Nude Water-trackers 57 



a quiet little bay, where they had careened her for repair. 

 I was told of the bad fortune of another Lao-ta (Chinese 

 captain) last year, who met with a similar accident, which 

 he successfully repaired, and had just re-stowed his cargo 

 and started again, when he made a total loss only five li 

 higher up. 



A big junk of 120 tons carries a crew of over 100 men, 

 viz. seventy or eighty trackers, whose movements are directed 

 by beat of drum, the drummer remaining on board under 

 the direction of the helmsman ; a dozen or twenty men left 

 on board to pole, and fend the boat off the boulders and rocky 

 points as she scrapes along, and also to work the gigantic 

 bow sweep formed of a young fir-tree. Another half dozen 

 of the crew are told off to skip over the rocks like cats, and 

 free the tow-line from the rocky corners in which it is 

 perpetually catching : besides a staff of three or four special 

 swimmers called " tai-wan-ti," or water-trackers, who run 

 along, naked as Adam before the fall, and may be seen 

 squatting on their haunches on rocks ahead, like so many 

 big vultures, prepared to jump into the water at a moment's 

 notice and pounce upon the tow-line, and free it when it 

 catches on a rock inaccessible from the shore. These tow- 

 lines are made of strips of bamboo plaited into a cable as 

 thick as the arm, requiring great skill in coiling and un- 

 coiling, which is incessantly being done, as the necessities 

 of the route require a longer or shorter line. Notwithstand- 

 ing its enormous toughness, owing to constant fraying on 

 the rocks a tow-line only lasts a single voyage, and when 

 one sees deep scores cut by the tow-hnes into the granite 

 rocks along the tow-path, the fact is readily accounted for. 



The trackers of our humble craft stripped themselves of 

 everything but one jacket, being in and out of the water all 

 day long, and, as it was, we at times caught the tow-line, 



