Page:Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China.djvu/352

344 TWENTIETH CENTURY IMPRESSIONS OF HONGKONG, SHANGHAI, ETC. chie6y mentioned in history as the successful party in an action in 1847 against a Lieutenant Sargent, of the 95th Royal Irish Regiment, claiming damages for assault. The lieutenant objected to a paragraph appearing in the Register and promptly assaulted and battered the editor. The jury awarded the editor $1,000 damages, and he had the distinction of being described in court as "a very in- offensive man, and one who, as an editor, seldom had come to extremes or suffered gall to mingle with his ink." In that respect all his successors in the journalistic world of Hongkong did not follow his good example, as events will show.

In the same year, when the judicial affairs of the Colony were regarded with a certain amount of distrust, the editor of the China Mail was cited for not conforming with the provisions of Ordinance No. 2, of 1844, by "having removed his printing establishment two years before from one place to another without communicating the fact to the authorities." The prosecution was supposed to have had something at the bottom of it, as " Mr. Shortrede had made himself rather conspicuous some time before in the matter of some revelations concerning the police," and it was quashed when it reached the criminal session stage, the Crown Prosecutor refusing to lend himself to such vexatious proceedings. The defence regretted " that the prosecution had not been suffered to take its course so as to have had an opportunity of exposing its whole history." Mr. Cairns later vacated the editorial chair of the Register, and it was taken by Mr. W. H. Mitchell, who, in 1850, resigned to join the Government service as a police magistrate and sheriff, the appointment being considered improper and much criticised. He was succeeded by Mr. W. F. Bevan, who, in 1853, in turn joined the Government service.

Considerable feeling existed in Hongkong in 1847 regarding the dismissal of Mr. William Tarrant from the Surveyor-General's staff — he having brought charges of extortion against certain Government employes — and later being charged with conspiring to injure the character of Major Caine. The charge was dismissed and the incident is only mentioned because Mr. Tarrant, in June, 1850, purchased and edited the Friend of China and Hougkoiig Gazette, in which paper he carried on a vigorous campaign against the Government. The year 1853 (September 24th), saw the publication of another Government Gazette, little satisfaction, in the shape of favourable treatment, having been obtained by the Government from the China Mail by virtue of its notifications having been published exclusively in that paper. In 1855 Mr. Andrew Scott Dixon — who some years later became proprietor of the China Mail — started a shipping sheet under the title of the Hongkong Shipping List, and, whilst it made no pretensions to give news, it seems to have filled a want, for it lasted many years. In 1857 came the Daily Press, started by Mr. G. M. Rider, first as a daily shipping list with limited news, but later as a full-fledged newspaper, with Mr. Yorick Jones Murrow as editor. Though small, it pioneered the way, at all events, for the daily newspaper in the Colony, the China Mail being transformed from a weekly to a daily shortly afterwards.

This year saw the beginning of bitter vendettas in Hongkong, and warfare was waged in and out of the Press. Actually, feeling was brought to fever pitch as the result of the great attempted poisoning scandal on June 23, 1857. In connection therewith the editor of the Friend of China was awarded $1,010, against Cheong Allium, for damages sustained in consequence of his having been poisoned by bread delivered by defendant, the editor taking action as a test case. Cheong Ahlum was the proprietor of the principal bakery in the Colony, and on January 15, 1857, an atrocious attempt was made to poison the foreign community by mixing about ten pounds of arsenic in a batch of bread baked at his premises. It was deduced that Cheong was cognisant of the attempt, since he settled many of his accounts and left for Macao in the morning before his customers' breakfast hour. He was given over by the Macao authorities, and, with nine others, was tried but found not guilty. Though he may have gone to gaol originally a rich man, his trial left him a poor one, and "consequently the verdict of $1,010 puzzled most people to know why this case, brought by one of the several hundreds poisoned, should have taken so much money to effect a cure. "In the middle of July, 1857, Cheong Ahlum was released from gaol (after having been illegally detained for twenty-two days), and immediately quitted