fortune-hunting for dummies

How does one become a soldier-of-fortune? Is it something you have to work hard at? Do you have to know how to be in the right place at the right time? Or do you just wind up there by chance?

In other words, do I need to work harder at becoming a reckless, wandering rogue, or do I have to wait and seize the opportunity when it arises?

I'm a romanticist. I'll confess the fact openly. Adventure calls to me. Yeah, sure, I hear you scoff. This is the 21st century. Adventures are passé. No one has them anymore. They went out the window a long time ago. The world shrank. The maps were filled in. Technology outran us. The world is safer now than it's ever been...and yet, somehow, more dangerous than ever. That means that (a) either the would-be adventurer just flails around attempting to have adventures and discovers that safety measures and fail-safes and civilization have occluded his efforts, or (b) he is immediately killed in the attempt by a heat-seeking missile or a pissed-off terrorist.

I know adventures are dangerous. I know I'm a foolhardy, air-headed young man with hardly any worldly experience. I know I probably won't last two seconds in the middle of an intrigue or a murder mystery or an international incident. But I can't stand just sitting around and having a normal life, cutting coupons and listening to talk radio. Maybe on my days off I'll do that stuff. For now, however, I seek adventure, and romantic old-fashioned adventure at that.

I've just been reading about a guy named Frederick Townsend Ward. Does that name ring a bell? I thought not. I'd never heard of him before, either. I've never seen his name in any history book. And yet I should've heard about him by now, because he led the sort of life I would've liked to have led if I'd lived in the 1800s. Or any century, really. This guy did it all: ran away to sea, filibustered in Mexico with William Walker, served under Juarez, rode from Mexico to San Francisco on a mule, enlisted in the French Army, served in the Crimean War, resigned after being insubordinate, and finally sailed to China. It's in China that he forged his most enduring legacy: training, commanding, and kicking major ass with the Ever Victorious Army in the Taiping Rebellion.

Now, here's the setup. A fellow named Hong Xiuquan (who was sort of like China's version of Joseph Smith) proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ's younger brother, set himself up as a prophet, established the Taipei Heavenly Kingdom, declared the ruling Manchu Dynasty to be decadent and sinful, and started a war that would eventually kill 20 million people.

Freddy Ward arrived in Shanghai in 1860, when the Taiping Rebellion was already a decade old. He and his brother had ostensibly come to set up a branch of their father's trading company, but Ward's biographers cite "ulterior motives" for his presence in China. Given that he had spent the last decade as a highly successful mercenary on two continents, we can hazard a guess as to what that purpose might've been. In any case, Ward's brother set up shop while Ward took a job as the executive officer on the Confucius, an armed river gunboat (commanded by a fellow American) in the service of something called "the Shanghai Pirate Suppression Bureau." This was a private paramilitary group put together by Xue Huan and Wu Xu, members of the Shanghai city government, and bankrolled by Yang Fang, a banker and mercantilist from Ningbo.

Sources are somewhat vague on Ward's service record with the Suppression Bureau, but he must've distinguished himself highly. Before the year was out Wu Xu and Yang Fang had contacted Ward and made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Impressed by Ward's lack of racism, his military experience, and his mercenary ambitions, the two Chinese men told Ward that they were organizing a new group, which would become the Foreign Arms Corps, composed primarily of foreigners who could handle firearms and were interested in a free bunk and the spoils of war. Though anxious to keep any association between the Imperial government and the Western powers a secret, Xu and Fang realized that a mercenary army was necessary. Conscripted peasants and poorly-trained Imperial officers simply weren't cutting the mustard against the fanatical Taiping rebels. Fortunately, the Chinese G-men had found the perfect man for the job. Ward immediately agreed to head up the Foreign Arms Corps. He then went straight to the Shanghai wharves and began recruiting every Westerner he could find who could shoot a gun, even if they were too drunk to hold one at the moment.

The start was rocky. Xu, Huan, and Fang were demanding financiers, and Ward was virtually their slave until he had won several impressive victories against Xiuquan's forces. This was not accomplished easily. Though Ward's rowdy crew of sailors, deserters and brigands was equipped with the latest small arms (including Colt revolvers and rifles) they had only begun to train properly before the Manchus sent them out on their first mission. Ward protested, but in vain; at his backers' urging he and his men were forced to accompany an Imperial force to recapture Songjiang, without so much as an artillery piece to back them up. The initial attack failed. The second was successful, but at a heavy price: despite reinforcements of some 80 Filipinos and a couple of artillery pieces, the 250 men of the Foreign Arms Corps lost 62 men, with 100 more wounded, including Ward himself.

Virtually the same thing happened at the town of Chingpu, the FAC's next target, and this time around, the Taiping knew they were coming. The FAC lost half its men, and Ward was shot in the jaw. The musket ball exited his cheek and left him with a speech impediment for the rest of his life.

