The River at the Centre of the World (15 page)

The little ship passed the red buoy at Woosung on 19 April 1949, and on the next day approached the section of the river where the Communists were known to be massing. Her captain ordered up precautions: large Union Jacks were to be draped over the ship's side, the guns were to be armed and trained, speed was to be increased to sixteen knots. The ship was officially neutral, and should not attract any hostile fire. But this was China, a country in an unpredictable mood. As she passed Low Island, near the end of a long north–south reach in the river, there was a sudden crackle of rifle fire from the shore. The captain ordered his gunners to train and aim. Then rifle fire was followed, more ominously, by the zoom and whine of shellfire as a shore battery opened up. Huge splashes of water erupted off the starboard beam. Fifteen rounds were fired – none hit the British ship. On the bridge the officers made caustic remarks about poor Communist marksmanship. As
Amethyst
rounded the bend and began to head due west along the river's muddy, duck-filled Kou-an Reach, the final leg on the way to Zhenjiang, so the order was piped: ‘Hands relax action stations.’ The danger, it was thought, was over.

The sun was rising into a cloudless mid-morning sky as the ship drew abreast of Rose Island. She was now at reduced speed, her guns trained fore and aft. No one aboard suspected a thing – when suddenly, without any warning, without any cries or flags or bugle blow, a shell flashed across the ship's topmast. The captain ordered ‘Action stations' once more, and demanded speed. The telegraphs clanged urgently, the motors began to roar. And then, in an instant, the Communists found their aim. Three shells slammed into the ship and exploded: one hit the wheelhouse, turning it into a maelstrom of splintered steel and wood and trapping the coxswain against the wheel, pulling it and the ship – hard over to port.

The wounded vessel was now racing directly towards the thick mud of Rose Island. The captain ordered ‘Hard a-starboard’, trying desperately to correct the course and prevent his ship's running aground. At the same time he ordered his guns to open fire. But almost at the very same instant two more shells hit the ship: the bridge detonated in a ball of fire, and everyone in or near it was killed or terribly wounded. The captain was mortally injured, and would live on for two agonizing days. The Chinese pilot had the back of his head blown off, killed instantly. Another man was blinded when a shell fragment took his entire eye out. The ship's Number One took a piece of shrapnel the size of a matchbox: it tore through his lungs and lodged in his liver. This man, Weston, though bleeding heavily and barely able to speak, took command: he had to watch in impotent horror as the ship slid steadily into the mudflats and then stopped dead, stuck fast, right in the gunsights of the Communist batteries. He managed to croak one urgent Flash signal to the Commander-in-Chief in Hong Kong: ‘Under heavy fire. Am aground in approx. position 31 degrees 10 minutes North 119 degrees 50 minutes East. Large number of casualties.’
*

General Zhu's men showed no mercy. Shell after shell tore into the ship, and within minutes the deck was an inferno, littered with dead and wounded men. The ship's power was cut, the radio was out, the sick bay suffered a direct hit, the aft gun-turret was ruined, the depth-charge store was penetrated by an armour-piercing shell and
Amethyst's
TNT went up in a roar. Injured men lay untended among the flames, and if not burned by the fires they were hit by splinters from new shell bursts. For more than an hour the ship shuddered and shook under the barrage: Weston gave the order to evacuate – though not totally abandon – the vessel. A steaming party was to be left on board, as were volunteers to help tend the wounded. The rest swam or took life rafts to shore – under withering hail of machine-gun fire, which killed further numbers of the terrified men. Those who made it set themselves up in the underbrush, watched and waited. The plan was to reboard the ship at nightfall, repair her, refloat her and get away. The Communists stopped shelling shortly before noon, and the river fell quiet.

The
Amethyst
remained where she was, critically wounded, immobilized and impotent, for the next 101 days – a neutral ship held hostage to a foreign revolution's fortune, a symbol of the unfamiliar new demands of what was being called the Cold War.
*
Everyone in Britain knew about her: just as with the American hostages who were held in post-revolutionary Iran some thirty years later, this was a drama that enthralled the nation. Not a day passed without the broadcast of some scrap of information on the helpless ship. Not a Briton lived who did not care about the trapped vessel and her helpless crew.

