The left-wing unions trumpeted their public concern for the refugees by a number of street demonstrations which police barely managed to keep from exploding into new riots. Wearying of the skirmishes, Police Commissioner Duncan MacIntosh tried a new tack. With the consent of Governor Alexander Grantham, he offered to satisfy the strident Communist demands to improve the refugees’ lot by paying full transportation costs and expenses of ten Hong Kong dollars to every person who wanted to return to any part of Red China. The only acceptance came from an old man who wanted to be buried with his ancestors in Northern China. The sea-lane incidents resumed on September 25, 1952, when a Communist gunboat halted the Macao ferry with a burst of warning shots, searched the ship and removed a Chinese passenger. In the same year, there were two other Communist and three Nationalist attacks on British ships. A Communist warship came upon a Royal Naval launch in the Pearl River estuary on September 10, 1953, riddled it with shells and killed six men, wounding five others. A stiff British protest was delivered to Peking without bringing either an apology or compensation. The Nationalists kept up their end of the harassment in that month with one of their warships firing on the British destroyer _St. Bride’s Bay_ off the China coast. Each of these incidents stirred the British government to send protests to Peking or Taipeh, but they usually elicited only transient interest outside the countries directly involved. The Chinese Communists’ capture of two American newsmen and an American merchant-marine captain on March 21, 1953, brought the United States government into the long succession of Hong Kong incidents. The reaction was quick and angry, for the Reds had subjected the United States to an unceasing campaign of vilification and had already imprisoned more than thirty American civilians in China. The Dixon-Applegate case came as a kind of climactic tail-twister. Richard Applegate, National Broadcasting Company correspondent in Hong Kong, and Donald Dixon, International News Service correspondent in Korea, were sailing five miles west of Lantau Island on Applegate’s 42-foot sailboat, the _Kert_, when they were stopped by a Chinese gunboat manned by Chinese soldiers. The newsmen, accompanied by merchant marine Captain Benjamin Krasner, his Chinese fiancée and two Chinese sailors, were in international waters, bound for Macao on a pleasure cruise. Protests that they were violating no law had no effect on the Reds, who accused them of straying into Chinese waters.