A Study of 16th Century Western Books on Korea: The Birth of an Image

III. Jesuit Letters
Through the Padroado, Portugal was able to monopolize the Catholic mission in the Far East in the late 16th century, and Father Francisco de Xavier set out to fulfill his lifelong dream of bringing the Gospel to the pagans in Asia. It is through these Jesuit efforts that Europeans were able to receive news on Korea in earnest. Reference to Korea began to appear with some regularity in letters sent home by Jesuit missionaries working in Japan, and through these letters, Europeans of the time were able to piece together at least a tentative description of the culture and geography of Korea. However, there is some dispute among historians as to the exact time in which Jesuit priests first began to make references to Korea in their letters.

According to Donald Lach, Luis Frois was the first Jesuit missionary to mention Korea, having written in 1562 that Korea played an intermediary role in the transmission of Buddhism from China to Japan; however, this argument must be discarded. Jesuit missionaries had the opportunity to hear about Korea even at the initial stages of their missionary labours in the Far East. Although Xavier's letters from Asia made no mention of Korea, he first learned of Korea in December of 1547 from a Japanese named Ajiro in Malacca, where he prepared for his mission to the Far East. In addition, two Spanish priests, Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernandez, were informed by Ajiro and two other Japanese who accompanied him that "The Japanese also trade with another people, further away than China, to the east, called Corea. From there they bring silver and marten skins [...] they bring back cotton fabrics." Father Juan Ruiz de Medina, who researches Jesuit documents in Rome, conjectures that Father Nicolao Lancillotto of Italy, dutifully reported these encounters in his letter to Rome from Goa, and thus the first Jesuit news of Korea would have reached Lisbon by July of 1594 and would have certainly found its way to Rome by September of the same year. It is also feasible that in 1549, Xavier, Torres, and Fernandez might have heard about Korea from a Chinese captain en route to Japan. It is also certain that Xavier's party of Jesuit missionaries had access to intermittent news about Korea once they arrived in Japan in July, 1549. Furthermore, Xavier crossed paths with Korean envoys dispatched to Japan during his sojourn in Hirado in the spring of 1550, and in Yamaguchi between November of 1550 and September of 1551. If this is true then the first modern contact on record between Europeans and Koreans, with the exception of the Gores, can be attributed to Xavier and his party in 1550.

What had compelled Jesuit missionaries to make frequent references to Korea in their letters to Rome was, of course, their aspirations to bring the Gospel to the Korean Peninsula. The first attempt by the Society of Jesus to initiate missionary labours in Korea was in 1566. That year, Torres, then in charge of the mission in Japan with the departure of Xavier, dispatched Father Gaper Vilela to Korea, and Father Vilela did indeed initiate attempts to reach Korea. However, in his letter to Lisbon from Cochin, dated February 4, 1571, Vilela reported that due to the civil war in Japan, he was regretfully unable to make his trip to Korea at that time.

Subsequently the Jesuit missionaries in Japan made continuous references to Korea in their official reports to Rome. Significant among these was Vilela's November 3 report from Goa to Francisco de Borja, General of the Society of Jesus, in which the following observations on Korea were included: According to my information, this kingdom is said to extend as far as some very high mountains, and beyond them live people of white race, with whom however they have no dealings on account of the many dangerous wild animals that live in the mountains. It may be conjectured that these lands beyond could be Germany. The Mongols in question are said to be a friendly race. It will be five years soon since Father Cosme de Torres decided to send a Father there to see what might be done, and his choice fell on me. I set out, but met with much fighting on the road, Japanese battling against other Japanese, which prevented me from achieving my purpose. I should rather say, for it is very sure, that God so willed it, since he wished for the fruit which was gathered afterwards through my staying in Japan. That other treasure awaits the man who more deserves to win it. If Fathers were there, great service, I think, might be done for the Lord. And one can get there easily and with little trouble by the help of the kings of Japan. I mean with letters [from them], for a certain king is known there, so that this would suffice to be able to get into the land, and the Fathers who would go to live there could be assisted from Japan with whatever was necessary, for every year Japanese merchants visit the land. Entry too into China could be secured through the harbour of this kingdom which is very near to the city called Beijing, where the king of China lives. And if we go in, great benefits would follow, which will only appear with time.

