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 a nearby island, but the Koreans who had been killed were left unburied. Wounded Koreans, however, were cared for by a ship’s surgeon, but when Admiral Rogers sent word to Korean officials that he would return the injured, he was told, “Do as you please with them.” The wounded were set ashore.
On July 3, after thirty-five days in Korean waters, the squadron set sail for China. The battle had garnered but a few paragraphs in American newspapers. The Daewongun, though, referred to it as a glorious victory for his country, having driven the enemy away.
Dr. Horace Allen, a Protestant missionary who arrived in Seoul from Ohio in 1884, and was employed first as a doctor with the U.S. legation, then as a diplomat at the legation until 1905, called the American attack an unfair and monumental mismatch, a “useless slaughter, one from which no good results ensued, and of which we have not since been proud.”
In the museum, we paused in front of the Sujagi. The flag had been taken back to America and had hung in Annapolis, Maryland, until it was finally returned to Korea in 2007. As we moved along, I was taking copious notes and asking lots of questions, which had to be translated into Korean by Heju, answered by the guide, then translated by Heju back into English. When the guide didn’t know an answer, Yun-ja would phone her tourism office to try to secure one for us. Thus, what normally should have been a two-hour tour ended up taking twice as long. It was close to three o’clock before we left.
We thanked the guide and Yun-ja, who had made a half-dozen calls on our behalf, and we apologized for taking up so much of their time. Yun-ja replied enthusiastically: “I loved so many questions — I learned so much today!”
After grabbing bowls of ramyeon (fried noodle soup) at the food hut by the museum, Heju and I drove the short distance west to Ganghwa town, which is located on a long bend in the island road that widens to six lanes through the town. On this tranquil island, the traffic here seemed incongruous, vehicles noisily motoring along at seventy or eighty kilometres per hour. Like many other towns and cities across the peninsula, this one was not what you would call pedestrian-friendly.
“If I was mayor, I’d reduce the number of lanes from six to two, and the speed limit to about twenty,” I decried to Heju. “It feels like we’re on a motorway.”
The town looked dusty and worn. We parked and strolled along the main street, past nondescript old shops that looked as if they’d been slapped together quickly with aluminum and concrete. I had naively envisioned the town as an attractive, historic little place, like one of those two-hundred-year-old colonial villages you would came across in, say, Massachusetts or Maine.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the country began modernizing and industrializing at a furious pace, transitioning from a primarily agrarian economy to one in which manufacturing played a major role. Sadly, the traditional rural villages of hanok dwellings constructed from wood, clay, tile, and granite gave way to inferior quality metal and concrete structures. In the cities, many of the hanoks and other one-storey homes were replaced with hastily built low-rise apartment blocks constructed of low-quality materials. Little attention was paid to aesthetics. Most communities were not well planned, and development happened haphazardly, particularly in big cities like Seoul, where millions had flooded to from the rural areas in search of employment. Seoul’s population in 1966 was 3.8 million; four years later it was 5.6 million. There were no heritage buildings of any sort that we could see as we strolled along the main road in Ganghwa town.
When British chaplain Mark Napier Trollope explored Ganghwa town in 1902, he described it as having four pavilion gates, a bell and bell-kiosk, and a number of other public buildings, though he did admit that they were in less than stellar condition: “The empty and ruinous public buildings, for which there is no further use, present a sad picture of decay,” he wrote. Except for the forts, which were for the most part constructed of stone, and the city gates, which are usually granite, almost everything in Korea’s long architectural history was built of wood and clay, which is prone to decay and fire. Trollope added, “Monuments, in a land where the most usual material for architecture is timber rather than brick or stone, have a way of not lasting.” He wondered why stonework — Koreans are excellent masons — had not played a larger role in their architecture.
For the trip, I carried with me the 1997 Lonely Planet Korea guidebook, among other guidebooks. It was quite uncomplimentary of the island, noting it was an “overrated” tourist attraction. “The tourist literature and some guide books to Korea go on at some length about Ganghwado’s attractions, giving you the impression that the island is littered with fascinating relics and ruins. To a degree it is, but you have to be a real relic enthusiast to want to make the effort.”
A tad harsh, I thought. The government had obviously spent time and funds to refurbish the forts on the island and establish the museum. There was real opportunity here to learn more about significant Korean history. I for one was content to absorb it in the short