Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/269

exacting fees and douceurs from the importers. Another consideration also influenced them: the smugglers let it be plainly seen that they intended to defy the law as well as to evade it. So long as the principal depot of the trade was at Macao, no very flagrant acts of violence were connected with it. But when Portuguese exactions drove it from that place in 1822, the smugglers took virtual possession of a small island called Lintin, which lay between Macao and the mouth of the Canton River. There their boats lay, heavily armed and openly indifferent to official control. On several occasions Chinese subjects were shot from these boats, but the native officials had no power to exact redress, and even though they had possessed such power, their own participation in the secret profits of the trade must have paralysed their authority. Under these circumstances an arrangement was subsequently made for levying a fixed charge on each chest of the drug and dividing the proceeds among all officials concerned, from the viceroy downwards. It is related that this hush money was paid regularly from month to month, sometimes in silver but more frequently in the drug itself.

Of course illegal practices at one place encouraged evasions elsewhere. The corrupt complaisance of the Canton authorities induced foreigners to believe that the vetoes against general trade at other ports might be similarly