The French Revolution, and the wars of Napoleon following, which distracted all Europe for a period of over twenty years, completely disorganized the missionary operations of the Holy See and French Roman Catholic Church. On the restoration of the Bourbons, and the strengthening of the papal throne by foreign bayonets, the stream of religious activity flowed anew into its old channels, and with an added volume. Missionary zeal in the church was kindled afresh, and the prayers of the Christians in the far East were heard at the court of St. Peter. It was resolved to found a mission in Corea, directly attached to the Holy See, but to be under the care of the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris.

Barthelemy Brugiere, then a missionary at Bangkok, Siam, offered as a volunteer, and in 1832 was nominated apostolic Vicar of Corea. He reached Shing-king, but was seized with sudden illness, and died October 20, 1835. Pierre Philibert Maubant, his host, stepped into the place of his fallen comrade, and with five Corean Christians left Fung-Wang Chang, crossed the neutral strip, and the Yalu River on the ice. Dodging the sentinels at Ai-chiu, he entered Corea as a thread enters the needle’s eye. They crawled through a water-drain in the wall, and despite the barking of a dog, got into the city. Resting several hours, they slid out again through another drain, reaching the country and friends beyond. Two days’ journey on horses brought them to Seoul, from which Maubant, the first Frenchman who had penetrated the hermit kingdom, or who, in Corean phrase, had committed pem-kiong (violation of the frontier), wrote to his friends in Paris.

Maubant’s first duty was to order back a Chinese priest who refused to learn Corean, or to obey any but the Bishop of Peking. With the couriers who escorted the refractory Chinaman to the frontier, went three young men to study at the college in Macao. At the Border Gate they met Jacques Honore Chastan a young [362]French priest, who, on the dark night of January 17, 1837, passed the custom-house of Ai-chiu disguised as a Corean widower in mourning, and joined Maubant in Seoul. Nearly one year later, December 19, 1838, Laurent Marie-Joseph Imbert, a bishop, ran the gauntlet of wilderness, ice, and guards, and took up his residence under the shadow of the king’s palace.

Visits, masses, and preaching now went on vigorously. The Christians at the end of 1837 numbered 6,000, and in 1838, 9,000. Up to January 16, 1839, the old regent being averse from persecution, the work went on unharmed, but on that day, the court party in favor of extirpating Christianity, having gained the upper hand, hounded on the police in the king’s name. The visitation of every group of five houses in all the eight provinces was ordered. Hundreds of suspects were at once seized and brought to trial. In June, before the death of the old regent, the uncle of the young king (Hen-chong, 1834–1849) and the implacable enemy of the Christians obtained control of power, and at an extraordinary council of the ministers, held July 7, 1839, a new decree was issued in the regent’s name. The persecution now broke out with redoubled violence. In a few days, three native lay leaders were beheaded, and a score of women and children suffered death. To stay the further shedding of blood, Bishop Imbert, who had escaped to an island, came out of his hiding-place, and on August 10th delivered himself up and ordered Maubant and Chastan to do the same. The three willing martyrs met in chains before the same tribunal. During three days they were put to trial and torture, thence transferred to the Kum-pu, or prison for state criminals of rank. They were again tried, beaten with sixty-six strokes of the paddle, and condemned to die under the sword, September 21, 1839.

On that day, the inspector and one hundred soldiers took their place on the execution ground, not near the city gate, but close to the river. A pole fixed in the earth bore a flag inscribed with the death-sentence. Pinioned and stripped of their upper clothing, a stick was passed between the elbows and backs of the prisoners, and an arrow, feather end up, run through the flesh of each ear. Their faces were first wet with water and then powdered with chalk. Three executioners then marched round, brandishing their staves, while the crowd raised a yell of insult and mockery. A dozen soldiers, sword in hand, now began prancing around the kneeling victims, engaging in mock combat, but delivering their blows at the victims. Only when weary of their sport, the human [363]butchers relieved the agony of their victims by the decapitating blow. The heads were presented to the inspector on a board, and the corpses, after public exposure during three days, were buried in the sand by the river banks.

On the day after the burial, three Christians attempted to remove the bodies, but the government spies lying in wait caught them. As of old in Rome, when the primitive Christians crawled stealthily at night through the arches of the Coliseum, into the arena, and groping about in the sand for the bones of Ignatius left after the lion’s feast, bore them to honored sepulture, so these Corean Christians with equal faith and valor again approached the bloody sand by the Han River. Twenty days after the first attempt, a party of seven or eight men succeeded in bearing away the bodies of the martyrs to Noku, about eight miles north of Seoul.

Thus died the first European missionaries who entered “the forbidden land.” As in the old fable of the lion’s den, the footprints all pointed one way.

With the foreign leaders there perished no less than one hundred and thirty of their converts, seventy by decapitation, and the others by strangulation, torture, or the result of their wounds.1 In November, 1839, a new edict in the vernacular was posted up all over the country. Six bitter years passed before the Christians again had a foreign pastor.

