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Updated: May 13, 2025
We met a heavy sea outside of Corregidor, and never have I seen anything more dizzy and drunken and pathetic than the rolls and heaves of the lorcha. At Iloilo we met the army transport McClellan, and continued our voyage upon her to Capiz. We bade farewell to her with regret, and consumed in an anticipatory passion of renunciation our last meal with ice water, fresh butter, and fresh beef.
While in the central provinces the T'ai P'ing rebellion was raging, China was suffering grave setbacks owing to the Lorcha War of 1856; and there were also great and serious risings in other parts of the country. In 1855 the Yellow River had changed its course, entering the sea once more at Tientsin, to the great loss of the regions of Honan and Anhui.
The lorcha was a dismasted hull, no more, with a Filipino family and one or two men aboard to steer. We had a Scotch engineer who might have been the original of Kipling's McFee.
No British lorcha would be safe if her crew were liable to seizure on these grounds." The history of the lorcha "Arrow" was officially proved to be as follows: "The 'Arrow' was heretofore employed in trading on the coast, and while so employed was taken by pirates. By them she was fitted out and employed on the Canton River during the disturbances between the imperialists and the insurgents.
The Chinese, for their part, placed every possible obstacle in the way of the British. In 1856 the Chinese held up a ship sailing under the British flag, pulled down its flag, and arrested the crew on suspicion of smuggling. In connection with this and other events, Britain decided to go to war. Thus began the "Lorcha War" of 1857, in which France joined for the sake of the booty to be expected.
Parkes reported to Sir John Bowring at Hongkong the particulars of an affair which had occurred on a British-owned lorcha at Canton. The lorcha "Arrow," employed in the iron trade between Canton and the mouth of the river, commanded by an English captain, and flying the English flag, had been boarded by a party of mandarins and their followers while at anchor near the Dutch Folly.
Well, let that go; before another day I was face to face with his other flaming characteristic. "Out of Ilo-Ilo we had contrary winds at first; all night the lorcha an old grandmother of a craft, full of dry-rot spots as big as woodpeckers' nests flapped heavily about on impotent tacks, and when the sun rose we found ourselves on the same spot from which we had watched its setting.
But these, after all, were some of his minor traits. I was soon to get an inkling of one of his major ones his prodigious meanness. For when I rushed about and finally found a lorcha that was to sail for Bacolod and asked him to chip in with me on provisions, he demurred. "'Ah'd like to git my own, seh, he said in that decisive drawl of his.
Lord Palmerston, though very popular with the people, had greatly offended a large portion of the House of Commons by his interference in China. A lorcha, called the Arrow, flying the British flag, had been seized by the Chinese, and the question arose as to the right of the vessel to the protection of England.
The people of the United States might well, he felt, see some inconsistency between such friendly sentiments and the sending of large military reinforcements to Canada. In the spring of 1857 Lord Elgin accepted from Lord Palmerston a delicate mission to China at a very critical time when the affair of the lorcha "Arrow" had led to a serious rupture between that country and Great Britain.
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