As the enchantment of distance faded and Ma-cha Töng revealed itself in plain prose, fading from purple into sober gray, the ideal of a romantic halt by the pure sea vanished. A long, crooked, tumble-down narrow street, with narrower off-shoots, heaps of fish offal and rubbish, in which swine, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, and children, much afflicted with skin disease, were indiscriminately routing and rolling, pools covered with a thick brown scum, a stream which had degenerated into an open sewer, down which thick green slime flowed tardily, a beach of white sand, the upper part of which was blackened with fish laid out to dry, frames for drying fish everywhere, men, women, children, all as dirty in person and clothing as it was possible to be, thronging the roadway as we approached, air laden with insupportable odors, and the vilest accommodation I ever had in Korea, have fixed this night in my memory.
The inn, if inn it was, gave me a room 8 feet by 6, and 5 feet 2 inches high. Ang-paks, for it was the family granary, iron shoes of ploughs and spades, bundles of foul rags, seaweed, ears of millet hanging in bunches from the roof, pack saddles, and worse than all else, rotten beans fermenting for soy, and malodorous half-salted fish, just left room for my camp-bed. This den opened on a vile yard, partly dunghill and partly pigpen, in which is the well from which the women of the house, with sublime sang-froid, draw the drinking water! Outside is a swamp, which throughout the night gave off sickening odors. Every few minutes something was wanted from my room, and as there was not room for two, I had every time to go out into the yard. Wong’s good-night was, “I hope you won’t die.” When I entered, the mercury was 87°. After that, cooking for man and beast and the kang floor raised it to 107°, at which point it stood till morning, vivifying into revoltingly active life myriads of cockroaches and vermin which revel in heat, not to speak of rats, which ran over my bed, ate my candle, gnawed my straps, and would have left me without boots, had I not long before learned to hang them from the tripod of my camera. From nine years of travelling, some of it very severe and comfortless, that night stands out as hideously memorable.
The raison d’être of Ma-cha Töng, and the numerous coast villages which exist wherever a convenient shore and a protection for boats occur together, is the coast fishing. The fact that a floating population of over 8,000 Japanese fishermen make a living by fishing on the coast near Fusan shows that there is a redundant harvest to be reaped. The Korean fisherman is credited with utter want of enterprise, and Mr. Oiesen, in the Customs’ report for Wön-san for 1891, accuses him of “remaining content with such fish as will run into crudely and easily constructed traps, set out along the shore, which only require attention for an hour or so each day.” I must, however, say that each village that I passed possessed from seven to twelve fishing junks, which were kept at sea. They are unseaworthy boats, and it is not surprising that they hug the shore. I believe that the fishing industry, with every other, is paralyzed by the complete insecurity of the earnings of labor and by the exactions of officials, and that the Korean fisherman does not care to earn money of which he will surely be deprived on any or no pretence, and that, along with the members of the industrial classes generally, he seeks the protection of poverty.
The fish taken on this coast, when salted and dried, find their way by boat to Wön-san, and from thence over central Korea, but in winter pedlars carry them directly inland from the fishing villages. Salterns on the plan of those often seen in China occur frequently near the villages. The operation of making salt from sea water is absolutely primitive, and so rough and dirty that the whiteness of the coarse product which results is an astonishment. In spite of heavy losses and heavier “squeezings,” this industry, which is carried on from May to October, is a profitable one.
The road beyond that noisome halting-place traverses picturesque country for many miles, being cut out of the sides of noble cliffs, or crosses basaltic spurs by arrangements resembling rock ladders, keeping perforce always close to the sea, now on dizzy precipices, then descending to firm hard stretches of golden sand, or winding just above high-water mark among colossal boulders which are completely covered with the Ampelopsis Veitchiana, the creeper par excellence of Korea. The sea was green and violet near the shore and a vivid blue in the distance, and on its rippleless surface fishing boats with gray hulls and brown sails lay motionless, for the rush and swirl of tides, rising and falling as they do on the west coast from 25 to 38 feet, are unknown on the east coast, the variation between high and low water being within 18 inches.
It was the hottest day of the year, and it was fortunate that the prettily situated market-place of Syo-im had a new and clean inn, in which it was possible to prolong the noonday halt, and to get a good dinner of fresh and salt fish, vegetables, herbs, sauces, and rice, for the sum of two cents gold. There also, being the market-day, Mr. Miller succeeded in obtaining cash for four silver yen from the pedlars.
After passing over a tedious sandy plain with a reserve of fine firs, under which the countless dead of ages lie under great sand mounds held together by nets or branches of trees, we reached at sunset my ideal, a clean, exquisitely situated village of nine houses, of which one was an inn where, contrary to the general rule, we were made cordially welcome.[20] The nine families at Chin-pul possessed seven good-sized fishing boats.
That inn is of unusual construction. There is a broad mud platform of which fireplaces and utensils for cooking for man and beast occupy one half, and the other is matted for sleeping and eating. My room, which had no window, but was clean and plastered, opened on this, and as the mercury was at 111° until 3 A.M. owing to the heated floor, I sat at the door nearly all night, so the dawn and an early start, and the coolness of the green and violet shades of the almost rippleless ocean, which laved its varied shore of bays, promontories, and lofty cliffs, were very welcome.
A valley opening on the sea which it took five hours to skirt and cross, covered with grain and newly planted rice, is literally fringed with villages, which look comfortably prosperous in spite of exactions. A smaller valley contains about 3,000 acres of rice land only, and on the slopes surrounding all these are rich lands, bearing heavy crops of wheat, millet, barley, cotton, tobacco, castor oil, sesamum, oats, turnips, peas, beans, and potatoes. The ponies are larger and better kept in that region, and the red bulls are of immense size. The black pig, however, is as small and mean as ever. The crops were clean, and the rice dykes and irrigation channels well kept. Good and honest government would create as happy and prosperous a people as the traveller finds in Japan, the soil being very similar, while Korea has a far better climate.
During the land journey from Chang-an Sa to Wön-san I had better opportunities of seeing the agricultural methods of the Koreans than in the valleys of the Han. As compared with the exquisite neatness of the Japanese and the diligent thriftiness of the Chinese, Korean agriculture is to some extent wasteful and untidy. Weeds are not kept down in the summer as they ought to be, stones are often left on the ground, and there is a raggedness about the margins of fields and dykes and a dilapidation about stone walls which is unpleasing to the eye. The paths through the fields are apt to be much worn and fringed with weeds, and the furrows are not so straight as they might be. Yet on the whole the cultivation is much better and the majority of the crops far cleaner than I had been led to expect. Domestic animals are very few, and very little fertilizing material is applied to the ground except in the neighborhood of Seoul and other cities, a fact which makes its exceeding fertility very noteworthy.