The Ganghwa Treaty, Part 2
“Shall we sink them?”
The meaning behind Captain Dupré’s urgent question was easy enough to guess.
He, too, had already realized that this war was not going to end in overwhelming victory, but in careful negotiation.
The seizure of the southern fortress battery at Chojijin, which should have been a matter of taking candy from a baby, had been blocked not by the Joseon regular army, but by some so-called national guards, la Garde nationale.
As a result, Érigone’s surviving ground force—about fifty men—was unable to push back the thousand Joseon soldiers now massed against them, swelled to absurd numbers by the same logic that had turned Chongwiyeong into a golden fleet.
Blaming disease was only proof of a lack of guts.
The British army had won by killing twenty times as many Qing troops with the same sort of force. There was no way the French nation’s sphincter could be any looser than those damned Englishmen’s. This was a matter of national prestige.
But prestige was precisely what they could not afford.
Day by day, the food was rotting faster than it could be eaten, turning to diarrhea in their stomachs. Captain Cécile’s strategic vision—built on the assumption of a swift, decisive campaign—had failed completely.
It was time to think about negotiation, and in a situation like this, unnecessary slaughter only deepened not just enmity but the debt owed at the bargaining table.
Captain Cécile shuddered at the itching of his inflamed conjunctivitis and rubbed at his eyes with the sort of motion that looked as though he were trying to dig them out.
If he had kept at it a little longer, he might have become Horatio Nelson, the world’s greatest admiral, and broken through this crisis. Unfortunately, Cécile had taken his hand away halfway through.
Then, with visible irritation, he barked an order.
“They’re not a serious threat. Just drive them off!”
The light 18-pounder guns fired. A small boat or two capsized in bad luck, but there were no direct hits.
The Golden Fleet did not retreat. Instead, it split smoothly to left and right. It was a beautiful haksik formation—a crane-wing deployment, so elegant it almost seemed choreographed.
They had hastily veered away from the Érigone head-on, but that did not mean they had been swept there by the current. It was, after all, the same crane-wing formation Admiral Yi Sun-sin had used.
The Érigone also stopped its half-hearted cannon fire. Then it simply watched the Golden Fleet glide past on both sides.
Captain Dupré, directing the sailors from the deck, narrowed his eyes.
“Wait. What is that?”
Among the Joseon vessels—somewhere between warship and fishing boat—there was one approaching the Érigone along a course that seemed either accidental or deliberate.
With a skeptical expression, Captain Dupré glanced around as though seeking confirmation. “Something is being waved from the boat. Not a white flag... Is it some kind of Joseon cultural object?”
If anything, it was a French cultural object. One officer, after taking a closer look through a telescope, answered.
“A broken silver candlestick. Looks like something used in Mass.”
It was the very object Taesu had received from Kim Dae-geon and handed over to Yi Won-beom.
Captain Dupré knew about the “English agent” Cécile had mentioned. He quickly ordered, “Lower the guns! Don’t fire! And send Father André out here!”
* * *
Taesu did not climb the rope ladder lowered from the ship.
Instead, he reached for the gear he had taken from the future convict kit.
It was a high-strength climbing rope.
At the end of the line was a folding stainless-steel hook with four claw-like prongs. Easy enough to buy online.
Taesu spun the rope around and threw it.
The hook caught firmly on the railing of the deck.
With a light push off the ship’s side, Taesu hauled himself up. Kim Dae-geon, seeing it, thought of the sa-jogu—the four-clawed hook said to have been devised by Admiral Yi for boarding actions during the Imjin War.
But the veteran sailors and officers like Captain Dupré could see what Kim Dae-geon, as a civilian, could not.
What is the material?
For all its simplicity, a “rope” is one of humanity’s earliest tools, capable of serving an astonishing number of functions.
Its value becomes even clearer on the sea, the place closest to the primordial world.
Modern fastening hardware has reduced the need for it, but the skill of solving hundreds of problems with nothing but rope and knots was once basic seamanship.
