Chinese fire-rafts as illustrated in the Wujing Zongyao, a military
treatise written in 1044 during the Song Dynasty. This demonstrates the
antiquity of such devices.
An illustration of a fireship from a book written about 1553 by the
Chinese imperial official Li Chao-Hsiang, superintendent of the Dragon River
Shipyard near Nanking. The Chinese devoted a great deal of ingenuity into
making fireships look like ordinary warships. The main trick was to conceal the
boat in which the crew would make their escape. In the `mother-and-child’ boat
the escape-boat was completely concealed within the after part of the hull, and
appeared only when the victim had been rammed and set on fire. To make the
principle clearer, the escape-boat in the picture is more visible than it would
have been in reality. At the bow we see the `wolf’s-teeth nails’ which secured
the fireship to its victim.
The Chinese fireship represented here also derives from Li
Chao-Hsiang’s book about the Dragon River Shipyard. We can see it is a kind of
combination-vessel, with the fastenings amidships working on the hook-and-eye
principle. At the bow the `wolf’steeth nails’ were rammed into the opponent’s
hull, the rockets and fire-missiles which are to be seen in the forward part of
the hull were ignited, and the crew made their escape from aft. In this
arrangement, too, the escape-boat for the fireship crew was invisible.
Fireships were becoming increasingly popular in Europe by
the beginning of the seventeenth century. But these destructive inventions were
not limited to the West. Fireships were also used by the Imperial Chinese Navy
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their deployment and the
deception of the enemy that went with them formed a well-understood part of the
general Art of War.
In China, naval skirmishes occurred for the most part in
rivers or in the mouths of estuaries, rather than on the open sea, for in these
relatively calm waters it was possible to make use of favourable tides and
currents, which were ideal for fireships. There are even descriptions of
successful fireship attacks from Chinese antiquity, one example being the battle
of the Red Cliffs, fought on the Yangtze-Kiang in 208 AD. One side set alight a
large number of boats laden with brushwood and oil, and these `fireships’
caused such panic among the enemy ships that they were run aground on the banks,
with huge loss of life.
About 1553 there appeared a book written by Li Chao-Hsiang
(Li ZhaoXiang), the superintendent of a large and important installation near
Nanking called the Dragon River Shipyard. In this book, which is illustrated
with woodcuts, he discusses historic vessels and events, from which it is clear
that in China, just as in Europe, there were a number of specialised types of
ship, and men of seemingly limitless inventiveness. As regards fireships, for
the Chinese the most obvious problem was that of getting the ship within
striking distance of an enemy without raising his suspicions. This was not
regarded as purely a function of technology, but also a matter of psychology:
how to exploit the enemy’s wishes and expectations. For example, in the
fourteenth century (by the Western calendar), there was an incident in which
one of the warring parties managed to convince the other that some of its ships
intended to defect, and as a result they were allowed to come near – too near,
as it transpired, when it became clear that they were fireships and there was
no way to avoid them.
In his book, Li Chao-Hsiang discusses several technical
tricks from the Chinese Art of War that could be used to disguise a fireship. Prominent
among these were various methods developed by the shipbuilders of constructing
the hull in two parts, either in tandem or side by side. The original function
of these `two-part’ junks was to divide on reaching shallow water, since each
half drew less water than the whole ensemble. The fireship variation of the
principle was built so that one part of the vessel – the inflammable `business
end’, so to speak – could be made fast to the enemy, while the crew used the
other section to make their escape. The combination-vessel looked harmless
enough as it approached, because one sure sign of a fireship was missing: a
boat in tow, ready for the crew to make their escape. Li Chao-Hsiang described
it as follows:
A vessel of this type is about fourteen metres long, and
from a distance looks just like an ordinary ship. But in reality, there are two
parts to it, with the forward section making up about one third, and the after
part two thirds of the length. These are bound together with hooks and rings,
the forward part being loaded with explosives, smoke-bombs, stones and other
missiles, besides fire emitting toxic smoke. At the bow are dozens of barbed
nails with their sharp tips pointing forward; above this are several
blunderbusses, while the after part carries the crew and is equipped with oars.
Should wind and current be favourable when they meet an enemy vessel, they set
a collision course, ram the bow as hard as possible into the enemy’s bulwarks,
and at the same moment let go the fastenings between the two sections, and the
after part heads back to its base.
