The Koreans, however, refused to have any intercourse with the European world, and seamen wrecked on that coast were compelled to spend the rest of their lives there as slaves and captives. This was why the story told by Henry Hamel, the purser of the _Sparrow-hawk_, aroused such a vast amount of interest when he reappeared with seven shipmates after escaping to Japan. The vessel flew the flag of the Dutch East India Company, and sailed from Batavia with a crew of sixty-four men, under orders to drop a new Dutch governor at the island of Formosa. This castellated ark of a seventeenth-century merchantman safely completed this leg of her voyage and was then sent to Japan to pick up a cargo of copper, silk, camphor, porcelain, and bronze. The winds drove the _Sparrow-hawk_ to and fro, and for a fortnight she still bobbled and rolled within sight of Formosa. Then came a tempest which made a wreck of her, and she piled upon the rocks of the Korean island of Quelpert. The governor promptly sent soldiers to make prisoners of the thirty-four Dutchmen, who were treated with unexpected kindness. The purser, the pilot, and the surgeon’s mate were given an audience by this island ruler, and the scene included a romantic surprise. Seated beside the Korean governor of this strange, unknown island was a man of a florid complexion who wore a great red beard. The castaways stared at him and declared that he was a Dutchman, which the governor jestingly denied; but presently the red-bearded one broke his silence, and the tears ran down his cheeks while he told them that his name was Jan Wettevri of the town of Zyp, Holland. He had been wrecked on the Korean coast in a Dutch frigate in the year of 1626, when he was a young man of thirty-one, and his age was now fifty-eight. Twenty-seven years had he been held in Korea, and no word respecting the fate of his ship had ever gone back to Holland. Two shipmates had been saved with him, Theodore Gerard and Jan Pieters, but they were long since dead. Both had been killed seventeen years before this while fighting in the Korean army against a Tartar invasion. Often had he besought the King of Korea, sighed this red-bearded sailor, Jan Wettevri, that he might go to Japan and join his countrymen at Nagasaki, but all the answer he could get from that prince was an assurance that he should never go excepting he had wings to fly thither; that it was the custom of the country to detain all strangers, but not to suffer them to want anything and that they would be supplied with clothing and food during their lives. Jan Wettevri found difficulty in speaking his own tongue when he attempted to tell his story to these seamen of the _Sparrow-hawk_, for in seventeen years he had heard no other language than Korean.