The old saw which tells us that “truth is stranger than fiction” receives many a new and unexpected confirmation whenever a traveller into strange countries comes back to tell his tale. Marco Polo was denominated “Signor Milliano” (Lord Millions) by his incredulous hearers, because, in speaking of China, he very properly used this lofty numeral so frequently in his narratives. Mendez Pinto, though speaking truthfully of Japan’s wonders, was dubbed by a pun on his Christian name, the “Mendacious,” because he told what were thought to be very unchristian stories. In our own day, when Paul Du Chaillu came back from the African wilds and told of the gorilla which walked upright like a man, and could dent a gun-barrel with his teeth, most people believed, as a college professor of belles lettres, dropping elegant words for the nonce, once stated, that “he lied like the mischief.” When lo! the once mythic gorillas have come as live guests at Berlin and Philadelphia, while their skeletons are commonplaces in our museums. Even Stanley’s African discoveries were, at first, discredited. The first European travellers in Corea, who lived to tell their tale at home, met the same fate as Polo, Pinto, Du Chaillu, and Stanley. The narratives were long doubted, and by some set down as pure fiction. Like the Indian braves that listen to Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, who, in the lodges of the plains, recount the wonders of Washington and civilization, the hearers are sure that they have taken “bad medicine.” Later reports or personal experience, however, corroborate the first accounts, and by the very commonplaceness of simple truth the first reports are robbed alike of novelty and suspicion. The first known entrance of any number of Europeans into Corea was that of Hollanders, belonging to the crew of the Dutch ship Hollandia, which was driven ashore in 1627. In those days the Dutch were pushing their adventurous progress in the eastern seas as well as on the American waters. They had forts, trading settlements, or prosperous cities in Java, Sumatra, the Spice Islands, Formosa, and the ports of Southern Japan. The shores of these archipelagoes and continents being then little known, and slightly surveyed, shipwrecks were very frequent. The profits of a prosperous voyage usually repaid all losses of ships, though it is estimated that three out of five were lost. The passage between China and Japan and up the seas south of Corea, has, from ancient times, been difficult, even to a Chinese proverb. A big, blue-eyed, red-bearded, robust Dutchman, named John Weltevree, whose native town was De Rijp, in North Holland, volunteered on board the Dutch ship Hollandia in 1626, in order to get to Japan. In that wonderful country, during the previous seventeen years, his fellow-countrymen had been trading and making rich fortunes, occasionally fighting on the seas with the Portuguese and other buccaneers of the period.