Under the Dragon Flag | Page 4

American firms on their behalf. Chubb was to command the vessel, and he offered to Webster and myself the posts of first and second hands. The remuneration was very handsome, and we, not adverse to the prospect of a little adventure, had little hesitation in closing with the proposal, much to Chubb's satisfaction, who said we were "just the sort he wanted." His employer, Mr. H----, I no sooner heard named, than I remembered to have heard described as a very keen hand, and not over-scrupulous.
The vessel which he placed at our disposal was a screw steamer of about 2000 tons, long, low, and sharp; an exceedingly fast boat, capable of doing her twenty knots an hour even when heavily laden, as, in a desperate emergency, we were soon to find out. Articles signed, our cargo was procured and shipped--cannon, rifles, revolvers, cartridges, fuses, medicines, etc., etc. We cleared without difficulty, weighed, stood out, and laid our course straight across the North Pacific.
Our ship, the Columbia, proved a beauty, in every way fit for the risky business we were engaged upon. Needless to say she had not only been selected for speed, but was rendered in appearance as unobtrusive as possible. Besides lying low in the water, she was painted a dead grey, funnels and all. The sort of coal we used, anthracite, burned with very little smoke, and even that little was obviated, as we approached the seat of war, by a hood on the smoke-stack. She slipped through the water silently and noiselessly as one of its natural denizens, and on a dark night, with all lights out, could hardly have been perceived, even at a short distance, from the deck of another vessel.
Without the ship's log to refer to, I cannot be certain of dates and distances, but it was in the latter days of August that we were steaming up the Yellow Sea, where, by the way, the water is bluer than I have ever seen it elsewhere. In some places it presents, on a moonlit night, the appearance of liquefied ultramarine, though it certainly is muddy enough about the coasts. Our destination was Tientsin, one of the most northern of the treaty ports, and of course we kept in with the Chinese mainland as closely as possible to avoid the Japanese cruisers. All had gone well, and we were fast approaching the entrance to the Gulf of Pechili, when we encountered one of those tempests which are only to be met with in the Eastern seas--pitch-black darkness, rain in one sheeted flood, like a second Deluge, blinding flashes of forked lightning more terrific than the gloom, and an almost uninterrupted crash of thunder amidst which the uproar of a pitched field would be inaudible. With our enormous steam-power we held our own for a while although unable to make much headway; but at last a tremendous sea took us right abeam on the port side; the main hatch had been left open, a small Niagara poured down it, and doused our fires. No canvas would have stood the hurricane that was blowing, and for some time we were in a serious way. Before our engines, which fortunately held firm, were working again, we had drifted helplessly over to the Corean coast, and it was all we could do to claw off-shore until the tempest abated, which it did very suddenly, as it had risen.
As the wind fell, we ran under the lee of an island, oblong, high, and thickly wooded, not far from a heavy promontory of the coast. Here we lay for two or three hours repairing damages. Of course we had no accurate idea whereabouts we had got to, but we reckoned that we could not be far from Chemulpo, a very undesirable neighbourhood from our point of view, as the port was in the hands of the Japanese, who were engaged in landing troops there, and whose armed ships would of course be in the vicinity. It was, therefore, necessary for us to spend as little time thereabout as possible. As soon as things were ship-shape once more--and luckily for ourselves we had sustained no real injury--steam was got up to regain our former course. It was already quite dark as we passed out from beneath the land; two bells in the first night-watch, or nine o'clock, had just struck. Truly that was a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire, for no sooner had we rounded the extremity of the island than we found ourselves in most unpleasant proximity to a ship of war. I was alone on the bridge at the time, and at once caused the engines to be reversed, in the hope of slipping back behind the land from the cover of which we had just