Knowing that the fortress was a very strong one, I made up my mind that there would be a protracted siege, and my spirits fell as I surveyed the prospect, for my pecuniary resources were limited, and it seemed very unlikely that I would again see the Columbia in the port.  However, my fears were groundless.  Little did I think that within three days the place would be in the hands of the Japanese.

It was on November 18 that I made the fruitless attempt to negotiate for a passage.  The appearance of the place had considerably changed since first I was in it.  The numbers of the soldiery had obviously been largely increased.  Industry was completely suspended in the dockyard, the whole of which had been converted into barracks.  In returning from the wharves with Chung, I witnessed a specimen of military punishment.  Passing the open gate of an enclosure near the clearing-house, I perceived a group which at once riveted my attention.  A number of soldiers were standing round one who, stripped to the waist, was kneeling with his forehead stooped almost to the ground, and his hands tied behind, the thongs that bound them being held by a man standing close in his rear.  Thus disposed, he received a tremendous flogging from a whip with a fearful heavy leathern lash, which made me think of the Russian knout.  The blows fell with a thud that made my nerves shiver, and the back of the sufferer was covered with blood, which was thrown here and there by the ensanguined instrument of torture as it whistled through the air.  He took his punishment, however, to use the language of the P.R., like a man, and though his body seemed to bend like a reed with each stroke, he never uttered a sound that I could hear.  I did not count the lashes, but there was no stint in the allowance.  Minute after minute the castigator laboured away in his vocation, until finally the victim collapsed, and rolling over, lay like a log in a pool of blood, and was then carried off.  I was rather surprised to see a whip used, as I had always supposed the bastinado to be the favourite method of flagellation in China.  I asked Chung for an explanation, but he did not seem to understand my question, and replied that the “one piecee ting (soldier) no hab muchee hurtee,” and that they might if they had liked have cut off his “one piecee head.”  True it is that decapitation is a very common punishment in the Chinese army.

Strongly as the massacre by the Japanese troops in Port Arthur is to be condemned, there is not the slightest doubt in the world that the Chinese brought it on themselves by their own vindictive savagery towards their enemies.  The attacking armies, advancing down the Peninsula in touch with the fleet, were now within a day or two’s march of the inland forts.  Bodies of Chinese troops harassed and resisted them, and brushes between the opposing forces frequently took place.  The Chinese took some prisoners, whom they slew mercilessly, and one of the first things I saw on the morning of the 19th was a pair of corpses suspended by the feet from the branches of a huge camphor tree near the parade-ground.  They were hideously mutilated.  They had been disembowelled; the eyes were gouged out, the throat cut, and the right hand severed.  They were perfectly naked, and groups of children were pelting them with mud and stones.