The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). Frederick Whymper
the Sea that’s Red,
The White, the Black, the one that’s Dead.”
Between the thirtieth degree of north latitude, where the group of the Choosan Islands commences, and the thirty-seventh degree, this sea of soup, this reservoir of tawny liquid, ranges, fed by three great rivers, the Tseen-Tang, the Yangtsze-Kiang, and the Hwang-Ho, the greatest of which is the second, and which contributes the larger part of the muddy solution held in its waters. Forty-five miles from the embouchure of the Yangtsze-Kiang, you reach the Woosung anchorage, and a few miles further the city of Shanghai, where the tributary you have been following divides into the Woosung and Whampoa branches, at the fork of which the land ceded to the British is situated. Here there is a splendid British consulate, churches, mansions, and foreign mercantile houses.
The old city was built over three centuries ago, and is encircled, as indeed are nearly all large Chinese cities and towns, by a wall twenty-four feet high and fifteen broad; it is nearly four miles in circumference. Shanghai was at one time greatly exposed to the depredations of freebooters and pirates, and partly in consequence of this the wall is plentifully provided with loop-holes, arrow-towers, and military observatories. The six great gates of the city of Shanghai have grandiloquent titles, à la Chinoise. The north gate is the “calm-sea gate;” the great east gate is that for “paying obeisance to the honourable ones;” the little east one is “the precious girdle gate;” the great south is the gate for “riding the dragon,” while another is termed “the pattern Phœnix.”
Its oldest name is Hoo. In early days the following curious mode of catching fish was adopted. Rows of bamboo stakes, joined by cords, were driven into the mud of the stream, among which, at ebb tide, the fish became entangled, and were easily caught. This mode of fishing was called hoo, and as at one time Shanghai was famous for its fishing stakes, it gained the name of the “Hoo city.” The tides rise very rapidly in the river, and sometimes give rise to alarming inundations. Lady Wortley’s description of the waters of the Mississippi apply to the river-water of Shanghai; “it looks marvellously like an enormous running stream of apothecary’s stuff, a very strong decoction of mahogany-coloured bark, with a slight dash of port wine to deepen its hue; it is a mulatto-complexioned river, there is no doubt of that, and wears the deep-tanned livery of the burnished sun.” Within and without the walls, the city is cut up by ditches and moats, which, some years ago, instead of being sources of benefit and health to the inhabitants, as they were originally intended to be, were really open sewers, breathing out effluvia and pestilence. In some respects, however, Shanghai is now better ordered as regards municipal arrangements.
The fruits of the earth are abundant at Shanghai, and “Jack ashore” may revel in delicious peaches, figs, persimmons, cherries, plums, oranges, citrons, and pomegranates, while there is a plentiful supply of fish, flesh, and fowl. Grains of all kinds, rice, and cotton are cultivated extensively; the latter gives employment at the loom for thousands. On the other hand there are drawbacks in the shape of clouds of musquitoes, flying-beetles, heavy rains, monsoons, and earthquakes. The prognostics of the latter are a highly electric state of the atmosphere, long drought, excessive heat, and what can only be described as a stagnation of all nature. Dr. Milne, reciting his experiences, says: “At the critical moment of the commotion, the earth began to rock, the beams and walls cracked like the timbers of a ship under sail, and a nausea came over one, a sea-sickness really horrible. At times, for a second or two previous to the vibration, there was heard a subterraneous growl, a noise as of a mighty rushing wind whirling about under ground.” The natives were terror-struck, more especially if the quake happened at night, and there would burst a mass of confused sounds, “Kew ming! Kew ming!” (“Save your lives! save your lives!”) Dogs added their yells to the medley, amid the striking of gongs and tomtoms. Next day there would be exhaustless gossip concerning upheaval and sinking of land, flames issuing from the hill-sides, and ashes cast about the country. The Chinese ideas on the subject are various. Some thought the earth had become too hot, and that it had to relieve itself by a shake, or that it was changing its place for another part of the universe. Others said that the Supreme One, to bring transgressors to their senses, thought to alarm them by a quivering of the earth. The notion most common among the lower classes is, that there are six huge sea-monsters, great fish, which support the earth, and that if any one of these move, the earth must be agitated. Superstition is rife in ascribing these earth-shakings chiefly to the remissness of the priesthood. In almost every temple there is a muh-yu—an image of a scaly wooden fish, suspended near the altar, and among the duties of the priests, it is rigidly prescribed that they keep up an everlasting tapping on it. If they become lax in their duties, the fish wriggle and shake the earth to bring the drowsy priests to a sense of their duty.
