All the Tea in China

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE EIGHT REGULATIONS UNDER WHICH THE EAST INDIA COMPANY MAY TRADE IN CANTON

(Paraphrase and abridgment)

No ships of war are to enter the Pearl River of Canton.

Europeans are permitted to inhabit the Factories of the Canton suburb during the shipping season only; and no wives, children or weapons may be kept there.

No boatman, agent or any other subject of the Celestial One may work for a European without a licence.

No European may keep a household larger than the lowest grade of mandarin might employ.

No European may leave the factories in pleasure-boat or palanquin; no visits to the City or other suburbs are permitted. Each ten days a party of not more than ten may be conducted to the pleasure garden on Hanan Island; there they shall not mingle with the populace, become drunk or remain after dark.

All commerce and all communication with authority shall be carried out through the merchants of the Hong.

Smuggling and the giving or taking of credit are forbidden.

All ships must anchor, unload and load at Whampoa, thirteen miles below the City.

From the moment that we dropped our Pilot at the mouth of the Hooghly our voyage seemed to bear a charmed life. Every wind was in our favour and of the right force, every line cast overboard brought in a large and succulent fish, and our rate of passage was such that the Captain seemed often almost benevolent in his demeanour, despite Blanche’s protracted headaches. Taking the perilous Malacca Strait without the least trouble — indeed, without shortening sail by a stitch — we found another favourable wind which sped us north and a little east at a splendid rate of knots. Captain Knatchbull appeared on deck precisely twenty minutes before the masthead sighted land — the Island of Hainan — then, without troubling to open his telescope, he gave a grunt of self-approval and vanished below. For all his faults, he was an inspired navigator. This made the crew admire him, although he had forfeited all claim to their affections. In the event, we raised Lin-Tin in the unheard-of time of eighteen days out of Calcutta. Grog was served out to all the fo’c’sle people and they romped and skylarked almost as cheerily as they had in the days before the dreadful Martha Washington affair. Almost but not quite. The more thoughtless and carefree lads seemed to be quite themselves again but Tom Transom and the other older salts were subdued and concerned, while Sean O’Casey, the Irish, professed to have some inner presage of disaster. This gift is not uncommon amongst folk of Celtic blood. The Doctor, too, muttered as he worked, although his concoctions, now that he had fresh Indian spices and herbs to conjure with, seemed to make memory a liar. He dedicated himself to teasing my appetite — which has always been small — into an interested state with ever new delicacies.

Before going up the Pearl River to Whampoa, where the Eight Rules said that we must unload and load, and, later, by boat to the European Factories and the Hongs, we put in at Macao, a lovely island, in order to learn the going prices of the various grades of the drug, the latest edicts of the Lord of the World sitting in his Court of Heaven, and to smarten the ship before proceeding to Lin Tin and Whampoa. Macao was enchanting: the Portuguese had been there for more than two centuries and their absurd baroque architecture seemed to grow naturally out of that Oriental soil. Our first view of it was a charming little bay with a crescent of old white houses fringing its waterfont and above them a maze of houses, churches and monasteries of every size and shape and style you can imagine. Highest above all were some ancient and imposing forts: there were cannon there still, but now only used, I was told, for ceremonial saluting.

This delightful place was the centre of European society in the Treaty Coast, for no families could go up to the Factories, nor could the merchants themselves inhabit the Factories except in the shipping season — that is to say, when the south-west Monsoon, which had sped us here, was blowing out.

It fell to Peter, the most junior watch-keeping officer, to go ashore and carry out the bribery necessary to obtain a pass for the ship from the resident Chinese official, also to buy a landing-permit which cost thirteen shillings and fourpence — although it cost quite that sum again to be passed into the presence of the scoundrel who issued it. We were carried ashore in an “egg-boat”, a curious craft some eight feet long and six feet in the beam and half-roofed over with a hemisphere of matting. It was propelled by two bold and beddable girls wearing, if you can believe it, trowsers of some blue material. I asked Peter whether he thought they were chaste, to which he replied, cryptically, that they were of the female sex, a fact which was palpable.

We had leave until midnight and, our tiresome business done, we strolled along the Praya Grande, where there were many ancient and crumbling buildings and many lovely, strolling ladies. The Portuguese ones were accompanied by ancient, crumbling duehas, but the English ones, although not so desirable, walked in pairs, glancing at us boldly. They seemed to be, for the most part, the neglected wives of merchants who were up at Whampoa or Canton, and impatient, in that tepid climate, with the enforced separation.

Peter carried me off to dinner with an old acquaintance of his, a strange, ugly little Irish with white curls and old-fashioned spectacles like those of my father. He had been in the Orient longer than I had been alive and was a painter much esteemed. His name was Chinnery and his talk was copious and enchanting. We were just becoming agreeably drunk when one of his servants came in and gabbled. It seemed that our ship was, inexplicably, flying the “Blue Peter” from the fore-topmast-head: this flag is blue with a square white centre and it means that everyone of that ship’s company must be back aboard instantly, for it is about to sail. This was vexing, because I had promised myself that I would console a merchant’s wife or two before midnight, and baffling, because I had heard the Captain dismiss our Ladrones pilot until the next afternoon’s tide.

When we were outside Chinnery’s house, climbing into a man-drawn vehicle, Peter pointed at the heavens. There was, indeed, a strange look to them, a kind of livid light which changed the colours of everything about; there was also an uncomfortable feeling to the air and a great stillness.

We scrambled across the “brow” between our ship and the sampan alongside it, under a glare from the Captain. In an instant the men at the sweeps were bending to it with a will and we were amongst a flock of vessels making best speed towards the open sea. I knew enough by now to keep out of the way. The men at the sweeps were pulling like galley-slaves and needed no whip to urge them. “Typhoon,” snapped Peter as he ran past me, “get oilskins — and get below!” I got both.

Later I crept out to the break of the poop, for nothing seemed to be happening. On the poop stood the Captain and all three mates. Captain Knatchbull and Peter were discussing something heatedly, the First Mate was growling ignorantly and the Second was looking white but holding his peace.

(Afterwards, I pieced together the burden of their argument: a typhoon in the Northern Hemisphere moves north, you see, and rotates anti-clockwise. The western side or half-circle is navigable but, clearly, blows south — dead foul for us. The eastern semi-circle is dangerous, for the wind there blows at unimaginable speeds — few have attempted to measure these speeds and very few have survived to record them. But that side blows northwards, towards the “country-trade” part of the Coast where, sooner or later, we wished to be. The Captain’s great experience and insanity told him that, by a dashing use of sail, we could make use of the south-western part of the rotatory storm, claw ourselves free on its eastern side and use the residual fringe winds to carry us safely north.)

I did not, thank God, understand anything of what was said, but I heard the Captain close the discussion with a roar of command, saw Peter throw up his hands in a gesture of despair and was jostled by the First Mate as he thrust by me, eyes terrified, to give orders for making sail. The sky was now a rich reddish-brown, full of bizarre menace. I crept below again. There was some cold food in the cabin but I could not touch it: I confess that I was alarmed.

This alarm was nothing to my feelings when the wind first hit us: the impact was such that I thought we had struck a great rock. But the blow was from behind: the ship leaped forward like a maddened horse, I could hear the water roaring against the skin of the ship, the yelling, then the screaming of the tortured rigging and above all the demented bellow of the prodigious wind. Again and again I was sure that this was the climax, that nothing could exceed such violence, no force on earth make a more deafening clamour, but again and again I was proved wrong as the clamour grew more intolerable. At last, insane with the noise and the terror, I clapped my hands to my ears and rushed on deck, determined to confront death sooner than later — and not in that rat-trap of a cabin. As I emerged the hellish din was heightened by an explosion — or so it seemed — as the fore staysail burst into tatters. We lost steerage-way, yawed, and in an instant we were pooped by a cliff-like wave which had been pursuing us. A thousand tons of grey water thundered the length of the ship, lifting me as though I were a fragment of paper and burying me oceans deep. I knew that I was a dead man, there was no question of it, my eardrums cracked, water spurted into my nostrils and, as I opened my mouth to scream, my lungs were instantly so gorged that I could feel them begin to split with the pressure. In the few instants it took to die the whole of my past life flashed in review across my inner eye: this was a disgusting experience.

I awoke in hell, which did not surprise me, all things considered. A black, glistening demon, ten feet high, was tormenting me excruciatingly, crushing my agonised ribs with his great hands. I spewed a gallon of sea-water at him. He turned me over and attacked my chest from behind. It was intolerable — and I knew that the torments would continue through all eternity. I vomited another gallon.

“Din’t eat yo’ nice supper, did you, Maz Cleef,” said the Doctor reproachfully, making me sit up and forcing my head between my knees. “Don’ tell me different: I seen you brung up nothing but sea-water. Might a gone to glory on a empty stomach; ain’t no sense in that now.”

As my eyes cleared and the shards of my wits reassembled themselves I became amused at the sense of disappointment that I felt. I began to cry, then to giggle idiotically. The Doctor smacked me hard across the face and I sank into a happy sleep.

What had happened, it seemed, was this: the great mass of water had wedged me into the bowsprit-rigging — in the angle between the martingale-backstays and the dolphin-striker, to be exact — and, as the ship stood on her tail after the wave had passed, gravity had thrown me onto the fo’c’sle, along the deck, where I caromed off the mainmast bitts and fetched up against the galley. The Doctor had plucked me inside, just before the next pooping.

“Were many drowned?” I asked when I could speak again.

“Of course not,” said Peter. “Everyone else had the sense to be lashed to something stout — or to stay below when told to. Do your bruises hurt much?”

