forgotten-souls-a-social-history-of-the-hong-kong

under Fischer, Willis & Co.,
Commercial and General Agents and connected with
Bates, Willis & Co., merchants
of Liverpool, Victoria and Canton. In 1850, Fischer became agent for the P. & O. in Canton, taking over
in 1855 from Robert Walker, as commander in Hong Kong. He was firmly
established among the merchant aristocracy, his three daughters all marrying
merchants. His wife, Caroline died in 1859, but Maximilian continued to live in Hong Kong until he died in August 1872 at the age of seventy.
The wife of Fischer��s successor, George Stanley Brooks, lies in a distant, leafy corner of the Cemetery. Mary Brooks [40/5/7] married George Brooks in May 1858, only to die eleven months later when she was just twenty-eight. The list of employees also includes three boilermakers, the earliest being John Treen [11B/6/6] who died in February 1849, and a clerk, Hugh Cross Gibson [40/1/2]. Esther Lambert [7/16/5] was the baby of an employee of the company.
Her father, William Lambert, may have been a sergeant in the 95th Regiment.
By 1842, he was living in the Canton Bazaar with his wife, and by 1855 had been
recruited as a P. & O. clerk and sent to Shanghai. In 1857, when Esther died, the
family were back in Hong Kong still working for the P. & O. and living in Spring Gardens. In 1866, Lambert was summoned by his neighbour, Narcaxio Simmons,
for throwing stones at his verandah in Wyndham Street. His address shows that
he had risen in the ranks of Hong Kong society.
It was a momentous occasion in August 1845 when the P. & O. initiated a regular service between Hong Kong and England and advertised in the Friend of China that it aimed to take no more than fifty-four days from Hong Kong to Southampton. The sailing ships of that time were taking between four and six months to cover the same route. Even so the long, complicated route that it recommended emphasized the distance of Hong Kong from Europe. Today it would be almost impossible to find anywhere on earth that would take fifty-four days to reach, yet in 1845 this journey was a milestone in speed, safety and simplicity. The journey is described in the company advertisement under the heading ��Steam to England��:
After calling at Singapore and Penang, the ��Lady Mary Wood�� will proceed to Ceylon where she will be met by the ��Bentinck�� Steamer which will receive her passengers, mails and cargo, and will convey them to Suez. From Suez, the Passengers will be taken across the desert to Cairo in the Egyptian Transit Company��s vans in about 24 hours, including stoppages for rest and refreshment at Station Houses. From Cairo there are powerful Steam Boats on the Nile for the conveyance of Passengers to Atfeh where the Mahmoudich Canal Passengers Boat will come alongside to receive the Passengers and they will then be towed down the Canal to Alexandria by a powerful Steam Engine. From the latter city, passengers, mail, etc. will be conveyed to Southampton by either the ��Oriental�� or the ��Great Liverpool��. 5


Benjamin Cook, a young man who was going out to work in Singapore in April 1854, described the desert crossing:
After a splendid breakfast served to us by a waiter who, truly, rejoiced in the name Ali-baba, we set off in a caravan of small omnibuses on a remarkably well organized journey eastwards across the desert to Suez. The vehicles, mounted on two tall wheels, carried six passengers three abreast under a canvas roof. Although resembling both in appearance and comfort rather
grand bathing machines, their open sides at least afforded a fine view of the
passing scenery. Each was drawn by two mules in the shafts and two horses on ahead which were changed every five miles, and at every fourth stage, about three hours, the passengers were refreshed at dilapidated inns.6
The fare for the entire journey in 1845 was quoted as $912 for a man and more for a
woman as women were considered to need extra care and attention. This included steward��s fees, food and table wine, the transit through Egypt and three hundred- weight (336 lbs or 153 kg) of personal luggage. No single piece of baggage could
be longer or heavier than what would fit on the back of a camel. For this price the
accommodation was described as: ��on the most extravagant (we were going to
write gorgeous) scale, affording all the comforts and luxuries of a floating tavern to 130 passengers��. But, at these prices, only civil servants and officers from the armed services, whose fares were paid for them, and merchants could afford to travel by
steamer to Britain.
Before the advent of the P. & O., the mail was dependent on wind and weather and at the mercy of uncharted waters and pirates. Many letters were lost and those that arrived could take anything up to six months. An editorial in January 1845 laments:
Much disappointment is felt at the non-arrival of the September and October mails which have been delayed beyond all precedent since the overland route
was established. London mails are now five months old, nor from Bombay or Calcutta have we later intelligence than the 7th or 14th October. In
consequence the whole mercantile community have been kept in a state of suspense regarding the tea market at home precisely at the season when the herb is being brought forward for shipment.
The cause of this long delay was rumoured in Hong Kong to be the start of a new war between Britain and France. Prince de Joinville was said to be blockading the Straits of Gibraltar and the Friend of China speculated that ��We might expect a visit immediately from the French fleet now at Manila which would find rare pillage here among the sycee boxes��.7
Even the commencement of the P. & O. steam ship service in Hong Kong was hampered by the non-arrival of letters from England. In late July 1846, the agent, Mr. Ryan, the first commander of the company, apologized on the pages of the Friend of China for his inability to quote details of fares for the first steamer which planned to leave for Britain in August, saying that the April post had been misdirected to Singapore ��and that he is every hour looking for them��. Finally on 17 August 1845, Captain Richard Collinson was able to report in a letter home:
To the agreeable surprise of the whole colony in came the ��Lady Mary Wood�� with the 24th June mail positively only seven weeks from England which is the shortest passage ever known. Now it is to be hoped a new era has commenced in China and we may bid farewell to mails lost and mails delayed
�X to clippers reported and clippers detained and to that atrocious Post-Master General at Bombay.8
Captains and Officers of Other Ocean-Going Vessels
The importance of this group to the economy of Hong Kong can be gathered from the fact that no less than fifty-two ship captains, officers and engineers in this early period are buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery. The expertise, courage and ability to navigate in all conditions, often in uncharted seas, of these captains of sailing ships drew a great deal of respect for their toughness and skills, particularly as most Europeans in Hong Kong at that time had had to entrust their lives to such men. They also brought to distant Hong Kong the familiar
foodstuffs, drinks and so on the expatriates craved for. The international make
up of the merchant navy captains and mates is demonstrated by the range of countries from which they came. Other than those from Britain, the Americans and the Dutch were the most numerous with seven members each. They were followed by three from Germany and two from Denmark. Of the thirty-two
British officers counted, five were from Scotland, four from the Channel Isles and
three from the North of England.

In 1853, Henry Lovett [9/8/4], captain of the Arratoon Apcar, had only just left the Hong Kong harbour for Calcutta when his vessel was taken over by the Chinese portion of his crew which consisted of eight Chinese sailors and two Chinese carpenters, the rest being Bengali Lascars. These Chinese sailors-turned-pirates were assisted by two Chinese passengers. Coming aft with very sharp square choppers, they met and dispatched the second mate and threw him overboard. They then surprised those sleeping in the captain��s cabin. They included Dr. Thompson, surgeon of the Lady Mary Wood, Mr. Smith, the captain of the Jardine opium clipper, Red Rover, and a seventeen-year-old relative of Captain Lovett. It is surmised that they jumped overboard and drowned, as they were never seen again. The Chinese escaped in the captain��s gig, taking whatever they could lay their hands on. The gunner of the ship slept through the attack and, when he woke up, he found the badly wounded captain asking for water, ��with a severe cut in his abdomen whence his bowels were hanging out��. The poor man expired soon after.
The Arratoon Apcar was brought back to Hong Kong by the Lascar members of its crew. Lovett had been defended to the end by his British bulldog, which was found alive but ��cut severely across the nose and hip��. He was put up
for sale for $50 by Lovett��s executors, a lot to pay for a dog, at a time when a gold watch and chain had cost John Wright $23.9 Lovett must have been an unlucky man. Two years earlier he had suffered from another not uncommon misfortune.
The ship Ardaseer, under his command with a cargo from China, was destroyed
by fire and sank off the coast of Penang. The crew managed to escape in life boats
and were picked up by the Bremen ship Leibnitz. 10
The international flavour of the oceans as well as the despotic power of captains aboard their own ships is illustrated by the following contemporary account given by James Ross. He had paid for passages for himself, his wife and four children on the Sarah Moers from Sydney to San Francisco at the cost of 150 pounds sterling, on condition that the vessel did not stop at any Pacific Ocean
island for more than three days. On the fifth day at the island of Rotahma, Ross complained to the American captain, Joel Woodberry, about the delay. In Ross��
own words:


The answer he [the captain] gave me was, ��You d---d son of a b----d, if you
interfere with what I call my duty, I will put you on the island���K. After being brutally maltreated, I was taken, tied and bound hand and feet �K and then I was hauled up to the main rigging and kept there for two hours. They rigged a purchase to the main yard in order to lower me into the boat, and when I was over the side of the ship, they let the fall go by the run, which caused me to fall heavily into the boat, breaking two of my ribs; �K I was lying with my head on the thwart, the Supercargo �K with the heel of his boot he kicked out my teeth, then rowed me to the shore and threw me on the beach and left me there tied and bound as I was. The native chief of the Island asked what he should do with me; the Captain said, ��Kill the son of a b---d. Cut his
head off���K. I had on board at the time money and property to the amount of
twenty-eight thousand dollars. My wife and four children were taken away
by the captain. I was on the island for five months. For the last two I had no
clothes to wear when Captain Stewart of the ��Jane Lucy�� called at the island and most kindly gave me passage to the Feejee Islands, and from there I got passage to Sydney �K and there I got funds to proceed to San Francisco �K
thinking to find my family there.11
In the meantime the Sarah Moers had been wrecked on the coral reef of the next island it visited. Everyone including Ross�� family was saved and brought to Hong Kong. Poor James Ross took ship to Hong Kong and arrived only to find that his family had stayed for three or four months ��and during that time my daughter
had been married to a serjeant of the 59th Regiment by the name of James Bodell,
and that my wife had bought his discharge and that they had all left for Australia��. The wedding took place on 14 October 1854 ��and a grand turnout it was��. As the wedding party passed the barracks, the regimental band turned out and played
Haste to the Wedding. 12 Ross met Woodberry again in Macau and in the ensuing fight Woodberry was knifed in the groin with his own knife and later died. Ross
was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self defence.13
Owners of River Boats
Three companies had regular boats plying the Pearl River and linking Hong Kong, Canton and Macau. Two were based in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong,
Canton & Macao Steam Packet Company was begun in 1847, when the
merchants were given to believe that the P. & O. had not the slightest intention of sending out steamers as it considered that river traffic was entirely outside its line. That being so, Jardine, Matheson & Co. contracted for two steamers, which were duly named the Canton and the Hong Kong and set up the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steam Packet Company to run them. This company, headed by Jardine Matheson, was the first shareholding venture on the coast. The shareholders included, with very few exceptions, the most influential members of the community in the three ports. Jardines were deeply disapproving when the P. & O. opened a river route with two more steamers and, to make matters more confusing, named one of their steamers Canton. The third river route was owned and run from Macau by James Bridges Endicott [11B/1/1]. He was born in 1815 and was a direct descendant of John Endicott, who went out with the Pilgrim Fathers to North America in 1628 and then became the
founder and first governor of Massachusetts. James Endicott crossed the Pacific
as mate on an American tea ship. After being shipwrecked near Java, he made his
way to Canton where he was employed by the American firm of Russell & Co.
to take charge of their opium-receiving ship, Ruparell, which was anchored at Cumsingmoon in the mouth of the Pearl River.
In 1851, a now more affluent James Endicott decided to move on and become respectable. He terminated his arrangement with his Chinese protected girl, by whom he had had five children, moved to Macau and found himself a mail- order bride. Brave Miss Ann Russell came out from England and married him in October 1852. They proceeded to have five children, two of whom, Rosalie and Fidelia, are buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Macau.14 In his diary, Captain George Henry Preble described Mrs. Endicott and her sister, Miss Russell:
The latter has just arrived from England. It is said she comes out to get married just as her sister did ��to order��. Notwithstanding Mrs Endicott is amiable and charming and a truly domestic woman and Captain Endicott, rolling in fat, drew a prize when he got her.15
Endicott began a steamer service on the Pearl River, with the Spark, a little
steamer built in John Couper��s yard at Whampoa. He was also a co-founding member of the well-known ships�� chandlers, Thomas Hunt & Co., at Whampoa
with his American colleagues, Thomas Hunt and J.B. Cook. John H. Cook [13/2/1], who came from Salem, Massachussetts, and died in Hong Kong in November 1865 aged twenty-four, is likely to have been a member of J.B. Cook��s family.
Captain Endicott seems to have got hold of the golden spoon at last. He has been here many years without making more than a respectable livelihood but the last year his little steamer ��Spark�� has been making him
$2,000 daily, and every speculation he has attempted has been transmitted
into the precious metal.16
Preble surmised that Captain Endicott had made a fortune of two or three hundred thousand dollars which he invested in more ships and then in docks. In this way, the capital gained from the opium trade was channelled first into a shipping line linking Hong Kong, Canton and Macau, and then into the Union Docks in Hong Kong of which Endicott became a director.
That the passenger steamers plying the river were also used to transport opium was shown by the bitter complaints of the passengers. The incommoded passengers complained that the steamer:
left Canton at 6a.m �K for Hong Kong via Macao, touching at Cum-sing-moon to deliver a little cargo. Having delivered the little cargo she took on board a little more �X say 250 chests of Opium which blocked up not only the whole of the cabin but every spare spot on the upper deck also.
The nine passengers who had paid the full fare of eight dollars each for the use of the cabin were forced to sleep on deck. ��For a party, who may not be used to open air accommodations, there may be a prospect of brain fever by sleeping on deck��.17 In February 1857, the Queen, another of Endicott��s steamers with about 120 chests of opium, was seized by pirates on the way to Macau. Mr. Osmund Cleverly was a passenger. In the attack his thigh was fractured by grape-shot. After shooting two pirates, he escaped by throwing a chair out of the cabin window and leaping out after it, having first had his wounded thigh bound up by the Chinese lady passengers. He was picked up by a passing lorcha after one and a half hours clinging to the chair in the water.18
Commanders and Officers of River Boats
This third group of officers was much more closely linked to the social life of Hong
Kong as they usually lived in the city. Four men in this category are buried or have
wives or children buried in the Cemetery. They include William Soames, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1847 and commanded the Canton, the steam packet-boat belonging to the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steam Packet Company. He buried two young daughters, Fanny Augusta [13/7/1] and Annie Kate Soames [13/7/4] in the Hong Kong Cemetery. He was typical of the river captains. His knowledge of the local waters and the haunts of the pirates was legendary and made full use of by the Royal Navy in their pirate hunting expeditions. A letter to the Friend of China entitled ��Fair Play�� expressed the general feeling of annoyance that Captain Soames had been given no share in the prize money allocated for the
defeat of the pirate fleet of Shap-ng-tsai:
It is generally known �K that Mr. William Soames �K by his intimate
knowledge of the coast, judgement and ability as a pilot, accompanying on board H.M. ships �K rendered invaluable service to the expedition in question. Poor Soames, so long known and deservedly respected by the foreign community in China is not even named to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.19
Captain Soames�� high standing in the community was shown when, in 1851, he married Ann Louisa Stubbs from Sidney. The merchants, David Jardine, George Lyall and Captain Farquar MacQueen of the Fort William, the P. &
O. opium-receiving hulk, acted as witnesses. Soames rose to become a long-
serving commander of the P. & O., only resigning in 1875 after a record thirty-
eight years of service in the merchant navy in Hong Kong. He died in 1884 in
Notting Hill, London, a rich and successful man leaving $22,000 to his daughter,
Annie Kate.20 The above-mentioned letter ��Fair Play�� continued by naming another captain equally respected:
Captain Jamieson of the P. & O. Steamer ��Canton�� was likewise reported to have rendered signal assistance to H.M. brig, ��Columbine�� when after a
hard night��s running fight against Chui-Apoo��s pirate squadron, the men of
H.M. brig were tired out and unable to sustain themselves at their guns, but
Mr. Jamieson seems likely also to experience the same reward of cold official
neglect as Captain Soames.
Finally the officers of the Royal Navy ships involved clubbed together and bought
silver breakfast services for Daniel Caldwell and Captain Charles Jamieson, and Captain Dalrymple Hay of the Columbine presented a gold snuff-box to Captain Soames.
The Spark was the first of the steamers built locally and owned by Captain James Endicott. It celebrated its commencement of service by a round-the-island trip with a large party including the governor. The steamer anchored in Tytam Bay for a ��feu de joie of champagne corks�� and a cold collation.21 Its passage provoked verses from a resident, more used to the silent, wind-driven sailing ships:
What screaming, screeching shrieking, in the dark
From that rattling, roaring, reeking, ranting ��Spark��
Gongs and guns and ghosts are listening to the revel �X
While she��s whirring, whirling whistling like the devil!
Truly when they cross the Atlantic, Yankee boys
Make the very ocean frantic with their noise!
A baby, Wilhelmina Mary de Castilla [7/12/15], is buried under a small granite slab in the Cemetery. Her father was the dashing Captain Henry de Castilla employed by Captain Endicott to captain the new steamer. Her mother
was the daughter of John Couper, the P. & O. carpenter at Whampoa, brought
from Aberdeen to organize the upkeep and repair of their steamers. Castilla was described by Albert Smith as ��a No. 1, piecey-man��. He had a reputation for the good food and wines served on his ships:
In the cooking stakes we yield the palm to our hospitable friend, Captain Castilla. To those who wish to know what Yankee cooking is, we recommend a trip or two to Macao or Canton in the ��Spark��. 22
In 1854, there was an
attempt by pirates to take
over the Spark. As reported in the China Mail:
Upwards fifty men took passage on board the steamer on her last trip from
Canton, it is believed with the intention of rising upon and overpowering her crew and so securing the rich cargo of opium and treasure she was to take in at Cumsingmoon.23
Luckily, when the steamer went first to Macau to drop off Endicott, Castilla, suspecting some plot, anchored in the inner harbour where he could easily call for aid. The gang of pirates, realizing their plot had been uncovered, then rushed
ashore in sampans leaving behind two sacks filled with swords and daggers. From that time onwards, the ship was crewed by Portuguese or Manila men. Commanders of other vessels were not always lucky enough to foil such plots. The precautions taken against pirates on river trips were described by Albert Smith: ��At dinner, guards were placed at the cabin door and on deck with swords and loaded guns and revolvers. We also kept our own on the seats and tables near us��.24 Endicott��s next ship, the Fei Ma or Flying Horse, was also built at Couper��s dockyard and commanded


