residents began to feel themselves boycotted. A public meeting was therefore held (July 29, 1858) to discuss the extensive departure of Chinese from the Colony and the stoppage of food supplies. In accordance with the urgent resolutions unanimously passed by this meeting, Sir John boldly departed from Lord Elgin's line of policy and issued (July 31, 1858) a proclamation emphatically threatening the Heungshan and Sanon Districts with the retributive vengeance of the British Government if servants and food supplies were withheld any longer. Copies of this proclamation were successfully delivered at Heungshan by a party of British marines, but when H.M.S. Starling conveyed copies of the same proclamation to Sanon, a boat's crew, while under a flag of truce, were fired upon by the braves of Namtao. Thereupon General C. van Straubenzee and the Commodore (Hon. Keith Stewart) proceeded to Sanon with a small military and naval force and took the walled town of Namtao by assault, with the loss of two officers and three men. This measure had its effect in an immediate restoration of the market supplies of the Colony and an altered attitude of the Mandarins.
In addition to all the excitement which the Arrow War and its by-play of poisoning, incendiarism and boycotting involved, the public life of Hongkong was, throughout this administration, convulsed by an internal chronic warfare the acerbities of which beggared all description. It is not the duty of the historian to drag before the public eye the private failings of individuals nor is it proposed here to enter upon all the details of the mutual criminations and recriminations in which the public men of the Colony and the local newspapers indulged during this liveliest period in the history of Hongkong. But as the eruptions of volcanoes reveal to us the secrets of the interior of the earth, so these periodical explosions of feeling in the Colony give us an insight into the inner workings of local public life. It is necessary therefore to characterize, and trace the real cause of, these dissensions which disturbed the public peace, the more so as these matters became subjects of debate in Parliament to the great injury of the reputation of Hongkong.
