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Rh foreigners on or about April 6, 1849, if it were practicable by that time, and to allow excursions into the country, also to let Europeans build a church near the factories and bury their dead at Whampoa. Meanwhile he secretly made his arrangements for an attack. But Sir John at once accepted the terms, though they virtually were below the level of what the Nanking Treaty had granted in 1842, and on April 8, 1847, the British expedition returned to Hongkong triumphantly, leaving Kiying to report to the Emperor that he detained Sir John in parleys whilst collecting and bringing up his army, but that Sir John precipitately fled to Hongkong as soon as he found himself threatened by the Chinese troops. The British communities at Canton and Hongkong were indignant at this wanton and bootless 'bucaneering expedition' which merely served to cause a sudden stagnation of the Canton trade, to render the lives and property of foreigners in Canton even less secure than before, and to make European views of state policy and international law ridiculous in the eyes of the Chinese. It seemed clear to them that Sir John Davis was even a worse failure as a diplomatist than Sir Henry Pottinger had been. Lord Palmerston, however, approved of Sir John's proceedings and so the matter rested for the time, the more so as Kiying treated Sir John's warlike frolic with silent contempt.

A few months afterwards, however, a new disturbance arose in Canton, and when Sir John Davis, none the wiser for his past experiences, meditated another military expedition against Canton, and induced Major-Oeneral D'Aguilar to write to Ceylon for re-inforcements, Sir G. Grey, delighted to have an opportunity of subverting Lord Palmerston's policy, peremptorily prohibited any further offensive operations to be undertaken against the Chinese without the previous sanction of Her Majesty's Government. At the same time Earl Grey censured the April expedition in plain terms. 'Although the late operations,' he wrote (September 22, 1847), 'were attended with immediate success, the risk of a second attempt of the same kind would far overbalance any advantage to be derived from such a step.