The war maker

WHEN I rejoined the “Leckwith,” after having started the Beautiful White Devil, who was a devil no longer but the one woman in the world for me, on her way to England to secure a pardon for her piracies which would open the way to our marriage, Frank Norton was very inquisitive as to where I had been and the reason for my sudden disappearance from Hong Kong. He had of course heard from Ah Fen of the woman pirate, who was mistakenly blamed by the real pirates for some of our raids on them, while we were held responsible for some of hers, and I could see that his keen mind had conceived the suspicion that it was her ship whose commander I had attended, in my capacity as a surgeon, after our joint fight with the Malays on the deck of the British bark, and that she was at the bottom of my absence, but I declined to discuss the matter at all or give him any information on the subject. I told him simply that I had been away on strictly private business. With even my most intimate friends I am naturally secretive regarding my purely personal affairs, and the “Beautiful White Angel,” as I now knew her to be, had become so sacred in my enraptured vision that I did not wish to talk about her with any one, and least of all with the cynical Norton. I knew he would base his estimate of her on her altogether undeserved reputation among people who had never seen her, and that he would say something which would make me want to kill him. There really was no need for that sort of a finale to our semi-partnership, so I remained silent. Norton was annoyed by my refusal to take him into my confidence and went away in a huff, but he was astounded, a day or two later, when I told him I had decided to sell the “Florence” and “Surprise,” divide up the profits with him, and quit the business we were in.

“What is the matter?” he asked in amazement. “Have you lost your mind?”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “I have only just come into my right mind.”

“But look at the money we are making,” he protested. “Is there any other place where you can make as much money so easily?”

“There is nobody who gets more satisfaction out of money than I do,” I said, “but after all it isn’t the only thing in the world. I came out here for the adventure more than for the money.”

“Well, isn’t the supply of adventure equal to the demand?” he asked with a tinge of sarcasm.

“Not of the kind that appeals to me. There is plenty of excitement, of a kind, but not an awful lot of adventure, as I understand the term. Most of the time it is nothing more than wholesale butchery of ignorant Malays and Chinkies who have no chance against us even though they do outnumber us. And to make it worse, we steal from them. That is not the kind of adventure that I enjoy.”

This sort of talk from me must have sounded very strange and I was not surprised at Norton’s dumbfounded expression.

“But we only take from them what they have stolen from somebody else,” he argued. “They have no right to it, while we can reasonably claim it as a reward for avenging those whom they have killed and robbed. Besides that, we ought to get a medal from the British Government for every one of those devils we put out of the way, for we are doing the world a service.”

“That is no argument,” I contended, remembering Miss Crofton’s curt reproval of my own defence to her, along just the same line, only a month before. “The fact that they steal from others gives us no shadow of right to steal from them. Perhaps it is a good thing to kill them, but I hold no commission and draw no salary for that sort of thing. If the world wants them put out of the way, let the world attend to it. The world has never done anything for me that should make me want to assume the whole contract. If it is a public service to slay pirates, I have certainly killed my share, and directed the slaughter of enough more of them to absolve all of my most distant relatives from any further responsibility in the matter. Somebody else can now step up and kill his share, and they can keep it going as long as they like. I am sick of murdering and robbing, even though they are pirates, and there will be no more of it from my ships.”

“What do you know about this ‘Beautiful White Devil’ Ah Fen has been telling me about?” he shot at me. He evidently expected to catch me off my guard, but I was looking for just such an inquiry and was not at all perturbed.

“There is no such person,” I answered with perfect truthfulness. “I satisfied myself on that point while I was in Hong Kong. That is only one of the wild stories you hear out here where there are so many people who smoke opium. There may be a man pirate who sometimes masquerades in female attire, but there is no woman pirate.”

“It may be,” he suggested sneeringly, “that this sudden decision of yours to retire is due to the fact that Moy Sen has threatened to exterminate us. If you don’t want to fight the old scoundrel, why don’t you say so, instead of backing out on an assumption of morality that does not harmonize with your makeup and with which it is far beyond me to agree.”

