Marines and Air Force (3)
Colonel Belcher said, “Since we may be in each other’s company for a long while yet, it would truly be a gentleman’s honor for us to exchange gifts of significance.”
And it would also be a point of honor for him when he returned to London and used the exchange as a veiled insinuation about Her Majesty’s 007, expanding his influence in society.
As befitted an English gentleman, he could hardly come right out and say such things.
Careful questions, deft evasions, ambiguous metaphors, and fantasies of gambling on a promise filled Belcher with something close to sexual excitement.
Taesu, who had no way of knowing about that delusion, also thought Colonel Belcher’s request was not especially unreasonable.
Besides, Taesu was interested in diversifying his trade routes.
After all, nearly everything the French smuggler De Thierry brought over was practically British-made anyway.
France had no stable commercial foothold in the Far East at present. Captain Lapierre of the Gloire, who should have been here in the first place, was busy blowing up Vietnam.
As a result, De Thierry had no choice but to buy wholesale from the British army and the East India Company.
In that case, leaving a line open for direct trade with Britain didn’t seem like a bad idea.
Above all else, Taesu was the sort of man who couldn’t ignore someone asking for a proper price in return. Hadn’t he accepted the national flag cloth?
Thinking that, Taesu looked around.
There, just in time, was Cha Un-hong’s jar of pickled crab, still rolling around on the floor after Arthur Adams had been knocked unconscious.
Taesu packed it into his backpack, then took something else out from there.
“Take it.”
He tossed Colonel Belcher the can of Spam he and Cha Un-hong had left over from a meal a few days earlier.
Cha Un-hong’s eyes widened.
It wasn’t that she was sorry to lose it. She was just dumbfounded. For a moment she wondered if he was picking a fight.
But that was a misunderstanding on the part of someone from Joseon.
The value of this empty can in the mid-nineteenth century was beyond counting.
The thin metal cylinder even Cha Un-hong had once admired.
The lid you could open with bare hands in an age that had no can openers at all.
The vinyl label.
The plastic cap fitted over the top.
For the British, it was alien technology so extraordinary it made them ashamed to think they were supposed to be proudly hosting a science exposition in only a few years’ time.
* * *
Colonel Belcher didn’t know much about metalworking or materials engineering either.
So, for a canned item that was supposed to keep for a long time, he thought the can was too thin, but if it was something meant to be consumed casually within Joseon, it was at least understandable. It was the limit of a liberal arts man.
The liberal arts Colonel Belcher read the printed English on this inexplicable material. And then he noticed other characters that he assumed were probably Joseon script as well.
He had no idea what SPAM meant, but being British gave him a strangely time-spanning sense of familiarity. In any case, without this stuff, a British man of the Second World War would have been forced into vegetarianism.
This is clearly mass-produced. Otherwise there’d be no reason to print on the packaging. A canned good jointly produced by Joseon and Britain?
Pasques was already carrying out a considerable level of economic cooperation with Joseon.
Belcher, ignorant of everything, ground his teeth at the stupidity of the East China command that had sent him here.
That it was top secret was no excuse.
In this era, not knowing another government department’s secrets was not proof of high security awareness but evidence of poor social competence.
What did that mean, if not that they had neither money for bribes nor the network to use them? It was just like Joseon, where if you couldn’t raid the neighboring office, beat them with clubs, and steal the budget, you ended up as some lazy clerk.
And these are the useless commoners who got themselves placed in office through family connections…
At this point, Colonel Belcher had no choice but to step forward.
The Chinese market, just opening up now, was a land of opportunity.
Hong Kong was only the beginning. The position of “governor” was as vast as the immense territory and population of the Far East.
There was no one more suitable than him—a man who was both an “expert on Asia” and “able to smoothly connect with the highest circles of government”—for the office of “Governor-General of Joseon.”
The speed with which self-justification born from wanting to save face turned into grand ambition was astonishing. The latter was less embarrassing, so the two often proved compatible.
