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12. Voyage Over
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
It remains a singular oddity, in the context of high Victorian imperial Britain, that the one example of a Chinese vessel that their scientists, shipwrights, artists and budding ethnographers had a chance to sketch accurately, measure with precision , make line drawings of, and a table of offsets for, they ignored. Equally, the one Chinese vessel the leading practitioners of the burgeoning field of marine art could have decided to paint with accuracy, they too, with the possible exception of Stephen Skillet, ignored. This is the more astonishing, given that the Keying was in London during the Great Exhibition—more fully, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations—at which one of its crew, the self-styled mandarin He Sing, managed to get himself accepted as a representative of the Chinese government, and in the organizing committee of which John Scott Russell, one of Britain’s most innovative naval architects, had a part. For what better example of the work of the shipping industry of China could be found, literally on the doorstep, than the Keying? Yet in the exhibition, as the catalogue reminds us, the exhibits devoted to China were all contributed by Western officials and merchants. By 1851, these Westerners were the default representatives of China in Western eyes, since China’s recognition of a world of equal sovereign states was still several decades in the future; there was no formal Chinese government involvement. These Western residents in China are very unlikely to have a high estimation of China’s maritime world. Even a China scholar like Samuel Wells Williams was not sufficiently impressed to devote more than a few pages of his lengthy description of Chinese life to its waterborne component—and that despite the enormous importance of water transport to China’s economic system. Chapter 12 Voyage Over 238 East Sails West It is hardly surprising therefore, that the exhibition’s catalogue contained just two mentions of China’s naval architecture, both of them models of, respectively, a cargo boat and a mandarin boat (revenue). These were the ninth and tenth items of the sixteen objects contributed by the Shanghai and London business, Baring Bros. & Co., of London’s Bishopgate Street.1 The rest of the hundreds of items were indeed the works of China’s industry, but primarily her retail craft and raw materials products.2 This is a puzzle, for whatever one may think about contemporary imperial arrogance and prejudiced Western attitudes of cultural superiority—and in the story of the Keying they predominate—they were never at the time inconsistent with a passionate interest in the acquisition of detailed empirical knowledge, by exact description, measurement and classification. This was the era in which the ideas for the great museums in London were germinating, and imperial expeditions of exploration and discovery were afoot. Why was the Keying so utterly ignored, save in terms of condescending disparagement? Consider the maritime context. The famous voyage of the Beagle had ended in 1837; it would inspire a run of successors, with their embarked scientists. The voyage of HMS Sulphur (1836–42), under Sir Edward Belcher,3 interrupted by the First Opium War, had been hotly followed by his voyage in HMS Samarang (1843–46), overlapping with the voyage of HMS Herald (1845–51), under Belcher’s quondam deputy, Henry Kellett.4 The voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, with Thomas Henry Huxley as its embarked scientist, was under way from 1846 to 1850. Both of the last were in progress at the very time the Keying was itself on voyage and in Britain. Arctic fever was rife, with expedition after expedition being launched, only to fail to find the Northwest Passage with an incompetence only the best British explorers can manage with such consummate aplomb. Many were backed by Sir John Barrow, who had cut his China teeth on the ill-fated Macartney embassy to China in 1795, for which he served as Lord Macartney’s household comptroller , and who, as secretary to the Admiralty, was the first to propose the equally unsuccessful Amherst embassy to China in 1816. Barrow had retired from public life only in 1845, after he had despatched the last, and most famous, Arctic failure, that of Sir John Franklin, whose disappearance with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror fired a series of attempts to find out what had happened that would [44.211.35.130] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:30 GMT) Voyage Over 239 last until the 1890s; as has often...