Anglo-Korean Relations and the Port Hamilton Affair, 1885-1887

Stephen A. Royle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351737869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In April 1885 the British navy seized the small archipelago of Port Hamilton (now Geomundo) off Korea, an incident dubbed the Port Hamilton Affair. This was part of a larger story of Empire and East Asian geopolitics involving China, Japan, Korea and Russia. At the time Britain and Russia seemed close to war over Afghanistan, and taking the islands, with their sheltered anchorage, would deny them to Russia while they might be useful in any blockade of the Russian fleet in Vladivostok. However, even in this imperial era, there were qualms about seizing inhabited territory belonging to a friendly nation, if only through the precedent it may set for others – particularly Russia – to do the same. Thus, Britain stressed that occupation was temporary and attempted to gain legitimate control anyway, through issuing leases.In the event, after much political posturing from East Asian nations, given that the geopolitical situation improved and there was no war with Russia, the British, after assurances that Russia would not take Port Hamilton, slipped away in February 1887. Geomundo returned to obscurity.

This book, the first full-length study of the Port Hamilton Affair, is based around contemporary material varying from printed dispatches and government reports to original archival manuscripts. This enables the book's scope to range from setting the Port Hamilton Affair into its context within the high geopolitics of East Asia through study of the life of the garrison stationed on the islands to relations between the powerless indigenous islanders and their British occupiers.

1Mercantilist imperialism in East Asia in the late nineteenth century

Mercantilist imperialism

Colonialism, in its modern context of the possession and rule of overseas territory, often assumed to be largely for the purposes and advantage of the ruling power, can be dated back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Age of Discovery. The process would culminate in the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries when European powers, including those late entrants Germany and Italy, as well as the United States and Japan, mopped up remaining parts of the world to bring them under the imperial sway. The Berlin Conference of 1884, which was associated with the European scramble for Africa, is one early and significant part of this new imperialism. The rules of the colonial/imperial game and its conduct changed after the Second World War when most of the colonial world progressed to independence. About ninety former colonies have joined the United Nations as independent states since that war ended in 1945. Another twenty and more entrants came from the break-up of larger countries in Asia and Europe, particularly Yugoslavia and the USSR, a process that had resonances with the ending of formal colonialism elsewhere.

From the early period of colonialism, territory was taken for a variety of purposes. In the seventeenth century, Caribbean islands were acquired by England (this was prior to the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) to produce sugar for economic gain. These were examples of what can be termed resource-extraction colonies under ‘mercantilist imperialism’ (Beasley, 1987: 9, citing Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). Other places were or became settler colonies, including parts of what was to become the United States, held under English control from the early seventeenth century. These were locations where settlement of migrants from the colonial power, sometimes involving disaffected groups, would take place. Other possessions were strategic. For example, St Helena in the mid-Atlantic was taken by the English East India Company in 1659 as a strategic way station to resupply its ships on their voyages home from Asia. The island was also a place where company vessels would wait in safety for others before sailing back to Europe in convoy for mutual protection in those troubled times.

A driver of the development of Empire was economics – profit. Money had to be generated from colonial and mercantile activity, even from the very voyages of discovery that enabled early European penetration of other parts of the world to take place. The first circumnavigation of the globe by the party led by Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan) in 1519 saw only one of the five vessels in the original fleet return to Seville in 1521 and only eighteen of the original 237 sailors make it home. (Magellan himself was killed in Mactan Island in the Philippines.) Such figures suggest that other than achieving a geographical first the venture was disastrous. Nonetheless, it still made a profit, largely from 26 tons of cinnamon and cloves collected in Maluku (Moluccas, the Spice Islands). Later voyages to the Orient, including to India and Maluku by the various European trading houses including the English East India Company and its Dutch counterpart, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), were also seeking financial return. These voyages and the activities of the companies for which they were carried out stimulated foreign control of territory and imperialism itself. For example, Fernão de Magalhães was to have been made governor of lands and islands he discovered. In India, from 1639, the English East India Company acquired land on the Coromandel Coast where Fort St George was built, around which the city of Chennai (Madras) developed. Puducherry (Pondicherry) was acquired and developed by the Compagnie Française pour le Commerce des Indes Orientales (French East India Company) from 1674. Mumbai (Bombay) had been granted to Portuguese traders, before becoming an English possession as part of the dowry Catarina de Bragança (Catherine of Braganza) brought to Charles II in 1661. The king leased the area to the English East India Company in 1668, from which the modern development of Mumbai can be traced. The East India Company became the effective colonial ruler of much of the Indian sub-continent from 1757 until it was wound up in 1858 following the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The purpose of these mercantile companies was to make financial gains from trade and/or other activities. Even the East India Company’s smallest possession, the island of St Helena, was supposed to turn an actual profit above and beyond its utility as a place of supply and shelter for company ships returning to Europe (Royle, 2007). As early as 1666, just seven years after the East India Company had entered into possession of the uninhabited island, there were complaints from company leaders about ‘the great charge in its keeping’.¹ Seventeen years later it was estimated that the company had spent £40,000 on St Helena ‘without one penny profit hitherto more than refreshment for our ships’.² Even what became settler colonies might have been founded originally for purposes of trade. The North American possession of Virginia was established by the London Company in 1607 and only became an English crown colony when the trading company went bankrupt in 1624. Even then, Virginia’s survival and subsequent development was not assured until tobacco was developed as a cash crop and a source of income and profit secured.

