On April 18 one of Hire’s subordinates, a Captain Aplin of HMS Centaur at Nanking, captured twenty-six Englishmen who were serving in the Taiping armies. “Most of the men,” wrote a diplomatic officer who witnessed the arrests,
assert that they were enticed into drinking shops at Shanghai by regular crimps, where they were drugged, and when senseless were conveyed to certain boats in waiting.… Only two or three confess to voluntary enlistment without any stipulation.… The men were in a most miserable condition, getting no pay, but plenty of rice and spirits. They were allowed to plunder wherever they went, but seem to have had little success. They made no secret of such crimes as rape and robbery, and even hinted at darker deeds. Most of them had been present at a fight near Sung-chiang, where their leader, named Savage, was wounded, and an Italian killed. An American named Peacock, at present living in Soochow, is Captain over all; he is of high rank among the Taipings, and has the power of life and death.
This successful operation bred greater conviction among Britain’s naval officers that an activist approach to the desertion problem was the correct one. On April 22 Commander Hire, accompanied by consulate interpreter Chaloner Alabaster, had an interview in Shanghai with Hsüeh Huan, at which Wu Hsü was present. Hire demanded that Hsüeh surrender all Englishmen in his service, but both Hsüeh and Wu predictably declared that they had no such employees. They admitted to hiring Tardif de Moidrey and another French officer as artillery instructors and said that they had heard that the rebels were making use of British deserters. But they were not doing the same. Hire assured Hsüeh that he had it on good authority that Englishmen in the imperial service were drilling at Sung-chiang, upon which Hsüeh urged Hire to go to Sung-chiang and arrest any such men. “Some questions,” noted the interpreter, Alabaster, “were then asked relative to Colonel Ward, the Commissioner saying he had employed him for two months last year but had then dismissed him and on being told that the Colonel declared himself to be still in H[is] E[xcellency’s] employ said he thought he was dead, he had heard he was wounded at Sung-chiang some long time ago while he was in his employ and thought he had died.” Wu Hsü “also expressed great horror” on being told of Ward’s enlistment activities, and, when both the taotai and Hsüeh promised to cooperate in capturing the deserted Englishmen and their new commanders, Hire said that he would consider it “a decided breach of faith” if they failed to do so.
The following day Commander Hire proceeded up the Huang-pu River and then Sung-chiang Creek in a gunboat, again accompanied by Alabaster as well as a detachment of Royal Marines. Startled by the appearance of regular British troops, the imperial Chinese soldiers manning Sung-chiang’s gates allowed them admittance. The commander of these Green Standard braves, one of Sung-chiang’s mandarins, was then sought out in his yamen. Hire presented the man with a notice that the British soldiers found posted on a column outside the yamen. Written and signed by Ward, the document prohibited entrance into Sung-chiang by any soldiers of the Chinese Foreign Legion without a pass. The nonplussed mandarin—who was placed in the unenviable position of lying to protect a group of foreign mercenaries who had consistently berated him and ignored his authority—denied that there were any foreigners in Sung-chiang. There had been in the past, Alabaster remembered the mandarin saying: “[F]oreigners constantly came and forced themselves into his presence but they were not in any way in his employ.” Unsatisfied, Hire declared that he would search the town and demanded that the mandarin accompany him.
Scouring the imperialist military camp, Hire found no evidence of activity by foreigners, but then several of his marines, posted at the west gate of the town, intercepted a Chinese who bore a pass into the “barracks” of the Chinese Foreign Legion—a pass that was written and signed by Ward. Confronted with this man and this document, the mandarin “suddenly remembered the existence of such a place, still however denying that he had anything to do with the foreigners or that there were any there.” Hire was next taken to a building that he was told was Colonel Ward’s residence, and his men commenced turning the apparently abandoned place upside down: “Some empty beer bottles [were] found, and a trap door seemingly leading to the roof at length discovered. This was at once burst open tho with some difficulty, it being nailed down and piled over with lumber of all sorts, and a long suite of rooms discovered full of European stores, wines and evidently used by foreigners that day as some plates and dishes had been shoved away unwashed.”
