“A Chinese Cage”
Illustrated London News, 1842
[d_1842_ChCageMrsNoble_ILN_vw]
WESTERN ACCOUNTS OF THE CAPTIVITY OF ANNE NOBLE
Western accounts of the captivity of Anne Noble emphasized the fact that she was transported to prison in a cage, and generally treated in an uncivilized manner. This was the subject of an 1842 image in the Illustrated London News, as well as a similar graphic in Lt. John Ouchterlony’s well-known 1844 memoir of the first Opium War. Other English accounts of her capture laid similar emphasis on her suffering. The contrast of these renderings to the picture of Anne Noble as a heroic woman warrior that appears in Kaigai Shinwa is startling.
“Cage, with Mrs. Noble” from The Chinese War,
by Lt. John Ouchterlony, Madras Engineers, pub. 1844
[ou_070a_Cage]
John Ouchterlony’s commentary on the Chinese treatment of shipwrecked suvivors including Anne Noble emphasized that they “were put into cages so small as to impose on the occupant a constantly stooping and cramped posture, and thus conveyed to Ningpo, where they were thrust into prison, and heavily ironed. The unmanly barbarity with which this hapless lady was treated, excited, when it became known at Chusan, through the medium of a friend to whom she contrived to convey a letter, a feeling of deep indignation.... She was exposed in the market-places of several towns, through which the prisoners passed, to the gaze of the populace, and to the jeers and hootings of a canaille, who, according to the custom of their country, consider anyone who quits her home to appear abroad, save in the seclusion of a sedan chair, to have lost all claim to the consideration due to her sex.” [pp. 70-71]
