The Marines and the Air Force, Part 2
When people think of Geomundo, they usually think only of Britain. But in fact, seven years later, in 1854, Russia would also come to Geomundo.
It was part of the so-called Great Game. No one had ever granted either side a permit to rule the Eurasian backwaters, and yet there they were, playing away as if the place belonged to them.
In 1854, Admiral Yevfimy Vasilievich Putyatin would find himself in a deeply embarrassing situation.
The terror of foreign ships had faded by then, and the Joseon people, now a little more accustomed to them, came swarming aboard in numbers of more than a hundred.
They wanted to see the strange sight for themselves. Even in the past, when Westerners washed ashore in Joseon, the crowd would usually begin by stripping them of their clothes.
The shape of things was still more or less the same now.
Only a little more hostile.
“Our guild master climbed aboard the enemy ship alone, just like when he shattered the old French triumph! If that isn’t righteousness, what is there to hesitate about?”
As Cha Un-hong shouted and thrust the crab jar forward like a club, the spirit of King Yeongjo, who had founded the Special Rescue Corps, descended upon everyone present.
They rigged ropes with the determination to stuff that obnoxious barbarian into a wooden chest for eight days and nights straight.
For fishermen, there is no climbing rope as convenient as Taesu’s.
But these were people who fought whales from skiffs on the open sea. Their strength might have fallen short of Taesu’s, but when it came to handling ropes or moving their bodies over water, they were far better than he was.
Captain Belcher and the sailors of the Samarang suddenly found themselves facing a rainstorm of boarding party troops falling from the sky.
The sailors tried to resist. But they had just been brawling over whether to haul cargo or not, and they were not ready.
Arthur Adams, the Samarang’s assistant surgeon and zoologist, took a direct hit from Cha Un-hong’s crab jar, hurled in from the starboard side.
The tilted deck had made him lose his footing, so for a moment he looked as if he were bearing down on Taesu in a threatening way. Adams, an authority on crustaceans, felt the horror of Joseon crabs in his skull and collapsed.
By the time the sailors came to their senses, the distance between Taesu and Captain Belcher was already too great for weapons to matter.
Colonel Belcher had the rare experience of looking up at an Oriental.
Taesu asked, “Who are you?”
English?
Of course, Captain Belcher had not been told the full appearance of the “British agent.”
But the moment he heard English, and saw the Union Jack lying at Taesu’s feet, a strange sense of purpose swept through him.
It’s him!
Colonel Belcher, an expert on Joseon, knew very well that there was no one in Joseon who could speak English.
Still, he could not understand why this man seemed so unfriendly. Nor why he had insulted the British flag.
Could he be worried that his identity will be discovered by the Joseon people who came with him?
In any case, Belcher decided to answer the agent’s rude question first. Even without looking at his age, there was no way a man of color could possibly outrank him.
“I am Sir Edward Belcher, captain of His Majesty’s Royal Navy vessel HMS Samarang. Now state your name.”
“People call me Axe.”
Taesu spoke with the air of a man utterly unmoved by the captain’s title or the honorific of sir.
“Want to buy some dried croaker?”
* * *
Captain Belcher was a man who had gathered hundreds of Joseon words in Jeju and Geomundo.
So he knew what ax meant.
As a Joseon name, then, it must mean he’s a Joseon-born agent cooperating with Britain. At first I thought he was someone hired from China.
But he could not begin to guess what kind of intelligence code the codename Axe’s gulbi referred to.
Could it mean gull and bee?
Even absurd ideas like that crossed his mind. Since both were also common ship names, it only made the confusion worse.
Fortunately, Taesu explained before any misunderstanding could take root.
“Since your ship’s in this state, you’ll need food before a rescue vessel comes. We’ll sell you a large quantity of dried fish.”
Only then did Captain Belcher feel ashamed.
Gathering his composure, he decided to wring out as much information as possible first.
“But why would the Joseon people sell this to us? How did you know we had run aground and prepare fish in advance? I mean…”
Belcher’s words were cut off by a sudden volley of glances.
They were not Joseon people. They were British sailors, all staring at him.
“Captain, we don’t know how things will turn out. It’s not like we’ve got no money at all, so why aren’t we buying the fish?”
That was the effect of Taesu speaking in English.
Colonel Belcher, who had been about to ask Taesu an important question, flared up at once.
“What does fish matter at a time like this! We’ve got plenty of provisions in the hold!”
They did, in a sense. Ship’s biscuits hard enough to require the bite of a hyena, “boiled to a rolling boil” orange juice for preventing scurvy, and beef with the texture of rock salt, to name a few.
These were such awful rations that even in Joseon, where yellow croaker was traditionally prized, it would have been hard to refuse the fragrant brininess of Honam gulbi, which was said to be the finest of the finest.
As for why Taesu’s British canned goods had vanished and they had returned to a diet fit for the Age of Exploration, one could only answer that canned food still did not command such widespread trust.
