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19 Sep 58 Peter Hong Kong Mother 5, Hyde Park Place West ______________________________________________________________________________________________
19 Sept 1858
My dear Mother
I am going to take advantage of Sunday as usual in order to give you the benefit of a few lines, for it is too hot for church.
They have no punkhahs at all which is the most extraordinary thing in a place like this & in every other way there is no inducement to go. There is no organ, no singing, no anthems. One Sunday no Litany, the next no Communion Service & in fact there is no regular clergyman. The consequence is nobody goes.
It is called a cathedral & the Bishop very often preaches, but a Bishop of Victoria (a place about the size of Romford) need not be as great a man. Victoria is the town of Hong Kong.
I know a Bishop of an island far larger than Hong Kong who wasn’t a very great man I think, tho’ his father was certainly, in one sense of the term.
I also heard a Bishop at Singapore – the Bishop of Labuan* – who didn’t strike me as anything very extraordinary except indeed as far as concerned his beard; a long and patriarchal looking affair, worthy of Abram, Isaac, Jacob & his seed for ever. Also a squeaky voice which seems rather proverbial with Bishops in the East, for the Bishop of Victoria has a most fearful one, tho’ he tries to hide it.
It has been a very mournful time lately. Nothing but misery every way. It is not merely the climate which alone is bad enough, but one sees nothing but sickness & death at every step.
You have nothing but the impudence from your own servants who give you more trouble in getting them to do anything than if you did it yourself. You go to bed at night not knowing but that you will find everything cleared out of your house next morning, as has twice happened to one of our attachés besides being also robbed upon the road. The three within three months.
You wake up in the morning to hear your most intimate friend is dead, another seriously ill & he dies next day. We have, during the six months I have been here, had two of our Captains die, three taken seriously ill, one nearly murdered. Our doctor who was with us every day was carried off lately at a few hours notice. You hear that so & so is dead without ever having known he was ill.
At this very moment we have death knocking at the door & beckoning at the bedside of one of our companions, & he loved & respected by all. Even his own Chinese servants went to ‘chu-chu Joss’ for him. He must be reprieved! Such a thing in a Chinaman was never heard of before.
I was laid up for a short time last week from the effects of the sun & was very feverish &c. but I withstood all doctors for a long time until I began to get better, when I took a dose & satisfied them. I don’t like the idea of medicine – here especially. One gets quite weak enough without that. The great thing is to keep up strength.
I was just aroused by an exclamation, when suddenly throughout our fleet, all the flags went half-mast. It was poor MacAlister*. I little thought while speaking his praise, at that very moment was breathing his last. But he is gone! He came to China to gain a future but he lost his health – now his life.
While still writing I hear one of my most intimate friends is suddenly taken ill & not expected to live an hour. Poor fellow, it was always his boast until lately that he had never known ill health since he left England. I always said, tho’ nobody agreed with me, that death was written in his countenance. He was in Blenkin Rawson’s house* & was to be their agent here until matters were settled.
1. P.M. I have just heard the poor Goss of Blenkin Rawsons is also gone. This is the second friend in one day. God only knows who will be next.
22 Sept 1858
My dear Mother
I do not wish to frighten you with so melancholy a letter as that of Sunday, but really things are, to say the least of it, really & indeed melancholy.
Yesterday we buried our newly appointed Attorney General, a man respected by all. Today another of my oldest friends was carried to his last home – poor Capt. Millman of Mr Lindsay’s steamer ‘Scotland’, late of the ‘Alipore’, on which vessel I spent so long a period in the Crimea & with whom I came home in that vessel. Poor man. He has been very kind & civil to me here & his vessel had only been at anchor half an hour on his return from Cochin,* China, when he breathed his last. He was a good, kind hearted creature as ever lived tho’ rather peculiar in some things.
In one week we have buried our Colonial Surgeon, our Attorney General, one of my best companions & two of my greatest friends. The number of deaths at this moment in Hong Kong is at the rate of 50 p. cent p. annum.
But I said I did not wish to frighten you & I really do not tho’ I cannot but give vent to my melancholy feelings. I am not ill myself & you can have nothing to fear. A change may come o’er the spirit of my dream & I may, when the memory of these sad days shall have passed away, be yet again as well in spirit as I still am in body.
I even sometimes try to laugh at myself & I have already observed that for a long, long time I have not so much as indulged in my constant whistlings, in any air which can in any way be turned lively.
