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The Embassy and the Canton System, episode 6

Pirates and an Admiral

In the first decade of the century a confederation of pirates commands the south China coast, and after its leader dies his widow, Zheng Yi Sao, takes it over, while a British admiral, William O'Brien Drury, lands troops at Macau to keep the French out and nearly starts a war. The episode follows both through the years when the Qing could not police its own waters, and asks how the court got both the pirates and the British to back down without winning a battle. It is one of the few episodes with Chinese public voices on the pirates, alongside the court's and the Company's.

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Transcript

Lieutenant Turner and boats crew taken prisoner by Ladrone pirates, about 1800
Lieutenant Turner and boats crew taken prisoner by Ladrone pirates, about 1800. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, we watched the British at Canton fight the Qing state over whose law should rule there, from a British warship whose watch shot a Chinese boatman at Whampoa, to a sailor named Edward Sheen, picked out after a riot and let go with a fine of about four pounds. And we watched the Company's young Chinese scholar publish the first major work ever translated directly from Chinese into English, the empire's own legal code, in 1810. Some of the Britons who read it decided that no Englishman should ever have to live under such a law. But all that time, while the British argued about law on the river, something much bigger was happening out on the water. This episode also stands on a new voice, the Chinese chronicler Yuan Yonglun, whose history of the pirate wars reaches us in Charles Neumann's English translation. Here is how one English captive, held prisoner in a pirate fleet, described the people who held him. The Ladrones have no settled residence on shore, but live constantly in their vessels. Ladrones was the old Portuguese word for thieves, and the Europeans on the China coast used it for the pirates. The captain lived in the after part of the ship with his wives, the captive wrote, and every man had a berth about four feet square, where he stowed his wife and family. No man was allowed a woman on board unless he was married to her under their laws, and in spare hours they gambled at cards and smoked opium. They were not a gang. They were a floating society, and by the time that captive was taken, it was large enough to rule the sea. For many poor families of south China, the line between land and water was blurred from birth. In Canton there were floating cities of tens of thousands of boat people, too poor for land or rent, who were born, lived and died on narrow boats lashed together seven or eight deep along the banks. The boat families did not bind their daughters' feet, and much of the work, steering, selling, washing laundry from the foreign ships, was done by the women. Out of that floating world came the woman this episode follows. She worked as a young woman in one of the floating brothels, the flower boats, for which Canton was famous, and in 1801 she married one of her clients, a successful pirate captain named Zheng Yi. History remembers her as Zheng Yi Sao, which means simply the wife of Zheng Yi. She helped her husband unite six rival pirate fleets into a single confederation, and by 1805 it numbered something like seventy thousand sailors on four hundred ships. That is more than twice the size of the Spanish Armada. How does a fleet like that come to be? It was easy for a fisherman to become a pirate in those years. A handful of men with rowboats and knives could take a small trading junk, and some of its crew would often join them, and so a band grew. And the core of the fleets had a harder origin: they had begun as Chinese mercenary navies hired in a Vietnamese rebellion, and when that rebellion failed in 1799 they came home, battle hardened, and swallowed up the smaller bands. Their timing was perfect. Tens of thousands of soldiers from the coast had been sent inland to fight the White Lotus rebels, and millions of taels from the hong merchants of Canton had gone to pay for that war instead of for defending the sea. The hong merchants were the licensed Chinese firms through which all Western trade at Canton had to pass, and a tael was a weight of silver of about one and a third ounces. The navy that was left did not want to fight. Qing patrols were so afraid of the pirates that some sabotaged their own ships to avoid going to sea, and others hid in quiet harbours and sent in reports of grand victories. The last time the dynasty had faced anything like this was more than a century before, in the 1660s, when a rebel pirate navy of over a thousand ships threatened the young Qing state. The Kangxi Emperor, a boy on the throne, knew his horsemen could not beat it at sea, so he ordered the whole southeastern coast evacuated instead. Nobody now was going to empty the coast of Guangdong. But nobody had a navy that could win, either. The pirates, meanwhile, became a kind of state. They collected tribute from coastal communities at offices they kept on land, and they sold passes guaranteeing safe passage to fishermen and cargo ships. The foreign merchants paid too. Pirate junks looked like any other junk until they were alongside, so the Western traders bought protection at the pirates' offices in Macau and Canton, and told themselves it was a kind of insurance. They were professional enough that if one fleet plundered a ship carrying another fleet's pass, its chief made his men give everything back, with money for damages. Then, in 1807, Zheng Yi died in a storm at sea. His widow did not step aside. She put her adopted son, Cheung Po Tsai, in command of the largest fleet, the red banner fleet that worked the coast around Canton, and then she took supreme command of the whole confederation herself. Cheung Po Tsai would later become her second husband. She had borne Zheng Yi two sons of her own; Cheung Po Tsai was an older boy they had adopted. No reliable picture of her has ever been found. By the end of 1808 her pirates had destroyed nearly half the ships of the provincial navy. That same year they killed the new provincial commander in chief who had been sent to Canton to suppress them. The fleet was divided into squadrons, each flying its own coloured flag under its own chief, and all under one supreme command. One English captive later described how the government fitted out a fleet of forty imperial war junks to deal with the pirates, and at the very first encounter, twenty eight of them struck their colours, while the rest saved themselves by a hasty retreat. The Company's men at Macau heard the guns of one such battle in July 1809, between about twenty six mandarin boats and a large pirate force, and it ended decidedly in favour of the pirates. A Chinese admiral put it plainly: the pirates are too powerful, he wrote, we cannot master them by our arms. So the Qing state could not police its own waters. And into those waters, twice in a few short years, sailed the Royal Navy.