Great events now began to ripen in China. The opium war of 1840–42 broke out. The “Western Barbarians” held the chief cities of the China coast from Hong-Kong to Shanghae, and the military weakness of the colossal empire was demonstrated. The French, though having nothing to do with this first quarrel of China with Europe, were on the alert for any advantage to be gained in the far East. In 1841, Louis Philippe sent out the war vessels Erigone and Favorite, to occupy if possible some island to the south of Japan, which would be valuable for strategic and commercial purposes, and to make treaties of trade and friendship with Japan, and especially with Corea. [364]

The Erigone cast anchor at Macao, September 7, 1841, and Captain Cecile awaited events. Moving north in February, 1842, with Andrew Kim the Corean student, as interpreter, on the Erigone, and Thomas Tsoi, his companion, on the Favorite, the French captains, hearing of the sudden conclusion of the war, gave up the idea of opening Corea.

The two Coreans, with two French priests, engaged a Chinese junk, and landed on the coast of Shing-king, October 25, 1842. On December 23d, Kim set out for the Border Gate, and within two leagues of it met the outward-bound embassy. Each of the three hundred persons had his passport at his girdle. Stopping to see them file past, he saluted one who was a Christian, and had in his belt letters from Maubant and Chastan, written before their execution, and from the natives. Unable to go back with Andrew to Ai-chiu, as every name on the embassy’s list was registered, the man went on to Peking. Andrew Kim, by mingling among the drovers and huge cattle returning from the fair, ran the blockade at Ai-chiu; but on the next day, having walked all night, he applied for lodgings at an inn for shelter, and was recognized as a stranger. Fearful of being arrested as a border-ruffian from the neutral strip, he took to his heels, recrossed the Yalu, and after resting at Fung-Wang Chang, rejoined his friends at Mukden.

On December 31, 1843, Jean Joseph Ferreol was consecrated Bishop of Corea, and resolved to cross the frontier, not at Ai-chiu, but at Hun-chun, on the Tumen. Andrew Kim exploring the way, after a month’s journey through ice and snow, mountains and forests, reached Hun-chun, February 25, 1845. The native Christians, having been duly instructed, had arrived at Kion-wen a [365]month before. For recognition, Andrew was to hold a blue kerchief in his hand and have a little red bag of tea at his girdle. At the fair which opened at Kion-wen on the 28th, the Christians met. The result of their conference was that Ai-chiu was declared safer even than Kion-wen.

Since 1839, the government had tripled its vigilance, and doubled the guards on the frontier. No one could pass the gate at Ai-chiu who had not a passport stamped with the chief inspector’s seal, bestowed only after the closest scrutiny and persistent cross-questioning. On it was written the name and place of birth and residence of the holder, and after return from China or the fair it must be given up. The result of these stringent regulations was to drive the missionaries to find a path seaward. In December, 1844, of seven converts from Seoul, attempting to get to the Border Gate, to meet Ferreol, only three were able to pass Ai-chiu. The other four, who had the wig, hair pins, and mourning costume of a widower for Ferreol, were unable to satisfy their questioners, and so returned. At the Border Gate, Ferreol, after seeing the caravan pass, ordered Andrew Kim to enter alone, while he returned and sailed soon after to Macao. Andrew, with the aid of his three friends, who met him at a lonely spot at some distance from Ai-chiu, reached Seoul, January 8, 1845.

As soon as resources and opportunity would permit, Andrew collected a crew of eleven fellow-believers, only four of whom had ever seen the sea, and none of whom knew their destination, and equipped with but a single compass, put to sea in a rude fishing-boat, April 24, 1845. Despite the storms and baffling winds, this uncouth mass of firewood, which the Chinese sailors jeeringly dubbed “the Shoe,” reached Shanghae in June. Andrew Kim, never before [366]at sea except as a passenger, had brought this uncalked, deckless and unseaworthy scow across the entire breadth of the Yellow Sea.

After the ordeal of the mandarin’s questions,2 and visits and kindly hospitality from the British naval officers and consul, he reached his French friends at the Roman Catholic mission.

The beacon fires were now blazing on Quelpart, and from headland to headland on the mainland, telegraphing the news of “foreign ships” to Seoul. From June 25th until the end of July, Captain Edward Belcher,3 of the British ship Samarang, was engaged in surveying off Quelpart and the south coast. Even after the ship left for Nagasaki, the magistrates of the coast were ordered to maintain strict watch for all seafarers from strange countries. This made the return of Andrew Kim doubly dangerous.

Bishop Ferreol came up from Macao to Shanghae, and on Sunday, August 17th, Andrew Kim was ordained to the priesthood. On September 1st, with Ferreol and Marie Antoine Nicholas Daveluy, another French priest, he set sail in “the Shoe,” now christened the “Raphael,” and turned toward the land of martyrdom. It was like Greatheart approaching Giant Despair’s Castle.

The voyage was safely, though tediously, made past Quelpart, and through the labyrinth of islands off Chulla. On October 12th, the Frenchmen, donning the garb of native noblemen in mourning, and baffling the sentinels, landed at night in an obscure place on the coast. Soon after this Daveluy was learning the language among some Christian villagers, who cultivated tobacco in a wild part of the country. The bishop went to Seoul as the safest place to hide and work in, while the farmer-sailors, after seven months’ absence, returned to their hoes and their native fields. [367]