Hamel's Memory, Part 3
The chain of events bore a striking resemblance to the Putney affair from forty years earlier, when Britain had run wild in Nagasaki.
An official naval force had illegally entered another country’s land.
They had even tried to swap flags and pass themselves off under a false nationality—at least that part was true of the Samarang side.
And, finally, they had taken hostages and threatened to kill them if they weren’t given food.
That last part was unfolding right now in Gangjin.
Captain Ogle, ever the civil servant, had copied the precedent from forty years ago to the letter.
“If food supplies negotiated with the Joseon government are not provided by noon today, I will execute the commander of the Joseon navy!”
Back during the Putney affair, it had been the Dutch in Nagasaki who’d threatened to carry out executions if they weren’t given food.
And now that the enemy wasn’t even European, there was even less reason to hold back. The starving sailors looked at each other with expressions that seemed to ask whether, in the old European tradition, they might be allowed to eat the corpse of the condemned man one bite at a time.
But that, too, was an Eastern tradition.
Having decided to beat the foreigners down, and knowing full well that no witnesses could be left behind, Provincial Military Commander O Chi-hyeon—who had come all the way to the harbor mouth to direct the battle himself—snorted.
“You think we’ll even blink?”
All he had to do was report that I Hee-jang had died from the abuse of the Westerners before he even made it to Gangjin.
That wasn’t delusion. Once a man was captured by the enemy, wasn’t he already dead as a general? O Chi-hyeon’s logic, so proud and so concerned with honor, had no holes in it at all.
The Military Headquarters could be silenced whenever he wished. More precisely, O Chi-hyeon could strike deals with the capital’s aristocratic clans and make sure the king would accept the report even if he “knew” the truth.
There was no way around it.
Judging by the foreign ship, there were at most fifty soldiers aboard.
By contrast, Gangjin Military Headquarters had ten thousand men on paper and five hundred stationed there at all times, if one counted the actual personnel.
The fact that most of those five hundred were clerks or craftsmen did nothing to cow O Chi-hyeon. In Joseon, they were all soldiers, weren’t they?
So O Chi-hyeon thrust out his baton with pride.
“Bury every last one of those half-formed foreign bastards under the sea. Fire!”
The patrol vessels surrounding the Royalist opened fire all at once.
* * *
“Starboard hit! Two carronades disabled!”
“Sh-should we kill the commander?”
“Idiot, how’s that supposed to get us food!”
“Well, maybe some meat would still come out of it...”
Captain Ogle hastily reined in the subordinates who were beginning to lose their minds.
“Fire everything at the Joseon troops around us! Crush their spirit with the first shot. And... don’t worry about collision, just get the ship alongside the dock no matter what!”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. What is our operational objective?”
At the petty officers’ question, Ogle realized he had made the order sound a little too much like a pulp adventure novel and corrected his mistake at once.
“If one man isn’t enough, then two. Capture the Joseon commander standing on the dock right now. Then disperse the Joseon troops immediately and resume the food negotiations!”
Only then did the soldiers understand, and the Royalist’s remaining guns fired in a furious volley.
The military vessels that had needlessly boxed the Royalist in and forced it to fully expose both broadsides were smashed to pieces without mercy.
Of course, if the Joseon troops kept returning fire without “breaking,” then in the end it would be the Royalist that sank.
More shots came in, one after another. By now, the port-side guns were ruined too, and there were no usable weapons left on starboard.
Ogle clenched his teeth.
Should they run now? But how, with a ship that had almost lost all mobility?
And then, in the very next moment, someone utterly unexpected came to the captain’s aid.
* * *
Kim Deuk-seong, a merchant from Nanjido who was overseeing this profiteering scheme as an executive of the Gyeonggang Merchant Guild, was watching the battle from atop a grain-hauling gyeongseon, a Han River merchant boat.
He clicked his tongue.
“So that was the Military Commander’s scheme. That’s why he was selling us rice and provisions at such outrageous prices.”
His subordinates were shaken as well, though not because the fight had broken out.
