17!
Fortunately our supply of waterproofing material was short. For proofing joints however we found local products, such as wood oil, bee's wax, and vegetable oil, made good waterproof compounds if mixed in suitable proportions.
The Chinese were very anxious that we should design a mine for use in the network of creeks and shallow waterways in the delta. The Chief produced some interesting combinations. I will describe one of these, which we called the Flamingo. It consisted of a bamboo stake about 3½ feet tall and pointed at the lower end. The top was cut to allow a long bamboo cross-piece to swivel at a point about three quarters down its length; the shorter arm of the cross-piece was weighted with a heavy stone so that it would pull up into the air the other much longer arm when released from a wire which held it down level. At the far end of the long arm a pipe mine was lashed, filled with H.E., connected to a pull switch. The idea was to drive in the stake in the soft mud at one side of the creek until the level cross-piece was about one foot under the surface of the water and parallel with the shore. The pull switch was made fast by a stone to the ground below and a string went off at right angles across the creek, also a foot or so below the surface. When a boat came along it pushed against the string, which released the retaining wire at the end of the long arm. The arm, pulled up by the weight at the other end, shot up; the sharp tug on the pull switch set off the pipe mine when it was about three feet in the air in such a way that the splinters burst all over the occupants of the passing boat. The Chinese were reluctant to use this mine as they were afraid it would catch their own boats. As Cyril said, "They want a mine which will set itself, will distinguish between friendly boats and hostile boats, and will renew itself after going off."
To help in the manufacture of the various devices we designed, and to make tools for us, we operated our own little workshop. I had been lucky to secure the services of a most original character, Reginald. His father was a Chinese ship's carpenter, his mother was Irish, and for the first seventeen years of his life he lived in Limehouse. He then went out to his relations in China, joined the Shanghai Fire Brigade, and moved on from that to work under Rewi Alley in the Co-operatives. He managed a machine shop for the Co-operatives, but felt that because of his half-foreign blood he had not received fair treatment from them; so he left them to join us. He was able to borrow two lathes, a drilling, and a planing machine, from a Co-operative machine shop, which had been