message of 1871 reported the facts to Congress, with copies of the correspondence, and said, "I leave the subject for such action as Congress may see fit to take." But there was no further action, as none could properly be taken respecting an unwarranted enterprise so injudiciously inaugurated, which placed the American minister and the navy in a false light before the world, and which may be regarded as the most serious blunder of American diplomacy in the Orient.[1]
The official record is sufficiently humiliating to Americans, but a vein of the ludicrous is given to it when it is learned from Consul-General Seward's reports that his informant was an American adventurer named Jenkins, who had misled him deliberately to cover an unlawful expedition which he was then organizing in conjunction with a French priest and a German described by Mr. Seward as a Hamburg citizen and referred to by historians of the country as a "Jewish peddler." The priest joined the expedition in the hope that it might be the means of opening the country to missions, he having been expelled from it. Mr. Seward says the expedition had "for its object to exhume the remains of a dead sovereign, and to hold the bones for profit."
The money to charter and arm a vessel flying the German flag was furnished by Jenkins. The German, who had made several surreptitious visits to Korea, directed the movement. With a crew of Chinese and
- ↑ U. S. Dip. Cor. 1867, pt. i. 414, 427, 459; 1868, pt. i. 544–551; For. Rel. 1870, pp. 333–339, 362; 1871, pp. 73, 111, 115, 127–149; 1874, p. 254; 7 Presidents' Messages, 145, Ex. Doc. 1 pt. 3, 42d Cong. 2d Sess. 275; Griffis' Corea, 391–395; 503–419; Gundry's China, 240.