The first time was in 1802. Macau was a small peninsula held by the Portuguese, where the foreign merchants of Canton lived out of season with their families. The Portuguese paid rent for it to the local Chinese magistrate, and China had never admitted that Macau stood outside its jurisdiction. In 1801 Portugal, under French pressure, signed a treaty that closed its ports to the British, and suddenly the little town mattered a great deal. Britain was at war with France, and the Admiralty in London feared the French would seize Macau and use it against British shipping in the south China seas. So, on orders from Lord Wellesley, the governor general of British India, a force was sent to hold Macau before the French could seize it. The Company's men at Canton were horrified, because they understood what London did not: that Macau was only nominally Portuguese, and that China still claimed it. The Chinese, they knew, would never accept anyone else occupying it, French or English. When the secret orders reached them in January 1802, the Committee wrote that the very rumour of such a plan being in agitation would have the most pernicious effects. The Chinese, they warned, already feared that the English were aiming at universal conquest in the East, after their victories in Bengal and their recent conquest of Mysore in southern India. Their rule for China, as they told their directors, was on no occasion to give offence to the Chinese government. But their warnings arrived too late, and in March 1802 a fleet of six British warships arrived anyway. On the eighteenth of March the warship Arrogant, under Edward Osborn, anchored off Nei Lingding island in the estuary, escorting three Company ships carrying troops from India. Osborn wrote at once to the Company's men at Canton, with a plea that was not about strategy at all. I should not take the liberty, he wrote, but the scurvy is making havoc amongst us daily. His orders said he must take great care not to give the Chinese government any cause for offence, and must do nothing at Macau without the full agreement of the Company's chief. The Portuguese governor would not give a straight answer to the request to land, so the troops stayed aboard their ships off Nei Lingding. Then the British commander wrote to the governor general at Canton, explaining that he had come in peace, only to protect Macau from the French. The governor general was the emperor's highest officer in the two southern provinces, and the British usually called him the viceroy. He did not believe a word of it, and neither did the Jiaqing Emperor, who called the British explanation lying words, a cover for a plan to take the town. We do not have to lend any credence to these comments, Jiaqing wrote, because the intention of the English was no more than to dissemble their project to take the town. The emperor ordered the warships sent away, and the governor general cut off their access to food and fresh water. And then the war ended, at least for a while. On the twenty ninth of April a Spanish frigate brought official news that the fighting in Europe had stopped. The troops sailed back to India on the second of July. Along the way, the Committee had paid an interpreter two thousand dollars, out of secret service money, for written proof that the Portuguese had been intriguing against them. Remember how this looked from Beijing. The British fleet had come, been refused food and water, and gone away. It had been reported to the emperor as a victory, and the lesson the court drew was simple: if the British come again, hold firm, and they will back down.

