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Updated: June 11, 2025
The Portuguese, it is true, still remained in Macao and the Moluccas: but they wanted those remittances which were almost exclusively sought after by the Chinese, viz., the silver which Manila received from New Spain.
It was war time, and we were very often chased by French privateers; but as we had a good crew and plenty of guns, none of them ventured to attack us, and we got safe to Macao, where we unloaded our cargo and took in teas. We had to wait some time for a convoy, and then sailed for England.
The second mate was a young man of very active and enterprising disposition, and who, I think, was formed for better things than to serve in an opium smuggler. There was an important officer on board who was called the gunner, though his duties were similar to those of a boatswain; he was of Portuguese descent, a native of Macao, though as dark as an Indian.
Trusted servants who have been many years in one employ frequently yield to this alluring but hazardous appeal to chance. One morning as I was leaving Macao for Hongkong by the daily steamer a Chinese passenger suddenly leaped overboard.
On the 6th of April the Centurion weighed from the Typa, and warped to the southward, and by the 15th she was got into Macao road, completing her water as she passed along, so that there remained now very few articles more to attend to; and her whole business being finished by the 19th, she, at three in the afternoon of that day, weighed and made sail, and stood to sea.
Nowhere in the world, not even in Macao, is there a greater intermingling of races. Here live in cheerful promiscuity Britishers and Chinese, Shans and Kachins, Sikhs and Madrasis, Punjabis, Arabs, German Jews and French adventurers, American missionaries and Japanese ladies.
Lin's subsequent demands were so arbitrary that at length the English mercantile community retired altogether from Canton, and after a futile attempt to settle at Macao, where their presence, owing to Chinese influence with the Portuguese occupiers, was made unwelcome, they finally found a refuge at Hongkong, then occupied only by a few fishermen's huts.
Touching at Japan and Loo Choo to obtain water and provisions, the party reached the Portuguese colony of Macao in safety. There were no nautical instruments or charts on the ship, and the successful result of the voyage was more accidental than otherwise. Close by the harbor of Petropavlovsk there is a monument to the memory of the ill-fated and intrepid navigator, La Perouse.
The remaining distance is usually got over in small tancea, or ferry-boats, numbers of which ply about Macao in all directions, invariably guided by women, called, from their mode of life, "Tancea-girls." Poor things! They work hard for their daily bread, being constantly exposed to the sun in summer, and to cold in winter.
As early as the year 1560 they had obtained from the local officials the right to found a settlement and to erect sheds for their goods at a place which is now known as Macao.
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