However, at length a ship venturing to pass nearer than ordinary, espied the smoke, and rightly judging that it must be made by some shipwrecked persons escaped to those sands, hoisted out their boat to take them in. Serrano and his companion readily ran to the place where they saw the boat coming, but as soon as the mariners approached so near as to distinguish the strange figures and looks of these two men, they were so affrighted that they began to row back. But the poor men cried out and that they might believe them not to be devils or evil spirits, they rehearsed the creed and called aloud the name of Jesus, with which words the mariners returned, took them into the boat and carried them to the ship, to the great wonder of all present, who with admiration beheld their hairy shapes, not like men but beasts, and with singular pleasure heard them relate the story of their past misfortunes. The companion died in his voyage to Spain, but Serrano lived to come thither, from whence he travelled into Germany where the Emperor, Charles V, then resided: all which time he nourished his hair and beard to serve as an evidence and proof of his past life. Wheresoever he came the people pressed, as to a sight, to see him for money. Persons of quality, having the same curiosity, gave him sufficient to defray his charges, and his Imperial Majesty, having seen him and heard his discourses, bestowed a rent upon him of four thousand pieces of eight a year, which make forty-eight hundred ducats in Peru. Alas, while going to take possession of this income, Peter Serrano died at Panama and had no farther enjoyment of it. This Spanish sailor of long ago deserved to enjoy those golden ducats, and it was a most unkindly twist of fate that snuffed his candle out. He was more fortunate, however, than most shipwrecked seamen, who have been thankful to find a shirt to their backs and the chance to sign on for another voyage when they set foot in port again. Seven years on a desert island was a long, long exile for Peter Serrano, but he saw home much sooner than the luckless Dutchmen of the _Sparrow-hawk_ who were cast away on an island off the coast of Korea in the year of 1653. Twelve years later a few survivors gazed once more on the quays and docks of Amsterdam, but meanwhile they were making history. These were the first men who ever carried to Europe a description of the hermit kingdom of Korea and its queer, slipshod people in dirty white clothes, a nation sealed up as tight as a bottle which had drowsed unchanged through a thousand years. Japan was not wholly barred to foreigners even then, for the Dutch East India Company was permitted to send two ships a year to Nagasaki and to maintain a trading post in that harbor. It was a privilege denied all other nations, and for two centuries the Dutch enjoyed this singular commercial monopoly.