In getting off the Amakarimas, the Powhatan parted company with us, bound for Amoy and Ningpo, and in four days we had a Chinese pilot on board, and the next dropped anchor in the harbor of Hong Kong, China, from whose mail facilities we had been absent over half a year.
Letters: considering the rapid occurrence of events of moment now-a-days, and the lightning transmission of intelligence, it was with joy we got letters on our arrival at Hong Kong, having been for over half a year, so far as news was concerned, inhumed in a remote country. The official news was, that we were ordered home by way of California and South America, at which all were overjoyed; and the commodore was granted permission to return to the United States _via_ Europe, at government expense. Many a poor fellow got letters that had been waiting for him in Hong Kong a long time, and at the same time letters from others of later date, that told that the writers of the former ones could never write again.
We found in the harbor the ships of the surveying squadron under Commodore Ringgold, among which was the since ill-fated Porpoise.
There had been no improvement in the intestine troubles. An American captain had been murdered by the Chinese; and the dearly-beloved occupants of the hongs of Canton, feeling insecure in the possession of their “filthy lucre”—for if the “chop dollar” of China is not filthy lucre, I know not what it is—the Mississippi proceeded to her old anchorage at Whampoa, and sent men and howitzers, as before, up to the city. The captain of the American ship Amity, having been murdered by two of his foreign crew, the next morning after our arrival through the intervention of “Judge Lynch,” their bodies were seen suspended from either yard-arm of their vessel.
The state of affairs in Canton being deemed imminent, the little jolly-boat English steamer, called the Queen, which the commodore had hired and left off the hongs, previous to our leaving for Japan in January, ran down and took up another force to the city. A body of rebels had captured the wealthy and populous city Fuhshan, about twenty miles from Canton, and the mandarins were doing nothing to arrest their progress. One morning, for this purpose, a detachment of a thousand men under a brigadier, were quietly taking up their ground, when they were surprised by a party of rebels, and before they could seize their arms, some hundreds of them and their camp-followers were killed, and the rest escaped pell-mell into the city. The tents, matchlocks, and ammunition, were all carried off, and the brigadier was among the missing.