230
47 United Service Journal 1841, pp.531-2. The latter could not always be guaranteed, as we have seen.
48
The British navy was the major element in this technical superiority. These were still the days of sail, when its ships' commanders' chosen tactic in a fight was to force their enemy into submission. This was achieved by means of the broadside, the firing together of all guns on one side of a ship, resulting in "the hull-and-gun-crew-smashing at which they excelled" (Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870, Fontana Paperbacks, 1982, p.146). In China, the same "hull-smashing" tactics were employed by the British navy against forts and city walls, with equally devastating effects. The inclusion in the expeditionary force of war steamers like the famous Nemesis, which could sail into any bay or anchorage regardless of wind and tide, meant that the British navy's supremacy was completely overwhelming.
49
Some examples may suffice. Upon coming from India, leaving only six men sick at Fort William, the 26th Regiment had numbered 28 officers and 902 other ranks. By the end of 1840, only 110 were fit for duty, having lost 240 by death and hundreds of others in hospital or too weak to go on parade. Yet this was the regiment, which, thanks to the healthy regime instituted in India by Colonel Oglander, had had a remarkable record of freedom from death and sickness. Holt, p. 112. Between 21 July 1842, upon its first landing at Chin-kiang-foo up to February 1844 - a period of little more than eighteen months - the unfortunate 98th Regiment had lost by death alone 432 out of 766 non-commissioned officers and men. Shadwell, p.123.
50 Cree, pp. 117-8.
51 Davis, ibid.
52 "The country round Chapoo beats anything we have yet seen, indeed I defy anything hardly to equal it in beauty, one immense valley as far as the eye could reach covered with the most luxuriant vegetation, with the people going on with their employment in the fields quite unconcerned." Blackwood's 1964, p.157.
53 Holt, pp.152-3.
54 Cited by Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, p. 179.
Bingham, Vols. 1, pp.3 and 277, and 11, p. 156