Clash of Empires

 A Devil Ship meets Imperial China

In my latest book I introduced one William Jardine, the Scottish trader who established the J&M (Jardine Matheson & Company) that came to be the center of the opium trade. Jardine got rich and powerful with his fleet of China Clippers running opium  from India to China, and bringing back teas and silks to England. He came to be known as the Tai-Pan, or supreme leader of the China Trade, and he also helped the mighty British East India Company take a nice profit from that trade. Then he sees  the Devil Ship, which he mistakenly calls the “HMS” Nemesis. Even though it was a purpose-built ship, not for the Royal Navy, but for the British East India Company who would profit from the war it would enable.

I first met this man (Jardine) in the landmark novel Tai-Pan by James Clavell, one of my most admired writers. I read Shogun nearly 40 years ago in 1975 when it was in everyone’s lap on trains, planes, and subways, the book that was Clavell’s breakthrough novel. Then I discovered Tai-Pan had been written eleven years earlier in 1966, and I devoured it. Returning to that book this year after finishing The Devil Ship, I was delighted to see it covered some of the same history as my latest novel.  I even found a scene where Clavell’s Tai-Pan, who he called “Dirk Struan” instead of the man’s real name, catches his first glimpse of the paddle steamer Nemesis in the book Tai-Pan. He swears at it roundly, seeing it for what it was, the coming of a new age in shipping, and the harbinger of the death of his prized China Clippers, the most beautiful sailing ships that ever graced the seas. 

These were the sort of things I explored in The Devil Ship, a time of conflict between two empires, two ages in naval technology, two starkly different cultures. It was a time where new ships, iron-hulled steamers, were just coming into regular service, and the sparks of inevitable conflict ignited by the grinding of two cultures, the British and Chinese, started the fires of war. They were both Imperial powers with long histories that were locked in a struggle in the mid to late 19th Century, and among the prizes Great Britain secured in those wars was the island that became the glittering jewel of a city we know today as Hong Kong. They held it for over 100 years.

I hope you’ll take the time to pick up a copy of The Devil Ship and enjoy it! In my story, there had to be mention of the Tai-Pan as well, for I had learned that William Jardine all but spoon-fed the plan the British used to defeat Qing China in the Opium Wars to Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary at that time.  So here was a perfect setting, the Age of Sail meets the coming of Steam and Iron, ships that ‘endured the disgust of the seas and the contempt of the wind’ as Clavell’s Tai-Pan laments. Throw in the last days of the red coated British infantry, the Martini & Henry Rifle, the new quick firing Nordenfeld field guns, Maxim Machine Guns, a Devil Ship sailing up river to Canton with the Royal Navy, and it was a whirl of a story.

The Devil Ship starkly illustrates the importance of a powerful navy. 42 Ships of the Royal Navy and less than 20,000 British regulars were able to bring down a dynasty that had ruled China since 1636, with an army of over 1 million soldiers. How could that have happened? Read The Devil Ship and see. Yet Britain could never do today what it easily accomplished in 1842.  Since then, England’s Navy has dramatically reduced in size, to a point where it now has only five destroyers, while modern day China has over six times as many and will build five new ships in that class every year. It pays to look at history and remember the vital importance of sea power. That is as true today as it was in the 19th Century.