“Yes” I said. “Very much.”

“Good,” he said. But he said it with a kindly grin.

Strangely enough, I slept through the last of the wind’s fury and, two mornings later, went on deck to snuff the wonderfully clean air. It must, in fact, have been almost the end of the morning for the comprador was standing behind the Captain holding the mahogany box which contained his quadrant (for our Captain did not hold with the new-fangled sextants) and the ship’s chronometer hung about his neck. (The sun is “shot” through the “hog-yoke” as Lubbock called the quadrant in his rough Yankee way, at noon, you understand.)

The sails were backed and, as Peter called out the time of noon, the Captain fiddled with the quadrant and soon gave Peter some figures. Peter scrambled to the chart-room and was back in less than a minute, handing the Captain a slip of paper which he gazed at with what seemed a kind of satisfaction.

“I’ll have a sounding, if you please, Mister,” he growled.

Lubbock — it was in fact his watch but Peter was usually on deck when there was a chance of a sun-sight because Lubbock’s arithmetic was that of the beasts of the field — roared his orders.

“Transom, there, fly the blue pigeon! Smart you now!”

In a trice the deep-sea lead was out of its locker abaft the fo’c’sle and Transom was whirling it about his head. (Why “swinging the lead” has come to be a term for idling is a mystery to me for, even with the little six-pound hand-lead and twenty fathoms of line in a flat calm, taking soundings is an arduous and testing work enough; and casting and coiling in the full deep-sea lead again and again, while balanced in the chains in foul weather and, perhaps, darkness is a labour for Hercules himself.)

Transom sang out numbers of fathoms which now I forget but which seemed to gratify the Captain.

“Arm it!” he cried. Transom ran to the locker and stuffed some mutton-fat into the hollow of the lead and hove it again.

The Captain thumbed out the resulting mess and sniffed it, felt it, even chewed a morsel of it. He now seemed uncommonly elated and positively capered to the chartroom.

“Happy as a dog with two cocks,” growled Lubbock.

“Why?” I asked civilly.

He shrugged. I suspect he did not know. The Captain emerged and gave Peter a course which Peter retailed to the steersman and soon there was much bracing of yards and hauling upon this and that rope until we were heading almost due west, with the wind on our starboard beam.

Within an hour we had raised an island, Namoa, which lies in the Bay of Swatow and was, so Peter assured me, a capital place for the selling of illegal opium of poor quality. When I say that this island is quite three hundred sea miles north of Macao you will begin to understand the ferocity of the typhoon which had driven us there in one day and a half.

“What a splendid seaman our Captain is, to be sure!” I murmured admiringly.

“Yes indeed, Karli,” said Peter, smiling at me in a friendly way.

When we reached the anchorage at Namoa I was alarmed to see two large junks, clearly men-of-war and heavily armed, riding inshore of us. One flew an enormous silken pennant, embroidered with dragons: this, Peter told me, denoted a petty Admiral of the Chinese Navy.

“Will they fight?” I asked bravely.

Lubbock, who was leaning over the rail of the poop and had heard, answered for him.

“Will they fuck,” he said in his coarse fashion.

No sooner were we swinging with the tide than a scow put off from the side of that junk which bore the imposing flag. Plainly to be seen in it, clothed in great finery and puffing at a long pipe, was a grossly fat man, surrounded by well-dressed servants who fanned him incessantly. In his cap was the button of a mandarin. I did not, at that time, know the insignia of the different grades of mandarin and at this time I have forgotten them.

Peter whistled.

“The Clam-Jandrum himself,” he said, “Governor of the whole district.”

“Has he come to arrest the ship?”

“Not he. Watch the Captain.”

The Captain was at the gangway, clad in his best uniform and flanked by two miraculously-scrubbed seamen and, behind them, his two servant boys. The representative of the Court of Heaven was prised out of his armchair in the sternsheets of the scow by his rattan-hatted servants and our Captain himself, having bared his head, assisted the great bulk aboard. The party proceeded to the cabin with measured tread. A moment later I was sent for: I was to bring the schroff and a ledger. Any ledger.

In the cabin the mandarin reclined on the sofa at full length, sucking wetly at one of the Captain’s biggest cigars and disdainfully sipping a tumbler of gin. The Captain was standing, a servant on each side. The schroff began to interpret.

“Fat old pig say why you doing here, no at Canton? He say he must cut off all heads by mercy of Emperor.”

“Tell him,” said the Captain, “that we have been blown here by terrible winds and that all we ask is to rest a while and to buy, with permission, some fresh food.”

“He say Emperor’s mercy bigger than all seas, perhaps give water, sell one-two pigs, one-two ducks. Then you go, chop-chop.”

“Tell him his world-famed generosity reflects the infinite compassion of the Celestial One himself,” said the Captain, grinding his teeth soundlessly.

The mandarin made a wonderfully elegant gesture with his third finger and all his people left the cabin. The Captain made an economic gesture with his head and one eyebrow and all his people left except for the schroff and me.

“Fat old pig say how many chests Western shit you get here in boat, Captain?”

“How many, Mr Van Cleef?” asked the Captain, staring at me meaningfully. “About a hundred and fifty, I fancy?”

I ran a diligent finger down the columns of a ledger-page which were, if the truth must be told, devoted to the sales of pigtail tobacco from the slop-chest.

“One hundred and forty nine, Sir,” I said at last, brightly.

The schroff translated at such length and with such unction that I became certain that his words, although they sounded like a small dog being sick, meant something like: “Idiotic young officer pretends only 150 chests but I, being a poor man, supporting many grandparents who display an undignified reluctance to die, throw myself upon the richly-embroidered slippers of the august one, confident of his famous generosity to the poor and ancestor-encumbered, and declare that from my hunger-shrivelled breast I have plucked a number closer to three hundred.”

The mandarin drew an exquisite little abacus from the depths of a sleeve and made its jade and cornelian beads flicker with a silver-encased fingernail until he had worked out, one supposed, some little problem of percentage, such as used to trouble us lads at school. (The Chinese and the Arabians will one day inherit the earth because of their mastery of the abacus, mark my words.)

Fatigued with this, he let the abacus lie on his lap. No, this is not accurate, for he had no lap. He let the little instrument lie on the point of one knee, where the splendid folds of his belly had left, as if by design, just enough space for it.

The Captain squinted at the position of the abacus-beads on their golden wires, nodded courteously and went to his desk. He counted certain guineas into a bag and left the bag absently on a chair. The Chinaman pulled out a tiny whistle of gold from his infinitely resourceful sleeve and blew upon it. His secretary slipped in, bowed with different degrees of obsequiousness to everyone present except the schroff and vanished. He had not, it seemed to me, approached the chair whereon the guineas lay, but they were gone.

“Fat old pig say now he sorry to take sunshine of his face from your blinded eyes but too much light not good for common men. Means he now fucking off. Also, on order of Celestial One, must seize any Western Ocean strong waters in boat. Think he wants get pissy-pissy.”

“Give him a case of the trade gin,” growled the Captain, “the stuff with the cayenne and tobacco-juice in it.”

No sooner had the mandarin’s scow — now a little lower in the stern — returned to the war-junk, than all kinds of other scows, sampans and egg-boats emerged from their concealment on the shore and made towards us, pulling frantically. At the Captain’s behest, I sent a small gang of sailors below decks to fetch up, under the schroff’s supervision, exactly one hundred and forty-nine chests of the drug. These comprised nine chests of very superior Benares balls, forty cases of middling stuff and one hundred of the cheapest quality, including some of the Madak mixed with charred babul leaves and the dottles from opium already smoked. (Oddly to say, there are addicts to the drug who prefer the last: much of the virtue remains in it and is now more readily released. Strange, is it not?)

All these chests were laid out on each side of the break of the poop just as the first of the Chinese boats came alongside. One merchant from each vessel scrambled aboard and all were welcomed with copious words from the schroff and a false, greasy smile from Lubbock. They jostled and shouldered each other with every mark of courtesy, making cackling, splashy noises as they burrowed in the chests, smelling, scratching and prodding at the opium, dabbing little spots of red pigment here and there on the woodwork and flicking similar memoranda onto the little leaves of ivory they each held.

“Should there not be a guard over the chests?” I asked Peter anxiously. He stared at me.

“Good God, no. These are Chinese merchants, Karli, the only honest men in the world. The word of one of these fellows would be honoured by his grand-daughter’s son-in-law fifty years from now. You could give any one of them a thousand in gold this moment; he’d give you a scrap of paper with a squiggle from his little paintbrush on it and a lick of his chop — that’s their sort of personal seal — and a year from now you could cash it on the Barbary Coast, aye, and get the accrued interest to the nearest half cent as well as a dashed good meal.”

This seemed strange to me, for I had hitherto believed that only we Jews had such standards and such international trust. I mused. The crowd around the chests thinned out and the merchants sauntered about the deck wearing polite expressions and taking care not to appear to be impressed by the marvels of Western civilisation evident thereon. Looking back, it occurs to me that perhaps they were, indeed, not impressed. They strolled everywhere. Sailors chuckled at them and hailed them with phrases of amiable obscenity, often using the word “plick”. To each greeting the Chinamen would bow, civilly although not deeply, but their faces were masks, masks.

“Damn it, Peter,” I said at one point, “three of the buggers are going into our cabin, don’t you see them?”

“Karli, do you never listen to me? I’ll give you a hundred pounds for every pin or penny you have missed when they’ve gone. They only wish to sneer politely at the poverty in which we barbarians live. If one of them asked you into his house it would be yours while you were there, except that part of it ‘behind the curtain’ where the women are. If you glanced more than once at their most treasured possession — again, I except the womenfolk — it would be pressed upon you. You would have to accept it. You would never be forgiven, of course. Not for accepting it, I mean, but for looking at it more than once. Do you begin to understand?”

