Between wars and internal bickering, the colony was growing up. The California gold rush of 1849, followed by a major gold strike in Australia two years later, created a surge of prosperity as goods and Chinese laborers funneled through the port on their way to the goldfields. Japan was opened to world trade in 1853, and American whalers and seal hunters had begun to call at Hong Kong. Total shipping tonnage cleared through the port rose 1,000 percent in the fifteen years after 1848. With skilled labor and well-equipped dockyards at hand, the building, refitting and supplying of ships became the colony’s most important industry. Overseas shipment of Chinese laborers from mainland China to perform work contracts in Central America, Australia, and the islands of the Indian Ocean created grave human problems. Chinese were being kidnaped, abused like slaves and packed into the airless, filthy holds of sailing ships where they died at an alarming rate. From 1855 on, the colony imposed tighter and tighter restrictions on the trade, prescribing better living conditions aboard ship and prosecuting kidnapers of labor. But the labor suppliers evaded the laws of the colony by taking on provisions at Hong Kong and calling at other ports along the China coast to shanghai contract workers. The first of many waves of refugees to seek asylum in Britain’s “barbarian” enclave arrived with the outbreak of the Tai Ping Rebellion in 1850. Led by Hung Siu Tsuen, a Christian student, the rebels attacked the ruling Manchu Dynasty and fomented wild disorder in Canton. Thousands of apprehensive Chinese fled to Hong Kong, throwing themselves on the mercy of the foreign devils. Governor Robinson and the land-hungry generals eventually compromised their conflicting claims to Kowloon real estate, but the colony government spent years of patient effort in straightening out the fuzzy, inexact and spurious titles to individual land-holdings on the peninsula. On the whole, British courts achieved a fair adjudication of claims. Sir Hercules did not permit his administrative successes to alter the colony’s reputation for day-to-day blundering. He housed prisoners in a hulk off Stonecutters Island where it was accidentally swamped by an adjoining boat with a loss of thirty-eight lives. On a kindly impulse, he belatedly moved the hulk closer to shore, and a group of convicts ran down the gangplank to dry land and freedom. Such oversights were exceptional; when Sir Hercules ended his term in 1865, he could look back on an administration which had put the unpopular colony on its feet by reforming its courts and modernizing and expanding its public works. This was no fluke, for he went on to similar successes in Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa before being elevated to the peerage.