Contributor
Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.
Old letters are treasured windows into the past. They lack the brutal honesty and starkness of diary entries, instead offering a sanitized portrayal of daily life, written to entertain and inform friends and family. Fred Dustin’s letters from Jeju Island, penned some 50 years ago, are no exception.
Homer Hulbert arrived in Jemulpo (now part of modern-day Incheon) on July 4, 1886. He was one of three American teachers hired by the Korean government to teach at the Royal College in Seoul. Their trip to Seoul and their subsequent adventures in Korea are interesting stories, but those will have to wait for another time. Since today is Christmas, however, it seems appropriate to recount the Christmas party of 1887, held at the home of Horace Underwood — an American missionary.
On Nov. 25, 1885, Signor Luigi sailed into Jemulpo (modern Incheon) harbor aboard his small blue schooner, the Prospector, with the Italian flag proudly fluttering from its mast. Although the Prospector was the first Italian merchant vessel to visit a Korean port, it was not the first to sail into Korean waters. That dubious honor belonged to the 666-ton Italian barque Bianca Pertica, which wrecked off the coast of Jeju Island during a powerful typhoon in 1878, shortly after departing Nagasaki. Only one crew member survived, and he provided an account of his ordeal at sea and subsequent rescue by the islanders — an account both fascinating and, at times, almost unbelievable.
The keys that unlock the past are often humble items — overlooked by historians and writers but prized by enthusiasts and collectors. These include stamps, postcards, matchbooks and, in this case, a knife.
“From time immemorial the sport of bowling has held a place in the pastimes of mankind, not as prominently in past centuries as in the present, but sufficiently to warrant notice in the chronicles of the ancients,” declared the Spalding Athletic Library in an 1892 issue dedicated to bowling. To support this claim, the magazine somewhat irrelevantly noted that Romans hurled stones “upon the heads or breasts of their foes.”
In the summer of 1900, Francis Arthur Coleridge, a 30-year-old Englishman with the Indian Civil Service, made a brief visit to Wonsan aboard the Japanese steamship Tarien Maru. Coleridge had a keen eye for detail and a deft pen in describing the port — its charms and vexations. There were things that he found intriguing and quaint, while others struck him as frustrating, yet amusing — the Korean post office being one of the latter.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Wonsan was, for the most part, merely a brief stopover for steamships traveling between Shanghai, Vladivostok and Japanese ports. It was one of those places that travelers occasionally mentioned in their travelogues but rarely devoted much ink to describing. Fortunately for us, Francis Arthur Coleridge was an exception.
Every neighborhood has its secrets. Behind the facades of clean storefronts, tastefully decorated interiors and the busy sounds of pedestrians going to and from work or school, some buildings have dark histories. If only the walls could talk — some eventually do.
In September 1884, the Royal Oak Saloon arrived in pieces and was laboriously carried up the hill to the consulate site. However, details of its reconstruction are agonizingly absent. The port was undergoing a building spree, and manpower was scarce. The American consulate had a team of builders from Nagasaki; did the British also have a team, or did they rely upon local labor?
When Sir Harry Parkes visited Jemulpo (modern-day Incheon) in the spring of 1883, he had almost nothing positive to say. The port, he observed, was nothing more than a collection of “wretchedly-built huts,” and there were no signs of trade or industry. He noted, “the surrounding country yields barely sufficient rice for the consumption of its small population.”