Page:Paine--Lost ships and lonely seas.djvu/421

Rh 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,

Jan Wettevri found difficulty in speaking his own tongue when he attempted to tell his story to these