On August 10, 1841, Sir Henry Pottinger arrived at Macao as Her Majesty's sole plenipotentiary and Minister Extraordinary. Negotiations with the Mandarins were carried on simultaneously with the capture of cities on the coast. The material losses and destruction of life to the Chinese were incalculable, particularly through suicide by those helpless people. An English officer who was present at the taking of Chā-Po in May 1842 wrote to a friend at Macao that on landing, about 3,500 strong, under cover of the men-of-war, the most terrible enormities were committed. He then goes on to say: 'After the city had been captured, I entered more than a hundred houses, and in each there were not less than two, and in many eight, persons found dead. They were the bodies of mothers and daughters who had committed suicide from a dread of becoming prisoners; 1,600 dead were buried after the battle, of which more than one-half were Tartar soldiers, who in despair of repelling the enemy, and preferring death to defeat, had _nearly all_ destroyed themselves. Is not this a splendid exhibition of patriotism?' The losses of the English on this occasion by the official accounts were one colonel, one sergeant, and seven men killed, seven officers and forty-seven men wounded; and so on to the end, the pigmy against the giant! At length the treaty of Nanking, in which the Chinese consented to pay an indemnity of _$_21,000,000, was signed off that city, on board of H.M.S. 'Cornwallis,' on August 29, 1842, by his Excellency Sir Henry Pottinger, the Imperial Commissioners Ke-Ying and E-Leepoo, and New-Keen, the Viceroy of Keang-Nan and Keang-Se. And thus concluded the first European war with China, one of the most unjust ever waged by one nation against another. The next treaty was that of the United States, which was signed at the village of Mong-Hā (Macao) on July 3, 1844, by Mr. Caleb Cushing and Ke-Ying. Together they were the 'knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave' of Old Canton. * * * * *