I reflected a while.

“No,” I said.

Had I understood and believed more, in those days when I was beginning to become clever, I might have become rich more quickly. Also, perhaps, dead. (Here, though, as you perceive, I am: both rich and alive. To be alive at my great age is pleasant for I love to indulge myself with eating, drinking and, from time to time, changing my will. There was a time when I thought that Bully Lubbock’s rope’s end “starter” could make men jump; now I understand that asking one of you to deliver a note to my solicitor has a much more enlivening effect. I am sure that you do not begrudge an old man his simple pleasures.)

After a proper interval to allow the Chinamen to exhibit their lack of interest in our ship and to make it clear that they had no vulgar, mercantile lust for our opium, the schroff passed among them, murmuring to such effect that they wandered, as if by chance, to the Captain’s cabin, there to be plied with a mixture of gin, rum and warm water which they much relished and which befitted their station in life.

They lolled elegantly for quite half an hour, our Captain showing no sign of impatience. Then the senior of the merchants, an austere and venerable person, commenced to quack. I had been eyeing his features for some little while: the thin, implacable lips, sparsely moustached, had reminded me of the private parts of the Griqua girl I had patronised in Cape Town. When he commenced to quack, however, all fell silent. The schroff interpreted the duck-like noises as an insulting bid for the whole of the cargo at a price which would not have paid for its weight in toffee-apples. The schroff’s phrase for him was less kind than the “fat old pig” he had applied to the mandarin but, curiously, it somewhat bore out the comparison I had been making in my mind with the Griqua girl.

The Captain was no whit nonplussed. He gazed at the decanter before him for quite a minute, then delicately placed the stopper in its neck.

“Tell the old person,” he said at last, “that although we Western Ocean barbarians are unable fully to comprehend the delicate spice of his wit, I would certainly allow myself to unbend in merriment were not so many of his juniors — his richer juniors — present.”

The schroff took thought, then launched into an impassioned speech in the duck-like tongue which went on and on. The Captain seemed to doze. The senior merchant studied the colza-oil lamp hanging above the table as though it were a relic of the past; something his ancestors had invented a thousand years ago and discarded immediately. A silence fell. I yawned; I was sleepy, for reasons of my own. The Captain snapped at me:

“The diplomacy is my part, Mr Van Cleef!” Then, to the eschroff, “Tell the old person that this ungifted step-child of mine comes from a country even more distant than mine and that there, because they know no better, to open the mouth widely, as though yawning, is a sign of admiration for those gifted in speech and riches.”

The old person half-rose and half-bowed. I could do no less. I do not think my old rabbi would have rebuked me, for there are precedents for doing just so in the house of Rimmon. (Study, children, study; why do you think we support the Rebb?)

Quacking now broke forth unstemmed from every side; the schroff took notes — bribes, too, of course — and I, having been given a secret price-list by the Captain, said both this and that from time to time and with great dignity. In a surprisingly short time all our chests had been sold and, after one last glass each of the dreadful “bug-juice”, the Chinamen left in order of seniority, becking and bowing. Their boatmen, cut-throats to a man, were then allowed aboard and these plucked out their masters’ purchases unerringly and boated them. No money had changed hands but the Captain’s mouth twitched visibly at the corners, almost as though he were on the point of smiling.

Within an hour, a frail and filthy sampan sculled toward us, a hideous half-man propelling it and three naked infants baling for their lives the water from its rotten bottom.

A line was lowered and a cloth bag was drawn up the side of our ship. The Captain turned to me.

“Have you an old garment, Mr Van Cleef?” he asked. I searched my mind.

“I have a pair of under-drawers,” I said, “which the rats have got at. I had thought of giving them to my servant-boy, since they are beyond repair.”

“Will you give them to me, Sir?”

“Of course,” I stammered, “but they are quite gone at the gusset of the crotch, quite gone.”

“All the better,” he said, “all the better. Ventilation is the secret of hygiene. You will donate them to this child of nature, if you please.”

Blushingly I sought out the small-clothes in avisandum. The Captain did not look at them, for he had been a gentleman once, you see; he dropped a half-handful of small copper coins into their noisome depths and tossed the parcel into the sampan. It was by way of being a gift or fee. The man was transported with gratitude.

The parcel which the fellow had delivered was exceedingly heavy; a seaman had to help the schroff to drag it into the Captain’s cabin. There we counted it and weighed it: there were Maria Theresa thalers worn thin, slabs of bar-silver, Spanish dollars which betrayed the presence of Yanqui traders, old English spade-guineas bent in half twice and hammered into a lump, and a fragment of paper, so greasy that one could have read a gazette through it, which proved to be a draft on a Cairo bank by one of the Bonajee family, written out nine years before. In each separate sub-package within the bundle was a trifle wrapped in silk: a little lump of jade, a morsel of carved ivory or of rose quartz, the tooth of a shark. They were tokens of esteem, what O’Casey would have called “luck-pennies”. Seeing my interest, Captain Knatchbull freely gave me all of them which were not made of precious metals. I prized them more than the lost, shameful under-drawers.

No sooner had we finished the counting and weighing but we heard a cry from the deck that various small craft were approaching us. No one save I was one whit alarmed at this news and, indeed, the craft proved to be nothing but egg-boats and sampans bringing out the promised pigs and ducks, along with hens, eggs and great store of a strange, cabbage-like vegetable much esteemed in those latitudes. Everything was absurdly dear at first asking, but the comprador, aided disdainfully by the schroff (for this was not his work), spoke so scornfully to the higglers that prices soon sank to a rocky bottom. The vendors shewed no bitterness; it was clear that they had set their prices at random, having no notion of how much we Western Ocean Barbarians might pay for the necessities of life.

The ducks were of a size and quality which I had never before seen: the Chinese may be a godless and illiterate race but in the matter of breeding ducks they have nothing to learn from the civilised world. Peter and I “clubbed” to buy a brace of these portly fowls for our own mess and talked seriously to the Doctor about how they should be dressed for the table. Greatly learned in all the cooking modes of the Seven Seas, he offered to make us a tidbit in the Manchu fashion. One coats the duck’s feet in a sort of syrup, he told us, then persuades it to trot up and down upon the red-hot stove-top until the feet are puffed and crisp. This delicacy, he assured us, is much prized. I was interested but, having been brought up in a cleanly household, pointed out that the duck’s toenails were dirty. Peter, too, demurred, saying that he preferred to save his appetite for the bird itself. The Doctor then prepared to pluck the first bird alive: this leaves the skin more perfect, he explained, and everyone accepts that the skin is the best part of the duck. To my surprise, Peter vehemently forbade this on the grounds that it would cause the duck — this Chinese duck — discomfort! I shall never understand the English, never. The Doctor smiled indulgently and, to prove that ducks feel no pain, held it between his knees and slit its throat gently. He stroked it and murmured soft words in some strange tongue while Orace collected the blood in a cup for the gravy. The duck, indeed, seemed perfectly complacent and, when the cup was full and the Doctor set it down, it waddled a few paces, opened its beak to quack, found that it could not and died tranquilly. It was most droll; the Doctor and I laughed and laughed.

At that moment we heard a succession of shouted orders, the thunder of sailors’ feet upon the deck and then Bucko Lubbock’s bellow of “Stamp and go!” told us that we were weighing anchor and setting sail: evidently our Captain had decided not to water at Namoa after all and had resolved to be clear of Swatow Bay before darkness fell.

Sure enough, as soon as we were in the open sea, we found a small but favourable wind — a false foretaste of the north-east monsoon — and the watch on deck was kept busy for much of the night setting more and more sail to it and sending light spars aloft until we were pretty well “a-taunto”.

Peter and I, too, were kept busy for a good while with the first of our ducks, served with the Chinese cabbage and a spiced sauce of oranges.

While Orace cleared away the dishes I picked my teeth and eyed the child in a benign but critical way.

“Orace,” I said.

“Sir?”

“You are a good enough boy.”

“Sir, thankyou Sir.”

“Your hands are always clean, despite the hazards of ship-board life. Your face, too, is spotless and I do not doubt that your ears and neck would bear the closest inspection.”

“Sir, thankyou; I do my best to be a clean boy, as you have bid.”

“Why then,” I asked judicially-for I was in the sententious phase of drunkenness — “why then is your shirt stained? You know how delicate a digestion I own and you are clever enough to understand the dyspeptic effect of a stained shirt upon such a digestion. Explain this negligence!”

To my astonishment the child burst into tears. I started to say something but Peter gave me a glance of such startling authority that the words froze in my open mouth.

“Karli,” he said evenly, “the boy’s shirt is clean. The stains are blood. Look at his face.” He crooked a finger and Orace bent his tearful face into the circle of lamplight. His nose was swollen and the nostrils crusted with blood. There was a little blood, too, at one corner of the mouth and an eye was puffed and discoloured. I was at a loss for words.

“Who struck you, boy?” asked Peter kindly. Orace, fighting back tears, answered manfully, standing to attention. It seemed that he had fallen out of his hammock. This was a plausible excuse and I was prepared to let the matter rest, but Peter told him to turn around. In his gentle, almost womanly way, he pulled the boy’s shirt-tail out of his breeches and raised it to the arm-pits. Orace’s ribs were black and blue. I rose, outraged, and was about to shout furiously but Peter quietened me with a gesture. He did not ask the boy who had brutalised him; he only asked whether it was any of the men before the mast.

