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bandits to seek their fortune. Mesny explained that the opportunity occurred for 'the four bold adventurers' to leave the city together with the bandits together with several old Taiping chiefs, amongst whom was a brother of the Shou Wang, the Taiping leader who formerly had held Ningbo. The four, Jerome, a cripple having had one of his legs damaged during the [Opium] war; Captain O.P. Damström, a Swede; Anthony Fiamin, an Austrian from Fiume; and Beeman, a Britisher from London. Mesny believed that they were the only foreigners who actually served with the Nian rebels. Mesny went to see them off and Jerome embraced him very affectionately after the manner of his country. They had not been gone very long when Mesny received a letter from Damström saying that he had been wounded in a cavalry charge against some 'trainbands' who had attempted to cut them off from the main body. The Four Bold Adventurers had then accompanied the Nianzi in their revolving rambles all over the country lying between the Yangzi and the Yellow River from Hankou to Zhifu and back again until the whole body of the bandits had been beaten and dispersed. At the dispersion Damström had been taken prisoner by the Imperial forces and as such had been brought down to Zhenjiang in a cage, or so Mesny understood, and had it not been for Captains Welsh and Macdonald who had been in charge of the artillery and rocket batteries in one of the Imperial camps Damström would very likely have been done to death like his three companions none of whom, though they had surrendered to the Imperial forces, ever returned to the [treaty] ports. Beeman was said to have been buried alive in Shandong, Jerome and Anthony appeared to have been murdered by their captors in northern Jiangsu [province], having become separated during the last few days march.
We know remarkably little about Mesny's life during the 1880s. A very serious famine ravaged Anhui province during 1888/9, and Mesny, then aged 46, made two long journeys through Anhui and northern Jiangsu provinces to judge and report on the extent of suffering. During his journeys, Mesny later wrote, he discovered that Earl Zeng [Guochuan], the Viceroy of Nanjing, needed the funds raised earlier by a Shanghai charity, the Renjishan Tang, to appease and pay off the Cantonese bandits, the Shap-ng Tsoi,33 who were very active in the Yangzi valley at the time. Mesny added that he, Mesny, in 1889, had assisted in the pacification of the excited populace at Zhenjiang where he had arrived a few hours after the British Consulate and other buildings