If it is difficult to decide how Coxinga died, it is even more difficult to assess his meteoric career. As a general he showed appalling judgment at Nanking, and through his carelessness lost the most powerful land mass in Asia. As a diplomat his boastful handling of the Manila affair was ridiculous and cost him the lives of the very people he was trying to defend. He was a ruthless, cruel man who in 1650 assassinated his cousin, in 1651 his uncle, in 1661 the defenseless patriot Reverend Hambroeck, and who on his deathbed certainly ordered the beheading of his own son, which atrocity was prevented by the fact that the executioners balked at the job. To the Dutch and Spanish, understandably, he was an archfiend.
But that cannot be the whole story of Coxinga’s amazing life. If he was cruel, he faced cruel adversaries. When the Dutch caught a Chinese insurgent “he was roasted alive before a fire [in Castle Zeelandia], dragged behind a horse through the town, and his head stuck on a pole. Two of his chieftains, who had ripped up a pregnant native woman and torn the child from her body, were broken upon the wheel and quartered.” It was a violent world in which he operated, and if he did slice off the ears and noses of his Manchu prisoners after Nanking, he nevertheless treated his Dutch prisoners with generosity and honor after the fall of Castle Zeelandia.
The one act for which Coxinga has never been forgiven by European writers occurred after the fall of Castle Zeelandia. Then Coxinga inspected the prisoners before him and his eye fell upon a young Dutch girl, whom all narrators describe as lovely and intelligent. Coxinga kept her as a choice concubine—he had dozens—and in so doing outraged all the decencies. For this girl was the daughter of Anthonius Hambroeck, that Lutheran minister who had ignored his own safety in order to acknowledge his pledge that he would return to certain death.
Asian judges, less punctilious about such matters, quickly saw in Coxinga’s vain battle to support the collapsing Ming cause an almost perfect example of fidelity to a principle, and the nations of Asia embraced his memory. In 1700 the Manchu emperor decreed that henceforth Coxinga must be referred to not as a rebel against the Manchus, but as a devoted loyalist to the Ming. In 1875 a later Manchu emperor announced that Coxinga would in the future be called Cheng-chieh (loyal and faithful) and would be the subject of public worship as an exemplar of these attributes. In 1898 one of the first things Admiral Count Kobayama did when taking over Formosa on behalf of the Japanese emperor was to proceed formally to Coxinga’s Formosan temple, where he ceremoniously invited the Chinese-Japanese pirate into the Shinto pantheon.
A more substantial immortality came when Chikamatsu, Japan’s greatest playwright, presented in the year 1715 a dazzling new drama, The Battles of Coxinga. Its instantaneous reception was repeated year after year until Coxinga entered not only the austere pantheons of Shintoism and Confucianism, but also the livelier deification of the alleys, the restaurants and the theaters of Japan. There he exists today, the pirate god.
By now the perceptive reader can probably guess why there has been a reawakened interest in Coxinga. His violent life foreshadowed that of Chiang Kai-shek’s. Like Chiang, he tried to resist an invasion of revolutionary ideas and the incursions of the revolutionists themselves. Like Chiang, he suffered debacles in the north and fled to Amoy. Like Chiang, he escaped to Formosa, where he instituted a good government which avoided the excesses that had cost his side the mainland. Like Chiang, he held on to Quemoy and never ceased being a thorn in the side of the mainland victors. Most persuasive of all, like Chiang he was loyal to an idea, from which he never wavered, regardless of the considerable temptations put in his way.
It is therefore little wonder that today on Formosa more scholars study Coxinga than any other figure of Chinese history, for his example is a steady reassurance to the people of that island, whose first king he was. In fact, the scholars have delved so deeply into Coxinga’s life that a schism splits them into two groups: some swear that Coxinga wore a beard; others insist that he was clean-shaven. The 1950 exhibition on Formosa of Coxinga’s relics prudently showed him in both guises.
Worshiped as a god by two nations, the accidental patron saint of another fugitive regime on Formosa, and the subject of a rapidly growing shelf of learned studies, Coxinga is at last coming into his proper position on the world stage. He was courageous and loyal, and one searches far in history before finding another who combined these two characteristics so steadfastly.
