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Mason's book is fairly thick and contains numerous anecdotes about life on the China coast which in the main have no particular relevance to his later criminal escapade. He explained that he had had no experience of criminal matters and therefore made many mistakes which, with hindsight, he should never have made. He referred also to the American consul in Zhenjiang, General Alexander C. Jones, Mason's oldest and most intimate friend in the port, a southerner who had commanded cavalry on the losing side of the Civil War, and then later, in Hong Kong, Mason assumed the role, in disguise, of an American sailor who had been beached in Hong Kong. He made a great point in his book of how Sir Robert Hart had favoured him as a good employee of the Customs Service, and that looking back he was able to see that Hart had been at pains to try to warn him off doing anything stupid. The tenor of the tale was that Hart and others, including the US consul and the British Consuls in Zhenjiang, had known that Mason was up to something, even, perhaps, what he really had intended to do. Mason ends with no apologies or even any thought of the stupidity of his acts. Out of context, his book would be a "cracking good yarn" but taken at face value, it depicts Mason having Walter Mitty fantasies.
Hart's letters39 to his London representative reveal that Mason was a 4th Assistant B in Chinchiang [Zhenjiang] in 1887. By mid-1891, in a short sentence within one of his letters, not in any way connected with Mason, Hart refers to the Gelao Hui, whom he did not see as particularly hostile to either foreigners or Christianity but were anti-dynastic and whose activities were incipient rebellion. In the October of the same year, he first mentions the Mason affair and comments on the immense harm it had done to the Service. He attached a draft telegram in which he called Mason ‘a foreign conspirator who had bought arms, seized at Shanghai, with his own money, and whether he himself [Mason] was amateur detective, conspirator, dupe or lunatic remained to be seen, as also whether his disclosures, plot confederates, etc., exist elsewhere than in his own diseased imagination'. There is no indication in any of Hart's published letters that he was aware of Mason's plans, despite, as we learn later, all had already been revealed to the local Customs Commissioner in Zhenjiang.
In Mason's Confessions, he tells of his attempt to resign from the Customs and of Hart's reply which explained that according to the regulations, this was not possible. He added half-way down his letter to
304
Mason's book is fairly thick and contains numerous anecdotes about life on the China coast which in the main have no particular relevance to his later criminal escapade. He explained that he had had no experience of criminal matters and therefore made many mistakes which, with hindsight, he should never have made. He referred also to the American consul in Zhenjiang, General Alexander C. Jones, Mason's oldest and most intimate friend in the port, a southerner who had commanded cavalry on the losing side of the Civil War, and then later, in Hong Kong, Mason assumed the role, in disguise, of an American sailor who had been beached in Hong Kong. He made a great point in his book of how Sir Robert Hart had favoured him as a good employee of the Customs Service, and that looking back he was able to see that Hart had been at pains to try to warn him off doing anything stupid. The tenor of the tale was that Hart and others, including the US consul and the British Consuls in Zhenjiang, had known that Mason was up something even, perhaps, what he really had intended to do. Mason ends with no apologies or even any thought of the stupidity of his acts. Out of context his book would be a "cracking good yarn” but taken at face value it depicts Mason having Walter Mitty fantasies.
to
Hart's letters39 to his London representative reveal that Mason was a 4th Assistant B in Chinchiang [Zhenjiang] in 1887. By mid-1891 in a short sentence within one of his letters, not in any way connected with Mason, Hart refers to the Gelao Hui whom he did not see as particularly hostile to either foreigners or Christianity but were anti-dynastic and whose activities were incipient rebellion. In the October of the same year
he first mentions the Mason affair and comments on the immense harm it had done to the Service. He attached a draft telegram in which he called Mason ‘a foreign conspirator who had bought arms, seized at Shanghai, with his own money, and whether he himself [Mason] was amateur detective, conspirator, dupe or lunatic remained to be seen as also whether his disclosures, plot confederates, etc., exist elsewhere than in his own diseased imagination'. There is no indication in any
of Hart's published letters that he was aware of Mason's plans despite, as we learn later, all had already been revealed to the local Customs Commissioner in Zhenjiang.
In Mason's Confessions he tells of his attempt to resign from the Customs and of Hart's reply which explained that according to the regulations this was not possible. He added half way down his letter to
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