The more ancient relations of Japan and Korea were such as are common to people who inhabit contiguous lands at the corresponding stage of civilization. “As to the relations between the two nations,” says Brinkley,[6] “they were limited for a long time to mutual raids.” On the one side, the Japanese could complain that, in the first century B.C., when a pestilence had reduced their forces, Korean freebooters invaded Kiushiu and settled themselves in the desolated hamlets of the Japanese; that the Koreans lent assistance to the semi-savage aborigines of the same island and to the Mongol invaders; and that their citizens who wished to enter into friendly relations of commerce with the neighboring peninsula were treated with scorn and even with violence. On the other side, there was valid ground for the charge that Japanese pirates, either alone or in conjunction with Chinese, often invaded the coasts of Korea; and that Japanese traders by no means always conducted themselves in a manner to win the confidence and friendship of the inhabitants of the peninsula. [Illustration: Peony Point at Pyeng-Yang.] The earlier trade relations between Japan and Korea were irregular and by no means always satisfactory to either party. The wardens of the island of Tsushima, which is by its very position a sort of natural mediating territory between the two countries—the So family—had virtual control of the legitimate commerce. They issued permits for fifty ships which passed annually from ports in Japan to the three Japanese settlements in the peninsula. These Japanese traders and the Korean officials behaved toward each other in so objectionable fashion that a revolt of the settlers in Fusan arose in 1610, in the effort to suppress which the Koreans were at first defeated; but afterward, being re-enforced strongly from Seoul, they compelled the settlers to retire from all the three settlements; and thus for the time being the trade between Japan and Korea came to an end. When, later, the Shogunate Government complied with the demand of the Korean Government that the ringleaders of this disturbance should be decapitated and their heads sent to Seoul, the trade was re-established. But it did not attain its previous proportions; it was limited to twenty-five vessels annually, and the settlements were abandoned. Similar troubles recurred some thirty years later. The Shogun of that period, too, caused the offenders to be arrested and handed over to the Korean authorities; but the Court at Seoul continued its refusal to allow the commerce with the Japanese to be expanded.