sheep” according to the Chinese Zodiac calendar).
Ganghwa has seen its share of death and destruction over its long history.
Just over the bridge, in Gapgot, a former historic town (though today, a four-lane main road runs through it), we drove to the Ganghwa War Museum. Over the winter, Heju and I had attended a national tourism exposition in Seoul, at which the Ganghwa Department of Culture and Tourism booth was represented by a youthful and friendly employee, named Gu Yun-ja, who spoke excellent English and insisted that we contact her when we visited her historic island. She had told us she would arrange for a tour of the museum. The appointment was for ten o’clock this morning.
We met Yun-ja, along with a museum guide who spoke only Korean, and the four of us moved slowly through the well-appointed and handsome interior of the museum. There was a glassed-in exhibit that incorporated G.I. Joe–type figures into a recreation of the battle between American and Korean soldiers that had occurred at Gwangseongbo (the suffix bo refers to a main citadel or garrison, where approximately 350 soldiers are stationed) on Ganghwa Island on June 11, 1871. In the exhibit, the Americans, decked out in blue uniforms and black leather boots, were curiously depicted in positions of submission. Six were supine and very dead; several others were on the ground, impaled by the swords of Korean soldiers. The Koreans wore baggy white pants and shirts of cotton — rather like judo attire — and straw shoes, and not a single one was injured or dead. The display would have been fine, were it accurate, but it was not, and visitors with no, or rudimentary, knowledge of Korean history, would wrongly conclude that the Yanks were walloped that day.
“What a bunch of BS,” I whispered to Heju furtively, because I did not want our museum guide — a stern, serious woman who I thought would not take kindly to knowing her museum was being maligned — to hear me.
The fact is that only three of 759 U.S. soldiers were killed that day, but close to 350 Koreans lost their lives. You see, the Americans were equipped with lightweight carbine rifles but the Koreans had only swords, spears, and slow-loading matchlock muskets. It was a monumental mismatch. I have seen graphic photos of the slaughter that showed American soldiers standing over the bedraggled bodies of Koreans, lying where they had fallen.
An American, William Elliot Griffis, who lived in Japan in the 1870s, and was one of the first historians to chronicle Korean history, wrote in Corea: The Hermit Kingdom, that the U.S. Asian Squadron had sailed to Korea in 1871 to seek trade ties. America was already trading with Japan and China and was desirous to trade with Korea as well. But Corea — as it was then spelled — kept its borders tightly closed.
The accepted Korean perspective today is that the U.S. squadron, though, did not arrive only to seek trade and sign a treaty. They contend it was to exact revenge for an incident in which a U.S.-flagged ship, the USS General Sherman, had steamed up the Taedong River to Pyongyang in 1866 and, after hostilities, its crew members, including several Americans, were reportedly beaten to death.
The U.S. Asian Squadron had arrived off Ganghwa in May 1871. Their flagship was the Colorado, and there were two gun boats, Monocacy and Palosa, and two corvettes, the Alaska and the Benicia. The Commander-in-Chief was Rear Admiral John Rogers, and there were eight hundred infantry and marines aboard the ships as well as the U.S. minister to Peking, Frederick F. Low, a man wary of entering the “sealed country,” believing Koreans to be “semi-barbarous and hostile people.” Admiral Rogers seemed prepared for war.
The modest Monocacy and Palosa were the only vessels of the five suitable to head up the shallow Han River to Seoul. But when the two ships finally anchored just south of Old Seoul, only low-ranking Korean officials were sent to meet them. King Gojong, then nineteen, would not hold power until he turned twenty-one. His father ruled as a regent in place of Gojong, and he was known as Prince of the Great Court, or Daewongun (dae means “great,” won “court,” and gun “prince”). His foreign policy was simple: no foreigners, no Catholics, no treaties or trade with the West or Japan.
Rebuffed, the U.S. admiral informed the Korean representatives that his squadron would survey the land from the local waters by ship. Korean maps featured cities, rivers, and hills painted in generous and artistic detail, but were usually rudimentary, with little sense of proportion and no reference to longitude and latitude. Monocacy and Palosa moved downstream along the Han, then south through the long, narrow Yeomha Channel. Along Ganghwa’s east shore was a twenty-kilometre stone wall, first erected (of earth) during the twelfth century. Along it were guard posts, armories, forts at regular intervals, and artillery emplacements for cannon. Surrounding the island’s four coasts was a total of five garrisons, seven forts, nine gun battlements, and fifty-three minor posts. In short, it was well-defended.
As the ships sailed south through the channel, they suddenly received cannon and musket fire from behind the wall. “The water was rasped and torn as though a hailstorm was passing over it,” wrote Griffis. “Many of the men in the boats were wet to the skin by the splashing of the water over them.”
Amazingly, the ships were not damaged, due to a combination of lack of mobility of the Korean cannons, poor quality gunpowder, and bad aim. Monocacy and Palosa fired back with ten-inch shells.
The American ships anchored in the channel and demanded an official apology, and ten days later, on June 10, they received a letter, but no apology. They decided to launch an assault in retaliation and sent cannon fire toward Choji Fort, the southernmost of the battlements, destroying it. Admiral Rogers ordered 759 infantry — 105 of them marines — and seven howitzers to the fort.
Choji Fort was deserted when the Americans arrived and they decided to camp overnight there. The next morning they marched north for two kilometres along hills and ravines, dragging the howitzers to Deokjin Fort, which had also been abandoned. They destroyed it, too, before continuing on to Gwangseong Citadel, a few kilometres north of Deokjin. But when the Americans reached the citadel, a mass of Korean soldiers charged down from the embankment. The Yanks answered with the howitzers, which scattered the Koreans. The corvette Palosa, moored just offshore, poured a steady stream of shells at Gwangseong’s stone rampart as American infantry and marines charged up the 150-foot hill to the fort, met only by sporadic musket shots. Matchlock gunpowder burned too slowly to allow for quick reloading.
The invaders gained easy entry through openings blasted in the walls. The first American through, Lieutenant Hugh McKee, received a bullet and died, but soon the American troops were decimating the natives. “Goaded to despair, [the Koreans] chanted their war-dirge in a blood-chilling cadence which nothing can duplicate,” wrote Griffis. They fought with furious courage, using spears and swords and even throwing stones or dust into the Americans’ eyes. “Scores were shot and tumbled into the river. Most of the wounded were drowned, and some cut their own throats as they rushed into the water.”
Koreans at the rear of the fort retreated, and the Yanks attacked. There was more fierce fighting and another fifty Koreans were shot dead. Another coterie met the same fate. Griffis described the U.S. soldiers as “mowing them down in swaths. Moving at full speed, many were shot like rabbits, falling heels over head.”
Around the fort lay dead 243 Koreans, an estimated one hundred more were dead in the water. Only twenty prisoners, all wounded, were taken alive. The Americans lost three men, and ten were wounded.
“It is said that even the commander of the American troops was much moved at the intrepid spirit of General Eo and his soldiers,” we read in the war museum.
After a mere forty-eight hours on Ganghwa, the invaders re-boarded their ships, taking with them an almost fifteen-foot-wide beige and yellow cloth flag the Koreans referred to as “Sujagi.” The flag featured two huge black Korean characters representing General Eo Jae-yeon, who had been killed in the battle.
The Americans interred their dead on