Last year, the HMS Terror and others dispatched to explore the Arctic route had met a fateful end worthy of the very stars themselves.
And the leading theory was that bargain-bin canned food had caused food poisoning and lead poisoning.
Colonel Belcher was one of that theory’s supporters. That was why there were hardly any canned goods aboard the Samarang.
Besides, the Samarang’s sailors were not simply rebelling because they hated navy rations.
They trusted their captain even less than they trusted canned food.
“The Royalists ran off, didn’t they? We don’t even know whether we’re supposed to be stuck here for one year or several, and you say we’ve got enough?”
“You dragged us into this hellhole! Hurry up and hand over something, anything, and get the fish over here!”
At a moment like this, even the lash was hard to use. What a disgrace it would be in front of all these foreigners.
Belcher was gritting his teeth when a report came in.
“The tide is coming in!”
It was time for the tide to change. Belcher was overjoyed.
“Stop talking nonsense and cling to the ship! It’s high tide! We can get out of here!”
He glanced at Taesu as he said it, but Taesu only stood there in silence.
He looked as though he already knew the future.
And the future foreseen by a regressor was never wrong.
“The ship... the ship isn’t rising!”
“Water’s pouring in through the shattered starboard side and the bottom!”
Belcher snapped to attention. There was a task that had been interrupted before the Joseon people boarded, because of the sailors’ mutiny.
“Move the provisions and opium up onto the deck, now!”
The sailors did not want to. Both were things they could not eat anyway, so why risk their lives hauling them?
Before long, the opium essential for calling for rescue, whether British or Joseon, and the voyage provisions that had kept the crew alive until now were all submerged beneath seawater.
Fortunately, the water did not rise any farther, but the Samarang was now little more than scrap.
The sailors and petty officers stared blankly around the ship.
Only the Joseon fishing boats, all around them, singing of full nets, tempted the British Navy.
It was not a siege from all four sides. It was gulbi from all four sides.
“Captain, only a little canned food is still intact. We really ought to buy the fish now…”
“Shut up! The opium’s ruined, so what are we supposed to trade with? This is all because you fools kept mumbling! Hanging! You’re all going to the gallows!”
But that was only Belcher’s British prejudice speaking.
To his surprise, there was a way to trade that did not involve opium.
“I’ll take guns, bullets, and swords instead.”
It was all of the Samarang’s weapons except for the cannon artillery, which could not be removed.
* * *
The moment I decided to make that deal was when I heard Cha Un-hong’s explanation in Geokpo.
Gangjin, being Song Sang territory, knew military matters extremely well.
“Gangjin’s Jeolla barracks may have everything, but there is one thing that’s always in short supply.”
“What is it?”
“Weapons.”
I asked whether the place was basically just a coastal city with barracks in its name, but I was told it was indeed a military base.
“So we often have matchlocks brought in from Tsushima. It’s not really smuggling, and it all gets submitted to the court anyway.”
Only then did I understand.
We had not done such a great job hiding our little promised land on Ganghwado.
For local military groups to trade weapons with foreigners or stockpile them was just normal business. What the court truly feared was things like red ginseng, which was supposed to become the court’s and the king’s money.
Then why couldn’t we do the same sort of trade with Britain that we had done with France?
It might not have been a merchant vessel, but like de Thierry, if you wanted to travel these seas in this era, you had to have at least some weapons.
Are you only hearing what you want to hear from Cha Un-hong’s explanation too? I said it was all submitted to the court. This isn’t just some peddler dragging a rifle on his back and selling it off. Even so, it’s a barracks!
Maybe because he spent all his time in the mountains, he didn’t really understand how Joseon worked.
I should’ve realized back in Chungcheong Province, when Un-hong was selling pistols while firing them. Joseon was a free-trade zone for weapons.
That’s not actually allowed, you know?
But it had gone through, hadn’t it?
There was no need to keep going on and on about it.
Just look at how the Joseon people had flocked to me and followed the ship by the dozens. Wasn’t that proof enough?
That’s because, idiot—because of that, I mean...
Forget it. This was not the time for ghosts. It was human time now.
The British ship was stranded, unable to move in any direction.
And I had exactly the one thing those people needed most: food.
* * *
Colonel Belcher was about to shout that it was absurd.
It would be far more British to attack the fishing boats nearby and loot their dried croaker.
But his protest was cut off by Taesu’s next move.
Taesu picked up the Union Jack lying on the deck.
“Why would you need guns and blades right now? Unless Britain was planning to invade Joseon by force, it shouldn’t matter.”
The gesture triggered a misunderstanding that had nothing to do with Taesu’s real intention.
It’s a warning not to forget that he’s a British agent!
Yes, he had almost forgotten, but Codename Axe was a 007 in service to Her Majesty.
If the Joseon authorities discovered this ship now, Britain would not be able to avoid suspicion of war. After all, France had invaded Joseon just last year.
