Jan Boonstra's homepage

Chiyngnok

A document, recently found about the shipwreck of the Dutch merchant vessel Sperwer in 1653 on Cheju Island.

 
Introduction to Yi Ikt'ae's account of the wreck of the Sperwer
Translation and annotations © Gari Keith Ledyard 2002  

The following Korean notice of the famous 1653 shipwreck off Cheju Island of the Dutch ship Sperwer comes from a heretofore little known compilation entitled Chiyngnok ("Records of Cheju Governance") by Yi Ikt'ae. The -yng element in the title, meaning "ocean" or "sea," alludes to "Tong'yng" (Eastern Ocean), a poetic sobriquet for Cheju island. Of Yi Ikt'ae not too much can be learned. But we know that he was of the Yn'an Yi lineage, was born in 1633, and was a passer in the special munkwa examination of 1668. From perhaps a dozen references to him in the Veritable Records (sillok) for Kings Hynjong (r. 1659-1674) and Sukchong (r. 1674-1720), we know that he served in a succession of mid-level posts. I have not been able to find any notice of his death. He would have been been 72, Korean age, in 1704, the date of the last sillok reference to him. In signing his preface to the Chiyngnok, dated 1696, he identifies himself as an acting Deputy Commander (haeng chlchesa), a senior 3rd rank military post in the Chlla provincial administration, to which the three districts on Cheju island were then attached. He says that after he arrived for his assignment on Cheju in 1694, he became concerned over the lack of records concerning the history of the island, and after a search of local archives and records compiled this book for the guidance of its future governors. I can find no mention of this work in standard reference works on Chosn dynasty source materials, and it would appear that its existence was unknown beyond Cheju island until recent years.

During the 1990s, a typescript translation of the Chiyngnok from its hanmun (classical Chinese) original into Korean was made by Kim Iksu, a local Cheju scholar. I learned of it just recently through the kindness of Mr. Jan Boonstra. Both the Korean translation and the original Chinese text have been posted on a website controlled by Mr. Henny Savenije. The English translation given here is based solely on the original Chinese written by Yi Ikt'ae.

Yi Ikt'ae's account is of considerable value. Among its distinctive features are fresh details of the capture and interrogation of the Dutch survivors by the Korean authorities, Korean alphabetic transcriptions of the Dutch names of two of the survivors, and an obvious relationship to records later derived from government archives in Seoul by other writers. It seems clear from its content that this document was closely connected with the records relied upon by Sng Haeng (1760-1839) in his notice of the Dutch castaways (see the translation of Sng's account in my book The Dutch come to Korea, Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, Seoul, 1971, pp. 33-35; hereafter cited as Ledyard.) Both mention the early attempt at interrogation before the arrival from Seoul of the earlier Dutch castaway, Jan Janse Weltevree. Although both accounts have topics in common, the details are different and mutually reinforcing. Both speak of the appearance and clothing of the castaways, ways of counting apparently related to roman numerals, and the visual appearance of Dutch writing. After the coming of Weltevree, both give accounts of his and the castaways' strong emotions upon meeting each other, their plea to him to arrange their transfer to Nagasaki and the Dutch factory there, his inability to do that, and his encouragement of them to accept instead transfer to Seoul, where they would be able to work with him.

The most interesting congruence between Yi Ikt'ae and Sng Haeng is that they both mention and spell out the name of the chief navigator aboard the Sperwer, Hendrik Janse, although in quite different ways. Yi Ikt'ae's account gives the name in the Korean orthography of the time as Hoyntulk Yamsoyn (Yale romanization for Middle Korean). The first name is an obvious rendering of Hendrik. The second uses the full Dutch patronymic suffix -soyn, "-son," which is commonly shortened to -se. ("Janse" is the Dutch equivalent of "Johnson"). I'm not sure why the Korean transcriber wrote the first syllable of this name with an -m, but that he meant to do so is clear from Sng's transcription. Sng writes the name in seven Chinese characters. In my book (Ledyard, p. 34), I transliterated these as Paekkyeyamsain, and although I recognized the -sain as the patronymic suffix, I could make no sense of the rest and was unable even to know where to divide the syllables. But now Yi Ikt'ae's Korean form becomes a chunk of Rosetta Stone that solves everything. The first two syllables of Sng's form, Paekkye, mean "white chicken," which would come out in the Middle Korean vernacular as hoyn tolk, an entirely recognizable and explainable variant of Yi's Hoyntulk. As for Yam-, it should really be Yam-, because the m character, as I learned only later, functions as an -m patch'im, representing the final consonant -m in vernacular transcriptions. In the case of -sain, I should have recognized that -a-, as a "lower" -a- (arae -a-) in the orthography of the time, needed special treatment. That vowel (transcribed o in Middle Korean, is obsolete in the modern language, generally becoming -a- in first syllables, in second or later syllables). Finally, the -n, similarly to the -m above, simply represents the final consonant -n for the preceding syllable. Thus the full transcription comes out as Hoyntolk Yamsoyn, almost exactly the same as Yi Ikt'ae's alphabetic transcription (even by Yi Ikt'ae's time the Middle Korean vowel o of Hoyntolk seems to have weakened in the second syllable to u). In the pronunciation of modern Korean, this would come out as Haendlk Yamsin (in the McCune-Reischauer system used in my earlier book and for this translation). It is nice to see Sng Haeng's Chinese character transcription of Hendrik Yanse's name solved after all this time. It might add even more interest if we could tell whether Yi Ikt'ae had Koreanized a Chinese transcription in his source document, or Sng Haeng had sinicized a Korean one in his. But for that we would have to find the official pouch with the original Cheju report of 1653.

