fleet that is always beating
through the Narrows, or is to be seen from the heights of Neversink. In
the three hours it took us to run from the light-ship to the anchorage
at Woosung, no less than seven large steamers passed us, outward bound.

The tide in the Yang-tze and its branch, the Woosung, runs with
tremendous force, having a rise and fall of eighteen feet at spring
tides, and few ships are able to proceed beyond Woosung with a single
tide, Shanghai lying twelve miles above. They anchor among a fleet of
native junks from the trading places on the Yang-tze, bound to the same
port, and awaiting a change of tide, which the Chinese sailors celebrate
by a great hubbub on the poops of their unwieldy-looking vessels, with
tom-toms and other instruments of the same nature. This fleet of junks
and sampans is a curious sight to the stranger approaching the China
coast for the first time, and, with a ramble through the filthy village
of Woosung, occupies the time which the tides compel him to spend there.

The junks give proof that if there have been great changes in the trade
of China and in the appearance of the cities where foreigners have
established themselves, there certainly has been none in the mode of
ship building, and in the thousand curious and uncouth ways of working,
acting, and living which have been for generations handed down from
father to son, and which are at the present time in no ways altered from
what they were a thousand years ago. No people in the world are slower
in admitting the ideas of foreign nations, or in taking advantage of the
most obvious improvements daily before their eyes; and, although the
improvements introduced by English and Americans in steamers and vessels
adapted for the navigation of their rivers are so far acknowledged by
them as to lead to the discontinuance of junk building to a marked
extent, yet the vessels they now build are of the same uncouth, clumsy,
and expensive shape as the first they ever put on the stocks.

Their anchors are still of wood, and occupy the greater part of the
vessel before the foremast; and, instead of cables, they still have
immense coils of rough rope like a hair lariat. The sails are still of
bamboo mats, although occasionally a piece of good American or English
duck is to be seen, stretched on bamboos in the style of the
old-fashioned square sail, and once, on the river Min, we saw a native
pilot-boat rigged with the regular fore-and-aft cut, h