The whole channel is dotted with hamlets. In spite of the green, terraced hills, there is a dreary look to it all. It doesn’t look the happy land pictured so in stories.
We knew when we reached the Yellow Sea for it is aptly named. We reached the Yangtze at nine in the evening and lay outside all night. At daybreak we sailed into the dirty but swift current. There is an enormous delta fast pushing out to sea. The mouth of the river is so wide and the shores so far away there is little to see. Where the river divides, entering the Whangpoo, the real river sights begin with ships of every description and nation.
The first flag to greet us was the Stars and Stripes floating over the stern of a destroyer. Millions of fishing boats and junks caught our attention. Some of them were tied up to the wharves and had not been away from their moorings for three hundred years. They had eyes carved on their bows and a shark’s tail on the forward mast. Some of the people on these river boats had never been ashore.
At the Dollar docks two miles above Shanghai we anchored. No customs to bother here and we went ashore at nine o’clock in the morning. Such a ragged, discrepant lot of Chinese were around the waterfront. They live worse than anyone in the world and earn about fifteen cents a day when a job can be had. (Fifteen cents Mex at that.) They can live on ten centavos a day, rather exist.
Such a racket unloading ship. Two coolies can balance five hundred pounds on a bamboo pole and trot off singing. One cries “Yahee” and the other in turn “Yoho,” a tone or so lower. Just those two notes over and over. It is weird as a death chant. It goes on from dawn to dark, all to earn fifteen cents Mex.
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