Free Trade's First Missionary by Philip Bowring

Author:Philip Bowring [Bowring, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9789888268894
Publisher: HongKongUP
Published: 2014-08-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15 - Arrow Ploy Sunk by Ye

Bowring landed in Hong Kong in March 1854, accompanied by his wife and two of his daughters. Hard on his heels arrived a new naval commander, Sir James Stirling, the first governor of Western Australia. News of the Crimean War also broke at his time. Remembered in Britain mainly for the glorious blunder of the Charge of the Light Brigade and for Florence Nightingale’s role in caring for wounded soldiers, the war was the biggest international conflict between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, costing between 300,000 and 400,000 lives. It saw Britain and France support the Ottomans against Russian efforts to expand in the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Caucasus. The war also had a forgotten Far Eastern dimension.

The Pacific theatre was a sideshow, but was a reminder that at the time, Britain saw Russia as its main threat. It may have been economically and politically backward, but it was huge and still expanding into Central Asia, the Caucasus and towards Istanbul. It vied with Britain for influence in Afghanistan and, some believed, had designs on British India. In 1854, its Pacific naval presence in Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk was seen as possibly threatening the British on the China coast. In Hong Kong, batteries were set up to guard the city against Russian ships. At that time, Britain’s Pacific fleet was on the other side of the ocean, based at Valparaiso in Chile and Esquimault on Vancouver Island. The Indian Ocean and the China coast were covered only by a small fleet, the East Indies and China Station, operating from Hong Kong.

On news of the war with Russia, Bowring immediately set off with Stirling with two very different objectives: to hunt down the Russian fleet and to try to establish relations with Japan. Stirling’s squadron found no Russians; Bowring returned to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the Pacific fleet had teamed up with a French squadron at Honolulu and sailed to Petropavlovsk, the volcano-backed harbour near the southern tip of Kamchatka that a hundred years later would become the Soviet Union’s major nuclear submarine base during the Cold War.

An Anglo-French fleet of six ships had command of the sea, but attempts to capture the town failed, with the allies losing 500 men to the Russians’ 100. Later, the Russians quietly evacuated the town, but there was little that the allies could do to take advantage. The expedition was a costly failure, with the Russian ships hiding near the mouth of the Amur River dumping cargo in order to cross the shoals at the river mouth.1 The most that could be said for the squadron was that it had prevented the Russians from harassing British trade.

But Britain had success in another direction. Stirling carried on to Nagasaki, where, in October, taking advantage of the concessions that American Commodore Perry’s “black ships” had just forced, he signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Tokugawa Shogunate. He was later criticized for his

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