ses were earthen-walled and straw-thatched. Under the floors
ran flues through which the kitchen smoke escaped, warming the sleeping-
room in its passage. Here we lay and rested for days, soothing ourselves
with their mild and tasteless tobacco, which we smoked in tiny bowls at
the end of yard-long pipes. Also, there was a warm, sourish,
milky-looking drink, heady only when taken in enormous doses. After
guzzling I swear gallons of it, I got singing drunk, which is the way of
sea-cunies the world over. Encouraged by my success, the others
persisted, and soon we were all a-roaring, little reeking of the fresh
snow gale piping up outside, and little worrying that we were cast away
in an uncharted, God-forgotten land. Old Johannes Maartens laughed and
trumpeted and slapped his thighs with the best of us. Hendrik Hamel, a
cold-blooded, chilly-poised dark brunette of a Dutchman with beady black
eyes, was as rarely devilish as the rest of us, and shelled out silver
like any drunken sailor for the purchase of more of the milky brew. Our
carrying-on was a scandal; but the women fetched the drink while all the
village that could crowd in jammed the room to witness our antics.

The white man has gone around the world in mastery, I do believe, because
of his unwise uncaringness. That has been the manner of his going,
although, of course, he was driven on by restiveness and lust for booty.
So it was that Captain Johannes Maartens, Hendrik Hamel, and the twelve
sea-cunies of us roystered and bawled in the fisher village while the
winter gales whistled across the Yellow Sea.

From the little we had seen of the land and the people we were not
impressed by Cho-Sen. If these miserable fishers were a fair sample of
the natives, we could understand why the land was unvisited of
navigators. But we were to learn different. The village was on an in-
lying island, and its headmen must have sent word across to the mainland;
for one morning three big two-masted junks with lateens of rice-matting
dropped anchor off the beach.

When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all interest,
for here were silks again. One strapping Korean, all in pale-tinted
silks of various colours, was surrounded by half a dozen obsequious
attendants, also clad in silk. Kwan Yung-jin, as I came to know his
name, was a _yang-ban_, or noble; also he was what might be called
magistrate or governor of the district or province. This means tha