'The
baying of the dog to the moon is as much an act of worship as
some ceremonies which have been so described by travellers.'
I think he would admit that fear is the origin of the
worship. In his essay on 'Superstition,' Hume writes:
'Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the
true sources of superstition.' Also 'in such a state of
mind, infinite unknown evils are dreaded from unknown
agents.'
Man's impotence to resist the forces of nature, and their
terrible ability to injure him, would inspire a sense of
terror; which in turn would give rise to the twofold notion
of omnipotence and malignity. The savage of the present day
lives in perpetual fear of evil spirits; and the
superstitious dread, which I and most others have suffered,
is inherited from our savage ancestry. How much further back
we must seek it may be left to the sage philosophers of the
future.
CHAPTER VII
THE next winter we lay for a couple of months off Chinhai,
which we had stormed, blockading the mouth of the Ningpo
river. Here, I regret to think, I committed an act which has
often haunted my conscience as a crime; although I had
frequently promised the captain of a gun a glass of grog to
let me have a shot, and was mightily pleased if death and
destruction rewarded my aim.
Off Chinhai, lorchers and fast sailing junks laden with
merchandise would try to run the blockade before daylight.
And it sometimes happened that we youngsters had a long chase
in a cutter to overhaul them. This meant getting back to a
nine or ten o'clock breakfast at the end of the morning's
watch; equivalent to five or six hours' duty on an empty
stomach.
One cold morning I had a hard job to stop a small junk. The
men were sweating at their oars like galley slaves, and
muttering curses at the apparent futility of their labour. I
had fired a couple of shots from a 'brown Bess' - the musket
of the day - through the fugitive's sails; and fearing
punishment if I let her escape, I next aimed at the boat
herself. Down came the mainsail in a crack. When I boarded
our capture, I found I had put a bullet through the thigh of
the man at the tiller. Boys are not much troubled with
scruples about bloodguiltiness, and not unfrequently are very
cruel, for cruelty as a rule (with exceptions) mostly
proceeds from thoughtlessness. But when I realised what I
had done, and heard the wretched man groan, I was seized with
remorse for what, at a more hardened stage, I should have
excused on the score of duty.
It was during this blockade that the accident, which I have
already alluded to, befell my dear protector, Jack Johnson.
One night, during his and my middle watch, the forecastle
sentries hailed a large sampan, like a Thames barge, drifting
down stream and threatening to foul us. Sir Frederick
Nicholson, the officer of the watch, ordered Johnson to take
the cutter and tow her clear.
I begged leave to go with him. Sir Frederick refused, for he
at once suspected mischief. The sampan was reached and
diverted just before she swung athwart our bows. But
scarcely was this achieved, when an explosion took place. My
friend was knocked over, and one or two of the men fell back
into the cutter. This is what had happened: Johnson finding
no one in the sampan, cautiously raised one of the deck
hatches with a boat-hook before he left the cutter. The mine
(for such it proved) was so arranged that examination of this
kind drew a lighted match on to the magazine, which instantly
exploded.
Poor Jack! what was my horror when we got him on board!
Every trace of his handsome features was gone. He was alive,
and that seemed to be all. In a few minutes his head and
face swelled so that all was a round black charred ball. One
could hardly see where the eyes were, buried beneath the
powder-ingrained and incrusted flesh.
For weeks, at night, I used to sit on a chest near his
hammock, listening for his slightest movement, too happy if
he called me for something I could get him. In time he
recovered, and was invalided home, and I lost my dear
companion and protector. A couple of years afterwards I had
the happiness to dine with him on board another ship in
Portsmouth, no longer in the midshipman's berth, but in the
wardroom.
Twice during this war, the 'Blonde' was caught in a typhoon.
The first time was in waters now famous, but then unknown,
the Gulf of Liau-tung, in full sight of China's great wall.
We were twenty-four hours battened down, and under storm
staysails. The 'Blenheim,' with Captain Elliott our
plenipotentiary on board, was with us, and the one
circumstance left in my memory is the sight of a line-of-
battle ship rolling and pitching so that one caught sight of
the whole of her keel from stem to stern as if she had been a
fishing smack. We had been wintering in the Yellow Sea, and
at the time I speak of were on a foraging expedition round
the Liau-tung peninsula. Those who have followed the events
of the Japanese war will have noticed on the map, not far
north of Ta-lien-wan in the Korean Bay, three groups of
islands. So little was the geography of these parts then
known, that they had no place on our charts. On this very
occasion, one group was named after Captain Elliott, one was
called the Bouchier Islands, and the other the Blonde
Islands. The first surveying of the two latter groups, and
the placing of them upon the map, was done by our naval
instructor, and he always took me with him as his assistant.
