Have I not said that I was a gayhearted, golden, bearded giant of an irresponsible boy that had never grown up? With scarce a pang, when the Sparwehrs' watercasks were filled, I left Raa Kook and his pleasant land, left LeiLei and all her flowergarlanded sisters, and with laughter on my lips and familiar shipsmells sweet in my nostrils, sailed away, seacuny once more, under Captain Johannes Maartens.
A marvellous wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr. We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnelhouse together. That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golcondaay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat unscuppered. And he found headhunting, treedwelling anthropophagi instead.
We landed on strange islands, seapounded on their shores and smoking at their summits, where kinkyhaired little animalmen made monkeywailings in the jungle, planted their forest runways with thorns and stakepits, and blew poisoned splinters into us from out the twilight jungle bush. And whatsoever man of us was waspstung by such a splinter died horribly and howling. And we encountered other men, fiercer, bigger, who faced us on the beaches in open fight, showering us with spears and arrows, while the great tree drums and the little tomtoms rumbled and rattled war across the treefilled hollows, and all the hills were pillared with signalsmokes.
Hendrik Hamel was supercargo and part owner of the Sparwehr adventure, and what he did not own was the property of Captain Johannes Maartens. The latter spoke little English, Hendrik Hamel but little more. The sailors, with whom I gathered, spoke Dutch only. But trust a seacuny to learn Dutchay, and Korean, as you shall see.
Toward the end we came to the charted country of Japan. But the people would have no dealings with us, and two sworded officials, in sweeping robes of silk that made Captain Johannes Maartens' mouth water, came aboard of us and politely requested us to begone. Under their suave manners was the iron of a warlike race, and we knew, and went our way.
We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on our way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. She was a crazy tub the old Sparwehr, so clumsy and so dirty with whiskered marinelife on her bottom that she could not get out of her own way. Closehauled, the closest she could come was to six points of the wind; and then she bobbed up and down, without way, like a derelict turnip. Galliots were clippers compared with her. To tack her about was undreamed of; to wear her required all hands and half a watch. So situated, we were caught on a lee shore in an eightpoint shift of wind at the height of a hurricane that had beaten our souls sick for fortyeight hours.
We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on our way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. She was a crazy tub the old Sparwehr, so clumsy and so dirty with whiskered marinelife on her bottom that she could not get out of her own way. Closehauled, the closest she could come was to six points of the wind; and then she bobbed up and down, without way, like a derelict turnip. Galliots were clippers compared with her. To tack her about was undreamed of; to wear her required all hands and half a watch. So situated, we were caught on a lee shore in an eightpoint shift of wind at the height of a hurricane that had beaten our souls sick for fortyeight hours.
We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a heartless crosssea mountain high. It was dead of winter, and between smoking snowsqualls we could glimpse the forbidding coast, if coast it might be called, so broken was it. There were grim rock isles and islets beyond counting, dim snowcovered ranges beyond, and everywhere upstanding cliffs too steep for snow, outjuts of headlands, and pinnacles and slivers of rock upthrust from the boiling sea.
There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever having been visited by navigators. Its coastline was only hinted at in our chart. From all of which we could argue that the inhabitants were as inhospitable as the little of their land we could see.
The Sparwehr drove in bowon upon a cliff. There was deep water to its sheer foot, so that our skyaspiring bowsprit crumpled at the impact and snapped short off. The foremast went by the board, with a great snapping of ropeshrouds and stays, and fell forward against the cliff.
I have always admired old Johannes Maartens. Washed and rolled off the high poop by a burst of sea, we were left stranded in the waist of the ship, whence we fought our way for'ard to the steeppitched forecastle head. Others joined us. We lashed ourselves fast and counted noses. We were eighteen. The rest had perished.
Johannes Maartens touched me and pointed upward through cascading salt water from the backfling of the cliff. I saw what he desired. Twenty feet below the truck the foremast ground and crunched against a boss of the cliff. Above the boss was a cleft. He wanted to know if I would dare the leap from the masthead into the cleft. Sometimes the distance was a scant six feet. At other times it was a score, for the mast reeled drunkenly to the rolling and pounding of the hull on which rested its splintered butt.