Therefore, it is with no intention of developing inferences applicable to the present—but merely to round out the facts of history—that we conclude our story of this fascinating pirate with one additional observation. Sometime after Coxinga’s death his grandson surrendered Formosa to the interlopers in Peking, whither he went as a prisoner. But to his and the world’s surprise, he was not beheaded. He was created a duke.
* Anyone writing of this distinguished adventurer has a plethora of names from which to choose. His name at birth was Cheng Sen, but he acquired the nicknames Cheng Sen-she, Cheng Ta-mu and Cheng Ming-yen. During the Japanese years of his life he was called Tagawa Fukumatsu, but in China he assumed the name by which he is properly known, Cheng Cheng-kung, whose ideographs are read in Japanese as Tei Seiko, by which name he is known in Japan today. In 1645 the Ming emperor bestowed on him his own imperial surname, Chu, which entitled him to the honorific Kuo-hsing-yeh, Lord of the Imperial Surname. These ideographs are read Kokuseiya in Japanese and Kokseng-ya in the Amoy dialect, from which the Dutch derived Coxinga, the name by which he is best known to the West. However, each foreign nation called him according to preference. In Spanish he was often Cotsen; to the French, Quoysim; to the Portuguese, Maroto; to the citizens of Manilla, Pompoan. In Latin he was Quaesingus, and in many works Kuesim. From this welter of names the following alternatives were easily derived, and it is by them that many writers refer to the great pirate: Cheng Kung, Chunggoong, Cocksinja, Cocxima, Cogsen, Cogseng, Cogsin, Conseng, Coseng, Coxiny, Keuseng, Koksengya, Kokusei, Kokusenya, Koshinga, Koxin, Koxsin, Kuesin, Kuesing, Pun Poin, Pumpuan, Punpoan, Quesim, Quesin, Quoseng, Quoesing, Quosing, Tching Tching-cong and Tsung-cheng Shih-lu. After his death, of course, he was accorded an official posthumous name, Chung-chieh.
† The Manila Chinese were always called Sangleys, a slang word of perplexing origin. Possibly it derives from two Chinese ideographs meaning “constantly coming,” a reference to trading habits.
‡ At his death Coxinga was thirty-seven, but he lacked only a few weeks of being thirty-eight, which by Chinese reckoning would count as thirty-nine.
4
Gibson, the King’s Evil Angel
One of the most engaging rascals who ever plied the Pacific was an amazing gentleman from South Carolina. Tall, handsome, dressed in black, with sharp, deep-set eyes and a patriarchal beard, he commanded an orotund speaking style, a fine gift for quoting the Bible and a vision of himself as the savior of all the native peoples in the Pacific.
“My heart is with the Oceanican races,” he once cried in the oratory that marks even his simplest statements. “I was born on the ocean and I have felt a sort of brotherhood with islanders.” He constantly dreamed of uniting the entire Pacific, and incredible as it seems, came reasonably close to doing so.
Think of what he accomplished solely through the exercise of a glib tongue. He plotted a Sumatran war of liberation from the Dutch. He rescued himself from a Java jail after more than a year of doleful imprisonment. Almost single-handedly he brought Holland and the United States to the brink of war. Then, shifting ground, he became one of the most potent missionaries in the Pacific, from which job he was ousted because of public scandal. He thereupon became an extremely wealthy man, and then he entered upon his greatest adventure.
With little more than his charm and cunning to support him, he became prime minister of a sovereign Polynesian kingdom, held at one time or another all the cabinet positions, and from this point of vantage launched his grandiose scheme for uniting the Pacific. As the power behind the throne for more than a decade, he
was indeed the evil angel of the Hawaiian king who reveled in the title of “the merry monarch.” And then Gibson boldly challenged the armed might of Germany, Great Britain and the United States, and initiated one of the most hilarious episodes of naval history.
Even in his declining years he was spectacular, involving himself in a notorious breach of promise suit. In addition to all this, he was a vehement writer, a philosopher, a dreamer, a self-appointed expert on tropical medicine, an energetic sea captain, a skillful editor, a fine farmer, a good businessman, a superb orator and a distinguished linguist.
