From Fukien to Canton, pirate fleets prowled the China coast. Two of their favorite hangouts were Bias Bay and Mirs Bay, within easy striking range of Hong Kong. With the arrival of the British, they began looting foreign merchant-ships with the same unsparing greed they had previously inflicted on Chinese ships and villages. British warships, superior to the pirate craft in all but numbers and elusiveness, hunted them down with task forces. In four expeditions between 1849 and 1858, the Queen’s Navy sank or captured nearly 200 pirate junks. Thousands of prisoners were taken, and a fair share of them were hanged. British landing forces, storming up the beaches from the warships, leveled every pirate settlement they could find. The land-and-sea offensive had a temporarily restraining effect, but new-born pirate fleets sprang up like dragon’s teeth to turn to the practice of seaborne larceny. A fifth column of suppliers, informers, and receivers of stolen goods within the colony obligingly assisted the pirates in plucking their neighbors clean. Hong Kong’s oldest industry has retained its franchise down to present times; in 1948, airborne pirates attempted to high-jack a Macao-Hong Kong plane in flight. The plane crashed, killing all but one person who was detained and questioned, then released for lack of jurisdiction and sent back to China. Piracy was the fuse that touched off a second Sino-British war in 1856, when the Chinese government charged that a Chinese ship manned by a British skipper was, in fact, a pirate vessel. While the skipper was absent from the Chinese lorcha, the _Arrow_, his entire crew was taken prisoner and accused of piracy by China. The incident landed in the lap of Sir John Bowring, a former Member of Parliament and one of the most curiously contradictory of all colony governors. Philosophically a liberal and a pacifist, he was markedly sympathetic toward the Chinese. A prolific author, economist and hymn-writer, he had a brilliant gift for linguistics and was credited with a working knowledge of 100 languages, among them Chinese. He initiated wise and far-reaching improvements, including the first forestry program, which were enacted into law by later governors. With all these gifts, his five-year term (1854-1859) was marred by a series of hot and futile wrangles with his subordinates. This mercurial man reacted to the capture of the _Arrow_’s crew by demanding an apology and their release. When the apology was not immediately dispatched, he assembled a military force and set out to capture Canton. War in India delayed the arrival of British reinforcements, and Canton withstood the assault. Meanwhile, Chinese collaborators in Hong Kong poisoned the bread supplied to Europeans; Bowring’s wife was one of scores of persons who suffered serious illness by eating the bread.