The Accidental Ethnographer (4d)—A Yankee on the Yangtze IV

One year ago on Round and Square (16 June 2011)—Management Repair: Patching the Vessel
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts in from A Yankee on the Yangtze:

Yankee 1          Yankee 2          Yankee 3          Yankee 4          Yankee 5

[a] Winding RF

I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society on June 1st, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series with William Geil's own words. I will post several readings from each of Geil's dozen books over the course of the summer months.

William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.

[b] Break RF

He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.

 ***  ***

We come to our penultimate posting from A Yankee on the Yangtze. We are headed for a little break from The Accidental Ethnographer, but I hope that you bear with the rushing waters of prose from William Edgar Geil's typewriter (which he carried with him through this and his other trips). Here again, if you read from start-to-finish, you will find changing prose and personality like the weather in Minneapolis...or Doylestown. Pay particular attention to his long description of the gunboat itself. Can you confidently say that you follow his prose? Follow that with his descriptions and opinions of what he calls "superstitious" behavior. The level of detail here is enticing, and the fact that Mr. Geil describes the writing of "charms" (in blood no less) without ever explaining what they are, adds to the mix of fascination and bewilderment that I find in reading him.

Finally, we conclude with a description of Geil "at work" on the boat as he endeavors to get it all down from dawn to dusk. He was a distinctive personality, and you have probably already guessed just from reading these introductory words that Geil was a character. This reading should convince you.

A Yankee on the Yangtze[1] 
William Edgar Geil (1904)

怪不人多禮

Much courtesy forestalls offence.

CHAPTER V.

THROUGH THE GREAT YANGTZE GORGES—ICHANG

TO THE WILD RAPIDS—IN A CHINESE GUNBOAT—

THE RED HEIFER—RIVER DISASTERS—THE

SACRED EDICT—SALUTING THE AMERICAN FLAG.

[c] Not Geil RF

It was a young and beautiful morning with a cloudless sky, this beginning of the twenty-seventh Sun of the eleventh Moon of the Old Tiger. It was less than a quarter after six, and the striped canvas of the native gunboat had been noiselessly struck and everything made snug and smart in ten minutes' time. The man in the prow was getting the black cannon ready, and the sun was rising back of (bang went the cannon!) the city. The echo as it rolled over the river and up the opposite mountain side was reinforced by a second and then a third shot. Thus my "honourable country" and myself were honoured. The bamboo mooring line was quickly slipped, and in a jiffy we were well out into the stream. The Red Life Boat was quite as spry, and thus early was begun the memorable journey of a Yankee in a Chinese gunboat. As we passed the junks and smaller craft, a sampan shot out to us and hauled alongside, and from her deck disappeared beautiful green and white vegetables which presently reappeared on our prow. The Pyramid was sharply silhouetted against the Eastern sky, and we imagined ghostly shapes leaping for the further shore and being hurled back by the guardian deity of fair Ichang.

The gunboat in which I sailed was a one-masted, square-prowed, high-sterned craft about forty feet from end to end, and not about nine feet beam. The mast had only one single shroud on the port side, the other side being more or less supported by the halyard. The solitary mast was forty feet high and stood in a socket, a mechanism by which it could be easily lowered. The top of the mast was a red wooden spearhead supplemented by three little flags on the port side. The gaff was fifteen feet long, made of a short piece of wood, and the boom was of stout bamboo twenty feet long. In between these, arranged at regular intervals, were fourteen bamboos without the support of which the clumsy sail would be blow to rags, as it was made of the thinnest calico. The main sheet was attached by a fan-like arrangement to the ends of these eight bamboos, the entire number of which were brought home to a block at the rudder post, so that the sail was worked with the greatest facility. 