And after that, hunting British spies inside Joseon would be a natural measure.
If that ended with Britain losing its foothold inside Joseon, the one place capable of checking French aggression, then it was no longer something Colonel Belcher could handle on his own.
At that moment, the captain’s gentlemanly mind, so well versed in classical education, recalled another meaning of Axe.
Fasces.
An axe bound together with rods.
Like the geumbyeol buwol of the East, which symbolized a license to kill freely, this too represented authority of a similar sort.
Why was the symbol of murder an axe and not a sword?
Because the axe had a far older pedigree. Compared with the Acheulean hand axe that Cain may have brought down on his brother’s head, a sword was a thoroughly modern weapon.
That fasces was also the etymological root of the fascism Taesu knew. If history had changed and fascism had emerged in the East, it might have been called buwol-ism.
Colonel Belcher felt the authority hidden behind the codename.
Fasces was clearly taking orders from a level above even the East India-China Command.
The motion with the flag was proof enough. Naturally so, since it was the cheat code that allowed Britain to maintain influence over Joseon without “supporting diplomatic debt.”
It was pointless to object that this line of reasoning leapt a little too far.
If that was the only way to preserve Belcher’s career and avoid a court-martial, then reality had to work that way.
The car accident involving the company whose stock I bought could never be sudden acceleration; it had to be driver error. The scandal involving the party I support could never be true; it had to be fake news from the opposing party.
This wasn’t only about immediate gain or loss.
It was because otherwise I’d be the fool. That part mattered more.
So the more “rational” people believed themselves to be, the worse this tendency became. The only place where “critical support” really functioned was in baseball, where reason barely got involved at all. “You bastards, just quit baseball already.”
Colonel Belcher was very rational.
So he did not struggle to infer the second meaning hidden in Taesu’s gesture either.
This was also the answer to Belcher’s earlier question—how Taesu had known in advance and prepared the croaker.
Fasces was taking orders from the British government and had already received advance navigation intelligence from headquarters.
That was why he had come here to prevent the Samarang from causing a commotion while trying to secure voyage provisions for no good reason, and why, once they had run aground and could no longer possibly avoid discovery, he was now trying to turn them into a “peaceful science vessel.”
Colonel Belcher was not really a man of conquest, but more of an explorer.
He immediately converted the Samarang into a science vessel and disabled its weapons upgrade. The cannons were still there, so if worst came to worst, he could fire them anywhere like radiation.
Taesu’s final words gave Colonel Belcher perfect confidence.
“We can’t use this flag anyway, so I’ll take it as a souvenir.”
Of course, Taesu’s behavior was only a rehash of a previous successful operation.
It was the same trick as before, when he had been given a French flag by de Thierry and used it to claim credit for “repelling a foreign ship.”
If Taesu wanted to distribute Western weapons in bulk without drawing suspicion, this was the minimum safety measure.
But Colonel Belcher, now thoroughly possessed by intelligence work, instantly understood the situation.
That was why he had struck the Union Jack with the axe in the first place.
Now that the Royalists had fled, as long as there was no British flag, they could pretend to be people of another country whenever they wanted.
This was not nonsense. There was already precedent for it forty years earlier.
British sailors aboard the Minerva-class frigate HMS Phaeton had used the exact same method to swap flags and infiltrate Nagasaki in disguise.
Then they took a Dutch civilian hostage and threatened to blow this orange all to pieces and turn Nagasaki harbor into a sea of fire if they didn’t bring food immediately.
It’s true.
That is why the Arrow Incident, with all its flag-insulting and whatnot, gets dismissed as nothing more than a fabricated excuse for war.
This disgrace, which laid bare the complete incompetence of the shogunate’s defense system, ultimately ended in the hostage-taker’s victory.
Anyone who knew this incident would have to be deeply connected to the upper reaches of the Royal Navy.
Having become even more certain of his own guess, the colonel hurried to match the rhythm.
“R-right! No, in fact, give us a few other flags too. You there, bring out the naval ensign and all the spare flags!”
He felt quite ashamed that, if only he had been a little smarter, he would not have had to say something so unnatural.
Belcher’s conviction that he could not possibly lose to an Oriental soon gave him another good idea.
“Could you perhaps grant me a small souvenir as well?”
Author’s Note
1. The statement that “the barracks have no weapons but trade is highly developed” comes from Haeam Kim Eungjeong, a scholar from Gangjin in the 16th–17th centuries.
2. The Annals of King Sunjo contains the following report:
“Recently, gunpowder, bullets, swords, and spears have been laid out in shops and sold at will; some have even formed guilds to conduct wholesale trade.”
“Given the mention of intelligence from the Three Military Commands (Hunryeondogam, Eoyeongcheong, and Geumwiyeong), it is highly likely this took place in the capital region. This shows that large-scale weapons trading was rampant even in the capital and its environs.”
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