By Robert Neff
Did you know that one of the first Americans (not associated with the military or fishing industry) to visit Korea was Frank Cowan: a doctor, butterfly collector, newspaperman and fraud?
Born in 1844, Cowan enjoyed a life of affluence and prestige. His father, a successful lawyer and senator, obviously played a key role in getting his son through law and medical school and an appointment as President Andrew Johnson’s personal secretary. He was the ultimate overachiever. Not only did he open his own law firm while practicing medicine, he also started a newspaper and wrote books and articles — both fiction and non-fiction.
Cowan was a prankster and wasn’t above perpetrating a fraud. In 1867 he helped a friend’s failing newspaper’s sales by claiming that a woman Viking had been discovered near the Potomac River proving that the Vikings had actually discovered America.
Following the death of his wife and infant son and his own subsequent illness, Cowan decided to take a trip around the world. It was while in Japan in 1881 that Cowan becomes interested in Korea.
Korea at that time was deemed an unfriendly land to foreigners — especially Westerners.
There were more than a few articles in newspapers of alleged violent acts committed by Koreans upon shipwrecked survivors but for the most part they were untrue. Cowan was aware of the perceived dangers but was determined to successfully penetrate the “mysterious confines” of Korea.
In May he offered his services as a surgeon aboard a Japanese steamship bound for Vladivostok. He knew that the ship would stop for a short time at Fusan (Busan) and Gensan (Wonsan) to load and unload cargo at the Japanese settlements. Going ashore at Fusan was not an easy matter as the Korean and Japanese officials tended to be very strict but Gensan was a different matter.
When the ship arrived at Gensan, Cowan promptly made his way ashore “bearing no banner more alarming than a butterfly-net, and no weapons more formidable and provocative of war than a pencil and pill-box.” According to him:
“I excited only a good-humored curiosity and a smile of mingled amazement and amusement at my incomprehensible occupation, and was unmolested accordingly. I saw nothing in the shape of a weapon among them, and nothing in their features and manners of the ferocious wreckers and piratical cutthroats, of which I have read and heard as forming an alarming proportion of the people of the strange peninsula.”
While Cowan did not see any weapons he did see gold. “I am of the opinion”, he wrote, “that the next of the countries on the golden rim of the Pacific, after Peru, California and Australia to disturb the monetary equilibrium of the world will be Corea.”
Cowan re-boarded his ship and continued his voyage to Vladivostok where he resumed his journey around the world claiming to be the first white man to visit the Hermit Kingdom. It wasn’t Cowan’s last round-the-world journey but it was apparently his first and last visit to Korea.
Cowan died on Feb. 12, 1905 in Pennsylvania. But his death wasn’t without a final prank dealing with Vikings. According to an American newspaper:
“Some days ago he notified the world through the newspapers that he was going to be buried in a ‘fire boat,’ the Viking, which lie he had constructed after the fashion of the boats of the old Vikings, of whom he claimed to be a descendant. This was only a grim joke, as he was laid away in an ordinary casket.”
Robert Neff is a contributing writer for The Korea Times.