OUT OF EDEN WALK

Incheon, South Korea: 37° 28' 20" N, 126° 37' 11" E

The car ferry from China sailed east into the night—into the Yellow Sea.

The ship was all but empty: a maze of vacant passageways humming under fluorescent tubes, its bulkheads trembling faintly as her screws drilled the waves. Information cards in the untenanted cabins implored passengers not to visit the café in their underwear. The next day we put in at a port. The port was industrial and had a park with a monument to General Douglas MacArthur. There were eateries with names like Jesus Light Cafe. Big box supermarkets sold ultra-processed foods with American labels, and the internet was uncensored. Almost every building was new. The country itself was new too, barely 76 years old: South Korea. The port was Incheon. After 28 months of wandering rural China on foot, traversing a cosmos of villages, I paced its hot concrete streets dizzily.

Incheon was Korea’s gateway to the outside world. In olden days the gate was always locked.

When foreign navies first began dropping anchor at this rocky coast in the 19th century—Incheon lies at the mouth of the Han River, a mighty water-road into Korea’s interior—the Joseon Dynasty kings who ruled the peninsula invariably refused to meet. The Koreans answered diplomatic notes (when they replied at all) with terse commands that strangers leave. This is how Korea inspired the original epithet “hermit kingdom.” The feudal Joseon kings knew very well what they were doing. They understood how Western colonial powers had nibbled away at China’s sovereignty, forcing the opium trade on its people, and how Japan had been obliged to welcome European and American business at the muzzle of cannons. So what transpired near Incheon some 153 years ago—what Americans once merrily dubbed a “weekend war,” and what Koreans call the Shinmiyangyo, or Western Disturbance in the Shinmi Year—became a foreseeable tragedy.

Today, the histories of the United States and South Korea weave a complicated braid. It is an alliance spun mostly during the Cold War, as Washington mobilized to help repel an invasion by Communist North Korea in 1950. The two countries remain the closest of allies. About 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed in the country. But at first contact there lay another, mostly forgotten, Korean-American war. I walked through its battlefields in South Korea, near Incheon, across a bridge to Ganghwa Island, where dusty stone fortresses pocked by cannonballs baked in neglect under a hot summer sun. Big trucks blared their horns as they passed on the highway.

“You don’t see people out walking here with backpacks,” explained Lee Junseok, my Korean walking partner. “It’s the drivers cheering us on. They’re middle-aged guys remembering the hardships of their military service with nostalgia.” Here was a reminder that North and South Korea remain technically at war. No peace treaty ever concluded the terrible fighting between sister nations in 1953. Millions of able-bodied young Korean men—Lee, my lanky guide, included—still wear uniforms for 18 months of national defense training.

At the old Shinmiyangyo forts, the historical signage seemed stilted. The plaques were circumspect, their words held at a distance as with chopsticks, an accounting of pain that read like careful SMS texts between a reconciled couple. This is what actually happened:

A small armada of five U.S. naval ships—the Colorado, Alaska, Palos, Monocacy, and Benicia—appeared off the shore of Ganghwa Island in June 1871. Officially, the outlanders had come to investigate the fate of another American-flagged vessel, the General Sherman, which had disappeared in Incheon’s waters five years earlier. (That ship’s buccaneering crew had been killed by the Koreans after ignoring repeated warnings to stand off.) Unofficially, the mission was to survey the Korean coast and open the kingdom to Yankee commerce.

Ulysses S. Grant was president. The United States was feeling its oats, having recently emerged from its Civil War a burgeoning global power. In old daguerreotypes, the troops aboard U.S. gunboats in Asia in fact looked like Civil War soldiers. At this time, the American West was being won or lost, depending on your perspective. Only five years later, two southern Cheyenne women would drive their bone awls into General Custer’s dead ears at Little Bighorn, to make him hear warnings better in the afterlife. Across the Pacific, meanwhile, the Americans haughtily expected the Koreans to listen.

“We expressed the hope that no molestation would be offered to our parties in landing or passing up the river,” wrote the commander of the U.S. squadron, Rear Adm. John Rodgers, “and [we] requested that word be sent to their people that they might preserve the friendly relations which were desired.”

Predictably, no word came back.

As if following a script, the Americans stoked their ships’ boilers with wood and barged into the delta of the Han River. They almost immediately came under Korean bombardment from stone-walled citadels onshore. Rodgers gave a 10-day ultimatum for an apology. What the regent of young King Gojon of the Joseon Dynasty sent instead were a "few worthless articles"—three cows, a few dozen chickens and about a thousand eggs—along with a note that stated, more or less, “You will be hungry on your trip home.” It was war. It lasted 48 hours. The outcome was fated.

American technology—fused howitzer shells—decimated Korean defenders armed with antique muskets and brass cannons. As many as 350 Koreans died, including some who committed suicide rather than surrender. Three U.S. troops were killed, likely by Korean sharpshooters who specialized in hunting Asian tigers. No Hollywood blockbusters have been made about the Shinmiyangyo.

“They say it was a misunderstanding,” said Eo Jae-seon, the great-great-grandson of the leader of Korean forces in the clash, General Eo Jae-yeon. “But that's what they always say, isn’t it?”