Korea (5 page)

Captain Egberts, of Amsterdam, was at the helm as the boat set sail. And Hamel wrote: ‘The day held fair towards the Evening, when, as we were getting out of the Channel of Formosa, there arose a Storm, which increas’d all night.’

It was a bad start to a journey that ended in catastrophe. The East India Company might well have expected it. July and August are, after all, the worst months for typhoons in the northwestern Pacific (remember the old mariners’ adage: ‘June, too soon; July, stand by; August,
if you must
; September, remember; October, all over’), and modern mariners might have construed it as foolhardiness on a grand scale to send a heavily laden sailing vessel across the East China Sea in August. Nevertheless, the company directors confidently expected their charge to make fast on Deshima Island, off Nagasaki, by the end of September at the latest. But she never did arrive, nor did she ever return to Taiwan. The
Sparrowhawk
and her crew of sixty-four men simply vanished. The company waited for more than a year, hoping against hope for some sign; but then, in October 1654, a brief announcement in the East India Company bulletin recorded the loss of the vessel. The cargo and crew, with expressions more of inevitability than sorrow, were written off.

Twelve years later, however, in September 1666, a message was received at the Dutch agent’s office in Nagasaki saying that ‘eight Europeans, dressed in a wondrous way and with a boat of strange fashion’ had fetched up on the Goto Islands in southwestern Japan and were being transported to the Japanese authorities at Nagasaki, where the Dutch—the only local Europeans—might see them and try to discern who or what they might be. The meeting must have been an extraordinary event, for the eight men were indeed Dutchmen, some of the surviving party from the
Sparrowhawk
. Their clothes, their little fishing boat, their newly adopted language, and their eating habits all came from the country in which they had sojourned for thirteen years after their shipwreck and that was only vaguely known to any Europeans—Korea.

Their tale ranks among the most romantic of the innumerable sagas of wreck and faraway adventure, and it has been meticulously recorded by Hendrick Hamel in a book that was published in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1668—a book that presented the first European account of ‘the Kingdom of Corea’.

The
Sparrowhawk
smashed onto the rocks at night, early in the morning of 16 August 1653:

…when the second Glass of the second watch being just running out, he that look’d out a Head cry’d Land, Land; adding, we were not a Musket-shot from it; the Darkness of the Night and the Rain having obstructed our discovering it sooner. We endeavoured to Anchor, but in vain, because we found no bottom, and the roughness of the Sea and the force of the Wind obstructed. Thus the anchors having no hold, three successive Waves sprang such a leak in the Vessel, that those who were in the Hold were drown’d before they could get out. Some of those that were on the deck leap’d Overboard, and the rest were carried away by the Sea. Fifteen of us got ashore at the same place, for the most part naked and much hurt, and thought at first none had escap’d but ourselves; but climbing the Rocks we heard the Voices of some Men complaining, yet could see nothing, nor help anybody, because of the darkness of the night.

The survivors had no idea where they might be; and when the first curious locals appeared on the clifftop to inspect these cold and frightened newcomers, the natives’ dress suggested they had landed in China. ‘These men were clad after the Chinese fashion, exception only their hats, which were made of horsehair.’ But then, two days later, the matter was clarified. The navigator was able to snatch a hurried sight of the sun and the horizon with his sextant. He pronounced the ship to have stranded not in China at all but at 33° 32' north latitude, 126° 20' east longitude, on an island the Dutch had sighted sufficiently often to have included it on their charts, with the name of Quelpaert, after a type of Dutch sailing vessel that, from a distance, it resembled. Quelpaert, ‘which the natives call
Sehesure
,’ was known to lie ‘12 or 13 leagues south of the coast of Corea’.

Hendrick Hamel’s account of the next thirteen years, written in a hurry while he was waiting in Nagasaki to be taken back to Batavia, is brief but vivid. He tells of the crew members’ interrogation by the local magistrates on Cheju Island and of the quite astonishing arrival in their midst of another Dutchman—the same Jan Weltevree who had been wrecked some thirty-five years before, had been impressed into the Korean Army, and had fought against the Manchus. Weltevree’s arrival was a piece of marvellous good fortune: he had been sent by the court in Seoul to act as interpreter:

It was very surprising, and even wonderful, that a man of fifty-eight years of age, as he was then, would so forget his Mother-tongue, that we had much to do at first to understand him. But it must be observ’d he recovr’d it again in a month. The Governour [of Cheju] having caus’d all our Depositions to be taken in Form, sent them to Court, and bid us be of good cheer, for we should have an Answer in short time. In the mean while he daily bestow’d new favours on us, insomuch that he gave leave to Weltevree and the Officers that came with him to see us at all times, and acquaint him with our Wants.

