13
DIVINE CALM
By Charles E. Gannon
Here is a fictionalized version of how a mistake that changed the history of Korea and China may have happened. The facts are accurate.
November 20, 1274, Hakata Bay,
Island of Kyushu, Nippon
Admiral Hong Dagu nodded; the captains of his mostly Korean landing force rose from their obeisant prostrations on the deck. “Report,” he ordered.
The tallest of the officers stepped forward. “Honored Hong Dagu, sea lord of Goryeo—”
Dagu made a chopping gesture with his hand. “The sky darkens behind us. There is no time for titles and ritual. How went the battle on the beaches?”
The captain swallowed. “We have carried the day, Admiral. The samurai who engaged us were brave, but fought more as individuals than as soldiers. I am told it is their fashion, and that they often resolve battles through one or more individual combats.”
“Uncivilized savages,” sniffed Dagu’s adjutant and childhood compatriot Ja-o dismissively. “Too stupid even to respond to Kublai Khan’s repeated, explicit commands that they recognize him, in title and tithe, as their suzerain. So the samurai of their leading shoguns make their impossible stand here in Hakata Bay, choosing a desperate defense over thralldom.”
Dagu shrugged. “I cannot say I blame them. And they die well.”
Ja-o’s voice lowered. “Do you respect them so much?”
“Respect them?” Dagu raised an eyebrow. “I observe they do what they think they must bravely. That does not make them any less stupid, any less a horde of vermin. Do you not agree, Captain?”
The tall Korean to whom he addressed this question snapped to attention. “Sir, they are vermin—but tenacious, even so. They suffered great casualties from our bow fire, and I do not believe they had prior experience with our flaming or gunpowder arrows. And after advancing through that fire, they had no organized tactics for breaching our shield wall. But despite their losses, they did not relent.”
“Did you take many casualties?”
The captain’s gaze wavered. “Fewer than they did.”
“Hmm. I see. So, if we were to face five times their number tomorrow?”
The captain grew pale. He paused long enough to choose his words carefully. “With your leadership, great Dagu, we would, of course, prevail. But I suspect that they would inflict even more casualties upon us with their strange, long swords and their—tenacity.”
Dagu frowned. “Yes. Of course. So what have your scouts reported? Are their forces massing inland, behind the rises and brush that hem in the shore?”
The captain licked his lips. “Our first two scouts did not return. We have sent another two. We await their return.” He shrank slightly before Dagu’s glower. “I shall send more,” he offered uncertainly.
Dagu frowned, turned away. “No. We have few enough men who have any familiarity with these people, their ways, their language, their coastline. We cannot spend them too freely. Besides, if the second pair of scouts does not return, that partially settles a measure of our present uncertainty: whether control of the beach means control of the coast. If these Japanese are picking off our scouts, denying us the ability to see what lies farther inland, it stands to reason that they wish to conceal a force from us, that our control may very well be limited to what we can see. So if we allow the army to camp on the beach, where it would be vulnerable to a much larger counterattack at night—” Dagu broke off, straightened formally. “Jo-a, pass the word: ready the landing barges to bring our men back to the ships.”
“Jun-gi,” Jo-a whispered, using Dagu’s given name, the one from their shared childhood, “is that wise?”
Dagu leaned closer to him, kept his own voice equally low. “Old friend, we know there is a literal tempest approaching from the sea. We have reason to fear there is a figurative Japanese tempest waiting just beyond the ridges lining this bay. We have two choices: leave or stay. We may gamble that the Japanese are not there and allow our army to bivouac on the beach. But that also means that we must keep our vessels here, where we may support and resupply them. Yet the masters of our ships tell me that our best chance to avoid their destruction is to escape this bay before the storm makes landfall. So, even if there is no Japanese army waiting beyond those ridges, our fleet might be wrecked if we remain here.”
Jo-a made a deferential bow as he offered an alternate perspective. “An almost equal number of the shipmasters are urging you to draw in closer behind the headland and weather the storm as best we might, that it is approaching too swiftly to avoid it.”
“A chance I would take, if we knew the soundings and rocks of this bay and if I knew there was no Japanese army beyond that ridge,” Dagu replied, jabbing a finger toward the open window of his cabin and at the body-littered beaches and the bluffs beyond. “If we receive a report from one of these scouts that the inland plains are clear, then we shall leave our men on the beach and our ships will weather the storm here as best as they may. But if we hear nothing, I must presume that destruction is bearing down on us from the sea and the land. In that event, our army might be slaughtered in the surf before the sun comes up. In that event, we must take them aboard and listen to our foremost shipmasters: that in order to save this fleet and the army that it will be carrying, we must flee this bay with all haste.”
Ja-o shrugged. “Then let us hope we hear from one of those scouts.”