by Castilla. In 1856, this steamer was attacked by Chinese and, unlike the Thistle whose entire crew was killed by Chinese braves, managed to escape. The chief officer of the Fei Ma, George Clarke Lawson [16Cii/7/31] from Whitby, Yorkshire, died in March 1858 and lies in the Cemetery. He may have been on
board when the steamer ran the gauntlet of fifty-three Chinese Imperial junks at the beginning of the Second Opium War. A passenger described the encounter in
the China Mail:
The ��Fei Ma�� was hulled eleven or twelve times and the shot flying overhead informed us that they came from heavy guns. At one time I gave up all for lost�K. Captain Castilla, however, took the helm, full-power steam was put on and three of Nankin��s [20/8/4] men dragged our little bow gun about [some sailors from the Nanking happened to be aboard]. Six or seven men belonging to the same ship kept up a sharp fire with their Minie [sic] rifles�K. Gradually we left the ��gallant�� fifty-three behind us after being under their fire for at least
twenty minutes. Mercifully none were hurt�K. There were two ladies on board who behaved in the most courageous and determined manner, refusing to go below and claiming to risk the same dangers as ourselves.25
By 1870, Castilla, like his employer Endicott, had become a wealthy director of the
Union Dock.
Captains of Opium Hulks
Old Indiamen were often transformed into stationary, floating warehouses known as hulks which were anchored at Hong Kong, Cum-sing-moon Island, Whampoa or one of the treaty ports. A newspaper article on the opium trade in 1849 gave the
following information:
At this present moment there are twenty-nine vessels permanently moored
at the different stations on the coast; of the number, five belong to American
firms, and seven to Indian merchants (Parsees), the others are English. These vessels are not under the protection of English or American law, �X their traffic is nominally contraband by the laws of China, �X they are but poorly armed, and could not (perhaps dare not) resist seizure did the Chinese
authorities find it convenient to capture them.
The article continues with a clear indication as to the firms involved and the kind
of captains they picked to command these vessels:
The firms engaged in the opium trade are wealthy and of long standing; as
a rule, the partners are men of education and integrity. In the selection of their captains they exhibit a sound judgement, none but men of good repute almost ever being put in command of an opium receiving vessel. It is perhaps fortunate that the trade is closed to needy, reckless adventurers by the enormous capital which is required to carry it on.26
These hulks were run like businesses and were manned with a staff of shroffs (gl.) and clerks who attended to their affairs.
Five captains and one chief officer in charge of opium-receiving ships have been recorded in the Cemetery if one includes Captain Endicott. The earliest, Captain John Wills [11B/6/3], was the late chief officer of the Anonyma at Whampoa in 1851 when he shot himself in the head ��while temporarily insane��. 27 According to the Friend of China, his predecessor, Captain Schmidt, had also come by his death very suddenly: ��He fell lifeless from his chair without a word. At the time he was feeding a favourite paroquet��.28 Another member of this group is William Henry Doller [16Cii/7/34], master of the Sassoon Family who died in October 1855, aged twenty-five years. The Sassoons, who came to China from Baghdad, were the first Jewish family to make their mark in the Far East.
Captain Charles Jamieson, who has been included earlier as receiving the
silver breakfast set from the Royal Navy officers in thanks for his assistance in their
battles against piracy, buried a baby boy Henry Charles Jamieson [20/14/2] in the Cemetery. Charles Jamieson arrived in China from London in 1836 on the Earl of Balcairns. 29 He became master of the P. & O. steamer, Canton, thus beginning his career in Hong Kong as a river captain. By 1852, he was established at the little island of Cum-sing-moon off Macau on the Bombay with his wife, Mary. In 1858, Jamieson anchored his own opium-receiving ship, the Circassian, in the
Hong Kong harbour, giving the command to his friend, William Kent Stanford,
who had been clerk with Jamieson on the Bombay from 1852 to 1854, and had then joined the John Adams. Jamieson established himself on shore as an inspector of opium. He took a lease on the spacious house and offices, lately occupied by
the merchant, Joseph Edger. In 1859 he auctioned off ��eight strongly built cargo
boats now and recently plying in the harbour now moored at John Burd��s wharf��. Perhaps the proceeds were to pay for the expenses of establishing himself on shore. Thus Jamieson moved from river boat captain to captain of an opium hulk
to finally becoming the owner of a hulk.
Captain Farquar MacQueen [13/9/2] was an old East India Company captain, brought out from England to command the P. &. O. Company��s opium hulk, Fort William. The company needed a receiving ship because the holds of its passenger liners were filled with such a weight of opium that it sometimes slowed the vessels down. Much indignation was caused by parcels being left behind in Bombay to make more space for opium. The Pekin, for example, in 1853 was carrying 1,565 chests of opium.30 According to the epitaph on his monument, Captain MacQueen was born in a manse in Applecross, County Ross, New
Brunswick, Canada. The first record we have of him dates from 1838, when he was
captaining the Honourable East India Company ship Vansittart and his wife gave birth to a son off the coast of Singapore.31 Mrs. MacQueen joined her husband on the Fort William in 1850, bringing with her a daughter, two sons and a niece. Then in October 1851, a pitch pot overturned in the seaman��s galley of the hulk,
ignited and started a fire, which rapidly spread to the mat roof of the ship. The wind spread the flames from stem to stern and soon the main mast was well alight. In the panic to escape the flames, poor Mrs. MacQueen suffered a miscarriage. The family and the crew lost all their worldly possessions in the fire.32 However the community in Hong Kong came to their rescue and the ship was repaired. In September 1853, Maria, their only daughter, was married from the refurbished Fort William in St. John��s Cathedral to a Royal Artillery officer, Captain Hugh Archibald Campbell. Two years later in October 1855, MacQueen collapsed in an apoplectic fit on board the Fort William and died. In the following year his younger son, David MacQueen [13/9/2], who shares a memorial with his father, also died aged only nineteen. It must have been with a heavy heart that Mrs. MacQueen left Hong Kong to retire to England.
One monument commemorates the death of George Chape [10/4/4], master mariner from Berwick-upon-Tweed, who died at sea on a voyage from Saigon to Hong Kong in 1860, aged forty-six. Chape was already sailing the China Seas in 1845, when he was listed as master and owner of the barque Starling. He is unusual
in that he was a master of an opium-receiving vessel on the Woosung River near
Shanghai. The 230 ton barque Masdeu was owned by the Parsee Portuguese partnership of Cowasjee Sapoorjee, Lungrana. Chape kept a ��protected�� woman, by whom he had two boys, George and William Chape [6/6/21], born in 1857 and 1859, respectively. The boys were sent to the Diocesan Home and Orphanage.

William is recorded as having been baptized in 1864, which would fit the dates. In 1874, his brother, George, described as half-caste, was apprenticed as a tailor to
Lane Crawford by the Diocesan Home. The boys�� mother must have outlived the two boys because the headstone to the two sons was erected by ��their loving and sorrowful mother��. One only hopes that
some of the large estate of $6,425.35 left by
Captain Chape went to her.
The last to be buried among these captains of opium-receiving hulks is Walter Toms [40/1/5] who died aged thirty-one in December 1858, and was buried in a handsome chest tomb with his wife, Margaret. He was master of the receiving ship, Cama Family, anchored off Cum-sing-moon. The vessel was owned by the Cama Company in Canton, a Parsee firm. Toms was a Devon man from Ilfracombe. It is difficult even to imagine what the daily round of life would have been like for wives such as Margaret Toms, Mrs. MacQueen or Mary Jamieson, who were prepared to followed their husbands to the other side of

178 Forgotten Souls
the world, living and giving birth, as Mary Jamieson and Margaret Toms did, on opium-receiving ships stationed at Cum -sing -moon in the 1850s. One son, Richard Toms, settled the estate. Another son followed in his father��s footsteps. A further memorial exists in the Cemetery to a grandson,
James Edward Toms [43/3/1], born at Shanghai, the son of Captain J.Y. and Hannah Toms. He was
four years old when he died in 1876 on his parent��s vessel, the Bonny Dunkeld on the Canton River. The Bonny Dunkeld is listed as an opium clipper built in Aberdeen in 1863 and under command of Captain J.Y. Toms.33
Marine Surveyors
The marine surveyors comprised a small but influential group of very weathered and experienced sea captains. Two family members from this group are found in the Cemetery. Sara Ann Rickett [5/3/34]
died in 1857, aged just twenty. She was
the second daughter of John and Grace Rickett. John was an old-timer, who had arrived in China from Manila in 1831, and worked for the Honourable East India
Company. He had lived in Macau from 1837
to 1845 where he was a member of the team surveying the harbour. On the removal of the chief superintendent��s office to Hong Kong, he was appointed government agent in Macau. He came to Hong Kong in 1846 and for a time was secretary of the Hong


Kong Club, after which he worked from 1847 to 1860 as marine surveyor. He
was one of the original ninety-nine volunteers and became a justice of the peace in 1855 but, perhaps saddened by the death of his daughter, resigned in 1860 and retired to England. Margaret Heaton [40/4/2], the wife of a second marine surveyor, Captain G.H. Heaton, died in December 1856 aged thirty-nine and is buried in a substantial pink granite chest tomb. Both these families lived comfortably up the hill away from the noise and bustle of Queen��s Road. Albert Smith visited Captain Heaton and described his home as ��A charming house and garden with thick foliage over the walks and a rill of water gurgling through the grounds with an open bathing place surrounded by cane matting��. 34
Merchant Navy Sailors
Those in Transit Using the Boarding Houses
The fact that in this period so few gravestones remain to commemorate any merchant seaman below the rank of engineer speaks clearly of the low status of
common sailors. When one considers that seventy-two captains and officers have
headstones in the Cemetery and that those of a lower rank were more vulnerable to drink and disease, the number of seamen from the merchant navy who died in Hong Kong must have numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.
The crews of visiting ships were often discharged in Hong Kong and stayed in the boarding houses, until they could find a berth on another ship. A letter to the editor signed ��Everybody�� in June 1857, complained that from ten to twelve daily,
the steps of the Court House, are quite blocked up by seamen, black, brown and dingy white, who won��t move for you, and cover the steps with a
disgusting decoction of tobacco juice, old quids [from chewing the tobacco]
and the skins of mangoes, lychees etc.35
Osmond Tiffaney probably had these men in mind when he wrote:
Scapegoats and scoundrels from the purlieus of London, creatures that only
missed Botany Bay [the penal settlement in Australia] by good fortune, were
to be found in the town of Victoria, lording it over the natives, many of whom were more respectable and respected than they had ever been or ever could
be. Low Wapping dock loafers who had never at home put their heads into
decent houses, would swagger along three or four abreast, elbowing quiet men out of their way, and replying to a word with a blow.36
For the lowly sailor, life ashore was full of dangers. They were preyed on by crimps and boarding-house keepers. In 1854, the Friend of China regretted that:
notwithstanding the attempts of the Government to improve the seamen,
shipping and boarding house business �K impudent loafers from shore [were] going off to vessels directly they arrive and persuading men to desert.37
A crimp, or runner as they were called, would be paid per head for the number of sailors he managed to lure into the clutches of a particular boarding-house keeper. The sailors were then exploited by the keepers, who enticed them to drink in the tavern they owned and introduced them to brothels for a fee. All sailors staying in Hong Kong were at risk of being intoxicated in the taverns and infected in brothels. In 1854, a coroner��s inquest described how a sailor from the John N. Gossler had met his death ��by falling into the water in a state of beastly intoxication��. His friend and shipmate had nearly met the same fate. After visiting the tavern ��he recollected nothing until he found himself swimming in the water and a Chinaman trying to lay hold of him and save him from drowning��.38 After the
unfortunate sailors had been fleeced of their money, they would be turned out to
sleep rough about the town and scrounge a living, often by begging or sometimes even by shipping out on Chinese pirate ships to the embarrassment of the Hong Kong establishment. A never-ending problem was what to do with sick and destitute sailors who were unable to return to sea.
Sailors Who Stayed on in Hong Kong to Man Local Lorchas
One class of sailors stayed in Hong Kong and manned the locally registered square-rigged vessels and lorchas. The Hong Kong Gazette of 23 January 1856 listed forty-eight such vessels as registering in the previous year, twenty-nine of which were owned by the Chinese and eighteen by Europeans. The Gazette of 1856 recorded twenty-nine men with English-sounding names, five with Portuguese names and thirteen with Chinese names as captains of these boats. This group of men was not considered respectable. None are buried in the Cemetery, or at least no gravestones survive. The newspapers of the time do not list their births, deaths or marriages. Sixteen of the listed British masters of these local lorchas were working for Chinese owners. They would perhaps have been the only Europeans in the colony working for Chinese employers. These Chinese-owned lorchas were
issued, in the words of the government notification, with ��Certificates of British
Registry granted ex favour according to the opinion of the Honorable, the Acting Attorney General��. It also seems likely that many such vessels went unregistered
and that a number of European sailors worked on them in the capacity of officers
or crew. It was by no means unknown for these men to work on or even to captain pirate ships. The Friend of China reported in November 1852: ��A pirate lorcha with some Europeans or men dressed as such is said to be prowling about the mouth of the Bogue on the look-out for unfortunates��. 39 A wounded man called Fenton brought in by some Chinese admitted to:
having for some time past been engaged on board one of the lorchas sailing
under the English flag, licensed to run salt on the Canton River and about
the coast: and also that, whilst on board, several piracies were committed into which he was coerced into participating as a matter of course.40
Two such captains were Tom Roberts and T.B. Blackhead. Roberts�� father, John, was an ex-naval cooper who had kept the Britannia Tavern from 1846. His youngest sister, Mary Primrose Roberts [16Ci/3/11], who died in 1863 aged almost twenty, is buried in the Cemetery. By 1851, John had made enough money to sell the tavern and open a cooperage and boatyard at West Point. Blackhead must have been the son of the German owner of a ships�� chandlery, Frederick Schwarzkopf, two of whose children, Charlotte [7/26/1] and William Murrow [7/26/2] both died at about six months of age.
In 1854, Tom Roberts was praised for his efforts in rescuing some of those wrecked on the Pratas shoals in an expedition that also throws light on some of the excesses of the coolie trade to the
7.16. Headstone in memory of Mary Americas: ��The name of Thomas Roberts, Primrose Roberts, d. 29.9.1863.

the humble shipwright from Westpoint, the immediate saviour of the lives of
upwards of one hundred and thirty people is deserving of being recorded��. The lorcha Victoria had set out when no-one else was willing to go to the rescue of two ships in trouble. Having rescued the crew and passengers from the Topaz, the little Victoria had to pass the wreck of the Hygeia. This ship of 420 tons was a former
Danish brig, but had been lying on the mud at Whampoa for two or three years as an opium-receiving hulk and had been condemned as unfit to put to sea. Even so, over five hundred coolies had been boarded just off Green Island. When Hygeia was nearing the Pratas, pieces of hull were seen floating alongside and the vessel began to fill with water. About 100 passengers managed to reach a sandbank, the remaining 390 clung to the wreckage.
When ��Victoria�� with only half a dozen casks of water to supply one hundred
and forty-seven souls on board passed near to the ��Hygeia��, the unfortunate creatures could be seen on the broadside of the hull �K and on the jib boom, evidently without a grain of food or a drop of water, �X and this under a burning sun. The horrible sight as described by a female passenger �K is a harrowing tale. ��It was dreadful enough��, she says, ��to see upwards of a hundred people on the Pratas Sand Bank ravenously devouring green mulberry leaves, chewing rank grass and sucking the warm blood of the boobies and sea gulls that came within their reach; �X but for nearly four hundred to have no hope; �X the moan of their fearful cry for help sounding low on the breeze �X and no help to give �X it was horrible!��41
This account of the plight of the unfortunate passengers on the Hygeia was described in a letter to the Friend of China written by one of the rescued lady passengers.
Chapter 8 Tradesmen, Artisans and Small-Scale Businessmen
From the very early beginnings of Hong Kong, adventurers and others who
stopped off on the island attempted to seize the opportunity to make money and
establish businesses. Those who happened to reach such a distant island were on the whole tough and in some cases unscrupulous men. Many had a sea-faring background. Hong Kong was from the start international with a strong element of Scottish and Irish adventurers. Americans, Germans, French, Scandinavians and even a Pole, to say nothing of Parsees, Jews and Arabs, were to be found running businesses with very mixed fortunes. This is the first group whose descendants could be classified as becoming Hong Kong belongers. Some of the surnames crop up again and again down through the generations. A number were intelligent
men, who understood local conditions and cared about local affairs. The owners
of auction houses and stores for example were mostly respected married men yet, during this period, they seem to have been increasingly excluded from political
influence and downgraded to the class of tradesmen. This denial of influence was made clear in an article in the Friend of China dated September 1849:
We have two leading classes who claim all public honours, �X we allude to
the heads of departments in the civil service, and the partners in mercantile firms �X or those, who, according to local regulations, are classed as real
merchants by the members of the old firms. There is a third class gradually
increasing in number and wealth: by birth, profession and education, many of
this class are equal to the other classes yet they have little influence. It is this third class, members of the learned professions, [doctors and lawyers] agents,
auctioneers and the higher class of storekeepers which usually contain the most intelligent portion of the community�K. But in Hong Kong as yet has no
public [recognition].1
The loss of status and influence of the tradesmen may have been a factor in robbing Hong Kong in the early years of a middle-class opposition that might
have acted as a makeweight to balance the power of the governor and his Legislative Council.
Auctioneers and More Important Storekeepers
Auctioneering was seen as so profitable that Sir John Davis slapped on a $50
licence fee and a 2.5 percent levy on all sales. According to the 1848 Almanac:
On average not less than ten sales are advertised every week, conducted by eight persons who hold licences; Opium, Long Cloths and Cotton Twist ... invariably realize excellent prices.
Shipping goods and furniture from England was slow, uncertain and costly. The locals were happy to bid for the goods and chattels of those who had died or departed.
Besides the above kind of goods, there was a brisk turnover in ships, houses and all kinds of furnishings, with the auctioneers claiming 5 percent of the price reached. Ninian Crawford, of Lane Crawford, auctioned for example the contents
of the Government House when Sir John Bowring left in 1859:

8.1. Auction of English goods at Canton, after C. Wirgman. (Illustrated London News, May 1858).
All the valuable property of his late Excellency, the governor, including carriages, horses, plate, linen, to be sold without reserve. Chinese compradors, boys and all sorts and conditions of domestic servants crowding in to invest the money they have pigeoned out of their unfortunate masters. Parsees, Mohamedans, Consuls, store-keepers, merchants, diplomatic servants, officers and editors, all invading the precincts of Government House to buy or ��makee look see��. �X running about with hats on; some smoking cigars; invading the most private apartments; totally unmindful of the dignity of the place; examining critically into bedrooms, presses, coffee pots and China vases; reckoning their chances and dollars�K. Seventeen
hundred and fifty dollars for the carriage and horses as they stood before the
door, and knocked down to a foreigner both in country and religion.2
The auctioneers also kept general stores, buying in bulk from passing ships and
auctioning off the goods or selling them from their stores.
In this period, the main tradesmen include Charles Bowra, Thomas Ash Lane and Ninian Crawford, William Franklyn, Charles Markwick [10/8/2], James Smith [10/5/5] and George Duddell.3 Thomas Ash Lane and Charles Bowra were their acknowledged leaders. Messrs Bowra & Humphreys was listed
as first in size among the auctioneers and ships�� chandlers in 1848 and was then
the only company to have its own water boats selling water to ships at anchor. By 1850 they had become auctioneers for the Royal Naval Department. Lane was an old China hand related to Edward Lane, a butler at the East India Company factory in Canton, who was reputed to have previously been the Scottish master of
a sailing ship trading with China. His partner in Lane Crawford, a firm which still flourishes in Hong Kong to this day, was Ninian Crawford, a number of whose
progeny lie in the Cemetery. Ninian Crawford gained his experience as a clerk in the firm of John Holmes [9/19/2], who was formerly a schoolmaster sergeant of the 98th Regiment. Holmes had left the army to set up as storekeeper and wines
and spirits dealer with his friend Bingham. A large chest tomb commemorates the death of two small boys, Alfred and William Franklyn [13/9/3] who died respectively in 1843 and 1845. They were
the sons of the auctioneer, underwriter and storekeeper, William Franklyn. He had been an officer in the Royal Navy. Like other storekeepers, his interests were
multifarious. He advertised himself as general commission and shipping agent, auctioneer and wine and spirit merchant. He was the first owner of the Corsair,
which was then captained by William Soames, besides acting as agent for the
schooner, Alpha, described as being ��well manned and armed��, and ��running between Hong Kong, Macao or Capsingmoon as required, carrying cargo, opium, treasure and passengers at most moderate terms��. Franklyn was also listed as the owner of the Victoria Daily Advertiser and Shipping List, as well as taking third place in the 1848 list of ships�� chandlers and general stores. He auctioned anything from ships and houses downwards. The variety of goods offered for sale in his auctions was bewildering. Among the goods advertised for auction by him were a Sydney bay mare, gunpowder in barrels, as well as 2250 shank bones
and 2960 ox horns, floating wicks, assorted sauces and a type of ship known as a wherry named John Gilpin which had won the pulling race at Whampoa in the previous year. But Franklyn eventually got into financial difficulties and in 1853 he
had to sell up, after which he left Hong Kong for Macau.4
Charles Markwick [10/8/2] by contrast was a rougher type. He had lived in Canton and Macau for at least thirteen years before moving to Hong Kong. He and his brother Richard came to Canton in 1826, when their father became steward to the East India Company factory. In 1846, Charles was appointed auctioneer and appraiser for the Supreme Court. In his ��card�� in the Government Gazette of 1856, he described himself as ��Government and Supreme Court Auctioneer and Appraiser, and general storekeeper of Queen��s Road, established
in 1843��. Dr. B.L. Ball described how he dined with Markwick in March 1849:
He lives alone in bachelor glory with only his servants round him. There were several friends present and a finer spread table I have not seen in this country. I remarked this more for the reason that he is a man of so little show and pretension. The dishes were numerous with a profusion of meats and viands and various wines; and the silver plate was massive and handsomely wrought.5
Two days later, Ball attended an auction held by Markwick of the jewellery and other belongings of ��that notorious murderer and pirate, Chui-a-poo��. Ball bought the earrings and anklets belonging to Chui-a-poo��s wife. Markwick��s attitude to the Chinese can be ascertained from his generally low opinion of his servants, as illustrated by this description of his four Chinese servants who had decamped. He had advertised in the Friend of China and offered a reward of $100 to get them back:
Assigh �X Mr. Markwick��s servant, about 23 years of age and about 5ft. 6in.
high. Dull and sulky countenance, speaks English indifferently.
Assam �X Cooly, about 5ft. 8 in. high and about 20 of age very active in his movements.
Ahone �X Cooly about 5ft. 7 in. high, 25 years of age. Dark complexion, slow
and dull, speaks English.
Ahoon �X Boy about 13 years of age, slightly made, brother to coolie Assam.6
In 1850, Markwick married Sarah Ann Hoare, the widowed daughter of
an old friend, J.B. Watson, but she died just two years later. Watson has been
described as a ship��s chandler, auctioneer, ship��s biscuit baker and general storekeeper. He had also run the Rising Sun Tavern.7 Watson��s wife, Charlotte Devereux Watson [20/12/3], died in January 1866, and lies in the Cemetery watched over by a kneeling Virgin Mary holding a large cross. This must have struck contemporaries as a very Papist monument. Charlotte fell from the balcony of the Stag Hotel, which had been run by her husband for the previous seven years, and was instantaneously killed. After the tragedy, he passed the deeds of the hotel to Joseph Viney [5/3/38] who died in August of the same year aged twenty-
nine. John Wright described Mrs. Watson as an amiable, kind-hearted woman
and says of the couple: ��They are about the plainest man and wife I have met since in these latitudes, the gentlest and the happiest��. 8 When Markwick died, he left half his estate to Sarah��s brother, Charles
Markwick Watson. The families obviously
remained close. Charles Markwick��s life ended violently when a servant opened the door of his house to his murderer in April
1857, betraying his master for the offer of a share of the booty they would find in the
house. The sick old man was strangled in his bed and the servant decamped to China with money and valuables. Markwick had, by the time of his murder, lived in China for thirty years and was a respected old resident aged sixty-two years. The registrar general, Daniel Caldwell, with the assistance of a
8.2. Monument to Charlotte Devereux,
Royal Navy gunboat, pursued the servant
wife of J.B. Watson, d. 31.1.1866.

