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Updated: May 22, 2025
The river became more populous. The crowding sampans, houseboats, and junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming.
Thence, keeping the watch-tower on Chuen-pee Fort well away from the North Fort of Anung-hoy, we worked up toward Towling Island in seven or eight fathoms. A thousand little boats and sampans clustered round us, and we were annoyed and a little frightened by the gesticulations of the Chinese who manned them, until it dawned on us that they wished to serve as pilots.
The Pearl River is too shallow for large steamers to go up any higher; so we stopped here only a few minutes to disembark some of the Chinese passengers, and from this point the interesting part of the voyage began. The river, as well as all the little supplementary creeks, was alive with junks and sampans masts and sails stuck up in every direction, gliding about among the flat paddy-fields.
It is not without some difficulty that we push our way through the thronging craft, principally little boats termed "sampans," to our moorings abreast of the Dockyard.
The coloring of woods and mountains stood out again in the resplendent verdancy of spring after the torrents of rain, like the wet colors of some freshly washed painting. The sampans and junks, which for the last three days had been lying under shelter, had now put out to sea, and the bay was covered with their white sails, which looked like an immense flight of seabirds.
Of course, the customs house officers have to be reckoned with from the moment a ship enters till she leaves the port, but sometimes in this drowsy climate a man falls asleep in his long chair, and here is the serang's chance the serang being the head and leader of the crew. The contraband is quickly lowered in gunny bags to the sampans and carried off in triumph to its destination.
To reach the Sha-mien and particularly the Hotel Victoria one crossed a narrow canal, always choked with rocking sampans over and about which swarmed yellow men and women and children in varied shades of faded blue cotton. At sunset the swarming abruptly ceased; even the sampans appeared to draw closer together, with the quiet of water-fowl.
The mails, consisting of half a dozen letters for each port, were tied up in big canvas sacks, sealed with big government seals, and the white men who lived on these remote, desert islands, would come themselves to fetch them. They paddled themselves to the steamer in pirogues or in sampans, white faced, anæmic, apathetic, devoid of vitality.
The sailors will soon land, and you can then descend in perfect safety." The boom of a cannon came from the sea. Instinctively the girl ducked for safety, though her companion smiled at her fears, for the shell would have long preceded the report, had it traveled their way. "One of the remaining sampans has got under way," he explained, "and the warship is firing at her."
Its lake-like expanses, without a spiteful rock or shoal, are alive with ships, barks, brigs, junks, proas, sampans, canoes; and the stranger is beset by a flotilla of river pedlers, expertly sculling under the stern of the steamer, and shrilly screaming the praises of their wares; while here and there, in the thick of the bustle and scramble and din, a cunning, quick-handed Chinaman, in a crank canoe, ladles from a steaming caldron his savory chow-chow soup, and serves it out in small white bowls to hungry customers, who hold their peace for a time and loll upon their oars, enraptured by the penetrating brew.
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