If Pasques prepares this weapon inside Joseon and, at the right moment, Her Majesty makes her decision, then he can strike the Joseon leadership. Then I’ll step in.
The Joseon government, attacked from both inside and out at once, would not be able to hold out for even a moment.
And for that plan to come to pass, Colonel Belcher obviously could not be dismissed or sent to prison over the loss of some trivial ship.
On the contrary, he ought to be given a new battleship. Just as if James Bond came back after beating someone half to death, and instead of being arrested for assault, he was handed a new Bond car.
A competitor to Charles de Thierry, the man who was fanning the dream of Joseon’s founding king, had just been born.
* * *
Of course, for Colonel Belcher’s ambitions to be realized, he had to survive and make it back first.
And for that to happen, the Joseon government had to refrain from treating him as an enemy.
But there was one variable in the way.
It was the HMS Royalist, which Captain Ogle had fled with.
Come to think of it, after realizing belatedly that a brig was not suited to ocean voyaging, he had turned back. Even when running away, he had to travel south along the coast the same way he had come.
In other words, he was following Taesu’s fleet.
And midway along the route from Buan to Gangjin lay Haenam—home of the Jeolla Naval Left Command, the strongest swimmers in Joseon.
Just as Taesu’s fleet was nearing Haenam, Jeolla Naval Commander Yi Hwijang received word of the British fleet.
Joseon’s coastal defense network, which linked busy coastal towns and islands like a spiderweb, had honestly spotted the useless foreign ship far too quickly.
“Urgent report from the beacon tower at Yudal Mountain in Mokpo Fort! A two-masted ship, slightly larger than a Daeseon, has passed Mokpo. Shall we raise the beacon and send a mounted messenger?”
As for the stranded Samarang, the officers near Geumpo had been too busy drilling seafood out there when the emergency happened, so they hadn’t been able to report it. Mokpo, which had spotted the Royalist first, had sent word ahead.
If translated into modern terms, what Jeolla Naval Commander heard was this:
There’s been an accident at the factory! Should we call the police and 119?
It was enough to make his teeth ache just imagining it.
This was not a matter that would end with Yi Hwijang alone being exiled.
So many people’s livelihoods depended on the military. It was a business, after all.
It was a headache if some fool stirred up attention and started talking about “reform.” What if some sycophant from a barbarian country, eyes red with ambition, possessed the position of a military ministry clerk and started demanding that they disband the useless navy?
And if someone asked what would happen if things really went wrong, the answer was the same as in the twenty-first century.
Mostly, nothing does go wrong. Most people who jaywalk make it across safely.
That was why the system endured.
So it wasn’t strange that Yi Hwijang first made sure to silence his subordinates.
“Don’t act rashly. A beacon is not something to be lit casually. As the art of war says, an army must be as weighty as Mount Tai! That foreign ship may simply be passing by, so let’s observe for now.”
He was the sort of man who, in the original history, had also merely watched when a French ship arrived and then ended up writing a self-criticism report afterward.
But even such a man as Yi Hwijang was now being swept up by the waves of historical change.
“The sea rats stationed in the navy are all racing over to testify that they saw the foreign ship!”
Come to think of it, the naval command also profited by exploiting the local people in its domain, just like any other pirate group.
Unless he imposed a coastal blockade, he couldn’t seal every eye and mouth shut.
In moments like this, the second-in-command who had to step up for the sake of the organization even if it displeased his superior reported to him.
“If you want to avoid being reproached for the navy being slower than the sailors, Commander, you’ll have to take the field yourself.”
Yi Hwijang let out a groan.
At any rate, without realizing it, the Park Axe fleet, which consisted of nothing more than a few fishing boats, had completely slipped beyond the attention of the most powerful force among the Seven Warlords of the Sea, the Jeolla Naval Left Command.
