The Chinese are believed to have fought Gough’s little army of 2200 men[138] at Chapoo with 8000 regular troops, 1700 of whom were Tartars. Their losses were, as usual, enormous--from 1200 to 1500--while those of the British were two officers and eleven other ranks killed, six officers and forty-six other ranks wounded. The casualties among the XVIIIth were heavy: Colonel Tomlinson, a sergeant, and three privates were killed;[139] Lieutenants A. Murray and E. Jodrell, a sergeant, a drummer, and twenty-seven rank and file were wounded. One of the pay-sergeants had a very narrow escape: he was in the habit of carrying the company roll in his forage cap, and when at nightfall he wanted to make entries in it he found it cut to pieces by bullets. As soon as the arsenal, guns, and other munitions of war at Chapoo were destroyed, the expedition made sail for the Yang-Tse-Kiang, where we bombarded Woosung, a town at the mouth of the river of the same name. Though small, the place was heavily fortified, for the Chinese trusted to its guns for the protection of the lower reaches of the river. In the capture of Woosung the army played no part, for the troopships were aground on mud-banks when the sailors and marines, after knocking the batteries to pieces, landed to take possession of the town. Two days later, on the 19th of June, the Royal Irish formed part of a column which marched fourteen miles inland to Shanghai, destroyed the warlike stores at this great centre of trade, and then returned to Woosung, to find that during their short absence some batteries of Royal Artillery, the 98th, and several Madras regiments had joined the force, and that Major J. Cowper had come up from Kulangsu to take command of the XVIIIth, bringing with him the company which had been left to garrison Chinhai. The fleet remained storm-bound at Woosung until the 7th of July: then the weather moderated, and the Admiral, Sir William Parker, ordered his seventy vessels--men-of-war, transports, and store ships--to weigh anchor for Nankin, now the object of our operations. This enormous city was the commercial capital of China, and the centre of a great network of canals connecting Pekin with the Yang-Tse-Kiang and the southern provinces of the Empire. Once masters of Nankin, we could stop all inland traffic on the canals, and by paralysing the commerce of the country bring irresistible pressure on the Emperor, six hundred miles away in his Court at Pekin. The task before the Navy was a heavy one. In peace time the mere passage of so large a number of ships over a hundred and seventy miles of an almost unknown river would have presented difficulties. Now these difficulties were increased by the necessity of guarding against attack, and by the knowledge that before the guns of the fleet could be trained upon the walls of Nankin we would have to fight the garrison of at least one large town on the banks of the river. The