^^8 Voyage of the Novara. 



lie rode forth of an afternoon with his wife, or was taken in 

 a sedan chair to a friend's Iiouse of an evening. 



Shortly before our arrival, the captain of a merchant- 

 man, while taking a walk outside the city, was set upon 

 by some Chinese, robbed, and so severely maltreated that 

 he expired of the injuries he received. So too the clerk of 

 a mercantile house had been picked up just outside the city 

 weltering in his blood and pierced with a number of womids 

 from a dagger, the murderer in this case also evading detec- 

 tion. An attempt was even made against the life of the 

 Governor, Sir John Bowring, which was only frustrated 

 through the vigilance of the sentinel, who discharged his 

 piece at the scoundrels just as, favoured by niglit, they were 

 stealing over the walls of the Government-house, with the 

 view of creeping through the garden as far as Sir John's 

 cabinet. 



Even in the most ordinary domestic matters might be 

 traced the same relentless hostility on the part of the Chinese, 

 and the state of affairs was becoming every day more in- 

 tolerable to the European residents. All the domestic 

 servants at Hong-kong are Chinese, who come hither from 

 the nearest provinces of the mainland, in order to benefit 

 by the rate of wages paid by the ^' foreign barbarian." The 

 Chinese officials, vying with each other in every possible 

 method of showing their implacable hatred to the strangers 

 and to embitter their life in China, now issued an order to 

 all the Chinese resident in Hong-kong to quit the island and 