[d] Yichang (Ichang) RF

The general shape of the sail may be described as a leg-o'-mutton sail and a mixture between a lug and a lateen. This kind of a sail is extremely handy on account of its lightness, and the fact that it reefs itself as it is run down. She carried the long fish-blade car with a T-topped handle strung with a leather thong. There were ten oarsmen, six abaft the mast and four forward. The part some four feet forward of the mast was occupied by the cook's galley, a most economical contrivance which consisted of a stove burning coal cakes, the fire of which is never let out day or night, and gave no smoke. She sat like a Delaware duck on the water, and, with a fair wind, was not likely to be out-sailed by an boat on the river. On the whole, she was as trim and natty a little vessel as one could wish to fine even in waters outside of China. She boasted one cannon forward, which was supposed to carry a mile, and a stack of rifles by the captain's cabin. There were also huge horse pistols for the crew, and some other firing irons. The official designation of this clean, trim war vessel was "Gunboat No. 7 of the Advance Squadron of the Ichang District."

The skipper was an interesting Chinaman. After some effort I got him to talk, and elicited the following facts. He was forty-two years of age, and went to sea at sixteen. Most of the time he had been in the coast Provinces, but his home was in Hunan, and now he lived temporarily in Ichang. He went out after a band of robbers in the fourth Moon, and spent two Moons following them up to catch them. As soon as they heard he was on their track, they turned into good people and offered no resistance when captured! The skipper gave up his cabin over the stern to me, and slept down in the hold where the tiller-man was accustomed to night it. The fine old steersman took to the right of my cabin door. The crew was composed of twelve men all told, including the cook, so that, with the captain, we had teh so-called unlucky number of thirteen. They were all nice, prompt, and intelligent-looking fellows. Translated from English, there were some odd names among them. The captain was Mr. Long Bow; the coxswain, "An-Official-Bound-for-Glory." "The-Ever-Victorious-Colour," "Special-Promise," "Red-Cinnamon-Grove," "Little-Profit," "Great-Treasure-of-a-Drum," "Graceful-Rest," "Keeper-of Truce," and "Crabtree-who takes-hold-of-Benevolence" made up, with the others, a fine lot of young Chinamen...

[e] Placid RF

Among the necessary preliminaries to starting on a boat of this kind, the Chinese usually kill a cock and smear the blood and feathers on the bow of the boat. Rice is also thrown over the entire boat as she puts out from the shore. In addition to these performances, a liberal supply of fire cracker are let off to show the River God that he is not forgotten. But as a foreign guest was on board the gunboat, I was spared the penance of witnessing this display of the superstions in which the natives live, move, and have their being. Instead of this, the cannon saluted and shook the vessel from stem to stern. The cook cut his hand severely with a clumsy axe, while trying to cut some bamboo rope into lengths to be used for torches. He straightaway smeared his fingers with his own blood and began to write charms on the deck. This is a fine art not revealed to many. Presently he rubbed some powdered medicine over the wound instead of cleansing it. On my enquiring what the wonderful concoction was, he replied, "Pulverized Dragon bones."

By noon we were at the entrance of the Ichang Gorge. Here were perpendicular cliffs eight hundred feet high. Along their base men were hard at work quarrying bluestone for the Ichang Embankment. It looked as if we were sailing through a chain of mountain lakes. Little can one imagine the grand and sublime scenery in China who limits his travel to the Yellow coast. But let him go a thousand miles up the Yangtze, and venture further up through the rapids between Ichang and Wan Hsien, and then the truth will dawn upon him that in all this world there is no finer scenery anywhere. Here were the most colossal cliffs and palisades I had ever seen since leaving the wonderland of New Zealand. Along the summit on those crags and eagle soared to its lofty eyrie. The whole scene was weirdly romantic. The first section of the Ichang Gorge bears the highly poetical name of "Moonshine," and the second is called the "Yellow Cat."

Soon after two in the afternoon, we had passed through the Ichang Gorge and were in the granite country. At this stage I got into conversation with Mr. Yun. I asked him to tell me about the great flood which devastated this valley, and carried away multitudes of people. He said, "Though I saw it with my own eyes, and though it was very terrible, it happened so long ago that I have forgotten all about it." The poor fellow was evidently afraid I was trying to entrap him into admitting some neglect of duty then, and believed, with Horace, Percunctatorem fugito nam garrulus idem est. The skipper came to the rescue and related how, once upon a time, the water became dammed up and could not get away. To relive the overflow the idol, Kang Yeh, met a red heifer and asked her to tell him where they could find an outlet for the water. She assented, and he grabbed the cow by the tail and she led him to the place. Later returns indicate that the heifer was afterwards carried up to heaven, and the small fry gods built a temple on earth for her worship. For we were shown the spot where is located the Red Cow Temple. Tradition says that the moment the idol and the cow entered the valley, the water rushed through and formed a new channel. All sorts of wonderful tales are told

十 RF

"Of moving accidents by flood and field"

in this region. In the summer months the river usually rises over fifty feet...