Hire presumed following the discovery of this shielded sanctum that although he was only a step behind the fleeing Ward, it was a long step. After happening on a roster of names of Westerners serving in the Foreign Legion, the commander decided to return immediately to Shanghai: Ward’s best hope of evading capture while simultaneously avoiding an accidental run-in with the rebels would be to hide himself among the thousands of fugitives and refugees in the port’s foreign settlements.
On returning to Shanghai, Hire subsequently wrote, he “waited on the American Flag Officer asking his assistance toward the detention of Ward, to which he unhesitatingly replied that [Ward] was not an American Subject, or entitled to protection as such. I then requested him to give me that in writing, which he did.” Disavowed, now, by both the Chinese and the Americans, Ward apparently had no protectors, and his arrest seemed an act free from international complications. Hire returned to the Urgent and “ordered the Master at Arms to go on shore and bring Ward onboard.” The commander then went out to dine and on returning found that Ward had been apprehended and confined on board the Urgent: “I informed him that he must consider himself my prisoner for the present.”
Ward had been picked up on the Shanghai waterfront and was kept closely guarded during the night of April 24. Having the Foreign Legion’s commander in his custody, Hire was anxious now to ascertain the whereabouts of Ward’s Shanghai headquarters, said to be the center of the legion’s enlistment activities but as yet not proved to exist. Dispatching agents on this mission, the commander himself sought the advice of Consul Medhurst and ex-Consul Meadows as to the eventual disposition of Colonel Ward. Both officials told Hire that “it would be best to get this ruffian Ward from the Colony” (the fact that Shanghai was not a possession of the British Crown was momentarily forgotten by all three men), and, as a first step toward this goal, Hire demanded another interview with Wu Hsü.
Before confronting the Chinese authorities, Hire returned to the Urgent to interrogate Ward. The principal area of uncertainty was the soldier of fortune’s nationality: Without hard knowledge on this subject, it would be difficult to force any government to accept and punish the prisoner. Hire demanded to know what country Ward hailed from, to which the prisoner cagily replied: “I was last employed by Mexico. I have been a citizen of the United States but certainly am not now. I am not an Englishman for I never was in the country but once and have no relatives there, tho I have some in the United States. I do not consider this a fair question and decline to give an answer.”
Ward apparently understood his captors’ predicament: A man without a country could hardly be prosecuted for violating any one nation’s neutrality laws. The heat was further turned up on the increasingly perplexed Commander Hire with the arrival, following the questioning of Ward, of a note from Nicholas Cleary, a Shanghai attorney. Claiming to represent Ward, Cleary demanded that Hire “hand him over to the proper Chinese Authorities at Shanghai for immediate trial upon such charges as you may have to proffer.” The entrance of the “proper Chinese Authorities” into the legal melee was a new element, and Hire proceeded to Wu Hsü’s yamen.
After presenting evidence of the foreign presence at Sung-chiang, Commander Hire “expressed his regret that he could not feel the same confidence in H[is] E[xcellency’s] good faith he had done at the former interview.” Wu Hsü, in turn, “expressed great indignation at the conduct of the Mandarins at Sung-chiang in concealing this from him.” Upon being informed that Hire had come “to request H[is] E[xcellency] either to punish Colo
nel Ward himself or to request Captain Hire to deport him,” Wu voiced approval for the latter idea, as “he had never punished foreigners before and at any rate it would be better to deport the Colonel as if he were Chinese all he could do would be bamboo him and let him go, and he would still remain here.” But Hire was subsequently informed by a legal expert that British confinement, punishment, and deportation of Ward were all questionable actions: Whatever country was entitled to exercise such measures, it certainly was not Great Britain. “My mind was then made up,” wrote Hire, “to make the Chinese authorities take possession of Ward and punish him.”