to his native village. They obtained his surrender by taking the village headman hostage and threatening to bombard the village.9 The servant was then taken back to Hong Kong and hanged.
As early as August 1843, James Smith [10/5/5] teamed up with James Brimelow Smith, who was running the Hong Kong Inn near the Lower Market. By 1845, the two Smiths were advertising themselves as ships�� chandlers, wholesale and retail wine merchants and commission agents. They continued to
run the tavern and, in 1847, James Smith, who was described as a publican and
was also keeping a boarding house, was found guilty of concealing a deserting sailor. Their business was built up slowly as extra capital became available. In 1844, the two Smiths opened a soda water manufacturing plant. In 1845, they were advertising paints, turpentine and canvas together with superior old port, sherry,
claret and champagne. By 1847, they were selling fresh Jordan almonds, French
plums, Yarmouth bloaters and even the essence of smoke in tins for the curing of beef, tongues and ham. By 1852 they were stocking luxuries like chocolate in tins and Lundyfoot snuff. In the Almanac and Directory for 1850, Messrs Smith & Brimelow take second place in order of seniority among the auctioneers with three employees. In October 1855, James Smith and his partner were auctioning, among other goods, four six-pounder and two four-pounder guns, thirty-two piculs of shot and fourteen muskets with bayonets. It was an acknowledged fact that the pirates re-equipped through the auction houses of Hong Kong. In that year also, James Smith became one of the representatives on the highly popular committee to oversee the running of St. Andrew��s School, established in 1856 for the education of European and Eurasian children in the colony whose education until then had been almost totally neglected.10 Smith died in July 1857, aged sixty-five, leaving $5000 to Harriet Brimelow Smith and $5000 to John, her son, surely
the sign of a happy and successful partnership. The marble inscription on his handsome chest tomb calls him: ��One of the oldest residents in China and much
admired and respected��. To us living in a much longer-lived age, it is difficult to appreciate how old sixty-five must have seemed at that time.
George Duddell, after whom Duddell Street in Central is called, was known for his love of gain and his willingness to come by it by whatever means that were at his disposal. He was a rough character little troubled in his dealings by conscience. His actions were not calculated to improve the image of the auctioneers. His sister, Martha Beazley [9/4/12], who seems to have lived with him, was the widow of Thomas G. Beasley late of the Indian Army and Royal
West Indian Mail Service. Duddell arrived in 1844 and stayed for the next thirty years. By 1845, he had taken on the opium farm for a fee to the government of $8,520
but dropped it after a year, when he found he lacked the means of enforcing his monopoly.11 He had also bought three lots of land in the first Crown land sale at West Point.12 When in 1844 rice growing in Happy Valley and So Kon Po Valley
were forbidden, the thirty-seven acres of land in that valley had been purchased
by the government, drained and divided into five farm lots. At the land auction in 1846, Duddell bought one lot and by 1857 had acquired all five lots and is said to have established a coffee farm on the land.13 In the 1846 Gazette and Almanac he is listed as a building contractor. He took part in a pernicious system of arranging overly low contracts, which put the unwary Chinese into debt, and then taking them to court.14 By 1849 he was the third largest landholder in the colony having twenty-five lots, four of which he had bought from the impecunious and feckless
government auditor-general, Adolphus Edward Shelley, for the ridiculously low sum of one pound and ten pence sterling.15 According to the Gazette and Almanac for 1850, Duddell had again increased his sphere of interests. He was listed as agent for the Ice Company, owner of Victoria Theatre, general and sheriff��s auctioneer, livery stable keeper and shipper of Malay, Lascar and Bengali seamen. He had also acquired a reputation as a dangerously reckless rider:
On Wednesday evening last, ten minutes to eight, the Queen��s Road was
thronged with people taking their accustomed walk. Suddenly the road was cleared as far as the eye could discern �K to allow a well-known person to pass along at a furious pace �X a pace equal to that usually seen on Victoria racecourse. It was impossible for the blind, the cripple or children to get out of the way of this furious rider�K. For years the person complained of has been in the habit of galloping through the most densely settled part of town from the Ice House16 to the head of the Lower Bazaar [Central Market].17
He was not just content with galloping horses. A letter signed ��Pedestrian�� to the Friend of China complains of:
the very dangerous amusement that Mr. Duddell is permitted to practise in the Public Road �X i.e. that of breaking horses. Last evening he was driving
furiously a Poney [sic] harnessed to an Omnibus and in his career passed
close to our respected Governor and Lady in their carriage as well as another carriage containing two Ladies.18
The writer asked why the constables, who ought to have apprehended him,
looked on with mirth or indifference. Duddell was not too choosy about the manner in which he came by profit.
It was hinted that he acquired his right to be sheriff��s auctioneer from Charles Holdforth, the sheriff, by a monetary consideration.19 He and Holdforth worked hand in glove, knocking lots down cheaply to themselves and reselling them at a profit. This questionable practice came to light at the auction of the barque, Louisa, when the Chinese version of the notice about the auction put the time at two hours after the English version so that, when the Chinese turned up to bid, Duddell had already knocked down the vessel to himself at a very low price.20 He
was ordered by the government to re-auction the barque. In personal affairs, he
seems to have been equally self-seeking. He aroused the anger of the community in 1850 by his callous behaviour towards his coachman, Sharp, who had fallen ill.
When ��he begged Mr. Duddell to excuse him from trying to break in two horses
as he was far from well��, he received an unfeeling reply. Duddell refused to visit him or send a doctor, merely replying to emissaries: ��Tell Sharp to go to the devil
and shake himself��. When the poor man was delirious, Duddell applied to the
committee of the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick for a free place for him at the Seamen��s Hospital where Sharp died half an hour after admittance.21
Duddell remained in Hong Kong adding to his fortune until 1870 when he
retired to Brighton. In that year, part of his land was resumed by the government for a civil hospital, but he made so much fuss about the amount of compensation owing to him that the hospital was not built on that site. Instead the land was added to the Botanical Gardens to increase its size.22
The Lifestyle and Status in Society of the More Important Auctioneers and Storekeepers
This successful group of auctioneers and tradesmen mostly lived above their stores in comfortable stone built houses along Queen��s Road. The partners inserted particulars of their births, deaths and marriages in the local newspapers and dealt extensively in property.23 They sat on juries and their signatures are found
on documents such as the valedictory address to the chief justice, John Walter
Hulme, before his sudden departure from Hong Kong in 1854. In 1851, Charles Bowra collected subscriptions from among his colleagues to cover the cost of ��a
grand display of English fireworks to take place at the Parade Ground, the first
ever witnessed in the Colony��. It cost 20,000 pounds sterling and consisted of ��sky rockets, roman candles, crimson and green fires, wheels, suns, tourbillons, balloon shells, pyramids, etc��.24 The display, which had to be ordered from Britain nine months in advance, was intended as a demonstration on the part of the tradesmen of their solid worth and loyalty towards Her Majesty the Queen, on the anniversary of her coronation.25
The dividing line between this class and some of the lesser merchants seems to have been somewhat arbitrary. The activities of the two groups were not very different. Fletcher & Co. was advertising for sale superior Russian cordage26 and Holliday & Wise, all kinds of wines and Italian salad oil.27 Drinker & Heyl were selling pickled tongues in half barrels, Kennedy��s Boston water crackers in tins, sperm candles and Winchester soap among other goods.28 The partners of these companies qualified as merchants. Yet Franklyn, who dealt in luxury goods and
claimed officer class breeding, was classified as a tradesman and did not get an invitation to, for example, the Agincourt Ball. It is clear that it was during this first period that the sheep of Hong Kong��s society were separated from the goats, and
once classified as a tradesman it was very difficult to make an upward move. When
A. Shortrede, editor of the China Mail, wrote in the paper, belittling Franklyn��s position as that of a mere tradesman, Franklyn replied in a letter defending his right to a better position in society but to no avail:
I cannot see upon what grounds he [Shortrede] assumes so much superiority,
his position being that of any other man in business, earning his bread as a book and print setter and printer �X yet he says he feels the degradation of its being supposed that he could be in the company of such persons as myself except in the way of business.
As the son of an officer of her Majesty��s Navy and the near relation of several
others in the same service, I have yet to learn as far as birth is concerned from whence he derives his exalted position. As to my occupation at present I leave that to the judgement of those who know me, having been a resident in China nearly seven years �K and having held situations of trust and responsibility, I am better known as to conduct and character to the community than himself, especially to old residents.29
It is worth looking more closely at how the class lines were being drawn. Hong Kong looked to England for its example. There too, at this time, the boundaries that separated one class from another were being redrawn and tightened. An article from The Spectator reprinted in a Hong Kong newspaper
summed up the differences between the present and the previous generation:
Obstinate sceptics may occasionally be met who doubt whether the mass of society is more intelligent and moral in this generation than the generation which preceded it; but no one can deny that it is vastly more genteel. Acquaintances are cut with whom our fathers would not have scrupled to associate; occupations are shunned in which they engaged without scruple �X and all on the score of gentility.30
This kind of tightening of the distinctions that separated one group from another was echoed in Hong Kong. A particularly telling example was the rudeness
with which George Duddell was treated by the officers of the 59th Regiment, which showed all too clearly the officers�� contempt for the tradesmen, whom they
considered as being almost beneath their notice. On the occasion of a theatrical entertainment given by the above regiment,
Mr. George Duddell �K finding a seat empty, occupied it and declined to
vacate it at the peremptory order of the officer, �K who said it was reserved
for the officer��s friends. By his direction, Mr. Duddell was forcibly ejected from the theatre and out of the barrack gate together with two soldiers of the Engineers who civilly remonstrated in Mr. Duddell��s favour.31
The chair on which Duddell had seated himself, ��like much of the other furniture��, was in all probability his own property lent to the Regiment from his own theatre for the occasion. Further down in the same editorial, the writer described how:
One of the ��Coolie Justices�� [justices of the peace who were considered by the Friend of China at that time to be under the thumb of the governor] was present on the occasion, and appealed to by Mr. Duddell, who first
called him by name, but finding ��there��s none so deaf as he who will not hear��,
touched him on the shoulder, and called on him to bear witness to the assault
�X to which he replied he would have nothing to do with the matter.
This particular justice of the peace had sided with the military in assigning to Duddell an inferior status.
The appearance of new dividing lines was much disliked by the editor of the Friend of China. When two classes of tickets were issued, $3 for unreserved seats and five for the more expensive seats, for a performance of the Amateurs in Duddell��s theatre, the editor of the Friend of China disapproved strongly:
The seats are common to all �X nor does a Peer of the realm feel his dignity hurt by sitting next to a tradesman and his family. The arrangements for this concert are new and novel, intended we presume to gratify the porcelain pride of some upstart aristocrat, who in his own silly mind, would feel degraded by sitting near the earthenware integrity of those who may not rank with the magnates of this little island�K. Any approach to exclusiveness in public among those who are not far removed from the same rank of life is objectionable and ought to be discountenanced.32
Sports were considered particularly character building and important in the formation of that important Victorian British virtue, manliness:
The sports and pastimes of England are not only the cheap defence of the nation but the cheap physic too. So my brave lads seize your cricket bats, your race whips, your oars or your guns, put your hearts into the sport while you are at it and hang care and the doctor. So says �X your father, JOHN BULL.33
Yet in the name of respectability, the tradesmen and lower classes of Hong Kong were effectively barred from participation in events at the cricket ground and
on the racecourse. Even the Victoria Rowing Club, founded in October 1849, specified in its rule book that anyone wishing to join had to be proposed by no less than five members.34
By 1851, the organization of horseracing had become the exclusive sport of the upper class. It was organized by a race committee composed of two merchants, one civil servant and one naval and one army captain. The rules for horseracing in
1848 included for the first time a clause stating that:
No person was allowed to enter or ride but officers of the Army or Navy, Members of the Club or Gentlemen nominated and seconded by any two Members of the above named bodies being Subscribers to the Race Fund, the parties thus being proposed and seconded becoming subscribers and being accepted by the Committee.
When in 1851 a tradesman tried to enter and ride his horse in the February races,
even though he had been duly proposed and seconded, his entry was refused. Letters of indignation were written and a tradesman cup was proposed to which the governor, Sir George Bonham, was said to have headed the list of subscribers
with a donation of $25. A letter written by A Lover of Sport complained that:
It is certainly not with an idea of improving the Colonial studs that the races take place but merely to gratify the ridiculous love of show that wealth always wallows in�K. Such rules could never have been countenanced in any other Colony.35
There was no mention of a tradesman��s cup in the programme for the Hong Kong races published in February 1851. Also in 1851, the price of entrance tickets to the
grandstand was raised from $5 to $6, well above what the less well-endowed could afford. In 1856, H.T. Ellis related a story illustrating the social divisions in sporting affairs. A storekeeper whose wife was a milliner (it could have been Henry Marsh)
requested permission from the race committee to enter a horse in his own name but was absolutely refused:
because only ��gentlemen�� were admitted to this privilege�K. ��Well��, said this
honest dealer in wearables and other necessaries of life �K ��I don��t see the great
difference. Ee sells ��ams, I sells ��ats��.36
The former parade ground became free for recreational use in 1851. It was located next to the present Legislative Assembly, on the waterfront in the area now known as Chater Garden. The way this piece of land was hijacked by the elite as a cricket pitch for use by an exclusive cricket club further demonstrates how the
division between tradesmen and elite was being effected. The elite wanted a cricket
ground so that those enthusiasts among them would be saved from making the troublesome journey to Kowloon, where they had previously played on the sandy foreshore. A public meeting was held to decide the issue. Significantly, James Smith and Thomas Ash Lane, who had been chosen to represent the tradesmen of the colony, were absent, though whether this was by their own choice is not known. By the time the editor of the Friend of China had arrived at the public meeting, the decision to turn the parade ground into a cricket pitch had been taken and a very animated discussion was in progress about the rules for the admission of members of the community to ��partake in the lively recreation of cricket��. The barrister, Dr.
W.T. Bridges, later to become acting colonial secretary,
was desirous of keeping cricketers somewhat select. For his part he had played with ��Tom, Dick and Harry�� at home and he wouldn��t mind doing the
same here �X but still there was a limit to all things and he thought the ��new-fangled�� system of ballot as good a mode as could be adopted if anything like respectability was to be kept up in our social system. If he intended to black ball any one he would tell the party of his intention without mincing the matter. (An old resident who was sitting pretty close to the learned gentleman remarked �X too truthfully �X that there were a good many here who would do nothing of the kind, and who rejoiced in the possession of such an instrument as a black ball to do their neighbours irremediable mischief.) As to the remark which had fallen from one gentleman �X about the different classes in which Society was divided in Hong Kong �X Mr. Bridges had to say that in arranging the Committee, particular regard had been paid to the selection of gentlemen who well represented those different classes. The Chairman himself, and Mr. Antrobus, (Merchant) were presumed to represent the Civil professions; �X Captains Lodder and
Chadwick those of the army, and Messieurs Smith and Lane [neither of whom were present] the trades people of Victoria; there could certainly be no objection to such classifications.37
In this manner the tradesmen found themselves outvoted on the committee and excluded from membership of the Cricket Club, unless they happened to be brilliant cricketers. The Friend of China refused to print the official report of the meeting since its editor was ��unwilling to believe that those proceedings represent the wishes of the bulk of the community, in the matter of a place for public recreation��.
In a later article, the editor talked of the disgust of a large number of citizens. He suggested that many would have preferred a spacious shrubbery with garden plots and, ��a pretty little fountain with granite images of Chinese cupids �X grotesque arbours a la Chinoise �X a small lake in the centre��. He would have liked to see a curds and whey, ginger beer and soda water house next to the barrack yard, with a real European pastry cook and a part of the sea locked in for public bathing. This, he said, would help as a step towards healing the divisiveness of
the ��complained-of class society, respectable people of all different professions and
ways of getting a living, so having an opportunity of getting acquainted with each other��. 38 Needless to say, the opposition expressed in an editorial in the Friend of China to this public area being used as a cricket pitch, which sided with the
tradesmen, had no effect on the outcome of the matter.
The effects of how people were classified when they applied, for example to become members of the Hong Kong Club, is shown by the words of the gentleman who talked of the ��irremediable harm�� that could be dealt to an individual by the casting of a black ball against his name. It categorized the applicant for membership openly and unequivocally as not part of the elite. This dividing line between the elite and the rest was made more obvious as more clubs and societies were founded. The Hong Kong Club opened in 1846, with the aim of ��promoting a general community of feeling among the Mercantile Residents and between the members of the various branches of Her Majesty��s Service stationed in Hong Kong�� and admitted its members by ballot, two black balls in a ballot of ten excluding a candidate. The entrance fee was $30, two months�� pay for a police constable, with a subscription of $4 a month. The high subscription rate and fear of being blackballed precluded all but the elite from attempting to join. But some societies such as the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick had difficulty in attracting men from the upper echelons of the merchants who were often absent from the colony visiting their branch offices in China. Regular attendance at meetings was necessary and the local knowledge that would enable members to sort the deserving poor from the other applicants for aid. This left the door open for the up-and-coming to make their mark on the community. When men like Douglas Lapraik, or the recently arrived Jewish merchant, E. Cohen, were invited or elected onto the committee, it was a clear indication of their having gained acceptance and a higher level of respectability in the community.
The cliquishness of the society in Hong Kong, the lengths to which men were prepared to go to preserve their own particular patch of privilege, and the bitter feelings that were engendered in the minds of those who were being excluded, may have been partly due to the fact that the differences between the classes were often very minor and based more on wealth than on birth or education.
Small-Scale Businesses
Shopkeepers
One step down on the social scale from the auctioneers stood the shopkeepers. Among these men in early days the Scottish family surnamed Just was probably the
wealthiest and most influential. Like Thomas Ash Lane and Charles Markwick,
they were old China hands. They had owned a watch and chronometer shop in Canton and had dabbled in the opium trade. The sailing ship, Swift, belonging to Leonard Just Senior had been searched for opium by the Chinese police as early as 1838 and he had been compelled to pay several thousand U.S. dollars in hush money. 39 The family had moved from Canton in 1843 to set up shop in Victoria. It was as an apprentice in the shop of Leonard Just Junior that Douglas Lapraik, a fellow Scot, learnt his skills as a chronometer and clock maker. In 1851, the year in which the fifteen-year-old Donald Just [13/8/5] died of cholera, his grandfather, the senior Leonard Just, retired to England and the younger Just left clock-making for a secure job with the military medical department. The elder Leonard was one
of the few of this group, who, when he wanted to retire, could afford to pay the
passage back to Britain. However he died at sea on board the Land o�� Cakes. In the same year, Leonard Junior was attacked by three Chinese on Queen��s Road in the vicinity of the Murray Barracks but fended them off ��with a sword stick providentially in his hand at the time��.40
The Justs�� Scottish apprentice, Douglas Lapraik, had left Britain in 1839 aged twenty-one to further his fortunes in the East, spending time in Macau where he met and made friends with Leonard Just Junior. He must have been a man of huge personal charm and ability. He is one of the few men to progress up through the ranks of society from apprentice to merchant. By 1850, Lapraik had opened his own clock and chronometer shop in D��Aguilar Street. By making friends with merchant navy officers, acting as their agent in Hong Kong and allowing them to use his address for their letters when absent from Hong Kong, he increased his sphere of influence. It seems that Lapraik smoothed his upward path by joining societies and working on the various committees in which the merchant class took little interest. In July 1851, Lapraik won a special vote of thanks for his efforts at fund-raising as a committee member of the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick.41 By 1855, he had become a special juror, and by 1859 was being described on the jury list as a merchant. By 1860 he was in partnership with John Lamont, owner of a ship-building yard at East Point, in order to buy land in Aberdeen with a view to opening the first dock there. He had also by then bought the first of the eight steam ships he eventually acquired which formed the Douglas Line. Lapraik built himself Douglas Castle at Pokfulam, now a hostel for Hong Kong University, and donated the clock that was installed in the clock tower in Pedder Street, before retiring aged forty-eight to the Isle of Wight, where he married, but died soon after.42 In 1849, he helped inaugurate the Victoria Regatta Club to encourage rowing and sailing. The club was open to those below the rank of merchant and its early meetings often took place in his house. His progress through the ranks of Hong Kong��s society was proof that upwards mobility was possible, and that at this time keeping a Chinese ��protected woman�� was no bar to popularity. Lapraik was universally liked and admired, both by those below him and by those above him. He had the reputation of being a staunch friend and generous benefactor to unfortunates such as shipwrecked sailors desperate for a handout. Perhaps being a Scot made his upward path easier, as Scots, who were to be found at every level of society, were usually ready to help each other.
A small group, who belonged among the ranks of the tradesmen, worked
in the apothecary trade as druggists. Dr. William Preston, whose wife, Caroline [9/9/7] died soon after arriving, took over at the Hong Kong Dispensary when Dr. James Young left in 1850 for Amoy. In 1856, Dr. Preston auctioned his furniture and left China, handing the dispensary over to John R. Spence [9/6/3] who was from Dundee and had been an apothecary for many years in the establishment of Duncan Flockhart in Edinburgh. Preston seems to have come back to Hong
Kong and worked there under Dr. Thomas Boswall Watson, the founder of the present day Watson chemist chain. During this period, the Victoria Dispensary,
which is still to be found in Hong Kong, was managed by the Portuguese Joao