A variant of this vessel was the `mother-and-child boat’, a
perfectly camouflaged fireship about twelve metres in length. The forward part
was seven metres long and was built like a warship, while the after section,
5.25m long, consisted of a framework with what appeared from a distance to be
the sides of the vessel separated only by a scaffolding, which supported the
big balanced rudder and concealed the oar-propelled escape-boat. On either side
of the bow there were `wolf’s-teeth nails’ and sharp iron spikes to prevent
boarding. The attack was made by ramming the enemy ship, which was then held
fast with grapnels, and at the same time distracting the victim with a hail of
arrows, stones and other missiles. The vessel was loaded with reeds, firewood
and flax saturated with inflammable material and bound together with big
black-powder fuzes. Once it had been ignited and the enemy was on fire, the
daughter-boat was cut loose and the crew made their escape.
Europeans would encounter such weapons when their desire for
commercial expansion brought them into conflict with the Chinese. The
Portuguese first came to China about 1516, and by the following year an
ambassador had visited the Chinese capital and obtained permission for
merchants to establish themselves and transact business in the trading centre
of Canton. For a long time the Portuguese were the only foreigners with this
privilege, which they later tried to turn into a total monopoly of the export
trade in the waters of southern China on the basis of their military strength.
They expected to repeat the success they had enjoyed in India, but in 1521 and
1522 the Chinese decisively defeated them at sea, and when trade was resumed it
was on Chinese and not Portuguese terms. The merchants switched to smuggling,
and when the authorities found they could not stamp this out completely, in
1587 they permitted the Portuguese to set up a trading post on the island of
Macao, at the mouth of the Pearl river. This was the foundation for the
Portuguese monopoly of trade between China and Japan.
For decades the Portuguese suffered no competition from
other Europeans and made huge profits, but at the beginning of the seventeenth
century the first Dutch fleets began to poach upon the preserves of their
colonial empire. The sea power of the Dutch slowly increased after the
foundation of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602; Molucca came under
their sway, and the town of Batavia was established on Java, on the Sunda
Strait. Apart from some minor setbacks, Dutch merchants enjoyed great success
in Asia, but they could not get a toehold in China. They failed to establish a
permanent trading post on the mainland, never winning the trust of Chinese high
officials. In the Middle Kingdom the `red barbarians’ were considered cunning
and greedy. The only notable thing about them was their powerful ships, with
their double-planking and `rigging like a spider’s web’.
In the year 1622 the Governor of the VOC in Batavia gathered
enough courage to take his fleet on an offensive against the Portuguese in
Macao, in an attempt to take over the China trade by force. However, the attack
was repulsed and the Dutch proceeded to the Pescadore Islands in the Formosa
Strait, where they began work on a fortified strong-point. At the same time they
tried to set up a permanent trading base in Amoy (Xiamen), but just as before,
their negotiations with the mandarins went nowhere, and they failed.
The Dutch now decided to use a trade war and a blockade to
force the Chinese government to trade with them. Thus in January 1623 a VOC
fleet raided the coasts of Fukien and Kwantung in south China, destroying the
huts of the farmers and reducing the trading junks in the little coastal ports
to ashes. This was a poverty-stricken part of the country, and the Chinese
military were powerless to stop them ashore. At sea, the navy could not stand
up to the heavily armed vessels of the Dutch, but there was one thing it could
do: attack with fireships. The fireship was the one Chinese weapon that
inspired fear in the Europeans.
As previously mentioned, Chinese fireships were normally
deployed in rivers and estuary mouths, for the most part disguised as fishing
boats, so the apparently innocent craft could drift down on the anchored
Indiamen at all hours. However, the Dutch learned to moor their ships with two
anchors, athwart the stream, so that if need be they could slip one, allowing
the ship to swing round and avoid the attacker. The crews were kept on the
alert, with the slow-match always burning and guns at the ready, so they could
engage quickly; any suspicious vessel would be immediately brought under fire
and sunk. Standing orders were nailed to the mainmast by the commandant of the
fleet, with stiff penalties for disobedience: anyone absent from his post, or
sleeping on watch, would be hauled up to the main yardarm and dropped into the
water three times for the first offence; a second offence attracted fifty
lashes; and if he further misbehaved, the ship’s council might decide it was a
capital matter, and he would be hanged.