In fact, Walter Murray Gibson was one of the most high-blown, dignified and utterly delightful adventurers in history; and if he had not simultaneously accepted two separate bribes totaling $151,000 for an opium monopoly, he might have ruled a fair portion of the Pacific until he died.
As he boasted, Gibson was truly a child of the ocean. Appropriately, he began his adventurous life by being born at sea, during a raging storm in the Bay of Biscay on January 16, 1822. He was the third son of English emigrants bound from Northumberland to the United States.
Growing up in New York and New Jersey, young Walter was fired by the tales of an uncle who had mysteriously returned from long voyages to Malaysia and who was then in the service of an Arab merchant of Muscat. This romantic relative announced that he was making the boy his heir. “And then he spoke,” Gibson later recalled, “of a great city in the center of the island [of Sumatra], a city once of mighty extent and population, whose sultans had given laws to all the rest of the Malay nations. But this great city had decayed; and its empire had been divided into many small and feeble portions. Now the Malays looked for the restoration of the sacred city; and their traditions had pointed to fair-skinned men from the West, who should come with wisdom and great power, and who should destroy the robbers of Islam, the evil genii of the woods, and a great plunderer called Jan Company.” It is clear that from then on, Walter Murray Gibson was determined to be the fair-skinned man who would restore this romantic city and save Sumatra.
As if such an uncle were not enough to inflame a boy’s mind, young Gibson also went to school to a teacher who had been a missionary among the Indians of the American northwest, and this man’s lurid tales committed the lad to a life of high adventure.
When his parents moved to the backwoods of South Carolina, the wild outdoor life gave Walter “independence of spirit and an impatience of restraint.” He ran away from home at fourteen and for a while dwelt among the Indians. He went to New York and then back to South Carolina, where he met a Miss Lewis, daughter of a planter. For a sample of Gibsonian prose at its best, no better excerpt could be found than his account of his wooing:
“When I was yet a boy, I met in my wanderings in the backwoods of South Carolina with a fair gentle girl of my own age, who had never been more than half a day’s ride from the plantation of her father. We often sauntered together in the still woods of Milwee on summer days; we would wade, barefooted, the shallow pebbly streams; cross the deep and rapid creeks, with mutual help of hands to our tottering steps, as we walked the unsteady swinging trunk that bridged them over. We rambled hand in hand to gather wild grapes and the muscadine, then we would rest beneath the dense shade, and at the foot of some great tree, and talk of our boyish and girlish fancies; and then without any thought as to mutual tastes, character, or fitness, or any thing that had to do with the future—but listening only to the music of our young voices, to the alluring notes of surrounding nature, and having only our young faces to admire—we loved; and long ere I was a man, we were married.”
The early death of his wife left him a widower at the age of twenty-one, with three children—a girl, Talula, and two boys, John and Henry. The father of this brood then went to sea, according to one account, as master of the first iron steamship ever built in the United States, which ran from Savannah to Florida. After a year or so he turned up in New York as a commission merchant, and then joined the gold rush to California.
Afterwards he traveled in Mexico, and he seems to have won many influential people there by the charm of his personality. Still feeling his way, he dropped down to Central America, where his pulse quickened, for he became involved in the intrigue of the banana countries. On a secret mission, of the kind he loved, he returned to the United States and in 1851 bought the cutter Flirt, a 96-foot schooner of less than a hundred tons’ burden. But before he could smuggle it out of the harbor, the Flirt was seized by the revenue service and found to be loaded with arms and ammunition for General Carrera of Guatemala.
Deprived of his chance to become an admiral in the Guatemalan Navy, Gibson nevertheless spirited the Flirt out to sea with a crew of eight and a ballast cargo of eighty tons of ice. After a few weeks of Atlantic weather, a mutiny aboard caused Gibson to put into Porto Praia in the Cape Verde island of São Tiago, owned by Portugal. There he avoided confiscation of his ship as the property of a filibuster by entertaining some officials with “gracious gentility and rare old wine.”