That dart struck a tender spot. I would be the last one to quit under a threat or under fire, and Norton knew it. The prospect of a rattling final fight was most alluring. Fighting pirates, I reasoned with myself, especially when they had declared war on you, was altogether different from preying on them, which I had given my word I would not do. It would be at least six or eight months before my beloved Kate could secure her pardon and meet me in Bombay, where we had planned to be married, and that, I figured, would give me time to accept the “defi” of the King of the Pirates, if he moved as rapidly as we might expect.

“Far from running away from a fight of that kind,” I told Norton, “I should much rather run into it. We will cruise around a while to see whether the Chinkies really mean to give us battle. But it is the sport of it that I want and nothing else, for if it comes off it will be a great fight. There must be no more looting.”

Norton apparently considered that he had shaken my decision to quit preying on the pirates, wherein he was mistaken, and hoped to be able to induce me to abandon it entirely. At any rate we were of one mind in hunting for a scrap with the Chinkies, just for the fun of it, and harmony was restored.

We loafed around in the path of the pirates below Great Natuna Island but nothing happened for ten days or two weeks and it began to look as though they were not seeking us very earnestly. We saw several junks which we could easily have stood up and robbed, but I would not permit it. Late one evening, just as the galloping night was closing in, an enormous junk appeared suddenly from behind an island and came sailing down a narrow strait through which we were just crawling. Instead of hurrying along through the dangerous passage, as she would have done had she been an honest trader, she began to shorten sail after she had passed us. That aroused our suspicions and we determined to look her over. She appeared to carry only a small crew, but when we came together it seemed to me for a moment that she had more Chinamen on board than I had ever seen before at one time. We increased our speed a little and drew up alongside to get a good look at her. We were almost on an even keel with her when she swung suddenly to starboard and would have smashed into our bow if we had not gone full speed astern without losing a second. As she passed under our short bowsprit she threw a grappling iron which caught on our port bow, and we let it stay there.

We lit our battle lamps and hung them along under the rail so that they illuminated our deck, where we preferred to fight, because we knew every foot of it. We had about one hundred and twenty-five men on the “Leckwith,” Norton having taken the pick of the crews of the “Florence” and “Surprise,” while I was away, in order to be prepared for any contingency, and I had no fear that the pirates could come aboard fast enough to get away with us. The junk’s grappling iron held and as soon as she was clear of us we went ahead slowly. This drew the two ships together, which was what we wanted. As the junk swung around we let go our carronades, but we were at such close quarters that the slugs did not have time to scatter and simply ploughed small holes through the mass of men that swarmed her decks. We gave them a volley of rifle fire and met them with another as the ships came together. They rushed over the rail at us in a sulphur cloud. Then it was revolvers and cutlasses. The pirates resorted to their old trick of throwing themselves on the deck, as though killed or wounded, and trying to hamstring or disembowel us, but we were up to that game and were watching for it. We made sure that every Chinaman was dead when he struck the deck. Every blow was that of an executioner. In a few minutes, as it seemed then, though it may have been much longer, the decks were slippery with blood and I could actually hear it dripping through the scuppers into the quiet sea.

It was such a fight as one gets into only in years, perhaps only once in a lifetime. The butchery was dreadful but the excitement of it set one’s blood ablaze. Our men became demons. As they shot and slashed they shouted and sang. A disarmed Chinkie seized me around the waist and dragged me in among his blood-stained fellows, but we were so closely wedged together that they could not chop at me without striking each other and they never thought of stabbing me. Norton and the mighty Lorensen, swinging an enormous Chinese sword which he had taken from one of his victims, came to my assistance and in a twinkling I was free, with dead and maimed pirates piled up around me in a circle. I could feel sword cuts now and then but they seemed like pin pricks. All of us were so covered with blood that there was no telling whether it came from our own wounds or those we had inflicted.

