NUMBER THIRTEEN.
My first impressions of this great empire, containing one third the whole population of the globe, were not altogether favorable. The four hundred miles of “Yellow Sea” that separate it from Japan has a reputation almost as bad as the English Channel. One may escape seasickness during a month’s voyage across the Pacific, but here the rough weather and short, chopping seas are pretty certain to bring him down. When one hundred miles away our approach to the coast was indicated by the color of the water from the sediment of the great Yangtse River which, rising in the Himalayas, three thousand miles away, flows through the heart of China and empties into the sea to which its discolored waters give the name. In size and extent of territory which it drains, the Yangtse should rank with the Amazon and Mississippi. But both these together cannot compare with this great artery of China in the population which crowd its banks, and the commerce it bears upon its bosom.
The mouth of the Yangtse strongly resembles the lower Mississippi. The shores are a dead level for nearly a hundred miles through the delta which its waters have formed, and are dyked to prevent inundation. It is so wide that for thirty miles but one shore is visible from the deck of our steamer. As it gradually narrows I catch glimpses of frequent dwellings, neatly whitewashed and thatched with bamboo, surrounded with groves of bananas and plantains. A dense population is indicated by the number of people working in the fields, which are cultivated down to the water’s edge. This rich alluvial soil is devoted to rice and grain, not a foot of land is wasted, and even the mounds under which dead are burried are green with crops of millet or wheat. Hundreds of junks are at anchor, or sailing up and down the yellow current, thousands of fishing boats are closer in shore, and though the steam whistle is constantly sounded as a warning, collisions seem at times inevitable.
These Chinese navigators have the faculty of running across the bows of a steamer,