As it happened, however, neither the ship nor the crew turned out quite as helpless as was thought. Slowly but eventually, the engines were repaired, as was her steering mechanism. And when everyone involved realized that negotiations with the Communists were going nowhere, it was decided, during the unbearable heat of the last days of that July, that the ship would try to escape. She would try to make her way downriver under the cover of darkness, and to break out from under the very gun sights of Zhu De's batteries.

All manner of precautions were taken for the run. Mattresses and awnings and hammocks were arranged along the ship's sides to make her look as different as possible from usual. She rearranged her lights, showing green over red, masquerading as a civilian vessel, a merchantman. The crew were told that talking above a whisper was forbidden; smoking was banned; no one could use the intercom, certainly not the radio. To preserve the silence that was vitally necessary for the break-out moment it was decided that the anchor could not be raised in the normal way – the chain's rattling passage up the hawse pipe would make a din certain to awaken every Communist battery from Zhenjiang to Shanghai. Instead it was decided to knock the pin from one of the half-shackles that held together the lengths of anchor chain, and to let the chain fall into the water – vertically, with thick grease on all and any of the ship's surfaces that it might touch. This, it was said, was the anchor I might see behind the old consulate's redbrick wall.

At 10 p.m. on the hot and moonless night of Saturday 30 July the bosun knocked out the pin on the anchor chain, the ship gunned her engines and steamed out into the night. Twenty miles downriver she was spotted, gunfire rang out, and she was hit – though not badly. Someone sent a signal to the C-in-C in Hong Kong. The admiral was hosting a dinner party, and a toast was drunk – ‘To HMS
Amethyst
and all who sail in her.’

More signals came in to headquarters during the night. ‘Halfway,’ said one. ‘Hundred up,’ another (a cricketing term, to which the admiral replied with the same metaphor: ‘A magnifi-ccent century!’). A junk unexpectedly crossed into the path of the fleeing and unlit ship: the bridge officers waited, sickened, for the awful crunch of smashed wood and the cries of drowning fishermen. There was nothing they could have done. Many must have died. But the
Amethyst
could not afford to stop. It raced on, now doing an unheard-of 22 knots.

At dawn they passed under the searchlights of Woosung Fort, where another Communist battery stood on the right bank, just where the Whangpoo entered the Yangtze. The searchlights briefly glanced off the hull – everyone on board holding his breath – and then moved on.
Amethyst
kept roaring onward. ‘Everything you've got!’ the bridge telegraphed down to the engine room. ‘Damage to engines accepted.’

And then finally, there in the dim light of morning, and resting under a plume of smoke on the wide grey waters of the outer Yangtze estuary, the spotters on the bow of
Amethyst
saw the familiar outline of her sister ship, the destroyer HMS
Concord
. The signal was flashed by Aldis lamp: ‘Fancy meeting you again.’ It was now beyond doubt that HMS
Amethyst
– after 101 days in captivity, and with 23 of her crew dead and 31 missing – had at long last broken free.

No one is quite sure how the Chinese in Zhenjiang reacted to the escape. It is said that divers were sent down and located the anchor – still attached to its several tons of chain – and pulled it from the river. They paraded it around town as a spoil of battle, a trophy that their men had wrested bravely from a fleeing imperial coward. How many of the locals accepted the story is anyone's guess; but it was not to be too much longer before the city of Zhenjiang had been swept clear of all its foreign residents, and the old British Consulate had turned into a revolutionary museum: it is said the Communists dumped the relic there, in the gardens. Some guidebooks mention it: but when I asked – and when Lily asked – no one could be sure either what it was, or where it was.

(It is a most baffling habit of most Chinese – this mute insistence that
they do not know where anything is
. You ask an ancient who has lived all of his long life in Zhenjiang, Where is the old British Consulate? as I did – and he will shake his head, wave you away with his hand, professing no clue, having no interest. Asking for the anchor itself produced still more puzzled refusal. No, never heard of it.
Purple Stone Hero
? Not anywhere here.
Doesn't ring a bell with me, old man
.)

