Chapter XII: Rapids and Trackers

A strong, fair wind took us swiftly and silently up the gorge of the “Military Code and the Precious Blade,” in which the water is said to be 1200 feet deep (?), and with some tracking up minor rapids, and some working round corners with poles armed with steel hooks which are inserted into the crevices of the rocks, we passed through the sublime Mitan gorge into a comparatively open reach abounding in vicious-looking reefs and rocks, among very rocky mountains, villages on heights, and superb temples on crags, and at sunset made fast below the picturesque and nobly situated town of Kueichow, the first walled city on the Upper Yangtze.

The Upper Yangtze is remarkable for the picturesque beauty of its cities at a distance, and their situations, almost invariably on irregular heights, backed by mountains, and with fine gardens and trees within their crenelated stone walls, which follow the contour of the site invariably, with one or more lofty pagodas denoting the approach, and with _yamen_ and temple roofs dominating the mass of houses are very imposing.

One is only slowly convinced by experience that the interiors are not worth investigating. Dangerous reefs run out from below the walls of Kueichow, and as the river, if not an actual rapid, was at that time at least a _chipa_, it was not surprising not to find a single boat or junk there. Very few people came to our moorings, and the place looked dead.

The next day we ascended one of the worst rapids, the Yeh-tan, of evil fame at certain seasons, the Niu-kau-tan, nearly as bad, the Heng-liang-tze, a minor rapid, and many _chipa_, only making ten miles in eleven hours. At times the cliffs and rocks were quite impracticable for people in European shoes, and I had reluctantly to stay in the boat during ascents, but the _lao-pan_ declined to carry passengers up the dreaded Yeh-tan.

Above Kueichow there is a comparatively open reach with steep hills 1000 feet high, cultivated in patches to their summits, then tinged with green, small villages with wooded surroundings occurring frequently. Though not called a gorge, even that part of the Yangtze has high cliffs with lateral openings, and there are numbers of small coal “workings” in the hills, mere holes, shored up with timber, about three feet high, out of which the glass showed strings of women and children creeping, with baskets of coal dust on their backs. From this reach onwards the people make “patent fuel” by mixing the coal dust with loam and clay and forming it into small cakes. The boatmen made great use of it from that point, and added clouds of smoke to the malodorousness of their cooking.

Again I admired the resourceful energy which has surmounted the difficulties of the rapids. Narrow, steep flights of steps are in many places cut in the rock to facilitate tracking, as well as rock paths a foot or so wide, some only fifteen or twenty feet above the river, others at a giddy height on which the trackers looked no bigger than flies. The reader must bear in mind that all difficulties of getting up and down are largely increased by the river varying in height forty, fifty, and even sixty feet at different seasons, and there are water lines even seventy feet above the winter level. When I came down many of these paths and stairs were submerged several feet. On all of these, and indeed for much of the upward journey, the life of the tracker is in continual peril from losing his foothold owing to the slipperiness of the rock after rain, and from being dragged over and drowned by the backward tendencies of a heavy junk tugging at the end of 1200 feet of a heavy bamboo hawser as thick as an arm.

The river at low water is thoroughly vicious above Kuei, and the pilot’s task is a severe one, even before reaching the Yeh-tan. At low water this is not so bad as the Hsin-tan; still, the hill of furious breakers with a smooth, narrow channel in the centre and a fierce whirlpool at the foot looked awful enough. The whole shore above the boulders, and indeed upon them, is covered with the mat huts of trackers and those who supply boats with provisions and bamboo ropes. A great bank covered with frightful boulders projects from the north shore, narrowing the river to a width of 150 yards. Mr. A. J. Little estimates the rush of the current round the point of that bank at from eight to ten knots an hour. Forty big cargo junks lay below it waiting their turn to ascend; and a thousand trackers were filling the air with their yells, while signal drums and gongs added to the din.

My attention was occupied by a big junk dragged by 300 men, which in two hours made hardly perceptible progress, slipping back constantly, though the drums were frantically beaten and the gangers rushed madly along the lines of struggling trackers, bringing their bamboo whips down on them with more sound than force. Suddenly the junk shivered, both tow-ropes snapped, the lines of trackers went down on their faces, and in a moment the big craft was spinning down the rapid; and before she could be recovered by the bow-sweep she flew up into the air as if she had exploded, a mass of spars and planks with heads bobbing about in the breakers. Quick as thought the red lifeboats were on the spot; and if the drowning wretches as they scrambled over the gunwales did not bless this most efficient of the charities of China, I did most heartily, for of the fourteen or fifteen souls on board all were saved but three. This was one of two fatal disasters that I saw on the Yangtze, but, to judge from the enormous quantity of cotton drying at the Yeh-tan and the timbers wedged among the rocks, many a junk must have had a hole knocked in her bottom. Our own ascent, which took three hours, was successfully made.

I had then had this boat for my home for a week, and various disagreeables grew apace. The _lao-pan_, the virago’s old husband, a small, fearfully lean man, with the leanest face I ever saw, just like very old, yellow, mildewed parchment strained over bones, sunken eyes, no teeth, and in the bitterly cold weather clad only in an old blue cotton garment, always blowing aside to show his emaciated form, was craftiness, greed, and avarice personified. Though “sair hodden doun” by his vigorous wife, he was capable of an attempt to repudiate his contract. He bargained and battled with the trackers at the rapids for hours to save a few _cash_, though by the delay he lost more than he saved; he ground the boatmen down, and gave them inferior rice; he would not spend a few _cash_ on patching his ragged sail; and at sunset near Kueichow he put in mysteriously to a creek where he mysteriously met a man with two big sacks, the contents of which were transferred with much mystery and secrecy to the shallow hold in which our luggage was kept. It turned out to be an investment in spurious _cash_, on which, if he got it safely to SZE CHUAN, he might make a puny profit; and for this he ran the risk, relying on a boat carrying foreigners not being searched at Kuei Fu. His hawk-like face was a study of pure avarice.

