Evidently desirous of conquering Japan by diplomacy, the great Khan despatched an embassy which reached, not the mikado’s, but only the shō-gun’s court in 1275. His ambassadors were accompanied by a large retinue from his Corean vassals. The Japanese allowed only three of the imposing number to go to Kamakura, twelve miles from the modern Tōkiō, and paid no attention to the Khan’s threatening letters. So irritated were the brave islanders that when another ambassador from the Khan arrived, in the following year, he disembarked as a prisoner and was escorted, bound, to Kamakura, where he was thrown into prison, kept during four years, and taken out only to be beheaded.
Upon hearing this, Khublai began the preparation of the mightiest of his invading hosts. To be braved by a little island nation, when his sceptre ruled from the Dnieper to the Yellow Sea, was not to be thought of. Various fleets and contingents sailed from different ports in China and made rendezvous on the Corean coast. The fleet was composed of 3,500 war junks, of large size, having on board 180,000 Chinese, Mongols, and Coreans. Among their engines of war were the catapults which the Polos had taught them to make. They set sail in the autumn of 1281.
From the very first the enterprise miscarried. The general-in-chief fell sick and the command devolved on a subordinate, who had no plan of operation. The various divisions of the force became separated. It is probable that the majority of them never [[74]]reached the mainland of Japan. The Mongol and Corean contingent reached the province of Chikuzen, but were not allowed to make a successful landing, for the Japanese drove them back with sword and fire. The Chinese division, arriving later, was met by a terrible tempest that nearly annihilated them and destroyed the ships already engaged. The broken remnant of the fleet and armies, taking refuge on the island of Iki, were attacked by the Japanese and nearly all slain, imprisoned, or beheaded in cold blood. Only a few reached Corea to tell the tale.
The “Mongol civilization,” so-called, seems to have had little influence on Corea. The mighty empire of Genghis soon broke into many fragments. The vast fabric of his government melted like a sand house before an incoming wave, and that wave receding left scarcely a sediment recognizable on the polity or social life of Corea. Marco Polo in his book hardly mentions the country, though describing Zipangu or Japan quite fully. One evil effect of their forced assistance given to the Mongols, was that the hatred of the Japanese and Coreans for each other was mutually intensified. After the Mongolian invasion begins that series of piratical raids on their coast and robbery of their vessels at sea, by Japanese adventurers, that made navigation beyond sight of land and ship-building among the Coreans almost a lost art.
The centuries following the Mongol invasion were periods of anarchy and civil war in Japan, and the central government authority being weak the pirates could not be controlled. Building or stealing ships, bands of Japanese sailors or ex-soldiers put to sea, capturing Corean boats, junks, and surf-rafts. Landing, they harried the shores and robbed and murdered the defenceless people. Growing bolder, the marauders sailed into the Yellow Sea and landed even in China and in Liao Tung. They kept whole towns and cities in terror, and a chain of coast forts had to be built in Shan-tung to defend that province.
The fire-signals which, in the old days of “the Three Kingdoms,” had flashed upon the headlands to warn of danger seaward, were now made a national service. The system was perfected so as to converge at the capital, Sunto, and give notice of danger from any point on the coast. By this means better protection against the sea-rovers was secured.
All this evil experience with the piratical Japanese of the middle ages has left its impress on the language of the Coreans. From this period, perhaps even long before it, date those words [[75]]of sinister omen of which we give but one or two examples which have the prefix wai (Japan) in them. A wai-kol, a huge, fierce man, of gigantic aspect, with a bad head, though perhaps with good heart, a kind of ogre, is a Japanese kol or creature. A destructive wind or typhoon is a Japanese wind. As western Christendom for centuries uttered their fears of the Norse pirates, “From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us,” so the Korai people, along the coast, for many generations offered up constant petition to their gods for protection against these Northmen of the Pacific.
Two-Masted Corean Vessel (from a Photograph taken in 1871).
This chronic danger from Japanese pirates, which Korai and Chō-sen endured for a period nearly as extended as that of England from the Northmen, is one of the causes that have contributed to make the natives dread the sea as a path for enemies, and in Corea we see the strange anomaly of a people more than semi-civilized whose wretched boats scarcely go beyond tide-water. [[76]]