[#] Navy Prick—Navy tobacco is served out in the raw leaf, and after being rolled and squeezed together by the men, is known as Navy Prick.
When we got aboard again—I’d never been so dirty in my life—the Captain was simply furious. I heard him say, "If that little fool had only stayed where he was, he’d have caught ’em," and we steamed back to our cruising ground.
That didn’t end the day’s excitement—not by a long chalk—for presently we sighted a solitary junk, thought it might be the one in which the pirates had escaped, and chased her. However, it turned out to be one of the Tinghai war junks looking for us, and bringing letters from the Taotai and Mr. Hobbs.
The news must have been very serious, for the Commander and the Navigator and the Engineer Commander were all sent for, and we could hear the Captain’s bellowing voice talking very fast.
We soon knew why; Willum and the sentry told us. The pirates had raided the monastery of Tu Pu, cleared out all the monks’ hoards, and left them hardly anything except what they stood up in. The Taotai had written imploring us to go back to Tinghai.
We didn’t understand how important this was till the A.P. (Moore, the Assistant Paymaster) heard of it, and then he whistled, "My aunt! you chaps, it’s the richest monastery in North China, and you can see it from the top of Joss House Hill—it’s not twenty miles away."
Well, that made it exciting enough for anyone, and showed how daring these pirates were becoming; and we all expected to go back at once, but someone heard the Captain growl, "I’ve made my plans, and I’m not going to fly this way and that way, every other second, for all the blooming Taotais and pirates in the world." So we didn’t go back till the Saturday afternoon—as we had arranged. No sooner had we anchored under Joss House Hill, than the Taotai and Mr. Hobbs came on board, the old Chinaman in a great state of funk. They brought two other Chinamen with them, and they turned out to be two of the servants at the monastery. Six days ago the monks had given shelter to some seamen, who had knocked at the great gates and told a yarn of having been shipwrecked. At night these chaps had knocked the doorkeepers on the head, opened the gates, and let in a whole crowd of Chinamen, and while some of them kept the monks in their quarters, the others had looted the treasury and carted away everything of value. One of these two men had been too frightened to notice anything, but the other said that he had managed to escape, had hidden in a swamp down by the sea, and had seen two steamers, one large and the other small, close inshore, and that the robbers all went away in them.