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.
But the people would have no dealings with us, and two sworded officials, in sweeping robes of silk that made Captain Johannes Maartens’ mouth water, came aboard of us and politely requested us to begone.
Under their suave manners was the iron of a warlike race, and we knew, and went our way.
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.
Close-hauled, the closest she could come was to six points of the wind; and then she bobbed up and down, without way, like a derelict turnip.
Galliots were clippers compared with her.
To tack her about was undreamed of; to wear her required all hands and half a watch.
So situated, we were caught on a lee shore in an eight-point shift of wind at the height of a hurricane that had beaten our souls sick for forty-eight hours.
We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn across a heartless cross-sea mountain high.
It was dead of winter, and between smoking snow-squalls we could glimpse the forbidding coast, if coast it might be called, so broken was it.
There were grim rock isles and islets beyond counting, dim snow-covered ranges beyond, and everywhere upstanding cliffs too steep for snow, outjuts of headlands, and pinnacles and slivers of rock upthrust from the boiling sea.
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.
There was deep water to its sheer foot, so that our sky-aspiring bowsprit crumpled at the impact and snapped short off.
The foremast went by the board, with a great snapping of rope-shrouds and stays, and fell forward against the cliff.
I have always admired old Johannes Maartens.
Washed and rolled off the high poop by a burst of sea, we were left stranded in the waist of the ship, whence we fought our way for’ard to the steep-pitched forecastle-head.
Others joined us.
We lashed ourselves fast and counted noses.
We were eighteen.
The rest had perished.
Johannes Maartens touched me and pointed upward through cascading salt-water from the back-fling of the cliff.
I saw what he desired.
Twenty feet below the truck the foremast ground and crunched against a boss of the cliff.
Above the boss was a cleft.
He wanted to know if I would dare the leap from the mast-head into the cleft.
Sometimes the distance was a scant six feet. 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.
I timed my leap, and made it, landing in the cleft in a scramble and ready to lend a hand to those who leaped after.
It was slow work.
We were wet and half freezing in the wind-drive.
Besides, the leaps had to be timed to the roll of the hull and the sway of the mast.
The cook was the first to go.
He was snapped off the mast-end, and his body performed cart-wheels in its fall.
A fling of sea caught him and crushed him to a pulp against the cliff.
The cabin boy, a bearded man of twenty-odd, lost hold, slipped, swung around the mast, and was pinched against the boss of rock.
Pinched?
The life squeezed from him on the instant.
Two others followed the way of the cook.
Captain Johannes Maartens was the last, completing the fourteen of us that clung on in the cleft.
An hour afterward the Sparwehr slipped off and sank in deep water.