manila-men ashore. A fight took place in
the streets. It was of very short duration, for the
Portuguese behaved in the most dastardly manner. The
Manila-men showed some spirit, but the Portuguese could not
even persuade themselves to fight for their lives behind
the walls of their consulate. The fortified house was taken
and sacked by these Chinamen, the Portuguese were pursued
among the tombs, where they sought refuge, and forty of
them were shot down, or hunted and butchered with
spears....

Merciless as this massacre was, and little as is the choice
between the two sets of combatants, it must be owned that
the Cantonese acted with purpose and discipline. Three
trading Portuguese lorchas which lay in the river with
their flags flying were not molested; and no European, not
a Portuguese, was even insulted by the infuriated butchers.
The stories current of Souero and his Portuguese followers
rivalled the worst of the tales of the buccaneers, and
public opinion in Ningpo and the foreign settlement was
strongly in favour of the Cantonese.

But if Hongkong was the centre of piratical organisation, it was also the centre of effort to put it down. The exploits of her Majesty's ships, destroying many thousands of heavily-armed piratical junks, were loyally supplemented by the legislation and the police of the Colonial Government, which were continuously directed towards the extermination of piracy. These measures, however, did not appear to make any material impression on the pest. As part of his general policy of suppressing crime, the most drastic steps were taken by Sir Richard MacDonnell against pirates. He struck at the root of the evil within the colony itself by penalising the receivers of stolen goods, and by a stricter surveillance over all Chinese vessels frequenting the harbour. He also endeavoured to secure the co-operation of the Chinese Government, without which no permanent success could be hoped for. This was not, indeed, the first time that Chinese co-operation had been invoked. In one of the hardest fought actions against a piratical stronghold--that of Sheipu Bay, near Ningpo, in 1856--her Majesty's brig Bittern was towed into action through the bottle-neck of the bay by a Chinese-owned steamer. But the assistance rendered to the Government of Hongkong by the steam-cruisers of the Chinese customs service was of too ambiguous a character to be of real use, smugglers rather than pirates being the object of the Chinese pursuit--smugglers of whom the high Chinese officials had good reason to be jealous.

The result of the police activity and of regulations for the coast traffic was a great diminution in the number of piracy cases brought before colonial magistrates. This, however, by itself was not conclusive as to the actual decrease of the crime, for it may only have indicated a change of strategy forced on the pirates by the vigorous action of the Colonial Government. Foreign vessels were by no means exempt from the attentions of the piratical fleets, though they seldom fell a prey to open assault at sea. A different form of tactics was resorted to where foreigners were the object of attack: it was to embark as passengers a number of the gang with arms secreted, who rose at a signal and massacred the ship's officers. Even after steam vessels had virtually superseded sailers on the coast this device was too often successful through want of care on the part of the master. These attacks were carried out with great skill and daring, sometimes on the short passage of forty miles between Hongkong and Macao, and in several instances almost within the harbour limits of Hongkong itself.

While awarding full credit to the indefatigable exertions of the British squadron in China--the only one that ever troubled itself in such matters--and to the unremitting efforts of the colony of Hongkong, the reduction, if not the extinction, of armed piracy on the coast of China must be attributed largely to the commercial development, in which the extension of the use of steam has played the principal part. Organised by foreigners, and employed by Chinese, lines of powerful steamers have gradually monopolised the valuable traffic, thus rendering the calling of the buccaneer obsolete and profitless. Foreign traders, however, do well not to forget the debt they owe to the institution which they have superseded. But for the pirates, and the scarcely less piratical exactions of officials, the Chinese would not have sought the assistance and the protection of foreign men, foreign ships, or foreign steamers. Piracy has thus not only worked towards its own cure, but has helped to inaugurate an era of prosperous trade, based on the consolidation of the interests of Chinese and foreigners, such as may foreshadow further developments in which the same elements of success may continue in fruitful combination.