On April 26 the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council wrote to Consul Medhurst to ask that the authorities prevent “the so called Colonel Ward or his agents” from “continuing to entice members of the Municipal Police Force and others from their duty.” For a man who was supposedly “crimping” foreigners into service, Ward was enjoying remarkable popularity. In addition, Commander Hire and Consul Medhurst were losing the elaborate diplomatic game being played around the prisoner on board the Urgent: Knowing full well that the British would eventually be forced to return Ward to him, Wu Hsü had already covered himself by protesting that if they did, there would be little if anything he could do to punish him.
The culmination of the affair came on April 26, when Wu Hsü put before Chaloner Alabaster papers purporting to show that Ward was a Chinese citizen. Apparently anticipating his arrest, Ward had mailed a letter to Consul Smith on April 24 expressing his desire to revoke his American citizenship and become a naturalized Chinese. The papers presented by Wu were, however, almost certainly forged: Peking would scarcely have approved Ward’s application for citizenship at this juncture, and, even had such approval been forthcoming, there had not been time since his arrest to deliver it. But the British were not prepared to accuse representatives of the imperial Chinese government of falsifying documents, and on that same April 26, Commander Hire recalled, “an armed party came down to Jardine’s Wharf, two officers came onboard when Ward was delivered up to them and marched by a strong escort of China Men into the Town.”
In the wake of Ward’s release, Commander Hire expressed the belief that he had, “by seizing Ward …, in a great measure struck a severe blow at the head of the crimping system in Shanghai.” Other British officers and officials shared his confidence that the incident had severely discouraged the members of the Chinese Foreign Legion, an impression strengthened by the capture, on April 28, of thirteen foreigners near Sung-chiang by British troops. Accused of being in the imperial service, the men were returned to their various consulates for deportation, but at least one was subsequently released, and before long the British authorities were forced to accept the fact that none of their moves had in any way slowed Ward down. British soldiers and sailors continued to desert and join the Chinese Foreign Legion, and proof that the unit was still active in the interior came when Burgevine took some sixty-five Westerners and joined General Li Heng-sung’s Green Standard braves in yet another unsuccessful assault on Ch’ing-p’u on May 11. (The affair was a further lesson in Green Standard unreliability: As the Herald reported, Burgevine’s contingent “saw nothing of the 20 gun-boats and 9,000 men who were to have cooperated with them until they met them on their return about 3 miles from the city.”)
Consul Medhurst and Captain Roderick Dew, who had succeeded Commander Hire as commander of British naval forces during Admiral Hope’s absences from Shanghai, now decided to put an end to all these activities. They ordered a thorough search of the foreign settlements for Ward and Burgevine, one that turned up no sign of the two men or of Ward’s supposed Shanghai headquarters. But roughly a week later Consul Medhurst received information from an informer, who, as Medhurst told Frederick Bruce, “to save himself betrayed his comrades”:
He deposed among other things that the accounts of the legion were to be settled on a particular day and hour in the Taki hong, a house in the settlement through which the Taotai conducts his business with our Commissariat, and on Captain Dew and myself going there with an armed party, we found the soi disant “Captain” of the legion deep in accounts with the purser of the hong, and we discovered upstairs eighteen stand of musketry with a quantity of ammunition and other munitions of war. All these were seized and brought away together with the “captain,” the purser, and a man pointed out as compradore to the legion. The captain claiming to be an American was handed over to his Consul, and the other men being Chinese and in the Taotai’s own employ I sent to him with a letter repeating my complaints against the Authorities for lending themselves so persistently to the system of foreign enlistment. He replied that he would enquire into the charge against the men and that as the arms belonged to him he would like to have them returned. I have of course not obliged him in this particular, and I only mention this fact as well as that of his employment of Taki to shew the duplicity of which he has been guilty throughout.