I began the climb. But they did not wait. One by one they unlashed themselves and followed me up the perilous mast. There was reason for haste, for at any moment the Sparwehr might slip off into deep water. I timed my leap, and made it, landing in the cleft in a scramble and ready to lend a hand to those who leaped after. It was slow work. We were wet and half freezing in the winddrive. Besides, the leaps had to be timed to the roll of the hull and the sway of the mast.
The cook was the first to go. He was snapped off the mastend, and his body performed cartwheels in its fall. A fling of sea caught him and crushed him to a pulp against the cliff. The cabin boy, a bearded man of twentyodd, lost hold, slipped, swung around the mast, and was pinched against the boss of rock. Pinched? The life squeezed from him on the instant. Two others followed the way of the cook. Captain Johannes Maartens was the last, completing the fourteen of us that clung on in the cleft. An hour afterward the Sparwehr slipped off and sank in deep water.
Two days and nights saw us near to perishing on that cliff, for there was way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishingboat found us. The men were clad entirely in dirt white, with their long hair done up in a curious knot on their patesthe marriage knot, as I was afterward to learn, and also, as I was to learn, a handy thing to clutch hold of with one hand whilst you clouted with the other when an argument went beyond words.
The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers, most of their gear, and most of the day were required to get us down. They were a poor and wretched folk, their food difficult even for the stomach of a seacuny to countenance. Their rice was brown as chocolate. Half the husks remained in it, along with bits of chaff, splinters, and unidentifiable dirt which made one pause often in the chewing in order to stick into his mouth thumb and forefinger and pluck out the offending stuff. Also, they ate a sort of millet, and pickles of astounding variety and ungodly hot.
Their houses were earthenwalled and strawthatched. Under the floors ran flues through which the kitchen smoke escaped, warming the sleeping room in its passage. Here we lay and rested for days, soothing ourselves with their mild and tasteless tobacco, which we smoked in tiny bowls at the end of yardlong pipes. Also, there was a warm, sourish, milkylooking drink, heady only when taken in enormous doses. After guzzling I swear gallons of it, I got singing drunk, which is the way of seacunies the world over. Encouraged by my success, the others persisted, and soon we were all aroaring, little reeking of the fresh snow gale piping up outside, and little worrying that we were cast away in an uncharted, Godforgotten land. Old Johannes Maartens laughed and trumpeted and slapped his thighs with the best of us. Hendrik Hamel, a coldblooded, chillypoised dark brunette of a Dutchman with beady black eyes, was as rarely devilish as the rest of us, and shelled out silver like any drunken sailor for the purchase of more of the milky brew. Our carryingon was a scandal; but the women fetched the drink while all the village that could crowd in jammed the room to witness our antics.
The white man has gone around the world in mastery, I do believe, because of his unwise uncaringness. That has been the manner of his going, although, of course, he was driven on by restiveness and lust for booty. So it was that Captain Johannes Maartens, Hendrik Hamel, and the twelve seacunies of us roystered and bawled in the fisher village while the winter gales whistled across the Yellow Sea.
From the little we had seen of the land and the people we were not impressed by ChoSen. If these miserable fishers were a fair sample of the natives, we could understand why the land was unvisited of navigators. But we were to learn different. The village was on an in lying island, and its headmen must have sent word across to the mainland; for one morning three big twomasted junks with lateens of ricematting dropped anchor off the beach.
When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all interest, for here were silks again. One strapping Korean, all in paletinted silks of various colours, was surrounded by half a dozen obsequious attendants, also clad in silk. Kwan Yungjin, as I came to know his name, was a yangban, or noble; also he was what might be called magistrate or governor of the district or province. This means that his office was appointive, and that he was a tithesqueezer or taxfarmer.
Fully a hundred soldiers were also landed and marched into the village. They were armed with threepronged spears, slicing spears, and chopping spears, with here and there a matchlock of so heroic mould that there were two soldiers to a matchlock, one to carry and set the tripod on which rested the muzzle, the other to carry and fire the gun. As I was to learn, sometimes the gun went off, sometimes it did not, all depending upon the adjustment of the firepunk and the condition of the powder in the flashpan.