Meanwhile the pirates were moving closer. In March 1805 the Company's men heard that the pirate force numbered between six and seven hundred vessels, some to the east of the river and the rest among the islands to the west. A fleet of the government's own salt junks arrived that spring under a pirate escort, and each boat was said to have paid two hundred dollars for the protection. Salt was a government monopoly in China, so the salt junks were in effect the state's own ships. In August two American residents travelling up from Macau lost everything they had when pirates took their boat, and the two men only narrowly escaped being taken prisoner themselves. Every small boat was at risk. Many villages along the river had been attacked, plundered and burned, and even the foreign factories at Canton were not entirely safe. The Portuguese of Macau fought back where they could. That July their armed ships destroyed a pirate boat carrying four heavy guns and a crew of sixty, and took twenty nine prisoners, who were handed to the Chinese. In September the mandarins brought ten of them down to Macau and beheaded them outside the city gate. The Company's men noted that the prisoners, worn down by long confinement and probably by torture, seemed almost glad to die. The factories were the row of trading houses on the riverfront at Canton where the foreign merchants lived and worked during the trading season. The Company's Select Committee, the senior traders who ran its business in China, were scathing about the Chinese authorities. They complained of the want of energy, not to term it pusillanimity, of this government, and worse, that officials were hiding from the emperor the very existence of the pirates. Their answer was to propose two small armed vessels of their own, stationed at Macau, to survey the coast, help ships in trouble, and clear out the pirates. And they got one. In 1806 the Company's armed brig Antelope arrived at Macau to survey the coast and chase pirates, and when a large pirate fleet passed through the anchorage off Macau that October, a few shots from her sent it off to the east at full speed. The Portuguese, characteristically, suspected some deep laid British scheme, and ordered her out of their harbour. In Beijing, the Jiaqing Emperor saw any foreign help as humiliation. When he learned in 1805 that the British were sending warships to protect their merchants from pirates, he wrote, if foreigners get plundered by pirates after they have already entered Macao, a port in our internal waterways, then how can we not be a laughingstock to them? To him, putting down the pirates was a matter of imperial prestige, and even a little foreign help would be an admission that the dynasty could not hold its own coast. And when King George wrote that he would be glad to be of service, Jiaqing took it as an insult. Do we now have to borrow help from vassal states to eliminate pirates? he asked, and he told the king bluntly, we have no need for the services of your state.

For the foreigners on the estuary, the pirates were not an abstraction. They took hostages. On the seventh of December 1806 the chief officer of a merchant ship from India, a man named Turner, set out in a boat for Macau to find a pilot, and was captured with his crew of five Indian sailors. At first the pirates demanded three thousand dollars for him, then ten thousand, then thirty thousand. They made it clear that if his employers did not pay, he would have to serve them as a gunner, or they would kill him. He slept in a space eighteen inches wide and four feet long, like the pirates themselves, and lived mostly on rice and dried fish. And he saw what they did to their enemies. A captured official, he wrote, was nailed to the deck by his feet and beaten by the pirates, then taken on shore and cut into pieces. The Qing authorities were notoriously brutal to the pirates they caught, nailing their hands together instead of binding them with rope, and the pirates returned the favour. Turner asked his captors why they did it, and the only answer they ever gave him was that the officials in their home districts were so corrupt and abusive that they had gone to sea to find safety with the pirates. It was the same answer the White Lotus rebels gave inland: the officials oppress, and the people rebel. Turner was held for five months. He came back to Macau in May 1807, released for a ransom of two and a half thousand dollars in cash, three chests of opium and five thousand pieces of matting, six thousand dollars in all. Half of it was raised by the Chinese merchants, and half by the foreigners. Two years later, in September 1809, another British officer was taken, Richard Glasspoole, the fourth officer of a Company ship, sent off in a cutter to fetch a pilot. His account takes us right inside the fleet. When the pirates hauled him before their chief, Glasspoole told the interpreter to say they were Englishmen in distress, four days at sea without food, and the chief would not believe it, called them bad men, and ordered the interpreter tortured until he confessed the truth. What saved them was a pirate who had once been to England, who spoke a few words of English, and who told the chief that they really were Englishmen, and rich ones, since the buttons on Glasspoole's coat were gold. They were given coarse brown rice, their first meal in nearly four days, and while they ate, pirates crowded round to examine their clothes and their hair. Several of them laid swords on the prisoners' necks, making signs that they would soon take us on shore, and cut us in pieces, which I am sorry to say was the fate of some hundreds during my captivity. The chief then told him to write to his captain that unless a hundred thousand dollars came within ten days, they would all be put to death. Glasspoole protested that they were poor men, and that the most they could raise would not be more than two thousand dollars. That night he took the coat off and laid it on the deck to stop them pestering him for it, and it vanished; the next day he saw it again, stripped of its buttons. His fleet sailed to an anchorage under Lantau Island, where the head admiral of the pirates lay with about two hundred vessels, and a Portuguese brig they had captured a few days before, after murdering its captain and part of its crew. At one stretch, Glasspoole wrote, he and his men lived for three weeks on caterpillars boiled with rice. He was held until December, and ransomed in the end for about seven and a half thousand dollars, paid partly in cash and partly in opium and other goods. Notice what turns up in both ransoms: chests of opium, handed over alongside the cash. Glasspoole also saw how far the pirates' power ran on land. Their ships carried him far up the rivers of Guangdong, through a landscape of ruined towns and villages, where whole villages paid tribute to the fleet and sang to it from the shore as it passed. Other towns the pirates attacked at night, burning the government buildings and demanding a yearly tribute in silver dollars, rice, roasted pigs and sugar. When they met government soldiers, they made their European prisoners fight with their muskets, which, Glasspoole noted drily, did great execution against troops armed mostly with bows and arrows and old matchlocks.