There is a melancholy air in ‘Trovatore’ which is ever bursting forth – ‘you are going far away, I cannot’ and ‘Don’t you remember the church yard, Ben Bolt’* as well as ‘Fare thee well (not my own Mary Ann, but) poor Mary Blair’ are always on my lips. ‘The Dead March of Saul’* an air which I never dreamed of before is now generally acknowledged to be my favourite & my particular tune.
This it is accompanies me wherever I go. This it is which precedes my bath & which only suddenly ends as I pull the string & the torrent suddenly, with a rush, bursts forth upon me as if to sweep me to destruction. I always take a heavy shower bath & it certainly requires a degree of moral courage to place one’s self beneath the fatal cistern, particularly in a climate so hot that the slightest chill here is almost equal to ice at home.
I have a little China dog, just like a wolf, only black. He has been on board ship some time but came to me two or three days ago & gives a great deal of trouble.
I think he bids fair to be a favourite tho’ he is so fond of fun that he will keep running into Mr Jardine’s office & skylarking with all the dogs there, which will get him into certain disgrace, for China dogs are considered very democratic & he in particular is very dirty & ugly & what is more, very cheeky. Fancy such a democratic, dirty, quadruped walking into Mr Jardine’s tiffin room, wagging his tail & when Mr J stamps his foot to turn him out, his standing & barking at him. Verily I wonder Mr Jardine did not nonplus him on the spot.
If I thrash him he only runs away with his tail between his legs & gives me far more trouble. If I tie him up, he only bites the string thro’. He is truly a Chinaman – a very difficult customer to be dealt with.
How strange it is I have never heard from John. I cannot understand it. I write to him & occasionally send papers to him, addressing them now to Bombay or Elsewhere.
Julius I have heard 3 or 4 times from & write to in return, also sending him papers so that he may see how I am getting on. The Papers do not cost me anything (with the exception of the ‘China Mail’) for we take in a large number every mail to send to correspondents & these are seldom all used.
The China Mail we do not take in because they once had the impertinence to abuse us – but as this occurred about 20 years ago & as pretty well every paper does now, it is rather a ridiculous principle to go upon.
27/9/58
I just sit down on my sofa to write & tell you I have been laid up with fever ever since I last took up my pen. The other sheets are down stairs so I am obliged to begin a new one.
I am now better but shall not be in good condition for some days. This is the 2nd attack of fever in 3 weeks. You do not know what misery it is to be ill here. Nobody comes near you. They are all at business downstairs. You cannot even get what you want – your boy is at the bottom of the house & you at the top, in a room without any bell or anything.
If a strange boy passes your room you may call, but he’ll never answer & so you must wait till next meal-time.
My meals have been breakfast – cup of tea & little toast to soak. At 10 – tiffin. Arrowroot at 2 (dinner as my boy calls it). Cup of tea at 8.
But today I want an egg & a chicken cutlet & some sherry & water, besides the tea I shall get for dinner.
I must not try to write any more as the doctor won’t let me do anything at present.
Goodbye, before you get this I shall have forgotten that I ever was ill at all.
Give little Helen a kiss for me but don’t communicate the fever.
Your affect Son
Peter G. Laurie
* Bishop of Labuan – Labuan is an island just off the coast of Brunei. Despite a rule of the Anglican Church that no diocese might be created outside the limits of the British Empire (and Sarawak was technically an independent principality of Rajah James Brooke), the difficulty was overcome by founding the diocese upon the island of Labuan, a crown colony since 1846. The Bishop of Labuan could then be appointed Bishop of Sarawak by the Rajah. This practice prevailed until Sarawak became a crown colony in 1946
* MacAlister – Jardine Matheson archives include an envelope addressed to H.J. Tarrant containing a probate of the last will and testament of George MacAlister of Stornoway, 16th September 1858, issued by the Supreme Court of Hong Kong, 26th October 1858, appointing the executor, William Thorn, as administrator
* Blenkin Rawson’s house – Blenkin Rawson & Co were well-known merchants based in Shanghai, but evidently expanding into Hong Kong at this time
* Cochin – Later, French Indo-China, now Vietnam. The French invasion had occurred less than a month earlier, on 2nd September 1858
* Ben Bolt – Song written by Dr. Thomas Dunn and Nelson Kneass, 1848
* Dead March of Saul – The Dead March (from 'Saul') by Handel