8.3. Paddle steamer of the Douglas Line. (Courtesy of the Maritime Museum, Hong Kong.)
J. Roza Braga, the forefather of the well-known Braga family. Five family descendants are to be found in grave number [11B/11/1]. Other shopkeepers present in the Hong Kong Cemetery include John Lemon [9/2/7] who, with his brother James, opened a bookbinding
and stationery shop in Wellington Street. John
Lemon was a Freemason and among the first hundred volunteers for military training.43 In 1853 he married Charlotte Mills, a hat maker, and set her up in business. In 1855, he sold his business to a Thomas Spence and worked instead for the China Mail.
Before the arrival of the Europeans in Hong Kong, horses seldom penetrated to the coastline of Southern China, the tracks over the mountains being too narrow and rough for riding. Many local Chinese had probably never seen a horse. Goods for trading were all brought by sea, or over the hills by men with carrying poles. The lack of local experience with horses, together with the very limited communication between the Europeans and the Chinese, meant that the merchants preferred to use European vets and farriers. In 1851 Henry Marsh, whose son may possibly be Edward Marsh [12A/10/10], set up a veterinary forge in Wellington Street and sold oats, a range of saddles, bridles, whips and ��patent India rubber speedy cut boots��. A saddler, harness maker and coach trimmer, James Adnams, whose baby granddaughter Grace Caroline Adnams [38/6/1] is buried in the Cemetery, received his training at Lawrie & Co. of Oxford Street, London. By 1845 he had set up in Canton Bazaar in Hong Kong and advertised that he had ��every description of gigs and carriages�� for sale. He also had a stock of white and brown top boots suitable for postilions, sword belts, scabbards and silver, brass or copper spurs. One wonders how many merchants really did keep postilions to ride behind their carriages dressed in top boots. Several smiths, including David Anderson, set up in Hong Kong, advertising their horse-shoeing services. Anderson had a smithy in Spring Garden in partnership with a Mr. Perkins, where it cost $2 a day or $1.50 a set of shoes to get horses shod. In spite of the high cost, he did not get rich. According to the advertisement for the auction of Anderson��s goods after his death, his sole possessions consisted of a portable writing desk, a bed, an elderly couch, an old percussion pistol and some articles of clothing.

One example of the type of small businesses that were set up in Hong Kong at this time involves an English man, Mr. Holmes, probably an ex-soldier, who had set up as a small-time sausage maker among the Chinese shops in the Lower Bazaar. The reporting of a court case he brought against two former friends, Turner and Thomson, gives us a glimpse of this type of person in Hong Kong. According to Holmes, the men had consumed thirty-nine pounds of his ��sassingers�� without paying. The reason that Turner came to eat sausages at Holmes�� house was in the words of Turner: ��They��se kicking up such a row in my house that I��ve come here to get a quiet meal o�� victuals��. Holmes further reported: ��He has asked me to send for beer and I did so and now I wants payment for it��. He produced a book of accounts but could not read what was written and when asked the meaning of certain hieroglyphics in the book said: ��Oh! them��s pounds,
your worship �X its my mark that��s all��. When he failed to convince the court of
his truthfulness, he referred to his wife: The old ��ooman, if she was here, could tell you all about it��. Poor Holmes who pleaded that he was ��on his oath��, had his case dismissed, one of the defendants, saying contemptuously: ��Your oath��s worth nuffin��. 44 Most businesses of this sort were small scale and transient, the owners either dying or leaving for better prospects elsewhere.
One path to respectability in Hong Kong was to find employment as a clerk or storekeeper to one of the big auction houses. Some of the clerks to the larger storekeepers obviously achieved their goal. Milton A. Harsant [9/3/10] and his brother Frederick May Harsant were employed by Charles Bowra as storekeepers, and Charles W. Horder [40/2/4] was a book-keeper for Lane Crawford at the time of his death. Horder is buried in a grand chest tomb of the
kind in which one would expect to find a prominent merchant. They were all three
listed as jurors. Frederick was listed as a juror and storekeeper for Bowra & Co.
every year from 1856 up to 1869.
Hotel Keepers
An American passing through Hong Kong in 1849 was dismissive on the subject of
shops in Hong Kong and his experience of hotels could not have been a happy one:
The shops in Hong Kong are of the most wretched order, there being no rich natives on the island, the Europeans being supplied from several shops kept by English, and in which the wares of London are retailed at enormous profits. But the ravening wolves most successful in Hong Kong are the hotel keepers. Their houses are of the first order, overrun with rats and mosquitoes, and they manage to charge more and give less than any other ��publicans and sinners��. 45
One of the better ones was run by a Pole, Henry Winniberg [40/2/3], who was listed as a juror from 1855 onwards. He had arrived by steerage from Sydney on the Corsair in 1846. Winniberg bought a house from the P. & O. and converted it into the British Hotel which included a fashionable billiard room. In the same year, he married Jane Tregarthen Curnow, the daughter of a merchant navy
captain from Penzance, Cornwall. William Tarrant described the hotel as being
conducted on a small but respectable scale. It failed to flourish because of ��the small influx of visitors who do not take up their quarters at the Club House��.
When Dr. B.L. Ball arrived in Hong Kong, he stayed at Winniberg��s hotel and
described dinner time there:
We amused ourselves by looking at the servants. They were Chinese boys
with bald heads and long braids hanging down their backs. They wore white frocks, long stockings and slouching pants.46
By 1860, Winniberg was combining running the hotel with the business of
importing and selling wines and spirits, besides his wife��s Victoria Millinery
business. He was a Freemason and one of the first ninety-nine volunteers. His wife
demonstrated to Hong Kong society his worth and respectability by providing him with a large and expensive chest tomb with an enigmatic inscription: ��And the
light shineth in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it��. Winniberg
must have had great faith in his wife��s ability because, at a time when it was very unusual to do so, he left her as sole executrix of his will.
Another hotel keeper was the ambitious H.E. Hoey, whose eleven-year-old daughter, Mary Ann Hoey [9/5/10], and presumed relatives, George and Mary Elizabeth Hoey [9/5/6], are buried in the Cemetery. Little Mary Ann lies in a large and costly chest tomb. In 1853, H.E. Hoey married Mary Anne Maclehose, the widow of James Maclehose [9/9/9] publican. Maclehose��s tavern, the
Fortune of War Tavern, and the collection of curious and extraordinary articles,
put together by him and destined for a museum, fell into Hoey��s hands. Mary Ann died just two years later. In the following year Hoey used his newly gained
wealth to buy Victoria Hotel where he opened ��a first rate billiard room�� with three
tables. In 1858 he commenced business as an opium boiler for home consumption and for export, which business he carried on in his hotel office. He was taken to court by the opium farmer, Chun Tai Kwong, resulting in terms being worked out between them for a partnership. Hoey had the means of acquiring information from the sea-faring men who visited his hotel, and worked as detector and informant concerning unlicensed opium aboard ships for Chun, who in
exchange granted him a sub-licence to boil opium for the fee of $100 a month. But
government enquiries into the workings of the opium monopoly led Chun to lose the monopoly and as a result Hoey found himself in financial difficulties. These landed the poor man in the debtor��s prison where he unsuccessfully attempted suicide by ��use of a revolver and a razor��. The China Mail commented unfeelingly, ��If men in their anxiety ��to do business�� and enjoy life, plunge into losses for which they are unequal, they must take the consequences��.47 By 1861, when he sold one of his properties to Charles May, he had already moved to Kanagawa in Japan.48
Artisans
Those men involved in the repairing and building of ships formed a well-respected group of skilled men, whose names are for the most part found in the jury lists. Most prominent among them was John Lamont, a Scottish ship��s carpenter from Aberdeen, who was set up by Jardine, Matheson & Co. with his own slipway in East Point as early as 1843, where the company��s barques and clippers could be looked after and repaired. Slim and bronzed with humorous grey eyes, Lamont always wore at least one item of Scottish tartan and spoke such broad Scot that no-one understood him when he first arrived. He, like Douglas Lapraik, had settled in Hong Kong with a Chinese ��protected woman��. He was also one of those rare men who were able to move in any society and seemed equally at home
whoever he happened to be with. In February 1843, he launched the first Hong
Kong built ship, the 80-ton Celeste. One must admire such a man who could overcome all obstacles, get on with everybody, and create for himself a happy loving home life with his two young boys and their Chinese mother.
Another Scot from Aberdeen was John Couper, or Cowper as it was sometimes written. He had been selected by the P. & O. help bring the docking
facilities at Whampoa up to the standard required by its iron-clad steam ships.
It was no small undertaking for a humble ship��s carpenter to transport himself and his family across the world to a strange new life on a chop-boat on the Pearl
River. He was already in his fifties and naturally spoke no word of Chinese. The
docks, where he was to act as overseer, were owned and run by local Chinese families. Couper did however have in-depth experience as a ship��s carpenter and was noted for ��his placid temper and ability to instruct��. He was soon joined by his wife, daughter, and son, John Cardew Couper, also a ship��s carpenter. The chop-boat consisted of a roomy house surrounded by decking with its own roof garden complete with trellises, bougainvillea and other plants. The houseboat had its own servant quarters and punts were provided for expeditions ashore.
John Couper established himself as a much esteemed father figure among the Chinese workers. In the meantime his son, John Cardew, teamed up with a Whampoa elder, Ah Moon, who, in his will, left his family dock to John Couper Junior. In 1851, John Couper moved his chop-boat to be close to his son��s dock so as to help him and together they built the first genuine dry dock in China, as opposed to the mud-bottomed docks used by the Chinese. This was a colossal undertaking for two lone ship��s carpenters from Scotland using local materials and helped only by Chinese workers who had never seen a dry dock before. The sad end to John Couper Senior is related in chapter 13.

8.5. Whampoa Dockyard showing the Couper family houseboat. (By courtesy of the Maritime Museum, Hong Kong.)
Other early members of this group are Alexander Badenoch [11A/10/1] and Charles Barton [9/9/8]. Badenoch was a shipbuilder from Banffshire with connections in Singapore who died aged twenty-eight in 1844. Barton, already mentioned as brother-in-law to Daniel Caldwell, owned a ship-repairing yard. He employed a Scottish blacksmith, George Dickson [16Cii/6/10], a native of Greenock, who died in 1860 aged forty-six. Two sail-makers, Thomas John Irwin [10/1/7] who worked for William H. Sutton, and William Dolan [5/2/8] of Spring Gardens who had come from the shipyards of Whampoa, were probably old sailors. Dolan continued to work in Hong Kong as sail-maker, hotelier, storekeeper and manager of a ship-building and sail-making yard until he died in December 1885. Robert Duncan, a sail-maker and Scotsman, typified this rough tough ex-naval breed. When his cook absconded with $200, he collected Police Constable Jenkins from the police station, and set off in a boat to intercept the cook whom they reckoned would have taken the first fast boat to Macau or China. When they attempted to board a passenger boat off West Point, the fourth they had searched, those on the boat were so terrified by their appearance, such was the reputation of some of the Europeans in Hong Kong, that the passengers all jumped overboard and five subsequently drowned. A Chinese who was on the way to the funeral of his uncle testified in the inquest as follows:


They called us to stop and immediately fired two muskets at us, not content
with this, they came on board and commenced beating the passengers with
the butts of their rifles; this so frightened the passengers and me in particular
(never having been in the service of an Englishman) that I jumped overboard with the other passengers. The men in the sampan chased us when we got into the water and commenced beating us with oars �K49
A verdict of manslaughter was returned at the coroner��s inquest against Duncan and the policeman. The other passengers who were rescued and gave similar evidence at the inquest seem a particularly harmless lot and the absconding cook was not among them. They included several carpenters, a musician and two cooks.
Tavern and Boarding-House Keepers
Eight tavern keepers or their wives from this period are found in the Cemetery. The taverns aroused many complaints. The Friend of China said of them in 1849:
Many of the public houses in Hong Kong are intolerable nuisances
�X we speak with feeling on the subject, having the misfortune to live
opposite to two of them. We are free to declare that during last summer
the neighbourhood was disturbed almost nightly by an uproar in these dens which seldom subsided before two or three in the morning. In warm weather, with the windows open, sleep was out of the question as the songs were heard distinctly and we can say only that it was fortunate they did not go farther than a bachelor��s bedroom.
The paper considered the licensing system, as it was applied, without any scrutiny of the men seeking licenses, to be at fault:
The fact is undeniable that about the low public houses in Hong Kong have congregated a number of idle Europeans (assuming the garb of seamen) having no ostensible means of earning a livelihood, and with these men the European police appear in close alliance. So long as a publican��s licence
is granted to any man who can raise $100 and the peace of the town thus sacrificed to raise revenue, the evil will exist.50
Ambitious ex-soldiers and ex-sailors often began their civilian careers in the
police force and then moved on to become barmen. When they had saved the requisite $100 for a licence they opened taverns. Recourse to taverns and brothels
provided almost the only pleasurable recreations open to the poorer sections of the European community. The habits of the soldiers and sailors when on shore leave ensured that grog shops flourished, even if the problems of keeping the peace between drunken, quarrelsome men and extracting money from inebriated
patrons called for tough publicans ready to fight:
The keepers of these grog shops might be mistaken for respectable members of society were it not for their bull-dog battered and damaged countenances, which betray sundry evidence of recent bruises and black eyes, received in taking the change out of their customers.51
A letter to the papers about tavern keepers from A Sailor��s Friend asserted that ��most if not all were low adventurers�� who had arrived in Hong Kong ��in pauper conditions��. It said that men without sixpence in their pocket who had set up taverns, ��more resembling pigsties�� were able to leave in one or two years for England or Australia where they could ��enjoy their ease�� on the money they had made.52 One such was J.C. Ryan of London Tavern. After having his house broken into, he inserted an advertisement in the Friend of China offering a reward of $100 for the recovery of the items stolen. These included two gold watches
made in Liverpool, six gold rings, one gold snake chain, two sets of studs, one diamond and the other gold, four gold watch guards and a pair of gold earrings. The list indicates how much spare cash he had to spend on luxuries. Ryan combined boarding-house and tavern keeping with crimping and was described by the Friend of China as ��shipping master of this place�� on the occasion of his death by drowning, when the small schooner he owned, the Jim Crow, overturned in a squall.53 Incidentally, he was sued by the Chinese boat builder for the cost of building the boat, but won the case at court which was not surprising at that time. The tavern and boarding-house keepers were not above making money from
arranging contests and taking bets, for example on cock-fighting in Tai Ping Shan: ��These cock fighters profess to be Christians but do worse than heathens. They meet and fight every Sunday and bet largely; afterwards they get into squabbles and dirk [stab] each other��. 54 Even so the tavern keepers of Hong Kong had a certain pride in the elevated position that their money could buy them. Under the leadership of Mr. Suaicar, of the Pilot Boat Tavern, an ex-Royal Navy boatswain who also owned a small schooner, they formed a small flourishing community which showed its spirit. The Friend of China was asked to insert in the paper a description of a masquerade ball held by Mr. and Mrs. Suaicar for his brother publicans. The ball was held to show:
that although in a middling class of life, our innkeepers although much despised by some parties have so much self respect as to conduct themselves with gaiety. Dancing was kept up until a late hour when the evening��s enjoyments were crowned by an excellent supper provided by our lady hostess, Mrs Suaicar.55
Only two tavern keepers buried in the Cemetery achieved the respectability of having their names on the jury lists in this period. They were James Lindow [16Cii/7/16] from Manchester who ran the National Inn and Henry John Carr
of the British Inn, who continued to run taverns until he finally died in 1874,
the oldest innkeeper in Hong Kong. Carr��s first wife, Eliza Steavens Carr [13/8/6], died aged twenty-two. He went on to marry twice more. George B. Jones [9/16/10] from Lambeth, London was the keeper of the Fortune of War
tavern. His executor was George Perkins who worked in the American-owned ship-building yard, Emeny and Frazer. His headstone, which was erected by his brother, proclaims that his death was regretted by a numerous circle of friends. He died in 1848 aged twenty-eight. Other tavern keepers and wives buried in the Cemetery include John Rice [9/4/2] and Eliza Mulholland [7/8/19], wife of Thomas Mulholland, both of whom were from County Down, Ireland.
Mulholland opened the Wellington Inn in the Circular Building in 1846. John
Rice, an ex-mariner, ran the Empire Tavern. In 1852 he took George Duddell to court
demanding the refund of $200 paid in advance
as rent for premises that were burnt down in the great fire of 1851. He became respectable enough to make the jury lists from 1863 to 1866.
James Maclehose [9/9/9], who is listed among the first ninety-nine Hong Kong Volunteers, ran the Commercial Inn in partnership with the saddler, James Adnams. His money-making abilities were shown by the fact that he was able to commission a Chinese stone mason, Man-chong, to produce a life-size statue in marble of Queen Victoria for $120, a large sum of money. 56 Not satisfied with the likeness to the queen, Maclehose refused to pay the unfortunate mason and was taken by him to court where the plaintive lost his case. Although he dismissed the claim, the judge did say that the workmanship was as well as any reasonable contractor could have expected. Maclehose planned to branch out as ��Curator, Collector and Curer in China and Japan�� for the Indian, Australian, Chinese and Japanese Museums and was prepared to purchase ��every description of Natural and Artificial SPECIMENS OF REAL INTEREST, both ancient and modern��.57 But only one month later, in August 1852, he died of