Now, back to the British, and the second time they came for Macau. By 1808 the China trade mattered to Britain more than ever. In the first decade of the century, the imports from Canton brought in two thirds of the East India Company's entire sales income in London. And the Company's tea was so heavily taxed that by some estimates a tenth of Britain's national revenue came from the trade at Canton. So when the British at Canton heard a rumour that France was sending troops to occupy Macau, they did not wait. The war had changed since 1802. Napoleon now held nearly the whole of Europe, and the British had heard that he was proposing to the Tsar that they attack India together. French cruisers were everywhere in Southeast Asia, with a strong naval force near Java, and Britain's China trade was more valuable, and more exposed, than ever before. And this time, the man pushing for action was not a naval officer. It was the Company's own President at Canton, John Roberts. Roberts read the lesson of 1802 the other way round from the court. To him, the fact that the Chinese had not fired on the British fleet proved that they had no real means, or will, to resist British force. In March 1808 his Committee wrote secretly to Lord Minto, the British governor general in India, that if Macau were seized, neither embarrassment to our affairs or any serious opposition are to be apprehended on the part of the Chinese government. They even suggested the Chinese might welcome the British at Macau, since the Royal Navy would surely deal with the pirates better than the Portuguese did, and Roberts added that any Chinese objections would be of a temporary nature. In September 1808 a fleet arrived under Rear Admiral William O'Brien Drury, commander of the Royal Navy in India. And the British had a problem at once: they had no interpreter. The Company's one real Chinese scholar was away in England, so they asked a young English missionary at Canton, Robert Morrison, to translate for them, and he refused. He had been sent to China to save souls, not to act as a diplomatic interpreter. So they hired a Portuguese priest instead, and we will come back to what that cost him. The Committee also sent a former head interpreter of the trade, a man of Macau called Goqua who hoped to become a hong merchant, to spread opinions favourable to the British among the townspeople, and he came back with a gloomy report of how they felt. On the eleventh of September Drury wrote to the Portuguese governor of Macau that he intended to occupy the town. The governor refused, and appealed to the Chinese governor general for protection. On the twenty first of September Drury landed three hundred marines, who quickly took Macau's shore batteries, against much protest but no physical resistance from the Portuguese. The Chinese answer was the one they always used. At the beginning of October the trade was stopped. The Company's great merchant ships sat in the river with their cargoes from England still in their holds, and Drury called in seven hundred more troops from India. When the reports reached Beijing, the Jiaqing Emperor was furious. He wrote that such a brutal eruption at Macao indicates an affrontery without limit. It is important in any case, he ordered, to raise considerable troops, attack the foreigners, and exterminate them. In this way, they will understand that the seas of China are forbidden to them. The governor general called up eighty thousand troops at Canton and ordered the forts along the coast to prepare for war. The governor general also refused to meet Drury, or to recognise him in any way. When Drury hesitated, Roberts urged him on, insisting on the impossibility of giving way to the Chinese so long as they persevered in their haughty conduct, and then suggested he open fire to frighten the viceroy. Drury ignored him. At one point the British even weighed advancing troops on the city and bombarding it, a plan their own masters in India later called inconsistent with the principles of their instructions. Drury now faced the choice the whole season keeps returning to: force, or trade. On the twenty first of November he ordered British shipping out of the river and told every British subject to leave Canton within forty eight hours. The captains of the Company's ships wrote back at once that under their orders from the Company's directors, they could not obey the admiral without the approval of the Committee. On the third of December the President received a round robin signed by twelve of the fourteen Company captains, begging him to find some peaceful approach to the Chinese government. By then the staff had gone down to Macau on the admiral's orders, and the President, with one secretary, was living aboard one of the Company's ships at Whampoa, ruling the Company's affairs alone, while rumours spread that the Chinese meant to burn the fleet, and two boats rowed guard at its head from evening until sunrise. A few days later word came that orders had been given to kill any English still found at Canton, and the Chinese suppliers stopped coming to the ships. Roberts wanted Drury to bluff, to threaten war without meaning it. Drury refused, in a fury. Threats without meaning is not my manner of proceeding, he told Roberts. It is scratching with a pin or squirting dirty water, and is the disguise of impotence. And he warned of something worse than a battle: that if the British pressed on, the emperor could simply close the trade for good. That, Drury wrote, would exclude the English forever, from the most advantageous monopoly it possesses in the Universe. He also warned Roberts not to stir up the anger of the Chinese people, which is always furious, implacable, irresistible, and which, he told him, the Chinese are not destitute of, however contemptible they are in your mind. Later, a Chinese scholar writing about the British quoted one angry British captain who put it even more simply. If you offend China and they shut down trade, then even if we capture Macao, what good would it do us? That same writer held that it was the closing of the trade that turned the British merchants against Drury, and suggested that trade was China's most powerful weapon in the whole crisis. So the admiral backed down. On the tenth of December he agreed with the Chinese authorities to leave Macau, his troops embarked between the fifteenth and the twentieth, and on the twenty sixth of December the Company's trade began again. Drury even admitted that his landing had given offence, and praised the governor general's response as dictated by wisdom, justice and dignified manhood. Roberts tried twice more to threaten war on his own account, with no effect at all. Drury had been beaten by a refusal to deal with him, without the loss of a man on either side. Even the apology was a battle. The merchants wanted Roberts to send a petition to Beijing saying the troops had been landed out of ignorance of the laws, and Roberts refused that phrase, and the strange characters chosen for the admiral's name, until a form of words was found that both sides could accept. And as soon as the crisis passed, the mandarins began talking of shrinking the space the foreigners were allowed at Canton, and demanded security that no silver would be sold to Europeans or taken out. In India, Lord Minto hurried to say he had never authorised Drury to make war on China, and that he highly approved of his decision to retreat. In London, the Company's directors voted unanimously to dismiss John Roberts, for coming so close to starting a war. They said they would rather see France holding Macau than risk a break with the Chinese government. And on the Chinese side, the governor general was punished too. The emperor was disgusted that his officials had not used their full force when the British first landed, and sent him into exile on the northwestern frontier. Every official who came after him learned exactly what the emperor expected.

