The sampan’s crew of two consisted of Kim, her owner, a tall wiry, picturesque, aristocratic-looking old man, and his “hired man,” who was never heard to speak except on two occasions, when, being very drunk, he developed a remarkable loquacity. On the whole, they were well behaved and quiet. I saw them in close proximity every hour of the day and was never annoyed by anything they did. Kim was paid $30 per month for the boat, and his laziness was wonderful. To dawdle along, to start late and tie up early, to crawl when he tracked, and to pole or paddle with the least expenditure of labor, was his policy. To pole for an hour, then tie up and take a smoke, to spend half a day now and then on buying rice, to work on my sensibilities by feigning exhaustion, and to adopt every dodge of the lazy man, was his practice. The contract stipulated for three men, and he only took one, making some evasive excuse. But I have said the worst I can say when I write that they never made more than 10 miles in a day, and often not more than 7, and that when they came to severe rapids they always wanted to go back.[12]
Mr. Wyers busied himself in putting a mat on the floor and stowing things as neatly as possible, and when curtains had been put up, the quarters, though “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” looked quite tolerable. The same limp, silent crowd looked on till we left Han Kang at midday. In a few hours things shook into shape, and after all the discomforts were not great, possibly the greatest being that the smoke and the smell of the boatmen’s malodorous food blew through the boat.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] I took very careful notes on the Han, but as minute details would be uninteresting to the general reader, and would involve a good deal of apparent repetition, I shall give only the most salient features of a journey which, if it has ever been made, has certainly not been described.
CHAPTER VI
ON THE RIVER OF GOLDEN SAND
During the five weeks which I spent on the Han, though the routine of daily life varied little, there was no monotony. The country and the people were new, and we mixed freely, almost too freely, with the latter; the scenery varied hourly, and after the first few days became not only beautiful, but in places magnificent, and full of surprises; the spring was in its early beauty, and the trees in their first vividness of green, red, and gold; the flowers and flowering shrubs were in their glory, the crops at their most attractive stage, birds sang in the thickets, rich fragrant odors were wafted off on the water, red cattle, though rarely, fed knee-deep in abounding grass, and the waters of the Han, nearly at their lowest, were clear as crystal, and their broken sparkle flashed back the sunbeams which passed through a sky as blue as that of Tibet. There was a prosperous look about the country too, and its security was indicated by the frequent occurrence of solitary farms, with high secluding fences, standing under the deep shade of fine walnut and persimmon trees.
Unlike the bare, arid, denuded hillsides between Chemulpo and Seoul, the slopes along much of the route are wooded, and in many cases forested both with coniferæ and deciduous trees, among which there are occasionally picturesque clumps of umbrella pines. The Pinus Sinensis and the Abies Microsperma abound, and there are two species of oak and three of maple, a Platanus, juniper, ash, mountain ash, birch, hazel, Sophora Japonica, Euonymus alatus, Thuja Orientalis, and many others. The heliotrope, pink, and scarlet azaleas were in all their beauty, flushing the hillsides, and white and sulphur-yellow clematis, actinidia, and a creeping Euonymus were abundant. Of the wealth of flowering shrubs, mostly white blossomed, I had never seen one before either in garden or greenhouse, except the familiar syringa and spirea. The beautiful Ampelopsis Veitchiana was in its freshest spring green and tender red, concealing tree trunks, depending from branches, and draping every cliff and rock with its exquisite foliage; and roses, red and white, of a free-growing, climbing variety, having possession even of tall trees, hung their fragrant festoons over the roads.
It was all very charming, though a little wanting in life. True, there were butterflies and dragon-flies innumerable, and brilliant green and brown snakes in numbers, and at first the Han was cheery with mallard and mandarin-duck, geese and common teal. In the rice fields the imperial crane, the egret, and the pink ibis with the deep flush of spring on his plumage, were not uncommon, and peregrines, kestrels, falcons, and buzzards were occasionally seen. But the song-birds were few. The forlorn note of the night-jar was heard, and the loud, cheerful call of the gorgeous ringed pheasant to his dowdy mate; but the trilling, warbling, and cooing which are the charm of an English copsewood in springtime are altogether absent, the chatter of the blue magpie and the noisy flight of the warbler being poor substitutes for that entrancing concert. Of beast life, undomesticated, there were no traces, and the domestic animals are few. Sheep do not thrive on the sour natural grasses of Korea, and if goats are kept I never saw any. A small black pig not much larger than a pug is universal, and there are bulls and ponies about the better class of farms. There are big buff dogs, but these are kept only to a limited extent on the Han, in the idea that they attract the nocturnal visits of tigers. The dogs are noisy and voluble, and rush towards a stranger as if bent on attack; but it is mere bravado—they are despicable cowards, and run away howling at the shaking of a stick.
Leopards, antelopes, and several species of deer are found among the mountains bordering the Han, but the beast by preëminence there, as throughout Korea, is the tiger. At first I was very incredulous regarding his existence and depredations. It was impossible to believe that peaceful agricultural valleys surrounded by hills, thinly clothed with dwarf oak scrub, could be ravaged by him, that dogs, pigs, and cattle are continually carried off by him, and that human beings visiting each other at night or belated on the roads are his frequent prey. But the constant repetition of tiger stories, the terror of the villagers, the refusal of mapu and coolies to travel after dark, the certainty that in several places the loss of life had been recent, and that even in the trim settlement of Wön-san a boy and child had been seized the day before I arrived and had been eaten on the hillside above the town, have made me a believer. Possibly some of the depredations attributed to tigers may be really the work of leopards, which undoubtedly abound, and have been shot even within the walls of Seoul. High up the Han, in a very lovely lake-like stretch, there is a village recently deserted because of the persistency with which tigers had carried off its inhabitants. The Korean tiger, judging from its skin, in which the long hair grows out of a thick coat of fine fur, resembles the Manchurian tiger. I have heard of one which measured 13 feet 4 inches, but never saw a skin more than 11 feet 8 inches in length.
The tiger-hunters form what may be called a brigade or corps, and may be called on for military service. They were conspicuous objects in the Kur-dong, with their long matchlock guns, loose blue uniforms, and conical-crowned, broad-brimmed hats. The tiger appears on the Royal standard, and tigers’ skins are the insignia of high office, the leopard skins, indicating lower rank. The Chinese give a very high price for tigers’ bones as a medicine, considering them a specific for strength and courage. Tiger-hunting as a business seems confined to the northern provinces. On the Han, and specially along its northern affluents, are found three if not four species of deer, and the horns, in the velvet, of the large deer (Cervus Manchuricus), which fetch from forty to sixty dollars a pair, are the prize most wanted by the hunters. Pheasants are literally without number and are very tame; I constantly saw them feeding among the crops within a few yards of the peasants at their work. They are usually brought down by falcons, which, when well trained, command as high a price as nine dollars. To obtain them three small birds are placed in a cylinder of loosely woven bamboo, mounted horizontally on a pole. On the peregrine alighting on this, a man who has been concealed throws a net over the whole. The bird is kept in a tight sleeve for three days. Then he is daily liberated in a room, and trained to follow a piece of meat pulled over the floor by a string. At the end of a week he is taken out on his master’s wrist, and slipped when game is seen. He is not trained to return. The master rushes upon him and secures him before he has time to devour the bird. A man told me that he sometimes got between twenty and thirty pheasants a day, but had to walk or run 100 li to do it. The season was nearly over, yet I bought fine pheasants on the Han for threepence and fourpence each. They were cheaper than chickens.