“Oh, no, Sir!” cried the boy.

“Very well, run along. Ask the cook for some salve for your hurts. Your master will protect you from now on, you may depend upon him.”

When the door had closed behind the boy Peter rested his chin upon his hands. His countenance was dark and bitter. I think that I was gaping foolishly.

“Lubbock,” said Peter, as though it were a dirty word.

“Lubbock?”

“Oh, God, Karli; who else? He had set his heart, if you can call it that, on a certain lady, who now, for reasons I care to know nothing about, no longer welcomes his admiration.” I looked at him sharply but he avoided my eye. “Then,” he went on, “he will have tried to sodomise your boy, part lust, part spite. He will not have succeeded, for Orace is a good boy.” Again I looked at him narrowly, again he preferred to fix his gaze on the bulkhead. “So he will now make the child’s life a hell until, in a very short time, he will go over the side. I am not exaggerating, Karli, you may take me at my word. I have seen this sort of thing before. Too often.”

I gazed at him dully, filled with guilt and trepidation.

“What, then, should I do, Peter?”

“A man doesn’t tell another how to look after his servants,” he said, a little stiffly. Then, seeing my face fall, he added in a kindlier voice, “You might try altering your rather regular sleeping habits. Lubbock has the second watch, from four until eight tomorrow morning. Your boy will be up at first light — say half-past six. Why not take the air on deck at, say, half past seven? Now I must turn in. Goodnight, Karli. You will know what to do in the event: you are a better man than you believe.”

“Goodnight,” I said.

My new silk nightshirt afforded me no sense of luxury that night, nor did sleep come readily.

Sure enough, I rose at the unheard-of hour that Peter had suggested. It was not cold. For some obscure reason I washed myself all over in cold water as though I were an Englishman. This had a tonic effect. I sauntered on deck. There was no one to be seen on the quarterdeck except the steersman, whose glazed eyes jerked from the compass-card to the leech of the sail and back to the compass-card. Two men were at the pump, watering down the deck; two more were dragging the “bear” — a large, weighted scrubbing-mat — to and fro in a drowsy fashion. The rest of the watch was clustered just abaft the fo’c’sle; they seemed to be staring up at something unpleasant. I followed their gaze. High up in the main-mast shrouds a tiny figure was picking its way even higher, clinging desperately at each hand-hold. Leaning against the halyard rail was Lubbock, a dirty smirk on his lips and the “starter” swinging like a fat serpent from his hand.

Peter was right: I knew what to do. Cupping my hands I shouted up to the boy, “Come down at once, Orace, and get about your chores.” I had ignored Lubbock. From behind me he drawled, “I sent him aloft, Mr Van Cleef.” I ignored him still. Orace was hesitating. “Come down at once!” I shouted, “you have no business there. Come down; no one shall hurt you.”

The nasal drawl behind me was now menacing.

“I said I sent him aloft, mister. The little bastard was insolent to me.” I rounded on him.

“If you have any complaints to make about my servant you may make them to me. You will not punish him, nor shall you ill-treat him. He has his duties; no doubt you, too, have yours.”

The man stared at me, quite at a loss for the moment, as a fox might be if a rabbit cuffed him across the muzzle. His mouth opened and shut. Orace jumped the last few feet of the ratlines and scuttled between us. As he passed, the Mate’s starter snaked out between the boy’s legs, curling cruelly up at his groin. He squealed with pain and scrambled on all fours to the safety of the galley where the Doctor stood, arms folded, his face a mask. Lubbock stalked aft. My feet seemed nailed to the deck. I turned my head to the little group at the fo’c’sle: they were all looking at me curiously, not unkindly. Strangely, it came to me with great certainty that they were all recalling that I was a Jew. They knew just how Peter Stevenage would behave in such a case but they could not guess how a Jew would comport himself. This helped me. I strode after Lubbock.

“Mr Lubbock!” I called clearly. He did not falter in his progress aft. I called again, louder; still he did not pause. By now he was at the break of the poop, I was just abaft the mizzen mast. I stopped, put my hands on my hips and roared “LUBBOCK!” in a voice such as I did not know I could command.

This time he stopped in his tracks, slowly turned, crouching dangerously. He waited. The moment span itself out for half an eternity. I could hear my heart knocking at my ribs.

“Lubbock,” I cried in a ringing voice, “you are a cowardly bastard!”

His face split open into an alligator-grin as he sidled to the rail, his hand outstretched for a belaying-pin.

I have already described that fight and how I won it. Afterwards I went to my cabin and lay down; as soon as my heart slowed a little I fell fast asleep, for I was not in the habit of rising early. When I awoke, towards noon, Peter was sitting on his bunk gazing at me morosely.

“Well,” I asked, grinning idiotically I suppose, “did I do the right thing?” I expected praise, admiration, but all he said was that I was a bloody nuisance for now there were but two watch-keeping officers besides the Captain, which would be burdensome to all aft.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Peter’s coolness, in the ensuing days, was reflected twofold by the Second, whose taciturnity changed to a complete unawareness of my presence. The Captain, too, chose to pretend that I was invisible and, when I appeared, would stump to the weather-rail and occupy himself with his telescope. It was otherwise with the common sailors of the crew: their smiles were broad and they tugged many a forelock as I strolled the deck. A proud, awe-struck Orace brought Peter and me a succession of splendid messes from the galley which made me confident that I had won the Doctor’s approval. Blanche made frequent visits to where Lubbock lay groaning in delirium, as a woman should, but there was no cause for jealousy. Once, when she passed close to me and no one was in sight, she smiled at me enigmatically and made the most delightfully suggestive moue with her wet, red lips.

When we were eating Peter would relax a little unless I brought up the subject of the duel, whereupon he would become cold and distant again. Looking back in time, now that I am in the prime of life and have purged myself of all vice and vanity, it occurs to me that he was trying to stifle in me a certain overweening self-satisfaction which he may have wrongly believed I was exuding in those days.

Despite the light airs, our great press of canvas brought us in a very few days to within sight of the island of Lin Tin. This means “Single Nail Island” but the resemblance is only apparent to the Chinese. Many things were apparent to the Chinese at the time of which I speak, things which were apparent only to them. They held this truth self-evident, for example: The Emperor, The Son of Heaven, The Dragon, bore the name Tau Kuang, which means Glorious Rectitude, and was, naturally, Lord of the World. It was serenely admitted that there were distant regions of his Empire, such as England, which had not yet been blessed with the ineffable radiance of The Heavenly Face, but this was a pardonable, childish ignorance and would be corrected when we grew old enough to learn. (This was comparable with the splendid common sense of the British Empire-builder when confronted with cannibalism and the feeding of worn-out old ladies to the crocodiles: get the beggars to understand hut-tax and road-making first, civilisation will follow. It was the missionaries who spoiled things with their prudery and prurience; to this day they cannot understand that making black women cover their breasts rehearsed the Fall — the key passage is at Genesis 3 vii — nor can they see that assuring the base savage that he is the equal, not only of his witch-doctor but also of his District Commissioner, is a source of bewilderment to the savage, resentment to the witch-doctor and a great nuisance to the D.C. I digress, but informatively: learn, learn.)

Our baseness — that of us Western Ocean Barbarians — was controlled by forbidding us to address anyone but the merchants of the Hong, or Ko’Hong, a venal body of contractors who purchased concessions to trade with us from the Hai Kwan Pu, a relative of the Emperor (who had in turn bought his unpaid but immensely lucrative appointment) and whose title was abbreviated in the usual, irreverent British way to “The Hoppo”.

The breath-taking absurdity of these people’s arrogance had been shown only a few years before — in 1834, I fancy — when Lord Napier himself, as Special Envoy of His Britannic Majesty, arrived at Canton and proposed to pay a visit of protocol on the Viceroy of the province. The first thing that happened was that the merchants of the Ko’Hong were terrifyingly rebuked for having allowed any person not a merchant to enter the Factories suburb. “Tremble!” the letter to them concluded, “Intensely tremble!” The next thing was that, finding it impossible to gain an audience of the Viceroy, Lord Napier sent a State Letter by his secretary to the Gate of the Petitions outside Canton. For hours this letter was proffered to one merchant or official after another, but none would touch it, for it was superscribed with a Chinese character which means “Letter”. Had it borne the character for “Petition” someone might have dared to carry it to some petty clerk in the Viceroy’s bureau. The third thing was that Lord Napier, addressed by a character which meant “elaborately nasty”, was urged, then ordered, to return to Macao.

If you find that hard to believe, read this, which is just as true. As late as 1839 a Mandarin or Commissioner called Lin Tsê-hsü wrote to Queen Victoria herself (naturally, the Celestial One could not deign personally to recognise so piddling a tributary sovereign) and rebuked her roundly for base ingratitude at the Celestial Bounty, saying that punishment for her disobedience would be, for the time being, suspended, and suggesting ways in which she could show proper submission without losing too much face. Lin, by all accounts, was a man of great intelligence; it is hard to tell whether his tongue was in his cheek and, if so, how far. But then, it is hard to tell anything about Orientals. One might say that they are the English of the East.

Perhaps the best of all illustrations of the working of their minds is the well-recorded tale of the first steam-ship to appear at the Bogue. They picked up a pilot at the Grand Lemma (the largest of the Ladrone Islands) and were taken through the island channels to the Macao Roads without the least flicker of curiosity from the pilot. Dropping him at Macao, the Captain, unable to contain himself, asked the pilot what he thought of the new system of propulsion. The latter glanced back at the funnel without interest and replied that this way of driving a ship had been invented in the Celestial Empire some thousand years ago, but had been discarded as too dirty and extravagant.

