The Age Herald

CRUISING UP THE YANGTSZE
Some Difficulties and Perils That Beset Such a Trip
From the Century.

The I-Chang Gorge cuts straight westward for five or six miles, and then turns at a right angle northward, an arrowy reach between gray, purple and yellowed limestone walls overhanging with the richest vegetation. Tiny orchards and orange groves are niched between the buttresses of these storied strata walls, and cling to terraces; quarries and lime kilns show, and mud houses are left behind, stone huts and houses being cheaper beside the quarry than the wattle and daub of the plains. Brown junks floated in midstream, and junks with square and butterfly and striped sails were dwarfed at the foot of the cliffs. All day our trackers strained at the braided bamboo ropes, crawled up and down and over rocks where bamboo hausers have cut deep, polished grooves in the conglomerate and limestone banks by the friction of centuries. Lookout men at the water's edge kept the line free from rocks, throwing it off from any projections and wading out to release it from hidden snags. Where foothold was wanting the trackers scrambled on board and rowed around the obstacle or across stream to tracking ground again.

Their whole performance was the burlesque of navigation, the climax of stupidities, and nothing ingenious or practical seems to have resulted from the three thousand years of 'swift-water' navigation on the upper Yangtsze. The ridiculous, top-heavy, tilting kwatsze is wholly unsuited to such a flood river, and the trackers tow by a rope fastened to the top of the mast, as on the Peiho, the mast shivering, springing and resounding all the while. They rowed us with poles, round sapling stems held to the gunwhale by a string or straw loop, and it was a marvel that the kwatsze responded to these bladeless oars, even when all hands, including the cook, rowed madly, screaming and stamping in chorus, and the captain on the roof raging and shrieking, and threatening to drop through upon us. The kwatsze would reel and wabble, gain by inches, and round the ripple or point, and the ragamuffin crew would drop off with the two line and fasten it by a flat metal button at the end of their bricole thongs. With a deft loop, that can be detached with the least slackening, the cotton thongs hold firmly to the slippery cable. In all these thousands of years they have never learned to 'line up,' either by a capstan on board or a winch on shore, nor to invent other compelling swift-water fashions of the Nile, the St. Lawrence, the Snake, the Columbia or the Stickeen.

Some years ago Admiral Ho was ordered to these river precincts, where lawlessness had been rife, and he, unprecedented in this century in China, took an interest in his work, and attempted to better things. He established a system of lifeboat patrol in the gorges, and his little red rowboats waiting above and below rapids and eddies, and moving alongside to render assistance, had a salutary effect on the wild river folk.