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Hendrik Hamel was supercargo and part owner of the Sparwehr adventure, and what he did not own was the property of Captain Johannes Maartens. The latter spoke little English, Hendrik Hamel but little more. The sailors, with whom I gathered, spoke Dutch only. But trust a sea-cuny to learn Dutch ay, and Korean, as you shall see. Toward the end we came to the charted country of Japan.
At other times it was a score, for the mast reeled drunkenly to the rolling and pounding of the hull on which rested its splintered butt. I began the climb. But they did not wait. One by one they unlashed themselves and followed me up the perilous mast. There was reason for haste, for at any moment the Sparwehr might slip off into deep water.
With scarce a pang, when the Sparwehrs' water-casks were filled, I left Raa Kook and his pleasant land, left Lei-Lei and all her flower-garlanded sisters, and with laughter on my lips and familiar ship-smells sweet in my nostrils, sailed away, sea-cuny once more, under Captain Johannes Maartens. A marvellous wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr.
There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it ever having been visited by navigators. Its coast-line was only hinted at in our chart. From all of which we could argue that the inhabitants were as inhospitable as the little of their land we could see. The Sparwehr drove in bow-on upon a cliff.
Sea-cuny I was, but I was man, and to no man would I be beholden in my way with women. Hendrik Hamel might be one time part-owner of the old Sparwehr, with a navigator's knowledge of the stars and deep versed in books, but with women, no, there I would not give him better. He smiled that thin-lipped smile of his, and queried: "How like you the Lady Om?"
Kwan Yung- jin, the provincial governor who had planked and beaten us when we were first cast away, I had shorn of power and banished for ever from appearing within the walls of Keijo. 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.
An hour afterward the Sparwehr slipped off and sank in deep water. Two days and nights saw us near to perishing on that cliff, for there was way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishing-boat found us.
We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on our way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. She was a crazy tub the old Sparwehr, so clumsy and so dirty with whiskered marine-life on her bottom that she could not get out of her own way.
It means the land of the morning calm. Remember, it was between three and four centuries back that I lived, the first white man, on the coral isles of Raa Kook. In those waters, at that time, the keels of ships were rare. I might well have lived out my days there, in peace and fatness, under the sun where frost was not, had it not been for the Sparwehr.
The Sparwehr was a Dutch merchantman daring the uncharted seas for Indies beyond the Indies. And she found me instead, and I was all she found. Have I not said that I was a gay-hearted, golden, bearded giant of an irresponsible boy that had never grown up?
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