The _tai-kung_ was a splendid fellow till he collapsed towards evening with the pangs of the opium craving. With his eyes fixed on the perils ahead, he never left the great bow-sweep except for the three meals a day, gave his orders tersely and quietly, and was master of the crew and the lean _lao-pan_. The trackers, who were troublesome from the first, broke out into rebellion, using violent language, forcing themselves into the front room, refusing to let us land (a breach of contract), and being insolent. Some of them looked too low to be human, just such men as would wreck and loot foreigners’ houses with violence. Mr. Stevenson was powerless with them, I think because they mistook his quietness and perfect self-control for weakness. They were absolutely masters, and decided about everything with and without motive. In that week I never saw a kind or good trait of character in them, and they misused a frail old man who was working his passage up. New faces appeared daily, till the number on board rose from sixteen to thirty-four (another breach of contract), but I could not grudge the _lao-pan_ the few dollars he made by it.

The trackers would not take the trouble to put a plank for me to land by, which compelled me to land on a pole, and on one day this spar turned over, and I fell into the water between the boat and the shore, being extricated to live in wet clothes for the day in a windy temperature of 38°. I must add, however, that by the end of three weeks they became considerably humanised, so that I was able to show them my photographs taken on the Yangtze. They recognised their own boat with yells. They said pictures could only be seen with one eye, so they used one hand for holding down one eyelid and made a tube of the other. I told them not to touch, and they actually obeyed! To the end I landed over the swift water on a pole, but latterly they held a bamboo for a rail and gave me a rough haul when I got in!

Poor fellows! I learned to pity them very much. Their ignorance and superstitions keep them in dread and terror of they know not what. They are so piteously poor, and work so hard even to keep body and soul together, and when the twelve hours day of dragging and risk is done there is nothing for them on a winter voyage on the bitterly cold nights but sleeping out of doors literally on a “plank bed.” They are rough and brutal, yet I admit, and that not reluctantly, that not one of them was ever drunk, that they worked hard, and that the cambric curtain which was my only partition from the passage was never pulled aside.

After the great Yeh-tan, with its crowds and excitements, we ascended various ugly rapids and had some minor disasters. The big junks are attended by fine, smart tenders, in which they land and re-embark their trackers, an operation which may be necessary thirty times a day, but my small boat made up to the rocks for this purpose, the _lao-pan_ being too penurious to spend two or three _cash_ in hiring the punts which are available. We were landing the trackers at the foot of the “Cross Beam” rapid when a heavy cargo boat, unmanageable in the strong wind, came upon us and forced the bow-sweep, which projected twenty feet over the bow, among the rocks, where it snapped short off, the side hamper of the two boats at the same time locking them in an unwilling embrace.

Both crews seized the iron-spiked bamboos used for poling, and with fearful yells and execrations and every sign of mad rage began a free fight, but Mr. Stevenson succeeded in preventing actual bloodshed, and after a delay of some hours the other boat repaired our steering spar for the time. A Chinese fight is apt to be nothing more than “much cry.” But our men insisted on going to law at the first convenient opportunity, so for two or three days we were always following that junk, hoping to be avenged on her at Kuei Fu.

The following day was decidedly what the Chinese call an “unlucky day.” In China everything is ruled by a rigid etiquette. There are four things to be attended to on getting into a cart, and rigid rules govern the getting into a chair or boat. It is not only that one is regarded as an unmannerly boor for breaking them, but one draws down the vengeance of gods and demons. The day before I came off from the shore in a punt, and just as I was getting into my own boat, and had one foot on her and the other on the punt, the swift current carried the punt away, and in the scramble which followed I violated one of these rules.

The first thing which happened was that the _lao-pan’s_ three-year-old daughter fell overboard, and was carried fast away by the current. The tender of a junk was being towed up astern of us, and a tracker, a strong swimmer, jumped over, and after a hard struggle saved the child and wrapped her in the clothes he had thrown off, warm with his vital warmth, going naked himself in the biting air. The virago went into one of those paroxysms which are common among the Chinese, and in which they occasionally die. She stamped, jumped, beat everyone within reach, execrated, raved, and foamed at the mouth.

Scarcely had this excitement subsided, when as we were sailing up with a stiff breeze we struck on a rock, knocking two holes in the bottom of the boat, and, as she began to fill, she was run ashore on a sandy beach, and the rest of the day was spent in repairs. Miserable repairs they were, owing to the stinginess of the _lao-pan_, and consisted chiefly in ramming cotton wool and tallow into the holes and coating the mixture with clay. After this, before she could be properly repaired, as it was the Chinese New Year holidays, it took four men baling night and day for forty-eight hours to keep the leakage down, and not only that, but as the deck on which the crew slept had to be taken up, I had to admit the trackers with their vermin and opium pipes into the “front room” next to mine.

In this leaky condition we went up a very severe rapid, which took us four hours of desperate dragging. Sitting shivering for that time on a big boulder, I saw one of the many vicissitudes to be encountered in ascending the Great River. A great cargo junk was being hauled up with two hawsers, over 200 trackers, and the usual enormous din, the beating of drums and gongs, the clashing of cymbals, and the incessant letting off of crackers to intimidate the spirit of the rapid, when both ropes snapped, the trackers fell on their faces, and four hours’ labour was lost, for in a flash the junk was at the foot of the rapid, and the last sight I had of her was far below twirling round in a whirlpool with a red lifeboat in attendance.