Page:Europe in China.djvu/257

Rh in one day for not having tickets of registration. The consequence was that the criminals of Hongkong had an easier time for a few months, as public flogging was suspended from January 23 to May 8, 1847.

The most predominant form of crime at this period was piracy. The whole coast-line of the Canton and Fohkien provinces was virtually under the control of a piratical confederacy under the leadership of Cheung Shap-ng-tsai and Chui A-pou, to whom trading and fishing junks had to pay regular black-mail. The waters of the Colony swarmed with pirates, and Hongkong-registered junks were, on escaping the pirates and entering the Canton River, subjected to all sorts of lawless plunderings on the part of the crews of the gunboats under the orders of the Canton revenue farmers. Hence the peaceful trading junk of this period had to sail heavily armed, so much so that there was frequently nothing but the cargo to distinguish a trading junk from a pirate. The worst feature of the case was the fact that lawless European seamen occasionally enlisted in the service of the native pirates and that the leaders of piratical fleets made Hongkong their headquarters, where native marine-storekeepers not only supplied them with arms and ammunition and disposed of their booty, but furnished them also, through well-paid spies in mercantile offices and Government departments, with information as to the shipments of valuable cargo and particularly as to the movements of the Police and of British gunboats. A Colonial gunboat, manned by the Police, was procured (June 5, 1846) to cruize in the waters of the Colony and did some little service until the vessel was wrecked (September 1, 1848). Deportation of convicted criminals inspired the Chinese with no terror, as it offered innumerable chances of eventual escape. The last convict ship of this period, the 'General Wood,' which sailed for Penang on January 2, 1848, was piratically taken possession of by the convicts most of whom made good their escape.

The European commerce of the Colony appeared to decline or to stagnate during this administration. The trade in Indian