but I was unwilling to disturb the people at their meal, although I began to suspect, from seeing the bullrushes a little more distinctly, that we were drifting too near, and in the next moment we slipped gently upon a shoal – so gently indeed, that I should not have known it, had not the tide, along with which we had been borne insensibly, now streamed past us. The hands were up instantly, and an anchor and hawser, kept in readiness alongside for such accidents, sent out to draw us off the ground. While this was going on, the Chinese in his boat paddled once more close under the spot where I was standing, and said, with his former tone and manner, and the addition of a knowing smile, ‘Don’t you want a pilot?’ I laughed, and told him to come on board.
“In half an hour we were again afloat, and a light breeze springing up, we soon reached the anchorage called the Second Bar, where a fleet of fourteen large ships of the East India Company lay at anchor. Being uncertain at first whether the brig would soon get afloat again or not, I had thought it best to make a signal for assistance. In less than an hour, upwards of a dozen of the Indiamen’s long-boats, each manned with not less than eighteen hands, came to us. Before they reached the brig we had got off the shoal, and I might have made signals to show they were no longer necessary, but was willing to indulge both my own crew and these strangers with a meeting. We had now been nearly nine months from England, during the whole of which period we had either been at sea, or amongst remote countries, beyond the reach of news; and nothing, certainly, was ever better bestowed than this rencontre. Our men were bursting with eagerness to tell the story of their adventures, and the people in the boats, who had Just arrived from England, had much to impart of friends and home.
“On reaching the Alceste, I found orders lying for me to proceed to Canton; and as a captain of one of the tea ships was just setting off in a large and commodious barge, I preferred accompanying him to rowing up alone. Probably, had I gone in a man-of-war’s boat, the Chinese, who had treated Captain Maxwell with great politeness wherever he passed, might have been equally civil to his brother officer. But they observed no such delicacy in the case of the East India captain; for wherever we passed, they climbed to the most conspicuous parts of their boats, and saluted us in a style the very furthest removed from good manners; suiting the rudest actions to words probably not more courteous. The eloquence was quite thrown away upon us, but there was no mistaking the purport of the gesture. For some time this was amusing, rather than otherwise; and to me at least the whole scene, from beginning to end, was subject of unmixed entertainment. But my companion, though one of the best men alive, was not the most patient person in the fleet, and replied at first to these insults by a few emphatic oaths in broad Scotch. Presently he stood up, and shook his fist in a very angry manner, which produced nothing but a loud and scornful laugh; this instantly drove my