The trouble was not quite over. When the Select Committee rejoined their President at Canton in January 1809, the first thing they had to deal with was the arrest of Padre Roderigo, the Portuguese priest who had interpreted for Drury. He had been seized soon after landing at Macau. So the Committee stopped all commercial dealings, to make it worth the hong merchants' while to get him out, and to show in the strongest manner their detestation of the treachery. A Royal Navy captain at the mouth of the river, Captain Heathcote of the warship Phaeton, was dismayed, and told them so with a sailor's frankness. He could see no probable effect of coercive measures in this instance, he wrote, but that of involving ourselves in a war with China and the expulsion of the Portuguese from Macao. So now the navy was preaching peace to the merchants. But the merchants got their man. On the tenth of January the hong merchants told the Committee officially that Padre Roderigo had been released. On the fifteenth they brought a formal promise from the viceroy that nothing more would be done against him, or against anyone else who had supported the English. He had been arrested, stripped naked and beaten, and even after his release his life at Macau was so dangerous that the Committee paid to send him to Brazil. They also gave him ten thousand dollars as a reward for his service. A small story, but a telling one. Macau was now a town where helping the British could get you arrested and beaten.

By the summer of 1809 the pirates were closer than ever. Back in February they had captured a foreign brig under Portuguese colours and fitted her out to cruise as one of their own, until some of her original crew, kept aboard to sail her, ran away with her back to Macau. In June the Company heard that a shortage of rice had driven them far up the rivers, where they sacked a market town within twenty miles of Canton. In August their boats raided in every direction, destroying, plundering and burning even within four or five miles of the city, and they posted notices on land threatening to attack Canton itself. They threatened the county town near Macau with attack until it paid a large ransom in money and supplies, and on the twenty third of August they attacked an American ship lying off Macau itself. Chinese war junks were driven to shelter among the foreign ships at Whampoa, the anchorage below the city where the Western ships loaded their tea. So the hong merchants did what the state could not. In August 1809 they privately bought a little English brig of a hundred and eight tons, the Elizabeth, to fit out at their own expense against the pirates. They also took on a foreign ship, the Mercury, and staffed it with fifty American volunteers, though it was too small to do much good. Then the province hired the Portuguese of Macau, who equipped six small ships of European type, and the officials paid the Portuguese eighteen thousand taels a month for them, while the hong merchants put in thirty thousand taels a month of their own. So the trade was now paying for the defence of the coast. But the officials at Canton, who had to face the pirates up close, saw things differently from their emperor. Many of those officials had been aboard European warships and knew exactly how useful they could be, but any recorded request for foreign help could be punished from Beijing, so whatever they asked had to be asked quietly. And the foreigners wanted the opposite: credit for their help, and something for their trade in return. The Company's President told them that any large operation against the pirates was a matter for naval officers, and that the viceroy must apply directly to the captain of the warship escorting the Company's fleet, Francis Austen. Francis Austen was the brother of the novelist Jane Austen. And as we will see in a moment, that was a request the viceroy could not bring himself to make.