When we had got within a short distance of the first great rapids, we lay to and stood alongside another gunboat. As my interpreter was stepping from one vessel to the other, a boatman, who wanted to help, saluted him as "My Lord Chang." Our little Mandarin whispered, "There is only one lord, that is my Lord Geil." In New Guinea they called me "The Big White Chief," but now I was "My Lord Geil." Whether I shall be able to recognise my humble friends when I reach home remaineth to be seen. When I returned to my cabin, I found a Chinese ten-cash coin which someone had dropped. The character 十, meaning ten, is very prominently stamped on the ordinary piece. I learned something new about the Offence of the Cross. The cross is, for obvious reasons, inseparably connected in the Chinese mind with missionaries, and is consequently despised by all Boxers. A short time before the Boxer outbreak in nineteen hundred, some leading spirits urgently petitioned the Government to change the hateful character. The Government acquiesed, and a special cash of the same value was struck off, but the character ten did not appear in the usual way, but in a complicated form in which the cross was entirely obliterated. The coin I picked up was one of these, and represents the Offence of the Cross.[2]

***  ***

In my diary I notice this remarkable incident recorded—The cook washed his hands this morning. Why should he do this? Are not his hands cleansed sufficiently from their various accumulations by mixing bread, preparing rice, and other things requiring direct manipulation. 

[f] Window RF

Of my own usual daily occupation my kind secretary, Mr. Douglas McLean, has written the following description which is here inserted:—"As soon as the first sign of daylight appears, Mr. Geil, clad in an enormous sheepskin overcoat (dark blue lining outside) and wearing a soft brown felt hat such as would have delighted the heart of the world-famed "Deadwood Dick," takes his stand outside the cabin door and describes the scenery as it unfolds itself to his admiring gaze. His visible wardrobe is completed by tan boots and a heavy grey sweater, and those who have seen him in the immaculate shirt front and faultless frock coat of the public platform would be amused could they meet him in this rough and ready garb. I say his gaze, because the door of the cabin is blocked by the aforesaid overcoat, and as there are no windows in front of me, I can see very little. The windows (?) are in the sides of the cabin a little to my rear, and are made of wood hung from the top edge, and propped out by a piece of small bamboo, so that only the water of the river is visible.

"Whenever anything noteworthy strikes his attention, he dictates a description, which I take down immediately on the typewriter, and thus the panorama is recorded as it passes. Nothing of interest escapes his critical eye, so that the click of the machine, though not so constant as the tick of the clock, makes a good substitute for the softer sound of the absent horologe.

"The rearward view is obtained by standing on the ample rudder-post which projects a foot from the deck; and this foot, added to Mr. Geil's seven feet less nine inches, after deducting nearly six feet for the height of the arched roof of the cabin, leaves a substantial credit balance in the right position for observing scenery. When an exceptionally fine view is behind us, Mr. Geil stands on a Chinese basket trunk about two feet high, and holds forth from that exalted station. This goes on from dawn till dark, and as the cabin is not well lighted, the early and late descriptions are written by the aid of a candle at both ends.[3]

Click below for other posts in from A Yankee on the Yangtze:

Yankee 1          Yankee 2          Yankee 3          Yankee 4          Yankee 5 

Notes
[1] Even though it should not be necessary for me to point out that some of Geil's language from 108 years ago will jar...I will anyway. I am not one to take either interpretive extreme in these cases. Some consider any language we would not use today to be offensive. On the other extreme would be those who say "everyone talked that way back then." I disagree with both extremes—language changes, yet not everyone did talk "that way back then." I prefer to let all of us develop ever-deeper historical sophistication. History is complicated; Geil is complicated. Period.

[2] William Edgar Geil, A Yankee on the Yangtze (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904), 69-75.

[3] Geil, Yankee, 77-78.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. A Yankee on the Yangtze. New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1904.

[g] Descriptions RF