Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/234

redress, and chafing under the pecuniary extortions of which they were themselves the victims, the foreigners were driven to "acts of atrocious violence, coming strictly under the definition of piracy, murder, or arson, which, under a more vigorous government, would have rendered them the property of the public executioner." To this category belong the exploits of a certain Captain McClary, who (1781) captured a sloop and carried her to Macao on suspicion that she was Spanish. The Portuguese, who never failed to rise to the level of a lucrative occasion, imprisoned McClary, compelled him to give an order for the sloop's release, and then, as she suffered shipwreck before the order could be executed, so ill-treated him during two months of incarceration, and so terrified him with threats of handing him over to the Chinese, that he agreed to pay $70,000 for his freedom. Restored to his ship, and finding himself anchored beside a Dutch vessel in the river below Canton, he promptly seized her on receipt of news that war had been declared between England and Holland. The Chinese Authorities remonstrated and sought the assistance of the East India Company's Council. But the latter declared that their power did not extend beyond protest, though McClary was in their service. An extraordinary compromise ultimately ended the trouble. The Chinese were suffered to simulate the re-capture of the prize by boarding her with shouts and demon-