The decision of the court was issued within weeks: the entire party was to be brought by ship across the Strait of Cheju to the mainland and then by horse and foot was to be transported north to Seoul. Only then, when the king and his court officials had seen and interrogated the party themselves, would orders for their disposition be made.

It is not necessary at this stage to relate in detail the entire story of this hapless band of stranded seamen—no doubt some mention of them will be made in subsequent chapters. Briefly, they, like Jan Weltevree, were pressed into the service of the army, as musketeers in the Seoul palace guard. They immediately tried to escape by attempting to win over to their cause the ambassador of the Chinese court, but they failed, were punished (feeling for the first time a punishment they had seen meted out to criminals on Cheju, the uniquely painful foot beating known as bastinado, which was performed with particularly efficient unpleasantness by the Koreans), and then exiled to the very southwest of the country. It was from there that eight of them managed, after ten years of waiting, to steal a small fishing boat and set out eastward for Japan.

I read all this on that dark and wet autumn night; Korean bookshops stay open late, mercifully, and the bookseller seemed not to mind my browsing. But I had in any case decided within moments of opening the book on the route of my walk. I would follow the path that Hamel, Denijszen, Ibocken, Pieterszen, Janszen, and the rest (which included a mysterious Scotsman named Alexander Basket), the first European party to be escorted through the Hermit Kingdom, had taken.

They had left Cheju in June 1654 and had landed at the southern port city of Haenam. From there, horses having been supplied, they trotted comfortably northwards—keeping to an almost die-straight path through the cities that are now called Yongam, Naju, Changsong, Taein, Chonju, Yonsan, Kongju—and finally having crossed ‘a river as wide as the Maese is at Dordrecht’, reached the city their hearing suggested was
Sior
and that we now know as Seoul. The journey had taken them ten
days. One of their number, a gunner ‘who had never enjoy’d high health since our ship-wreck’, died along the way; but otherwise the party arrived without incident before His Highness the King Hyojong, seventeenth monarch of the Yi Dynasty.

The journey I would make, then, would start at the very point on Cheju Island where the
Sparrowhawk
had stranded. I would cross the island to its capital, Cheju City, where the Dutchmen met Weltevree and were told of the court’s decision to bring them north to Seoul; I would sail across to the mainland and, with compass and stick, set off due north along the track that my fellow Europeans had taken all those years before. I would go to Seoul, of course, but I would then, for the sake of completeness, walk smartly for those last few miles up to the point where South Korea ends and its other half, the implacably hostile neighbour-state of North Korea, begins. More precisely, I would try to finish my journey at the celebrated village where the country finishes—the war-wrecked hamlet of Panmunjom, through which the frontier (or the Military Demarcation Line, to be exact, for this is not a legal frontier, merely a temporary division caused by a war frozen in cease-fire) runs—and from beyond which North Korea glowers menacingly at its neighbour and the outside world.

I had an early and devastatingly naive notion that it might be a comparatively simple task (for such an innocent as a British passport holder) to walk on through the frontier and make the journey run from Cheju Island to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, or even to the Yalu River, on the Chinese border. I had visited the North Korean Embassy in Peking once and was told that there should be no problem at all about gaining access to North Korea—no problem, particularly, no matter how many times I had visited the South. But when I mentioned this possibility to friends in South Korea, inward whistling and pursing of lips began at a furious pace. No, they said in unison. You go to North Korea, and you will not—respectful regrets, mumble mumble, dreadful shame, mumble mumble—be permitted to
enter the South. So there seemed no point: a walk through Korea that turned out to be only a walk through North Korea sounded monumentally lacking in point. Besides, Mr Hamel hadn’t been there, which realization finally set a cap on the matter.

There was little enough organization to be done, other than to secure the necessary time off. The journey would be about 320 miles, and at 20 miles a day I should need only 16 days if nothing of interest happened and nothing caught my fancy: I was certain to require more, so I arranged to be away from my base in Hong Kong for two months, which, it turned out, was almost exactly the time I needed.

