aviour, happily
escaped with no other injuries, than some considerable bruises. The
fire, though at last thus luckily extinguished, did great mischief
during the time it continued; for it consumed an hundred shops and
eleven streets full of warehouses, so that the damage amounted to
an immense sum; and one of the Chinese merchants, well known to the
English, whose name was Succoy, was supposed, for his own share, to
have lost near two hundred thousand pounds sterling. It raged indeed
with unusual violence, for in many of the warehouses, there were large
quantities of camphor, which greatly added to its fury, and produced a
column of exceeding white flame, which shot up into the air to such
a prodigious height that it was plainly seen on board the Centurion,
though she was thirty miles distant.

Whilst the commodore and his people were labouring at the fire, and
the terror of its becoming general still possessed the whole city,
several of the most considerable Chinese merchants came to Mr Anson,
to desire that he would let each of them have one of his soldiers (for
such they styled his boat's crew from the uniformity, of their dress)
to guard their warehouses and dwellings-houses, which, from the known
dishonesty of the populace, they feared would be pillaged in the
tumult. Mr Anson granted them this request; and all the men that he
thus furnished to the Chinese behaved greatly to the satisfaction of
their employers, who afterwards highly applauded their great diligence
and fidelity.

By this means, the resolution of the English at the fire, and their
trustiness and punctuality elsewhere, was the general subject of
conversation amongst the Chinese: And, the next morning, many of the
principal inhabitants waited on the commodore to thank him for
his assistance; frankly owning to him, that they could never have
extinguished the fire of themselves, and that he had saved their city
from being totally consumed. And soon after a message came to the
commodore from the viceroy, appointing the 30th of November for his
audience; which sudden resolution of the viceroy, in a matter that had
been so long agitated in vain, was also owing to the signal services
performed by Mr Anson and his people at the fire, of which the viceroy
himself had been in some measure an eye-witness.

The fixing this business of the audience, was, on all accounts, a
circumstance which Mr Anson was much pleased with; as he was satisfied
that the Chinese