Jan Wettevri found difficulty in speaking his own tongue when he attempted to tell his story to these seamen of the Sparrow-hawk, for in seventeen years he had heard no other language than Korean.
The friendly governor of Quelpert was succeeded by an unpleasant old tyrant who made life so uncomfortable that the stubborn Dutchmen resolved to escape to Japan, sink or swim. The pilot and six sailors stole a junk, but luck was against them. The rotten mast went over the side as they were sailing out to sea, and so they were carried back for punishment. Their hands were tied to a heavy log of wood, and they had to lie in a row flat upon their stomachs while a sturdy Korean jailer flailed them with a heavy cudgel, twenty-five blows each upon that part of a Dutchman’s back where his baggy breeches were the most voluminous. So cruel was this chastisement that several of them lay a month in bed.
So long as they were content to submit to circumstances, the Koreans were inclined to treat them with a certain good humor and toleration. After several months they were conveyed to the mainland and lodged in the capital city, where the king had his palace. He enrolled them in his body-guard, and they received wages of seventy measures of rice per month. Armed with muskets, they drilled under the command of Jan Wettevri. Henry Hamel, the purser, relates:
Curiosity induced most of the great men belonging to the court to invite them to dinner, that they might enjoy the satisfaction of seeing them perform the military exercises and dance in the Dutch manner. The women and children were still more impatient to see them, a report having been propagated that they were monsters of deformity and that in order to drink they were obliged to fasten their noses behind their ears. Their astonishment, however, was so much the greater when they saw that they were handsomer and much more stalwart than the natives of the country. The whiteness of their complexion was particularly admired. The crowds that flocked about them were so great that during the first days they could scarcely pass through the streets or enjoy a moment’s rest in their huts. At length, the general was obliged to check this curiosity by forbidding any one to approach their lodgings without his permission.
For some reason the Dutch company of musketeers was mustered out of this service after a year or so, and they were more or less turned adrift and scattered, always under the vigilant eyes of provincial governors or other officials. Sometimes they loafed and again they worked for their board or begged their way from one village to another, and were entertained by the peasantry, who never ceased to wonder at them. Once an ugly-tempered governor refused to give them clothing and said they might starve for all he cared; but the account was handsomely squared, for
he held his dignity only four months, and being accused of having condemned to death several persons of different ranks on insufficient grounds, he was sentenced by the king to receive ninety strokes on the shin bones and to be banished for life.
Towards the end of this year a comet appeared. It was followed by two others which were both seen at once for the space of two months, one in the southeast and the other in the southwest, but with their tails opposite to each other. The court was so alarmed by this phenomenon that the king ordered the guard at all the forts and over all the ships to be doubled. He likewise directed that all his fortresses should be well supplied with warlike stores and provisions and that his troops should be exercised every day. Such were his apprehensions of being attacked by some neighbor that he prohibited a fire to be made during the night in any house that could be perceived from the sea.
The same phenomena had been seen when the Tartars ravaged the country, and it was recollected that similar signs had been observed previous to the war carried on by the Japanese against Korea. The inhabitants never met the Dutch sailors without asking them what people thought of comets in their country. Comformably to the idea prevalent in Europe, the Dutch replied that comets prognosticated some terrible disaster, as pestilence, war, or famine, and sometimes all three calamities together.
At the end of twelve years of this forlorn exile, eight of the crew of the Sparrow-hawk succeeded in stealing away from Korea in a staunch sea-going junk. Eight others of the thirty-six officers and men were still alive, but they had to be left behind. With some rice, a few jars of water, and an iron pot, the fugitives sailed the junk to the coast of Japan, where the fishermen directed them to Nagasaki, where Dutch ships were at anchor in the bay. The eight Dutchmen who remained in Korea were never heard of again, nor was any word received of Jan Wettevri, now seventy years old, and that great red beard well streaked with gray.
When a sailor kissed his wife or sweetheart good-by in those rude, adventurous centuries, the voyage was likely to be darkened by these tragedies of enforced exile, which were ever so much worse than shipwreck. Quite typical of its era was the fate of the crew of the English privateer Inspector when foul weather set her ashore near Tangier in the year of 1746. Incidentally, the narrative of the experience of these eighty-seven survivors conveys certain vivid impressions of an Emperor of Morocco, Zin el Abdin, and of his amazing contempt for the Christian powers of Europe and their supine submission to his ruthless dictates. This was in accordance with the attitude of centuries, during which the treatment of foreign envoys in Morocco was profoundly humiliating, and the gifts they brought were regarded in the light of tribute. Indeed, it was not until 1900 that the custom of mounted sultans under umbrellas receiving ambassadors on foot and bareheaded was abolished.