Sir Robert Hart | Page 7

and dramatic manner, turned a simple action into
a ceremony. What he did was to draw carefully from his official boot a
wad of fine white paper, detach one sheet, and solemnly blow his nose
upon it. The action was nothing, the method everything. He then
proceeded to fold the paper into a cocked hat, and, calling a servant to
him, gave it into his hands with a grand bow, just as if he were
presenting the man with some specially earned honour. As for the
servant, he took his cue excellently well, received the paper like a
sacred relic, and, still as if he were taking part in some ceremony;
opened the flap of the tent and threw it away.
[Illustration: THE CANAL: THE ROUTE BY WHICH SIR ROBERT
HART FIRST CAME TO PEKING.]
Still more adventures awaited Robert Hart on the short trip from
Shanghai to Ningpo; indeed I think the best and the most romantic

adventures took a certain pleasure in following him always. At any rate,
this time he was to have such a one as even Captain Kettle might have
envied; he was to be chased by a pirate junk, a Cantonese Comanting,
with a painted eye in the bow, so that she might find her prey, with a
high stern bristling with rifles and cutlasses, so that she might destroy it
when found, and with stinkpots at her mastheads and boarding-nets
hung round her. Of course he was to escape in the end, but so narrowly
that all possible sail had to be crowded on to his little ship, and the
whole crew set to work the big oar at the stern, while every soul on
board shivered and shook as men should when pirates are after them.
Ningpo itself in 1854 was the quietest place under the sun. A handful of
merchants lived there, buried without the trouble of dying; one or two
consulates had been built, but roads were non-existent, and the few
houses were separated from one another by a network of paddy (rice)
fields. The new consular assistant shared his house with a man called
Patridge, for whom he had conceived a liking, a jolly fellow and a
capital messmate, yet not without certain peculiarities of his own. I
believe he took a special delight in posing for fearful and radical ideas
like the abolition of the House of Lords, and could never be made to
see why a man should not sit in the presence of his Sovereign, or wear
his hat either if he felt so inclined.
The other youngsters laughed at his notions; one or two even went so
far as to accuse him of being a snob and to twit him on having changed
the spelling of his name and dropped the first "r" for the sake of a
stylishness he pretended to despise. He protested hotly; they stuck to
their assertion. He declared his name was Patridge, always had been
Patridge, and never could be anything else; they disbelieved him, and
so the dispute remained a drawn battle for want of an umpire till long
afterwards, when Robert Hart himself proved the point in a very
curious way.
A word or two about Patridge's early history must be told in order to
show how he did it. Patridge, as a young boy, was on board a vessel
carrying opium along the coasts of China, when in 1842 she and
another engaged in the same trade were wrecked on the island of

Formosa, and both crews--175 Bengalis and 13 white men in all--were
captured by the natives and taken to the capital, Tai-Wan-Foo. The
Bengalis were beheaded immediately. It was touch and go whether the
white men would suffer the same fate, when a brilliant idea struck the
ship's carpenter. Why not seek to soften the hearts of his captors by a
kotow as profound as it was novel; why not stand on his head? He did,
with the happiest results. The Formosans, delighted with this feat of
submission, spared the lives of himself and his companions and kept
them in prison instead of decapitating them.
But for a long time it was doubtful whether they would ever regain
their liberty, and, as a record for friends who might later search for
them in vain, they made a schoolboy's calendar on the walls of their
cramped and dirty prison, ticked off each day, and signed their names
below. It is nice to know that they got away free at last, though their
fate has little to do with my story.
The record remained. More than twenty years afterwards, when Robert
Hart, then Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs, had occasion to
go to Formosa on business, he found it in an old rice hong (shop), and
Patridge's name among