This is the 5th
section of a draft version of one of the chapters for my upcoming book The Silver Bowl. It is one of four thumbnail
sketches of Irishmen whose impact on Hong Kong in its early days as a Colony
were significant. My hope is that helpful readers can set me straight if I am
wrong about any of the facts. I still have much to learn.
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Sir Henry Pottinger (1789-1856)
It wasn’t until 1842, at the conclusion of the First
Opium War and a year after the flag had been raised at Possession Point, that
Henry Pottinger from Co. Down, as the Queen’s representative, dictated the
terms of the Treaty of Nanking to the Chinese after their military defeat. A
year earlier, aged fifty-two, he had been appointed Envoy and Plenipotentiary
to China by Lord Palmerston. Palmerston had hand-picked him to negotiate the
new treaty, but when he finally signed it, he overstepped his mandate. Like
many of the other Governors who followed him, and who also overstepped their
mandates, he felt no need to apologize:
…
the retention of Hong Kong is the only point in which I have intentionally
exceeded my modified instructions, but every single hour I have passed in this superb
country has convinced me of the necessity and desirability of our possessing
such a settlement as an emporium for our trade and a place from which Her
Majesty's subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled.
When he spoke of the need to defend the right of Hong
Kong merchants to carry on their
mercantile pursuits, without molestation or restraint, he was also echoing
the language of his father, Eldred Curwen Pottinger, a political radical who had
formed the Mountpottinger Volunteers in 1779, an organization which was inspired
by the patriotic and revolutionary fervor of both the American and French
revolutions. The Volunteers of Co. Down were also dedicated to protecting the
rights of men like themselves - farmers and linen traders. At a meeting when
Eldred was in the chair, they had pledged:
We
believe that Ireland should be a nation, independent and free, without
impolitic restrictions on our commerce under which we groan.
Eldred’s was one of the first Volunteer resolutions to not
only speak of Ireland as a nation, but also to link that vision to a need for
political reform.
A biography of Pottinger, published in 1846, mentions
that one of his ancestors led a body of
mercenaries who did good service in the wars of the north of Ireland, in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. For at least a hundred years after 1602, a time when
the Pottingers were first recorded as working as merchants based in Belfast,
the family had done quite well for itself. They had also supported the winning
sides in various battles. In the 1690s, his three times great-grandfather had sold
part of his estate to help fund King William, the monarch who prevailed in the
Battle of the Boyne. Perhaps the subsequent Pottingers were over-generous, or
foolhardy, or unlucky, but regardless, the family fortunes went downhill from
there. By the early 1780s, seven years
before Henry was born, his father had to sell most of the family land at
Ballymacarrett - except for Mountpottinger House and 65 acres - to cover debts.
Five of his sons, all but his oldest, were then pressed into military service,
and two died in combat in India. As for young Henry, he was 22 years old and
living in Bombay in 1811 when the house he was born in was sold to cover even
more debts. A decade after that, with no help from his family, he had saved
enough to be able to marry Susanna Maria Cooke, the daughter of Captain Richard
Cooke of Cookesborough, Westmeath, Ireland.
In spite of all his accomplishments, financial, military
and marital, Pottinger was still treated as an outsider in the halls of power
in London. Lord Aberdeen was among
those known to mock his Co. Down accent to his face, while others discriminated
against him behind his back. After his death, his family accused
Parliament of not treating him as well as they should have, and his brother
William went so far as to erect a plaque in St. George’s Church in Belfast
which reads in part:
On concluding his successful Treaty with
China in the year 1842 he was destined for the Peerage by her Gracious Majesty
Queen Victoria the First, but Lost this High Distinction through the same
Hostile Influence which was exerted in Vain to Prevent Parliament Rewarding his
Eminent Services to the State.
Even though Henry had been made a baronet in 1839 in
recognition of his services in India, the government had never recognized the
significance of his services in China in any tangible way. It took until June
1845 for Prime Minister Peel to grudgingly offer a pension, one that was somewhere
between a tenth and a third of what should have been Pottinger’s due. The
proposal to award this pension hadn’t even originated with Peel, but had been
advanced by the radical MP Joseph Hume, a member of the opposition. A
contemporary biographer, writing in 1846 in the
Dublin
University Magazine pointed out:
It was the fate of Sir Henry Pottinger to
have been appointed by one minister, and rewarded by his opponent.
Although Pottinger later served as the first Governor of
Hong Kong, his was the shortest stay of any of the Irish Governors (1843-44). He
wasn’t very popular with the merchants, but his year there was also a year when
he suffered significant personal losses.
John Robert
Morrison (1814–1843), his very dear friend and
Colonial Secretary, died in August of
Hong Kong fever [probably malaria].. A
second and perhaps even greater loss for Pottinger was the death of his nephew, Eldred
Pottinger, a hero in the battles at Herat in Afghanistan, and a son of Henry’s
older brother Thomas. Eldred was only 32 years old when he succumbed to a fever
in 1843 while visiting his Uncle Henry in Hong Kong.
Many of these Irishmen, who inevitably socialized with
one another during the very early years of Hong Kong, already had deep
connections to China, and had many had met long before the Colony began. Pottinger’s
friend, John Robert Morrison, was the son of John Morrison (1782-1834),
the first Protestant missionary to China. He had been born in China. His
mother was Mary
Morton (1791–1821), the eldest daughter of John Morton, surgeon-in-chief of the
Royal Irish Artillery, of Dublin. In 1821, just after his mother’s
death, when Morrison was 7 years old, he had been cared for by Dr. Francis
Dill, an Irish relation of Thomas Jackson. At the time, Dill had been a surgeon
on the East India ship, the Atlas. Dill
later served as Hong Kong’s first colonial surgeon. He was known as a
compassionate doctor, but he too succumbed to malarial fever in Hong Kong which
he contracted in 1846, after caring for destitute sailors. He left as his
legacy the creation of the Society for the Relief of the Sick Destitute, a
service that long outlived him.
Disease was not the only cost to men such as these who
served most of their lives abroad. The lengthy separations also wreaked havoc
on the lives of their wives and children, people who they barely knew after
decades of living apart. Henry’s eldest son
Frederick had been
raised by his wife, and Henry barely knew him. Frederick’s life did not turn
out well for anyone. He lost most of his mother’s wealth at the race track, and
then after Henry’s death, also squandered that inheritance. He failed at
everything he tried, got into drunken brawls, and died in Australia from an
accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound to his abdomen.
This is not to diminish Pottinger’s own accomplishments,
nor the accomplishments of any of these Irishmen mentioned above. Even before the
Treaty of Nanking was signed, a glorious future was expected to result from it.
The very first edition of the very first Hong Kong newspaper described its potential
(emphasis mine):
… we accept all as auxiliaries (whatever
clime or country may claim their origin) who will join us in demanding an
unrestricted trade with the Chinese – we
inscribe Free Trade on our banner and that it may wave triumphant we shall
insist on the permanent occupation of Hongkong, the authoritative declaration
by the British Government of its being a Free Port, and the exercise of a
generous policy by the Home and Local Governments to foster and encourage this
insular settlement on the coast of China, which we earnestly believe requires little aid to become one of the
most important commercial emporiums in the East.
March
17, 1842 The Friend of China,