“What should we do? If we take all of that on, we’ll be...”
They’d all be buried together beneath the bright golden sand of the Han Riverbank before long, mom and dad and siblings and all. The Gyeongsang merchants did not forgive fools like that.
Kim Deuk-seong drew a long breath through his nose.
Then he looked around at his men.
“If the government troops win over there, then yes, that’ll be the end of it.”
The men exchanged glances.
“But if the barbarians win, then the Military Headquarters will have no choice but to buy food from us and hand it over to them.”
Only then did the subordinates understand what he was saying.
But even by Gyeongsang merchant standards, that was no easy thing to say aloud.
“You mean... we help the foreigners and stand against the government troops? That would be treason.”
“Who said anything about helping the foreigners? I never said that. But with so many boats crowding this harbor, I’m afraid the government vessels might bump into one another.”
If they still didn’t get it after that, then he’d have to start by throwing the idiot into the sea.
The Gyeongsang merchants immediately signaled the other ships.
Eight of the Gyeongsang boats—each much larger than a naval vessel—suddenly began to “missteer.”
Bang! Crash!
The Navy’s carefully fixed aim on the Royalist went wildly off target at once. Some ships even ended up firing into one another and sinking themselves.
After all, the navy had only been patched together from different units, and if they weren’t in the positions they were assigned, they couldn’t even fight properly.
So the sailors resorted to screaming instead.
“You insane merchant bastards! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh dear, our apologies. My hand slipped.”
Back in the days of the late king, these were the same men who had encouraged mass starvation in Hanseong just to drive rice prices up, even while the high officials themselves were going hungry.
And the punishment, of course, had ended with only a few tails handed over as scapegoats. The Gyeongsang merchants had never feared the court even once.
The Royalist was freed from its hellish bombardment.
Captain Ogle did not waste the chance.
“Advance to the dock! Capture the Joseon commander on the pier and turn the battle around!”
It was, in truth, a sound judgment.
The Royalist’s sailing skills were limited, but it was still morning.
The tide was coming in on this coast of Gangjin.
The incoming water shoved the brig straight into the harbor landing. Fearing that Joseon cannon fire might resume at any moment, the British marines stormed ashore with ferocious momentum.
* * *
“P-Provincial Commander, sir! Please, retreat at once!”
“What nonsense! Back in the Imjin year, I charged through rainlike volleys of musket fire and arrows while fighting those Western rebels, and I shot down how many of them? What are you lot so afraid of?”
O Chi-hyeon sprang up with righteous force. Whether he had any right to be righteous was another matter, but in any case, he was righteous.
For now, he decided to deal with those mad Gyeongsang merchants. There was no longer any need to worry about their backing.
“Have the navy kill those Gangjin townsmen right where they stand!”
The flag of the Military Commander was carried off by a messenger at a run.
As orders went, it wasn’t a bad one for a man who had seen real combat.
Of course, the Gyeongsang merchants had bigger boats than the navy, and at least ten times the combat experience.
But Joseon troops naturally became a hundred times stronger when dealing with their own civilians.
O Chi-hyeon looked back toward land.
The English barbarians who had landed numbered only twenty or thirty at most.
Meanwhile, more than a hundred soldiers still stood around the Military Commander. There was no way they should lose on either sea or land.
But on land, unfortunately, there was one thing O Chi-hyeon had overlooked.
The lessons of the recent Opium War.
The exchange ratio between the British and the Qing had been more than twenty to one. And even after paying that price, the Qing had still lost the war.
There were plenty of reasons Joseon should be weaker than the Qing, and not a single reason it should be stronger. If there had been, they would already have achieved the northern expedition that every Joseon soul longed for, and then some.
Mathematically speaking, O Chi-hyeon should have had at least six hundred men.
That said, the Joseon troops were not annihilated.
Not because the British were hungry or exhausted. Joseon troops simply did not meet ugly, humiliating ends like total annihilation.
After one thunderous exchange of gunfire, O Chi-hyeon—furious that all his men had vanished—finally drew his sword and prepared to fight alone.