That was why the French Navy realized at once that the hook and line were made of a material they had never seen before. Much like Cha Un-hong.
And that was not all. The speed with which Taesu kicked off the gunwale was faster than the most seasoned sailor’s, and before long they also caught sight of the diving watch gleaming on his left wrist.
Wristwatches did exist in this era. But they were still closer to “ladies’ jewelry with a timekeeping function” than to anything common.
Captain Dupré scratched his chin, his face full of confusion.
An Asian couldn’t have made that. So, as the captain suspected, is he English? But I’ve never heard of the British military using equipment like that...
Still, Dupré did not remain lost in thought for long.
As a senior officer, he had responsibilities. He quickly bellowed orders and formed his men up.
* * *
After I’d twisted the jaws of those Frenchmen around so they could stop flailing about as they pleased, there was still the matter I’d promised Cha Un-hong.
Opening a private trade channel with the West.
[And how is that any different from the middlemen in Kaesong who deal in ginseng? They’re all just black-market peddlers, aren’t they?]
I told you. Their profits depend on secrecy, so they’ll keep doing things in secret. We’re only starting with smuggling.
That was why I had to come at this exact moment.
At present, France’s chances of winning had dropped dramatically.
That did not mean the Joseon army would annihilate the French.
It meant that if the war continued as it was, Joseon would suffer far greater losses, but France would struggle to achieve anything beyond a pile of Joseon corpses.
In other words, I’d avoided the route where Joseon is ruined and the entire market disappears.
But a total Joseon victory over the West would not necessarily be good, either. In that case, Joseon would conclude that isolation had been the right choice all along.
So I had to close the matter before Joseon achieved complete victory over France.
And for that, I needed Choe Yang-eop’s name.
A Joseon bobusang barging in would only get treated like some 20th-century door-to-door salesman. We needed to front the Joseon Catholic figures who were, as the Mountain Spirit put it, “the illegitimate children of Yanggwi-ja.”
Even Kim Sun-won, who I still couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t off trying to be a pirate king instead of some salted-fish merchant, had done a remarkable job. From my perspective, since I’d be using ships a lot in the future, he was a pretty useful partner.
That said, extreme sports involving climbing a several-meter-tall wooden wall with nothing but a rope? That had not been my intention.
This was the Mountain Spirit’s bullshit “strategy.”
[Westerners are forever boasting of strange and marvelous contraptions. If one looks closely, they are merely a rabble of swindlers who dazzle fools with useless toys and then bleed them dry of coin. We must show that we possess such things too, so they won’t even dare look down on us.]
So this was what he thought my otherworldly magic items were for. I couldn’t decide whether to call him detached from luxury or simply ignorant enough to be brave.
In any case, the open sea was no place for that sort of musing. I tugged the rope back up first.
* * *
Once I was aboard, I was escorted straight to the captain’s cabin.
Maybe they judged the Letter of Thomas Choe Yang-eop I was carrying to be important. Or maybe it was simply proof that Captain Cécile had been driven far enough into a corner.
After reading the letter for a while—which, strictly speaking, was rude, since it had originally been written by Choe Yang-eop to Kim Dae-geon—Cécile finally broke the silence and clamped a pipe between his teeth.
“I’m Captain Jean-Baptiste Cécile. Welcome aboard the Érigone.”
I said nothing.
If he was a British officer or agent, there was no way he wouldn’t know French. Cécile, finding this puzzling, soon came up with an answer.
Seeing as he’s Asian, he must be some high-born sepoy from Madras. That would explain it—if he’s another Asian, it’ll be easier for him to pretend to be Joseon.
Cécile congratulated himself on his deduction. This was roughly how European “science” and “rational thought” worked back then.
At that moment, Kim Dae-geon also realized that I didn’t speak French and opened his mouth in Joseon speech.
“As I said then, this makes the third time we’ve met. Have you been well?”
The answer that came back had all the friendliness of a boot to the face.
“I’d have been better off if it weren’t for you. If I’d known you were just going to come back dragging pirates behind you, I should’ve killed you the first time we met.”