When I first heard that story I laughed immoderately. Later, I came to wonder uneasily whether the pilot might not have been speaking the truth.

This island of Lin Tin is three miles long and is occupied chiefly by a mountain of some two thousand feet. Only the anchorage has interest. The first and finest sight was an ancient ship which, had you seen it in a storm in the Southern Seas, you would have taken for the Flying Dutchman itself. It was, I was told, an old “country wallah” — teak-built in India perhaps two hundred years ago and modelled on an even earlier design. As the name suggests, these ships were for the “country-trade” only and dabbled in all sorts of trading as well as opium. This one had been on the Coast since the end of the last shipping season so, despite our digression with the typhoon, we were still the first in the field.

Apart from a swarm of egg-boats, sampans and such Chinese craft, the only other vessels in the anchorage were the receiving ships: large, dismasted hulks which were nothing more or less than floating warehouses — although from the gay awnings, the stove-chimneys, the pots of flowering plants and the strings of laundry you might have thought them floating tenements. We laid alongside one of them and a “brow” was quickly laid from our deck to one of the many entry-ports. I was loafing at the entrance of the galley when four of our men laboured up from ’tween decks bearing a makeshift stretcher. I had known that Lubbock’s wound was not healing well but was nevertheless startled at the change in his appearance: his face was yellow and the skin stretched tightly over his bones, his hands were like claws, plucking at the light sheet which covered him and his head rolled to and fro in a horrid way.

“Why does his head wag so?” I asked the Doctor. “Is it delirium?”

“No, Maz Cleef,” he replied gravely. “I think he looking for you.” Ever ready to receive an apology and give a forgiveness, I strode towards what had been Lubbock. So soon as I came within his range of vision the horrid wagging of the head ceased, sure enough. His lips, crusted with sordor, cracked open and he croaked something inaudible. I bent over him, so as to hear what might well be his dying words of repentance.

“I am going to live, Van Cleef,” he rasped faintly, “live. Can you hear me?” I nodded, encouragingly.

“Live to make you wish you never had lived.” I started back, but not before he had spat, feebly but disgustingly, into my ear. I should have known better: people of such vileness do not change, even in the presence of death. As the men carried him to the receiving ship he was making an ugly, gasping sort of titter which no doubt sounded to him like a bellow of ribald mirth.

(There was an excellently-appointed sick-bay on this receiving ship, I was assured, and if necessary Lubbock would be carried to Macao where a neat little hospital was maintained by a Pomeranian medical missionary called Gutzlaff who was one of only two Europeans who could speak, read and write the Chinese tongue and whose nimble intellect was able to reconcile the creation of twenty million opium addicts with the opportunity to distribute Protestant Bibles and Cockle’s pills. This Prussian Christian and Lubbock deserved each other.)

Then our chests of opium were brought up and flowed into the receiving ship. Our schroff, and the grand schroff on the larger vessel, made a show of marking off each chest but there was little need: pilfering was unknown in that otherwise dishonest trade. Captain Knatchbull went, in his good uniform, to pay calls on old acquaintances aboard the receiving vessel, taking his comprador, servants and both remaining watch-keeping officers with him for the look of the thing.

The air of Lin Tin must have been sovereign, for Blanche’s headache vanished like the dew upon a Dutch tulip as soon as we were alone together.

When the party returned after several hours — none too soon for me because the heavy climate was not conducive to prolonged lessons in venery, such as Blanche loved — the Captain’s face was long and glum. Although we were the first at Lin Tin the Chinese were confident that other and larger vessels would soon be at the anchorage and therefore they would pay no more than an average of £185 per chest of the drug, the poorer grades making up for the better. (At Namoa we had taken an average of £210 per chest although the overall quality we had sold there had been lower.) Why, then, had we not sold all at Namoa? For one thing, the country trade, so early in the season, although glad to pay high prices to satisfy a craving market, had not the resources to buy large quantities until their retail profits came in. More important, each ship had to sell a plausible quantity of the drug at Lin Tin in order to keep the mandarins, the Hong merchants, the Hoppo (all of whom, of course, took large, illegal commissions on each transaction) and even the proprietors of the receiving ships, content.

To my surprise, we did not stay at Lin Tin to deal but set sail the next morning for Whampoa, the official unloading port, thirteen miles below Canton. It was explained to me that the people of the receiving ship would deal for us capably and honestly.

At Whampoa an absurd Chinese official, calling himself the port doctor, came aboard to give us “pratique”. This means that such an official should satisfy himself that there are not, and have not recently been, any cases of infectious disease aboard. In practice it meant that there was a long and bitter argument as to how much he would take to go away.

The cargo we unloaded there into crab-boats was scarcely plausible as the entire contents of a ship’s hold: the rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks, a few bags of American ginseng (which the Chinese prized more than their own) a few tiger- and leopard-skins, a small but valuable box of tigers’ whiskers, some furs and woollen goods and, for the European community, liquor, letters, journals, books, hats, corsets and the like. There would of course be no comment on the paucity of our cargo — everyone understood perfectly that the bulk of it had been discharged elsewhere.

Leaving in the John Coram only the Second (now acting-First) Mate, Blanche and a handful of teetotallers as skeleton crew, the rest of the ship’s company followed the goods up the Pearl River to Canton, or rather to that suburb where the Factories were permitted to exist. (Why they were called “Factories” is a mystery to me for nothing was manufactured there but profits.) Long before we reached the Factories, however, we seemed to be in a city upon the water: I swear one could have walked for a mile at least across the tightly-packed boats without the least risk of a wetting. The racket and the stench were quite enervating. Our Chinese boatmen pointed our craft into a narrow alley between these floating houses, stowing the oars and using paddles and, finally, boathooks to squeeze a passage. I was gazing entranced at a wonderful houseboat full of charming young ladies when Peter nudged me. “Canton,” he said, pointing. There it stood; a grim, thirty-foot wall, each side more than a mile long and pierced by imposing gates.

“They say there are more people inside those walls than in London,” said Peter. “Add the population of the suburbs and of this water-city and the number cannot be much less than two millions.” Much impressed by this, for large figures always make me think of money, my eyes nevertheless strayed back to the houseboat of the young ladies. It was a splendid building — wonderfully carved and gilded balconies with intricate railings sprouted from every part of it and each balcony held a richly-clad young lady or two, whispering, tittering and nodding at us.

“Calm yourself, Karli,” said Peter, drily, “they are forbidden to admit you onto the Flower Boats.”

“Then why are they at such pains to make themselves attractive?”

“‘Nightee time come’,” he replied enigmatically.

“Which means?”

“It is a pidgin-English phrase of wide application: it means that, after dark, officials cannot see regulations being broken.”

“Then …?”

“No, Karli. Below decks in that boat of sin there are quite half a dozen burly pimps. If you ventured aboard you would, at the very best, be beaten and robbed but, more likely, you would never be seen again. Small parcels of you, neatly wrapped, would be thrown overboard when the tide was running. If you must sample Chinese womanhood, contain yourself until we are back at Whampoa, where there are many complacent and hygienic young persons of fine quality. But I warn you, anything you may have heard about the, ah, eccentric arrangements of the Chinese women’s anatomy is simply one of those ‘bouncers’ with which sailormen love to tease landsmen. They are exactly like English women in that area.”

“Oh,” I said, a little put out, for I had been looking forward to making love on a T-shaped bed.

“But somewhat smaller,” he added thoughtfully, “although whether this is due to the application of alum-water I cannot say.”

At that moment we bumped, at last, at the foot of the landing stairs to the English Factory’s garden. In front of us, across an elegant shrubbery and garden, rose a flagstaff from which bravely waved the Union Jack. Over to the left, two more flagstaffs bore the flags of France and the United States of North America.

Meanwhile, our Captain’s face was darkening with anger as the schroff bickered with the boatmaster over the price of our passage. This darkening or scowling arose from the evident fact that the schroff was having difficulty in making himself understood; he had done well at Namoa for his native tongue was Foo-Kien, but his command of Cantonese was clearly not as perfect as he had claimed. At last a bargain was struck and we poured off the boat and into the garden. At the top of the stairs my heart leaped up, for to my right, over a high wall, I saw the flag of Holland herself.

All the Factories were curiously dignified in a variety of European styles yet all bearing an indefinable Oriental flavour. The English Factory was enormous: forty yards wide and one hundred and forty yards deep, a maze of courtyards, treasuries, state reception rooms and even a church. It was as self-contained as a monastery.

Each of the common crewmen was now issued a small advance of pay: enough to buy a few trinkets and to become drunk for just less than the length of time we were to remain there. They were strictly enjoined to stay in parties of not less than five, each party to include, and be governed by, a senior rating who was familiar with the perils of the place. The boatswain “Tommy Pipes” was to make these arrangements. Finally, the Captain vowed that he would severely fine any man who allowed himself to be murdered. To this day I am not certain whether he meant this as a joke, for he was a humourless man.

Then, before he entered the factory proper, to pay his formal calls, he turned to me and thrust a slip of paper into my hand.

“Proceeds of your share, Mr Van Cleef,” he growled. It was a brand-new draft on a Parsee bank.

I puzzled at the amount, for it represented a price of no less than £215 per chest — the price for the highest quality we had sold at Namoa. I opened my mouth to point out his error but he silenced me with a gesture.

“I sold all yours at Namoa, Mr Van Cleef. Lay it out carefully on your cups and saucers and fiddle-faddles. They’ll not rob you but you’ll not get the choicest wares unless you put on a little arrogance. That’s a word to the wise, young Lewis.”

