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trouble with police) had embarked for the Far East. But a significant proportion were always local recruits; they were simply lower-class women forced into prostitution because of poverty. The case of Bridget Montague, convicted in 1873, at the age of 23, of running a clandestine brothel is illustrative. Bridget, a Californian, had married a Portuguese storekeeper in San Francisco. Her husband took her to Hong Kong where he abandoned her. She went to live with an Irish barman from the Crown and Anchor, a tavern in Queen's Road. A year later her bibulous Irishman was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for public drunkenness. Homeless and penniless yet again, she took lodgings with a young Portuguese widow from Macau, who had been formerly kept by a policeman. The two women, now lacking male protectors, went into business as full-time prostitutes. Convicted, together with the Portuguese widow, Maria Roza, of running a clandestine brothel, Bridget was fined $50, or one month's imprisonment, and compelled to undergo medical examination for a period of six months.15
A life of prostitution was the common destiny of many European women deserted, abandoned or widowed, whose husbands or protectors were, or had been, policemen, turnkeys, inspectors, overseers, or employed in similar occupations. Prostitution was the only occupation that allowed a destitute European woman, if reasonably young or attractive, to support herself, for there were no jobs available in Hong Kong for uneducated European women, and precious few, apart from work in mission schools, for the educated. Bridget Montague, for example, after conviction and payment of fine, went back to work as an independent prostitute, took a beachcomber as a lover for a time, and then disappeared from Hong Kong.
In 1877 there were about 17 European prostitutes known to the police, but probably many more operated covertly as occasional or part-time prostitutes. There were also working transients, mainly French women, on their way to Shanghai or Yokohama. In the 1870s the number of prostitutes increased, mainly from a great influx of such women from San Francisco. At the turn of the century with the growing respectability of the European population in Hong Kong and a growing feeling that Europeans had to prove their moral worth as missionaries of Western civilisation in the East, the government took steps to reduce by deportation their numbers.
Apart from prostitutes, Hong Kong always had a small number of seedy adventurers, gamblers, swindlers, impostors, petty criminals
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