* * *
As had been proven on Ganghwado, Westerners were brutish and had the custom of smearing excrement on their bodies.
Yi Hwijang led out the majority of the thirty Daeseon under his command and ordered that clean towels and basins of water be made ready as standard issue.
In some cases, he took even more advanced measures.
Among the Western soaps that had started selling in the Imjin River area the previous year, some had drifted as far as Haenam.
Since Joseon soldiers often doubled as merchants, the naval command had heard about it early as well.
There was nothing unusual about that. Soap had already been brought to this very Jeolla region by Hamel two hundred years earlier. It was no accident that Hamel, imprisoned throughout King Hyojong’s reign, managed to escape in the reign of the “hot spring king” Hyeonjong.
The water soldiers, emulating the hygiene-minded monarch, rubbed Western soap over their bodies as if it were an amulet.
The belief that bad odors cause disease was not superstition but science, even in Europe at present. The radiant modernization of scientific Joseon filled the fleet with fragrance.
The total available strength of the Jeolla Naval Left Command, which had fully adopted Western technology, went out to face the foreign ship.
“Enemy ships ahead…? Fourteen of them!”
Captain Ogle felt it was the moment he had been dreading.
A Joseon Daeseon was not all that much smaller than a six-gun brig.
And there were fourteen of them. Even without cannons, the numbers were overwhelming.
Commander Yi’s desperate caution had turned out to be a perfectly sound tactical judgment.
“What in the world are they doing? We’re not even at war.”
The stunned cry of a noncommissioned officer snapped Captain Ogle back to his senses.
That was right. Britain and Joseon were not at war.
He’d almost forgotten in his very British way and started a war first, but Britain was a “United Kingdom.”
Captain Ogle decided to become Irish from this moment on. Irish, in the midst of the potato famine.
“Raise the white flag and make contact for now. This works out perfectly. We’ll explain our situation and try to get some food!”
There was naturally not much food aboard the little brig Royalist.
But a brig needed a surprising number of hands for its size. At the very least, they would have been better off sharing the dried croaker after they’d run.
The Royalist advanced while requesting relief.
But Captain Ogle should have thought about how the Irish had been treated.
The English were the ones who had forced them into an agricultural colony, driving Irish refugees to the brink of cultural extinction, and then sung at them, “Stop wasting food and get lost, illegal immigrant bastards.” They still sing it in the twenty-first century.
Karma came back around.
Why else would Joseon have appointed Yi Hwijang to the forefront of the Seven Warlords? He was a descendant of a clan that was, by nature, the end of all things for “island pirates.”
He was not Yi Sun-sin. He was descended instead from Yi Rusong, the Ming general who recaptured Pyongyang from the Japanese.
So just as his ancestor had stripped the people of Joseon bare during the Imjin War, his descendant could also reliably make money in exactly the same way. It was the extreme form of Joseon-style bloodline nepotism.
Yi Hwijang, like Konishi’s own Yi Rusong, bulged his neck veins and shouted.
“Those thieves are charging under a white flag! That yellow banner is a command flag, isn’t it? They mean to fight!”
“Isn’t that a white flag? It doesn’t even seem to have any writing on it…”
“You brat, do you think a commander’s eyes are the same as yours?”
Well, after spending so long at sea, the color had faded a bit, so to some eyes it did look vaguely potato-colored.
Shop clothes can look different depending on the monitor, can’t they? Most of the people here couldn’t tell a stain from a character, so no one objected much to that line of reasoning either.
Yi Hwijang shouted the way a modern person would scream at a cockroach in the room and start throwing things.
“Open fire! Fire!”
The soldiers hesitated, then fired the cannon.
The ships that had forgotten their powder—expensive powder, at that—only made a show of firing. In any case, neither side was hitting anything.
* * *
Water columns erupted around the Royalist.
Captain Ogle cried out against the unjust violence of xenophobia.
“Why are they firing at us!”
