Shipwrecked and Captive in Korea

On 16 August 1653, in the black night and storm of the China Sea, the Dutch yacht De Sperwer, sailing from Formosa toward Japan, breaks apart on the reefs of an unknown coast. Sixty-four men were aboard when she left port; twenty-eight die within the first hour, crushed between the planks or swallowed by the surf. At dawn, thirty-six survivors drag themselves onto a black beach, around the body of their captain, Reijnier Egberse. They do not yet know it: they have just landed in the hermit kingdom, a country that no one enters and no one leaves. Thirteen years will pass before eight of them reappear in the world of the living.

Hendrik Hamel, the ship's supercargo, keeps the journal of this long captivity. He describes the chains and interrogations on Quelpaert, the astonishing encounter with Jan Janse Weltevree, another Dutchman already forgotten there for twenty-six years, the forced march across the peninsula through Haenam and Jeonju, the audience with the king in Seoul, service in the royal bodyguard, the fortress refuge of Namhansanseong during the passage of the Tartars, and then the banishment to the garrisons and rice paddies of the south. He watches the Khan's ambassadors pass, honoured above the king himself, the comets of 1664 that unsettle the court, the soldier monks, the great famine that ravages the peninsula, the winters spent begging, and the secret purchase of a junk that finally carries eight of the castaways over the wall by night.

Through his pages, the silhouette of a kingdom kept apart from the world comes into view in Europe for the first time: its eight provinces and hundreds of towns, its laws and its differentiated punishments, its heated floors, its writing, its markets and its ginseng, its weddings and its dead wrapped in silk, its tribute paid north to the Khan. What Hamel reports is not the account of an explorer but that of a captive man, watchful, factual, a bookkeeper by training who counts the leagues, the rations of rice, and the coins of tael and cash even as he lives among strangers he cannot leave.

The first Western testimony on Joseon Korea, illustrated and annotated, this Journael, long smothered by the counterfeit and interpolated editions that circulated out of Amsterdam, here regains its original voice, restored from the manuscript that Hamel and his companions delivered to the Dutch East India Company in 1668. An unmatched document across three centuries, later confirmed by Bruno Hoetink's critical edition of 1920, it is the notebook of a castaway who learned, against his will, to live in the nameless country, and who returned to tell of it.

Complete rewriting in modern English of the captivity narrative: "Journael van de ongeluckige voyage van ’t jacht de Sperwer" by Hendrik Hamel, 1653-1666, including maps and illustrations.