Oh, and Johannes Maartens.  Discipline is well hammered into a sea-cuny, and, despite my new greatness, I could never forget that he had been my captain in the days we sought new Indies in the Sparwehr.  According to my tale first told in Court, he was the only free man in my following.  The rest of the cunies, being considered my slaves, could not aspire to office of any sort under the crown.  But Johannes could, and did.  The sly old fox!  I little guessed his intent when he asked me to make him governor of the paltry little province of Kyong-ju.  Kyong-ju had no wealth of farms or fisheries.  The taxes scarce paid the collecting, and the governorship was little more than an empty honour.  The place was in truth a graveyard—­a sacred graveyard, for on Tabong Mountain were shrined and sepultured the bones of the ancient kings of Silla.  Better governor of Kyong-ju than retainer of Adam Strang, was what I thought was in his mind; nor did I dream that it was except for fear of loneliness that caused him to take four of the cunies with him.

Gorgeous were the two years that followed.  My seven provinces I governed mainly though needy yang-bans selected for me by Yunsan.  An occasional inspection, done in state and accompanied by the Lady Om, was all that was required of me.  She possessed a summer palace on the south coast, which we frequented much.  Then there were man’s diversions.  I became patron of the sport of wrestling, and revived archery among the yang-bans.  Also, there was tiger-hunting in the northern mountains.

A remarkable thing was the tides of Cho-Sen.  On our north-east coast there was scarce a rise and fall of a foot.  On our west coast the neap tides ran as high as sixty feet.  Cho-Sen had no commerce, no foreign traders.  There was no voyaging beyond her coasts, and no voyaging of other peoples to her coasts.  This was due to her immemorial policy of isolation.  Once in a decade or a score of years Chinese ambassadors arrived, but they came overland, around the Yellow Sea, across the country of the Hong-du, and down the Mandarin Road to Keijo.  The round trip was a year-long journey.  Their mission was to exact from our Emperor the empty ceremonial of acknowledgment of China’s ancient suzerainty.

But Hamel, from long brooding, was ripening for action.  His plans grew apace.  Cho-Sen was Indies enough for him could he but work it right.  Little he confided, but when he began to play to have me made admiral of the Cho-Sen navy of junks, and to inquire more than casually of the details of the store-places of the imperial treasury, I could put two and two together.

Now I did not care to depart from Cho-Sen except with the Lady Om.  When I broached the possibility of it she told me, warm in my arms, that I was her king and that wherever I led she would follow.  As you shall see it was truth, full truth, that she uttered.