The record remained. More than twenty years afterwards, when Robert Hart, then Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs, had occasion to go to Formosa on business, he found it in an old rice hong (shop), and Patridge's name among the rest, spelled with two "r's" (Partridge), whereupon he could not resist the temptation of cutting off the list with his penknife and, on his return to Shanghai, triumphantly handing it to his old messmate.
In 1855, owing to a dispute with his Portuguese colleague, the British Consul at Ningpo was suspended from duty, and young Hart put in charge of affairs for some months. His calm judgment and good sense during this first period of responsibility gained him favourable notice with the "powers that be," for a little later at Canton, when the British General Van Straubenzee remarked, on introducing him to Mr.(afterwards Sir Frederick) Bruce, "This young man I recommend you to keep your eye on; some day he will do something," the latter answered, "Oh, I have already had my attention called to him by the Foreign Office."
The Portuguese were much in evidence in the Ningpo of those days. They were numerous; they had power, and they abused it: with the result that retribution came upon them so sure, so swift, so terrible that not only Ningpo but the whole of China was deeply stirred by the horror of it.
I am thinking now of that dreadful massacre of June 26th, 1857, the culmination of years of trouble between the Cantonese and the Portuguese lorchamen, who with their fast vessels--the fastest and most easily managed ships in the age before steam--terrorized the whole coast, exacted tribute, refused to pay duties, and even fell into downright piracy, burning peaceful villages and killing their inhabitants.
Rumours of Cantonese revenge began in the winter of 1856, when news came that all the foreigners in Ningpo would be massacred on a certain night. Some one thereupon invited the whole community to dine together; but Robert Hart refused, thinking that men who sat drinking hot whiskey punch through a long evening would be in no condition to face a disturbance if it came. Thus, while the others kept up their courage in company, he slept in a deserted house--the terrified servants had fled--with a revolver under his pillow, and beside his bed an open window, through which he intended to drop, if the worst came to the worst, and try to make his way on foot to Shanghai. Nothing happened then, however; but the talk of the tea-shops had not been unfounded--only premature.