Places that were colonised were usually already occupied, with the exception of a few uninhabited islands. Cristofero Colombo (Christopher Columbus) did not discover the West Indies in 1492; there were people already there. Nor did Vasco Núñez de Balboa discover the Pacific from his peak in Darien in 1513, except through a Eurocentric lens. Australia might have been declared terra nullius (nobody’s land) by the British in 1770, but, again, there were already people there. (Terra nullius relates more appropriately to other places where it has been applied such as Svalbard and Antarctica.) Thus, colonialism almost always necessitated negotiation of some sort with a pre-existing indigenous people. Such encounters could be benign but more often involved dispute and violence with the winning side, often immediately and almost always ultimately, being the colonialists, really the invaders. There are some terrible tales from a dark colonial past, such as the ‘Black War’ in Tasmania in the 1820s and early 1830s, which saw the European settlers almost completely eradicate the indigenous peoples in a genocidal campaign. Even when it was acknowledged that the indigenous inhabitants had rights, these were often ignored or the people swindled. This can be seen well from the case of Vancouver Island, now part of British Columbia in western Canada but prior to that the separate entity of Vancouver Island Colony. There is a record of a chief of an indigenous group there being told in 1860 that the ‘King George Men’ (the British) were coming but he was not to be concerned because his group’s land would be purchased at a fair price. The chief’s poignant response was, ‘We do not wish to sell our land, or the water, let your friends stay in their own country’ (Sproat, 1868: 4). The King George Men came. As to the ‘fair price’, a contemporary account calculates that the Hudson’s Bay Company, which for most of the 1850s ruled Vancouver Island Colony under licence from the British crown, had purchased about 200 square miles (518 square kilometres) of land from various indigenous groups for 1,000 blankets, which ‘does not seem a large price to pay’ (Grant, 1857: 296; see Royle, 2011).

Despite much local antipathy against the foreigners, the globe was opened up to colonial and/or trading influences from those early sixteenth-century voyages onwards. ‘And/or’ is used in the previous sentence because it was quite common for trade to be offered to, perhaps even imposed upon, a place without a formal transfer or assumption of sovereignty. For example, Argentina has been described as being part of Britain’s informal empire in the nineteenth century, but it was never colonised or controlled politically (leaving entirely aside the vexed question of the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas). However, it was dominated economically by British industrialists. This was at a period when free trade was espoused. Sir Thomas Farrer was a contemporary proponent, proclaiming it to be an ‘elementary truth’ that ‘every innocent operation of trade is necessarily an advantage to both parties concerned in it, and that to stop it by law is necessarily an evil to both’ (Farrer, 1886: 1). Later scholarship has been less confident, seeing in free trade the possibility of economic domination; W. G. Beasley has written of ‘imperialism of free trade’ (1987: 3) at this time which could create an ‘informal empire’ or a ‘semi-colonial system’ (Edwardes, 1967). Such a system related not only to Latin America but also to parts of East Asia, although in other parts of Asia, such as India, the British achieved the benefits of dominating trade more formally through the assumption of sovereignty. By the late nineteenth century, it had become easier for Britain to expand its trade and power by either means elsewhere rather than try to penetrate more difficult and developed markets in Europe and North America (Cain and Hopkins, 1993; Kim, 1989).

Let us turn now to this book’s focus on East Asia, a region which is no longer known as the ‘Far East’, given that the latter implies distance from somewhere else which by implication is of more importance as well as the term assigning remoteness and exoticism. During the nineteenth-century period covered by the book, use of Eurocentric language was certainly commonplace, the ‘Far East’ being anywhere to the east of British India, other than, of course, the white settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand.