Dagu stared back out the window. “If the gods are kind, we shall.”
• • •
Gwan crept through the unfamiliar undergrowth that dominated the floor of the small defile between the ridges hemming in Hakata Bay. He had already found one of the prior two scouts slumped in the bushes, an arrow through his back. He hoped that discovery was not a harbinger of his own imminent fate.
Flinching as an incautious step snapped a twig, Gwan crouched down, his upper teeth set upon his lower lip. The slightest sound could kill him, if a Japanese archer was still nearby, was still—
Gwan saw the edge of a sandal, its sole turned perpendicular to the ground, beneath a bush on the other side of the game trail. Leaning down even farther, he peered between the leaves that concealed him and saw, quite clearly, the scout that had been sent out with him—a Mongol named Tughur—sprawled beneath the foliage, the snapped shaft of an arrow protruding from this left temple.
I am the accursed of the gods, Gwan thought, offering a quick devotional word to those same gods in the hope that it would propitiate them enough to grant him deliverance. If only they would give him some sign of assurance—
Gwan caught a glimpse of movement to his left, glanced swiftly in that direction—but what he had at first imagined was the feathered fletching of a Japanese archer’s arrow was, in fact, the wing of a butterfly, or perhaps a moth, which had alighted upon a nearby branch. Late in the season for you, Gwan thought. It puts you in at least as much peril as I am. Curious that such an insect was still flitting around in November, he reflexively moved closer to examine it.
In another reality, in an alternate world, Gwan’s typically cautious habits of thought might have caused him to pause just long enough to worry about the sound he could make while moving in that direction, and could have instead propelled him back out onto the game trail to die at the hand of a hidden Japanese archer. But instead, before he could think the better of it, Gwan had moved deeper into the bushes to get a better view of the butterfly and so startled it into flight again.
Disappointed, having come within a foot of its simple, white wings, Gwan stared up after it, then lowered his eyes—
And discovered that he had stumbled upon a perfect vantage point that showed him the plains that lay behind the ridges around Hakata Bay. He inched forward, pushing a stray bough out of his way.
The plains were empty. There was no Japanese army, not even patrol encampments or pickets. The path inland, and to Kyushu’s administrative capital at Dazaifu, was clear.
And best of all, Gwan reflected as he began to carefully and quietly retrace his steps, he would live to make that report.
August 18, 1853, War Department,
Washington, DC
Secretary of the Navy James Cochran Dobbin glanced up from fortress assessment reports as Lieutenant Billings ran in, breathless. “Sir, today’s mail pouch. A letter from the Susquehanna.”
Dobbin stuck out a hand that was at once forceful in motion but patrician in form. “About time.” Not bothering with the saber-shaped letter opener in the top drawer of his immense desk, he tore off the sealing flap, pulled out the folded papers within, and read:
Commodore M. C. Perry
to the Secretary of the Navy, the Hon. James C. Dobbin
United States Steam Frigate Susquehanna,
Yedo Bay, July 14, 1853
Sir:
I have the pleasure of informing you I have now commenced my mission to open relations with the islands of Nippon, which the Chinese call by the pejorative title Dongyang.
The flotilla arrived in Yedo harbor on July 8. As the reports of Siebold led us to anticipate, the ruling classes of these islands affect Chinese or Korean names. However, the great majority of these administrators and bureaucrats trace very little if any of their personal heritage back to the invaders who secured a foothold on Kyushu for the Yuan Dynasty in 1274, which enabled the larger and decisive landing in June of 1275.
Although Siebold’s accounts had readied us to expect an initial rebuff, we were instead met with guarded interest by a legation of officials from China’s Qing Dynasty, attended by an almost equal number of native notables. The circumstances, dress, and titles of the former were as opulent as those of the latter were unassuming. These profound distinctions in authority and class were repeatedly observed during our initial visit to the city itself, there to provision the ships under the direct supervision of the imperial Chinese authorities.
The condition of the majority of the population is reminiscent of a country that remains under strict occupation, although Chinese military forces are not commonly in evidence. However, imperial officials and bureaucrats are omnipresent, maintaining close watch on almost all transactions of any political or economic import. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that this autocratic power was maintained through the exercise of severe punishments—including torture and execution—for the slightest of infractions. The unremitting fear that is the daily diet of the indigenous Japanese is matched only by the suppressed hatred with which they regard their foreign rulers.