And then a marine, acting on impulse, smashed him with the butt of his gun.
Crack!
“Hey. Wasn’t that a little too hard?”
“I-I think he’s dead.”
“...”
He was old, so it wasn’t all that surprising.
Captain Ogle’s head was a mess now. Who was supposed to receive the surrender and clean up the battlefield?
A petty officer hurriedly said, “Should we seize the fortress over there? The Jeolla Military Headquarters fortress?”
They had almost seen the kingdom’s richest military post end up ruined by barbarians with fewer than fifty men, but fortunately Ogle shook his head.
“We can’t hold it with this number. And we’re out of ammunition... Let’s get back to the ship. If we move now, I think we can take the upper hand in a naval battle.”
The sea side was, for some reason, in chaos because the Joseon men were busy fighting each other.
With the enemy commander killed, Joseon’s unified command had collapsed. Perhaps a miraculous victory—and a full stomach for dinner—might still be possible.
* * *
Ogle regretted that Joseon hadn’t been given the telescope that would have let them see I Hee-jang’s face, but someone else already had that.
Cha Un-hong, peering through a high-powered pair of compact binoculars that even Britain could not yet manufacture, was stamping her feet in frustration at the chaos before her.
“How did things end up like this?”
Kim Sun-won and Im In-son looked equally stunned.
“We knew those Gyeongsang merchants would make trouble like the Sungdo cucumber sellers, but... this is outright treason.”
“And the Military Commander is just as foolish and greedy. If he was going to attack the English, he should’ve done it properly. Otherwise, he should have quietly carried out the relief orders from the court!”
Then all three of them turned to look at Taesu at once.
But Taesu was only staring out toward the sea.
At a glance, his expression seemed calm, as if nothing had disturbed him.
But the two people who were spiritually and physically connected to him could, at least dimly, see what he was feeling.
Cha Un-hong swallowed.
Taesu was angrier than at any other time she had ever seen him.
* * *
At this rate, Taesu’s plan to send the British ship back quietly and preserve the trade line he had opened with Samarang at Gokpo would be ruined.
If Britain turned hostile to Joseon, then trade would become impossible.
The reasonable objection—that Britain had been the one to strike first—applied to human beings. It did not apply to Britain.
De Thierry’s smuggling route might also be affected. The Promised Land was a crucial part of Taesu’s business empire.
And now he would have nothing to say to Park Jae-bin, who was even now running breathlessly about with the Military Headquarters merchants. It would be hard to avoid the accusation that the Military Headquarters had been shattered after Taesu arrived.
Worse still, if things went badly enough, the Gyeonggang merchants and the Jeolla Military Headquarters—each already burdened with their own sins—might join hands and pin the blame on Taesu.
But Taesu’s fury didn’t seem to come from any of that.
Since she understood his feelings in much the same way Cha Un-hong did, even the mountain spirit—who had been watching nervously—spoke carefully this time.
[There is one method.]
I know.
[You know?]
Instead of answering again, Taesu called his companions over.
First, he spoke to Cha Un-hong.
“Go get the people from the Gokpo guild hall and have them take out every spear and gun in the dried-yellowtail warehouse at the back.”
Cha Un-hong screamed.
“W-wait! Where are you trying to throw yourself into now?”
“The British ship.”
“Why? Why on earth?”
Taesu didn’t answer.
Cha Un-hong strained to hear an answer she hadn’t received.
On an intellectual level, it made sense. Putting aside the other bastards for the moment, it would be best to get rid of the Royalist first.
If they made the Royalist permanently “Hamel” itself, they might win the goodwill of Colonel Belcher, who wanted Captain Ogle dead more than anyone else. As a bonus, it would also reduce the number of mouths spouting useless nonsense.
But Cha Un-hong had the sense that she was thinking about something wrong.
And when she looked at Taesu’s face, she understood what that wrong thing was.
The real problem now was the Gyeongsang merchants, the Military Headquarters, and the British all at once. Their greed, malice, and shamelessness had fused together to create this mess.