I believe I have already suggested the reason why he had once before given me that name. He was, I suppose, not really a bad man, only sad and mad; this is like having a broken leg inside your brain — no splints can be applied and, since there are no physical signs, you get no sympathy nor any kindly nurses.

Dismissed, Peter and I joined forces and he offered to be my cicerone. I checked him.

“First,” I said, “we eat.”

“Well now,” he began, “there are numerous …”

“No,” I said. “Be guided by me.” He gaped, then grinned sardonically and thrust his hands into his trowsers-pockets.

“Very well, Karli. Lead on, I am in your hands.”

Taking a mental bearing on the flagstaff which I had seen over the wall, I soon found the entrance to the Dutch Factory and we sauntered into the great counting-house, where a dozen pairs of eyes, and as many eyebrows, rose from desks and ledgers to meet us. I studied these people rapidly and selected a youngish man who seemed to be of middle rank and, although his eyes were blue and his hair yellow, was clearly of my own race. Introducing myself courteously, I gave him some vague story of a long-lost uncle who had last been heard of on the China Coast. It was wonderfully pleasant to speak — and to hear again — the good Dutch tongue and he seemed no less pleased to converse with someone fresh from home. Soon everyone in the room was gathered around the desk, gossiping freely. A gong sounded for dinner and we were carried in to a veritable feast, a wonderful blend of Dutch and Chinese food — and great store of it. Peter, at first a little huffed, soon succumbed, for his nature was generous, and winked at me across the mounds of rijsstaffel. Afterwards, for I had been at pains to make myself agreeable, a splendid bedroom was pressed upon us — the place at that time of the year was half empty — and I changed my draft for several smaller drafts and a little gold and silver for pocket money. It was arranged that a Chinese dealer in fine porcelains would be summoned to wait upon me that evening with his wares and that I should pay one half of one per centum on any transaction in exchange for the services of their interpreter.

“Now,” I said, linking arms with Peter as we emerged into the sunlight and stink, “I have exhausted my little skills, please take command and let me follow.”

“Do you mind if I call you a bastard, Karli?”

“Not in the least,” I replied smugly, “for I know that it is not literally true and that you would not say it if you thought so.” He roared with laughter, for he was as full of food and wine and schnapps as I was.

“You are a pompous bastard, then, Karli, a crafty bastard and, I suspect, a lucky bastard. Also, you are drunk.”

“Not yet, but the suggestion is a good one. Where shall we go?”

First we went a-sightseeing the length of Thirteen Factories Street, past the English, Parsee, “Old” English, Swedish, Imperial and Paou Shun Factories until we came to the corner of Old China Street, where the American Factory and the Hong warehouses faced each other. To the right, Peter pointed out an elegant building which was the Consoo Hall, which was a sort of Council Chamber for the Hong and the office of their mutual-assistance-against-bankruptcy fund. (True to the quirkiness of Chinese humour, this was funded not by brotherly co-operation amongst themselves but by an arbitrary ad valorem charge of four or five per centum on all Western goods passing customs, so that the “Western Ocean Barbarians” were, willy-nilly, protecting the Hong merchants against their own rashness in business (God save the mark!) to the tune of some third of a million sterling each year. Although I have no Chinese blood, I could relish the irony of this.)

Strolling a little further, so as to see the fine French Factory, we turned down New China Street between the Spanish and Danish Factories, which flew no flags because they were no longer staffed by Spaniards and Danes, but let out as offices and bedrooms to all sorts of minor commerce-venturers. At the end of this street we entered a sort of square called Respondentia Walk or, after the nearest feature of the river-bank, Jackass Point. This was an alarming place, thronged with pimps and pedlars, whore-masters and hucksters, beggars, loafers, cripples, madmen; drunken sailors from our own ship and a knot of a Chinese policemen who were laying about them with seven-foot staves in their twice-daily pretence of clearing this promenade of undesirables. We made haste to turn left into the thoroughfare between the English and Parsee Factories: this was called by a string of crack-jaw Chinese syllables which meant “Green Pea Street” but was known to all English-speakers as “Hog Lane”.

It was indeed a hoggish place, devoted to drunkenness, the selling of caged birds, threatening demands by able-bodied beggars, the telling of fortunes by professional liars, carneying pleadings by shifty fellows who had failed to pass the examination for mandarin because of enemies in high places, pimps, ponces, perverts and minor civil servants with secrets to sell. Had the street been broader and the faces white, one would have thought oneself to be in Fleet Street.

We shouldered our way to Ben Backstay’s establishment, a gin-shop where Peter was remembered and greeted rapturously. Enough drunken people were kicked and thrown into the street to make a table clear for us. Delicate little dishes of shrimp and duck-skin appeared as if by magic and, as we munched, Peter ordered a bottle of gin, a loaf of sugar, a lemon, and a pot of hot water. This was not to my taste and I signified to the proprietor that I would have what the happily-drunk fellows at the next table were enjoying. This came in a bottle shaped like an Indian club and proved to be “First Chop Rum Number One Curio”, which promised well. Peter shook his head gravely.

“Better stick to gin, Karli, I promise you. That is not only a violent intoxicant but a most inflammatory genital vesicant. In other words, it will not only make you fearfully drunk but also desperately lustful.”

It certainly commenced to make me drunk but as to the other property I cannot honestly vouch because, to speak plainly, I was in those days desperately lustful all the time. I should be most interested to try that drink again, now that I am a little less full of sap.

As I plied my glass with a will, Peter grew more concerned.

“Karli, I beg you, take advice: that is no common puggle-pawnee or nose-paint, it is like firing a charge of dismantling shot into the brain.” I smiled at him reassuringly and sang a stave or two to show how little I had been affected.

“Listen, Karli. Listen, you booby. In an hour you have to do business with a Chinese dealer in porcelains. Business, Karli. Porcelains! For a great deal of money!”

That fetched me. With a magnificent gesture I swept everything off the table, gave Peter my purse and rose to my feet. After the third or fourth attempt I succeeded in rising to them. Peter lugged me to the booth of a Chinese apothecary, where they made me drink something to make me sick; then something else, hot and bitter, which cleared the fumes from my brain. I clearly recall that on the druggist’s counter there was a glass jar full of curious objects and I continued to drink the bitter drench until I could focus my eyes on all the little scraps of ivory, amber, jade, roots and pebbles in the jar. Amongst them was a tooth. It was a human incisor, but half the size of a playing-card, a sure proof that giants had indeed once walked the earth. I longed to buy it but Peter hustled me out. To this day I still wish I had bought it.

At the Dutch Factory I was again quite sober although a little exalted. A fat, richly-clad merchant awaited me in a side-room, accompanied by the interpreter and a disdainful person sitting at a window with his back to us. This last was a merchant of the Hong, for no commerce could take place except through such a person. The porcelains laid out for my approval were good, several of them of a quality such as I had never handled. I picked up the very best piece of all, which I sensed had been included to test my knowledge; it was a plain, undecorated bowl of the richest, deepest ox-blood colour and could not have been later than the fourteenth Century. I put it down again and turned on my heel. I knew nothing of Chinese practice in these matters but I have a deep, inherited knowledge of how to deal with Gentile antique-dealers.

I lit a cheroot and addressed the interpreter.

“Tell this old person that he is under a misapprehension. I am not a drunken sailor looking for trinkets to take home as presents for whores. I have serious funds to dispose of and wish to buy serious wares. Imperial wares. Wares with six-character marks. If he has nothing better than these earthenware beggars’ bowls, tell him to borrow some from a dealer of seriousness. I shall be here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” He caught the small gold coin I flipped at him and bowed me out of the room. Peter was vastly impressed.

I was ill in the night, but not through trepidation.

The wares laid out the next morning were indeed of serious quality, I separated some two-thirds of them and asked a price. The dealer named one.

“Tell him,” I said to the interpreter, “that, when I wish my gravity to be relaxed, I go to where some professional story-teller has unrolled his mat, but when I am conducting business a certain heaviness of the spirit makes it difficult for me to unbend in merriment.” We began to deal. Twice the dealer began to re-pack his wares, thrice I began to walk out of the room with well-feigned impatience. At last we struck a bargain and the dealer put a little dab of ochre on my pieces. When I said that he should return that evening with more and better goods, his face went even blanker than it had been all through our chaffering.

“Wanchee see cash,” explained the interpreter. I showed him enough to convince. By the end of the afternoon I owned porcelain of a quality and quantity beyond my wildest dreams, and still possessed £200 in notes and gold. I was well satisfied. The merchant’s porters carried all away: it was explained to me that it would be at Whampoa, carefully packed and crated, before we sailed. Naturally, I hated to let it out of my sight, but I knew that no merchant with his knowledge would stoop to sharp practice once a deal had been struck.

As I left the room I heard the Hong merchant, who had stared silently out of the window for most of the day, stir in his chair and begin to click his abacus. He had made, no doubt, a pretty commission. For my part, I had made, at the smallest estimate, some twenty-five thousand per centum profit on my capital.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At Whampoa I found Blanche looking radiant, puzzlingly radiant. I could not help wondering whether she had been practising her late-found skill with one or another of the handsome young Europeans. I particularly wondered whether she had fallen in with any Dutchmen and perhaps tried on them the phrases I had taught her. But I was never a jealous man.

We made but a poor passage down towards the open sea: the winds were either dead foul — and often there was little sea-room for tacking — or else they were non-existent. The Captain’s temper deteriorated hourly; it erupted when the cooper, hat in trembling hand, reported that many of the water-casks were foul.