Out of Porto Praia, with his cargo of ice rapidly melting in the warmer seas, Captain Gibson found that somebody had vengefully smashed his chronometer and other nautical instruments, and sailing blind, he headed for Brazil to get some new ones. There, to raise funds, he sold one or two tons of ice, all that was left of his melting cargo. For the rest of this unbelievable voyage, the Flirt sailed completely unladen. At the port of Maceió the death of a crew member in a drunken brawl almost brought confiscation once more, but Gibson’s appeal to the British vice-consul enabled him to escape arrest.
Gibson then sailed the empty Flirt eastward around the Cape of Good Hope. He said that the magic islands he now passed in the Indian Ocean—Madagascar, Mauritius, Cocos-Keeling—held no allure for him, as he was drawn almost magnetically on toward the great island of Sumatra, about which he had dreamed since youth. His rhapsody upon his first sight of it is still moving: “On Christmas eve, we were sailing with a gentle wind over a smooth sea. We were nearing thick masses of land-clouds, when there came a faint aroma of sweet woody scents, wafted on the breeze; as we sped through the yielding vapory banks, the fragrant air came strong and pleasurable, like distant strains of song; then the retreating clouds presented to our gaze a dark blue peak, piercing the skyey blue above; the wood, and blossoms, and gum-scented breeze came stronger and more thrilling, rivaling in pleasure sweet melody on the waters; and the peak, and the odor-laden winds, were the first sight and first welcome breath of the land of long dreams, the island of Sumatra.”
But he was tempted to leave Sumatra by prospects of a trip to nearby Singapore, where his storytelling uncle, now dead, had supposedly left him a fortune. Unable to go because the Dutch would not clear his ship, he turned with a profound uplifting of spirit to his main job of setting Sumatra free from Dutch rule. Accordingly he steered the Flirt into one of the most sensitive and spy-ridden ports of the Dutch colonial empire, the tin depot of Muntok on the metal-rich island of Bangka.
There followed a hilarious interlude. One practical Dutch official after another tried to figure out what an empty ship, seeking no cargo, was doing in the East Indies. Did mynheer come halfway around the world for a shipment of tin? No? Then perhaps coffee? No, then surely he seeks pepper? Cloves? Cinnamon? Good, then the captain wishes a cargo of lumber? No, then maybe arrack? Perhaps tobacco for the China trade? Ah, yes! Mynheer has come for a boatload of our wild animals for the zoos of America. The great elephant? The fierce tiger? The rhinoceros? The curious tapir? Perhaps the musk deer?
The questioning went on day after day, and one can imagine the frustrating reports filed by the Dutch secret police. At one point it was suspected that Gibson was after a restricted and highly lucrative cargo of birds’ nests for the Chinese soup trade, and after half a dozen similarly exotic suggestions had proven vain, the patient Dutch started to repeat the litany. Did mynheer come for tin, for coffee, for pepper?
Gently Captain Gibson gave reply: “I reached out my hand ov
er the rail of the veranda where we sat, and drew towards me the limb of a jessamine bush, which becomes a tree of twenty and thirty feet high in these islands. I inhaled the sweet fragrance of its blossoms. I then pointed to some banana and coconut trees, loaded with their fruit; to a tame musk deer, running about in the yard; to a bird of bright plumage.…” These were the things, he said grandiloquently, that he had come around the world in an empty boat to see.
The Dutch gave up and concluded that Gibson must be a wealthy yachtsman traveling solely for pleasure.
A local guide, a native of Bali, now offered to lead Gibson to Palembang, the largest town of Sumatra, a floating city known as the Venice of the East. This was a ticklish proposal, because Englishmen were stirring up native revolts against Dutch rule; and when Gibson indicated that he might go inland, the Dutch concluded that he was a super-smart secret agent. They began to suspect him of being an American spy or deserter, and kept an increasingly attentive eye on his activities.
Gibson, meanwhile, was reflecting upon the success of James Brooke, about whom he had read back in the United States. On the island of Borneo, to the east of Sumatra, Brooke had succeeded in setting up a personal kingdom as Rajah of Sarawak. Gibson felt that he was as good a man as Brooke and began looking around for a similar opportunity in Sumatra.