In October 1809 an imperial decree arrived ordering the Company's ships to be admitted to trade again, and the senior hong merchants brought astonishing news: the viceroy wished to see the President in person, on the twenty seventh of October. The viceroy they were about to meet was Bailing, new to Canton that year. Back in May, a newly arrived viceroy had received the British at Macau, read their account of the invasion with apparent approval, and sent them away like children told to behave. Then a report went to Beijing calling for further inquiries, and the emperor ordered that the Company's ships not be admitted until they were made, which is why the October decree mattered so much. The Committee saw its chance, and drew up a memorial of grievances. They complained that they were denied access to the viceroy and other senior officials, so that their complaints had to pass through the very people they were complaining about. They complained that the charges the merchants levied on the trade were far greater than the emperor's own duties. And they complained that they were kept more as prisoners than persons entrusted with the management of a great and powerful trade. Their every action, they wrote, was viewed with suspicion and distrust, and they were exposed to insult from the meanest officer of the government. At the palace, the hong merchants tried to persuade them to hand the memorial over for delivery, and then the prefect of Canton tried, and both were refused. Then they were called into the hall of audience, where the viceroy sat with the governor, the Hoppo, who was the customs chief, and three other officials, on either side of a raised throne. On the throne stood a table with incense and lights burning, and behind it a chair and screen that stood for the emperor himself. The British were told to stand in a line across the hall, below the officials' chairs. Then the prefect of Canton took from the table a paper deposited there in a small box covered with yellow silk, which he brought down and read aloud to us, and it went back in its box and was carried away in a chair to the factory. Yellow was the imperial colour, and the box was treated as if it carried the emperor's presence. That was the decree. And there was one more person in the room worth watching. The Committee bowed and withdrew, and afterwards the viceroy received the President privately in an inner room, with only one interpreter: Robert Morrison. A year before, Morrison had refused to interpret for an invading admiral. Now he stood beside the Company's President before the viceroy himself. And after much protestation, the viceroy took the memorial from the President's hand. He promised he would always be ready to receive the President on anything truly important, and pointed to the prefect of Canton as a man they could talk to as freely as to himself. But the decree he had read out made the terms plain. It praised the perfect humility of the British and their good conduct since their troops had, as it put it, presumptuously and blindly entered Macau. It ordered their merchant ships admitted to trade, and it ordered their ships of war kept outside. That was all the British had won by invading Macau. Days later the prefect came back, sent everyone out of the room, and asked the President quietly whether help could be found against the pirates. Francis Austen said he was ready to help, but before killing Chinese subjects who had never attacked him, he must meet the viceroy and receive his commission face to face. So on the second of November the captain, three more naval officers, the President and Morrison went into the city for the meeting, and were kept waiting in a small room. At last the merchants came back to say the viceroy had gone, obliged to retire to open dispatches from Beijing, and would be happy to see the captain another day. Austen replied that if the viceroy wished to see him now, he could come to the factory. The viceroy would surely have taken any help offered him against the pirates, but he could not bring himself to show his weakness by asking for it. Just before the audience, the Committee had even been pressed to send the viceroy a humble petition saying that the British had taken their admiral and punished him. They would not adopt it.

