At about Noon the Weather began to freshen, and at Night we spread our Sail, directing our course by guess South-East. The Wind growing fresh at Night, we clear’d the point of Corea, and were no longer apprehensive of being pursu’d… Hendrick Hamel, 1668 I stayed around the frontier zone for a while that Friday afternoon. While I had been in Seoul earlier in the week, an invitation had come to me, in a roundabout way, from a man who, for the previous three years, had lived and worked in and around the borderline: he wanted to give me tea and to ask me how I had found the Korea through which I had travelled. He was a man who rarely moved beyond his own immediate circle of specialist colleagues, and I jumped at the opportunity of seeing him and of hearing his impressions of a country he was able to know better than almost all other outsiders. His ability to know Korea well stemmed from his uniquely privileged position. He, unlike almost all foreigners who visit the peninsula, was permitted—and permitted by no less an authority than the terms of the 1953 armistice agreement—to travel more or less at will on both sides of the frontier fences.