Reading over the first few pages of Hendrik Hamel's account of the shipwreck and subsequent events (see Jean-Paul Buys, tr., Hamel's Journal and a description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666, Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 1994 [2nd edition, 1998], pp. 3-10; hereafter cited as Buys), one is struck by the many details shared by Hamel's account and Yi Ikt'ae's, and by the complete lack of any significant conflict between them. This is a credit to the accuracy of both the humble Dutch memoirist and the bureaucratic personnel and procedures of the Korean government at that time.

Gari Ledyard February, 2002

Yi Wnjin, Governor (moksa) of Cheju

No Chng, Executive Officer (p'an'gwan)

Kwn Kkchung, Magistrate (hyn'gam) of the district of Taejng.

On the 24th day of Seventhmoon in the year Kyesa (16 August 1653), sixty-four men headed by Haendlk Yamsin (Hendrik Janse), barbarians from a Western country and all together aboard the same ship, were wrecked along the coast near the Taeya River, just below the Ch'agwi Garrison in the district of Taejng, in the south-west of the island. Twenty-six men drowned and two died of injuries, but thirty-six survived.

Their clothing was of black, white, and red in no orderly pattern, and they were all looking around at each other, some sitting casually, some standing. When we questioned them in writing, one of them drew three crosses (tens), then counted out six extra digits and right away tapped his heart. Next he drew two crosses and counted out six extra digits, then closed his eyes and made a gesture of falling. Their appearance and looks were quite strange, their clothing was of a very odd fashion, and they couldn't understand our language, yet even so, by tapping the heart they conveyed the idea of living people, while closing the eyes and falling signified dead people. When we checked the numbers of the living and the dead, it was really as they had indicated. However, neither our interpreters of Chinese and Japanese, nor a person who had returned from a ship wreck in the Ryűkyű kingdom, could understand their speech, so there was no way that we could ask about their situation. But we suspected that they were people from the southern barbarians or a Western country, and so reported. As a result of the report, Pak Yn (Jan Janse Weltevree), a southern barbarian who had (previously) been shipwrecked here (in Korea), was sent down (from Seoul). He wrote out his questions and their answers in Korean, and these were then reported with urgency to the Court in a separate document.

Pak Yn met first with (only) three of the cast away barbarians. He looked at them carefully for a long time, and then said, "It's as if they are my own brothers!" Then he talked with them, and they cried sadly for a long time. Pak Yn cried too.

The next day, Pak Yn summoned (all of) the barbarians in groups and had each of them tell him the names of the places where they had lived. All of them lived in the southern barbarian lands. But among them there was a boy, just turned thirteen, named Nnes Kobulsin (Denijs Govertszen), who alone had lived close to the place where Pak Yn had lived in the Western country. When Yn asked about his own family, the boy replied, "The house where they lived has been torn down, and the old foundations are completely covered with grass," adding that his younger uncle had died and only a few relatives were left. At this, Yn was even more unable to overcome his sorrow and grief.

Yn asked further, "Why is the style of all of your clothes different from what it used to be?"

They replied, "Months and years have gone by since you left long ago, and clothing styles, along with everything else, are no longer what they once were."

Yn also asked what kind of goods they had been carrying and where had they been heading. They said, "We had taken on a number of goods including sugar, pepper, and putchuk, and were going to Towan (Taiwan) Island to trade them for deer skins, which we were going to sell in northern China. From there we were going to Japan to trade the putchuk for Japanese products. But while at sea we came suddenly upon a horrible gale and ended up wrecked here. It has already been five years since we left home. Day and night we pray to our Heavenly Lord that we may return to our own land. If by your grace our lives are spared and we are sent to Japan, which is a port of call for many of our country's merchant ships, we would from there be able to return home alive."

Yn said, "The only market city in Japan that is open (to foreigners) is Nagasaki, but the trade there is different than it was in former days. Foreign merchantmen are not permitted to land there, but only to conduct trade aboard ship. It has come to the point that even Japanese who travel to or from other countries are always killed. How much more would this be the case for you, who are foreigners! The best thing for you is to join with me, go back up to the capital city and be assigned to the (Military Training) Commission (hullyn togam). As gunners you would have food and clothing to spare, and you would be personally secure and have no problems."

From the time that the castaway barbarians heard these words, they gave up all hope of returning to their homeland and had great confidence in the encouraging remarks about working with Yn.

The barbarians speak their given names first and their surnames last. Their writing goes horizontally from left to right, with the letter forms similar to our alphabet. But it was all irregular and slanted, and we could not come to any understanding of it.

As to their persons, the eyes are blue and the nose is prominent. The skin is white in the young ones, yellowish white among the adults. The hair is either red or blond. When trimmed, some is left to hang to the eyelids and in back to the shoulders. Some of them are completely shaved, while others shave their beards but leave a moustache. They are between eight and nine ch'k tall (159-179cm, 5'3"-5'11"). In showing respect to others they remove their hats and their shoes and touch the ground with both hands, kneeling for a long time with their heads lowered. As for head wear, their hats are of thickly woven wool.

Haendlk Yamsin (Hendrik Yanse), who they say is their leader, was the ship's navigator. He is expert in making observations of the skies and of solar (altitudes), and he understands the compass.

Pak Yn, at the head (of the castaways), took them to the mainland, where they were divided into groups and safely escorted to the Honam (Chlla province) army and navy bases to which they had been assigned. Their military weapons, large, medium, and small cannons and other items, were all deposited in the armory of this district.  

---