Sir Robert Hart | Page 8

the rest, spelled with two "r's" (Partridge),
whereupon he could not resist the temptation of cutting off the list with
his penknife and, on his return to Shanghai, triumphantly handing it to
his old messmate.
In 1855, owing to a dispute with his Portuguese colleague, the British
Consul at Ningpo was suspended from duty, and young Hart put in
charge of affairs for some months. His calm judgment and good sense
during this first period of responsibility gained him favourable notice
with the "powers that be," for a little later at Canton, when the British
General Van Straubenzee remarked, on introducing him to
Mr.(afterwards Sir Frederick) Bruce, "This young man I recommend
you to keep your eye on; some day he will do something," the latter
answered, "Oh, I have already had my attention called to him by the
Foreign Office."
The Portuguese were much in evidence in the Ningpo of those days.
They were numerous; they had power, and they abused it: with the

result that retribution came upon them so sure, so swift, so terrible that
not only Ningpo but the whole of China was deeply stirred by the
horror of it.
I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857, the
culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the
Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vessels--the fastest and most
easily managed ships in the age before steam--terrorized the whole
coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell into
downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their
inhabitants.
Rumours of Cantonese revenge began in the winter of 1856, when
news came that all the foreigners in Ningpo would be massacred on a
certain night. Some one thereupon invited the whole community to dine
together; but Robert Hart refused, thinking that men who sat drinking
hot whiskey punch through a long evening would be in no condition to
face a disturbance if it came. Thus, while the others kept up their
courage in company, he slept in a deserted house--the terrified servants
had fled--with a revolver under his pillow, and beside his bed an open
window, through which he intended to drop, if the worst came to the
worst, and try to make his way on foot to Shanghai. Nothing happened
then, however; but the talk of the tea-shops had not been
unfounded--only premature.
The 26th of June saw the vengeance consummated. With great bravery
and determination the Cantonese under Poo Liang Tai swept the
Portuguese lorchas up the entire coast and into Ningpo. The fight began
afloat and ashore. Bullets whistled everywhere; the distracted
lorchamen ran wildly about, hoping to escape the inevitable. Some of
the poor wretches reached the British Consulate, alive or half alive,
clamouring for shelter; but Mr. Meadows, then Consul, refused to let
them in, fearing to turn the riot from an anti-Portuguese disturbance
into an anti-foreign outbreak, and the unfortunate creatures frantically
beat on the closed gates in vain.
Perhaps much of their fate was well deserved--some historians say
so--but it was none the less terrible when it came; and I can imagine

that the predicament of Meadows and young Hart, standing behind the
barred gates of the Consulate, could have been little worse, mentally,
than that of the wretches outside praying to them in the name of
Heaven and the saints for shelter.
All were hunted down at last, dragged out of their hiding-places in old
Chinese graves among the paddy fields, butchered where they stood
defending their lodging-house, or taken prisoners only to be put on one
of their own lorchas, towed a little way up the river and slowly roasted
to death. Then, "last scene of all," the Cantonese stormed the
Portuguese Consulate, pillaged and wrecked the building, and were just
climbing on to the flat roof to haul down the flag when a stately white
cloud appeared far down the river, serenely floating towards the
disturbed city.
It was the French warship Capricieuse, under full sail. She had come
straight from South America and put in at Ningpo after her long voyage,
all unconscious of the terrible events passing there. Was ever an arrival
more providential? I greatly doubt it; for had she not appeared in this
miraculous fashion, who knows what would have come to the handful
of white men left in that last outpost of civilization?
Such was Robert Hart's first experience of a fight, but it was by no
means to be his only one. Bugles have sounded in his ears from first to
last, and a wide variety of military experiences--he was present at the
taking of one city and during the siege of another--has come to him
without his seeking it.
From Ningpo he was transferred to Canton in March 1858, and made
Secretary to the Allied Commission governing