Page:Korea (1904).djvu/58

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
6
KOREA

Alceste, with Basil Hall, commander of the British sloop-o'-war, the Lyra, in 1816, deserve the passing fame which is secured to them by the waters and capes which have been named after them. Their names figure as landmarks upon the west, the east, and the south coasts. While Maxwell and Hall preferred to devote their attention to the discovery and examination of the Korean Archipelago—of which, although Broughton does not mention it, it seems impossible that the discoverer of Broughton Strait can have been ignorant—Broughton roughly charted and surveyed the west coasts, coming to a temporary halt in Broughton Bay, some six hundred miles to the north. Hall left his name in Basil's Bay, where Gutzlaff landed in 1832 to plant potatoes and to leave seeds and books. A generation later, in 1866, the archipelago to the north-west was named after the Prince Imperial, who was to meet his death in Zululand in 1878. In 1867, Prince Jerome's Gulf, an inlet upon the mainland of the Chyung-chyöng Province, was to be the scene of Oppert's famous attempt to remove large deposits of buried treasure and venerated relics from an Imperial tomb. These names upon the east and west coasts suggest nothing of the romance which actually surrounds them. At most they conjure up the shadowy silhouettes of the redoubtable personages, to whom they once belonged, and with whose memory many journeys of discovery in these seas are inseparably linked.

Englishmen were not the sole navigators who were attracted by the unknown character of the land, and the surpassing dangers of the waters, around the Island of Quelpart, where the Sea of Japan mingles in tempestuous chaos with the Yellow Sea. Russian and French navigators also worked their way through the dangerous shoals and quick-