fever and dysentery. He left $1,500 to his wife Mary Ann. This represented a large sum when board and lodging in a respectable house cost $30 a week.58
The success of Richard and Elizabeth Neil [9/5/11] makes their story an interesting example of what a man from the lowest level of society in England could achieve in Hong Kong. Richard Neil joined the army in December 1834. He came from the county of Leicester, where he described himself as a framework knitter. He may have been among those who joined the army because they had been put out of work by the knitting machines in the new factories. He was discharged from the army in 1846, one of the forty-one men who volunteered to
stay on that year and serve in the Hong Kong Police Force. Neil first came to the
notice of the authorities when he was involved in a raid on the merchant Joseph
Edger��s bungalow at West Point, a part of which was in use as a police station.
The raid on 22 April 1844 was described in a report by Captain J. Bruce, superintendent of police, to the governor and then sent on to Lord Stanley in London:
About half past 12 o��clock last night, Sergeant Neil in charge of the station at Mr. Edger��s hearing the dogs barking went out to see what was the matter. The man on watch and the sergeant soon saw some men coming along the high road and they went down (imprudently) only with their sticks �K. On going along the ramp which leads to the gate, Private Hogan was suddenly dragged
by a hooked spear off the footway down
the scarped side �K The Sergeant then
hastened back, turned out his men and

called Mr. Edger. This was scarcely effected when it was perceived that the
men had mounted to the top of Mr. Edger��s godown and were breaking in the roof�K. It is thought there were about 150 men engaged in the attack. The
party, taking up a commanding position on the ramp, opened fire, after which
the robbers remained at least ten minutes during which time about twenty
shots were fired by the Police.59
In the aftermath of the raid, one dead Chinese, two long ladders and eight twenty-foot spears were found besides a severely wounded Private Hogan. A search was made of all the Chinese houses in the vicinity which included an examination of the feet of the inmates to see if any had just returned home, ��but none exhibited marks of having been recently abroad��. Shoes were then a luxury that this class
of Chinese could not have afforded. The governor, Sir John Davis, in a report to
Lord Grey in England commented:
While I rejoice that the attempt in question proved abortive, I am more
convinced that a Chinese Police can never be trusted in this Colony. If not actually collusive with their countrymen, they have not the resolution to do their duty in case of emergency.
Hogan was married to Richard Neil��s sister, Annie. After Hogan died partly due to the wounds sustained in this attack, Annie married James Corrigan [9/13/3], who was chief engineer on the P. & O. steamer, Sir James Forbes, which connected Hong Kong with Canton and had a daughter by him. He died in October 1858, after a long illness, during which he was unable to work, leaving his widow ��much involved��. When she was unable to afford the fees for a second class burial, John Smithers, the sexton, wrote a letter to the governor on her behalf pleading: ��It would be an act of Charity if His Excellence orders a pauper fee only to be paid��.60
Richard Neil left the police in 1847 to run the Albion Hotel with James McLaughlin and, when that partnership was dissolved, he became a livery stable keeper. Neil died in 1858. He and his wife are buried in a large chest tomb that must have given great satisfaction to his sister Annie, who probably erected it. After Corrigan��s death, in June 1859, Annie accepted a proposal from John Patrick Martin, a Scotsman. He had been married to Elizabeth Martin [9/18/13] in 1845 and had taken her back to his house in the Canton Bazaar. She had died less than a year later aged twenty-three, from dysentery. At that time he was still a storekeeper for the commissariat. By the time of his second marriage, John Patrick was an independent businessman running his own ships�� chandlery and bakery in Queen��s Road. He had also taken over a second chandlery business run from a chop-boat on the Canton River. One year after his wedding, in 1860, he shut up his store in Queen��s Road and left Hong Kong to join the army commissariat on
the Northern Expedition at the time of the Second Opium War.61 When John
Patrick came back from the war, he was rich enough to buy the Oriental Hotel on the Praia Grande, Macau. Thus, Annie Martin nee Neil rose from being among the poorest of the poor in England to become, by way of three marriages, a respectable manageress of the family hotel. She had rivalled her brother in upward social mobility and outlived him.
Chapter 9 Beachcombers and Destitutes
By 1846, some kind of action was felt necessary to provide a minimum of support for this class of underdog, and the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick was founded:
Here as is usual elsewhere, there is a portion of the inhabitants who have come to the colony in the hopes of bettering their fortunes. It may be that their own imprudence has been the chief cause of their want of success in the onward struggle of life, but that matters not. It is among this class �X destitute, too often dissipated, and sometimes without even the necessaries of life �X that disease commits its greatest ravages �K Those who have neither money nor friends are thrown upon the government, and too often an
admittance [to hospital] at Government expense is delayed until the fever has
done its work and sometimes an admission is refused, the applicant not being
considered a fitting object, and death is inevitable.1
Unemployed merchant seamen, policemen who had been dismissed from the police force for various offences often including drunkenness, and those who fell into debt drifted downwards into this group of unfortunates. This is where for example Police Constable John C. Smith would have probably ended up. It was reported
in 1847 that he had enlisted in the police four days previously and been drunk on three of them. He was dismissed and fined $20;2 likewise, Police Constable James Macreary, formerly of the 98th Regiment, was brought to court for sleeping at his
post the previous night. He had been dismissed before and this was the seventh report of misconduct since his reinstatement. He was found to be too drunk to make his appearance in court and again dismissed from the police force.3
In its report at the first annual meeting, the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick had helped twenty members of the destitute class, ��and there is every reason to believe that but for this benevolent institution many of them would have died in the extreme of misery��. At the same meeting the scheme was extended to cover female applicants, to an amount not exceeding fifty cents per day.4 By 1851, 206 destitutes had been relieved, including 41 new cases that year. According to Charles Batten Hillier, the magistrate, more than half the applicants were seamen: ��Much of this sickness and misery and a great deal of vice arose from the habits induced by the relation of seamen and crimps��.5 Two examples are given below of the downward path that could lead to destitution and a pauper��s grave.
The claustrophobic atmosphere of the island with little in the way of amusement and nowhere much to go to escape its constraints, the high cost of returning home and the risks involved in business here, all increased the temptation to drink one��s way to oblivion. A prime example of this was a local tradesman, Frederick Funck, who may possibly still lie in an unmarked pauper��s grave in the Cemetery. He had owned one of the largest stores, stocking everything from
ladies�� wear to anchors. When on the verge of bankruptcy, he literally drank
himself to death in June 1848, leaving behind a wife and baby son in dire straits. The report on his inquest describes how his death came about:
He with three Europeans sat down to a drinking bout in a tavern on the previous Monday, and continued at it day and night till Saturday, by which time they had consumed two dozen of Brandy, one dozen of Rum, and above a dozen of Beer and Cider. Deceased then had an attack of delirium tremens, under which he expired. Verdict �X Deceased came to his death by delirium tremens, caused by excessive intoxication.6
The most talked-of pauper known to be buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery must be P. Caulincourt McSwyney, though whether his bones remain to this day in the grounds is a matter of conjecture. He was reported to have been a graduate from Dublin University of undoubted ability and arrived in Hong Kong as early as 1842, an adventurer and atheist from Sydney. He and the sheriff, Charles Holdforth, could be said to exemplify the element of corruption that ran through the civil service in early days. From being clerk to Major Caine, he was promoted in 1844 to deputy registrar general. Ejected from that post for ��blunders��, he was permitted to practise law, signing himself barrister, solicitor and attorney-at-law. An article on legal pettifogging does not mince its words: ��The mischief this man did to the colony in its earlier days is almost incalculable. In connection with other
parties �K swindling and barefaced robbery were perpetrated to an extent difficult
to be conceived��. According to the same article, his career was brought to a close
because: ��no respectable person would be seen within a hundred yards of his office
�K From lawyer he turned to opium dealer and it is said made quite a fortune at speculating��. 7 When it came to marriage however, it was McSwyney who was taken in. A wily Chinese lady, Aho, represented herself as the widow of a rich Fukien merchant with property in Canton. After signing the customary Chinese marriage documents, McSwyney was taken to Guangdong and introduced to the lady��s ��brother�� who purported to be an extensive tea dealer whose business would be shared with his new brother-in-law. He was shown a large house belonging to the family. On returning one year later to collect the rents due on the house,
McSwyney was astonished to find that the occupier knew nothing of Aho or her
brother. Returning to Hong Kong in a rage, he abused his wife, turned her out of his house and charged her and her servants with stealing his property. Aho, who had been detained in prison, made out a case that all the objects found in her possession were presents given to her by husband and, there being no proof to the contrary, she was discharged by proclamation before her trial.
In 1849, McSwyney became an insolvent debtor. He was accused of gross dishonesty and fraud in issuing a false statement and returned to the debtor��s prison: ��Deprived of the means of subsistence and shunned by everyone, he contracted dysentery and was forced to beg an admission to the Seamen��s Hospital �K where he died [on 21 December 1850] without a friend and received the funeral of a pauper��. The editor drew the moral: ��The profoundest knowledge, the greatest talents are as nothing when wanting in the great essential �X PROPER MORAL PRINCIPLES��. 8
Chapter 10
Missionaries
In this first period one cannot help but wonder at the missionary fervour that led men to bring their wives and children to China, sacrificing their lives on the altar
of their missions with a seeming lack of concern which to us appears irresponsible. Three groups of missionaries stand out in the early years of the colony as being of
particular significance. They are the London Missionary Society which under Rev.
James Legge founded the English Nonconformist Union Church, the American missionaries, and Karl Gutzlaff��s Christian Mission which led to the arrival in Hong Kong of the Basel Mission, the Berlin missionaries and the Mission of the Rhenish Church.
English Nonconformist Union Church Missionaries
To understand the background of these early missionaries in Hong Kong one
must look back briefly to Dr. Robert Morrison and Rev. William Milne, the two men who inspired so many. They had been sent out in 1807 by the London Missionary Society (L.M.S.) to be the first Protestant missionaries to China. The
Nonconformists, including the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists and the Baptists, had united in Britain under the umbrella of the L.M.S. in order to pool
their resources and send missionaries into the field. Dr. Morrison worked in the
East for twenty-seven years ��extending the kingdom of the Blessed Redeemer��. 1
Among the considerable achievements of Robert Morrison and William Milne
were the founding of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, the compilation and publication of a first dictionary of the Chinese language and the translation of the Bible into Chinese. Morrison lived and worked for many years as interpreter and translator to the British East India Company in Canton and was known and admired by the British merchants, especially the Nonconformist Scots like
William Jardine. He died in Macau in 1834 aged fifty-two and is buried in the
Protestant Cemetery there.2
In the following year, Morrison��s son, John Robert, and a group of friends and admirers among the foreign community in Canton set up the Morrison Educational Society (M.E.S.) with the aim of founding schools where Chinese boys could learn the English language and gain a grounding in Christianity in order to
lay the axe to the root
of these long standing and deep -rooted evils (heathenism and idol worship) to revive, develop and cultivate long dormant mental energies by introducing as many youths as possible to the sources of moral elevation that are found in English Literature and Science.
It was thought that, within a space of not many years, such schools would exert a
great influence in overcoming native prejudices and clear the way for
a more cordial intercourse between the Chinese and foreigners �K The diffusion of knowledge by means of schools �K will disabuse the people in their notions of the outside barbarians; since the exclusive wisdom in which they pride themselves must then stand the test of an enlightenment their fathers never dreamt of.3
In 1838 a second society was founded, the Medical Missionary Society (M.M.S.), which would follow in the footsteps of Dr. Morrison and Dr. Colledge to open medical clinics for the Chinese such as they had opened in Macau, and so link missionary work with Western medicine. Free medical attention would be provided so that the gospel could be preached to patients at a time when they would be prepared to listen, thus overcoming the hostility of the people. The yearly subscriptions paid by the merchant members of the M.E.S and the M.M.S. would enable them to carry out their mission.
Both societies received grants of land in Hong Kong as early as February 1842, and Sir Henry Pottinger became their patron. Together they started to build

a large house on Morrison Hill in Wan Chai. Dr. Benjamin Hobson, who had
been sent out from Britain by the London Missionary Society, opened a clinic and hospital at the foot of the hill. Rev. Samuel R. Brown moved the M.E.S. school from Macau into the purpose-built house on Morrison Hill. Brown, who had been recruited by the Society to run their school, had formerly been a professor in the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. He had immense faith in the effects of the total immersion of his Chinese pupils in the language, culture and Christian life of the household. Beside the Browns and the Hobsons,
the household included the families of the Rev. William C. Milne Junior, and his wife, Frances Williamina, and John Robert Morrison Junior, who was working
for the governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, as interpreter and Chinese secretary. The school may have also included the sons of some merchants among its pupils. Certainly an older boy from the school is commemorated in the Cemetery: Vere Pallett Harris [11A/12/2], the son of a Manchester merchant, died in the house in November 1843 aged fourteen years.4
The three missionary families mentioned above all lost baby boys in the early years: Robert Morrison Brown [11A/5/6], died in January 1844 aged nine months, John Abbay Hobson [11A/3/7] departed this life in April 1843. These two baby boys are commemorated by almost identical square, stepped granite stones, the only difference being that John Hobson��s has lost its bevelled covering stone. Then, in 1846 John Robert Morrison Milne [9/8/17] died aged only two days. Life cannot have been easy for the mothers of these babies. They were catering for a household of some forty-four people including thirty-two Chinese schoolboys, and teaching in the school, besides caring for their own children. To add to their trials, in May 1843 the household was attacked by robbers: ��The robbers drove all the inmates from the house of which they had possession for two hours only decamping at daylight��. 5 The household was forced to take refuge in the hen-house, where the ladies were able
to staunch the flow of blood from two spear
thrusts to the legs of Samuel Brown. The

Hobsons, the Browns and John Robert Morrison all lost possessions. The Great Seal of Office belonging to the governor was also unaccountably in the house at the time and taken by the robbers. Finding nothing else of much value to take, the robbers vented their frustration by breaking down the doors and windows, cutting
up the beds and setting fire to the piled-up clothes.6 The health of both Jane Hobson and Mrs. Brown suffered from the stresses
and strains of life in Hong Kong. Jane had to be taken back to England, but
died at sea in sight of the white cliffs of Dover. Dr. Hobson, while on holiday in
England, found himself a new wife. He married Rachel Morrison, the daughter of Dr. Robert Morrison. The couple returned to the East but, from then on
concentrated most of their missionary efforts in Canton, where Hobson did much to popularize Western medicine by his writings, such as the Treatise on Physiology published in May 1854. The Browns left Hong Kong in 1847 because of the ill
health of Mrs. Brown. They took with them to Connecticut six of the older boys from the school, thus beginning an educational connection between China and America and, in particular, between China and Yale College that was to become
very influential in spurring the later reform movement in China. The remaining
boys were sent to Rev. James Legge��s Anglo-Chinese College.
Rev. Dr. James Legge (1815�V97) is a very interesting character who does not seem to fit the orientalist mould as described by Edward Said. As Anthony Sweeting says: ��His manifest respect for Confucian tradition and his refusal to treat Chinese Culture in general as some sort of passive and inferior ��other�� makes Legge stand rather apart from his contemporaries��. 7 As a young man, he had been inspired to follow in the footsteps of Rev. William Milne, who came from Legge��s home town of Huntley near Aberdeen. After training, he and his young bride, Mary Isabella Legge [9/17/9], the daughter of a Scottish pastor, joined Rachel and Benjamin Hobson on the Eliza Stuart to sail to China. Legge spent his early years in the missionary field at the Anglo-Chinese (Ying Wah) College in Malacca. In 1843, he moved the college and seminary to Hong Kong. His many great achievements over the long years from 1843 to 1876 in Hong Kong and also, after he had been appointed the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, were perhaps partly due to his lifelong habit of waking up at 3.00 a.m. and working for twenty out of twenty-four hours each day. In 1845, with the help of Hobson, he founded the Union Chapel as well as a chapel for Cantonese speakers. His active ministry there as the first pastor included work among soldiers, sailors and convicts. His sermons were well received and influential enough for the subject of them in the coming weeks to be published in the local papers. His yearly sermon addressed to the clerks and assistants of the colony for example was often commented on
by the papers. Young men such as John Wright, the diarist and post office clerk,
found it worthwhile to attend the Union Church as well as the cathedral. Legge was among those who became disillusioned with the impediments to working as a missionary in Hong Kong and asked the L.M.S. directors repeatedly for permission to move to Canton, going so far as to declare in 1852: ��If we had the work of 1842, 43, and 44 to do again, we should not think of establishing ourselves in Hong Kong as we have done��.8
In Hong Kong, Legge began his lifelong work, translating the Chinese classics into English, which endeavour he considered crucial to his mission. Many
of these first scholarly translations have not yet been improved on, in spite of some
criticisms from later scholars. Legge believed that only an understanding of each other��s cultures could bring about that meeting of minds that was necessary for the spread of Christianity in China. He explained his attitude to Confucianism in relation to Christianity:
So shall missionaries in China come fully to understand the work they have to do; and the more they avoid driving their carriage over the Master��s grave,
[the grave of Confucius] the more likely are they soon to see Jesus enthroned
in His room in the hearts of the people.9
But Legge��s life in Hong Kong was to be a constant battle against ill health, reversal, and disappointment. In November 1845, he was so ill with dysentery that he had to leave for England, returning only in the summer of 1848. His fourth child, Anne Murray Legge [9/17/10], died from a lingering illness only two months after their return to Hong Kong. His school and seminary were considered a failure by 1851, and he was forced to close them.
His wife��s household duties must have overtaxed her strength. She wrote
to the L.M.S. that it was very difficult to find time for letter writing: ��what with
our own family duties and the domestic care of both boys and girls, in all thirty-eight young men and children, and our almost constant stream of missionary visitors��.10 In October 1852 Mary Isabella Legge died, aged only thirty-two, while giving birth to a stillborn son. She had been suffering from recurring bouts of diarrhoea and sickness. Dr. Hobson had tended her and Mrs. Hobson and Helen Chalmers [23/3/4] were at her deathbed as well as James Legge and
two of their three surviving daughters. At the funeral, Rev. Dr. William Dean of
the American Baptist Missionary Union
��offered an impressive prayer�� over her grave.
The Friend of China commented on the rank and number of people attending Mary Isabella Legge��s funeral:
Although the deceased was by principle and education a dissenter, and the wife and daughter of eminent dissenting ministers, we observed among others giving testimony of their esteem, his Lordship, the Bishop of Victoria, together with his Excellency, Her Majesty��s Plenipotentiary, the
Chinese Secretary [Karl Gutzlaff] and the Colonial surgeon [Dr. Morrison] and several other officials.11
This seems to show that the Legges may have been admired and respected for their work and their sincerity, but the Church of England held sway in the social scale. Mary Isabella Legge had been teaching several girls and their care was passed to Helen Chalmers newly sent out by the L.M.S. Her husband, John Chalmers [23/3/4], wrote back to the London Missionary Society, fearing that it would be too great an undertaking for Helen with her short experience in the East and lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. The Chalmers both spent the rest of their lives in Hong Kong. A family monument [23/3/4] commemorates Helen who died in 1897 and John who died in 1899 and their son, James Legge Chalmers, who died in 1914 when a commissioner in the Chinese Maritime Customs, as well as a grandson, Peter J.N. Stewart, a journalist in Hong Kong
who died in 1978.
Perhaps James Legge��s most important contribution to Hong Kong people lay in the field of education where he believed that a practical general secular education which was not backed by any particular religion or sect should be
available to any Chinese who wanted it. In this he was influenced by the failure
of his seminary. He felt very differently about his school which remained an inspiration for him:

