Map illustrating the Jesuit Survey of 1709.
While making their surveys, the party of missionaries, whose assignment of the work was to Eastern Manchuria, caught something like a Pisgah glimpse of the country which, before a century elapsed, was to become a land of promise to French Christianity. In 1709, as they looked across the Tumen River, they wrote: “It was a new sight to us after we had crossed so many forests, and coasted so many frightful mountains to find ourselves on the banks of the [[166]]river Tumen-ula, with nothing but woods and wild beasts on one side, while the other presented to our view all that art and labor could produce in the best cultivated kingdoms. We there saw walled cities, and placing our instruments on the neighboring heights, geometrically determined the location of four of them, which bounded Korea on the north.” The four towns seen by the Jesuit surveyors were Kion-wen, On-son, and possibly Kion-fun and Chon-shon.
The Coreans could not understand the Tartar or Chinese companions of the Frenchmen, but, at Hun-chun, they found interpreters, who told them the names of the Corean towns. The French priests were exceedingly eager and anxious to cross the river, and enter the land that seemed like the enchanted castle of Thornrose, but, being forbidden by the emperor’s orders, they reluctantly turned their backs upon the smiling cities.
This was the picture of the northern border in 1707, before it was desolated, as it afterward was, so that the Russians might not be tempted to cross over. At Hun-chun, on the Manchiu, and Kion-wen, on the Corean side of the river, once a year, alternately, that is, once in two years, at each place, a fair was held up to 1860, where the Coreans and Chinese merchants exchanged goods. The lively traffic lasted only half a day, when the nationals of either country were ordered over the border, and laggards were hastened at the spear’s point. Any foreigner, Manchiu, Chinese, or even Corean suspected of being an alien, was, if found on the south side of the Tumen, at once put to death without shrift or pity. Thus the only gate of parley with the outside world on Corea’s northern frontier resembled an embrasure or a muzzle. When at last the Cossack lance flashed, and the Russian school-house rose, and the church spire glittered with steady radiance beyond the Tumen, this gateway became the terminus of that “underground railroad,” through which the Corean slave reached his Canada beyond, or the Corean Christian sought freedom from torture and dungeons and death. [[167]]
CHAPTER XXII.
THE DUTCHMEN IN EXILE.
The old saw which tells us that “truth is stranger than fiction” receives many a new and unexpected confirmation whenever a traveller into strange countries comes back to tell his tale. Marco Polo was denominated “Signor Milliano” (Lord Millions) by his incredulous hearers, because, in speaking of China, he very properly used this lofty numeral so frequently in his narratives. Mendez Pinto, though speaking truthfully of Japan’s wonders, was dubbed by a pun on his Christian name, the “Mendacious,” because he told what were thought to be very unchristian stories. In our own day, when Paul Du Chaillu came back from the African wilds and told of the gorilla which walked upright like a man, and could dent a gun-barrel with his teeth, most people believed, as a college professor of belles lettres, dropping elegant words for the nonce, once stated, that “he lied like the mischief.” When lo! the once mythic gorillas have come as live guests at Berlin and Philadelphia, while their skeletons are commonplaces in our museums. Even Stanley’s African discoveries were, at first, discredited.
The first European travellers in Corea, who lived to tell their tale at home, met the same fate as Polo, Pinto, Du Chaillu, and Stanley. The narratives were long doubted, and by some set down as pure fiction. Like the Indian braves that listen to Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, who, in the lodges of the plains, recount the wonders of Washington and civilization, the hearers are sure that they have taken “bad medicine.” Later reports or personal experience, however, corroborate the first accounts, and by the very commonplaceness of simple truth the first reports are robbed alike of novelty and suspicion.