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JAMES HAYES
Nor did he mince his words. “You have disobeyed and neglected your instructions” he told Elliot. "You seem to have considered that my instructions were waste paper which you might treat with entire disregard, and that you were at full liberty to deal with the interests of your country according to your own fancy." The Foreign Secretary accused Elliot of having settled with the Chinese for much less than he had been told to demand “without the full employment of that force which was sent to you expressly for the purpose of enabling you to use compulsion, if persuasion should fail”. He was not impressed by the cession of Hong Kong “a barren island with hardly a house on it” and clogged by conditions which made it doubtful if it was a cession in full sovereignty."
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This myth, for myth it was, has died hard. Indeed, I fear it is not yet dead. It has always been more striking to compare the glowing present with such an insignificant past, and this has been the case at all times in Hong Kong's later history. Over forty years after the British occupation of Hong Kong, Governor Sir G.F. Bowen, addressing the Legislative Council at the opening of the 1884-85 Session, stated that "... the Island of Hong Kong... when annexed to the British Empire in 1843 (sic) was merely a barren rock, inhabited only by a few fishermen and pirates.” This view was expressed another forty years on by the American Consul-General, George E. Anderson, writing on the Hong Kong Consular District in an official publication of the American Department of Commerce. "The island of Hong Kong consists of a broken ridge of lofty hills, the highest, Victoria Peak, being approximately 1,800 feet in height. There are few valleys of any extent and scarcely any ground for cultivation... In general, the hills and mountains are bare and the soil is poor." He added usefully, "The island of Hong Kong, 28 square miles in extent, is about 11 miles long and from 2 to 5 miles broad; its circumference is 27 miles".*
Is this a justifiable description? Was Hong Kong ‘a barren island with hardly a house on it"? Were its people, such as they were, "a handful of fishermen and pirates"? The answer is NO, on both counts. There were several villages of some size, as well as hamlets, and a few larger coastal villages which served as market towns for the villages and as home ports for a permanent boat population and visiting craft. The land people were settled, and as we shall