The Jesuit missionaries indicated that they obtained information on Korea from Japanese merchants who frequented the shores of Korea. Information on Korea thus acquired was necessarily limited and superficial in nature. For instance, in referring to Korea, they retained the medieval designation of "the Kingdom of Corea" instead of "Chosun," the official title of the contemporary sovereign state. Furthermore, in quite erroneous thinking that Korea bordered Germany to the North, they considered Korea to be a viable route to Europe. For 16th century Europeans, Korea seemed like the final frontier that could bring a meaningful closure to the age of discovery. However, they also understood that establishing a Christian mission there would be a formidable task, a point accentuated by their perception of Korea as marked by mountainous terrain filled with lions and tigers and peopled by fierce warriors skilled in archery, spear throwing, and horsemanship. These initial misgivings about Korea notwithstanding, Vilela insisted that the Koreans were by and large a friendly people, and that although their language was different from Chinese or Japanese, they were able to communicate with one another via a common written language. Vilela maintained that despite the failure of the initial attempt to reach Korea in 1566, further attempts should be made. This November 3, 1571 letter provided the most comprehensive reference to Korea to date, and its subsequent inclusion in the Jesuit Cartas, published in Evora in 1598, made a substantial contribution to the introduction of Korea in Europe. Vilela's ulterior motive was, of course, to procure permission and support for his plans to establish a mission in Korea. However, his plans were ultimately rejected on the grounds that the success of the mission in Japan took priority over all others, and no missionaries could be spared to be dispatched to Korea. Furthermore, Vilela had lost his strongest supporter when Father Torres died in Japan in 1570. By 1572, both Vilela and the General of the Society of Jesus had passed away, and with them also died any hope for establishing a Catholic mission in Korea in the immediate future.

In the late 16th century, with the noted increase in the number of Jesuit priests and Portuguese merchants who visited Japan, it was inevitable that some Europeans would find their way into Korea, albeit more accidentally than intentionally. The earliest European accounts of visitations to Korea were indicative of the prevailing biases about Korea and its people harbored by the Europeans at the time. The first recorded European sighting of Korea occurred in October, 1578. Domingo Monteiro, captain major of a ship owned by Francisco Lobo, had already visited Japan on two previous occasions starting in 1576. He sailed from Macao toward Japan in July of 1578. Although the exact number of crew and passengers is unknown, there were at least 14 on board including Father Alfonso Lucena of Portugual and Father Antonio Prenestino of Italy. Monterio and his party left Macao 11 days behind schedule, and the cruise was uneventful for the next 20 days. However, 40 to 50 leagues short of their destination in Japan, weather began to change for the worse, and an unexpected typhoon drove the ship off course. Having lost its rudder, the ship drifted aimlessly on the open waters until it approached "a point on the Korean coast a musket shot away." Monterio, who had considered Koreans to be barbarous convened an emergency meeting, and ultimately determined to die at sea rather than risk landing on Korean shores. Fortunately for them, they arrived in Japan without further incident. Three months after this incident, Prenestino provided the following account in his letter composed in Portuguese and sent to Lisbon on November 8, 1578: Korea, a barbaric and inhospitable people, desires to have dealings with no other people. and they say that in the past a Portuguese junk wished to stop here, but these wicked people took their boat and all who were in it, and they were lucky to get away without being burned alive. As well exemplified in the letters of Vilela and Prenestino, the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese merchants harbored a rather negative impression of Korea. Prenestino's misfortune off the shores of Korea was well known among the Jesuit missionaries in Japan at the time. It was mentioned in Frois's Die Geschichte Japans. The account was also included in Annual Letters published by the Jesuits in 1598, and widely read throughout Europe at the time. The fact that these letters were published is in and of itself notable, in view of the Jesuit policy not to publicize materials that presented a negative view of Asia.

Following 1580, Korea once again received European attention, as the Jesuits in Japan began to chronicle the war between Japan and Korea. The bulk of these documents were written by Frois. It is uncertain at what point the Jesuit priests in Japan first caught on to the possibility of Japan's invasion of Korea. But in any case, they would certainly have realized this by 1580. In a meeting with Oda Nobunaga, who was supporting the Jesuit mission in Japan, Frois, Alessandro Valignano, and Soldo Organtino had the opportunity to listen to Nobunaga's ambitious plans to invade Korea and China. Furthermore in his letter dated November 5, 1582, Frois informed Claudio Aquaviva, General of the Society of Jesus, that Nobunaga "was planning to build then a great armada to go and conquer China and share out all his territories among his sons."