“Some of ’em’s salt, Sir, and some of ’em’s foul; there’s a liddle dead dog floating in one of ’em. I jest can’t understand it, I watched every one of ’em filled with me own eyes and lidded ’em with me own hands.” He held out his gnarled hands as though they were evidence.

The Captain’s face changed in the most terrifying way: it darkened and swelled until all around expected him to fall to the ground in an apoplexy. But he stepped forward and smashed his fist into the Cooper’s mouth. The Cooper scrambled to his feet and spat a bloody tooth into the scuppers.

“Begging your pardon, Sir,” he mumbled with a sort of dignity, “I signed to be flogged, but I never signed to be struck in the face.” The Captain was twitching all over, his face working, his hands clutching and clutching convulsively.

“Then flogged you shall be,” he whispered at last. “Flogged you shall be. Yes; yes, you shall. Just as soon as we have re-watered, for after the flogging that you are to have you won’t be fit to work for many a day. Oh, many and many a day.”

I must say that I felt a little sympathy for the poor fellow; he was fond of rum and had doubtless been deceived by some Chinese sleight-of-hand, but on the other hand he knew very well that all our lives depended upon his care for the water-casks. Had the spoiled casks not been discovered until we were many miles from a landfall we might have been in grave trouble.

As it fell out, although we were close to many landfalls, we were in the gravest trouble, although we thought it no more at the time than a vexing delay in our race to bring the new season’s teas to London.

A course was set for one of the smaller islands of the Ladrones group — but one where the Admiralty Directions said that there was a safe anchorage and sweet water. By manning the sweeps we reached this anchorage just at dusk and dropped our hook some six or eight cables’-length from the shore. There was nothing to see to landward except the glints of two or three driftwood fires, from the hearths of hovels pitched among the wind-stripped palms.

“Mister,” growled Captain Knatchbull to the Second (who was now, as I have explained, entitled to that form of address since the First was at death’s door and at Macao, whichever be the nearer), “Mister, I’ll have all hands, idlers and all, ready at first light to go ashore to scour and refill water-casks. You’ll see to it that every man who touches a cask will scratch his name or mark on a stave — and may Christ protect anyone who has handled a cask which proves foul, for he’ll get no mercy from me.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said the Second in a thin voice. He leaned over and plucked up the end of the smouldering length of punk which lay coiled in the tub, meaning to light his cheroot. The Captain chose to take this as a piece of nonchalance which, in his mood at that time, was the same as insolence.

“And Mister, secure the ship, if you please. No lights of any kind” — the Second flipped his cheroot over the side — “the galley fire to be out in five minutes. Two lookouts at the mast-head, each responsible for the other’s vigilance, on pain of flogging. I’ll write that on the watch-keeper’s slate and you’ll be so good as to initial it.”

“Aye aye, Sir,” said the Second in the most expressionless voice I have ever heard.

“And, Mr Van Cleef,” the Captain said to where I lurked in the shadows against the lee rail, “reassuring though it is to have your presence so continually on the quarter-deck, I fear we are depriving you of the opportunity to carry out your duties in the lazaretto and the specie-room.”

“Aye aye, Sir,” I said briskly. You cannot go far wrong on ship-board if you say “aye aye, Sir”: almost any other remark can be misconstrued.

As I slipped below I heard the Captain, while still on the companion-way, rasping out an order to Blanche to be ready in four and one half minutes. I gritted my teeth a little, for I was in love with Blanche, as I think I have made clear; moreover, there had been no time in Whampoa to meet any of the adept young ladies Peter had spoken of. My hand on the brass handle of my cabin door, I heard Knatchbull raise the sky-light and address the Second yet again.

“Mister, you understand that ‘secure ship’ means that boarding-nets are to be rigged, do you not?”

“Aye aye, Sir. The nets are being broken out now. They should be in place in precisely four and one half minutes.”

Who would have thought that the bloodless Second would have a sense of humour? It makes me happy to think that his last words were his first jest.

I closed the door of my cabin, kicked off my boots and reached for the plate of delicate eatables beside my bunk. I was at something of a loss as I lay down, for there was nothing to read except the Bible and nothing to think about except the Captain exercising his recondite connubial rites upon Blanche, a few feet above my head. As I munched the doctor’s “tabnabs” I strained my ears for the crack of the lash, the stifled scream, but all was drowned in the patter of bare feet upon the deck as the watch rove the boarding-nets into place, the occasional muffled curse and thud as a seaman lost his footing and a strangled cry of anguish as some clumsy fellow caught his finger, I supposed, in the tackle.

At a loss for pastime, I reached under the bunk and fished out the fat, flat mahogany box which contained my expensive revolving pistol. I drew the charges and loads and cleaned each chamber carefully. The watch on deck seemed to be making a great deal of noise about their task of rigging the boarding-nettings, they were yelling and blundering about like drunken men — woe betide them, I thought, if they disturb the Captain at his pleasure.

Yes, sure enough, there was the sound of his cabin door flung open, and a crash as (I hoped) he tripped over a chair and fell heavily. As I finished reloading and fitted the first percussion-cap onto its nipple, Peter flung open our cabin door. I looked up idly. Peter proved to be a huge yellow man with a shining naked head and a shining naked sword in his hand. There was a blood-curdling screech — from both us I fancy — then I shot him in the face. Just such another fiend took his place in the doorway, waving an even larger sword above his head. Time seemed to stand still as I carefully fitted another cap and shot him in mid-spring. His sword bit deep into the foot of my bunk and his blood hosed out in three or four great gushes: I must have severed the aorta. I dragged the two of them right into the cabin (so that they would not attract attention) then bolted the door and sat on my bunk, shaking uncontrollably. When I could master the use of my fingers again I reloaded the two expended chambers, re-capped all with infinite care, span the cylinder. Above my head, from the Captain’s cabin, came a frantic, rhythmical thumping and pounding, a sound that none but a nun could mistake for anything but what it was.

Inside my head the battle began: valour and honour strove to come to grips with and strangle slippery cowardice, who dodged and whined and hid behind the furniture of my mind. Was I a craven hound? Could I skulk behind a bolted door while the woman I loved was being abused and polluted by murderous savages?

Yes, I could. Yet there is some inner resource, deep inside us dastards, which rises up in times of terror and makes us ignore the commands of common sense. Somewhere, close by, a cannon roared; I was too bemused to wonder why or whence but the noise drove me to my feet. I unbolted the door, opened it a crack. Whooping, half-naked, blood-slobbered Chinese — some ten or a dozen — were pouring down the companion-way to the specie-room. I stole out and drew closed the water-tight teak door they had passed through and silently shot the great brass bolts. A-tiptoe, quaking, I mounted until I could just peer out, my nose at deck-level. Much of the tarry standing rigging of the main and foremasts was alight and by its gleam I could see a rabble of pirates forrard, crouched ready to storm the fo’c’sle and only held at bay by the occasional crack of a well-aimed pistol from its darkened recesses.

Behind and above me on the poop there was a stamping and shuffling and Peter’s voice, cracked with desperation, screaming “Dogs! Dogs!” Now my cowardice had quite crept away and in a moment I was on the poop, where Peter stood astride the body of the Second Mate, his back to the binnacle, a Chinese sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, daring them to come on.

“Hold quite still for a second, Peter!” I shouted, and fired past his ear at a gigantic pirate who had stolen up behind him. The man fell, but Peter’s assailants now turned to me — only to be dazzled by the blinding light of a dozen flare-rockets which turned the night into noon-tide. A speaking-trumpet blared from the sea: “All white men, flat on your faces on the word ‘three’. One, two …” I stared at the loom of a great ship which was almost aboard us — on her deck was a double rank of scarlet-coated men, those in front kneeling, the others standing. I flung myself to the deck. “… THREE” blared the loud-hailer and a withering blast of musketry swept the decks clear of pirates.

“Boarders away!” came the stentorian bellow and, with a mighty cheer, a host of sturdy, cutlass-armed bluejackets jumped over the side of their ship and landed thunderously onto the pirate lorcha which was grappled to our side. In another instant they were swarming into our John Coram, our own men were joining them from the fo’c’sle and the pirates were being hunted down like rats. I seized a midshipman, perhaps fifteen years old, his eyes wild, his dirk bloody.

“Down there!” I yelled into his ear, pointing at the door I had bolted. “A dozen of the swine!” Then I rushed to the Captain’s cabin.

As I burst in I stumbled over a hard, round object — the Captain’s head. This stumble saved my life, for a pistol banged and the ball whirred over my head. Lying on the ground, I shot the man who had tried to kill me, then the man who was squatting, dazed or drugged, in a corner of the room, all passion spent. The man on the bed, hunkered between Blanche’s out-spread thighs, was wearing the Captain’s stove-pipe hat; he was oblivious of all around him as he pumped and pounded at her belly. It was necessary to walk beside him and clap the pistol to his temple so as to shoot him without danger to Blanche. His rapt convulsions did not falter until his brains were splashed onto the bulkhead.

I have often tried to recall in the mind’s eye the precise expression Blanche’s face wore when I dragged the corpse off her. It was a fleeting expression, for she fainted a moment later and was not, indeed, properly herself for several days afterwards.

I have only related the adventure as I heard — and mis-heard and saw scattered parts of it. To make things clear I should explain that the men rigging the boarding-nets were already too late, their throats were silently slit as they leaned over the side. The clumsy noises and the cries of annoyance, as I had thought them, were, in reality, the death-struggles of the watch on deck. One of them, thank God, had survived long enough to fire a distress-rocket, which had been seen by the frigate, en route from Macao to Lin Tin. The watch below, and a few other survivors, had succeeded in holding the fo’c’sle by virtue of a couple of little Bulldog pistols smuggled aboard by the Yankees we had recruited at Calcutta. The Second had succumbed to a ragged scalp-wound which laid him unconscious for days but from which he recovered. Peter had defended the poop with all the blithe ferocity of a man who does not care whether he lives or dies.

