In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This book started life as a result of three quite unrelated stimuli. All three resulted from the creation by the nascent Hong Kong Maritime Museum’s curatorial team, under the supervision of Mr. K. L. Tam and with the advice of the late Geoffrey Bonsall, my acquaintance and colleague of many years, of the Keying model in the museum’s displays. The first stimulus came when Mr. Y. K. Chan, a member of the museum’s board of directors, drew my attention to a fairly critical Wikipedia entry on the museum’s model. Reading its strictures, which came down to saying that the model did not look sufficiently like the floating banana in the best known images, forced me to think about why it did not, why it should not, and in general about what the Keying must really have been like. In effect, the book started as Part II. A few months later, in a quite unrelated way, I got an enquiry from New Zealand asking what the Hong Kong Maritime Museum (HKMM) knew about the Keying and its voyage. The answer was ‘Not a lot’. But the enquirer turned out to be Susan Simmons, the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Kellett, the Keying’s Western captain, who had amassed an amazing archive of press clippings and genealogical material which, in an act of amazing generosity, she made copies of and sent to the HKMM. In them, I realized I had the detail that would enable me to get a far clearer picture of the voyage, not only as a navigational accomplishment but also as an exercise in the vexed business of nineteenth-century cross-cultural co-operation—or its absence. To Susan, I owe the most profound thanks. Without her work over the years—supported by a family of equally interested Charles Kellett descendants—this book would have been nigh impossible. Acknowledgements xxiv Acknowledgements In responding to these first two stimuli, I began reading and came across the third stimulus, John Rogers Haddad’s fascinating and illuminating The Romance of China, which had some very hard things indeed to say about Charles Kellett, when it described the Keying’s stay in New York and the court case that took place. Hard things that I already knew, from Susan Simmons, had been very difficult for Charles Kellett’s descendants to read and to accept. I am a sailor and grew up in a sailor’s world. It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, seven years and many thousand words later, that Charles Kellett’s story needed better contextualization; needed to be seen from the sea, as I have put it, in the context of what would have been perfectly ordinary nineteenth-century sea-going, however that may outrage our more enlightened, early twentyfirst -century sensibilities habitually blind, as they too often are, to anachronism. To be sure, the Keying’s Chinese crew were probably not treated as today we would expect any crew to be treated anywhere. To be sure, it is to the credit of Samuel Wells Williams, Lin King-chew, W. Daniel Lord and Samuel Betts, the New York magistrate, that they helped twenty-six people from far away, who were in need of help. But we need also to understand the other side of the story; how ships were run in the mid-nineteenth century, and not expect Charles Kellett, his mate and his co-captain to conduct themselves in a manner that could not be required of mid-nineteenth-century mariners, either British or Chinese. We needed to see the twenty-six disaffected Cantonese crewmen rather more in the round, as denizens of a nineteenth-century, post-Opium War, Chinese waterfront. As canny enough men, who were alive to the rough-and-tumble of a contact zone and not raw bumpkins, gulls to any unscrupulous Western or Chinese chancer. To achieve this, it would be necessary to share that troubled and troubling voyage from Hong Kong. To understand in its appropriate context what this young and obviously capable skipper had achieved. To understand the inescapable tensions and flat misunderstandings that inevitably resulted from trying to run a Chinese ship with a majority Chinese crew in ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’. And thereby to enable myself and my readers to get a handle on why everything fell apart in the way that it did, without going down the ever-tempting route of easy, moralistic outrage. [3.135.213.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

Share