China and the Treaty of Nanking

European trade was managed and controlled – perhaps ‘imposed’ might be a better word – through a series of treaties established with various East Asian governments. There had been trade with Asia for a long time before, of course. However, this tended to be one-way, Europeans collecting spices, silks, teas and porcelain (which is usually called ‘china’ in English), with East Asia not being a large market for European goods in return, given European products were not allowed free access. Trade into China, for example, was limited to being channelled through an area of Guangzhou (Canton) known as the Thirteen Factories or Hongs. Imposed treaties between China and, later, other East Asian countries and the West, often described as being ‘unequal’, would bring changes. The earliest was the Treaty of Nanking, following the Opium War of 1839–1842, in which China fought against Britain because that country was selling opium into China. After 20,000 chests of opium were seized by the Chinese authorities, a one-sided military campaign followed during which Britain’s navy and its guns inflicted defeat. After this, by far from being the only example of Western ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in East Asia at this period, China was forced to concede, and the Treaty of Nanking was signed in August 1842. A commercial addendum of October 1843 saw Britain gaining most-favoured-nation status under which any rights and privileges granted later to other nations would be applied also to Britain. Trade was the predominant driver in the treaty discussions as the British government negotiators followed closely the wishes of their country’s merchant class (Beasley, 1987). The Treaty of Nanking opened up five treaty ports – Guangzhou, Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou (Foochow), Ningbo (Ningpo) and Shanghai – and ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain in perpetuity. In the treaty ports, tariffs were fixed so domestic industries could not be protected unduly against foreign competition. Later, foreigners partly staffed and certainly managed the (Chinese) imperial maritime customs service, which oversaw trade and had a range of other duties including cartography, harbour maintenance and currency reform (Larsen, 2008). Under the treaty, extraterritoriality was imposed, which meant that in the ports the foreign traders and expatriate residents were subject to their own country’s laws as regulated through their consuls and not those of China (or other nations where treaties were later to be signed). Extraterritoriality in practice granted foreigners immunity from local laws and jurisdiction, rights open to abuse. Further, a system of indemnities was imposed to compensate foreigners for any hostility and conflict against them perpetrated by the local people. East Asians in Europe or North America did not enjoy the reciprocal privilege of extraterritoriality there (Cassel, 2012).

The Chinese Qing (Ch’ing) Empire then went on quickly to conclude further treaties with the United States and France and later with a number of other nations: Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Prussia, Russia and Spain. These treaties, and others between Western nations and Japan and Korea were also ‘unequal’. East Asia became dominated by the Western powers: ‘co-operative imperialism’ was Beasley’s (1987: 17) depiction of the system; ‘imperialism without annexation’ was another phrase used (Edwardes, 1967). Some people in the region were opposed to the treaties and what they represented. Larsen (2008) has identified several groups within China, including the purists who sought to resist the Western ‘barbarians’ by any means, even unto a plan to incorporate Korea into China and also invade Japan. Another group from the merchant class looked to see more benefit come to Chinese traders from the treaties, wanting to see the abolition of extraterritoriality and greater local control over trade, including the setting of tariffs more favourable to indigenous business. Antipathy to the early treaties was among the factors that inspired domestic unrest against the Qing Dynasty, including the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864. However, the Second Opium War of 1856–1860 (the Arrow War) saw British and French navies again defeat Qing forces and the resultant Treaty of Tianjin led to eleven more Chinese ports being opened to foreign trade (Nield, 2015).

Another mark of the opening up of China was the establishment in 1861 of a de-facto foreign office, the Zongli Yamen (Tsungli Yamen). E. V. G. Kiernan was less than complimentary in his description of it, recording that the Zongli Yamen was housed in poor accommodation where ‘a long line of ministers plenipotentiary sat on hard dirty seats and were plied with pastries they didn’t want, fretted by pointless conversation and generally sapped of their vitality’ (1939: 24). Nonetheless, this was the institution ‘to which most Western powers would go to resolve issues with the Qing Empire’ (Larsen, 2008: 51). Seo-Hyun Park noted how the Zongli Yamen’s establishment was ‘followed by China’s gradual and managed adoption of a host of basic European institutions and practices in the conduct of diplomacy and international affairs’ (2013: 281). However, this process was by no means smooth or straightforward, and there was even outright warfare between China and the West.

This warfare involved France, which in the early 1880s sought to move north fro...