A marvellous wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr.  We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices.  In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnel-house together.  That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda—­ay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat unscuppered.  And he found head-hunting, tree-dwelling anthropophagi instead.

We landed on strange islands, sea-pounded on their shores and smoking at their summits, where kinky-haired little animal-men made monkey-wailings in the jungle, planted their forest run-ways with thorns and stake-pits, and blew poisoned splinters into us from out the twilight jungle bush.  And whatsoever man of us was wasp-stung by such a splinter died horribly and howling.  And we encountered other men, fiercer, bigger, who faced us on the beaches in open fight, showering us with spears and arrows, while the great tree drums and the little tom-toms rumbled and rattled war across the tree-filled hollows, and all the hills were pillared with signal-smokes.

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.  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.