If the Dutch sailors of 1627 were among the earliest to reach the
forbidding shores of this kingdom, the activities of British voyagers
were most prominent in the succeeding century. The work of Captain W. R.
Broughton, of the British sloop-o’-war, of sixteen guns, _Providence_, is
described to this day by the bays and harbours into which he penetrated,
and the capes and straits which this gallant man christened, to the
credit of the distant island kingdom from which he hailed. Broughton
in 1797, Maxwell of the _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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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