“That makes us even,” I shouted to Lorensen, as I cut down a yellow devil who had crept up behind him, while he was busy with those in front, and had his knife raised to put him out of commission. A Chinkie who had lost his sword seized my empty pistol from its holster, pressed it over my heart and pulled the trigger. I let him go that far and then laughed at him as I backed away and cut his head half off. I saw Norton go down and fought my way to him, to find that he had only slipped in a red pool. He had been singing a loud requiem of profane abuse over those who met his sword and he resumed it where he had left off, hardly missing a note. We kept the pirates in front of us and steadily forced our way forward. Every time one of our own men fell it made us fight the harder. The Chinkies cut and slashed with all of their desperate savagery but it was impossible for them to stand before the fury of our men and, though they outnumbered us four or five to one, they finally began to give way. We followed them onto their own deck and piled them up on top of each other. Finally a lot of them took to the hold and the rest, perhaps a hundred of them, jumped overboard. Those that foolishly fled to the hold we treated to a dose of their own medicine. We threw their stink-pots down among them until the air was thick with the poisonous smoke, and closed the hatches. Some of them, gasping and blinded, tried to escape through the guarded gangways; the rest of them died in the hold. There was not a pirate left alive on the junk or on our own deck.

We looked upon our work and pronounced it good, but before we had time to congratulate ourselves or count noses to ascertain the extent to which we had suffered, we discovered a big steamer almost on top of us. It was the “Ly-ce-moon,” the flagship of Moy Sen’s fleet, and, though we did not know it, the old pirate chief himself was in command of her. We barely had time to refill our revolvers and get back onto the “Leckwith,” when she banged into us and made fast with her grapplers. She was nearly twice the size of the “Leckwith” and her rail was three or four feet above ours. We did not know how many men she carried nor did any of us care, for we were mad with monotonous murder; the bestial blood lust that comes from a glut of human butchery was over all of us. We were both exhilarated and enraged; stimulated by the quick work we had made of the junk, and furious at the revelation of the cunning trap that had been set for us. The junk was the bait. It was expected that we would attack and board her; that our boarding force would be overwhelmed by the hundreds of devils who were crammed into her hold, and while this fight was on the “Ly-ce-moon” was to come up on the other side and finish us off. It was shrewdly planned and if we had not been on our guard and suspicious of everything, we would have fallen into the trap, and delayed matters so long that when it came we would have had a fight on our hands which it would have been hard to win. As I reasoned it out, when we ranged alongside of the junk to size her up more closely, as soon as she came up with us, her commander, naturally thinking we were preparing to attack him, decided that the cunning thing for him to do was to throw his horde aboard of us instead of waiting for us to board him. He supposed we carried only our ordinary crew, as all of our extra men were out of sight, and figured that it would be an easy game for him, in which he stood to win a lot of glory with no chance of losing; for even if we should develop unexpected strength, the steamer would come up in time to make our defeat certain. Nothing but this turn of affairs, which was not according to the programme, and the fury with which our augmented crew went at the Chinkies, made it possible for us to render the junk entirely harmless before Moy Sen arrived.

When he threw his grappling irons we made them fast and, before he had time to think, or to see all that had happened, we were scrambling over his high sides, each man armed with a revolver in one hand and a cutlass in the other. The Chinaman, even when he is a pirate, has no rapid resourcefulness. When you “switch the cut” on him, or do anything in a different way from that in which he expects you to do it, he has to stop and figure it out and fix himself all over again. Moy Sen’s crew were prepared to board us, and when we made the offensive our defensive, and carried the fight to them with an altogether unexpected rush, they were so taken by surprise that they offered little real resistance to our invasion. But by the time we were all on board they had regained their senses and the fight that followed was even more savage than the one before it. There were no lights, except those under the “Leckwith’s” rail, which did us little good, and the pirates fired at us from hiding places about their well-known decks, which we could not make out until our eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. Our men shot and, when their revolvers were empty, slashed at every noise. In order that we might not attack each other we kept up a contemptuous chant of curses on the Chinese, counting time to it with our cutlasses.