Kim Dae-geon felt admiration before he felt anger.
Even if we had won once, this was still the enemy’s main camp, with hundreds of soldiers. Right there in the captain’s cabin stood several officers, including Captain Dupré, all wearing sabers at their hips.
And yet Taesu was utterly unconcerned. It was the conduct of an ideal chivalrous hero—brash, insolent, and without the slightest fear.
“Render unto God what is God’s, and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. What the hell is a clergyman doing hanging around, expecting anything from the army?”
Kim Dae-geon was silent for a moment, then replied.
“But if Caesar destroys the faith that belongs to God first, then the matter changes. And the reason I am here—well, when the secular world interferes with ecclesiastical authority, the Church has no choice but to interfere with the secular world in turn.”
“And the three-digit number of people who’ve died because of that?”
“A sad thing. We will pray for them. But there are still far more of our brethren who have been killed by the king.”
Just as Captain Cécile was starting to wonder whether these two were secretly colluding in a language he didn’t understand, Taesu pointed at the table with his chin.
“I didn’t come here to trade insults, so I’ll get to the point. Withdraw before you disgrace yourselves any further. As the letter says, you can use the excuse that you’re returning to wait for a reply to the ‘protest letter against the execution of missionaries’ you sent.”
He wasn’t speaking to Kim Dae-geon. After Kim Dae-geon glanced at Taesu for a moment, he translated, and Cécile asked back,
“Is this perhaps a deceitful trick by the Joseon government to make us withdraw? No—and was that letter even truly written by Thomas?”
Kim Dae-geon disliked the way Captain Cécile was trampling on his own dignity.
The handwriting and tone of that letter were Choe Yang-eop’s, and Kim Dae-geon could vouch for it. Even if some other man in Joseon was fluent in Latin, he could not have written it like that.
If there had been any sign of forgery, or if Kim Dae-geon had judged that Choe Yang-eop had been coerced, he would have said so from the beginning.
Even if that meant Choe Yang-eop would die for it. Just how little could they think of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society’s intelligence network to say something like that?
Fortunately, Taesu answered in Kim Dae-geon’s place, rubbing salt into the wound.
“The Joseon government has no need to forge anything. They’re winning by doing nothing at all, so why would they?”
It looked as though the blood in Captain Cécile and Captain Dupré’s faces might drip right out onto the floor, one red drop at a time, as if the facts themselves were cutting them open.
Taesu then shattered the rest of their bones.
“In any case, you have to withdraw. And this time, you’ll be leaving with nothing in your hands. But I’ve come, together with Choe Yang-eop, to propose something better than that.”
The reason he mentioned Choe Yang-eop was obvious.
If they did not accept this proposal, Choe Yang-eop would also have to withdraw.
To heaven.
Under ordinary circumstances, a man who was neither French nor even a priest would not be worth considering in terms of life and death.
But when the very pretext for the expedition was “protest over the killing of priests,” and they were already in debt to the Catholic Foreign Mission Society from the outset, that changed everything.
Choe Yang-eop might have been only a deacon, but in that regard he stood on the same footing as Kim Dae-geon. Together with Choi Bang-je, they were the three original disciples of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society.
And unlike Choi Bang-je, who had died during training, Choe Yang-eop’s death would be the responsibility of an “outside organization” called the navy.
Even if the Catholic Foreign Mission Society were not angry, it would have to be angry. That is what an organization is.
Any cooperation between the navy and the Catholic Foreign Mission Society would naturally be finished. Just as England could not conduct diplomacy without opium, France could not conduct diplomacy without priests.
Captain Cécile struggled to shake the feeling that he was being driven ever more tightly into a dead end.
And on the paper he had unfolded to resist that feeling was written the “good conditions” Taesu had mentioned.
In other words, an unprecedented civilian port opening.
* * *
Yi Ha-eung—still the Heungseon-gun, but not yet the Daewongun Taesu knew he would become—was meeting with General Lee Yusu of Chongwiyeong.
