The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers, most of their gear, and most of the day were required to get us down.  They were a poor and wretched folk, their food difficult even for the stomach of a sea-cuny to countenance.  Their rice was brown as chocolate.  Half the husks remained in it, along with bits of chaff, splinters, and unidentifiable dirt which made one pause often in the chewing in order to stick into his mouth thumb and forefinger and pluck out the offending stuff.  Also, they ate a sort of millet, and pickles of astounding variety and ungodly hot.

Their houses were earthen-walled and straw-thatched.  Under the floors ran flues through which the kitchen smoke escaped, warming the sleeping-room in its passage.  Here we lay and rested for days, soothing ourselves with their mild and tasteless tobacco, which we smoked in tiny bowls at the end of yard-long pipes.  Also, there was a warm, sourish, milky-looking drink, heady only when taken in enormous doses.  After guzzling I swear gallons of it, I got singing drunk, which is the way of sea-cunies the world over.  Encouraged by my success, the others persisted, and soon we were all a-roaring, little reeking of the fresh snow gale piping up outside, and little worrying that we were cast away in an uncharted, God-forgotten land.  Old Johannes Maartens laughed and trumpeted and slapped his thighs with the best of us.  Hendrik Hamel, a cold-blooded, chilly-poised dark brunette of a Dutchman with beady black eyes, was as rarely devilish as the rest of us, and shelled out silver like any drunken sailor for the purchase of more of the milky brew.  Our carrying-on was a scandal; but the women fetched the drink while all the village that could crowd in jammed the room to witness our antics.

The white man has gone around the world in mastery, I do believe, because of his unwise uncaringness.  That has been the manner of his going, although, of course, he was driven on by restiveness and lust for booty.  So it was that Captain Johannes Maartens, Hendrik Hamel, and the twelve sea-cunies of us roystered and bawled in the fisher village while the winter gales whistled across the Yellow Sea.

From the little we had seen of the land and the people we were not impressed by Cho-Sen.  If these miserable fishers were a fair sample of the natives, we could understand why the land was unvisited of navigators.  But we were to learn different.  The village was on an in-lying island, and its headmen must have sent word across to the mainland; for one morning three big two-masted junks with lateens of rice-matting dropped anchor off the beach.

When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all interest, for here were silks again.  One strapping Korean, all in pale-tinted silks of various colours, was surrounded by half a dozen obsequious attendants, also clad in silk.  Kwan Yung-jin, as I came to know his name, was a yang-ban, or noble; also he was what might be called magistrate or governor of the district or province.  This means that his office was appointive, and that he was a tithe-squeezer or tax-farmer.