Sir Robert Hart | Page 8

I have already had my attention called to him by the Foreign Office."
The Portuguese were much in evidence in the Ningpo of those days. They were numerous; they had power, and they abused it: with the result that retribution came upon them so sure, so swift, so terrible that not only Ningpo but the whole of China was deeply stirred by the horror of it.
I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857, the culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vessels--the fastest and most easily managed ships in the age before steam--terrorized the whole coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell into downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their inhabitants.
Rumours of Cantonese revenge began in the winter of 1856, when news came that all the foreigners in Ningpo would be massacred on a certain night. Some one thereupon invited the whole community to dine together; but Robert Hart refused, thinking that men who sat drinking hot whiskey punch through a long evening would be in no condition to face a disturbance if it came. Thus, while the others kept up their courage in company, he slept in a deserted house--the terrified servants had fled--with a revolver under his pillow, and beside his bed an open window, through which he intended to drop, if the worst came to the worst, and try to make his way on foot to Shanghai. Nothing happened then, however; but the talk of the tea-shops had not been unfounded--only premature.
The 26th of June saw the vengeance consummated. With great bravery and determination the Cantonese under Poo Liang Tai swept the Portuguese lorchas up the entire coast and into Ningpo. The fight began afloat and ashore. Bullets whistled everywhere; the distracted lorchamen ran wildly about, hoping to escape the inevitable. Some of the poor wretches reached the British Consulate, alive or half alive, clamouring for shelter; but Mr. Meadows, then Consul, refused to let them in, fearing to turn the riot from an anti-Portuguese disturbance into an anti-foreign outbreak, and the unfortunate creatures frantically beat on the closed gates in vain.
Perhaps much of their fate was well deserved--some historians say so--but it was none the less terrible when it came; and I can imagine that the predicament of Meadows and young Hart, standing behind the barred gates of the Consulate, could have been little worse, mentally, than that of the wretches outside praying to them in the name of Heaven and the saints for shelter.
All were hunted down at last, dragged out of their hiding-places in old Chinese graves among the paddy fields, butchered where they stood defending their lodging-house, or taken prisoners only to be put on one of their own lorchas, towed a little way up the river and slowly roasted to death. Then, "last scene of all," the Cantonese stormed the Portuguese Consulate, pillaged and wrecked the building, and were just climbing on to the flat roof to haul down the flag when a stately white cloud appeared far down the river, serenely floating towards the disturbed city.
It was the French warship Capricieuse, under full sail. She had come straight from South America and put in at Ningpo after her long voyage, all unconscious of the terrible events passing there. Was ever an arrival more providential? I greatly doubt it; for had she not appeared in this miraculous fashion, who knows what would have come to the handful of white men left in that last outpost of civilization?
Such was Robert Hart's first experience of a fight, but it was by no means to be his only one. Bugles have sounded in his ears from first to last, and a wide variety of military experiences--he was present at the taking of one city and during the siege of another--has come to him without his seeking it.
From Ningpo he was transferred to Canton in March 1858, and made Secretary to the Allied Commission governing that city. Life was very different there from what it had been in Ningpo. Instead of the small community to which he had been accustomed, he found himself in a town filled with troops--British and French. Instead of living alone or with one companion, he occupied quarters in a big yam��n full of officers and men--a change which probably benefited a character too given to seriousness and introspection.
The work in Canton was exceedingly interesting. He was much more in the centre of affairs than he had been before, and he had the opportunity of serving under Sir Harry Parkes. With some of the erraticness that is said to belong to genius, Parkes enjoyed doing things at odd hours. He liked to fall asleep after dinner, for instance, with a big cigar in his mouth, then