Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1927
Also I passed the first band of wild monkeys that I had ever seen. As soon as the bottom work on the ship was completed we started off north again past Formosa and into the great mouth of the Yangtze without stopping at Shanghai this time. Another terrific experience had started - going 600 miles up into the interior of Asia. I felt like Marco Polo as the scenery changed mile by mile. At first the river is miles wide but there are islands and the channel mostly runs near the southern shore. As evening came on that first day we dropped anchor at a place called Vine Point. It was September 6th, 1927. At this time the deck seamen were constructing machine gun barricades on top of the ship's higher structures above the main deck. The material they used was inch-thick boiler plate that we had picked up on our last trip into Shanghai. The bridge and other important control points were also sheathed with iron plates. It seems that one of our sister-cruisers, the Cincinnati, had passed some hill-top forts on the same trip a short time before and acquired a few bullet holes in her smokestacks. So we were prepared if one soldier had so much as thrown a pebble at us. We kept every gun on the ship, large and small, trained point blank on the forts as we went by. I was watching from my vantage point and any minute I expected to see the whole top of a hill vanish in smoke but I guess the Chinese were sufficiently impressed by our armament and nothing happened.
The next morning we got underway at daybreak and passed the city of ChinkKiang before noon. There is a very sharp bend in the river here and we had to manoeuvre forward and back to get our long ship around it. This is also the place where the Grand Canal that in olden times used to link north China with south China crosses the Yangtze. On September 7th we anchored at a place called Pleasant Island. I didn't see an Island there but the river varied so in width that it could have been there and I just thought it was the opposite bank. When we passed the important city of Nanking I saw very little of it because it is built back quite distance from the water. On the night of September 8th we anchored at Tunglin Beacon. The next morning at KinKiang we crossed the top of a very large lake. It looked like the river had suddenly become a sea. That night we stopped at Hwangchow and next day we cruised through level country to the Chicago of China, the big city of Hankow. Actually there are three cities here in a cluster where the Yun Ho river joins the Yangtze: Hankow, Wuchang and Hanyang all together, but separated from each other by water. It had been a wonderful trip, excellent weather and terrific variation in scenery.
I saw little Buddhist monasteries perched high up in rocky grottoes like in old Chinese paintings and I saw rice paddies below the level of the river and every conceivable type of landscape between. The Chinese themselves looked and dressed differently in different regions that we passed through. The river traffic was fascinating. Sometime we saw very ancient junks that looked as though they must have come all the way from Szechwan Province on the border of Tibet. Some had very fragrant deck loads of camphor wood, delightful to smell. Sometimes we met big rafts of logs with families living on them drifting from distant forests down to the coast cities. Often we saw junks with chickens and a pig or two living on the deck and boxes of earth with vegetables growing in them. So often it seemed the old grandfather of the family would be leaning over the huge tiller guiding the vessel and he almost seemed to be an integral part of it, like an automatic pilot. Often I had to shake myself to realise that these things that I was seeing were real and not part of some old adventure film on a movie screen. When we reached our anchorage opposite the Bund we found that there was an English gunboat and a French one ahead of us and a Japanese gunboat behind us. Before we were allowed to go ashore on liberty we were called together and told that the normally peaceful hardworking people of this region had been organized into mobs filled with determination to drive out the foreign devils. The chief trouble maker at that time was a man from Soviet Russia named Borodin and he had stirred the people up to the point where it would be very foolhardy for any of us to go out of the European Concession area of the city. So we were allowed to go ashore on liberty from 5:00 P.M. until 10:00 P.M. only.