The VOC’s war on the Chinese state did not have the desired
effect and, apart from gaining a seasonal trading permit which they had to
renew every year, the Dutch again failed to establish themselves on the
mainland. The strongpoint in the Pescadores had to be abandoned, and only in
1624, after building a fort and trading post on Formosa, did they gain indirect
access to the lucrative China trade.
It was not just the Dutch who had to face the Chinese
fireships. Among others who had to deal with them on the Pearl river were three
English East Indiamen under the command of Captain John Weddell. The English
ships were observed with hostility and suspicion by their competitors, the
Portuguese, as they sailed up the river, trying to get as close as possible to
Canton, the trading entrepot of the area. On board one of them was a remarkable
man, Peter Mundy, a traveller who had roamed all over Europe and Asia recording
his adventures and observations, and it is from his journal that we know what
happened on the Pearl river on the dark night of 10 September 1637.
The three ships, the Anne, the Catherine and the Dragon, lay
at anchor astern of one another, and at two in the morning the water was
flowing quickly, with the ebb-tide reinforcing the normal current. They were
expecting goods to arrive from Canton and did not think too much about it when
they saw some junks sailing towards them. The Anne, the smallest of the three,
lay furthest upstream, and at first it looked as if the junks were just going
to sail past, but then they altered course to bring themselves athwart the
hawse of the bigger Catherine. The alarm was raised and the junk was fired on,
alerting the other ships. The shot appeared to act as a signal to the junks,
which all at once burst into flames – they were fireships!
Immediately the English realised what was going on. The
first two fireships were connected by chains, and then three more appeared, all
steering for the English ships. However, they had no more time to observe, for
they had to work flat out if they were to save their lives. Luckily it was
almost the end of the ebb, and the current slackened somewhat, which gave them
time to cut or slip their cables and make sail. Even more fortunately, just at
that moment a light breeze sprang up, and having had the foresight to keep
their boats in the water, they were quickly able to take the ships in tow. `The
fire was vehement. Balls of wild fire, rockets and fire arrows flew thick as
they passed us, But God be praised, not one of us all was touched.’
The night was lit up by blinding flames, which illuminated
the hills above the river bank. And the noise as the fireships drifted by was
unnerving, the cries of the Chinese crews aboard them blending with the
crackling of burning bamboo and the whistling and hissing of rocket and
fireworks canisters. In the light of the flames, the English watched as the men
on the burning junks jumped into the water and swam for the shore. One of the
junks ran aground at the level of the Indiamen, while two more drifted out of
sight downstream, and one junk seemed to have been set on fire prematurely and
burned out harmlessly, before she reached the English ships. Now they awaited a
second attack while it was still dark, but after two hours the fireworks were
finally over.
When day broke the English looked on the river banks for
Chinese sailors who had abandoned the burning junks, but they found just one
swimmer, who attempted to evade them by diving. Finally he was hooked with a
pike and hauled aboard halfdead. Then behind an island they found the biggest
of the fire-junks, which was still intact, having run aground before being set
on fire. Peter Mundy learned about the appearance of this vessel from the crew
of the boat:
This being full off dry wood, sticks, heath, hay, etc, thick
interlaid with long small bags of gunpowder and other combustible stuff, also
cases and chests of fire-arrows dispersed here and there in abundance, being so
laid that might strike into ships’ hulls, masts, sails, etc, and to hang on
shrouds, tackling, etc, having fastened to them small pieces of crooked wire to
hitch and hang on any thing that should meet withal. Moreover, sundry booms on
each side with 2 or 3 grapnels at each with iron chains; other also that hung
down in the water to catch hold of cables, ground tackle, etc so that if they
had but come to touch a ship, it were almost impossible but they catch and hold
fast.
The English salvaged the grapnels and chains from the junk
and then set it alight. `It burnt awhile so furiously that it consumed the
grass on the side of the hill as far as a man could fling a stone; so that had
they come within as they came without us, they had endangered us and at least
driven us out.’
The Chinese sailor in the boat was patched up by the ship’s
surgeon and survived, and was put in irons. The English learned from him that
the fireship attack had been instigated by the Portuguese at Macao, and that the
intention had been to catch the ships just at change of tide, when they would
swing broadside to the stream and present a bigger target. Captain Weddell and
his men had been very lucky.