From first to last the pupils amounted to seventy boys. The progress made
by the mass in their studies was considerable. Nearly a third of them made a profession of Christianity. Very few of them have disgraced that profession while several have adorned it. They have shown great strength of principle, maintaining integrity and holding a quiet onward course of consistency and usefulness. I believe there are few schools in England of which the results, so
far as comparison of widely different conditions can be drawn, have turned
out more satisfactorily.12
After earlier and unsuccessful attempts to persuade Sir John Davis to sanction the founding of a free school such as already existed in Singapore and Penang, Legge
played a major role on Hong Kong��s Education Committee from 1853 to 1857 and
then on the Board of Education from 1860 to 1865 to bring this dream to fruition. It was in this role that he inspired the first headmaster, Frederick Stewart [23/5/7], and helped guide the Central School towards maturity.
The American Missionaries
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (A.B.C.F.M.) and the Baptist Mission were active in Hong Kong from its earliest days. The Boston-based A.B.C.F.M. was the first and largest U.S. mission to focus on preaching overseas. It was formed out of an alliance, later to break down, between the Presbyterian and the Congregational Churches in the United States. Its
teaching was deeply influenced by the New Haven Theology which taught free
will, individual responsibility and self reliance through hard work, ideal virtues in an era of frontier dreams and westward expansion.13 Dr. Dyer Ball, who was among the first missionaries to come to Hong Kong, was deeply committed to self-improvement through education, having already founded a successful school in Charleston before leaving for the Far East, and was also a trained doctor.
He had married Lucy Mills in 1827, when he was attending lectures at the New
Haven Theological College. The couple had left New York for China in 1838 arriving in Hong Kong from Macau in 1843 in the hope that Hong Kong would prove healthier than Macau. It did not, and Lucy Dyer Ball [11A/5/7] died in June 1844 at the age of thirty-seven. She was followed by two of her small sons, Mills Bridgeman [11A/3/13] who died aged two at Macau in August 1844 and Frederick Joseph [11A/3/12] who died aged five just over one year later, leaving
Dr. Ball at nearly fifty years old with two small daughters to bring up. In Hong
Kong, Ball joined forces with the missionaries sent by the American Baptist
Mission, Rev. J. Lewis Shuck and Dr. William Dean and together they opened a
chapel on Queen��s Road in July 1842, a school in 1844 and a Chinese Teochiu (Chiu
Chau) church and a dispensary in Sheung Wan market.14
The very first missionaries to arrive in Hong Kong were the Shuck family. The Shucks left Macau for Hong Kong in March 1842. J. Lewis Shuck agreed to edit the Friend of China and the Hong Kong Gazette for the first year of publication in return for board and $50 a month. The first edition of the paper was issued on 22 March of that year under the editorship of Shuck and James White. Henrietta, in a letter home, wrote that she was one of the first women to reside in Hong Kong and that she was quite satisfied with her life there in spite of their being ��deprived of many comforts and of society��. 15 Henrietta Shuck [11A/3/9], the daughter of Rev. Addison Hall of Virginia, had married J. Lewis Shuck in 1835 when only seventeen. She left almost immediately for China and gave birth to her first son in Singapore, leaving soon after with her newborn baby for the nineteen-day journey by sailing boat for Macau. In 1838, Henrietta was gravely ill and nursed back to health by a Mrs. King. Henrietta is described as a typical missionary wife with her hair swept behind her ears in braids fastened together at the nape of her neck, and wearing a voluminous, dark, long-sleeved dress fastened down the front with plain fastenings, a wide white collar and a white apron over the dress. When she walked with a group of missionaries across Hong Kong Island in 1839 on a prospecting trip, Henrietta became the first known Western woman to set foot in Hong Kong. Although the First Opium War brought devastation and death to the cities it touched in China, the Shucks saw it as ��a means of opening the eyes of these blind and ignorant people��. Henrietta wrote in a letter to her father: ��Doors are flying open and missionaries carrying the bread of
life are entering��. In 1842, Dr. and Mrs. Dean came from Bangkok to join the Shuck family.
While Dean concentrated his missionary efforts among the Teochiu, his wife
helped in the Shuck household. Theodosia Dean [11A/3/6] was Dean��s second
wife, the first having died and been buried in Singapore. Theodosia Barker had come out to Macau in 1837 as a young girl of seventeen, sent by the British Female
Education Society to help in the school for blind Chinese girls set up by Mary
Gutzlaff, the second wife of the German missionary Karl Gutzlaff. It was said that Theodosia had left the Gutzlaff household due to the treatment she had received at the hands of Mary Gutzlaff to live with the same Mrs. King who had nursed
Henrietta Shuck back to health. According to a letter from the F.E.S.: ��Most undue influence was used to persuade her to marry Mr. Dean, contrary to the
known regulations of the Society, as a more agreeable expedient to Mrs. Gutzlaff than her remaining in Macao under another roof��. Theodosia was the first of the
missionary wives to die when she caught smallpox from one of the Chinese girls being educated by them in the girls�� school and living in the household. She died in March 1843 aged only twenty-four years. Her starkly Nonconformist epitaph was: ��Let me die the death of the righteous��. Dean left to take his two small daughters, Matilda and Fanny, back to the United States. Henrietta wrote that she missed Theodosia greatly as she was ��kind enough to take charge of her children and pupils two hours a day and give them instruction. They were making astonishingly good progress and the arrangement relieved me greatly��.16
A feeling of optimism must have swept the ranks of the Nonconformists when the various Nonconformist schools joined hands to celebrate the opening of the American missionaries�� school on 23 September 1844. The buildings were substantial. The new Bazaar chapel was two storeys high with a dispensary, book depository and seven rooms for native preachers.17 Upstairs there was an auditory and a vestry. The boys�� schoolhouse was a good-sized, two-storey building and twenty boys were enrolled. The building for the six girls was smaller. The pupils from the Morrison Educational Society School and those from the Anglo-Chinese College joined Deane��s Teochiu boys, making a grand total
of over fifty students for the opening service
and tea.
The happy intelligent faces of the majority of the assembled children gave promise that at a future date by the blessing of God, many of these young heathens may become teachers of their

countrymen and, feeling the saving power of God in their hearts, become instruments in the conversion of multitudes to our pure and holy faith.18
Yet the strains of missionary life coupled with child-bearing were beginning to tell on Henrietta. In her last letter dated 30 October 1844, Henrietta wrote:
I have not been free from care and trouble for with so large a family as mine, there must necessarily be great anxiety. But I trust I have been able to bear up under all. At one time I had two mission families living with us, thirty children; besides I had to instruct the children and superintend all and I often felt sad and pressed down with care.
A fourth baby had been born in 1843 and Henrietta felt the added burden of visiting the soldiers�� wives whom she described as:
The most destitute set of human beings I ever saw. Many of them have not
a second dress or garment of any kind. I find use for all my old clothes and
I have begged the other ladies for their �K. The great cause of their distress
has been a fire, which broke out and consumed, not only their houses (which
were made of matting), but everything they possessed.19
She continued that their condition in the cold weather of Hong Kong��s winter was ��worse than that of the slaves in Virginia, notwithstanding the English speak so harshly of American slavery��. Henrietta did not long outlive Theodosia. She

10.5. Headstone in memory of Henrietta Shuck, the first Western
woman to set foot in Hong Kong, d. 27.11.1844.
struggled on, coping with her large household and her four children including a frail little daughter who suffered constantly from diarrhoea, another pregnancy
and weak health. Henrietta died aged twenty-seven giving birth to her fifth child,
a healthy baby son, not much more than nine months after the previous birth. ��At two o��clock, a powerful and sudden prostration took place and every effort and prayer and remedy proving unavailing. At three o��clock her pure spirit winged its flight to the bosom of her God and Saviour��. 20 Her funeral was said to have been the largest so far in the colony, so widely was she loved and esteemed by all classes, high and low, foreign and native. The European police force, about forty in number, asked for the ��sad privilege of being permitted to bear her remains to the grave��.
J. Lewis Shuck married again in 1847 and his next wife died in Shanghai, one
day after giving birth, aged twenty-seven. He then married for a third time. Four
female missionaries including Henrietta Shuck had left America in 1839 and when
the last of the four died in 1845, leaving behind three small children, it was shown that the life expectancy of an American woman missionary in China was less than four years.
Yet another Baptist missionary wife, Anna Johnson [9/16/12], died in June 1848, aged twenty-six years. She had been born in Eastport, Maine. Rev. John
Johnson went on, in 1851, to marry a Miss Wakker of the Christian Union, who had come from Germany to help Karl Gutzlaff in his missionary work.
The American missionaries felt that China proper would be a more fruitful field for their endeavours and moved away from Hong Kong. Rev. Dyer Ball moved to Canton in August 1845 and in the next year married a Scottish missionary, Isabella Robertson. There Rev. Ball pursued his medical, educational and evangelical work successfully until his death in 1866. A month later, in September, Rev. Shuck journeyed to Canton to negotiate permission to move there. He left
Hong Kong the following year. It must have been a difficult decision considering the amount in time, effort and money they had invested in Hong Kong.
Gutzlaff, the Christian Union and the German and Basel Missionaries
Standing in a class of his own for his charisma, dynamism, drive and optimism in the missionary field is the controversial figure of Karl Frederick August Gutzlaff [13/8/4], the first Lutheran Missionary to come to China. Gutzlaff was born in Pomerania, Germany, where he is said to have begun his adult life as an apprentice to a stay-maker. He later trained with the Netherlands Missionary
Society, first arriving in the East in 1826. He had a great talent for languages and by the time he came to Hong Kong, he was fluent in Fukkien, Cantonese, Hakka and Mandarin. When dressed as a local with a false queue, he could pass himself off as Chinese: ��Perhaps no foreigner of the age has more thoroughly identified himself with the [Chinese] people�K. Even in personal appearance, the learned gentleman has, in a degree, become Chinese��. 21 Before the First Opium War, Gutzlaff had travelled the coasts of China in opium clippers belonging to William
Jardine as translator and interpreter. He proved very useful in the talk and
bargaining that preceded the sale of the then-officially banned drug, opium, to the local mandarins. Gutzlaff considered the pay-off sufficiently valuable. It gave him
the chance to preach to the natives along the way and distribute his pills, potions
and religious tracts. Gutzlaff, in his Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China, described what he saw as the widening gulf between the Europeans and the Chinese:
We regret that the possession of the gospel has not taught Europeans more forbearance and long-suffering. Had these been oftener practised on suitable
occasions, we should have had fewer causes of complaint against the Chinese. But it is not strange, that Europeans, destitute of the spirit of meekness, on coming to this country, and finding themselves treated as barbarians by a nation so evidently below them in civilization, should feel their indignation aroused, and should retaliate insolence for insolence and dislike for hatred. Thus the line of separation became broader and broader.22
Gutzlaff had also accompanied the Expeditionary Force to Chusan in the
First Opium War as interpreter to General Gough, following him into battle through a hail of bullets. Then, due to his language abilities, Gutzlaff was made
chief magistrate of that island. In 1843, on the death of John Robert Morrison, he became chief Chinese interpreter and then registrar general in the Hong Kong government. Meanwhile, starting in June 1844, he drew together a body of Chinese in the Christian Union. These men after instruction were sent to the
interior of China to distribute tracts and spread the word of God. Gutzlaff worked
every hour God gave him on his mission to convert China. At dawn, he left his
house for the office where he taught his colporteurs for four or five hours before the official day��s work began. In the evening, classes for twenty to thirty ��respectable
Chinese�� were held in his house. On Sundays, he was away by the break of day to the Kowloon hills ��and was preaching the Gospel in Chinese hamlets which had never been entered by any other foreigners��. 23 As his organization grew Gutzlaff needed help and, after applying to his native land, was put in touch with the Basel Evangelical Mission in Switzerland who sent out two of their highly trained missionaries.
Theodore Hamberg [4/20/4] from Stockholm and Rudolph Lechler arrived
in March 1847 to lay the foundations for the development of the influential
Basel Mission in South China. Help also came from the Rhenish mission, and
from the Berlin Woman��s Missionary Society who set up a foundling hospital out of which grew the Hildesheim Mission for the Blind. Gutzlaff insisted that
each of his European assistants adopt Chinese dress and cuisine, live among
the Chinese and learn a specific Chinese dialect. Hamberg, for example, learnt
Hakka, the dialect of a people originally from Northern China who had settled in the hillier and less fertile land in the neighbourhood and
specialized in stone cutting. When Gutzlaff visited Europe in 1849 to raise funds, he left
Hamberg in charge of the Christian Union. Questions were asked, and in the subsequent investigations, it was discovered that, of the 280 members of the Union, 50 were opium smokers
and between 70 and 80 had given false names
and places of work. Furthermore a number of Chinese colporteurs had been falsifying their accounts. Some members had remained in Hong Kong and pocketed the money meant
for expenses and the profits from the sale of the
tracts which they were supposed to distribute free of charge on the mainland. For example, Jiang Jiao Ren, who later became a preacher and a respected elder of the church at Lilang, confessed:


Each person tried to win the favour of Dr. Gutzlaff in order to obtain money. None of us thought about pleasing God. At that time, I expressed the wish to return to Guangxi in order to proclaim the gospel
to my fellow countrymen. What I really
wanted however was the money allotted
for such purposes.24
Jiang never went to Guangxi but returned
to his home village at Lilang. When he came
back to Hong Kong in January 1850 he handed in a false diary of preachings. The Basel missionary, Hamberg, immediately began dismissing those members he considered untrustworthy.
On his return from Europe, these discoveries dropped like a bombshell on
a much angered and saddened Gutzlaff and may have hastened his death in 1851
from kidney disease complicated by gout. Gutzlaff has been aptly described by
Arthur Waley as ��A cross between parson and
pirate, charlatan and genius, philanthropist and crook��. 25 Needless to say, Hamberg had made enemies among the colporteurs. They accused him of going on a boat with the wife of a Christian Union member, and there caressing her and speaking to her of things other than the gospel. Perhaps these accusations led to Hamberg��s request that the Basel Mission send him out a wife. It was common practice for the society in Switzerland to pick suitable
girls as wives for their missionaries in the field
and send them off to marry a man they had never even seen. Fraulein Louisa Mutander arrived in Hong Kong in September 1851 and was married on the thirteenth of the month to Hamberg. Her life cannot have been easy. In 1853 Hamberg opened a mission


twenty-five miles inland in a Hakka village where, according to the editor of the
Friend of China: ��The lawless disorders against civil order in the neighbourhood has placed him in the disagreeable situation of having as much to depend for the safety of himself and his wife upon the fear of his skill as a marksman as much as upon any respect for his peaceful calling��.26 He produced the first dictionary of the Hakka language and wrote an illuminating account of the beliefs of the Taiping rebels entitled The Visions of Hung Taue-Tseuin, which in July 1854 was advertised for sale at John and James Lemon��s stationery shop.27 Hamberg died in May 1854 of dysentery, leaving his wife and two sons to find their way back to Sweden. Louisa lost one of her sons on board the ship. The following year her second son died of cholera and Louisa herself died four days after him.
At the time of the Second Opium War, when there was a price on every
European head, five missionaries, including Lechler, Lobscheid, Genaehr, Philipp Winnes and Friedrich Louis [8/5/3] were besieged by rebels at Pukak not far from Hong Kong. An expedition of seamen from HMS Winchester and a military detachment set out to their rescue in the Sir Charles Forbes which had
been offered for the occasion by merchant David Sassoon. Help arrived in the nick of time for Rev. Philipp Winnes, who was being held with a sword at his throat while the mob were ransacking his house and demanding a heavy ransom. Winnes
was not the only missionary to have luck on his side:
Mr. Lobscheid��s escape might well be termed miraculous. On the mob forcing his doors, he escaped to the roof and running over the tops of the adjacent houses, leapt down a height of eighteen feet and ran through the rice fields. He failed to clear a rivulet �K jumping into the water up to his armpits. His pursuers were hard upon him, dashing large stones in the water and thrusting their spears in every direction while some of them got into the water within a foot or two of where he was.�K Finally Mr. Lobscheid, after having been nearly three hours in the water, came out and a friendly hand supplied some clothes.28
William Lobscheid of the Chinese Evangelization Society had lost his wife,
Alwine Lobscheid [16Cii/7/22], who died in childbirth in August 1851 aged twenty-nine. She had been in Hong Kong less than one year and had been very
ill from Hong Kong fever the previous October. While he was away on a mission
in the mainland in April 1854, Rudolph Lechler��s wife also died in Hong Kong of diarrhoea aged thirty-one. Her grave has not been found in the Cemetery. Lechler and Lobscheid both married again.29
The contributions of these highly trained and educated missionaries from Germany were invaluable. The Basel missionaries were especially valued by the government for their intimate knowledge of the local Chinese people and their dialects. The regard that these remarkably able, intelligent and well-trained missionaries were accorded by the society of their time is perhaps summed up in the article written on the departure of Lobscheid in 1861 on sick leave:
Though a native of Germany, his written English is superior to that of most Englishmen. In several important respects we differed from the opinions of Mr. Lobscheid but even when so differing, it was impossible not to admire the extensive erudition which he brought to illustrate his views and the philanthropic zeal with which they were inspired�K. He displayed that higher virtue which can forgive an enemy and never forgot the courtesies of a Christian gentleman. Such men are rare in China.30