We were at a loss to understand why the famed isolation of these islands was so readily relaxed upon our arrival, but this became evident when the local prefect’s exchequer entertained us with a light lunch in his own secluded garden. It seems that with the increasing chaos arising from the Opium Wars on the Chinese mainland, Dongyang has become a poor relative in the greater family of Peking’s satrapies. The resident imperial authorities, holding their offices by familial inheritance and sinecure, are mindful of their need to maintain control through harsh measures. But with China spending lavishly to both quell the Taiping Rebellion and restore authority lost in its Opium Wars, Nippon’s imperial factotums are painfully aware that their reduced coffers are insufficient to the costs of ensuring their own protection and continuance. Through tortuously indirect insinuations, the exchequer let it be known that if our flotilla had arrived with the purpose of opening Nippon for trade in opium, this could be effected, but surreptitiously, and only if the local imperial authorities were properly compensated for their carefully averted attention.
I am happy to report that none of our shore party expressed their resentment at this assumption that their oath, uniform, and flag were presumed to be nothing more than facades behind which we concealed profiteering ambitions and the intent to trade in substances that are not only contraband but patently unwholesome and unholy in their effects. (I suspect the youngest of our party held his tongue more out of shock than circumspection.)
These initial encounters also served to bring us into contact with various Japanese who revealed that the truth of their nation’s sad durance beneath its Chinese masters was even worse than we had thus far conceived. Whereas we projected that Peking kept Nippon inviolate from foreign contact because it wished to maintain a monopoly over the resources and clever craftsmen of these islands (and then later, to protect them from the scourges of opium), we learned that the real reason was far different.
In the nearly six centuries since the Japanese were conquered by the Chinese (or, more precisely, Mongols and Koreans), there have been at least five rebellions which stretched from the northernmost islands down to their southernmost extent at Yakushima. There may have been further rebellions almost as expansive, but since local histories are forbidden (all chronicles are kept by the Chinese bureaucrats; the writing or possession of rival accounts carries a capital sentence), there is no reliable consensus on just how many full-scale revolts have occurred. What a matter of both record and recent memory are the bloody reprisals, in which whole families or towns have been put to the sword on the faintest of suspicions. The fashion in which these reprisals have been carried out rivals the most savage and extreme to be found in the annals of human history. The veracity of these claims is not to be readily doubted: the diverse accounts of Japanese from every social station varied little on the bloody particulars of these atrocities.
In consequence, we have come to learn that there is a very large number among the indigenous Japanese that trace their traditions and influence back to pre-invasion Nippon. Although stripped of their lands and official titles, the descendants of the shoguns and samurai are remembered through secret names and shown great (albeit covert) deference and honor by the overwhelming majority of the population. Similarly, although native Buddhism has been uniformly suppressed for the last five hundred years (insofar as it was deemed a refuge for cultural intransigence and insolence), its undisclosed practitioners still roam the land, often working as itinerant healers, scribes, or storytellers. Members of both these now-secret societies are avidly sought by imperial intelligencers, who routinely seize, torture, and slay their suspected members on the thinnest of pretexts.
Through channels which I shall not endanger by sharing either names or places of contact (not being able to ensure the fate of the contents of this mail pouch), I and several of my officers have been approached by well-situated members of this diffuse cabal who are committed to tossing off the yoke of their oppressors. Specifically, they have made it quite clear that, were we to use our new presence on Nippon to surreptitiously aid them, they would remember our United States with deathless gratitude at such time as they might free themselves from the shackles of more than half a millennium of bondage. While I refused to vouchsafe them an immediate answer, I vigorously commend their request to both the State Department and the Executive for long and careful consideration.
In closing, I do not possess the arrogance, nor presume the competence, to discourse upon the issues of farsighted statecraft or implicit moral responsibility that are raised by this request from a long-oppressed people whose industry and courtesy have been beyond compare. What I may speak to with reasonable competence are the military practicalities inherent in embracing the relationship they propose.
To wit:
We live in the era of steam as the decisive naval innovation of this moment and of the foreseeable future. This means that safe harbors and far-flung coaling stations populated by loyal populations are necessities if our burgeoning Republic, barely seventy-five years old as I pen these words, is to stand as a strategic equal among its globe-spanning peers. The location of Nippon alone, convenient to the Chinese coast and furnished with numerous well-developed ports, makes it ideal to those purposes. We would also possess the deathless gratitude of its people, while conversely resting assured in their enduring enmity toward the only regional power large enough to warrant our military concern: China. The iron foundries and steel products of the Japanese are superior to Chinese manufactures in almost all regards, and their attention to detail and innovation promises that they shall more readily and successfully adopt the principles of industrialization.
It is said that no force may project itself into new regions without first securing a steady ally therein. I submit we may have just found that ally.
With Great Respect,
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Commodore M. C. Perry,
Commander, Pacific Squadron
Billings was standing on the balls of his feet, having watched Dobbin digest the contents of the letter in that precarious posture. “Sir, what does it say? Has Commodore Perry done it?”
Dobbin smiled—not an entirely benign expression—and carefully folded the letter. “Yes, Billings, he has done it. As for what it says—well, I suppose you could summarize it this way:
“Now things will be different.”