Normally, Lee Yusu should have been leading the front line of the very Golden Fleet that had just been dispatched. That was Chongwiyeong’s current duty.
But if the head of the king’s newly strengthened military force sank into the void, it would be a tremendous loss. King I Hwan would not have wanted that, either.
Lee Yusu felt certain of the king’s mind, just as he felt certain of his own.
The first thing a senior commander needed was not strategy or martial skill. He had to possess, before anything else, the kind of insight that could see through even a king.
That was why Lee Yusu showed no particular guilt as he received Yi Ha-eung safely within the land camp.
“The righteous army raised by the Heungseon-gun, who inspired the people and provided the funds, will remain as a fine example for future ages. Thanks to that, the government forces were able to act without missing the moment.”
Yi Ha-eung suppressed the urge to snort.
Well, he had indeed inspired the people and provided the money. It was just that Jang Sun-gyu, inspired by Park Axe, had been beaten senseless and robbed, and the righteous army had been recruited with that money.
“I’m as worthless as they come, but I am, at least in name, a member of the royal house. If those filthy barbarians invade Gangdo—Ganghwado, where the revered records of our forefathers are kept—how could I not roll up my sleeves?”
In theory, Yi Ha-eung—being a hyeonrok daebu of the royal clan bureau and holding a military title as well—was no lower in rank than Lee Yusu, a second-rank general of Chongwiyeong.
But in theory, the CEO of a subcontractor is no lower than a department head at the main contractor, either. So Yi Ha-eung spoke humbly.
“I also sent a messenger to help, though in the end it was the work of the boatmen and commoners of Ganghwa who rose up. Among them, there was a certain warrior who might have stepped straight out of an ancient chronicle.”
He was bringing up the matter because of the promise he had made with Taesu.
But General Lee Yusu only burst into a hearty laugh.
“Ha! Heungseon-gun, there’s no need for such modesty. Even if the hound or hawk snatches a rabbit, in the end the credit belongs to the hunter holding the whip, doesn’t it?”
Yi Ha-eung wished Taesu were here. He would have loved to see the look on the general’s face when his nose got smashed.
Lee Yusu, whose insight was so specialized in perceiving the king’s mind that he obviously could not imagine Yi Ha-eung’s private thoughts, simply turned to the side.
“So, this is the Western guns and sabers taken at Chojijin?”
“That is correct. Since His Majesty worries about the defenses of the frontier, just as Lady Seonmyo—King Seonjo—once standardized matchlock guns during the Imjin War, these famous Western firearms are also worth using in the military.”
The introduction of new weapons had nothing to do with the anti-Western or enlightenment ideologies. Lee Yusu nodded in agreement.
“I shall make sure to submit the matter for approval.”
“And please do not forget the loyalty of the boatmen, who risked their lives in the midst of fierce battle to seize the enemy’s banner and arms.”
Lee Yusu looked mildly annoyed, but he soon straightened his posture.
Whatever one said, it was poor manners to trample a man’s face just because he was a merchant.
He asked in a gentle voice, “Mentioning it again like that makes me think there must be a man among them that the Heungseon-gun takes a special interest in.”
Yi Ha-eung smiled faintly.
Exactly right.
That man will never end his life as a mere peddler. If I keep him under my command, he will be useful to me one day.
To do that, he would need to bestow as many favors as possible. That was why Yi Ha-eung had taken the risk of mentioning a merchant twice in front of a high official.
But he hid that ambition with practiced ease.
Then he said airily, “Yes. As I mentioned earlier, one of the enemy’s bijang—their deputy commander, the one called De Chene—is a fine warrior, and he even brought a ship to take part in the naval operation.”
Lee Yusu could hardly ask whether that meant Yi Ha-eung wanted compensation rather than a medal of honor. Given his position, he had to believe in the victory of the Golden Fleet.
“His spirit is quite lofty. If he is a merchant whom the Heungseon-gun rates so highly, then he will surely accomplish something this time as well. If he returns, I shall make sure to keep the merits of the righteous army in mind.”