911
11.
A Council of State held by the Queen of Portugal in November unanimously voted Lord Palmerston's despatch to be unsatisfactory, and a further note was sent by Viscount Moncorvo, Minister of Foreign Affairs, which was said to have aggravated the indifferent terms upon which Lord Palmerston and the Portuguese Ambassador were said to have been.
The Queen of Portugal, in opening Parliament in January following, thus alluded to the matter in her speech:
"I grieve to announce to you that our establishment at Macao has been the scene of two attempts against the sovereignty of my Crown and the law of nations, and my Government has already taken the necessary steps to secure the integrity of the establishment, the sovereignty of the Crown, and the dignity of the national decorum; it has likewise claimed the satisfaction due, which, I trust, will meet with attention and lead to a just reparation."
The records of the time unfortunately contain contradictory versions as to what really was the nature of the "satisfaction" eventually given to Portugal. At first, it was asserted that Her Majesty's Government fully approved of Captain Keppel's conduct and that there the matter had ended; though it would appear that the later reports contained a correct statement of the facts, and that Lord Palmerston with great reluctance had acceded to — "first, that an apology be made to Portugal for the wrongful invasion of her dominions; second, that Captain Keppel be reprimanded for having caused it; and third, that the widow of the Portuguese soldier who was slain on the occasion be granted a pension of £20 a year; to the three wounded soldiers, £500 each, and to the daughter of the gaoler £50; and thus ended this unfortunate episode."
Summers after his release was brought over from Macao in H.M.S. Columbine.
Evidently his continued sojourn in Hongkong was not quite as pleasant for him as it might otherwise have been, we find it recorded that his connexion with St. Paul's College came to an end about that time; and a few years later we find him in London, appointed in 1854 to be Professor of Chinese at King's College. The appointment resulted in considerable criticism, mainly, it would seem, because Mr. Summers, then about 24 years of age, was both youthful and "without experience of the Chinese language"!
Some old schools of Hongkong have already been dealt with in this series, and it is proposed to give brief histories to-day of two well-known boys' schools, one of which goes back nearly seventy years: these are St. Joseph's and St. Stephen's Colleges, both, in fundamentals, Church mission institutions.
St. Joseph's College shows a remarkable growth and is one of the chain of Brothers' Schools which have become famous in many parts of the British Empire. It commenced in 1865 as St. Saviour's School, or College, being established as a Roman Catholic boys' school by Father (afterwards Bishop) Raimondi. St. Saviour's was reorganised in 1875 and dedicated on November 15 that year to St. Joseph, so that month saw the commencement of the present College. By the end of 1876, it was attended by 165 boys, compared with only 75 when it was reorganised.
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