ons given to Commissioner
Lin were "to cut off the fountain of evil, and if necessary to sink the
British ships and to break their caldrons, since the hourly thought on the
Emperor's part was to do away with opium forever." Within a week of Lin's
arrival at Canton he issued an edict wherein he stigmatized the foreigners
as a heartless people who thought only of trade and of making their way by
stealth into the Flowery Land, whereas the laws of England, he asserted,
prohibited the smoking of opium in their own country. A demand was made to
surrender to him all stores of opium within three days. To enforce this
demand, Chinese troops were concentrated around the European settlement.
Eventually more than 20,000 chests of opium were seized and dumped into the
sea. After this triumph, Lin wrote a letter to Queen Victoria calling upon
her government to interdict the importation of opium. At the same time a
memorial was sent to England by the British merchants of Canton begging the
government to protect them against "a capricious and corrupt government"
and demanding compensation for the opium confiscated by the Chinese. On the
part of the British Government no answer was vouchsafed to the demands of
the viceroy. In China, matters took their course. Captain Elliot at Canton,
on May 22, issued a notice in which he protested against the action of the
Chinese Government "as utterly unjust per se," and advised all British
merchants to withdraw to Hong Kong. The merchants acted on the suggestion,
and the English factory at Canton, which had existed for nearly 200 years,
was abandoned. The British sailors in Chinese waters threw off all
restraint. Frequent collisions occurred between them and the natives. In
one of them a Chinaman was killed. The Chinese viceroy denounced this act
as "going to the extreme of disobedience to the laws" and demanded the
surrender of the British sailor who perpetrated the murder. This demand was
flatly refused. The Chinese thereupon refused to furnish further supplies
to the ships and prohibited all British sailors from coming ashore on
Chinese soil. The official notice said: "If any of the foreigners be found
coming on shore to cause trouble, all and every one of the people are
permitted to withstand and drive them back, or to make prisoners of them."
The English naval officers retaliated by sending out their men to seize by
force whatever they needed. A boat's crew of the British ship "Black Jack"
was ma