Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

Instead of answering her questions they made a feeble attempt to reason with her.

Hong Kong was a long way away, they said. Getting there would entail a voyage of many weeks and she, with her uncertain health, would find it difficult to be at sea for such a length of time.

Shireen laughed. She was just as hardy as either of them, she said — and as proof of this she reminded them that her ‘sea legs’ had always been better than theirs. As children, when they went on sailing trips with their parents, she was the only one among the siblings who had never suffered from sea-sickness; the two of them had scarcely been able to step on deck without heaving up their insides.

Their faces reddened and they quickly changed tack. What about the costs? they said. The journey would be expensive — where was the money to come from?

This aspect of the plan had so occupied Shireen’s thoughts that she knew the numbers by heart: reaching for a quill she jotted down some figures on a sheet of paper and pushed it across the table.

Leh , she said. There — have a look.

Frowns appeared on the seths’ faces as they went through the numbers. Their disapproval was focused on one particular figure, which they underlined and thrust back at her.

The price of the passage had been greatly underestimated, they told her. The voyage would cost much more than she had allowed for.

This was exactly the opening Shireen had been waiting for.

I have been offered a special price, she said, by Mr Benjamin Burnham, who was my husband’s colleague on the Select Committee at Canton. He will provide me with a fine cabin on one of his ships, the Hind , which will be arriving soon in Bombay. She will sail at the end of March, going from here to Colombo and then Calcutta, where she will pick up some troops for the eastern expedition.

She paused: So you see — it will be a very safe and economical way to travel.

Her brothers looked at each other and shrugged. Their expressions were such that Shireen knew that she had carried the day even before they said: tho pachi theek che , all right then; do what you want.

January 14, 1840

Honam

I have been very, very fortunate in chancing upon my lodgings in Baburao’s houseboat. I’ll warrant that nobody in Canton has a better view of this vast city than I do. A fortnight ago the residents of the American Factory put on a fireworks display in the foreign enclave, to celebrate the arrival of the year 1840, of the Christian era. I watched it from my terrace and it was as if the show had been put on expressly for my benefit; where others saw only the display in the sky, I saw it replicated also in the water, on the surface of the Pearl River and White Swan Lake.

Later, Zhong Lou-si interrogated me at length about calendars and was very curious to know which are in use in India and why. Often, when he questions me I am reminded of the tutors of my childhood, the learned pundits who schooled me in Nyaya , logic, and Sanskrit grammar. Like them Zhong Lou-si has an inexhaustible fund of patience, a tenacious memory and an unerring eye for inconsistencies and contradictions. With him too I have to be very careful in choosing my words — he examines everything I say and if I were to make extravagant claims I know I would be quickly taken to task.

In Lou-si’s demeanour too there is something that reminds me of my old punditjis: like them he sometimes lapses into woolly distractedness and sometimes bristles with irascibility. Yet there is one great difference: unlike the pundits of my childhood, Zhong Lou-si has no taste for abstractions or philosophical speculation. He is interested only in ‘useful knowledge’ — chih hsueh — which includes a great variety of things, mainly pertaining to the world beyond. In months past he would sit with me for hours, asking questions about one subject after another: were the people who Tibetans and Gurkhas call ‘borgis’ the same as the ‘Marathas’? What was the date of the Battle of Assaye by the Chinese calendar? Was Sir Arthur Wellesley the same man as the Duke of Wellington? I am sure Zhong Lou-si knows the answers to many of these questions — he asks them either for confirmation or to check my own reliability. He treats every statement critically; to him the provenance of what is said is just as important as its content: how did I know that the British expedition to Burma had come close to defeat in 1825? Was it just hearsay? What were my sources?

But since the disaster at Humen there has been a marked change in the direction of his inquiries. He no longer seems to be so interested in history and geography: his questions now are mainly about military and naval matters.

One day he questioned me at length about paddle-wheel steamers. I told him that I well remembered the day, fourteen years ago, when a steamer called Enterprize had steamed up to Calcutta, having come all the way from London: this was the first steamer ever to be seen in the Indian Ocean and she had won a prize of twenty thousand pounds for her feat. Being young at that time I had expected that Enterprize would be a huge, towering vessel: I was astonished to find that she was a small, ungainly-looking craft. But when the Enterprize began to move my disappointment had turned to wonder: without a breath of wind stirring, she had gone up and down the Calcutta waterfront, manoeuvring dexterously between throngs of boats and ships.

I told Zhong Lou-si that the arrival of the Enterprize had set off a great race amongst the shipowners of Calcutta. Within a few years the New Howrah Dockyards had built the Forbes , a teak paddle-wheeler fitted with two sixty-horsepower engines. This had inspired my own father to enter the race: he had invested five thousand rupees in a company launched by the city’s most eminent Bengali entrepreneur, Dwarkanath Tagore: it was called the Calcutta Steam Tug Association, and it was soon in possession of two steamers. I told Zhong Lou-si that steamers and steam-tugs are a familiar sight on the Hooghly now; people have grown accustomed to seeing them on the river, churning purposefully through the water and exhaling long trails of smoke, soot and cinders.

Zhong Lou-si remarked that if steamers had been built in Calcutta then surely it should be possible to build one in Guangzhou as well, me aa?

Gang hai Lou-si! Yes, of course.

I told him that I did not see why not: it all depended on the engine. The engines for the Calcutta steamers had come from England, as I remember, but I have heard that a Parsi shipbuilder has built similar engines in Bombay. If it could be done in Bombay then there is no reason why it should not be possible in Guangzhou.

From the drift of these questions I realized that there was a plan afoot to bring steamers to China. Later Compton told me that a steamer had already visited Canton some years before — he confided also that a local shipyard is now experimenting with a prototype.

From this, and from some other tasks that we’d been set, it became clear to me that the lessons of the disastrous naval engagement at Humen have not been lost on Commissioner Lin and his entourage: they have realized that China’s war-junks are antiquated and are making every effort to acquire some modern sailing vessels of the Western type.

A while ago Zhong Lou-si had asked us to look out for notices of sale for Western-built ships. As luck would have it, I soon came upon one. It was in one of the journals that Lou-si’s agents procure for us — the Canton Press .

The notice was for a ship called Cambridge ; she had been put up for sale by her owner, an Englishman by the name of Captain Douglas. The notice said that she was a Liverpool-built merchantman of 1,080 tons, armed with thirty-six guns — perfect in every way from Lou-si’s point of view. But would Mr Douglas sell to a Chinese buyer? Would Captain Elliot allow him to make such a sale?