The adventures of five Shanghai Britons and a boat during a New Year trip would probably have made uninteresting reading had it not been for an unruly wind, which kept them and their craft on House Island when they fain would have returned to the more equable surroundings of the Settlement.
It was originally intended as a plain shooting expedition, and indeed the programme was pretty faithfully carried out until it came to the question of the return home on Sunday. They had hoped to set out some time during the day and arrive home in time to resume office duties on Monday. Three of them did not, in fact, reach Shanghai until late on Tuesday night and the remaining two, up to the time of writing are standing by the boat which is still held up by the wind.
The trip had been a success up to Sunday, the shooting had been good and the amount of provender carried had proved quite sufficient for ordinary comfort. But when the time came to depart the wind was so strong against them that they had to stay until Monday. Determined then, to gob back to Shanghai in time, they bailed a junk. They were taken to the mouth of the creek in which they had put up, but when the Chinese saw the seas they had to face they promptly put back and waited another day. On Tuesday the marooned voyagers had practically resigned themselves to waiting for an abatement of the storm, when another Chinese craft have in sight, and use was made of it to get ashore on the mainland from whence it was hoped to walk overland to Woosung.
They were landed at a small village and with the help of one of the party who knew a little ese they were able to make it understood that they wanted to get to Sh ticularly anxiot til a small piratical-looking fellow said he would undertake the task. Some little difficulty was exp ienced in obtaining a crow which was, however, eventually got together; and the three men, after eight hours with next to nothing to eat and only the boards of the craft to lie on, travelled along one of the small canals in a sampan and arrived in the Huangpu somewhere near the Arsenal. Here they were held up by s Chinese soldier for some considerable period, reaching Shanghai shortly before midnight.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.