If it was going to be like this, he might as well have started the battle in the first place.
The Royalist’s long guns could fight from outside the Joseon fleet’s effective range. The carronades were sturdy enough as well.
But Joseon had been sly, showing no hostility until the very last moment, then suddenly opening fire. There had to be an officer in command who had learned the lessons of the Opium War.
“W-We have to return fire!”
“And if we do? We’re just going to die together out here in the sea?”
He could not do that under the honor of HMS Royalist.
The Royalist was a ship that had survived the typhoon that struck Hong Kong six years earlier with only its masts broken. Since then it had suffered a variety of accidents, and three senior crewmen, including the captain, had died.
Captain Ogle was a survivor who had lived through every one of those ordeals. That was both why he had been chosen as Samarang’s escort and why he had run off and abandoned Samarang in the first place.
The commands of Survival King Ogle were abrupt and merciless.
“Run! Turn the helm hard over! The wind? Northwest? You fucking bastard! It was southeast a moment ago! And reef that spanker right now!”
This wasn’t just panic. Whether they fought or fled, it was better for the Royalist to break away.
The trouble was that with fourteen ships firing cannon at such point-blank range, it was hard not to be hit by at least one.
What happened should be called an accident more than a hit.
“The mast’s been struck!”
Among the two masts of the brig, the mainmast was slammed dead-on by the round shot.
And that mainmast was one that had broken in the typhoon six years ago and been repaired.
Captain Ogle stared blankly up at the falling mast.
It must have been exactly the same expression the Japanese soldiers in Pyongyang had worn when they were struck by the cutting-edge artillery Yi Rusong had brought with him.
* * *
The soldiers marveled at the bloodline power of Yi Rusong’s clan, which had annihilated the island pirates without mercy.
So this was what it meant to have a pirate king for a father. The soldiers shouted in triumph.
But the cheer did not last long.
“Huh?”
The Royalist, with its mast broken and bent, slipped completely out of control and began moving in a direction opposite to what the helmsmen and bowmen intended.
The Royalist had originally tried to flee.
Which meant it now looked as though it were charging straight into the Joseon fleet.
A brig has the same kind of sails on its foremast as on its mainmast. The light northwest wind was pushing the Royalist along, slow but steady.
“I-It’s going to hit!”
Commander Yi’s flagship was stationed a little farther back, as befitted a cautious commander, but the Jeolla sailors split apart swiftly with the maneuverability of a galley—something an English sailing ship could never imitate.
So the flagship and the Royalist collided head-on.
A Joseon Daeseon and a brig were not very different in size. In other words, the two were joined side by side.
Then Yi Hwijang was seized by the memory of his ancestor.
Yi Rusong had certainly brought down Pyongyang and driven the Japanese all the way back to Gaeseong when his cannons were in full supply.
But when he unexpectedly met the Japanese at Byeokjegwan “without artillery,” his famed Liaodong cavalry had been nearly wiped out. He himself had nearly died.
This was exactly that same situation.
The panicking British navy realized it was time for the marines and gripped their guns one by one. In any case, if Joseon couldn’t use its cannons, this side would win. The British were not exactly sane either.
Of course, as Taesu had shown, if Britain was the Marines, then Joseon was the Air Force.
The Joseon soldiers leapt all at once.
They kicked off the deck and shot into the sky, then soon plunged into the sea and swam.
The soap bubbles raised by the water soldiers became beacon signals at once. Other ships, accustomed to CSAR, rowed backward while deftly hauling their comrades aboard.
In an instant, Yi Hwijang was surrounded by British marines.
Just like Yi Rusong, who had been defeated at the final moment by the Mongol army and captured to die.
A useless hope seized Yi Hwijang—that these Westerners might, at least, be a little better than the Mongols.
Author’s Note
1. The song sung by the English is a famine song, and its content is as described in the novel. Englishmen still sing it often in the twenty-first century whenever they want to insult an Irish football team.