In 1897, Isabella Bird asked her acquaintance Mr. Endecott how she might occupy herself during the voyage up the Yangzi. "You'll have enough to do looking after your life," he enjoined.
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The Yangzi was such a major trade and communication route that as soon as the Communist government came to power in 1949, one of its priorities was to improve the Upper Yangzi's navigability. By dynamiting its many small gorges and submarine perils, the Communists revolutionized its safety.
Nowadays, though still a dramatic cataract, sided by precipitous, limestone cliffs, a cruise through the 3 gorges gives little impression of the risk and terror that this same journey provoked a century ago. The following passage taken, like the story and photograph above, from "The Yangtze Valley And Beyond" by Isabella Bird (Virago Books) provides a keyhole through which we can peer at the history of navigation along this serpentine waterway. The year is 1898.
"The river at low water is thoroughly vicious above Fengjie, and the pilot's task is a severe one. The hill of furious breakers with a smooth, narrow channel in the center and a fierce whirlpool at the foot looked awful enough. A great bank covered with frightful boulders projects from the north shore, narrowing the river to a width of 150 yards. Mr AJ Little estimates the rush of the current round the point of that bank at from eight to ten knots an hour.
Forty big cargo junks lay below it waiting their turn to ascend; and a thousand trackers were filling the air with their yells, while signal drums and gongs added to the din.
My attention was occupied by a big junk dragged by 300 men, which in two hours made hardly perceptible progress, slipping back constantly, though the drums were frantically beaten and the gangers rushed madly along the lines of struggling trackers, bringing their bamboo whips down on them with more sound than force. Suddenly the junk shivered, both tow-ropes snapped, the lines of trackers went down on their faces, and in a moment the big craft was spinning down the rapid; and before she could be recovered by the bow-sweep she flew up into the air as if she had exploded, a mass of spars and planks with heads bobbing about in the breakers. Quick as thought the red lifeboats were on the spot; and if the drowning wretches as they scrambled over the gunwales did not bless this most efficient of the charities of China, I did most heartily, for of the fourteen or fifteen souls on board all were saved but three. This was one of two fatal disasters that I saw on the Yangtze, but, to judge from the enormous quantity of cotton drying at the Yeh-tan and the timbers wedged among the rocks, many a junk must have had a hole knocked in her bottom."