The Basel Mission set up a number of schools and churches and a foundling home in Hong Kong. Many of these institutions continue to thrive today in one form or another, including the well-known Ebenezer School & Home for the Visually Impaired.
By the 1850s the climate of opinion against the Chinese was hardening, the
downturn in the economy had taken the edge off the optimism and much needed
funds for the missionaries were drying up. Hong Kong was no longer seen as a good centre for missionary activity. The Medical Mission in Hong Kong was in dire straits, many merchants having ceased to subscribe. The Friend of China lamented: ��The trivial duty of calling a meeting has been neglected for the space of two years��. Two attempts were made during the month of October to hold a
meeting of subscribers to the fund, ��but in both instances have proved ineffectual
and the Society may now be considered to have fallen to the ground�K. The dissolution is greatly to be deplored��.31 Dr. Hirschberg, who had taken Dr. Dyer Ball��s place at the M.M.S. hospital, was sent by the London Missionary Society to Amoy and there was no-one to replace him in Hong Kong. The clinics for the Chinese ceased to function. The Morrison Education Society languished after the departure of Rev. Samuel Brown. In 1856, the Anglo-Chinese College and Seminary were closed by Rev. Legge, who felt that they had failed. The Christian Union had been exposed to some degree as a hollow sham. The possible reasons for these failures and for the abandonment of Hong Kong by a number of missionaries shed some light on the society they left behind.
Missionary Disillusionment
A hardening of racial prejudice in these years made the Hong Kong Europeans take a second look at the usefulness of attempting to educate Chinese boys. The feelings of doubt and hesitancy about spending large amounts on educating a handful of Chinese boys from poor backgrounds were exacerbated by a rash of court cases in 1851, involving boys from the Anglo-Chinese school. In February, Tam Achuen was convicted of forgery. The Friend of China commented: ��The malpractice of knowledge imparted to him by this country was an ungrateful return for misdirected kindness and tends to check all desire to raise the Chinese from their present station��. 32 Then, in July, Tong Ayoke was tried for conspiracy to extort money from brothel keepers, both boys being the products of M.E.S. Lastly, Ungh Assow, a boy from the Anglo-Chinese College, was charged with
robbery, when bills of exchange worth $10,998 disappeared. At this point the
newspaper wrote damningly: ��Give a Chinese boy an English education and you give him the means of becoming a greater rogue than he was born��. Further the whole aim of the education the boys received in the Anglo-Chinese College and Seminary had been to produce native preachers who would spread the word of God. But once the youngsters had a good grasp of English they could earn far more as, for instance, interpreters in the courts, ��leaving them to abandon the less alluring prospects of quiet connection with the missionaries��. It was for this reason that a dejected James Legge disbanded the college and seminary in 1856.
Rev. Joseph Smith who, later in 1856 while he was bishop of Victoria, was to lose his two-year-old son, Andrew Brandrum Smith [7/28/6], had in 1846�V47 made an exploratory visit to Hong Kong and China. In the ensuing book about his visit, he argued that Hong Kong had an ��unpromising and uninviting Missionary character��. 33 Beside the insalubrious climate and the many regional dialects spoken there, he listed as reasons the social characteristics of the local Chinese population and of the Europeans. He found the Europeans to be rough and racist in their attitude to the Chinese and irreligious in their lifestyles. The example they set to the Chinese seriously disadvantaged the work of evangelization. ��Scenes frequently occur in the public streets and in the interior of houses which are calculated to place the countrymen of the missionaries in an unfavourable aspect before the native mind��. 34 Besides ��Sabbath desecration��, he was dismayed by what he had seen of the drinking and whoring in the taverns and brothels of the port. Furthermore he disapproved of the way the government dealt with its Chinese population, saying that they were treated as a ��degraded race��. He particularly disliked the laws that enforced passes on the Chinese out after dark and the necessity for them to carry lanterns:
The few Chinese who profess Christianity are not exempted. Some of them have frequently given utterance to the most impassioned indignation when speaking of the cases of harsh treatment to which they are exposed, �X only to return to their native soil alienated with prejudice and heart burnings increased to a tenfold degree to spread abroad disaffection to Hong Kong
and hatred of the Western Barbarians.35
A further reason given was the calibre of the Chinese in Hong Kong. Smith
wrote that: ��They consisted of the lowest dregs of native society�� who ��flock to the
British settlement in the hope of gain or plunder��. 36 He considered it easier to preach to a settled community with educated leaders. The Hong Kong Chinese of the early days were largely male, migratory and illiterate, ��consequently shutting out an important channel of religious instruction��. 37 It was useless to produce tracts and translate the Bible into Chinese for those who could not read. It was thought that the missionaries would have a better chance of meeting and converting the higher class Chinese in Canton.
The deepening rift between the merchants and the Nonconformists over the opium trade soured relationships and may have led to a drying up of funding. In 1853, Rev. Legge was unable to pay the amount required for the building of a
chapel and hospital in Upper Bazaar and was forced to pay the outstanding $46.86
from money sent for other purposes by admirers in Leicester. The Friend of China commented:
Some supporters from L.M.S. are known to entertain extraordinary ideas about the propriety of accepting donations from people who make money out of opium�K. This, we suppose, accounts for the apparent determination to make no general application for funds.38
Again, later in the same year Dr. Hirschberg, the L.M.S. missionary doctor, publicly announced that funds for the support of the hospital should never be provided from the pockets of dealers in opium.39 This antagonism to their most lucrative trade may have driven the Scottish merchants, who were previously generous supporters of L.M.S. and whose roots were in the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, into the arms of the less critical Church of England. Certainly when the subscription opened for funds to build a Protestant cathedral, Jardine, Matheson & Co. topped the list with a donation of $500 to the governor��s $150.40 Although they could not match the magnificence of the Dent contribution totalling
$1,050, this sum gave David Jardine a seat at the very front of the cathedral. His
attendance at the cathedral services rather than at the chapel would also have bolstered his social standing.
The rift was also partly due to the fiery nature of the Nonconformist preachings which struck a wrong note with their congregations. The editor of the Friend of China regretted: ��The exhibitions of fanaticism, bigotry and religious intolerance are so frequent, so discreditable and so injurious to religion
itself��. He added that the sects ��should not endeavour to intimidate them by fiery
denunciations, by pharasaical ravings or shock them by sectarian intolerance��. 41 The Nonconformists were well known for the pointed denunciations from the pulpit of what they considered immoral. Many old China hands and merchants had formed quiet liaisons with Chinese girls and the amount of drinking at all levels of society dismayed the clergy.
A further factor was the dire poverty of many of the Chinese in Hong Kong and their need to obtain money and sustenance in whatever way they could. This gave rise to the suspicion that conversions were less than sincere. The papers talked of ��Rice Christians��. Legge was accused of drawing the vagrants of the bazaar to his chapel by the sound of the gong and the promise of a good dinner: ��Agents in every missionary society in Hong Kong are liable to the very serious charge of holding out the mercenary motive of a good dinner to induce the lowest of the Chinese population to attend their preaching��. 42 For these reasons, the treaty ports became the new centres for missionary endeavour leaving Hong Kong to go its own rather irreligious way. The missionaries who stayed on in Hong Kong at this time and continued to make steady progress were mainly the Roman Catholics.
Catholic Missionaries
One cannot leave the subject of missionary endeavours without a mention of Emily Bowring, who electrified the society that surrounded the governor by running away to become a nun. The Roman Catholic Church had not been idle in Hong Kong. The Apostolic Prefecture of Hong Kong had been created as early as 22 April 1841. Four Sisters of the St. Paul de Chartres order arrived from France in September 1848. They opened the Foundling Home and Orphanage. But as the number of Portuguese arriving in the territory increased and more people converted to the Catholic faith, more help was needed. At the request of the Italian Prefect Apostolic, Father Aloysius Ambrosi, six Italian sisters of the Cannossian Order landed in Hong Kong on 12 April 1860.
Meanwhile, before she left Britain, the governor��s daughter, Emily Bowring, the eighth child in the Bowring family of ten children, had followed her brother Charles into the Catholic Church. They had both been influenced by the Oxford Movement to leave the Unitarian faith of their father. Charles had been cut out of his father��s will and banned from the family home when he became a Jesuit. By the time Emily converted, her father was a little more reconciled, and she accompanied him to Hong Kong where she helped out on social occasions, but only after going to the Catholic Church daily for mass and communion. When her father was about to leave Hong Kong, Emily decided to throw in her lot with the soon-to-arrive Cannossian sisters. The Cannossian records reported the event:
Not finding her about, the father concluded she must have gone on board already �K but how despairingly sad was his discovery that his daughter was
no where to be found on board! What decision was there to be taken when the final warning had already been given, the anchors already weighed, the
engine already belching smoke out of the funnel? Nothing was there to be done at the moment, except to leave his beloved daughter in the hands of God knows who �K and later, under a wave of bitter sorrow, write threatening letters to friends, acquaintances, newspapers, begging to retrace for him his lost treasure�K his beloved daughter �K in vain.43
Emily meanwhile waited out the time until the arrival of the Cannossians at the house of the Portuguese chief clerk, Leonardo d��Almada e Castro.
Emily was a godsend to the nuns from Italy who spoke little English. She became headmistress of the English school and translated between English, Portuguese and Italian whenever needed. She gave the convent a social cachet that must have helped the nuns recruit girls to the school. Sister Aloysia Emily
Bowring died in August 1870 and is buried in St. Michael��s Catholic Cemetery in
Happy Valley, in the Cannossian sisters�� plot to the left of the main path. Nearly opposite on the other side of the path is the chest tomb of her guardian and protector during the year she waited for the nuns�� arrival, Leonardo d��Almada e Castro. In spite of all the changes in Hong Kong, the Cannossian convent still occupies the same site that it did in the 1860s and the site where the sisters of St.
Paul de Chartres set up their convent, school and orphanage in Wan Chai is still
occupied by Roman Catholic institutes.
Chapter 11 The Americans
The American Navy
A surprising number of sailors from the U.S. Navy were buried in the Cemetery
during these early years, many being members of the largest American fleet ever
assembled up to that time. Of the four earliest sailors, who were all from the U.S. Navy steam ship Constellation, three died on the same day, 14 September 1842. The most senior was Lieutenant Lewin Handy [11A/5/10] who was twenty-nine years old. The other two were G.W. York [11A/10/2] of Bangor, Maine and E.J. Hume [11A/8/1]. It would be interesting to know whether these three deaths had some related cause. The fourth sailor, Robert Brand [11B/2/1], ��beloved son of John Heal and Jane Brand��, died aged twenty but the date of his death in October 184? is too faded to be read.
The squadron, which provided the headstones of the majority of American sailors buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery during these early years, was led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry. It was on a historic mission to open up Japanese ports to American trade. Hong Kong was a convenient stopping off place to

replenish supplies and repair vessels, which had just crossed the Pacific. A port of call in Japan for the shipping which had made the long journey across the Pacific
Ocean was particularly sought after at a time when American commercial ties with China were expanding so rapidly. Japan had, up to this time, maintained a policy of strict isolation with only the Dutch allowed limited access to its ports. In 1825, Japan had decreed that any foreign ship approaching its shore would be
fired on and destroyed, and foreigners attempting to land would be killed. Two previous attempts to open Japanese harbours to American ships in 1846 and 1849
had failed. This time, the preparations of Commodore Perry were immaculate and his timing fortuitous. The tide of opinion in Japan was turning against the policy of rigid isolation. So there was a sense of jubilation when the talks were going so well that an exchange of presents was arranged. The American presents included an entire miniature train set with engine, tender and passenger carriage plus track whose circuit measured fifty yards in diameter. Japanese officials perched on top of the engine or clung to the top of the carriage as they were whisked round at speeds of up to forty miles per hour. Other presents included a magnetic telegraph system of over one mile in length down which messages could be passed. The signing of the treaty with Japan in March 1854 was of enormous
significance to both Japan and America.
Twenty-three sailors have headstones dating from between 1853 and 1855. The highest ranking of these sailors was James Hendricks [10/8/1], captain of the USS Plymouth, who died in 1854. The Plymouth, a 22-gun sloop-of-war, was the flagship of the East Indies squadron. The ship was scuttled in the Norfolk Naval dockyard in 1861 to prevent it falling into Confederate hands. Among the sailors from the squadron who died at the hands of pirates, six were killed during what may have been the first example of Anglo-American co-operation
since the War of American Independence.


combined operation against pirates.
One of the largest monuments in the Cemetery once stood in Leighton Road
and was moved to its present site in the Cemetery to relieve traffic congestion. It
is dedicated jointly to the dead of the steamer sloop, HMS Rattler, and the steam frigate USS Powhatan [21A/1/33]. Dating from August 1853, it commemorates four British sailors from Rattler and five Americans from the Powhatan ��who fell in a combined boat attack on a fleet of piratical junks off Kuhlan�� about 150 miles south-east of Hong Kong.1 The description of the fight in the Gazette praised the pirates for their courage
although they were fighting for the wrong
cause. According to the inscription, on another headstone, one sailor, Seaman
W.M.T. Graves [15/1/14A] from Pennsylvania serving on the Vandalia, ��was accidently killed during an attack on pirates near Lantao Island on May 18, 1855��. The death of another seaman, John Morrison [16Cii/11/4] from the Macedonia, was described by Captain George Henry Preble in his diary entry for 13 November 1854. It seems a combined force of Portuguese, British and American ships confronted the pirates of Kuhlan Bay destroying forty-seven pirate junks, burning three towns and breaking up a

pirate depot that had defied the Chinese government for over five years:
The only casualty in effecting this victory was the death of one of my men, John Morrison, killed by a shot in the head�K. My impression is that he was shot by some of the John Bulls who were foraging and shooting chickens regardless of orders or discipline. Our men, I am happy to say, behaved better and were kept under control.2
This incident could not have improved the relationships between the British and the American forces.
A very unusual and poignant account of the death of one American sailor gives us a graphic picture of the drama of such moments. John Williams [16Cii/10/7], aged twenty-two years, was described by Bayard Taylor, then a clerk on the paddle frigate, USS Susquehanna, as a ��strong, dark lusty fellow��. He would
come every evening to sling Taylor��s hammock. Williams was numbered fourth of the maintop men, ��generally the picked men of the ship��. Williams had asked
Taylor whether it would be possible to get a release from the service: ��His mother, he said, had died, and some property had fallen to him, which he wished to secure��. Given a negative answer he looked depressed
and said: ��Well, sir, it is the last cruise I shall
ever make��. Bayard continued with a moving account of the poor young sailor��s death:
I had not slept more than two hours, when my sleep was suddenly broken by a cry �X a wild gurgling despairing cry which still rings in my ears whenever I think of that night�K. I sprang to one of the windows, looked out and saw a hand beating the water blindly and convulsively in the eddy of the rudder. I was about to spring out when a coil of rope fell in the water and the hand grasped it. A horrible phosphorescent light shone around the body struggling beneath the surface�K.

The hand let go its weak hold�K. Just beyond �X just out of their reach �X [the men in a dinghy] a head rose for an instant to the surface once more, making
a ring of ghastly light. There was one bubble, and it sank forever�K. The
drowned man was none other than John Williams.
It was thought that he had either fallen asleep or lost his balance and keeled over while resting on an upturned bucket during his watch: ��His body was found, however, two or three weeks later �K unmutilated, and was placed in the cemetery at Hong Kong where a tomb-stone was erected over it by his messmates��.3
It is worth noting that no less than twenty-five ordinary American sailors were commemorated with headstones at a time when so few stones survive to commemorate British sailors.
American Business
American citizens had long been among the most active in the region. By 1844,
when the United States signed the first Treaty of Peace, Amity and Commerce
with the Chinese Empire, tea made up 80 percent of the total exports from China to the United States with the main import being opium. Russell & Co., A. Heard & Co., Olyphant & Co. and Bush & Co. were among the largest American
companies. F.T. Bush, the first American consul in Hong Kong, was extremely
active in the social life of the colony. His house was used as a meeting place for various societies including the Society for Relief of the Destitute Sick.
Beside the larger American merchant houses, U.S. citizens had set up a number of smaller-scale businesses in Hong Kong. American ships passing through Hong Kong could replenish their stores from American ships�� chandlers like that of Captain Nathaniel Crosby Junior [10/7/6]. Two of Crosby��s daughters married in St. John��s Cathedral, one to Captain Smith of the Annie Buckman and the other to Captain Samuel C. Woodruff of Long Island, New York. When Crosby died of heart disease in December 1856 aged forty-six years, his daughter and Captain Woodruff continued the business on the Praya. Americans could also repair their vessels at Emeny��s yard and from 1853, drink at a tavern called Uncle Tom��s Cabin owned by the New Yorker, Edward Thomas [9/2/1]. He died in July 1859 aged twenty-nine, leaving his estate to his wife, Eudocia, who bravely continued to run the tavern even after she was robbed of her jewellery by her servant.
Five captains of American ships found their way in this period into the Cemetery, including Captain Elias Elwell [9/14/14] of the Arcatus from Boston who died in 1846 at the advanced age of sixty and Latham
B. Avery [9/4/3] of Golden City who died in August 1856. The third captain was the Russell & Co. captain, E.C. Nickels [16Cii/7/11] of the Bald Eagle. He was described as a ��heavy man �X He jumped into a Chinese boat and went right through its frail deck��. 4 He may have been a regular visitor as Dr. B.L. Ball, the American dental surgeon, in September 1848 remarked in his diary that Captain Nickels of the John Q. Adams from Boston had come in that morning: ��His arrival with letters and papers from America made the day an eventful one��.5 Nickels died in Hong Kong in 1861.
Steven Haskell [9/8/6], commander of the American barque Old Hickory, died in Victoria harbour aged forty in September 1853. The ship was bound for London with a cargo of tea:
Yesterday at daylight, Mr. White, the chief officer, was sent on shore to get two
fresh hands in place of others who were diseased. Greatly to that gentleman��s astonishment about two p.m. the steward came into town to say that Captain Haskell was dead! �K It appeared that Captain Haskell had an apoplectic fit, of which he partially rallied after the steward left, dying only at 4.30 p.m. just as the ��Spark�� was leaving the harbour
with a coffin for him.6


Among the old American families who remained on the China Coast for many years, the name of Huttleston might be mentioned. Ann Maria Huttleston [9/3/3] of Fairhaven, Massachussetts died in Hong Kong in July 1858 aged thirty. Perhaps she was the sister of Jane Huttleston who was married to Clement Nye of Shanghai. Henry Curtis Huttleston [16C11/7/6], also of Fairhaven, died later in 1870 leaving just $225.15 to his descendants.
Chapter 12 The Armed Forces
The Army
Monuments to Soldiers in the Hong Kong Cemetery
In the Hong Kong Cemetery, five monuments to particular regiments date from
this early period and fourteen headstones commemorate individual officers or sergeants who died then. Two of the most moving monuments in the whole of the Hong Kong Cemetery bring home the plight of the common soldiers who
garrisoned the island. They commemorate the unfortunate men of the 95th and the 59th Regiments. The memorial to the soldiers of the 95th Regiment [20/19/2] is a stark reminder of the high levels of sickness and death. In the four months from June to September 1848, fever (or malaria as it later came to be called) killed nine sergeants, eight corporals, four drummers, sixty-seven privates, four women and four children. Over the three and a quarter years the regiment was in Hong Kong, death from other causes took the lives of nine sergeants, four corporals, three drummers, one hundred and fifty-five privates and four women. Of the twenty-nine children who had arrived with the regiment, seventeen
died. The plight of the 95th
drew the pity of the residents.
In March 1849, the Garrison
Amateurs put on a play, The Lady of Lyons by Sir E. Lytton Bulwer, for the benefit of the widows and orphans of soldiers who had died of fever over the previous summer,
with box tickets priced at $3 each or $5 for a couple and tickets to the pit at $2. This was a high price at a time when the wages of a policeman was $15 a month. Jardine, Matheson & Co. put a

��large and handsome boat�� at the disposal of the soldiers ��in which convalescents were in the habit of taking airings in the evening��. In return ��as a slight token of their vivid remembrance of kindness at a time when it was so much needed by them��, the regiment presented the company with a cup in the shape of a pineapple with designs representing a boat full of soldiers.
The second monument is the towering column to the unfortunate 59th Regiment [17/1/1] whose losses during their long nine-year tour of duty from 1849 to 1858 in Hong Kong are still breathtaking. The inscriptions on the four sides of the monument list 10 officers, 502 other ranks and 146 women and children from the regiment who died in Hong Kong. Many more were invalided home and died on the voyage to Britain. James Bodell, sergeant of that regiment, wrote:
Two years from the time we left Cork Barracks, there was a General Parade
called of the Originals, that is of the men who came out in 1849, and out of the 650 men that left Cork Barracks in 1849 only 62 remained.1

12.2.a and b. Monument to the officers and men who died in Hong Kong
while serving with the 59th Regiment.
In July 1850, the Friend of China reported:
We have been told that a residence in Eastern District of Victoria has been,
for some time past, positively unbearable. Morning after morning during the last two months, the dwellers in that locality have had their slumbers disturbed by fife and drum reminding them that death had made havoc of
another soldier.�K Our readers �K will imagine the effect �K of hearing between
sleeping and waking, portions of that most melancholy strain, the ��Dead March in Saul��. The brain drinks in the din and it resounds thro�� out the day.2
The effect on the morale of the soldiers must have been appalling.
Other monuments include two to the Royal Artillery, one to the 10th Battery [15/1/9] which lost nine men, one wife and two children in just over two months from December 1856 to February 1856 and the other to the 6th Battery, 12th Brigade [19/1/9] which lost twenty-three men between 1857 and 1864. One monument, to a detachment of the Medical Staff Corps [17/1/9], erected in 1859 records twelve names of men who died in the course of the Second Opium War
either in Canton or on the Canton River.
Just one headstone to a common soldier can be found in the Hong Kong Cemetery before 1866. Gunner George Tankard [11A/9/13] of the Royal Artillery was honoured with a headstone in 1855. Perhaps the fact that he had survived army life until the advanced age of fifty-two accounts for his presence in the Cemetery. The cost of the burial of a soldier at this time devolved on his family or
his company and they would not be able to afford more than the basic numbered
granite marker, especially in view of the high rates of death among the soldiers. Nothing could show more clearly the social gulf that existed between the ordinary
soldier and the officers who commanded them than their very different treatment
in death.
The Position of the Army in Society
The armed forces gave Hong Kong the feeling of a garrison town not unlike Gibraltar to which it was sometimes compared. Up to about 1845, the army was in charge of law and order as well as the defence of the colony. The general commanding troops in the East shared the top position in the colony with the
governor. When the judicial system became better established with the arrival of the first chief justice, John Walter Hulme, in June 1844, Major-General d��Aguilar
showed a marked reluctance to accept the loss of his powers. The boundaries
between the civil and the military spheres remained blurred. When a list of
precedency in the colony was printed in the newspaper, the editor commented
sarcastically: ��We presume, if it comes to an actual question of real rank, the
Aide-de-Camp to the Major-General would take precedence of the whole establishment��.3
Certainly for some years after the appointment of a civilian governor and civil service, the general continued to act with little regard to the civil authorities or to his legal status. He provoked outraged editorials in the Friend of China when he ordered two policemen, Sergeant Atkins and Constable Simmers,
both recently soldiers, to enter the house of Mr. Welch, the dispenser at the
chemist shop, who happened to live opposite him, to demand that he stop
singing between the hours of ten and eleven at night. Welch ordered the men to
leave and then, leaning from the window, threatened to horsewhip them if they came back with more ��impertinent messages��. He was brought before a military
magistrate and fined $20:
The injustice of this sentence cannot be surpassed. In the first place, every citizen has the same right to enjoy himself in the company of his friends, even by singing, that the Hon. Major General has. �X In the second, the Hon. Major General has no control over the police and any order from him was worthless. �X In the third, the police acting under his orders committed a
breach of the peace in entering Mr. Welch��s house and behaving insolently,
and had he kicked them downstairs, he would only have done that, which many will do under similar circumstances.4
When the major-general found his sleep was disturbed by the watchmen beating
their bamboos at hourly intervals throughout the night, he unilaterally put an end to this time-honoured custom, much to the annoyance of the community who no longer knew whether their watchmen were awake or asleep and feared for their safety should robbers descend on their houses. The good major-general
continued to act ��like some Eastern potentate�� when he issued Mr. Wyseman with a summons that resulted in a fine of five pounds for ��cantering his horse near
the Gap, a locality which is used for that purpose by nearly every resident of the Island��. The editor complained:
How he can reconcile his treatment of others with the bacchanalian orgies which have been heard in his own dwelling on the evening of the Sabbath? In a free community there cannot be two sets of laws �X one for the porcelain of the earth, another for the more common ware.5
This quotation acknowledged the high social position occupied by the major-
general and his entourage of officers in Hong Kong society.
Officers
Twenty-two officers and four of their wives are buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery from this early period. Ten of these are from English and twelve from
Indian regiments. Eighteen of the earliest tombs of army officers, dating from the First Opium War, have come from the old cemetery in Wan Chai. Seven consist of handsome, well-constructed chest tombs. Five officers of the 55th Regiment share
a striking six-sided pedestal topped by a shrouded urn and two are remembered
by cubed pedestals topped by urns. The officers of the British army at this time
were largely drawn from the ranks of the lesser gentry, the younger sons who