I bought myself a stout Lowe rucksack and one of those canvas-and-Velcro purses in which you can keep all your valuables suspended from your neck. I dug my New Balance boots (last used a year before to clamber along the Crib Goch ridge in North Wales, and thus well worn in) out of a cupboard. I bought bars of Cadbury’s Fruit-and-Nut chocolate and sachets of instant coffee and the inevitable slabs of Kendal Mint Cake (brown, not white). I found a long blackthorn stick with a ramshorn crook that had been made by a shepherd in the Cotswolds, somewhere near Chipping Norton. I discovered, after a long hunt, my old Silva compasses, which are the best found outside ships’ bridges, are made in Finland, and must therefore be a mainstay of the Finnish export business. I bought woollen socks and gloves, cotton shirts and underwear, and a khaki-coloured neck stocking known as a ‘headover’, which I had been given one particularly frigid day in the Falkland Islands by an army sergeant who feared I might freeze to death. I begged back my Swiss army knife (two types of screwdriver, a spike for undistressing begravelled horses, several wicked blades, an ivory toothpick, tweezers,
and
a magnifying glass, the better for lighting fires with) from the son who had borrowed it. I bought a Sony Walkman Professional and clipped a weatherproof microphone to my shirt so that I could recite reassuring things to myself at lonely moments and then transcribe them at night into one of my waterproof-jacketed Alwych notebooks. I took a Sony ICF 4900 lightweight
shortwave radio receiver so I could hear the BBC (except I rarely could; the Spanish Service of Radio Peking used an identical frequency). And I took plenty of spare batteries; pencils; a first aid kit; sunglasses; and a Leica M6 camera with a 35 mm Summicron lens, a yellow filter, and plenty of Agfa black-and-white 100 ASA film.

Thus equipped—the weight of the rucksack, like the length of the Chinese measure known as the
li
, would vary according to whether the journey was uphill, downhill, or on the flat—I squeezed myself into a pair of Rohan walking breeks and a Viyella shirt, thrust on my head a battered old Akubra drover hat I had bought in Queensland that was said to be good for drinking out of or for fanning a dying fire and, braving the puzzled looks from the Brooks Brother’d bankers in the Hong Kong departure lounge, boarded Cathay Pacific Flight CX410 from Kai Tak to Kimpo.

The Cathay people, unfailingly kind to the inquisitive, let me sit on the flight deck for the approach. Kimpo Airport is regarded with distaste by most professional pilots, said the captain, a rather dyspeptic Londoner. Not only was there a very nasty mountain that reared up in the final moments of the approach but the South Korean security services placed extraordinarily strict controls on the precision of that approach. A slight northward drift off the glide slope and, said the captain, ‘You’re dead meat.’ The problem was that the North Korean aerial frontier was only three minutes’ jet time away from the Kimpo glide slope, so any friendly airliner that strayed north from the slope could appear, to an unsophisticated Seoul approach radar operator, to be a North Korean intruder. And since the glide slope passed only a few miles from the Blue House—the Korean presidential palace—it
could
be that the intruder was on his way to blow up the Blue House. ‘So we are warned—more than at any other airport in the world—to stay exactly on the slope we’re told. Any plane that makes a mistake is in deep trouble. They nearly blew the tail off a Northwest Airlines jumbo a few years ago. They mean business, those Korean boys.’

But Cathay did its job this time with sedulous efficiency, and we screeched to a halt at Kimpo on time, and I began my struggle through the immigration counters. It took an hour or so, but by evening time I was in a hotel, asking the advice of friends, mugging up on my understanding of Korea’s
hangul
script (which was pretty poor and so remained), and making the last plans for the trip.

A day later I was armed with maps. I had imagined there would be some difficulty, given the security situation—after all, it is well nigh impossible to buy decent maps of countries like India and Pakistan, and one has to make do with American aerial navigation maps bought at Stanford’s in Covent Garden, where most of the world’s journeying seems properly to begin. I had asked the defence attaché at the British Embassy in Seoul, and the American Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, if I could acquire some good English-language maps of Korea, but both, with weary you-should-know-better-than-to-ask sighs, had refused. In the end I discovered you could go into an ordinary Seoul shop and buy as decent a 1:250,000 or even 1:50,000 map as you could wish for, but for the script being in either Chinese characters (which I did not understand) or
hangul
(which I was trying to). I thus bought coverage of the entire country in the smaller-scale 1:250,000 for about £5; and I was not particularly alarmed to notice, in red letters on the reverse, a strict enjoinment to the effect that were I to take the map abroad without permission of the director general of the National Institute of Geography, I could be sent to prison for two years or fined 2 million
won
. After use, the warning ended, the map should be destroyed by fire.