Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 July 1895 — WATER LIFE IN CHINA. [ARTICLE]

WATER LIFE IN CHINA.

FLOATING HOUSES OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. Numerous Craft of Queer Shapes— Express Boats—Cormorant Fishing Vessels. Julian Ralph has in Harper’s Magazine an interesting article on Chinese life. “The activity on the water,” he writes, “is marvellous. The craft are as numerous and varied as the water will hold or the mind can fancy. The most impressive are the junks, with preposterous sails that hide everything behind them from earth to sky. These junks ride low in front, and are built up behind like the Pints, Nina, and Santa Maria They have great gog-gle-eyes painted and carved on their bows, and turned to look down at the water. Every European in China loves to tell a stranger why nearly all the boats, of every shape and size, are thus ornamented. It is because, *if no hab eye, how can see ? If no can see, how can savey? If no can savey, how can walk 7* Then there are large cargo-boats shaped like long barrels or large cigars. Their rounding tops are made of bent mats that can be piled on top of one another in one place to make a little cabin, or can be pulled out, end to end, to cover all the cargo. There are other long narrow boats, laden high with garden truck, with potatoes or pease or beans or rice straw, and looking like so many Flatbush farm wagons afloat. There are little sampans, from which men and women flsh with nets. And there are innumerable other small boats, wherein men, women and children are working those tools, like oyster tongs, with which they tear up the weeds thut grow beneath the water. These are spread on the farms, and thus raise all central China higher and higher above the water of the creeks and canals, which is where the ocean water once was, though the land now rises from four to six feet above it. The express boats are very interesting. They are slender, long row-boats roofed over with mats, for one or two passengers, and carrying in the stern a muscular Chinaman, who propels a big-bladed oar with his feet. With a small oar in one baud to steer with, with the other hand holding a parasol or fan, the while he may be puffing at his pipe, he toils carmly on, all night or all day, seated on the point of his spine, and describing endless circles with his muscular legs and his dexterous feet. “Thousands of the vessels, even the smallest, are the only homes of the people in them. In them men take wives; in them children are born and reared; in them death pursues his rounds. In them we saw whole families at work making baskets, making lanterns, busy at many sorts of labor. The tamily cat or dog, or the melancholy chicken perched on an outrigger and watching the family duck at his ablutions, tail up in the water, with a string tied to his leg to keep him at home—these were some of the assurances we had that certain of the craft were floating homes.' Often, on the cargo boats, the dwelling place was beneath a great square mat in the stem. There the man slept, the woman cooked the rice and fish, and the tiniest children worked the yoolo to send the boat ahead. Baskets hanging behind served as closets and clothes chests. On the chop boats, which are floating homes of the best grade, we saw pots ot pretty flowers, and kitchens and cooks, and gentle ladies and solemn looking mustachioed old grandees, as well as nurse 3 and children. “Most of all were we interested in the cormorant fishing boats. These are the size of a Whitehall row-boat, and are all open within, to permit the fisherman to walk from bird to bird between bow and stem. Often he is alone; often he carries a boy or a wife to work the yoolo. The birds sit at the sides of the boat, on projecting sticks over the water. They perch in pairs, and there may be ten of them or two dozen. They are the size and look very like the fish hawks of the Atlantic coast; but they are dirty birds, with ragged wings, plucked to keep them from flying. In color they are a metalic black, with mottled or creamy or even white bosoms. They have long, narrow, curved bills of the flesh-tearing character. Their perches are wrapped with straw, to give the birds a good foothold. When fishing is done their master tightens the noose that each wears round its neck, and, putting a stick before each one, lifts it down to the water. When they have caught fish enough or, more likely, have become so soaked that they must be taken aboard to dry, he rows among them and lifts them back on their perches. Their skill lies in their greed, and their greet has doomed them to servile labor. “They are caught on the sea coast when young, and are trained by their purchasers until they become worth ten dollars, Mexican, apiece. Their training consists in starving them all day and in throttling them so that tiny cannot swallow what they catch. When they are in the water they not only dive for fish, but are said to swim swiftly under the water after their prey. When a fish is caught, the bird rises to the surface and gasps and chokes to get the fish down. The other birds rush at him to wrest his prey from him. The fisherman hurries to the spot, beats the other greedy birds away, and lifting the successful cormorant into the boat, takes his fish from him, loosens his throttling string, and pokes some food into his ravenous beak as a reward of merit. At last the birds are all returned to their perches. They yawn and flap their wings to dry themselves, and he prepares for them a fairly good dinner of rice and small fish, or whatever is cheapest, stopping now and then to scold and beat one with a cane if one is quarrelsome.”