"Why not?" growled the Skipper, glaring at him.
"He’d probably be dismissed, sir, or lose his head," Ching answered.
"And a good thing too. Umph!" the Captain muttered. "Tell the old chap that I’m sending a gunboat up to Shanghai to-morrow or the next day, and will report everything to the Admiral, and must wait his orders. It’s no use me looking for that yacht by myself—might as well look for a needle in a haystack. Umph!"
What annoyed him was that the Taotai wouldn’t send out his war junks. We didn’t know the real reason for some weeks, but the old Taotai almost cried when he said that if the _Huan Min_ could be beaten off by them, the feeble junks wouldn’t stand a chance. There was a good deal of sense in that.
Of course, instances of piracy are always cropping up among these islands—we had been long enough in Chinese waters to know that—and we knew, too, that unless they became very numerous in the same locality, the authorities did not take much notice of them. You see it was only in times of bad trade, when perhaps the fishing had been a failure, or when the crops had been destroyed by one of the typhoons which used to devastate the islands lying in its track, that the inhabitants, practically threatened with starvation, would take to piracy as a means of tiding over the bad time.
Just imagine the temptation of seeing some lumbering great junk becalmed off your village, or stuck fast in the mud, if everyone was hungry and desperate, and imagine what an easy thing it was to man all your boats, surround her, and capture her. The chances were that she was full up with foodstuffs, beans, or rice or fish, and there was little to fear from the authorities, far away in Tinghai. They would never hear of it either, if you knocked the crew on the head. That is practically what would happen, and one lucky capture would set a village "up", till next harvest enabled them to carry on their peaceable pursuits.
Sometimes, of course, it happened that their appetites would be so whetted with their success, that they would lay in wait for every favourable opportunity, and every crawling junk which passed. Sooner or later it would be known that it was dangerous to take that channel, and sooner or later, if the trouble continued, a war junk or two, or perhaps one of the Peiyang corvettes, would be sent there to burn the village and hang a few of the inhabitants.