In fact, the mysterious Westerner Medhurst and Captain Dew had captured turned out to be none other than Burgevine. On May 18 the Carolinian was confined in the house of the American marshal (the American settlement still had no jail), and Consul William L. G. Smith tried the case at ten o’clock that morning. Burgevine was officially charged with violating the neutrality laws and enticing British sailors to desert. But once again the Western authorities were frustrated in their attempts to deal a mortal blow to the Sung-chiang force. One officer of the Shanghai Municipal Police testified that he had seen Burgevine at Yang Fang’s but also said that he had not at the time seen anyone he could identify as a British deserter. And while one such deserter was called to testify that he had served in the Ward force, he denied that Burgevine had either enticed or recruited him. In the end, Burgevine was released for lack of evidence, the whole affair producing nothing more than a cost to the American consulate of $17.50 for marshal’s and clerk’s fees.
Medhurst now became determined to find Ward, and on the day after Burgevine’s trial British search parties again spotted and captured their quarry. The British were taking no chances this time: Ward was imprisoned on board one of their warships. Edward Forester, commanding the Foreign Legion garrison at Sung-chiang, was now in a tight spot. He had good reason to suppose that the British would march on the town and seize the rest of the legion’s Western officers. As for Ward, Forester later recalled that there “seemed no hope of release or even of trial. The arrest had been an arbitrary one and the physical power was in the hands of the admiral.” Hope—knowing better than to trust the Chinese to deal with the problem of Ward—evidently intended himself to make sure that the young mercenary left China this time.
In addition, while Ward was in captivity, Hope directed a strong force of British soldiers, sailors, and marines to march on Sung-chiang and demonstrate to those Westerners still at large the cost of their continued defiance. Apprised of the British move by Yang Fang, Forester “put the mud forts which we were occupying—about a mile east of Sung-chiang—in the best possible state of defense, and then sent word that I would defend my position at all hazards. The British, about eight hundred in number, marched entirely around our fort and, without firing even so much as a volley, returned to their ships.” The British expedition up-country was apparently intended as a show of force, but it had little if any effect on the members of the legion.
In Shanghai, meanwhile, Yang Fang was making plans with Burgevine and Vincente Macanaya for Ward’s escape from the British warship, since it seemed impossible that the British would repeat the error of releasing him into any other nation’s custody. Although kept under close guard, Ward was confined in a comfortable cabin rather than the brig and was allowed daily visitors. One of these was Vincente, who managed to communicate to Ward that he should be prepared at an appointed hour during a coming night to jump through one of the large windows in his cabin (such ample openings being typical of British warships of the day). He would be picked up by Vincente, who would be waiting in the waters below in
a sampan, a small river skiff propelled by a single scull. Ward could then be taken to safety at Sung-chiang.
The exact date of Ward’s escape—sometime during the last week of May—is unrecorded, but the circumstances were more grist for the popular mill that was turning the Foreign Legion’s commander into a folk hero among the Chinese. At the sounding of four bells (two o’clock in the morning), Ward called on the skills he had learned as a boy on the Salem wharves and leapt through the window of his cabin into the waters of Shanghai harbor. True to plan, Vincente was there and hauled Ward into his sampan while cries of alarm went up aboard the warship. As Forester wrote, “This was before search-lights on a man-of-war were even dreamed of,” and by the time British launches had been manned and made their way into the dark harbor, they were faced with the sight of some thirty sampans racing in every direction: a diversion that was the final element in Yang Fang’s plan. The British soon became convinced that the search was hopeless. Vincente pulled for the bank of the Huang-pu opposite Shanghai (the western edge of the Pootung peninsula), where Ward debarked and stayed hidden for twenty-four hours. He then journeyed to Sung-chiang by an indirect route. Reaching the garrison without incident, Ward remained there as the British once more turned Shanghai upside down and arrested anyone even suspected of serving or having served with the Chinese Foreign Legion.
Ward was free again—yet the British once more underestimated his determination by believing that they had dealt a death blow to the legion’s activities. On June 8 the Herald triumphantly crowed that “[t]he force is now disbanded. Some have probably suffered capital punishment at the hands of the Chinese, some have fallen in action, some are expiating their offences against our laws in common jails, and some few have escaped it is to be hoped with sufficient examples before them never to again engage in such an illegitimate mode of earning a livelihood as enrolling themselves in such disreputable ranks as those of a ‘Chinese Foreign Legion.’ ”