A singular meteorological phenomenon often occurs at Shanghai—a fall of dust, fine, light and impalpable, sometimes black, ordinarily yellow. The sun or moon will scarcely be visible through this sand shower. The deposit of this exquisite powder is sometimes to the extent of a quarter of an inch, after a fall of a day or two; it will penetrate the closest venetian blinds; it overspreads every article of furniture in the house; finds its way into the innermost chambers and recesses. In walking about, one’s clothes are covered with dust—the face gets grimy, the mouth and throat parched; the teeth grate; the eyes, ears, and nostrils become itchy and irritable. The fall sometimes extends as far as Ningpo in the interior—also some 200 miles out at sea. Some think that it is blown all the way from the steppes of Mongolia, after having been wafted by typhoons into the upper regions of the air: others think that it comes across the seas from the Japanese volcanoes, which are constantly subject to eruptions.
VESSELS IN THE PORT OF SHANGHAI.
The population of Shanghai, rapidly increasing, is probably about 400,000 to 450,000 souls. It swarms with professional beggars. Among the many creditable things cited by Milne regarding the Chinese, is the number of native charitable institutions in Canton, Ningpo, and Shanghai, including Foundling Hospitals, the (Shanghai) “Asylum for Outcast Children, retreats for poor and destitute widows, shelters for the maimed and blind, medical dispensaries, leper hospitals, vaccine establishments, almshouses, free burial societies,” and so forth. So much for the heartless Chinese.
The sailor certainly has this compensation for his hard life, that he sees the world, and visits strange countries and peoples by the dozen, privileges for which many a man tied at home by the inevitable force of circumstances would give up a great deal. What an oracle is he on his return, amid his own family circle or friends! How the youngsters in particular hang on his every word, look up at his bronzed and honest face, and wish that they could be sailors—
“Strange countries for to see.”
How many curiosities has he not to show—from the inevitable parrot, chattering in a foreign tongue, or swearing roundly in English vernacular, to the little ugly idol brought from India, but possibly manufactured in Birmingham!93 If from China, he will probably have brought home some curious caddy, fearfully and wonderfully inlaid with dragons and impossible landscapes; an ivory pagoda, or, perhaps, one of those wonderfully-carved balls, with twenty or so more inside it, all separate and distinct, each succeeding one getting smaller and smaller. He may have with him a native oil-painting; if a portrait, stolid and hard; but if of a ship, true to the last rope, and exact in every particular. In San Francisco, where there are 14,000 or more Chinese, may be seen native paintings of vessels which could hardly be excelled by a European artist, and the cost of which for large sizes, say 3½ by 2½ feet, was only about fifteen dollars (£3). What with fans, handkerchiefs, Chinese ladies’ shoes for feet about three inches in length, lanterns, chopsticks, pipes, rice-paper drawings, books, neat and quaint little porcelain articles for presents at home, it will be odd if Jack, who has been mindful of the “old folks at home,” and the young folks too, and the “girl he left behind him,” does not become a very popular man.
And then his yarns of Chinese life! How on his first landing at a port, the natives in proffering their services hastened to assure him in “pigeon English” (“pigeon” is a native corruption of “business,” as a mixed jargon had and has to be used in trading with the lower classes) that “Me all