The result was a repetition of what had occurred with the crew of the junk, but it required much longer to accomplish it. The junk had carried more men than the steamer, for it was planned that those on the junk were to do the brunt of the fighting and get us going before the others came at us from behind; but the first battle was fought on a well-lighted deck with every foot of which we were familiar, while the second struggle took place on a strange ship and in semi-darkness, which was lightened only by the lamps on our own ship below us and a few stars above, for the sky was overcast with clouds.

We strung our forces along the full length of the “Ly-ce-moon,” to prevent the pirates from getting behind us, and fought our way crosswise of the ship. One of the first things that caught my eye was the figure of a gigantic Chinaman in the afterpart of the vessel, who at first directed the fight and then took a large hand in it himself. It was, as I suspected at the time from the manner in which he had been described to me by Ah Fen, old Moy Sen himself, who had paid us the high honor of taking personal charge of the campaign against us. He was the biggest Chinaman I had ever seen and must have been a full-blooded Tartar. He was raw-boned and his face, of which I now and then caught a glimpse, was that of a fiend. He had tremendously long arms and every time he swung his sword he cleared a space. Lorensen and I, who were close together while Norton was farther forward, tried to fight our way to him, but we were held back by important business directly in front of us that demanded immediate attention. By the time we succeeded in working our way aft, the chief of all the pirates had disappeared.

Made more desperate by the annihilation of their comrades on the junk and inspired by the presence of their great leader, and his commanding and defiant shouts, the Chinkies fought with a grim stubbornness which I had never before seen them display. They made no noise about it but kept chopping away, sometimes aimlessly, but always chopping. The scent of veritable rivers of blood would have sickened us, and our tired arms, like those of our enemies, would have settled into a methodical swing, had we not been spurred on by one victory and the prospect of a still greater one. My sword was broken off at the hilt in warding off a vicious blow, but before another one could be struck I seized a fortunately falling Chinkie and held him in front of me, while his blood gushed all over me, until I had secured his sword, which I used as effectively as my own. In trying to hamstring me a half-dead pirate gashed the calf of my leg to the bone, yet I scarcely noticed it. I felt something trickling down my face and knew a glancing blow had laid open my scalp, but there was no twinge of pain. It was the same with all of the others. No one thought of his wounds unless he was disabled, when, if he had strength enough, he dragged himself to the rear to be out of the way. Nothing was in our minds but to fight and win. Had there been twice as many of the pirates the result, in the end, would have been the same, for it was not in us to be defeated that night. Gradually, but slowly at first, we got the upper hand of them. When the inspiring voice of their chief was silenced they gave way more rapidly and our men chased them over the side and rushed into cabins, deckhouses, for’c’sle, engine room, and stokehole, hunting out those who had sought hiding places, and putting an end to the continued danger of pot shots.

It was broad daylight by the time we had thrown overboard the last of the dead Chinamen and washed down the decks, after giving our own badly wounded men such attention as was possible under the conditions. We thought for a time that Moy Sen had escaped, but we found him, almost chopped to pieces, close to the after wheelhouse, with three of our men dead beside him. Except for his great size we would not have known him, but he was identified by Ah Fen, who was the only one on board who had ever seen him. We had twenty-one men killed and twice as many so seriously injured that a number of them subsequently died, and there was hardly a man of us who did not have one or more wounds of some kind. In addition to the cut on my leg, which was a nasty one and barely missed the tendons, and the scalp wound, which was not a severe one, I had a dozen cuts and gashes of assorted sizes and widely distributed. The point of a sword had ripped open my already scarred cheek and another one had taken away a souvenir from my arm. Norton had a long cut along his abdomen, which almost accomplished the intended disembowelment, and half of one ear was hanging by the skin. He also had many minor injuries, but neither of us was damaged beyond speedy repair. Lorensen, a mighty man in any position, who had sent as many Chinamen to join Confucius as had any of us, was one of the very few who escaped with only trifling scratches.

