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tised extortions on their protégés. It became no longer optional with the native craft to employ convoys; they were not at liberty to decline protection, nor were they consulted as to the amount they were to pay. From this, the transition to piracy was easy; and robbery and murder at sea were followed by like crimes on land. Whole villages were reduced to ashes, the men butchered, and the women violated; some being carried off to the lorchas, and retained in purchased exemption, from such treatment, by paying large sums of money. No sum, however, was sufficient to redeem a mother or daughter, whom the fiends determined to take to their vessels. Chinese officers, who attempted to thwart these buccaneers, were killed on the spot or captured and held to ransom. The number of unoffending natives who have been put to death—some of them tortured in a most diabolical manner—would not be credited if told. Much of my surgical practice in China has been due to these piracies and forays. Of course, the loss of the Chinese in property has been proportionably great. No device that could be employed, for raising money or supplies, was left untried. The store of yams, dried fish and fuel laid up for winter's use in the hut of the solitary peasant, the only goat, and last fowl of the farmer, were (and still are, for the evils yet exist) carried off by the foreign marauder. The fisheries were subjected to heavy charges, for this coercive protection.
"Adventurers, who could not command a lorcha, fitted up native boats, carrying on depredations in estuaries and rivers. Others opened offices in the small towns, for the sale of passes, which boats,