I handed over one yuan to a woman behind the museum gate's guichet, and inquired whether the anchor might be inside. No, she said, definitely not. There is no such thing as an anchor anywhere here. The cadre standing inside the gate said much the same: there were plenty of Song dynasty pots and pans, but no anchor from a barbarian war vessel. ‘You have wasted your time,’ he said, and laughed bitterly.

Just then a young Chinese woman came down the stairs. She had been reading a novel – the museum had few visitors – and was chewing on a sweet called Sugared Cow Skin. She offered me one. She smiled warmly.

‘I heard there was an anchor here. But it is buried in grass, I think. Besides, they are doing some demolition work. Come with me.’

And we followed her up a hillock, through one of the archways, past a flight of stone steps that must have once seen processions of clerks and second secretaries and consuls bearing the intelligences of the world from one empire to another. We came out onto a newly razed area of wrecked brickwork, where one of the seven buildings had recently been flattened. Behind it was a small slope, covered with jungle. The girl pointed to it.

‘There, I think. Use a knife, if you have one,’ she cried, and went off, back to her novel and her bag of Sugared Cow Skins.

Thick laurel bushes had infested the hillside, and the branches slashed at my legs as I waded through to the edge of the cliff. And there, burdened by growth but unmistakably nautical, was the anchor – four feet tall, its shank covered in some kind of cracked poultice, its ring solid, a half-shackle with a pin hanging loosely from it. The anchor's crown was firmly cemented to the ground, and the flukes rose sharp and spadelike into the surrounding bushes. It looked half a century old – but it had been built well, and it was neither rusty nor broken. The Admiralty commissioned its iron to last.

A small notice, half illegible from dirt and growth, was mounted in front. I rubbed away the grime, and read: this was the anchor from the foreign imperial war vessel
Purple Stone Hero
, ‘captured in the seventh month of 1949 by heroic members of the People's Liberation Army after the ship had made a cowardly run away down the Long River to the sea.’

But was it? Since coming back, and poring over the pictures, I have begun to wonder. I have started to have doubts.

The anchor in Zhenjiang is a much smaller device than that normally used to hold a warship. Its design is that of a fisherman's anchor, made specifically to hold a little craft. It is most certainly not the standard Admiralty Pattern Stockless Anchor, with which pictures show
Amethyst's
bows to have been equipped. My guess is that the Chinese have actually duped us, and themselves – not, one might say, for the first time. What stands among the undergrowth in Zhenjiang may well actually be another anchor, perhaps from one of the vessel's whalers – perhaps, indeed, a British anchor, and so a symbol of the treachery. But my guess is that the real half-ton of iron, together with all its chains – that which was so silently slipped on the night of the getaway – remains buried in the Yangtze mud, even today. It might have been a good idea to raise it, but it was in all likelihood far too heavy and far too sunk for even the bitterest Chinese to try to recover it and put it on show. A lesser substitute had to do.

I imagined it might be tempting to cross the river and make a pilgrimage to Yangzhou, where there are temples and gardens, and supposedly the most beautiful women in China. So I went over on the chugging car ferry, and found as I had rather anticipated that it was filled with tourists and their buses; but when I saw two noble Mongolian camels locked up in a paddock for the benefit of sightseers, and that their keeper had left them so ragged and hungry that their humps had withered and fallen across their sides like empty shopping bags, I stormed off and went looking for the Grand Canal instead.

But that too turned out to be an infinitely depressing thing. It may be long (1554 miles) and ancient (fully 2500 years, if one accepts that the first of its links was built in the fifth century BC). It may be noble and wondrous, a triumph of Tang dynasty engineering and perseverance, and a celebration of the technology of earlier times as well.
*
But it is now filthy dirty, its congestion makes it irredeemably ugly, it is choked with rubbish and human leavings, and it is so industrialized as to have any hint of romance hammer-pressed out of it. What remains of it, even in a supposedly picturesque place like Yangzhou, seems so ruined and broken as to be barely a canal; and it is certainly, for all of its miles, anything but grand. Canals are in general fascinating memorials to commerce and civil engineering: it is a shame indeed that this, the greatest of them all, has fallen so very far from grace.