On the “Ly-ce-moon” were two teak chests, filled with gold and silver coin and ingots, silverware, jewelry, and precious and semi-precious stones, of the Oriental variety, apparently representing the most valuable portions of several stolen cargoes, and these I allowed to be transferred to the “Leckwith,” in preference to throwing them overboard. It then became a question as to what we should do with Moy Sen’s ships. There was some apprehension that if we took them with us we might run into a cruiser and be unable satisfactorily to explain exactly how we came into possession of them and what we were doing with such a large crew on a private yacht. We compromised the difficulty by scuttling the junk and putting a crew aboard the steamer. We went to Singapore, arriving there in the early Summer of 1876, as I remember it, to close up our business, and sold the pirate ship to our Chinese agents for a third of what she was worth. We also sold to them, for a small part of its value, the loot we had taken from her, but all of that money was divided up between Norton and the crew. I held to my promise and touched none of it. We retained about twenty-five of our best men, paid the others off, after dividing up a large share of our profits with all of them, placed the injured in a hospital, and headed for Hong Kong, where the “Florence” and “Surprise” had been ordered to report. On the way we stopped at a small, out-of-the-way island, landed all of our guns and most of our small arms, and, after covering them well with red lead and tallow, buried them in a deep hole, over which we planted a lot of young cocoanut trees. The “Leckwith” then became, in fact, a private yacht. We had no anxiety regarding our old friends, the pirates, for there was nothing we could not run away from.

It was fortunate that we removed all traces of piracy and restored the “Leckwith” to an honest vessel for as soon as we reached Hong Kong we were boarded and inspected with great care. It transpired that while I was away with Miss Crofton, Norton had landed at a little village a hundred and fifty miles down the coast and played hob with it. I knew nothing about it until after we were examined, when Lorensen told me about it. Norton’s excuse was that he believed the village was inhabited only by pirates and he wanted to teach them a lesson, but there was no doubt in my mind that he had hoped to find a lot of loot there. The “Leckwith,” naturally, answered the descriptions of the ship that made the raid, and if we had not been nicely cleaned up when the officers came aboard, we undoubtedly would have been arrested for piracy, instead of which we were absolved from all suspicion.

The “Florence” was waiting for us and I at once disposed of her, through our agents, to an English trading company. In a few weeks the “Surprise” came in from Yokohama, where she had delivered a cargo, and was sold to a Japanese house with a branch in Hong Kong. I remember that she brought seven thousand pounds, which I gave to Norton. We paid off their crews, with a bonus and their share of the profits, and saw that they were scattered and shipped on long voyages in different directions, as we had done with the surplus crew of the “Leckwith.” We had no fear that they would carelessly tell what they knew about our operations, for they were pleased with their treatment and, beyond that, self-protection would have stood in the way of any complaint against us, but we considered it wise to distribute them to the four corners of the earth before they had an opportunity to fill up with rum and become braggarts, wherein would be danger to all of us. The two captains, Brown and Heather, had fallen under the spell of the China Sea, with its dangers and its delights, and were in no hurry to leave it for prosaic England, but we knew they could be relied on; if they had not been discreet and close-mouthed I never would have engaged them. I had been out East about two years and considered that the adventures I had encountered there amply repaid me for the time, to say nothing of the joy I had found in establishing the identity of the Beautiful White Devil as a real, live being, and falling in love with her. Therefore I insisted on treating all of our men with a liberality that amounted to prodigality, but even after that Norton and I divided up something over three hundred thousand dollars, as the remaining share of what we had cleaned up from the pirates.

We loafed around Hong Kong for weeks, for it had been arranged that Miss Crofton should communicate with me there as to the probable result of her effort to secure a pardon after the confession she intended to make to the Home Secretary. Finally the word came, and it was a great shock to me, for it was a report of her death, which occurred suddenly at her old home in Ireland, soon after she arrived there on her way to London. I had been in love before, more times than once, but never so much as with her. For her I was ready to give up my adventurous life, but the knowledge that she was gone from me made me more desperate than ever. I was tempted to resume the old piratical life, yet I could not bear to remain amid scenes that would constantly remind me of her. So I left the China Sea behind me and never have returned to it.

