pilot, although English merchants occasionally showed off by making the trip unaided. The swift current and lack of wind meant most ships needed towing; this was usually done using the ship's boats but some needed help from other ships' boats or the Chinese sampans. Chinese regulations prescribed that the ships entered the anchorage with their gunwales decked out in a "paunk suite", a brightly colored cloth with yellow ribbons; the crew were also done up in special clothes: black velvet caps, tassels, cotton stockings, buckled knee-garters and shoes, and special buttons. The firing of salutes and replies at Pazhou, where twenty ships might be anchored at a time, made the area a noisy one. While at anchor, the ships were overhauled: cleaned, repaired, painted, with the rigging and sails mended. To facilitate loading and unloading cargo, the ships' yards and sprits were removed and stored in sheds on Pazhou or Xiaoguwei. The sheds, made of bamboo poles and woven mats and known as "bankshalls", were usually rented from local officials, though the French and Swedes received permission to build their own on Xiaoguwei. They also served as a workshop for careful repairs or living quarters for the ships' supercargos, but most of them preferred to be left at Macao or ferried to the Thirteen Factories at Guangzhou. Foreign crews were usually left on their ships, but captains usually rotated shore leaves and work on land to keep up morale. Common trips were to the Fanee Gardens and Hoi Tong Monastery on Henan and to the shopping streets of the Thirteen Factories, particularly Hog Lane. Despite the generally healthy climate, fevers still occasionally decimated crews and drunkenness and brawls were common. Officers chaperoned shore leaves but sometimes required help from local authorities, as in 1761 when the Pazhou mandarins closed down a Dutch punsch tent set up on Xiaoguwei at the request of Puankhequa, then the fiador of the Swedish East India Company. He was passing along a request from their supercargo, who in turn was acting on a note from a Swedish captain who had become powerless to keep his men away from it. For the men on the ships, however, sampan ladies would crowd around them to get laundry work or odd jobs. At that time, the land from Pazhou down to the Humen Strait was made up of undulating green hills cut into rice paddies and crowned by