Note 12.

This report, at least as edited by Yi Ikt'ae in 1696, does not mention the nearly two years that the Dutch survivors spent in Seoul (Buys, pp. 12-19; Ledyard, pp. 39-63). After being sent away from Seoul, they were at first assigned to the principal military base in southern Chlla Province, then in 1663 they were divided into three groups and stationed in Namwn, Sunch'n and a place Hamel called "Saijsingh." Following the interpretation of the late Yi Pyngdo in his Hamel p'yoryugi (Ilchogak, Seoul, 1954), p. 49, both Buys and I identified this place as Chwasuyng, which was the headquarters of the Chlla Province Left Naval Command (Buys, p. 46, n. 31; Ledyard, p. 70). But I later came to doubt this, and this is a good opportunity to suggest a better explanation. The phonetics of Saijsingh are just too distant, either from "Chwasuyng" or from "Naeyep'o" or "Naeryep'o," the name of the town near modern Ysu where the command headquarters was located. There is a town on the eastern coast of the Ysu Peninsula, on Kwangyang Bay, now called Sinsng, which means "new fortress." It is about 13km southeast of Sunch'n. In the vernacular, the name would be Saesng, at that time pronounced Saysyeng. On this site there was an impressive fortification left behind by the Japanese from the Imjin Wars, which would surely been under the control of the Korean military in Hamel's time. Although there is no doubt that Hamel and eleven others had been assigned to the Left Naval Command, they or at least some of them could well have been stationed at Saesng, a fortified spot on the coast that would certainly have been under the authority of that command. And although Saesng was further from the open sea than Chwasuyng, it was quieter and more out of the way, and could well have been an easier place to escape from. At any rate the escape of Hamel and seven others in the late summer of 1666 was from "Saijsingh," and I just do not see how "Chwasuyng" can be phonetically wrested from that name.

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