Viceroy Yeh continued his irregular warfare. The S.S. Queen suffered (February 23, 1857) the same fate as the Thistle and her captain and European crew were assassinated. Incendiarism flourished in a petty way in Hongkong, and Duddell's bakery, inaccessible to poisoners, was fired (February 28, 1857). Mandarin proclamations once more (March, 1857) peremptorily ordered all Chinese to leave Hongkong on pain of expatriation, but as yet with little result. A vast conspiracy was discovered (April 15, 1857) to have been organized in Canton to make war in Hongkong against British lives and property. Attacks on British shipping and even on British gunboats were of frequent occurrence until Commodores Elliot and Keppel (May to June, 1857), by a series of dashing exploits, drove Yeh's war-junks out of the delta of the Canton River and, by a brilliant action near Hyacinth Island, destroyed Yeh's naval headquarters in the Fatshan creek.
On 2nd July, 1857, Lord Elgin arrived in Hongkong. Reluctantly he condescended to receive an address from the British community, but departed presently for Calcutta. He left upon Sir John and the leading residents, whose suggestions he treated in supine cavalier fashion, the impression that his sympathies were rather with poor old Yeh than with his own countrymen. He shewed plainly that he looked upon the Arrow incident as a wretched blunder. Hongkong residents rejoiced to learn that his instructions (of April 20, 1857) included, besides the demands for compensation, for a restoration of Treaty rights and the establishment of a British Minister at Peking, also 'permission to be secured for Chinese vessels to resort to Hongkong from all parts of the Chinese Empire without distinction.' But this hope, like every other local expectation centering in Lord Elgin, was doomed to disappointment. Before his departure he would not even listen to Sir John's urgent advice that the reduction of Canton was a necessary preliminary to an expedition to the Peiho. But when he returned from Calcutta (September 20, 1857), together with Major-General C. van Straubenzee and his staff, he yielded the point as it