On receipt of the heart-breaking news I told Norton the whole story of how I became acquainted with the beautiful Miss Crofton and fell in love with her, and how my romance had been shattered. I told him he could stay there if he wanted to, and return to the old life if he wished, but that I intended to leave at once and for all time. He declared he would go with me, and suggested that we take a trip to Australia; but I was moody and wanted to cruise around a bit, in the solitude of the open sea, with no definite object in view. We headed up along the coast and Norton, who was looking after the navigation of the ship, in which I had lost all interest for the time being, put in at Amoy, for want of something better to do. He thought a visit to a strange port might do me good. While we were lying there Norton became acquainted with a Chinese or Corean merchant. He was anxious to get up to the Shantung Peninsula, where the Germans were beginning to establish themselves firmly with the idea of taking possession of that rich section of China when the Empire was divided up among the “friendly” powers, so called because they were altogether unfriendly, and Norton proposed that we continue our indefinite journey that far and take him along. I agreed, thinking we might find something interesting in new scenes. When we got nearly up to the Peninsula Norton unfolded a new scheme. Our merchant passenger, he said, had told him of a lot of treasure buried in a cemetery in Corea, close to a river and not a great way from the coast, which was guarded only by the superstitious native fear of the dead. It would be an easy matter to secure the treasure, according to his story, and he offered to lead us to it if we would give him a share of it. By that time I was in a frame of mind to welcome any excitement and I told Norton to close with him and go ahead.

Accordingly we altered our course and sailed for the west coast of Corea. I do not know how far we followed it but we stopped at the mouth of a small river, which ran close to the cemetery, about twelve miles up. We went up to it at night in a steam launch we had bought at Hong Kong; Norton, the merchant, and I, and eight men. The cemetery, which was five hundred yards back from the river, was an open space of perhaps ten acres, filled with funny-looking graves, covered with signs and charms. In the centre of it was an unroofed structure about fifty feet square, with stone walls twelve or fifteen feet high. It was there, said our guide, that the money was concealed.

Just as we came to the edge of the burying ground a procession of twenty or twenty-five white-robed men, marching in Indian file and carrying a number of ladders, appeared on the opposite side. They marched to the square structure, raised their ladders against the wall and went over. In half an hour they climbed out again, with several large and heavy sacks which were lowered with some difficulty, took down their ladders and marched away in silence. Our guide explained, with many Chinese curses, that they doubtless were a delegation sent from Seoul after the treasure. Certainly they had taken something away with them and it probably was money. There was no telling whether it was gold, silver, or copper, for all our guide professed to know was that a “large amount” was hidden there. From the size and weight of the numerous sacks in which it was carried away I got the idea that the “treasure” consisted of the cheap “cash” used in that country and China and that the total value of it probably did not exceed a few hundred dollars at the most. Had it been made up of gold coin it would have represented the national wealth of Corea.

Some of the store might have been left behind, but I did not care to investigate. The outlook was not promising and the situation was uncanny to a degree that got on my already depressed nervous system; so, with some random remarks about Corean methods of burying their dead and hiding their money, we walked back to the launch and returned to the ship, without having derived even a reasonable amount of excitement from the trip. That fiasco finally fixed in me a resolution, that had been forming for some time, to get entirely away from that part of the world. We turned about and landed our disappointed passenger at Shanghai and from there took a course almost due south, which carried us east of the Philippine Islands, down through Molucca Pass, past the Island of Celebes, into the Florida Sea, and out through the Floris Strait into the Indian Ocean. Our final objective port was London, but I had no wish to make another trip through the China Sea and its islands at the south, which held so many painful memories, and took this roundabout course to avoid them.