12.3. Officers Quarters now known as Murray Building and reassembled at Stanley. (Illustrated London News, 27 December 1856.)
under British inheritance rules were not eligible to inherit the family estate, which
was passed on undivided to the firstborn on the death of the father. Younger sons
were groomed to join the armed services, the law or the church. Commerce was considered beneath the status to which they aspired. The less intellectual gravitated

towards the army. Officer commissions at this time were for sale. A commission
would be bought by the parents for their sons in the regiment of choice with the price depending on the status and reputation of the particular regiment.
There was a distinct pecking order in the army with the England-based regiments of the line considering themselves superior to the Indian regiments like the Ceylon Rifles or Madras Native Light Infantry, which attracted the offspring of, for instance, impecunious parsons without the wherewithal to buy expensive commissions for their sons. The Royal Engineers and the Royal Artillery ranked in between and the Royal Marines were well down the pecking order. Orlando Bridgeman, for example, a lieutenant with the 98th Regiment in Hong Kong, conformed to this pattern. He was the younger son of Captain Orlando Bridgeman and his wife Selina. Both parents were descended from aristocrats. Orlando��s grandfather, Baron Bradford, had four sons, the eldest succeeding to the family title, the second, third and fourth following careers in the army navy and church respectively. His mother was the daughter of the Earl of Kilmorey. Two of the sons of Orlando Bridgeman, Orlando Jack and his brother Francis, followed their father into the army with purchased commissions.
Junior officers were at times rowdy and drank to excess, with those stationed in Hong Kong behaving true to form. Orlando Bridgeman commented on a farewell party given by the Madras Artillery for one of their officers: ��Men of this sort never sit down to a large party without drinking to such an excess that they lose their sences [sic] and are put to bed more like beasts than Christians��. He deplored the lack of women in Hong Kong: ��Give me women��s society! Without it we are beasts��. 6 Officers lived in comfort in rented houses and ate and drank of the best in their regimental messes. Parties of officers would go across to Kowloon for a day��s snipe shooting, which was a popular pastime. The following letter published in the Friend of China and translated by Karl Gutzlaff shows how seven young officers on one particular occasion went about their sport and also in what humble terms the Chinese felt obliged to offer their complaint, reduced as they were in status by their defeat three years previously in the First Opium War:
13th January 1845 My second Major Ye stated that several Englishmen on a previous day entered into the fort. Your humble officer treated them with politeness
because there exists peace and friendship between our two countries. Who
would have thought that the said Englishmen would have gotten drunk in a public place and afterwards madly fired their guns doing everything
which is disgraceful. On the 4th day Inst (11 January) there came again 7
British soldiers from the Barracks to the Fort. The garrison at the time prevented their coming in but the English soldiers pointed their guns at them and threatened us as if they wanted to strike us. The soldiers of the fort therefore seeing that matters went on in this manner let them come in. The English military then entered, produced their drink and after having become intoxicated went out of the fort and perceiving the pigs and dogs as well as
their tame pigeons fired at them at random just as they pleased.
I would therefore request my elder brother to direct the soldiers of your Honourable Country that whenever they come in future to Cowloon to walk about and to shoot birds, they ought not to go into the fort and injure the domestic animals of the people. This would be no trifling proof of neighbourly friendship. I inform you of this and hope you will cast your glance on it. True translation
Signed Karl Gutzlaff
Chinese Secretary
A tragic incident, that may partly have been caused by over-indulgence in alcohol, took place near Stanley Village and resulted in the deaths of Captain Augustus Frederick Hippolyto da Costa [20/16/2] of the Royal Engineers and
Lieutenant Dwyer of the Ceylon Rifles. After a champagne tiffin, the two officers took a stroll to the Chinese village of Wong Ma Kok. There, according to Chinese
witnesses, in a state of intoxication they demanded women without success until they came to the last house, belonging to an old man:
When they entered the house, his wife and daughter-in-law were engaged in
cooking: the shorter and stouter of the two commenced by taking liberties with this young girl and on being remonstrated with by the old man and
his wife, the latter officer struck them both with his stick with such severity
as to draw blood so that this old woman rushed out of the house and cried
out to the neighbours, ��Save our lives. Save our lives��.�K Whereupon Chui-apo [a well-known pirate chief] rushed in armed with spears and attacked
the officers, who retreated fighting back fiercely. They were finally both
overpowered and chucked over a precipice called Bluff Head.7
Da Costa must have been a bit wild as he had already faced court-martial in Hong
Kong for throwing a glass at a senior officer. His death at the age of twenty-seven was mourned by a broken-hearted mother and two sisters and finally avenged by
the British who bribed the Chinese to capture Chui Apou and hand him over for trial. He hanged himself in his cell rather than face the public hangman��s noose.
Non-Commissioned Officers (N.C.O.��s)
From this period just five sergeants with headstones have been found in the Cemetery. They are Sergeants J. Lambert [9/18/5], Henry Welch [11A/9/4], John Holmes [11A/9/4], schoolmaster, all of the 98th Regiment, Sergeant Daniel Bently [7/10/12] of the Royal Irish and Sergeant Blaik [9/19/1] of the Sappers and Miners, who is buried with his little daughter. The fact that these men merited headstones is an indication of the elevated status given to sergeants in an army where the officers depended almost entirely on them for the day-to-
day running of regimental affairs. Sergeant Thomas Miller of the 98th Regiment
even merited an announcement in the Friend of China when he was promoted to garrison sergeant-major. According to the announcement, he was entitled to a salary of 20 rupees a month and a household
consisting of a head cook at $7 a month and seven coolies at $6 a month.
Commissariat Storekeepers
The members of the Commissariat were mainly chosen from the ranks of the senior sergeants and were entitled to be addressed as mister. The graves of two of them even predate the opening of the Hong Kong Cemetery. The first commissary general, Francis Foote [11A/9/2], died of apoplexy in 1842. The second, John Irving [11A/11/2], was sent out with his wife and four children, but died in 1844 soon after arrival, his health having been weakened by his years at the Cape of Good Hope.


The commissariat consisted of a well-respected small group who socialized with the better known tradesmen and the second echelon of the civil service. Their status can be gathered from the addition of the title, Mr., on the inscriptions, denoting a high degree of respectability. Lydia Priscilla Pearse [9/4/13] died in 1852 aged twenty-eight, one day before her eleven-month-old daughter Elizabeth. She is described on the marble rectangular inscription panel of her handsome pink granite
chest tomb as the beloved wife of Mr. T. Pearse, of the Royal Engineers department.
John Wright mentions in his
diary several engagements that included T. Pearse. Both Daniel Felgate of the navy purveying store, and James F. Norman [9/2/6], assistant storekeeper, who
12.6. Headstones to Elizabeth, wife of Commissariat
was only twenty-two when
General Smith and four of her children.

he died, were also given the title of mister on their inscriptions and Olivia Donnelly [9/6/11] is described as the child of Mr. W. Donnelly, also of the Royal Engineers Department. They were not called to do jury service perhaps because they were so closely connected with the armed services. A high proportion of these men were married. Perhaps illustrating the vulnerability of women and children, a surprising number of the dependants of this small group seem to have succumbed to the diseases of the time. The most unfortunate family among them was that of Commissariat-General John Smith, whose wife Elizabeth Smith [9/3/12] and four children, two girls, Adelaide and Elizabeth Smith [9/3/12],
and two boys, all died in a three-year period from 1849 to 1852. The two boys,
Charles and Walter Smith [9/4/15] aged four and sixteen months, died within a day of each other ��after a few hours illness��. 8 A fifth child, Henrietta, who is not commemorated in the Cemetery, died of quinsy in March 1851.
Besides this sad family, three other commissariat storekeepers, four wives and six children are found in the Cemetery. William King [16Cii/8/4] of the Ordnance Office, who died in 1866, had by that time witnessed the death of his wife, Maria King [9/18/16] and three sons, Thomas King [9/18/18] in 1852 after an illness of only four days, then William, who died aged two years in 1854 after a few hours of illness, and Harry King [9/18/17] who died aged three years, just one month later. Sophia
C. Boxer [9/18/15], the wife of William Boxer,
chief storeman, Naval Victualling Department, is another in this group whose inscription records also the death of their little daughter.
Soldiers
About one thousand troops were stationed in Hong Kong at any one time. The soldiers usually came from the ranks of the British working class, often driven by poverty and unemployment to the dire extreme of joining the army. The illiterate and destitute, including beggars picked up by the authorities and orphans from the workhouses, were pushed to become soldiers. Others took the Queen��s shilling to avoid starvation. Out of every

120 soldiers entering the army in the 1840s, 117 were listed as indigent, idle or bad
characters. Only one in 120 was listed as ambitious. Up to 1856 the cost of housing a convict was greater than the sum allowed for the keep of a soldier.9
A soldier was provided with beef and bread, but most other foods had to be paid for out of his pay. The editor of the Friend of China, who publicized the plight of the common soldier, had this to say about how the nominal twelve pennies a day due to the soldiers as pay was spent:
Five out of twelve pence per day goes to the Commissariat to pay for one pound of beef �X one pound of bread �X one and two sevenths ounces of tea and four ounces of rice. Two ounces of oil and a small quantity of wood for cooking are divided among twelve men. As a kind of supplemental mess, the Commissariat for the consideration of three half pence per man supplies also a cup of coffee at Gun-fire, some potatoes and other vegetables. The remaining fivepence per day is appropriated to paying for Regimental necessaries, washing, barrack damages and other incidental charges (Samsoo etc. etc.) Ten dollars per month is the amount generally considered necessary for the keep of a horse in this country �X that is to say ten times more per day
than the sum allowed to the British Soldier for his maintenance whose five pence to the Commissariat is hardly on a par with the $1 . per month allowed
by Missionary societies to their Chinese salt fish and rice eaters. British soldiers in the Hongkong garrison appear to us to be treated more like dogs than human beings.10
Soldiers�� wives and children often shared the barrack rooms with the men, merely curtaining off a corner with a blanket. So little attention was paid to hygiene that the tub used by the men to urinate into at night was emptied out and then used in the morning to wash the soldier��s clothes. His only article of crockery, a basin, was used in turn for drinks, for the daily ration of boiled beef, for shaving, for mixing his pipe clay to whiten his belt and gloves, or for the polish which he used to shine the ninety-four brass buttons on his coat. In the cramped unhygienic conditions of the barrack rooms it is not surprising that tuberculosis was rife. Venereal diseases including syphilis were also very common as, even
back in England, soldiers could only afford to go with the cheapest available kind
of women: The women who are patronized by soldiers are, as a matter of course, very badly paid; for how can a soldier out of his very scanty allowance, generally little exceeding a shilling a day, afford to supply a woman with means adequate to her existence?11
When the soldiers had leisure time, the streets of Hong Kong offered little
in the way of recreation except for drinking holes where they drank whatever would render them tipsy in the quickest and cheapest way. This meant arrack in the European taverns or a trip to the Chinese quarter where shamshoo, that lethal concoction of ethanol, sodium nitrate and alcohol sold by the Chinese, was readily
available. A non-commissioned officer of the 18th Irish Regiment addressed the
recruits as follows:
I would especially and above all entreat you to always be on your guard against that monstrous enemy, that greatest of all evils and prolific source of all troubles and crime in the army, viz: DRUNKENNESS�K. Beginners do not generally like either the taste or the smell of spirits. They are however frequently led to believe that it betokens a degree of manliness to drink even against their will a glass of spirits in company �K and then they come to love spirits for spirits�� sake.12
Attempts were made to control the drinking of soldiers. In February 1850, Bishop
Smith preached a special sermon to the soldiers of the 59th Regiment on the sins
of intemperance, ��informing them that he had buried hundreds of their fellow soldiers whose disease and death had been brought on by no other cause than that of drink��.13 When Private Nathaniel Hudson died of the effects of drinking arrack at the British Grenadier Tavern, the German innkeeper, Mr. Christopher, was fined $100.14 Nor were the wives of the soldiers immune to the dangers of drink. Dr. Edward Cree, newly appointed surgeon to HMS Vixen, reported in his diary in August 1843, ��Nearly a hundred of the wives of the 55th soldiers arrived from
Calcutta. I was on shore with Moorsom in the evening. We met many of the ladies
in the road rather the worse for liquor��.15
Public flogging was accepted in the army as the only way in which discipline
could be maintained, just as the cat o�� nine tails was used in the navy. A debate was reported by the local press from the English newspapers. A soldier in Hounslow
had been beaten to death in a particularly gruesome fashion under the indifferent gaze of officers who ��never cried hold, never even felt his pulse to ascertain if he
could bear another lash, while the men in the ranks were fainting at the horrors they were compelled to witness��. This long article republished in the Friend of China gave the reason for
continuing flogging to be as follows:
Far from dismissing those who have entered as a punishment, they are
retained in service as a punishment and the state is so unreasonably terrified
at losing a few men that it will not even accept their services for a limited
period �X it will have them for their whole lives. The difference between the
army and other services is that dismissal from the latter is almost synonymous with death�K. Dismissal from the former is life and liberty. From the army a man buys his discharge. The army is a service of slavery and dismissal is a
coveted blessing. It is plain that the use of flogging in the army after it has
almost been banished from the gaol is to make the soldier submit to the
caprice of individual officers �X being the chief and main circumstance why
service in the army is abhorred by the bulk of the population.16
Even in sickness, little consideration was shown to the soldiers in early Hong Kong. The editor of the Friend of China visited the military hospital and complained about the conditions he found there. In September 1845, before a proper hospital had been built, the editor complained that:
The hospital consisted of but one large entire square room; and there the convalescent, the raving, the dying, the dead, were promiscuously huddled up with the young; and the strong soldier, who had just arrived from Europe, was thrown into such scenes as he never could have contemplated in his
wildest moments and it had such an effect on his senses as naturally tended
both to frighten and unnerve him and frequently brought on that morbid feeling which aggravated the symptoms under which he laboured, and led him to a speedy death.17
Desertion was the only way out, but the consequences were terrible and it was almost impossible to desert on an island such as Hong Kong so far from
home with nowhere to escape to. In 1849, Privates Alfred Hunter and William Gillispie of the 95th Regiment attempted to desert but were picked up at Stanley
by soldiers of the Ceylon Regiment. At their subsequent court martial, the charges against them read as follows:
First Charge
For having at Victoria Island of Hong Kong or at Tattoo Roll Call on the
night of May 9th 1849 deserted
Second Charge
For having each of them lost by neglect or designedly made away with or being otherwise deficient of the following articles of Regimental clothing, viz:-One pair of ammunition boots, value eight shillings One pair of black cloth trousers, value eight shillings and sixpence Findings: Guilty on both charges Sentence: To be transported beyond the seas as felons and to be marked
with the letter D in the usual manner. [i.e. with a tattoo].
The appearance of the American whalers in Hong Kong made desertion easier. Norton-Kyshe in his History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong wrote:
There had been upwards of twenty deserters since Jan. 1st (1851) and nearly
all had been inveighed on board ships in the harbour chiefly whalers in want
of hands�K. In one case a verdict of not guilty was released, the majority of the witnesses having left the colony in the whale-ship, Mount Wolleston, in which
two soldiers of the 59th regiment had deserted the year before. From the
ill-usage they were exposed to, both fell sick, one of them becoming totally blind, and at the first island reached they were put ashore and left without medicine, clothes or provisions of any kind.18
In an attempt to flush out deserters, Superinterdent James Jarman boarded the
American whaler Canton Packet in March 1856, and ferreted nine deserters out of their hiding places: ��These were so cunningly designed and well concealed that it required the scaldings of boiling water and pricks of sharp swords before the renegades were compelled to unearth themselves��.19
From the above description of the life of private soldiers in the colony, it can be seen that their status in society was among the lowest in the colony, only slightly higher than the beach-combers and destitutes.
The Royal Navy
By 1860 the British navy had around 240 ships crewed by 40,000 sailors making it the biggest in the world. Besides this, ��thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world��s merchant tonnage. At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world��s oceans as Britain did in the mid-nineteenth century��. 20 The Royal Navy acted as the watchdog of the seas and the East India Command swept the oceans from the northern coastline of China as far south as Borneo and Burma. One of the most valuable tasks undertaken by the Royal Navy of this time was the survey of these coastlines. Accurate charts contributed enormously to the safety of the
merchant navy shipping. During and after the First Opium War, Captain Richard
Collinson, who produced one of the earliest maps of Hong Kong, was at work in an old Calcutta pilot brig, HMS Plover together with Captain William Thornton Bate in HMS Royalist mapping the coastlines, ��in the face of great perils, hardships and obstacles, writing sailing directions and calculating and compiling marine statistics and astronomical data of unsurpassing accuracy and value��.21
A number of monuments were erected in the first half of the period before the Second Opium War to commemorate the dead of the Royal Navy squadrons who policed the eastern seas against the fleets of pirates that preyed on the merchant shipping. The earliest two were erected by the officers of the sloop, HMS Scout [15/2/15] and frigate, HMS Vestal [21A/1/32], both dating from 1847. The monument to the men of the Scout records thirteen names of which only two can now be clearly read. Some were killed in action against pirates and others
during a punitive expedition in 1847 against the Bogue Forts which guarded the
approaches to Canton. The monument to the Vestal formerly stood at the junction of Queen��s Road and Leighton Road. It marked a convenient place, where those who could not face the prospect of following the cortege from St. John��s Cathedral to the cemeteries could meet the funeral procession. The Vestal monument records the names of nine men. The ship was part of a squadron which visited Borneo in 1845 to uphold the authority of the Sultan of Brunei and Rajah James Brooke. She took part in the battle at Marudu Bay at the mouth of the Brunei River, where Captain Talbot landed a force of 340 bluejackets and 200 marines. John Watson, whose name is recorded on the monument, was among those killed. There was
fierce hand-to-hand fighting until the pirates were routed. Dr. Edward Cree, who
was tending the wounded on the Vixen, commented after amputating the arm of an unfortunate sailor:
Surgical operations on a crowded deck, by the light of half a dozen dip candles, with too many excited lookers on, are not done under the most favourable conditions, but one had no choice.22
The other men commemorated died from accidents or illness in Hong Kong, Ceylon and Madras.
The third monument, erected in 1850, commemorates twenty men from HMS Columbine [11B/1/4]. Five of the sailors died in a hotly contested engagement in September
1849, when they destroyed the forces of the
pirate chief, Chui Apou. His fleet consisted of, ��twenty-three junks carrying twelve to eighteen guns each, manned by one thousand, eight hundred desperadoes��. 23 A few weeks later Captain Dalrymple Hay commanding a fleet of three ships, Columbine, Phlegeton and Fury as well as a large contingent of men from HMS Hastings, battled an even larger pirate fleet, commanded by the pirate chief, Shap-ng-tsai. They destroyed fifty-eight out of the fleet of sixty-four junks. This pirate fleet is said to have been manned by over three thousand men and carried over one
thousand guns.24


12.9. Destruction of Chui Apou��s pirate fleet at Bias Bay by Dr. Edward
Cree. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, Cat. 79, p. 31.)