After resupplying in Shanghai, the FAC attempted to bombard Chingpu into submission, but Li Xuicheng, the Taipings' best general, sent 20,000 men to sweep the attackers off the map. Ward's troops retreated to Shanghai to lick their wounds. Ward himself left the city for a time to get his face fixed, and one of his subordinates (H.A. Burgevine) took over. But Burgevine didn't get along so well with the Manchu management, and after some dust-ups he was arrested and died in an accident.

When Ward returned to Shanghai in 1861, he managed to get the group back together. It wasn't difficult, even after the disastrous defeats the FAC had suffered. The Corps was beginning to make a name for itself. With its advanced weaponry, the puny force had held its own against the Taiping war machine even in defeat. Ward's stock was rising with Chinese civilians. The rogues and deserters and thieves and beggars down on the Shanghai wharves loved him too. With its solid financial basis, the Corps was able to offer extremely lucrative contracts—so lucrative, in fact, that they caused several mass desertions from the British warships in the harbor. This destroyed Ward's standing among the foreign powers, who already saw him as a filibustering, money-hungry brigand and a loose cannon. His forays against the Taiping rebels threatened trade routes and destabilized diplomatic relations. So ticked were the foreign powers that they issued a warrant for Ward's arrest. Realizing that sitting in a jail cell might impede his efforts to stuff a Bible down Hong Xiuquan's ugly neck, Ward opted for Chinese citizenship. He then led a bunch of new recruits into a third engagement at Chingpu, which likewise disastrously failed.

Then Ward sat down and had himself a think. It was no good. This kind of war was doomed to failure. He had a bunch of boisterous, drunken, disorderly vagabonds who depended largely upon the element of surprise and superior weaponry to get the job done. Furthermore, they were being pushed, nudged, chivvied and shoved into battle by their corporate sponsors in Shanghai, who desperately wanted victory and didn't care about training their troops. So Ward decided that, from now on, he would recruit the local Chinese into his army. These he would meticulously train and properly discipline into an effective fighting force.

Here, I can more adequately explain this with pictures. Freddy Ward was going to turn his army from this:

...into this.

And he succeeded. He set up a training camp in Shanghai where, aided by the most skilled survivors of the old Corps, plus a bunch of hardasses from the regular Imperial Army, he trained a crack outfit of 1000-plus Chinese troops (uniformed, helmeted, equipped and well-paid). He pronounced them ready for action in January 1862. This was timely, as Taiping forces had just re-invaded the region with 120,000 troops, bent on capturing Shanghai.

This time things were different.

With only 500 men, Ward drove a vastly superior force from their fortified positions in Wu-Sung in the middle of January. Shortly thereafter, at the city of Guangfulin, the Imperial troops demoralized and scattered twenty thousand rebels. In ensuing weeks, Ward and his hand-trained Chinese soldiers (with a little help from the Imperials) routed the Taiping from several cities near Songjiang. Thousands of rebels were killed or wounded. Ward himself suffered several wounds, which included getting his finger shot off.

Li Xiucheng, the Taiping army's best general (remember?), went out of his skull when he heard about all this. He sent a host of 20,000 men to attack Songjiang and crush Ward. Ward had about 1500 men to defend the city, and performed with flying colors. As the rebels approached, they came under fire from hidden artillery positions. Two thousand men were mowed down instantly. Like lightning Ward's infantry charged out of Songjiang and captured 800 more, in addition to some supply barges on the river. The rest of the rebel army beat a hasty retreat. The Chinese peasants in the surrounding countryside went mad with joy and hailed Ward as a living god. There was no longer any question about financial backing from Shanghai or Imperial military support. Ward had made his name at last, and his contingent was dubbed "the Ever Victorious Army." Ward was given an official title under Imperial law, an exceedingly high honor for a foreigner.

All through 1862 Ward and his army continued to pull off random acts of badassery, defeating numerically superior opponents in entrenched positions. Ward fitted a fleet of steamboats with heavy guns and turned them into floating fortresses, sending them up canals and rivers to wreak havoc on the poorly-equipped rebels.

Sadly, Ward was mortally wounded in the Battle of Cixi in September of 1862. He lived just long enough to dictate his last will and testament, in which he provided for his son, his Chinese wife, and his brother. He had endured no less than 14 battle wounds and dealt the Taiping Rebellion a blow from which it would never recover. Though Ward's army won the war under the command of a different leader (Charles Gordon, who would die himself some years later in the Mahdist War in Sudan), it was Ward who had raised, trained, and led the brave Chinese on so many successful sorties.

(Whew.) That's quite a life, huh?

Now, my question is (as it was at the beginning of this post), how do you wind up doing something like that? Post a flyer? Stick an ad in the paper? Ward was born in Salem, Massachusetts. That's on the other side of the world from China. And yet he was such a rowdy cuss and did so poorly in school that his father stuck him on a ship to make a man out of him. And so Ward found himself sailing to all these different ports all over the world—East Asia, Central and South America, Europe—and, somehow, fighting in wars or hiring himself out as a mercenary everywhere he went. That takes guts.

I'm wondering: do I lack the guts? Or do I lack the means? Do I merely need to run away to sea for a while and see where the wind blows me?

What do you think?