So how did the Qing finally beat a pirate confederation it could not defeat at sea? Mostly, it did not fight it. The provincial government put up proclamations offering pardon to any pirates who surrendered peacefully, and it cut off their supplies with an embargo along the coast. As food grew short, the alliance began to crack, and the captains who turned themselves in were rewarded and sent out against their old comrades. At the end of 1809 a split broke out between the two largest fleets, Cheung Po Tsai's red fleet, and the black fleet under a rival. The black fleet's leader, fearing attack, petitioned for pardon. We now live in a very populous age, he wrote; some of us could not agree with their relations, and were driven out like noxious weeds. It was from necessity, he went on, that the laws of the empire were violated and the merchants robbed of their goods, but now we will avoid these perils, leave our connections, and desert our comrades; we will make our submission. Zheng Yi Sao saw that the black fleet might soon be fighting for the government, against her. In February 1810 two hundred pirate boats were reported anchored off the forts at the Bogue, at the mouth of the river, waiting to surrender. But early in March the talks broke down, and the viceroy went back to Canton deeply chagrined. And then she did something no one expected. She came to Canton herself, with a small party of women and children from the red fleet, and met the viceroy at his offices to negotiate the surrender. The British heard that she had gone up to arrange with the viceroy the submission of the whole force, and that she had great influence over Cheung Po Tsai, the most formidable of the pirates on that coast. The viceroy told her, according to one account of the meeting, that he was commanded by the humanity of his Majesty's government not to kill but to pardon you. The pirates were in no hurry. If the viceroy wanted them back, the British were told, they had no objection, provided their terms were met. Cheung Po Tsai asked to keep eighty armed boats, supposedly to hunt the pirates who were left, and thirty or forty more for the salt trade. On the twentieth of April it was reported that his conditions had been accepted, with an imperial commission and a subsidy of eighteen thousand taels a month. He and his men were welcomed with gifts of food and money, and of his followers, some joined him in the emperor's service while others were paid to give up the sea and settle on land. In May he paid a state visit to Canton, and then called at Macau. The poacher had become the gamekeeper. Between January and April 1810, more than four hundred junks, mounting two and a half thousand guns, and twenty four thousand men surrendered. In the end, the viceroy's silver did more than the iron shot of the Portuguese. A Chinese chronicler of the pirate years ended his account with the rewards: the viceroy was made a guardian of the heir, allowed to wear peacock feathers with two eyes, and given a hereditary title, and the pirates were pardoned and allowed to settle wherever they wished. From that period till now, he wrote, ships pass and repass in tranquillity. All is quiet on the rivers, the four seas are tranquil, and people live in peace and plenty. That summer the British offered warships to help against any pirates who were left, and were told politely that the province was at rest and there was no need. The British were not quite so sure. That autumn the Committee feared that the reformed pirates, long used to their freedom, would soon be as formidable as ever. But Zheng Yi Sao's war was over. The woman who had commanded tens of thousands of sailors had come ashore, under a pardon she had negotiated in person. So the Qing had brought both the British and the pirates to heel, and in the end not by battle: the British by stopping the trade, the pirates with pardons and silver. Against the White Lotus inland, the dynasty had fought a long war of scorched earth. On the coast it used embargoes and pardons, which were far cheaper, and it worked. Next time, we turn back to George Staunton, the Company's young Chinese scholar, and to what the court makes of a foreigner who reads its language so well.

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