Taesu meant to wipe out all of it.
* * *
Taesu also spoke to the others.
“Hobansu and Kim Haengsu, please pick twenty young men as quickly as you can. Tell anyone from the Military Headquarters side who wants to come to step forward as well.”
“I’ll lend a hand too.”
Taesu turned around.
It was Yi Ha-eung, who had come out with Park Jae-bin.
“You, sir?”
He was still young, but that was too Korean a way to think about it. Yi Ha-eung pointed to Ha Jeong-il.
“I brought him because he’s descended from a family of interpreters, but the bow slung across his back isn’t just for show. He’ll surely be useful.”
Ha Jeong-il looked displeased, but Yi Ha-eung moved closer to Taesu and whispered,
“Since Jang Sun-gyu is with the king’s man as an errand-runner, I can imagine the situation well enough. As far as I know, His Majesty doesn’t want to fall out with the English either. I’ll do what I can to press the matter later, so go and earn your military merit.”
Yi Ha-eung hadn’t heard it directly from Lee Hwan either.
But he knew enough about the Chongwiyeong affair, and he was also a contact for smuggling aphrodisiacs, so he could guess why Lee Hwan had chosen “relief” here and nowhere else.
Taesu gave no answer and strode toward the other side of the harbor. Cha Un-hong, realizing that if she kept trying to stop him she would only lose the very men meant to support him, clenched her teeth and ran in the opposite direction.
* * *
Samarang had taught them this much: once the tide turned, it took time for it to turn back again.
The incoming tide that had helped the Royalist earlier was now working against its departure.
“Wind! Why isn’t there any wind?”
“T-there is wind, sir. It’s just that our sails are a bit...”
“Shut up and keep your hands moving! Hoo. At least the fact that the Joseon navy has collapsed is a blessing.”
The Joseon fleet seemed to have no time left to worry about the British, what with its battle against the Gyeongsang merchants. The Gyeongsang men, too, were fighting back against the government troops who were outraged at being made to suffer because of one tiny “mistake.”
Then a report came in.
“A Joseon ship is approaching rapidly from this side!”
“What? Damn it, smash them with cannon fire!”
“There are no working guns on the starboard side!”
“Do I have to explain everything to you? Shoot a few of them down when they get close! They’ll run then!”
Only then did gunfire reach their ears. A veteran soldier would have recognized the sound at once: Brown Bess muskets.
Cursing his stupid subordinates, Ogle turned back to the sails. Just a little more, and they’d...
Ping!
The captain felt a sharp pain in his ear. He dropped low at once, a reflex born of long experience.
Over his head, the bullets from the Brown Besses were flying.
“What the hell is this! Joseon fire? Return fire! Return fire!”
But most of the Royalist’s crew had been busy with the helm and the sails until just moments before. Having lost the advantage of the first firing position, the soldiers kept popping their heads up and then ducking back down in a panic.
Ogle snapped in fury and grabbed a musket himself.
But he made a mistake unworthy of a survivor king.
The most necessary skill in survival isn’t strength or courage or anything like that.
It’s vigilance—knowing how to avoid the elements of death.
And the element of death here was not those Joseon men’s British-made muskets.
The moment he thought the ship’s bow-side rail had been broken, death fell from the sky.
“...!”
Taesu, having lowered himself to minimize the impact, didn’t even waste that motion.
He swept his leg straight through the captain’s ankle with a kick. The captain had to endure both the pain of a broken ankle and the disorienting upheaval of the world turning upside down.
He did not have to endure it for long.
Before the captain even hit the ground, Taesu chopped his neck in two.
The head spun away from the body in a wild circle.
The last thing Captain Ogle saw was the memory of Hamel lingering in Gangjin.
Joseon men armed with European flintlock muskets were swarming aboard.
The scene, filtered through the eyes of a severed head, was upside down and strangely warped, but it was unmistakably the wish King Hyojong had once sought to fulfill through Hamel.
Author’s Note
1. Kim Deuk-seong was a real historical figure. What exactly he was doing will probably be revealed in the next chapter.