“Karli,” he said that night, laying his hands on my shoulders, “you saved my life today.”

“Oh really,” I said, shuffling my feet in an embarrassed, British way, “I beg you to forget it, anyone would have done the same.”

“Yes, I suppose they would,” he said, disappointingly. “But Karli” — solemnly again — “there is one thing I cannot forget.”

I kept a modest silence.

“Yes, Karli, I cannot erase from my memory that in your shirt-box there are quite eight inches of good Italian sausage, also a crock of wonderfully smelly cheese steeped in wine. I have a bottle of the best Constantia hidden away for just such an occasion as this. Shall we eat?”

“We shall indeed,” I replied happily, “just so soon as Orace has scrubbed up the last of the blood from the cabin.”

That was our last happy night.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The next two days were full of great business. Our depleted crew toiled mightily, some sewing our dead into their “tarpaulin jackets”, some renewing the burned rigging, others rowing to and fro to the island refilling our water-casks under the supervision of the frigate’s cooper — for our own had escaped his flogging by the valiant fight he had put up against the pirates. The hewn pieces of his body were even now forming part of the long line of packages which awaited consignment to the deep.

The frigate had in attendance an aviso boat in the form of a little, country-built, sloop-like vessel; this was dispatched at first light to ask orders from our owners’ agent at Macao.

The frigate’s Captain came aboard to carry out the burial services, a long and mournful task. He also lent us a bosun and a sail-maker’s mate, together with a few old salts who could reeve and splice and a file of marines for the coarser tasks. Peter, now the only watch-keeping officer aboard (except of course the unconscious Second), had no time to eat or sleep, poor fellow, I have never seen anyone work so hard and so deftly in all my life, yet again and again he threw a laughing word over his shoulder to me or cracked a coarse jest for the labouring crew-men.

There was little I could do to help except check stores, make lists, set the specie-room to rights and write out receipts for the hundred-and-one things which we had to borrow from the frigate. It is quite amazing how much damage a few pirates can do in half an hour when they set their minds to it.

Late in the following afternoon our splendid little ship was again more or less fit for sea and the kindly frigate hastened off to its rendezvous, asking us to send off the aviso boat as soon as it returned with our orders. Every man-jack on the John Coram who could be spared was sent to his bunk or hammock; those who remained on deck, the barest anchor watch, were asleep on their feet. I could not, for very shame, repair to my bunk until Peter, my true, kindly-mocking, pox-ridden friend, could also find repose. He and I and the binnacle-post supported each other: I kept him awake and in good humour by proving to him, with many a cogent argument, that his so-called Jane Austen was clearly a German Jew called Shakespeare, going under the name of Göthe. We were both propped up, nine-tenths asleep, against the binnacle, giggling feebly, when a sleepy bellow from the mast-head announced that the little sloop was in sight. We kicked the deck-messenger from his hoggish slumber and bade him see that those few who should be on deck were awake. I bellowed wearily for Orace; good boy, he was with us in a trice and scampered below to fetch us clean neckcloths.

As we tied them, the fellow at the mast-head warned us that a boat had left the sloop and was pulling towards us. We went to the rail and, as soon as the boat was visible, Peter seized the trumpet and cried “Boat ahoy! What boat is that?”

“John Coram,” came the answer, faint but clear. This did not seem to me to be an answer but Peter understood: it seems that, in the old navy, when a boat’s coxswain named a ship, it was understood that his boat was carrying the Captain of that ship. Peter rapped out a filthy word, then a string of brusque orders. There was a bosun’s mate trilling upon a pipe and two reasonably clean seamen pretending to be “sideboys” at the entry-port just one second before an ugly, shag-haired, purple-nosed old gentleman heaved himself aboard. He looked around with a disgust he made no effort to conceal. Then he sketched out a tipping of his hat to the quarterdeck, skipped up to the poop and glared at us.

“Where is the Officer of the Watch?” he snarled. Poor, unshaven, red-eyed Peter swept the hat off his tangled curls and made a dancing-master’s bow.

“Your servant, Sir,” he said, “but whom have I the pleasure to…?”

“Jacob Dogg, Sir; Lieutenant R.N., retired. I have orders from your owners’ agent appointing me Captain into this ship.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, snapped it open and thrust it away again. Peter touched his hat.

“Welcome aboard, Sir. I am Peter, Viscount Stevenage, third officer.”

“Pray summon my other officers and present them to me, Mr Stevenage.”

“I fear that is not possible, Sir. The First Officer is in Macao Hospital, the Second is in the sick-berth, still unconscious from a wound received in the engagement with the pirates. I am the only watch-keeping officer, although there is a capable sailing-master who could serve for the time being.”

“Make it so, Mister. And this gentleman?”

“Carolus Van Cleef, supernumerary and shareholder.”

“Very well. I’ll take the larboard watch, you the starboard. You are temporary First until the Second regains his faculties, then he is promoted First, you Second and the sailing-master acting Third. Mr Van Cleef to take lessons in navigation three times a day. Now I’ll have a sight of the watch-bill, if you please.”

Peter drew out a tattered document and handed it over.

“The names crossed out are the dead,” he explained. “Those underlined are wounded — a tick beside the name indicates that the man should be fit for duty in a few days; a cross means he’s likely to survive. As you see, we could muster three strong watches before the fight: now we can scrape together two weak ones. We are desperately short of top-men. I have not yet sorted out the new watches.”

“Why not, pray?”

“I had hoped that we might have picked up a few hands at Macao, Sir.”

“My orders are to make all speed to London with the teas. Positively no recruiting. The men we have must work harder. They will have had an easy time up until now.”

Peter opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“Now, Mister,” growled the Captain, “how soon will the ship be ready to sail?”

“She is ready to sail, Sir. As soon as the men are rested, that is.”

“Ready? Ready? Have you seen the state of the decks? Do you suppose I’m going to put to sea in a floating jakes, a stinking abattoir? Why are they not clean? Why are the men not at work?”

“Sir,” said Peter flatly, wearily, “the frigate’s Captain advised me to make the ship seaworthy first. We have completed with stores and water, sewn-up and buried our dead, repaired and renewed all burned and damaged rigging and done a hundred other necessary things. The decks, I was advised, could be properly cleansed when we were at sea, under plain sail.”

“Advised,” sneered Captain Dogg. “Ah, advised, Mr Stevenage, eh? You are one of those fellows, are you, always ready with someone to blame? I’ve met your sort before. I asked you, why are the men not at work on those abominable DECKS?”

Peter drew himself up and spoke in a languid and lordly voice I had not heard him use before.

“Sir, not a soul in this vessel has had a wink of sleep since fighting a bloody battle two nights ago. It is too dark to scrub decks, even if the men could be aroused from their exhaustion. I sent them to rest an hour ago. I gave these orders while in temporary command of this ship. So soon as you care to read me your orders I shall relinquish command to you and make an entry in the Ship’s Log to that effect. From that moment I shall of course accept your reprimands for any errors of judgment I may make — after that moment.”

Captain Dogg’s nasty old face wreathed itself into a sly and malignant smile.

“A sea-lawyer, too, Mr Stevenage? Well, well, we shall have much to learn from each other in the next few months, shall we not?” He fished out his Orders again, gabbled them out and touched the brim of his hat. Peter touched the brim of his and, taking the log from the deck-messenger, solemnly inscribed the fact that Jacob Dogg R.N. (Ret’d) had assumed command of the John Coram at — he fished out his watch — such and such a time. When he had done, the new Captain, still smiling nastily, took the log from him and said that he, too, wished to pen a few remarks on coming aboard. Peter sauntered to the rail as he did so, as though he had not a care in the world.

“Now then, Mister,” rapped the Captain as he closed the book, “If you’ve finished your promenade perhaps you’ll be good enough to have someone shew me my quarters.”

“Well, Sir, our late Captain’s widow is still in the Great Cabin, prostrated with grief and shock and, ah, molestation.”

“The First Officer’s quarters are empty, are they not? Good. See that the bereaved lady is removed there at once, with all gentleness and solicitude — and speed. Her personal possessions, too, of course. The late Captain’s stores, particularly in the way of wines and ardent spirits, to remain in the Cabin. Mr Van Cleef and the Comprador to be strictly accountable.”

“Aye aye, Sir,” said Peter with no expression in his voice.

“All hands — all hands — to be mustered at first light, yes, write that on the watch-slate, Mister; they will have the decks snow-white in one hour precisely, all falls flemished and coiled — you know what is expected. See to it. At the end of that hour we shall set sail.”

“Aye aye, Sir. I formally request, Sir, that you enter in the Log that in my considered opinion, as an officer who has known this ship for several years, it is imprudent to put to sea without at least one more watch-keeping officer and ten more seamen, six of whom should be able top-men.”

“It is your right to request that, Mister, as you know, and I shall do it. It is my right, and my duty, to make an entry at the same time stating that Lord Stevenage, from the moment I joined this ship, has put every obstacle in my path while I endeavoured to make this ship fit for sea.”

Peter bowed.

“I shall be happy to initial that entry, Sir, and to record the time at which it was made — some four minutes after you assumed command.”

He and Captain Dogg smiled politely at each other, like two Bengal tigers over a dead Hindoo. It seemed plain to me that our homeward voyage was not to be a cheery one.