Frois went on to state that although using the war to further the Catholic cause in the region was not a particularly desirable proposition, the impending war, however, would most certainly provide the opportunity for the long sought evangelism of China and Korea. Since it took some two years for correspondence to traverse the distance from Nagasaki to Lisbon, it is likely that the leaders of the Jesuit brotherhood in Europe would have known of the possibility of war by 1584. After Nobunaga's assassination in 1582, the Jesuit missionaries were able to hear of Japan's plans for the invasion of Korea from Hideyoshi, who held the title of Kanpaku (Regent). On May 4, 1586, Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gasper Coelho, Frois and some 30 followers of the faith gained an audience in Osaka with Hideyoshi, who provided them with details on the planned invasion. The Jesuits were reported to have pledged their support to Hideyoshi. Coelho agreed to Hideyoshi's request for two battleships for the invasion of Korea, and added that if necessary additional support from bases in India could be made available. For his part Hideyoshi stressed that once China and Korea was conquered, he would give the Jesuits a free hand in the evangelism of the region. However, Hideyoshi's lip service to the missionaries proved to be an astute political gesture. In July of 1587, Hideyoshi, ever mindful of the growing influence of the Catholics in Japan, decreed the expulsion of Coelho and all the other Jesuit missionaries in Japan on the pretense of national security, although he was to postpone his own orders in a short time. In any event, Frois, in his October 17, 1586 letter, dutifully reported back to Europe about his audience with Hideyoshi, and consequently the Jesuits in Europe were privy to Japan's invasion plans a considerable time before the actual war in Korea took place. The May 4 audience has generated a considerable amount of interest, and controversy, among historians through the years.

Catholic historians maintain that Coelho's promise of military assistance for Japan's war effort was motivated by his aspiration to procure Hideyoshi's support for the Catholic mission in the region, and that he honestly did not believe that Hideyoshi would actually carry out his plans to invade Korea. However, such conjectures lose their credibility in light of the collective zeal of the Jesuits in establishing a mission in Korea and of Cohelho's personal reputation as someone willing and able to go to extreme measures for the Catholic cause in the region. Frois, Cohelho, and the other Jesuit missionaries in Japan knew only too well the enormous opportunity presented by Japan's successful invasion of the Korean Peninsula. This sentiment was also echoed in Valignano's letter to Aquaviva from Nagasaki, dated February 15, 1592. Valignano was in Japan just prior to the war as visitor of the Jesuit missions in Asia. Valignano concluded that Hideyoshi's plan to invade Korea was motivated by his wish to subdue the civil strife plaguing Japan, also adding that Hideyoshi might, in the end, prove to be God's instrument in the evangelism of China and Korea. However, it must also be noted that although the Jesuits did not openly censure Hideyoshi for his war, they did not trust him either and were uncomfortable with the idea of reaping the fruits of human violence, albeit for the Catholic cause. They were merely making the best of a bad situation, so to speak.

The 1592 War between Japan and Korea provided westerners with their first opportunity to visit Korea. Under orders of Gomaz, the Jesuit Vice Provincial, Cespedes arrived in Korea with a Japanese monk for the purposes of administering to the Japanese troops. He stayed there for approximately 18 months, until May or April of 1595, thus being on record as the first westerner to visit the Korean Peninsula. In addition, Cespedes made a brief stopover on the island of Tsushima, thus becoming the first European to introduce the existence of the island to the West. However, Cespedes failed to make any significant strides in the introduction of Korea to the West. His two letters written during his sojourn in Korea were filled with his personal impressions of the battles and of Korea's severe winter weather, and he made absolutely no mention of the culture, political system, and geography of Korea. In addition to their periodic letters, the Jesuits also left a variety of materials on the Far East. Most of these materials were compiled by Jesuits such as Valignano and Frois, during their missionary labours in Japan. Based on his visits to Japan on three occasions, Valignano completed the three volumes of Sumario de las cosas de Japon in 1577, 1580 and 1583, which later served as the basis for his Historia; however, the manuscript was not published during the 16th century and was not made available except to a selective few in the Jesuit brotherhood. Neither Sumario de las cosas de Japon nor Historia makes any mention of Korea. Besides this, Giovanni Pietro Maffei was commissioned by the Pope to write Historiarum Indicarum in 1588, based on his close study of Valignano's Historia and on his own encounter with Japanese boys who arrived in Rome in 1582. Along with Mendoza's Historia, Maffei's work is considered one of the most authoritative studies on the Far East in the 16th century, and it was translated into several languages and widely read in major cities throughout Europe at the time. Maffei's Historia mainly deals with the Portuguese conquest of Asia and the West Indies and the accomplishments of the Jesuits in India, and does not offer much on Japan and China. While Books 6 and 12 are devoted to China and Japan respectively, there is no mention of Korea anywhere in the book. This is more than likely due to fact that one third of Historiarum Indicarum is comprised of earlier letters, written between 1549 and 1574, which make no reference to Korea. It is also worth noting that Maffei relied heavily on Valignano's Historia and Pinto's Travels, neither of which make any reference to Korea.

Other than the Jesuit letters from Japan, the only material that mentions Korea is Frois's Die Geschichte Japans. As previously examined, Frois's book, written between 1549 and 1578, does make some passing references to Korea; however, it was not until 1926 that it was finally translated into German and published, and consequently it made little contribution to the introduction of Korea to Europe in the 16th century.