There were eight rules for traders from the outside world in the Pearl River. No foreign-devil warships above the Bogue at the mouth of the river. No women, guns, spears or any arms allowed at the factories, or hongs, in Canton. All ships had to register at Macao, as well as all river pilots and ship's compra-dores. Each factory could have no more than eight Chinese working for them, so the fewest people would be contaminated by foreign-devils. Foreigners had to forego the pleasures of sailing the river for pleasure. Only on holidays could foreigners go to the Flower Gardens or the Honam Joss House, and then no more than ten at a time and only when accompanied by a linguist. They could not stay out after dark, or carouse. Foreign-devils could not present petitions to the native Viceroy; everything had to go through the Co Hong's eight members. The Co Hong could not go into debt with foreigners. Smuggling was forbidden. And lastly, foreign-devil ships could not loiter about outside the river but must go directly to Whampoa, instead of "selling to rascally natives goods subject to duty, that these may smuggle them, and thereby defraud his Celestial Majesty's revenue."
It was also, Alan learned, against his Celestial Majesty's law to teach foreign-devils Chinese, so trade was carried on in a mix of Portugee, Chinese and English called "pidgin," the closest the Chinese could come to saying "business."
Anything, anything that upset the touchy mandarins could bring a total cessation of trade, which hurt everybody, so merchantmen had to obey "tremblingly," as the Chinese officials concluded their documents. Yet, at the same time, a lively and illegal trade went on down-river at Lintin Island and at Nan'ao. Brainard had even told of mandarin boats ordered to enforce the ban against smuggling, and the opium trade, which contracted lucrative deals, and smuggled the stuff up to Canton themselves!
"Tonight, this lorcha'U be receiving a government mandarin on her decks," Brainard explained. "He'll get his tobacco and wine, warn about lingering in the estuary instead of going direct to Whampoa, and then he'll get down to brass tacks. 'How many chests?' he'll ask, and we'll tell him outright. Then he'll figure out what he thinks we're worth and ask for his singsong."
"He'll want a serenade?" Alan grinned. "God help him if Mister Twigg takes his bagpipers along, then."
"No, his sing-song is his cut. His cumshaw … his custom. 'Allee same same sing-song, allee same custom.' " Brainard laughed. "After he's been feted and bought off, that's the signal for the real traders to come aboard and purchase. Then the lorcha comes back to Macao full of silver. Taels and taels of the bloody stuff, maybe five or six lac with the amount of opium we have on board, young sir. A lac, let me inform you, is worth about ten thousand pounds."
"Merciful God!" Alan gasped in awe.
"And you'd better believe the custom official ashore yonder in Macao knows exactly what we're doing here, and our 'chop' will conveniently not arrive aboard 'til we've disposed of the opium, so we can sail up-river innocent as newborn babes. Gad, what a country!"
"So what are the chances of our suspected French privateers being at this Lintin Island, sir?" Alan asked.
"Depends on whether they've arrived or not. We may ask about, but not too much, else we'd raise too much suspicion. Might even affect the price of our cargo." Brainard frowned. "If they've looted all the ships we suspect they have, what they didn't have to share out to their native associates, they might already be up-river off Whampoa, pie-faced innocent as any other merchantmen."
"Then they'd be a big ship, like us, sir?" Alan pressed.
"Possibly. Something fast, like one of their latest seventy-four-gunned Third Rates converted to a merchantman, like us. But that pretty much describes half the ships in the world that could get here. If they came here at all."
"Well, sir," Alan speculated, "they'd have to dispose of their ill-gotten gains somewhere. Why not here?"
"Oh, I'll grant you that. Sooner'r later, they'd be stuffed bung to the deck-heads with loot," Brainard snorted. "But, they could drop it at He de France in the middle of the Indian Ocean, at Pondichery or Chandernargore, and ship it home on a Compagnie des Indies ship with no one the wiser."
"But they've taken Indiamen and country ships loaded with silver or opium. The silver they could keep, maybe load it into a second vessel. But the opium would have to be sold here. Where else is there such a market for it, and where else on the Chinese coast would the mandarins collude with 'em?"
"Which is why we're here, young sir. We may not be right, but it is a strong chance. Once we're up at Whampoa, and at Canton, I'll warn you to keep a weather-eye peeled for anything out of the ordinary."
"As if China isn't enough out of the ordinary, sir," Alan said with a shrug. "I doubt if I'd know what to look for."
"I leave that to our super-cargoes, Twigg and Wythy. They know the trade well as anybody."
"And pirates," Alan muttered under his breath.
"I know, that cut a bit rough on you, to see what Twigg did," Brainard said comfortingly. "But they'd have gotten the same after an Admiralty proceeding, stretched by the neck by 'Captain Swing.' Wish we'd had the time to hunt down their anchorage and chastise 'em just a bit more."
"I was thinking more of the way he got his information, sir."
"And not much of that, either. I've spent years out here in the Far East and the Great South Seas. It's the way of things out here. Something to leave behind you once you get back into the Bay of Bengal, or the Cape of Good Hope. Don't fret on it."
"If you say so, sir," Alan replied. "But seeing that made me feel a lot less guilty about my own faults. I don't think I could ever torture a man to death. Or feed him to the sharks for the fun of it."
"Wasn't 'fun,' Mister Lewrie," Brainard sniffed. "Just business."
Chapter 3
Whampoa Reach was so densely crowded with shipping when they dropped the hook after a four-day voyage up the teeming Pearl River that they barely had room to swing. The river had narrowed from a wide estuary to a proper river at the Bogue after the first two days. The river pilot that guided them had gone hoarse cursing the sampans and junks full of fishermen, mendicants and permanently poor to get out of their way. And the closer they got to Canton, the more it seemed that the Pearl River had been cruelly inaptly named. It stank worse than the Old Fleet Ditch, the Hooghly or the Thames, bearing as it did the ordure and the garbage of untold millions of Chinese from its mountain birthplace to their anchorage.
There were ships of every nation there, crowded into the Reach as cheek-to-jowl as the thousands of native boats that made up floating suburbs, too poor to live on land. Dane and Dutch flags fluttered above vessels so beamy they looked like butter-tubs. There were Spanish and Portugese ships, Swedish ships, and a few merchantmen from Hamburg and the Baltic, even a pair of Prussians. There were British East Indiamen as lofty and trim as the stoutest "ocean bulldogs" of the Royal Navy, and country ships looking more rakish and piratical than something from a Defoe tale. There were Russian ships, even some Austrians, and lesser nations from the Mediterranean. And there were three or four racebuilt and over-sparred vessels, a little smaller than most, flying the new Stars and Stripes of the late Rebel Colonies, now graced by the name of the United States of America. And the French, huge merchantmen of the Compagnie des Indies, and their own country ships.